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CHAPTER SIX
Joh
I found her.
You found who?
The girl that was taken.
Joh
Joh
His mother needed to hear what he’d heard.
He started down, and did not hear the car that rose on the crest behind him. He imagined what the news might do for his mother. Get her out of bed. Get her off the pills. It could be a whole new begi
His father would come back.
They could get their old house.
The headlights found him and Joh
Joh
Ken jammed the transmission into park and threw open his door. “Don’t talk back to me, kid. Just get in the car. Your mother’s falling apart over this. The whole town is in an uproar.” Ken climbed out. He was tall and heavy, shapeless in the way that Joh
Joh
Ken gestured with a thick hand. “In. Now.”
Joh
I found her.
The house was lit up like Christmas: inside lights, outside lights, cop cars that angled in the drive and painted the yard with slashes of blue. Uniformed cops stood under the darkening sky, and Joh
“What’s going on?”
Ken opened his door and dropped a hand on Joh
“That hurts.”
“Not as much as it should.” Ken dragged him across the seat and out of the car. His hand came away and he offered the cops a perfect smile. “Found him,” he a
Joh
A static-filled voice acknowledged what the cop had said. Then, some seconds later, the radio hissed again. “Twenty-seven, be advised. Detective Hunt is en route to your location.”
“Ten-four, dispatch.”
Joh
Joh
His mother nodded against his neck. “They went into lockdown right after lunch. They called here and said they couldn’t find you, so I called your Uncle Steve; but he said he dropped you off. He swore it. And then you didn’t come home, and I thought…”
Joh
His mother caressed one side of his face. “Oh, Joh
“What has?”
His mother broke. “Another girl’s been taken. Right off the school grounds, they think. A seventh-grader. Tiffany Shore.”
Joh
“Me, too.”
Her voice trailed off, but Joh
She rocked back on her heels, looking for the right words; but one of the cops stepped forward before she could find them. “Son,” he said, and Joh
CHAPTER SEVEN
Levi waited with the broken body as the sun sank. The flies bothered him and his finger hurt so bad he wondered if God was testing him. He’d been to church and knew that God did that kind of thing; but Levi was nothing special. He swept floors to make money. The world confused him. But God’s voice had been with Levi for seven days. It came like a whisper and was a comfort when the world seemed dark and tilted left. A week of whisper left a huge hole in a man’s head when the whisper stopped, and Levi had to wonder why God was silent now. He was an escaped convict sitting in the dirt ten feet from a dead man. He’d been wandering loose for seven days.
I made the world in seven days.
The voice gushed into Levi like a flood, but it sounded different. It flickered in, faded out, and the thought felt unfinished. Levi held his breath, turned his head, but the voice didn’t come again. Levi knew that he was not smart-his wife had told him that-but he wasn’t stupid, either. Convicts and dead bodies looked bad together. The road was just above his head. So Levi decided that God would have to wait.
Just this once.
He knelt by the dead man and went through his pockets. He found a wallet and took the cash because he was hungry. He asked God to forgive him, then dropped the wallet in the dirt and straightened the man’s body. He pulled the broken arm from behind his back and crossed his hands on his chest. He dipped a finger in the tacky blood and made a cross on the pale, smooth forehead, then he closed the open eyes. He prayed to God to take the dead man’s soul.
Take it.
Care for it.
He saw the flash of white when he stood.
It was in the dead man’s hand, a scrap of fabric that poked between two fingers. It came out easily when Levi pulled. Pale and ragged, it looked like a piece of shirt that had been cut free or torn. It was as long as a baby’s shoe, faded and dirty, with a name tag sewn into it. Levi couldn’t read, so the letters meant nothing, but the fabric was kind of white and just the right size. He twisted it around his bleeding finger and used his teeth to tie it off, pull it tight.