“You think these people deserve it?” he asks.
“Not my business.”
“But if you had to guess?”
“No one deserves to be shot down from behind a fruit basket,” I say, holding in my temper behind clenched teeth so I don’t rile up the neighbors. “But my mom didn’t deserve to get cancer, either. It doesn’t matter if it’s fair or not. It just . . . is what it is. If I don’t do it, someone else will.”
“I guess cows don’t think it’s fair that people eat them.”
“Just let me get this over with so I can eat a burger,” I say, and by the way his nose wrinkles up, I figure he’s a vegetarian, or maybe he only eats organic.
I slip into the back of the truck and yank my Postal Service shirt out of the fridge, shrugging into it like it’s made out of slime and yellow jackets. It’s cold and smells like gunpowder. I keep my chest pointed away from Wyatt as I tuck the gun into the back of my jeans, slide on my shoes, roll up the door, pick up the basket, and get the card ready. The entire process is smooth compared to the bumbling joke I was this morning in Wyatt’s front yard.
I jump down, my feet unsteady on the overgrown sidewalk. The Preserve has been running wild for only a few years, but this nameless neighborhood has languished for decades. It’s weird to think of people going to the trouble of buying a house and then just letting it go to shit, but that tells me a little bit more about how the economy came to suck. Everybody just took so much for granted.
Wyatt watches me from the passenger window like I’m a wild animal that might be rabid. It occurs to me that I left the mail truck running with my only key in the ignition, and he could easily slam on the gas and get the hell out of Dodge, leaving me without my stuff, my GPS, my other gun, and a way to escape from Ashley Cannon’s crappy house before the neighbors show up to take me down, country-boy style. But he’s just sitting on the passenger side, one bare foot up on the dash, and he smiles, just a tiny smile, like he’s glad to see me watching him back. Somehow, deep in the pit of my belly, I know he’s not going to leave me here, dead in the water, even if it would make his life easier.
The walkway up to Ashley Cannon’s house is both completely different and utterly the same as the one up to Robert Beard’s house. Yellowed grass pokes up through the cracked and puddle-riddled sidewalk, and the screens over the windows are all ripped up. The house is a faded gray that could have been any color, twenty years ago. I think I’m going to feel worse about Ashley Cannon than I did about Robert Beard. Whatever Ashley used credit to buy, it didn’t improve anyone’s life very much.
I ring the doorbell, and a dog starts barking and scratches at the door. A guy yells, “I’m coming. Shut up, dog. Goddamn!”
The distinctive shick-shick of a twelve-gauge shotgun behind the door silences the barking. It’s a pretty common greeting for strangers in my county, but sweat breaks out all over me. Balancing the fruit basket in one hand, I whip out my gun and hold it sideways under the basket, my jittery finger on the trigger. Does this guy know what’s going on with Valor? Are his neighbors dropping like fiscally irresponsible flies? Will he even open the damn door, or is he going to just shoot me right through it?
While I wait to feel a hole blown in my chest, I struggle to straighten my posture and smile, which feels so wrong and awkward under the circumstances that it’s more like a chimp pulling back its lips to show scared teeth. The door snaps open just a few inches, and two black chasms poke out slowly over the chain. Behind the shotgun barrels, the man’s eyes are wary and bloodshot.
“That for me?” he asks.
“That depends,” I say with cheerfulness I don’t feel. “Are you Ashley Cannon?”
The gun pokes out a little more, and I take a step back.
“Who’s asking?”
“Just your friendly postal carrier.” I waggle my eyebrows and lean the basket forward enticingly, covering the gun as I get a better handle on it. My hands are so sweaty that it keeps slipping. My face is starting to hurt from smiling so much. I just want this to be over. And I can feel Wyatt’s eyes boring into my back like two red-hot pokers.
Ashley undoes the chain and opens the door enough to stick his head out over the gun. He’s your average country guy, in his late forties, wearing a camo hat and sporting a dark beard. There’s something familiar about him, but honestly, I’ve seen a thousand guys like him at the pizza parlor and at Walmart and at church on Sunday mornings, when my mom forces me to go. I look down and am unsurprised that he’s wearing a NASCAR shirt.
