Page 86 of The Bright Lands

“Joel?” Clark was here. A half hour had passed. He thought he had hallucinated calling her.

Rising from the couch, the memory of his arrest still echoing in his brain, Joel recoiled when he saw the state she was in.

Clark was covered in ash. It powdered her hair, smudged her cheeks like theater paint. Her eyes were a violent red. When he told her that Wesley’s house was empty, she brushed glass from the sofa and dropped heavily into the seat beside him. A chalky ghost remained, briefly, suspended in the air above her.

“Are you alright?” he asked, rising to get her a drink before she could tell him otherwise.

“Have you ever seen what an oxygen tank does to someone when it explodes next to their bed?”

Joel handed her a whiskey.

She said nothing. Joel poured himself a drink and considered his approach. Clark was clearly exhausted, but he needed her now more than ever. He needed to move while the memory was still fresh. Joel needed to know what that fat fucker of a cop, like Wesley, had never been invited to.

“I have to speak to Grissom,” Joel said. “Do you know where he lives?”

Clark stared at Joel as if to confirm he wasn’t joking. She exploded with a violent spasm of laughter. Little wisps of ash drifted off her quaking body and rose through the air like she was smoldering herself.

“I was just at his house,” she said. “There’s not much of him left.”

FRIDAY

THE BRIGHT LANDS

JAMAL

“We need to talk.” Jamal awoke to the sound of his lawyer rapping on the bars of his cell. Mr. Irons was dressed in a sharp suit and tie, smelled of leather and cinnamon. “But you got a visitor. Hurry now, I have an appointment at the federal courthouse.”

Jamal dragged himself up from the hard cot. He had finally slept last night, had suffered no dreams, but after a week of terrible nights it felt almost more exhausting to be rested.

He said to Mr. Irons, “I can’t shower or nothing first?”

“They’re transporting you to the jail in Austin tomorrow. They have showers there.” Irons dug into his suit pocket. “I brought you these.”

Jamal accepted a pack of wet towelettes his lawyer passed through the bars.

He let the deputy cuff him and lead him down the hall past a drunk who had screamed half the night and a woman curled in the corner of her cell. She raised her gray head as he passed.

“It’s back,” she said, staring Jamal straight in the eye. “It never left.”

Jamal stepped into the interview room and saw Kimbra Lott and for a moment he was happier than he’d been in weeks. She had straightened her hair and made up her face and painted her nails a bright Bison green. Of course. The Stable Shootout was tonight.

A foil packet waited for him on the table. Jamal slid out the cookies he knew awaited him inside—he noticed that someone at the department had already opened them for him—and tried to laugh at the name written in icing across their crust: KT.

“Don’t mind the name,” Kimbra said. “I figure you deserve them more.”

“Did your dad make these?” Jamal asked. Mr. Lott was famous for his Bison spirit.

“The man can’t help himself.”

A brief silence came over them. Jamal took a bite of the cookie: he hadn’t eaten anything decent since his breakfast yesterday at home.

He waited a moment to raise the cookie and asked, “Has anyone heard from KT?”

Kimbra glanced back at the one-way glass. Jamal wondered if Mr. Irons had warned her about the men who would be listening on the other side. If he had, her face betrayed no concern. She said only, “I hear he got home last night.”

“He did? Where was he?”

“Dallas, I think.”