Page 79 of The Bright Lands

“It’s not the entire team that’s safe.” Wesley was beginning to sound exhausted. He rose and headed for the drinks cart. With a shaky hand he filled his glass. “There was always a clique. A little band of golden boys no one could touch.”

“Was Troy Clark one of those boys?”

Wesley emptied the glass in one gulp. “Of course he was. He and Ranger Mason, Jason Ovelle, a few others.”

Joel’s stomach turned at the thought of Ranger Mason. Of Ranger’s bloody mouth.

“Is that why Troy Clark was selling drugs around here? Because he knew he was immune from the law?”

“How should I know? I wasn’t one of them.”

“And what about Dylan? Was he one of the untouchable boys today?”

“You have to ask?”

“Who else?”

“Not Luke, I’ll tell you that. Joel, this can’t be hard to figure out. Look at this town. Look at who walks around like they own it.” For the first time since he spotted the medal dangling from Joel’s fingers in the hallway a look of fear came over Wesley’s face. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“One of those untouchables killed my brother, didn’t he? It’s why the whole damn town is trying to cover it up by framing Jamal Reynolds.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“KT Staler got mixed up in trouble over the summer. You said it yourself. But his girlfriend knew nothing about it. There’s no record of anything in the sheriff’s department’s system. Wesley—what did KT do?”

“I can’t talk about that place, Joel.”

“What place?”

Wesley splashed bourbon somewhere in the vicinity of his glass. His face had gone white.

Joel studied the fear in the man’s sunken eyes. The exhaustion.

Joel said, “You’re dreaming about it too.”

Wesley stood so still Joel thought the man had stopped breathing. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

KT told me once he was gonna hang out with his White Lands boys.

Joel said softly, “You can’t remember them well, can you? The dreams. They chase you all night and then you wake up shaking and stare at the ceiling and ask yourself, ‘What the hell has got me so scared?’”

i can’t go to the bright lands it’s not the same no more.

The bourbon sloshed in the minister’s glass.

“Wesley,” Joel said. “What are the Bright Lands?”

Mores laughed abruptly, a violent reflex, the second the words were out of Joel’s mouth, knocking his hip into the bar cart and making the bottles titter. Yet when Wesley regained control of himself all he said was, “I don’t know. I was never invited.”

I was never invited.

The memory came rushing up at that: the bad memory, theworstmemory. Joel felt a coarse thumb press itself against his asshole. He heard a man say,“Cheer up, son. I weren’t ever—”

As the memory of fat deputy Grissom filled his mind Joel dug his nails into the leather of the couch. If Joel thought about it, if he let himself remember, he was certain he would go falling backward, be lost permanently in the dark folds of the past.

Pulling himself into the present, Joel stared at Wesley and said, “What does the Bright Lands have to do with my brother?”

A little echo of the laugh rose from the other man’s chest. He shook his head. “You just can’t help yourself, can you?”