“Say it,” I tell him. “Finish the sentence. I want to hear you say it out loud one more time.”
He looks at my face and doesn't finish it.
“You want money,” he tries instead. His eyes skip from me to Cole on the hay bale to Silas by the wall and then to Logan, who has that familiar madness in his eyes. “We can be reasonable men here?—”
“You're not going to buy your way out of this, Howard,” Cole says, almost kindly.
“Then what.What.” His voice goes up an octave. “You're going to beat me up? Over her? She's nothing, she's a fat little nobody who?—”
I cross the space between us and crouch to his level, close enough to smell the bourbon coming off him in waves, and whatever is on my face shuts his mouth.
“She's the reason this is fast,” I say quietly. “You should thank her. The man I was raised by taught me how to make it slow, and every part of me wants to show you what I learned. But she has to live in this town after tonight, and the story needs you sad and drunk and alone. So you get mercy you didn't earn. From her. Not from me.”
His face changes then, like it finally sinks in.
“Please,” he whispers.
“She said that too, I'd bet.”
I stand and nod to Cole.
He does it carefully—the knife going in at just the right angle. Vance thrashes for three seconds and then goes limp. No new bruises where bruises shouldn't be. Silas checks his pulse and nods.
Then we stage the scene. Vance is seated against the post, legs out. The shotgun is set butt-down between his knees, barrel angled up under the sternum so that the blast will take the knife and scalpel wounds with it. We place hishands on the barrel, his thumb guided through the trigger guard. Silas leaves the note on the kitchen table, printed from Vance's own machine.I'm sorry. I can't watch it all come apart.
“It's done,” Silas says when he comes back.
Logan and Cole step back. I look down at Howard Vance one last time, and I think about a button on a tile floor.
I press on his thumb.
The shotgun blast is deafening, and then there's a long ringing silence, and it's done.
We stand in the settling dust. Cole exhales through pursed lips. Logan rolls his neck until it cracks.
“Barn cats will find him by morning,” Silas says, already moving, placing the bucket back on the nail. “Mail carrier by Tuesday at the latest. Nobody will look for anything, because everybody already knows this story. They've been telling it at the diner for months.”
We leave the way we came, and Logan drives us home. Nobody talks for the first few miles. Then Cole leans forward from the back seat.
“For the record,” he says, “I still like her. The scalpel was good instincts. Center mass next time, but good instincts.”
“There won't be a next time,” I say.
“No,” Logan agrees, eyes on the dark road, and there's nothing light in his voice at all. “There won't.”
The carnival rises out of the fields, unlit, sleeping. I'm out of the van before it even stops moving, my eyes on the light in the trailer Silas shares with Nova and Teddy.
Wren is there, waiting for me.
And we need to talk.
21
WREN
The trailer door opens, and I'm on my feet before it finishes swinging.
Rowe fills the frame, and his eyes find me first—over Nova's head, past Jules's shoulder, past Teddy, who arrived an hour ago and has been standing by the kitchenette like a sentry.
