When Devils Sing(35)
Sam wanted to smash the horrible thing across Jack’s face, but the urge quickly passed as reality set in. This was the cost for saving her brother’s life—covering up the death of another. Of the person she once called her best friend.
“This isn’t right,” Sam murmured as she slowly unscrewed the cap, watching as the clear liquid disappeared into the sloshing lake water.
Jack was quiet as he pulled a pair of Dawson’s scuffed-up Nikes from the bag. Sam remembered when he’d bought them, right after his first paycheck came from caddying last summer. Jack buried them in the sand, then splashed them with water. He tossed the bag, empty beer bottles, and Dawson’s shoes onto the grass in a pile.
“What’s the story then?” Sam asked, guilt lacing her words. “How am I supposed to help you cover this up?”
Jack held out his hand, gesturing for the bottle. “You’ll say that last Wednesday, after your shift at the Tavern, you and Dawson met up out here around ten. He was upset. Drinkin’ heavily. Kept asking you to swim with him, but you declined. You drove home while he, supposedly, waited on a friend to take him home. After you left, one thing led to another, and Dawson went for a solo swim and never came back. And well … you know the rest.”
Sam squeezed her eyes shut for a long moment before opening them again. “What if I refuse?”
“Then your brother dies like the good Lord intended,” Jack said evenly. “Bottle, Red.”
Sam tossed the empty vodka handle toward Jack, not minding the intensity of the throw. He caught it with ease, then added it to the pile that now painted a pathetic, fabricated picture of the end of Dawson Sumter’s life.
“What’s gonna happen to him?” Sam’s gaze was fixed on Dawson’s bag.
“Somethin’ that won’t happen to you as long as you keep your head down and mind your goddamn business,” Jack cautioned, then his expression softened as he met Sam’s eyes. “I’m not intendin’ to be cruel here. Just trying to help you out.”
“You can help me by being honest,” Sam snapped in return. “I deserve that, at the very least.”
Jack heaved a heavy sigh, rubbing the shadow of facial hair along his jaw. “What’s happening to Dawson is punishment. For somethin’ he did. It pissed some Clearwater folks right off. There’re some forces at work here that you don’t wanna be involved in for your own good. Got it?”
Sam nodded, not wanting to hear any more. It seemed Andrea had been right all along—Dawson had gotten mixed up in something bad at Lake Clearwater. Something that was going to kill him. And there wasn’t a thing Sam could do about it without risking Ben’s life.
“Can you take me home?” Sam asked in a small voice.
“Not just yet.” Jack hesitated before he said, “There’s another stop we need to make first. WCLB News. For your eyewitness statement.”
CHAPTER 13NEERA
The next day, Neera was out running errands for the motel’s cleaning supplies when her grandfather surprised her with a phone call. She’d just left Walmart in the next town over when her phone began to vibrate on the passenger seat. She debated simply not answering it, as she was unwilling to do whatever asinine task Nanaji was surely to ask of her. Her stubbornness was, perhaps, one of the worst Singh traits she carried.
With a dramatic sigh, she fumbled for her phone, putting the call on speaker in her lap as she drove.
“Neera?” Nanaji’s aggressive voice rang out. “I need four lottery tickets. Four, okay? Two Powerball and two Mega Millions. All right?”
“Got it,” Neera told him, swallowing back a groan. Her grandfather only spoke to her about two things these days: college or the lottery. Finding success with either was equally unlikely.
“You have cash, yes?”
“Yep.”
He hung up the phone without warning. If Nanaji truly thought the lottery would be the solution to his debt, they were all surely dead.
Neera sighed, fumbling to enter the address for the nearest gas station into her phone. She and her mom had lived at the motel on and off for years, but she still didn’t fully know her way around Carrion. Everything looked like the same backroad, a dizzying maze of pine and oak trees and overgrown kudzu. It was a wonder anyone got around at all.
Twenty minutes later, Neera arrived at a tiny Chevron. It was the early evening now, the sun sitting low in the sky, casting the world in warm shades of orange and long shadows. The cicadas had quieted, their raucous screams an annoying hum rather than a deafening cry.
Several good ol’ boys hung out in the parking lot, sitting in the beds of their trucks, shooting the shit, and drinking cheap canned beer. One truck had a Confederate flag pitched proudly on the back. The air was flat and breezeless, the faded cloth falling limp against the dusty truck. Country music blared from one of the radios—not the kind Neera loved, with soaring harmonies and sad, twanging guitar, but the kind they played on the radio that was machine-made pop music, only about trucks and freedom and beer.
As she walked across the sizzling asphalt, Neera was careful not to make eye contact with any of the drinking country boys. They leered but otherwise paid her no mind.
Outside the gas station, two other men stood in front of the missing persons’ wall that this Chevron was known for. Most of the dates went back years, some even before Neera was born.