The crazy girl laid down the big black duffel bag she’d dragged down to the dock with her, TJ convinced it was full of high-dollar dresses and shoes, maybe a bottle or two of that good wine in the basement.

She unzipped the bag and pushed aside some jeans and sweaters and a pair of sparkly boots to show TJ a heavy, dark pile of metal.

“Where you get those?” TJ asked.

“My daddy’s,” she said. Chastity’s bag was bulging with a fancy-looking rifle, a few handguns, and boxes of ammo. “Someone will buy ’em. Somewhere.”

“You stole your daddy’s guns?”

“Sure,” Chastity said. “The TV was too big.”

*   *   *

Momma Lennie opened the door and stepped into the processing barn just as the damn fun had started. Dusty and Daddy had stripped that old military boy buck-ass nekkid and bound his hands in chains that lifted him onto his tippy toes. He struggled to breathe with duct tape across his mouth, his face turning a bright red. Under the fluorescent lights, the stainless steel they used to butcher deer, hogs, and cattle shone slick and clean as a mirror.

“Just what the hell’s happening?” Momma said. She was tall and skinny, nearly twice as big as Daddy, wearing her Disney Princess nightgown. Old Tinker Bell touching her sparkly wand to the sky. This Grandma Believes in Holiday Magic! “This the man who tried to burn down my shed?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Dusty said. “Caught him red-handed. He’d set up at Uncle Frankie’s old trailer with a deer rifle, about to try and blow a hole in me and Daddy.”

“What for?” she asked. “What’d y’all go and do now?”

Daddy had taken to cutting a fresh field-stripped deer swinging next to the man, slicing a juicy rump roast with his pocketknife, and dropping the meat on the table. “Only know one fella want us dead,” Daddy said, licking the blood from his fingers. “That’d be ole Chester Pratt. Ole Mister Fancy Pants sent you out to the Nix place? Ole Mister Fancy Pants wants you to take out the trash same as we done took out his whore?”

That thick-bearded man tried to yell and scream through that duct tape. Dusty figured it would smart like hell if they ripped it from his mouth. But he yanked it off anyway, kind of curious just what the man had to say about dealing with old Chester.

“I don’t work for Chester Pratt,” the man said, turning his head to spit. A good bit of his beard pulled out and stuck on the tape in Dusty’s hand. “Christ Almighty.”

“You shouldn’t never have trespassed, son,” Daddy said. “Who was it, then?”

“Let me go and I’ll tell you,” the bearded man said. “All right? This ain’t personal. Someone paid me to punch both y’all’s tickets.”

“Chester Pratt,” Dusty Nix said. “Right?”