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I reined Sonny in again, never taking my eyes off Dean. I had a feeling we’d stopped talking about Jeanie a while ago.
“If you haven’t noticed, there aren’t a lot of custody courts around these parts,” I said quietly. “All that went away after the Fog. You’re the law now. So, if you said Ethan should keep his kids, he would—that is, if he and Jeanie ended up wanting to divorce.”
Dean stuffed his hands in the pockets of his coat and scuffed at a thistle on the ground with the tip of his shoe. He eventually sighed.
“Everyone has a part to play in making a marriage and a family work. That’s all I’m saying. I’m sure Jeanie has her reasons for doing what she did too.”He shrugged. “We might not agree with those reasons but to her they must be sound.”
“That doesn’t make them right.”
He nodded. “Thatdoesn’tmake them right.”
I faced forward and started jogging again, not sure why his words bothered me. I knew he was right on some level. Things like love weren’t simple. I’d loved Alton, but we weren’t a happily married couple with a handful of kids. Things with Sicily were complicated, even at the best of times. Post-Fog, it was nearly impossible to get her to agree to see him. Regardless, there was no way we could bridge the gap and become the happy family I’d always thought my daughter deserved.
Dean was right—people were complicated.
Chapter Seventeen
“Well, son of a bitch,” I muttered. “Ethan was right.”
Slim Jim came to a halt behind me.
He’d gotten used to chasing after Sonny since the Fog turned the feral pig preying on his chickens into the half-man thing he was now. So far, Sonny was the most human-like of the metamorphized animals in the area. Overall, any altered animals looked more like the mutations you’d find in the vicinity of Chernobyl than anything human.
Still, if the Fog could do this to Sonny, what else could it do to the animals unfortunate enough to be swept up into this mess? I didn’t want to come face to face with a half-formed mountain lion that couldn’t reason like a person. The crazies were one thing. They could be rehabilitated into something approaching human. I wasn’t sure what we were going to do if we found something less agreeable than Sonny. He was a pain in the ass already.
“Whaddya feckin’ mean?” Slim Jim asked, almost chewing the toothpick wedged into his mouth to splinters in his agitation. His fur bristled, which I took to mean that he was as anxious as I was.
I pointed straight ahead. There was a break in the trees, and just beyond, I could make out a house. If this part of the state had more oversight, the structure probably would have been condemned and demolished a long time ago. Instead, it had been swallowed up by the woods and was now barely visible over a sea of native prairie grasses.
What remained of the house looked pale and skeletal in the moonlight. The plywood that boarded up the windows stood out like bandages on milky white bone. If Sonny’s nose hadn’t led us here, those windows would have clinched it for me. People didn’t board up a wreck like this. Its windows should have been gaping black holes with broken shards sticking out at the base where some kid had busted the panes out with a rock.
I gestured to the house and kept my voice low, just in case Arnie’s new form had stellar hearing. True, he might have chosen to go home and punish his prisoner some more, but I wasn’t going to take any chances.
“I bet you dollars to donuts that this became a meth lab after the owners moved out,” I whispered. “Or hell, it could’ve been onebeforethey moved out.” Abandoned homes usually became meth labs, eventually. Furthermore, it couldn’t have been hard to find a place like this, especially since most of the tweakers had lost their minds and ran off into the woods.
Slim Jim’s brow furrowed. “I still ain’t followin’. So what if it was a meth lab?”
I sighed. I was spoiled by having an extremely intelligent daughter, so things that seemed obvious to me might not be to the rest of the team. Dean would have understood, but he was a policeman. He’d probably busted labs when he was doing his time as a beat cop. As to Sicily—she’d been sure to lecture me about the safety of our trailer before we ever took residence in it. Back when she was in middle school, she researched enough to tout statistics about how much methamphetamine contaminated walls and other surfaces and what health hazards it presented. She’d even tested our trailer until she was satisfied it was safe to live in.
“So, meth is extremely combustible and only about forty percent of it can be removed if you’re trying to remove it,” I started and it wasn’t lost on me that I sounded exactly like my daughter. “The rest of it stays in the floors, on the walls, on the ceiling. You name it.”
“Okay,” Slim Jim said, nodding, but there was still confusion written all over his muskrat face.
“So… what do you think would happen if Ethan came charging in here as a hellhound?”
Slim Jim’s eyes then bugged in sudden understanding. “It’d be feckin’ blown to feckin’ kingdom come!”
“Right,” I answered with a quick nod.
Slim Jim took off his hat, swatted his thigh, and then put it back on his head again. “Even if Ethan somehow escaped an’ came after them kids o’ his, as soon as he stepped foot in this place, it’d go up in flames.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” I said.
Slim Jim shook his furry head. “That Arnie… talk about a spiteful sonovabitch.”
“No kidding,” I said. “He’s making sure that if he can’t have Jeanie, no one can.”
“Well, that ain’t gonna happen,” Slim Jim said. He stooped and took Sonny’s leash from my hand before tying it around a tree branch. Sonny happily descended on a pair of carcasses Slim pulled from his rucksack when he tossed them to the ground. “That oughtta feckin’ keep him for a while. Now, what’s the feckin’ plan, Miss Twila?”
