Later that night I flushed the rest of the pills down the toilet. Numb my back and claw my heart; it wasn’t a good exchange.

Not at all.

Chapter 6

The next morning I went hiking—that would be “hiking” with quotes around it and a good amount of subtext. Leo didn’t want to go with me—he said the limp, shuffle, drag of my hiking boots was giving him flashbacks. I wasn’t sure if those flashbacks were to the last Mummy movie he’d seen or some previous work he’d had at a nursing home as an orderly. Grumbling and bitching aside, he came along in the end. He also brought snacks and a cooler. At least he was good for something, I told him.

“You’ll be begging for that something one day,” he challenged, “and I might not give it to you. Ever think of that, ‘boss’?”

We swapped glances, both responded “Nah,” with a grin, and I started the car. He shrugged and propped his cowboy-booted feet out the window; it was the only way he’d fit in my little racing bug of a car even with the top down. “But there’s no denying you’ve always liked the bad boys. Robin, for example, he couldn’t keep it in his pants if an alligator was undoing the zipper.”

“Oh, come on. You’re exaggerating.” He wasn’t. “And the donkey thing. That was a complete lie.” I was hoping. “Total urban legend.” I turned on a country music station. I didn’t like country music really, but lately the women singers were stomping the hell out of their cheating, lying, no-good men. Blowing up their trucks, setting their houses on fire . . . righteous vengeance. Maybe I should sign up for Eden House. And, lo, we shall smite the sinner with good old country girl ingenuity—all we need are boots and lighter fluid. “And you’re one to talk. You dated that one with the boob job five years ago.” I steadied the wheel with both knees while I held out my hands about two feet in front of me. “They were bigger than the Himalayas. I swear I saw a goat grazing in there, and its shepherd probably suffocated on her perfume.” I dated the bad. Leo dated the bimbos.

He snorted. “Wake me up when we get there.”

In Vegas there are two places: your destination and then the circles of Hell called construction you have to pass through to get there. This time they’d been doing construction under the Spaghetti Bowl, the intersection of I-15 and U.S. 95, for more than a month. Every time I passed through it, I used it as an educational experience to watch the pearification of a man’s ass and to practice the curse words of every language I knew, which, considering how much I’d traveled in my youth, were more than a few. Some days it was entertaining if I didn’t have anyplace better to be. Some days, as I watched an entire line of men sit on a guard-rail and do nothing but swig Gatorade and work on their tans instead of the pavement, it got old.

Today it was old. Very, very old.

Until it wasn’t.

I finally wove my way inch by inch through the orange barrels, and had just snailed my way beneath the shadow of the overpass when the squeal was first heard. Failing brakes, the heart-banging crumple-crunch of metal against asphalt, and in my rearview mirror, the truck tumbling over the side. Its cab’s front wheels caught at the last minute and out of the back catapulted hundreds of cans of red paint. They hit the asphalt, popped their tops, and geysered the scarlet fluid high in the air . . . into a sudden gust of wind that pushed the flood of it sideways. Every still-unmoving, gaping-mouthed “worker” out there was coated in it.

Now wasn’t that lucky?

I put on my brakes and turned for a better look. “Ha!” said the truck driver who’d scrambled to safety. He was pointing down at the workers on the road beneath the overpass. “Take that, you lazy-ass motherfuckers. Next time you hear brakes, I bet you get off that fat ass just like that.” He went on ranting as road worker arms were flung out, dripping red, and blank-eyed bodies shambled through a river of red paint. It was pretty as any picture in those fancy art galleries you’d find in the casinos. I tucked the mental picture away for later savoring as I stepped on the gas again, still watching it all in the mirror until it faded from sight.

Blood from the sky. Who knew laziness would trigger the Apocalypse?

