“Maybe then they’ll find out what happened,” she said. “Maybe then they’ll know Chester Pratt is a lying sack of shit.”

“Why’s he trying to pin this all on you?”

“I told the sheriff what I knew and he wouldn’t listen,” she said, punching the old CD player to a new track, “Nothin’ but a Good Time.” “I promised Momma I wouldn’t say a word about her stabbing that man outside the Southern Star. But I did anyway. Now no one believes it happened.”

“Did she know them?”

“She said she’d never seen them before in her life,” TJ said. “There was two of them. She thinks she mighta killed one. You saw the blood on her clothes. She got a knife free from one of them and stabbed him right in the belly.”

“You right,” Ladarius said. “Can’t trust the law. You and me both straight on that.”

TJ didn’t answer, agreeing with him. She kept on driving, running through the essential Poison, then Cinderella, and on to Bon Jovi. When the CD switched up to “Wanted Dead or Alive,” Ladarius looked over at TJ and shook his head. That one cut a little too damn close, so she changed it up to “Livin’ on a Prayer.”

“Is that better?” she asked.

Ladarius nodded.

They didn’t talk for a long while, Ladarius falling asleep somewhere around Benton while TJ’s mind turned to messed-up images that kept popping into her thoughts. She imagined her mother cut up, tossed like trash or roadkill in some old gully, and the idea of it damn near hollowed her out. She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand, following that snaking road up into the hills and then down into the outskirts of Hot Springs, the lights bright in the cold dark, a nice welcome from the desolation of the highway from Little Rock. The signs kept on pressing her on toward Lake Hamilton, passing the old horse-racing track and a place called T-Rex Jurassic Golf and Go-carts, the last sending John Wesley bolt upright and pointing, “Whoa. Look at that.”

“It’s closed.”

“No, it ain’t,” he said. “Folks racing around that little track right now.”

“We got to git where we’re going.”

“Where we going?”

“Big house on the lake that belongs to a friend of Holly’s momma.”

“Can we get something to eat?”

“There’ll be food when we get there.”

“All right then.”