Eddy was coming down from a three-day high (okay, maybe four), and every bit of his body felt it. His eyeballs were two fucking massive marbles in his head, so glassy he could throw sand off of them; his skin itched as if it had been pulled off by hand, turned inside out, and stapled back on that way. His teeth went up and down, up and down, like tiny knife points, so he kept his mouth open, drooling, trying not to cut himself. His hands were jitterbugging, but at least they’d taken off the handcuffs, which had been hot to the touch on his turned-all-the-way-around, fucked-up skin. And he was goddamn thirsty, like trapped-in-the-desert-for-four-days (okay, maybe five) thirsty, but was afraid the water would taste like his own blood, so instead he just sat there: mouth open, bug-eyed, tongue hanging out.

He looked like a panting dog.

On the table in front of him sat a small handheld radio wrapped in plastic. No one was saying anything about it, but it kinda looked familiar, although he wasn’t sure.

The female deputy, the pretty Mexican girl, wasn’t doing much talking about that radio or anything else. She stared past him, like she was a hundred miles away somewhere else.

That stare could set ants on fire, though. Like playing with a magnifying glass in the Texas heat, something Eddy had done as a kid.

He’d set a whole bunch of little grass fires that way.

The other deputy, the fucker who’d coldcocked him down in the cane, was pointing a finger at him and going on and on about how Eddy had nearly killed him with a skillet. Now, there was a real possibility that something like that had, in fact, happened, although Eddy couldn’t remember it exactly. It might come to him later, though, unsummoned, while he was falling asleep or taking a piss, and then he’d be right back in that moment, reliving every second of it in too-bright colors. But Deputy What’s-his-name was righteously angry right now, although Eddy got the sense that only part of what he was pissed about involved Eddy at all.

For all Eddy’s faults, and they were legion, he’d had at one time a pretty good ability to read people, kinda a sixth sense. A Spidey sense (Eddy’s favorite superhero, although that Bat-dude was kinda badass, too). It had served him well and had kept him (mostly) out of serious trouble. But after too many years on too many drugs, it now came and went like a shaky radio signal out on the edge of the desert. When it worked, it worked just fine. But when it didn’t, Eddy was lost in the static, trapped between the AM stations his daddy had listened to while driving his truck. Then, it was like Eddy couldn’t even read, much less recognize, his own damn handwriting.