Evers turned back, shook his head at Joel.

“And I thought Dylan was the crazy one,” he said.

When Luke reached the truck he tousled the young boy’s hair and climbed into the cab and left Joel standing alone in the dark.

With all the amphetamine in his system it took ages for the adrenaline to wear off. Light eventually began to creep through cracks in his vision where a moment before only darkness had been. He marveled at how easily he had surrendered himself to all of the violence and rage and despair that had climbed up from the pit of his mind.

Marveled at the way some of that darkness felt as if it had come from somewhere else. Somewhere not inside him.

Perhaps Clark had been right last night when she’d started talking about her kooky mother. The nightmares Joel had experienced since Dylan’s murder—they didn’t feel like normal dreams. That hadn’t felt like normal rage. And while Margo Clark had seemed utterly bonkers, if she really had been in touch with some force or energy or occult magic, well: who could blame her for coming a little loose at the hinges?

After all, something had just come knocking at Joel’s own head. Something rotten. Something old.

With a twist of guilt he remembered that Clark had been called away to an emergency of her own. He texted her:

Everything ok?

He texted Kimbra:

I’ve learned that KT was brought home this evening. He’d been arrested in Dallas.

Kimbra responded: Oh.

Sorry about that, Joel thought. Add it to the pile of things to feel awful over.

Joel walked until he caught a glint of moonlight on his black convertible parked in the distance, on the highway’s dark shoulder. He toggled his phone over to the escorting ad and found he could still only study it for a few seconds. Looking now at his brother’s grinning face, his shirtless body, Joel saw it in a new light.

Didn’t the ad feel a little absurd, like a bad joke? Indeed, some of the Bison, according to Kimbra, had apparently considered it a prank when they saw it. But Joel wasn’t stupid. There must have been plenty of Bentley boys who did not find it funny, who might even have taken it seriously, considered it evidence of his brother’s deviance. Would it be such a stretch to imagine that the ad could have outed Dylan, however inadvertently? All it might have taken was one person spreading this URL to put the boy in terrible danger.

His brother’s murder might have been a hate crime. The thought was too banal, too appalling, to fathom.

Whether the ad was genuine or not, it raised another question. Why had Dylan never told Joel that he was gay? Surely he must have known that Joel would treat the news with nothing but love and discretion. Dylan had always laughed when Joel described the absurdities of the city’s gay scene, had always taken a good-natured interest in Joel’s trips to bars and beaches, had never betrayed a hint of homophobia.