Which put me in the mood for some old, cheesy eighties, heavy metal music, and I listened to that all the way up to the caver’s hovel. When I stopped the car in a cloud of dust, Leo yawned, lifted his hat, and grunted, “I feel very, very angry and in the need of hair spray and a pentacle-studded leather codpiece. Your doing?”

I ignored him and pointed out the shack. “That’s where his body was. I think our best bet is to go into town”—a couple of more shacks and a few mobile homes—“and check out his friends when they come down for supplies.” Today was the day everyone stocked up and caught up. I found that out with a little earlier investigation. But there would be one—one who wouldn’t show up. That would be the one we’d have to go tracking. Jeb had told Hun; he would’ve told someone else. Hun couldn’t be counted as anyone’s best friend and closest and only confidante.

“Too bad your last girlfriend isn’t here. The Amazon. She could’ve piggybacked us into the mountains.” I started the car back toward town.

“She wasn’t an Amazon. She was a nice girl,” he said with a calm that was possibly more annoying than the Amazon had been.

“She was six foot five if she was an inch. She could’ve taken off that belly ring, put it around my neck, and led me about like one of those little yappy dogs.” All right, maybe she’d only been six foot one, but she had been taller than she deserved and her stiletto stripper shoes made her even taller.

“Funny you should say that.” His lips curved. “You’re not the first.”

I narrowed my eyes behind dark sunglasses. “She did not.”

“Said you’d be her first shiksa-poo. She could get one for all her friends. They’d be the toast of the temple.”

I narrowed my eyes further and a brown finger wagged once. “Nuh uh, little girl.” He emphasized “little,” the bastard. “That’s not how it works. We don’t screen one another’s hookups or dates. No retaliation, no matter how low our opinion, remember? Which means you can’t fill her car with mating tarantulas . . . again.”

“Fine. Fine,” I said irritably as we pulled into town. We talked to the dusty locals, who knew all of Jeb the aver ’s friends. Turned out Jeb even had a last name: McVann. “One-sixteenth Indian, he was,” said one old guy who’d been around long enough for that term to go from politically correct, to incorrect, to back again without any idea things had ever changed. “Get the old sot drunk and he’d go on and on so much, you’d think he’d been the one to stick the arrow in Custer’s dick at Little Bighorn himself.”

He, one Artie Beaver, served me another canned lemonade at his trailer/refreshment stand. “Yeah, he was all about the land and saving your home. I told him if the Indians had saved their home, fifteen-sixteenths of his ass’d be back in Scotland drinking warm beer and wearing a kilt.” He shrugged. Artie was a big guy, happy and helpful, but he didn’t know much more than that. He knew Jeb was dead and that his friends would be down today to say a few words, restock, and head back up. And for a few dollars he’d point them out for me. I handed over the money willingly. Artie was working hard entertaining me. He deserved to be paid.

“Guess he just wanted roots.” He carefully swiped at my rickety plastic table. If he’d wiped too hard, it probably would’ve collapsed under the attention. It was older than Methuselah and cheaper than a bleached-blond, teenage pop star. “We all want roots, right?”

But sometimes only the ones we pick. Still, that might have been why Jeb found the Light. He believed in saving and protecting. No better person around here to have found it. Leo and I sat and watched as the day dragged on. It was comfortable. I didn’t miss the summer heat. I enjoyed it when it was there and I enjoyed the cooler temperatures when it was gone. Mama had taught us that. Appreciate what you can’t change, and change what you can’t appreciate. She was as tough as the mountains around us and filled to the brim with common sense. I liked to think she’d passed that on to me, but she’d also said more than once that I wasn’t half as clever as I thought I was. Considering what I thought of myself, that still made me pretty damn clever. That attitude had gotten me more than a swat or two when I was younger. I’d learned to temper my self-belief in my quick wits with a dash of caution. It wasn’t enough. A swat to my ass was still waiting for me at every family reunion. I yawned, stretched my legs out, and let Leo be my eyes for a while. I didn’t nap, but I let the world slide gently out of focus.