“Do I know you, missy?” he says, leaning closer and squinting. But he doesn’t drop the gun. A river of sweat runs down my back, but my shoulders are burning and my hands are freezing and I’m about to drop the gun again.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “Because I don’t know your name, and you still haven’t told me if you’re Ashley Cannon or not.”
His eyes light up with recognition, and his face breaks out in a snaggletoothed grin as he puts the shotgun down. “You’re Jack’s girl, aren’t you?”
I was cold all over before, but now it’s like an egg full of lava cracked over my head, and I can feel my face filling up with red and all my nerves firing at once. I bounce on my toes and swallow hard.
“Ashley Cannon. Yes or no?”
His arms reach for me, and I stumble back. “Of course I am. Don’t you remember when you were just a little thing, and—”
It happens so fast that I’m not sure which of us pulled the trigger until I see a hole bloom in his chest, inches from Rusty Wallace’s teeth. Ashley fumbles for the shotgun and falls to the ground, his mouth opening and closing like a fish trying to breathe and his eyes all but popped out of his head.
It was me. Oh God. It was me. My finger slipped. I couldn’t hold on to the gun, and I squeezed too hard, and I feel like my fingerprints have melted into hot metal. I drop the basket and stare at my traitor hand, clamped around the gun for dear life, the finger shaking like a worm on a hook.
“Patsy,” he says, barely a whisper.
I drop the gun and fall to my knees on his doorstep. He reaches for me, his hand trembling as hard as mine as it makes a clumsy grab for my shirt, for that top button, like he wants to pull me closer.
Oh, shit. Are they watching? Does this count? I can’t find his card. Everything is a mess of blood and tears and snot and sweaty, murdering fingers. I yank my face away, point the button down. He’s still breathing, but it’s no comfort.
Because he knows my name. And even though his lips are moving, nothing is coming out of his mouth except more blood.
“Ashley Cannon, you . . . you owe an assload of money to Valor Savings, and Amendment 7B, and we all know you sure as shit can’t pay it,” I say, stumbling over the words and ending in a jerking sob.
His reaching hand falls, and his eyes go dry and empty.
And I am empty.
But the gun isn’t. I snatch it up and stuff it down my waistband under my shirt, half wishing it would accidentally shoot me, too. They said suicide didn’t count, but they didn’t say anything about being so stupid and scared that you slip up and blow yourself a new asshole.
Trembling from head to toe, I find his card in my back pocket, toss it down, and hurry back to the truck. I pull off my shirt and wad it up and sling myself into the driver’s seat. Remembering the signature machine in the shirt’s pocket, I pull it out and write Ashley Cannon in wobbling script and click accept. The machine logs it normally, and I roll it up in the shirt and remember to breathe. But before I can put the truck into drive and break some more laws, if there are any laws left, Wyatt’s hand lands on my arm and stops me.
“What happened back there?”
“Nothing.” I shake my head, look away, swallow, tremble. “The gun went off by accident. It’s done. Let me drive.”
“No,” he says. “Something went wrong.
You totally freaked out. I could see your neck go red. Are you okay?”
“I just killed somebody. My fourth murder today. Of course I’m not okay!” I shout.
He wants to say something, but he doesn’t. He just stares at me like he’s interrogating me with his eyes, but also like he’s hugging me with his eyes. It reminds me of when I was six and I tried to steal a flying monkey figurine from the drugstore and my mom made me take it back in. She wasn’t mad at me, but the disappointment and tragic love in her eyes was heavier than the house that landed on the Wicked Witch. Now Wyatt’s eyes are squeezing me like that too.
I lick my lips and reach back to tug my hair out from its ratty half ponytail. I don’t want him watching my neck so closely.
“He knew my name,” I say quietly. “He said he knew me.”
“Did you ask him how?”
“He knew my dad’s name too. I haven’t seen my dad since I was four.” I can’t help sniffling. “He . . . Ashley Cannon has my eyes. Or I have his. And the same dimple.”
“And you just shot him and ran off? Without asking him about your dad or why he knew you?” Wyatt looks down, shakes his head. “You don’t seem like a coward.”
