Eddy Lee Rabbit, aka Take-Out, was forty-one years old, and supposedly named after the Eddie Rabbitt, the famous songwriter and singer. Eddy had grown up around Floydada, drifting southward after high school before finally washing up in the Big Bend ten or fifteen years ago. Take-Out had come by his nickname honestly—he was the drive-thru-window guy, selling his first bag of weed out of a Beto’s Taco Shop along with three street tacos. He then moved on to coke, heroin, meth, pills; like he moved on to Arby’s, Wendy’s, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. You just had to wait for his shift and know what to ask for when you pulled up to the window to get your order.

He’d wrap it in some napkins and slip it in with some extra ketchup or honey barbecue sauce.

Eddy was arrested twice for drug distribution, dividing his time between the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Preston Smith and James Lynaugh units. Neither stint had been very long, but the facts laid out at both sentencings all but guaranteed he’d never work at another Big Bend fast-food restaurant again.

That’s when Eddy started selling out of his own place down by the river, and from the look of it now, using a hell of a lot more than he was selling. It was all pretty much the same as before, though. You called or stopped by to place your order and took it with you when you left, because Eddy Lee Rabbit never tripped with his dope—he never delivered and never would.

Small-time, small-town stuff.

And if that’s all there was to it, Deputy Danny Ford of the Big Bend County Sheriff’s Department might have left Eddy alone out here in Delcia Canyon. Sheriff Chris Cherry knew Eddy’s local history well enough not to want to hang a third arrest around his neck, so he’d given the word to all his deputies to leave him be.

But unfortunately for Eddy, that wasn’t all of it.

Not according to Charity Mumford, Eddy’s on-again, off-again girlfriend. Last weekend they’d been off-again, real off, after Eddy had spun a cue ball upside her head. He’d thrown it at her from across the trailer, and afterward she’d driven herself—still a bloody mess, needing stitches—up to the urgent care in Murfee, where they referred her instead to the Hancock Hill Medical Center, since it was clear she was still very high and screaming her damn head off the whole time. All about Eddy. The sheriff sent Deputy America Reynosa to Hancock Hill to figure out what all the fuss was about, and that’s when Charity had started going on and on about the Mexicans.

All about Eddy and his goddamn motherfuckin’ Mexicans . . . so that Eddy’s small-time “stuff” suddenly didn’t sound so small anymore.

It sounded damn serious.