“Why would I have to be dead?” I was genuinely curious.

“’Cause that’s the way my baby is. She pays attention to things when they’re right in front of her, but if they’re out of sight, they’re out of mind.”

That seemed like underrating Lizzie, to me. But he knew her better than I ever would. I understood, after a second’s thought. Chip knew that failing to prevent me from coming to Texas was his big mistake. If I died, my death would erase that mistake. Of course that couldn’t be done. But it would make him feel better.

“Lizzie, I’m sure someone drew your attention to my website,” I said. “I’m sure someone pointed you in the right direction, thought it might be interesting to have me here to look at your graveyard.”

“Yeah,” Lizzie said. The sun was shining onto the terrace at an angle; it was about three thirty in the afternoon. “Yeah, Kate did.”

“How’d you come to think of that, Kate?” I asked.

Kate was clearly in a bad state. Her face was white, her breathing panicky. Her hands were tied to the arms of the chair, and I saw her wrists were chafed raw. It took her a moment to understand the question.

“Drex,” she said, her voice jerky. “Drex told me that he’d met you once.”

Chip’s head whipped around like he was a snake about to strike. “Drex, thanks to you, we’ve lost everything,” he said in a deadly voice. “What were you thinking?”

“It come on the TV when we were watching the news,” Drex whispered. “About her being in North Carolina, finding those boys’ bodies. I told Kate I’d gone to her trailer when she was living in Texarkana, ’cause I knew her stepfather. I’d met her.”

“And you told Lizzie,” I said to Kate.

“She’s always looking for something new,” Kate said. “That’s the name of the game, here. Find things for Lizzie, keep her happy.”

Lizzie looked absolutely astounded. If we lived through this day, she would have a lot of mental rearranging to do.

“So it’s a TV newscaster that brought me down.” Chip laughed, and it was an awful sound.

“How much of a snake handler are you, Chip?” I asked.

“Oh, now, that’s Drex’s strong point,” he said, grinning at the man standing beside him.

“Jesus, no!” Lizzie said, shocked out of her senses. “Drex? Chip, are you saying that Drex threw a rattler at Granddaddy?”

“That’s what I’m sayin’, darlin’,” Chip said. His grip on Lizzie’s shoulder never wavered.

“Have you gone nuts, man?” Drexell said, and his face looked different now. He didn’t look as bewildered and befuddled as he had. He didn’t look as weak as he had. He looked craftier and harder. “Why are you telling my sisters lies?”

“Because we’re not going to get away with it,” Chip said. “You hadn’t gotten that yet, I see.” Drexell looked blank. “There’re too many loose ends, fool. We should have killed the doctor. Yes, you asshole, sometime within the past few years we should have moseyed on over to Dallas and taken care of that old idiot. And we knew Matthew was getting out of jail sooner or later. We should have been waiting outside the gate for him with a gun.”

Now there was a sentiment I could agree with.

“You say we’re not going to get away with it,” Drex said. “So why are you doing this hostage thing? I thought you were playing a deeper game. I thought you had a plan. You’re just crazy.”

“Yes, I am, and I’ll tell you why,” Chip said. He let go of Lizzie’s shoulder, and she swung around to face him, taking a step backward, closer to the wall covered with guns. “I had me an appointment with a much better doctor than Bowden last week, and you know what he told me? I’m eaten up with cancer. At thirty-two! And I don’t give a fuck what happens when I’m not on the earth anymore. I don’t have long enough to live for you-all to do anything to me. Since I’m not getting away with anything, I sure as hell don’t want ol’ Drex to.”

His eyes were mean beyond belief when he said this.

“You’re going to die?” said Lizzie. “Well, good. I wish Drex had cancer, too. I want you both to die.” She seemed to have shaken off her fear, and I wished I could do the same. I looked at Tolliver, and I thought we would not make it through this. Chip would take us all out, because we were going to live and he wasn’t.

With one incredibly fast motion, Lizzie grabbed a rifle off the wall, the one right by one of the doors. It was pointed at Chip in a split second. “Go on and shoot yourself, since you’re going to die anyway!” She meant it, too, and she was ready with that rifle. “Save me the trouble!”

“I’m not going by myself,” said her lover, and he shot Drexell Joyce in the chest.

Katie shrieked and went over backward in her chair, covered with the mist of her brother’s blood, and as we all looked at the falling dead man, the screaming woman, Chip put the gun barrel in his mouth and fired at the same moment Lizzie did.

Twenty

I was so tired after the sheriff’s department finished with us that it was hard to focus when I got behind the wheel to drive back to Dallas. In fact, we never did make it to Garland. When I realized there was no real reason why we should, I pulled off at the next exit and got a room. We were just about out in the middle of nowhere, except it was nowhere with an interstate and a motel. It wasn’t a very good motel, but we could be pretty sure that no one was going to shoot us through the window.

I was still confused about several things, but both the shooters were dead.

Tolliver took his medicine, and we crawled into the bed. The sheets felt cold and almost damp, and I got back out of bed to turn the heater up. It made the curtains billow in an unpleasant way. I’ve run into that before, and I keep a big clip in my overnight pack for just such a situation. It came in handy tonight. As I got between the sheets, I realized that Tolliver was already asleep.

When I woke, the sun was up outside. Tolliver was in the bathroom, trying to take a sponge bath, and he was grumbling to himself about it.

“What are you talking about in there?” I asked, sitting and swinging my legs out from under the covers.

“I want to shower,” he said. “I want to shower more than anything.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was. “But we can’t get the shoulder wet for a few more days.”

“Tonight we’ll try taping a garbage bag or a grocery sack over it,” he said. “If we tape it good, I can shower and be out before the tape starts to give.”

“We’ll try,” I said. “What should we do today?”

He didn’t answer.

“Tolliver?”

Silence.

I got up and went into the bathroom. “Hey, you, what’s with the silent treatment?”

“Today,” he said, “we have to go talk to my dad.”

“We have to,” I said, letting only a hint of a question seep into the words.

“We have to,” he said, absolutely positive.

“And then?”

“We’re going to ride off into the sunset,” he said. “We’re going to go back to St. Louis and be by ourselves for a while.”

“Oh, that sounds good. I wish we could skip the part about your dad and go right into the ‘be by ourselves.’”

“I thought you’d be straining to get at him.” He’d started working on his stubble, and he paused, one cheek still gleaming with shaving gel.

I’d thought so, too. “There’s a lot I almost don’t want to know,” I said. “I never imagined I’d feel like this. I’ve waited so long.”

He put his good arm around me and held me close. “I thought about leaving Texas today,” he said. “I thought about it. But we can’t.”

“No,” I said.

I called Dr. Spradling’s nurse that morning and told her, as I’d been instructed, that Tolliver wasn’t running a temperature, wasn’t bleeding, and his wound didn’t look red. She reminded me to make sure he took his medicine, and that was that. Despite the shocks of the previous day, Tolliver looked better than he had since the night he was shot, and I was sure he was going to be fine.