“Riley Millsap was one of the girls in the truck the day I found the three punks dealing drugs about fifty yards from here,” I say to Burt Webb.
He and I are standing under the sign that says “Silas Tucker Field.”
“She’s the one I talked to. The one I basically told to run away from those punks.”
“Not fast enough or far enough,” Burt Webb says.
“Nash Hader knows who those guys are, by the way,” I tell him. “I could never prove it, but I’m pretty sure one of them fired the shot into my windshield.”
“If they work for the Crocketts,” he says, “it won’t do much good for me to find out who they are or even haul them in for questioning.”
“Like you’re going up against the Mafia.”
“No, man,” he says. “Notlikegoing up against them. That’s exactly what we’re doing. The Southern Mafia.”
“Or Briar Crockett’s.”
“Same difference,” Burt Webb says.
We start walking toward where EJ and Taylor and Abby are waiting for us in front of the gym, near where Burt parked his squad car and I parked my truck. Burt gives them the girl’s name and I recount how I’d spoken to Riley Millsap a few days ago. Burt says he has to drive over to the hospital now, where Riley Millsap’s parents will be waiting for him.
Abby starts to cry.
I ask her if she knew the girl.
“No,” she says. “It’s just so awful.”
I hug her, then Taylor, then EJ. Like we’re standing outside a funeral. I tell Burt I can give Taylor a ride home. There is just the sound now of one siren in the distance, and after that it’s as if the whole town has gone silent, the cheers I’d heard a few minutes before like one more memory from inside the football stadium.
Burt kisses Taylor and tells her he’ll see her when he sees her.
To me, he says, “We’ll talk.”
“Count on that,” I say.
Then it’s Taylor McCarter Webb who quietly says, “It’s their fucking town.”
FORTY-EIGHT
IF I WERE a different person—or if I’d been raised differently, first by my parents and then by EJ—I would drive straight to the nearest bar, probably Rowdy’s just because it’s closest. Or maybe try to find one where nobody would care who I was, if there even was such a place around here.
But that’s never been me.
I drive straight home to my basement gym instead.
I take everything I’m feeling, all the anger in me and hurt and frustration, an almost overpowering urge to hit somebody or something, the feeling I’d get on the field sometimes even when I was the one with the ball—I take all of that home with me and get into my workout clothes and take it all out on myself.
The only way I feel even remotely lucky right now is that it’s Burt who has to meet with that girl’s family and not me.
But all the way home I kept wondering how things might have been different if Riley Millsap had been inside the stadium today, listening to me—reallylistening—and not outside.
What if I’d somehow gotten through to her?
Or, and more likely, had she already made her choices before I’d seen her that day in the school parking lot?
The only thing to do is find a way to save the next one.
If I get the chance, that is.