Under my hair, my neck goes from red to maroon. I can feel the rage creeping up, itching. I hold up the gun, ignoring the way it quivers in my hand.
“I’m not a coward. I’m a shitty assassin with slippery hands. And you don’t want to be calling me names right now,” I say, reedy and desperate.
Wyatt looks at me, looks at the gun, and then turns back to look at Ashley Cannon, who’s strewn out in his own doorway. A big, bear-shaped black Lab is nuzzling his side, and the dog’s upset whining carries across the still space of the yard. This is the longest I’ve stayed behind after an assignment, and I’m a little surprised that none of the neighbors have come outside to see what all the fuss is about.
It’s the dog that finally changes my mind. The way that big, thick tail slowly waves back and forth and the way those floppy black ears are laid back against its square head. When the dog falls to its belly and crawls forward to lick the dead man’s face, I mutter, “Shit,” and get out of the truck. That damn dog’s devotion cuts me to the heart more sharply than Eloise Framingham’s son with his stupid gun and stupider girlfriend.
Wyatt hops out without a word and follows me back up the sidewalk, bare feet dodging around a broken beer bottle. It seems like a longer walk than it did when I was on my way to kill a stranger, like I’m crossing continents or tectonic plates as they heave and sway. My tummy feels a bit like that too, like it’s falling apart into bits and pieces. Wyatt suddenly spins around and jogs back to the truck, and I have one moment of heart-wrenching terror as I think he’s going to abandon me here. Instead, he just pulls the keys out and hurries back to my side, and I feel small and fragile in his shadow. And I realize I’m glad that he’s there.
The dog looks up at us, whining. It’s a girl—she’s a girl. Her tail thumps against the door frame, her eyes trusting and the color of Hershey’s syrup. She belly-crawls to me and licks my hand like she’s asking for help, and my heart wrenches in my chest.
“Good girl,” I say. I pull her frayed camo collar around and see that her name is Matilda.
“He’s gone.” Wyatt stands up from where he was squatting by Ashley Cannon.
“I know,” I say. “He was gone pretty quick.”
I leave out the part about how I watched the second Ashley Cannon’s eyes went dull, drawn in by the fact that they’re the same cloudy blue as my own.
“Hello?” Wyatt calls, careful not to stick his head too far in the door. He might be rich, but I guess he knows that trespassers around here don’t get prosecuted. They get shot.
No one answers. Matilda whines. I realize that I’ve been stroking her head as my unfocused eyes linger on the red splotch on Ashley’s NASCAR shirt. I clear my throat and pull my hand away, but when she whines again, I put my hand right back where it was. Her head is like a cross between a seal and a shoe box, and I don’t want to stop stroking her between her silky ears until the world goes right again.
“I don’t think anyone’s home,” Wyatt says. “Do you want to go in? Look around? Maybe y’all are related or something.”
I put a numb foot through the door and smell barbecue potato chips. Somewhere farther back, Garth Brooks is playing.
“I guess we have to,” I say.
I am terrified to set foot in the dead man’s house, but I don’t want Wyatt to think I’m a coward, either. I don’t want him to think any less of me than he already does. Underneath that false bravado, the sullen, bruised child in me wants to know why the hell this guy knew my name and my dad’s name. I need to know if he still knows my dad. Most of all, I need to know if we’re related, because he’s as familiar as a dream I’ve forgotten, as a face smudged in a mirror.
I remember my daddy like some kids remember meeting Mickey Mouse on vacation—larger than life, magical, perfect. My mom never talked about him, but I imagined him in Vegas, or out in Arizona. Someplace wild, like he’d just gone into the jungle and become a vagrant or a wizard or a crazy shaman.
I never let myself think about the fact that even crazy shamans can send letters or e-mails, every now and then.
Shaking, I step over Ashley Cannon onto carpet the color of nicotine-stained fingers. Matilda doesn’t budge from my heels, her tail wagging side to side lazily and her head held low. Wyatt dodges the fruit basket and bends down to pull the body inside, grunting as he settles it against the wall. I close the door and turn the dead bolt. Already I am aware that Wyatt is doing the hard work for me, but I can’t think of a way to thank him that doesn’t sound monstrous.
