Just like Troy.

Clark had a theory that went a long way toward explaining the “weekends at the coast.” If Dylan had gotten involved in the drugs through KT Staler—and if ever a boy came from a family with a disposition toward narcotics it was KT Staler—then it stood to reason the two boys might have left town to move their product, perhaps at someone’s behest. She’d told Joel how Jason Ovelle, at the game on Friday, had been caught searching KT’s Tacoma, with Jason insisting KT owed him money. Just a few minutes before, on the sidelines, she’d noticed that KT had lost several pounds in just a week, which was a textbook consequence of consuming methamphetamine. Most meth dealers, in Clark’s experience, tended to be addicts themselves, addicts with an unfortunate tendency to dip into the product they were supposed to be selling.

“Those trips would be a perfect chance to scratch an itch,” Joel had said.

And the fact that Dylan was gay? Well, she told Joel, the boy sure seemed to spend an awful lot of time with KT. It wouldn’t be the first time a pair of young lovers had gone into some sort of business together.

A few things still concerned her. For one, the drug game today was different than it had been in Troy’s time. Back then, as Mayfield had mentioned, a cartel representative named Benicio Dos had controlled most of the supplies of meth and opioids sold in central Texas. Benicio, to put it bluntly, had been a very bad man, rumored to have killed an informant by injecting radiator fluid into the woman’s brain stem.

But Benicio had been arrested by the Feds three years ago. Clark remembered the day of the arrest well—it had come during her first week on the job. An air of relief had filled the department for a few months as drug arrests finally trended down.

Yet lately things had started to change. Over the last nine months or so Clark had discovered more and more baggies of ice and handfuls of pills while making traffic stops and house calls. Someone new had taken up shop.

Clark’s stomach turned. If her brother had stolen money from Benicio, could it possibly follow that Dylan had gotten involved with whatever reprobate had replaced Señor Dos? She’d taken an Introduction to Forensic Accounting course in school, passed it by the skin of her teeth and brought home only one lesson: drug money had a habit of turning up in even the most dignified of pockets.

Clark’s truck began to buck and she realized with a jolt of panic that she’d somehow veered onto the rough shoulder—when had she started to drift? She jerked the wheel, returned to the highway, let out a shaky breath. Had she just fallen asleep with her eyes open? Did that really happen to people?

“These dreams, they started the night your brother died,” she’d said as a flat yellow dawn had teased the Flats through her kitchen window. “Don’t that seem odd?”