Dusty Nix had shimmied up onto the roof with a crowbar he’d grabbed from his toolbox, going to work on a tin sheet and lifting it up to the rafters. His pockets full of an old shirt and underwear of Daddy’s soaked in gasoline to stick up under the stilts and up and under the tin. Didn’t take long before the fire caught hot and fast while he held on to the satellite dish and giggled to himself.

Daddy was down on the road, smoking another cigarette on that empty street, a dozen houses looking just like the Bloodgood place, all in a pretty straight row, lightless and empty on a cool February morning. The only lights he could see were two streets down by the Gulf. Dusty figured those two girls and that little boy would come running out of that house like a family of scared rabbits.

Dusty waved down to Daddy.

Daddy waved back.

Dusty covered his mouth as he started to giggle some more, gripping that satellite pole, about to monkey down onto a window, when he saw a dark-colored Dodge Charger hauling ass up the main road and come wheeling in hard where Daddy was parked. Goddamn Daddy, deaf as a damn post, kept on waving to Dusty up on the roof until he finally turned and hobbled up toward that Dodge.

The dumb son of a bitch reached for his gun. Dusty yelled for him, but the man wouldn’t listen. He never listened.

The doors jacked open and two folks got out onto the road, a woman yelling for Daddy to put down the weapon. Dusty knew he’d never forget Daddy’s final words as the old man raised his pistol, yelling, “Y’all can suck my damn dick.”

Guns were drawn. Shots were fired.

Daddy lay dead not fifteen feet from that Dodge Charger with its motor still running. Dusty felt all the air leave him as he gripped the drainpipe and lowered his feet down onto a railing. That’s when he heard the shots fired from inside the house and saw the silver tin bucking up wild and free.

Dusty grabbed hold of that pole and pulled himself back up onto the roof. His feet slick as goose shit under him as someone started to unload a magazine full of bullets up into his ass.

*   *   *

Three minutes before, TJ asked Chastity: “Where’s your daddy’s gun?”

“Why don’t you use your daddy’s?” Chastity asked. “Since you love him so damn much.”

“My daddy’s gun’s right here on my damn hip,” she said. “But I need that big-ass gun, the one with the american by birth, southern by the grace of god written on it, to shoot the goddamn nuts off whoever is up there setting fire to your place.”