Scanning the room, I take in the faded paintings of landscapes, the plaid couch with a distinctly butt-shaped dent in the middle, the huge flat-screen TV that doesn’t fit with the other, older, broken-down furnishings. A football game is on but muted, a bag of barbecue chips open on the dinged-up Goodwill coffee table. Garth continues his sad bastard wailing from a back room. A row of dusty pictures staggers across the mantel in cheap plastic frames, and they draw me over like a bass on the line.
The first two are old, two boys and a girl eating Popsicles in threadbare bathing suits and then posing by a lake with a wolfish older man a few years later, sometime in the seventies, maybe. The girl looks a little like me—rangy, with crooked bangs hacked into dark hair and a ponytail. At first I think the next picture actually is her, but then I notice that it’s much more recent.
And it’s me.
Ashley Cannon has my ninth-grade school photograph on his mantel, horrible sweater, braces, and all.
I lurch forward to pull that picture down. My fingertips leave streaks through the dust, and the frame feels heavier than it should. With Wyatt standing over my shoulder, I turn it over and pry the metal lever open. Photos burst out, five more school pictures hiding behind this one. They’re not from every year, more like every three years since kindergarten. On the back of each one, unfamiliar handwriting in blue ballpoint pen spells out my nickname and the year.
Patsy. Patsy. Patsy.
My mom named me Patricia. My dad nicknamed me Patsy, and I wouldn’t answer to anything else, even after he left.
“You were cute when you were little,” Wyatt says quietly, and I am suddenly overcome with shyness about the differently flawed, younger versions of me laid out for him to see. I force them all back into the frame and twist the lever shut. When I put the frame back in the dust-marked place where it lives, I see the one on the other side of it, and my hands stop, fists clenched, inches away from it.
It shows three men in camo and neon-orange hats. They’re smiling, arms around one another’s shoulders, behind an impressive buck. One is Ashley Cannon, maybe five years younger than he is today. One is the older guy from the photo with the kids, gray and grizzled but broad as a
bear. The third is a face I only remember from dreams. My heart lurches and the world goes sideways as I realize that I’m looking at my dad for the first time in thirteen years. My mom didn’t save a single picture of him after he walked out on us. In the photo, my dad is smiling, older than I remember him and with a dark beard that matches the men who must be his brother and father. When I wrench the smooth photo paper out of the frame, the date tells me it was taken six months ago.
My mom used to call him Jack when they were together, but I’ve always wondered what my dad’s last name was. Now I know. Cannon.
I didn’t think about it at all for the longest time, that my mom and I shared the same last name as her parents and sister. Not until I filled out my driver’s license forms last year did it become a problem, a puzzle. My mom turned her face to the rain-streaked window of the DMV and told me to put “deceased” for my dad’s name. At the time, I was more interested in getting my license than driving my mom to tears before my exam. I guess that means they were never married, or maybe she kept her name. And it shouldn’t matter, but it does.
I always wondered what my dad’s side of the family was like. I knew my mom’s parents, who lived thirty minutes away and gave me Juicy Fruit gum and haunted their small house like they were already ghosts before they died. I knew my aunt Patty, the one I was named after, before she moved across the country to California and had a heart attack. All Kleins. But I’d never had a passel of cousins like most kids, and I’d always wondered if maybe somewhere my dad’s family was getting together for a reunion picnic by a lake, maybe having three-legged races and spitting watermelon seeds together and generally being impossibly idyllic without me. Waiting for me.
Looks like at least three of them were getting together, and they were doing the same thing I’m doing right now.
Hunting.
“Jack Cannon,” I say to myself.
It’s a manly, violent name. It sounds like he’s the brother of G.I. Joe, like he walks around with a cigar clenched in shark teeth.
I fold the photo in half and stuff it in my back pocket before spinning around, hungrily eyeing the room as if there might be a trail of clues for me to find. Like at the end of the road, my dad’s going to pop out of the closet with a bouquet of balloons and explain that he still loves me and wants to take me to a picnic to meet the cousins.