“While I’m reluctantly accepting your invitation to stay with you and your grandmother,” she says to me, “something I’d be happy not to see is you going through my underwear drawer.”
“I can respect that,” I say.
“You want to know the only good part of this?” she says. “I don’t have to see pictures of Burt and me every time I turn around.”
She’s still not feeling sorry for herself. That’s not it and that’s not her, wasn’t her even after Burt died, from that first moment in his hospital room.
She had said the other day she was just trying to put one foot in front of another.
Only now she’s not sure she can even do that.
Out of nowhere comes a flash of anger. “I cannotfuckingbelieve this, Silas. I really can’t.”
She’s scared, we’re both scared, nothing I say is going to change that, certainly not tonight. Nothing is going to give her a conclusive answer about when her eyesight is coming back.
We’re still in the living room, me next to her on the sofa now, when we hear EJ’s car. I start to get up and open the door for EJ, but Taylor finds my arm with her hand to stop me. I look down at her, not sure what she’s seeing.
But something.
“You need to know nothing has changed,” she says.
Still holding my arm, her grip as fierce as the look on her face.
I think:Practically everything has changed.
Then I ask her, “What hasn’t changed, Tay?”
“What I told you that day at the gun club, about anybody who would hurt somebody I love,” she whispers. “I want them fucking dead.”
PART THREE
SEVENTY-SIX
ANOTHER TREE BRANCH Lynyrd Crockett doesn’t see coming whips his face. His brother’s flashlight a few yards ahead does him no good at all.
“By the time we get there,” Lynyrd says, “I’m gonna look like one of ’em scratched my eyes out.”
“I told you,” Roof says, “the complaints box is full already.”
They’ve hidden the pickup where they always do, tucked behind some trees just off the narrow dirt road, and are making their way through the woods.
“You sure the cops didn’t follow us out here after we left Daddy’s house?”
“It’s why we used the tunnel.”
They’ve been to these parts plenty of times before, to the abandoned hilltop farmhouse surrounded by empty land their father had once used for hunting. They’ve just had to take more of a circle route tonight after thinking they’d heard some of what their daddy called prairie wolves in the vicinity.
“Fucking cops are watching us all twenty-four seven now,” Lynyrd says. “Feel like they’ve got eyes on me even when I take a piss.”
They finally see the lights from the farmhouse now up ahead of them, knowing the first two men with guns will be at the edge of the clearing, wearing their night-vision goggles and camouflage outfits.
Roof holds the flashlight up high, signals with it twice.
When they reach the two gunnies, part of the small force the big boss has hired, Roof says to them, “He here?”
“Beenhere about twenty minutes,” the taller and wider of the men says. “Said you and your brother were supposed to already be in the house.”
“Thought we might have run into a coyote.”
