Jamie threw up his hands. “Find him?” He looked out at the dark. “We’ll never find him.”

“Yes, we will.” I stepped closer. “You and me.”

“How?”

I jabbed him in the chest. His eyes opened, wide and yellow-bright. “You’d better be right,” I said.

A sallow dawn threatened the dead-end hollow by the time we parked under the shot-up pie plate. Four hours had passed since I sat up, smelling smoke. Then the fire trucks, my father’s helpless rage, and the battle to save what remained of the vineyard. They dropped a line into the Yadkin and used its mud-choked water to extinguish the flames. That was the one good thing, the proximity of limitless water. Otherwise, the whole thing would have burned. Everything.

We got out of there before the cops came. I took Jamie by the arm and pulled him into the darkness. Nobody saw us go. Jamie was hard-faced and sullen, his skin the color of ash. Crusted blood made a sharp ridge over his left eye and finger-wide streaks of red smeared his face. We’d barely spoken, but the important words still hung between us, and would do so until this was over.

Until we found Zebulon Faith, and settled things once and for all.

He got in the car when I pointed, opened his mouth when I stopped at Dolf’s and came out with the 12 gauge and a box of shells. Once, ten minutes out, he said, “You’re wrong about me.”

I cut my eyes right, knew my voice was brutal. “We’ll see,” I said.

Now, knee-deep in bent grass at the end of the civilized world, Jamie looked scared. His hands spread on the top of my car and he watched me crack the barrel and shove in two thick, red shells. “What is this place?” he asked, and I knew what he saw. The gray light was unforgiving, and the road in was a hard, fast slide to the bottom rung of the human experience.

“Just a place,” I said.

He looked around. “Ass end of nowhere.”

I breathed in the stagnant water smell. “Not everybody was born lucky.”

“You preaching at me now?”

“Faith has a trailer just around that bend. If I’m wrong about you, I’ll apologize and I’ll mean it. Meantime, let’s just do this.”

He came around the car. “What’s the plan?”

I closed the gun with a metallic click. “No plan,” I said, and started walking.

He fell in behind me, stiff-legged and clumsy. We came to the bend, the granite shoulder cold and damp under my fingers. We couldn’t see it yet, but dawn bulged on some far horizon. Birds trilled from the deep woods, and color rose in the earth as the cold gray began to die.

I rounded the corner and the low drone of the diesel generator rolled over me. Lights burned in the trailer, weak yellow and a television flicker. A mud-stained Jeep was parked near the front door. Jamie stumbled behind me, nodded once, and I sidled up to the back of the Jeep. Gasoline cans lined the floor behind the front seats. I pointed with my chin, made sure that Jamie saw them. He raised his eyebrows as if to say, I told you so. But I wasn’t sold yet. Could be diesel for the generator.

Metal slipped across my hip as I moved. Dried mud crumbled to rubble and fell in the grass. I laid my hand on the hood and found that it still held some engine heat. Jamie felt it, too. I nodded and pointed to the front porch. We crossed the last of the clearing and knelt beneath the windows. Jamie was eager, and started for the steps. I stopped him, remembering how the wood had sagged. We had almost five hundred pounds between the two of us, and I did not want the porch to collapse. “Slowly,” I whispered.

I went first, stock of the gun against my hip, twin barrels angled in front of me. A night sweat slicked the steps. The generator put a vibration into the structure, so that it thrummed at a cellular level. Rust scaled the siding next to my face. From inside came a dull and rhythmic thump that felt wrong. It was too regular, too hollow.

The door stood open a crack, screen door closed behind it. Up close, the thumping sound grew louder. I thought that if I put my hand on the wall, I’d probably feel it. We knelt beside the door.

I stood, looked in the window.

Zebulon Faith was sprawled across the floor, his back propped against one of the decomposing chairs. Mud darkened his jeans, shoes in a corner. A burn on his forearm glowed with cherry heat. His left hand held a near empty bottle of vodka stuffed with lime wedges. He raised it, wrapped his lips around the neck, and swallowed three huge slugs, choking. Thin tears pushed out from under tight-squeezed lids and he slammed the bottle back down. He opened his mouth and shook his head. The television stained the room with a twilight zone flicker.

The gun was in his right hand, a black, thick-barreled revolver, probably the same one he’d tried to kill me with at the river. The fingers held it loosely until he shook off the vodka chug and opened his eyes. Then the fingers closed and he started pounding the butt of the pistol against the trailer floor. Up and down, lift and slam, once every five seconds. The thumping sound. Wood and metal on a sagging floor.

The room looked the same. Trash, strewn paper, the overwhelming sense of neglect and decay. Faith fit right in. Vomit stained the front of his shirt.

He stopped pounding the gun on the floor, looked at it, tilted it, then began tapping it against his head. He smoothed it over his cheek, a look of sensual awareness captured in the lines of his open mouth. Then he struck harder, against the temple, strong enough to twist his head sideways. He chugged more vodka and lifted the gun, stared into the muzzle, and then, in a most disturbing manner, reached out a tongue to taste it.

I ducked down.

“He’s alone?” Jamie whispered.

“And fucked-up. Stay behind me.”

I got my feet under me, clicked the safety off the 12, and went through the door smooth and fast. He didn’t even notice. One second I was on the porch and then I was on the vinyl floor of his kitchen, maybe ten feet between us. I had the gun up and he was still oblivious. I watched the revolver. His eyes were wrinkled shut, the television pure snow.

Jamie crowded in behind me. The trailer shifted under his weight and Faith opened his eyes. The gun didn’t move. I stepped forward and to the side, squaring up my line of fire. He smiled the most hateful smile I’d ever seen, like I didn’t know a smile could be. The hate filled him up, then drained away. In its place rose a deep, liquid hopelessness like I’d seen only once before.

And the gun began to rise.

“Don’t,” I said.

He hesitated, took a last mighty suck on the vodka bottle. Then his eyes glazed as if he was already gone. I leaned into the stock, finger so tight on the trigger I felt it creak.

But deep down, I knew.

The gun came up, straight and smooth and unstoppable. The hard round mouth settled against the bellow of flesh beneath the old man’s chin.

“Don’t,” I said again, but not very loudly.

He pulled the trigger.

Painted the ceiling with red mist.

Sound crashed through the tight space, and Jamie staggered back, collapsed into a kitchen chair. He was in shock, mouth open, eyes wide and dilated. “Why’d you wait?” he finally asked, voice uneven. “He could have shot us.”

I propped the shotgun against the wall, looked down on the crumpled ruin of a man I’d known for most of my life. “No,” I said. “He couldn’t have.”

Jamie stared. “I’ve never seen so much blood.”

I took my eyes off Faith, looked hard at my brother.

“I have,” I said, and walked outside.

When Jamie came out, he held onto the loose rail like he might bend over it and hurl. “You didn’t touch anything?” I asked.

“Hell, no.”

I waited until he looked at me. “Faith had soot all over him, a nasty burn on his arm. The whole room stank of gasoline.” Jamie saw where I was going. I put a hand on his shoulder. “I owe you an apology,” I said.