The next morning, after Charity had come down a bit—and figured out what she’d done—she’d refused to discuss it again. More than that, she took it all back. Said she got hurt falling against her car, and claimed she’d made the rest of it up; it was all tweaker bullshit. The sheriff didn’t want to get a warrant based on the shaky word of a recanting meth addict—maybe the stuff about Eddy was bullshit—but the twelve stitches across Charity’s scalp were not, and the sheriff couldn’t ignore those. He had America take Charity over to the family crisis center in Artesia, and finally relented and told Danny and Amé to take a long, hard look at Eddy Rabbit.

To get inside his trailer.

And that was how Danny found himself now standing in cool morning shadows on Take-Out’s porch, watching him eat eggs without a care in the world.

“I got an order . . . I need something . . . an eight-ball. Speed. You got it?”

Eddy held his fork in his mouth a long, long time, balanced there without his hands, clenched in his bad teeth. When he finally took it out, he did it in one smooth, slow motion.

Other wheels, though, were turning furiously behind those already spinning, too-bright eyes.

“That ain’t me no more, brother. I don’t do that. Don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”

Danny shrugged, spit. “C’mon, that’s not what I heard.”

“Says who? That man’s a goddamn liar.”

“Who said it was a man?”

“Really? Interestin’ . . .” Eddy took another mouthful of eggs, the same slow fork routine as before, like he was afraid if he moved too fast his head would fall off and roll around on the ground between them.

Fucking tweakers. Danny wasn’t unsympathetic to whatever pain or problems or life’s fuck-ups drove someone like Charity or Eddy to start getting high in the first place, but he had zero tolerance for the consequences, since he was the one who had to deal with them. When tweakers were using, they only saw the world through the holes that shit had burned through their brains, like circles cut into a bedsheet for a little kid dressing up as a ghost for Halloween. Their whole world turned into these brightly colored fragments that didn’t quite fit together anymore, all light and sound and fury. A silver spinning ball above an empty dance floor. It made everything magical or mysterious to them, or worse, dangerous.

It also made them unpredictable, because even they didn’t know what they were going to do next. Looking out through the ragged holes that circled the world, they just couldn’t see that far ahead.