“Don’t know what to tell you, Sheriff,” Pratt said. “I guess I’d figured Gina had gotten herself straight. That she’d gotten too old to put on a bikini and race around the mud. Damn if I don’t feel stupid as hell. I’ve been married three times and had more women than I can count to cheat on me. I’ve always been the trusting type. I figure when relations happen between a man and a woman that they got some kind of special bond. You know what I’m saying, Sheriff?”

“Have you tried calling her?” Quinn said.

“So many times my fingers’re nearly worn out,” he said. “Want to see my cell phone?”

Pratt reached into his pocket without being asked, thumbed through the Samsung and showed a screen with forty-nine calls to the same number and name. gina. Quinn looked at it and nodded, his own phone buzzing on his hip and showing a familiar number. He held up a hand to Pratt, stepped back toward his truck, and took the call.

“Some bad shit’s going down in Parsham County,” Boom Kimbrough said. “I came down to get Gina Byrd’s Nissan and had to help that sheriff out of some booger woods junkyard after he fired a shot at me. I don’t know what’s going on. Nobody will tell me nothing. But the county coroner showed up, along with three more deputies and a news van out of Tupelo.”

“Roger that,” Quinn said. “Headed your way.”

Quinn turned to Chester Pratt and said they’d have to continue the conversation later.

“Everything okay out there, Sheriff?” Pratt asked.

Quinn nodded and climbed into the Big Green Machine, heading back to Parsham County.

*   *   *

“Something’s a-matter,” Holly Harkins said.

“Nope,” TJ said. “Everything’s just fine and dandy.”

“Bull W. Shit,” Holly said. “Friends don’t lie to friends. If something’s bothering you, you better damn well spill it.”

TJ drove Holly’s mom’s beat-up Dodge minivan along Jericho Road headed toward Choctaw Lake, where Holly worked two nights a week at the Captain’s Table fish camp. She’d serve up fried catfish and hush puppies until ten o’clock when she’d come out of that cinder-block restaurant smelling like grease and nicotine. The poor girl had to wash her hair twice with Suave rosemary and mint shampoo to remove the stink.

“Why do you think something’s a-matter?” TJ asked.

“Hell,” Holly said, popping her bubble gum and watching the winter landscape roll by. Nothing but bare branches, dead weeds, and gray skies. “I don’t know. Maybe because I’ve been your best friend since third grade.”

“I thought you’d been my best friend since kindergarten.”