“She’s no criminal,” Holly said, shouting as she slid from the hood of the car. “Are you out of your damn mind, Goldilocks? We don’t want trouble. We want less trouble. How the hell is TJ pointing a gun at your dumb head gonna make things easier for any of us? You just want the drama? The drama is making you excited and crazy. Just why were you in that rehab center, Chastity Bloodgood? I don’t think it was just drinking and pills. I think you’re a goddamn crazy woman.”

Chastity smiled and shook her head, trying to make it look like Holly was the one who’d now gone crazy. The day gray and cold, pine trees making wave-like patterns up into the hills. Cars zoomed up and down the Arkansas highway.

“Post it,” TJ said. “Or don’t. C’mon. Let’s get back on the road.”

“What’s the use of kidnapping if you don’t threaten me?” Chastity said. “Don’t be so damn small and dumb. We need some money, girl.”

Ladarius walked up between them, placing a hand on TJ’s shoulder as he knew this just might go to fist city. No one spoke to TJ like that. Or at least, no one ever did it twice.

Chastity rolled her eyes and headed back to the SUV, opening the back door and slamming herself inside. John Wesley walked from the woods, where he’d had a longer transaction than expected, and asked Ladarius if they had any napkins in that car. TJ had been concentrating so hard on what to say and what to do for Chastity, that she nearly missed Holly turning a hard shoulder and marching down the sloped grassy hill to the highway. TJ shouted down after her. Where in the hell was that girl going?

Holly kept on moving down the slope through waist-high weeds, headed down to the road, marching back toward Hot Springs. She was almost to the highway.

“Shit,” TJ said.

She yelled to Holly. But Holly broke into a run, charging down the hill toward the shoulder of the road.

Holly stopped just before she crossed the highway and turned back to face them, lifted her right fist, and offered her middle finger to them all.

*   *   *

Stagg hung back from the workers inside Frontier Village that morning, the hammering and the high whine of an electric saw so loud it rattled the metal walls. Inside the empty Diamond Saloon, he watched the boys work on the little stage where they’d have real-life can-can girls putting on a revue for all the daddies, flipping up their skirts and showing a little thigh. It wouldn’t be the fifty-dollar pecker pulls Fannie Hathcock offered, but Stagg knew having some pretty girls around wasn’t ever bad for business.