Page 102 of The Bright Lands

With a sudden, violent lurch Jamal felt the gears in his head catch, the lights flicker back on. He wrenched off the flimsy scrubs they’d given him to wear, kicked himself into his jeans, shrugged on the T-shirt and the jacket. He was getting out of here.

“We’ve got a long drive ahead of us,” Irons said.

They followed Jones through the empty sheriff’s station. “It wasn’t just the arrest warrant,” Irons continued. “The document of probable cause, the report on the discovery of the sock—shot all to shit, the entire thing. That Mayfield, he’s been in this business how long, twenty years?”

“Twenty-three,” Jones said, unable to keep a little lilt of satisfaction from his voice.

“You’d think he could type a statement by now.”

“Nobody bothered to read it?” Jamal said, still not entirely convinced this wasn’t another vivid dream.

Irons said, “Somebody was in a hurry to get you locked up.”

Past the empty front desk, into the little lobby with its flags and its low ceiling, through the glass doors.

And then he was outside, smelling the air of a clear night, looking up to see the sun all but gone and the thin streaks of cloud fading slowly from ember to ash. He wasn’t sure he’d ever spent so long inside in his life.

“It’s the Mercedes,” Irons said without breaking stride. “Might be wise if you ride in the back until we’re over the county line.”

CLARK

She’d been trapped in traffic outside Houston for nearly an hour. She’d called Joel twenty times. She’d messaged his mother on Facebook, messaged Kimbra Lott and Bethany Tanner asking if they’d heard any word of his whereabouts. As Bison halftime approached on the radio, she picked up her phone and prayed she wasn’t making a mistake.

Clark had wasted the day watching her father sleep. On the phone this morning outside KT Staler’s house, a nursing home attendant had informed Clark that her father’s condition had deteriorated all week, that he’d had difficulty sleeping, refused to eat, and finally this morning had attacked another patient.

“Difficulty sleeping?” Clark had said.

“Yes, ma’am,” the nurse had told her. “You don’t read your emails?”

When she’d finally arrived in Houston, the home told her they’d had to sedate him. “There were mitigating circumstances,” a sweaty doctor informed her. “But if he lashes out again we’ll have no choice but to release him.”

Release him.Like a tiger. There was nowhere else she could put him. If not for the discount the home offered to retired veterans—and could you really be surprised, in a house stuffed full of old soldiers, if one of them threw a punch over a plate of cold toast?—Clark could never have afforded to keep him there.

She’d stayed at the nursing home all day, watching her father sleep off his Ativan. On smoke breaks throughout the afternoon she had checked her phone but only received one message from Joel.

Just left Ranger M’s house. Jason O is dead. Garrett/Dylan connection dubious. I think I know a little more about the Bright Lands. Call me.

She’d called. Joel’s phone had gone straight to voice mail. Just like it did an hour later. And an hour after that.

Around seven thirty, Clark had found a radio in her father’s room and tuned it to the game. When the marching band finally commenced with “My Herd, My Glory,” she’d heard his breathing quicken, saw his eyelids flutter open.

He’d not looked happy to see her. “Did you shut them off?”

Oh boy. “Shut off what, Dad?”

“The lights!” he said to her sharply. “Those damn queer lights! Fuck it, girl, youknow.”

“Dad, Dad, please, listen to me.” She grabbed his thin hand, squeezed until he shut up and stared at her. “I need to ask you something important.”

He blinked: foggy eyes, the other hand scratching at the bedsheet.

“Dad, do you remember all that stuff Mom used to talk about back in the day? About the monster in the trench, and the dreams and—”

“Crazy as a fucking loon, that was her. Do you know how hard it was living with a woman who said the ghost of her first love would keep her company at night? A woman who always knew exactly where you’d been because her favorite man was always whispering things in her fucking ear? Fuck him, fuck her, fuck me.”

Clark frowned. “Her first love?”

“The boy on the team, the one ran off! She swore and swore, oh no, he ain’t run off, ‘he’s dead in a concrete box,’ whatever the fuck that is. ‘It’s why the catfish came to town,’ she said. ‘It came to drink his blood.’”