“Twenty-three,” Jones said, unable to keep a little lilt of satisfaction from his voice.

“You’d think he could type a statement by now.”

“Nobody bothered to read it?” Jamal said, still not entirely convinced this wasn’t another vivid dream.

Irons said, “Somebody was in a hurry to get you locked up.”

Past the empty front desk, into the little lobby with its flags and its low ceiling, through the glass doors.

And then he was outside, smelling the air of a clear night, looking up to see the sun all but gone and the thin streaks of cloud fading slowly from ember to ash. He wasn’t sure he’d ever spent so long inside in his life.

“It’s the Mercedes,” Irons said without breaking stride. “Might be wise if you ride in the back until we’re over the county line.”

CLARK

She’d been trapped in traffic outside Houston for nearly an hour. She’d called Joel twenty times. She’d messaged his mother on Facebook, messaged Kimbra Lott and Bethany Tanner asking if they’d heard any word of his whereabouts. As Bison halftime approached on the radio, she picked up her phone and prayed she wasn’t making a mistake.

Clark had wasted the day watching her father sleep. On the phone this morning outside KT Staler’s house, a nursing home attendant had informed Clark that her father’s condition had deteriorated all week, that he’d had difficulty sleeping, refused to eat, and finally this morning had attacked another patient.

“Difficulty sleeping?” Clark had said.

“Yes, ma’am,” the nurse had told her. “You don’t read your emails?”

When she’d finally arrived in Houston, the home told her they’d had to sedate him. “There were mitigating circumstances,” a sweaty doctor informed her. “But if he lashes out again we’ll have no choice but to release him.”

Release him. Like a tiger. There was nowhere else she could put him. If not for the discount the home offered to retired veterans—and could you really be surprised, in a house stuffed full of old soldiers, if one of them threw a punch over a plate of cold toast?—Clark could never have afforded to keep him there.

She’d stayed at the nursing home all day, watching her father sleep off his Ativan. On smoke breaks throughout the afternoon she had checked her phone but only received one message from Joel.

Just left Ranger M’s house. Jason O is dead. Garrett/Dylan connection dubious. I think I know a little more about the Bright Lands. Call me.

She’d called. Joel’s phone had gone straight to voice mail. Just like it did an hour later. And an hour after that.

Around seven thirty, Clark had found a radio in her father’s room and tuned it to the game. When the marching band finally commenced with “My Herd, My Glory,” she’d heard his breathing quicken, saw his eyelids flutter open.

He’d not looked happy to see her. “Did you shut them off?”

Oh boy. “Shut off what, Dad?”

“The lights!” he said to her sharply. “Those damn queer lights! Fuck it, girl, you know.”