Land had taken me to the hospital because Cal was watching over Junie, tucking her back into bed and telling her lies about what had happened to her mama. Land had stayed with me until they’d wrapped my arm and told me to come back in two days for a permanent cast. And then he’d led me back out to his cruiser, parked on the dark edge of the hospital parking lot, and told me the drill.

“You’re causing me a lot of trouble,” he’d said. “This business with you and Jimmy Ray.”

“Me?” The word coming out smushed and garbled between my swollen lips. “I just want him to go away. We’re over. I don’t understand why you can’t make him leave me alone. Isn’t that your job?” I wasn’t worried about myself. What was one more beating in the scheme of things? But Junie, every day she was growing older, cataloguing more of the world around her, remembering. And I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep Cal contained, promising him I could handle it, swearing I’d never speak to him again if he put himself in the middle, risked his job over an idiot like Jimmy Ray. Secretly, I worried he’d try something and end up dead. Cal was smart and strong, but Jimmy Ray didn’t care about anything except his own survival, and that made him the more dangerous man.

Land had sighed, his default expression of choice, and turned toward me. Both his mustache and his belly were smaller then, but he still had the outlines of the same man. One who’d worn his authority for so long, and with so little resistance, that he took it all for granted. “Well, that’s the thing,” he said. “I can’t do my job, not the way I’m supposed to, when you’ve got me at odds with Jimmy Ray.” He spread his hands in the darkness. “He and I, we do for each other. You understand?”

I’d heard rumors about the arrangement between Jimmy Ray and Land. Hell, everyone had. That they scratched each other’s backs. That whatever they had worked out was the reason Jimmy Ray might get arrested for beating a girlfriend or drunk driving, but never for anything more serious. And never for anything that wouldn’t quietly go away the next morning.

“No,” I said. “I don’t understand. Are you not going to help me, then?”

“Look,” Land said, his voice slow, like he was talking to a child. “I know what Jimmy Ray does. But he keeps it away from this town. He keeps his people in line. No drug murders. No dead bodies filling up my streets.”

I snorted. “Yeah, because he dumps them in the woods instead for the wild hogs to eat.”

“I don’t care what the fuck he does with them, long as they don’t show up on my watch. No one gives a shit about what happens to those people, anyway. Ones that are all mixed up in Jimmy Ray’s world. Good riddance, far as I’m concerned.” One of Land’s hands inched closer to my leg, not quite touching. I watched it the way you would a spider skittering toward you. Knowing it was coming, but hoping for a detour at the last second. “That’s the deal we got. He keeps his business under control, and I look the other way. Neither one of us wants a war. It’s better this way.”