“Jason, Freddy, that other one?”
“Michael,” Jade fills in, shaking her head no. “I already—”
“No, the one who eats people.”
“Leatherface. Bzzzt, not a slasher, sorry. It’s not about revenge with him, just—there’s nobody to get revenge against.
Who’s he supposed to come after, the Texas economy that forced his family into cannibalism?”
“Other one who eats people, I mean,” Shooting Glasses says.
“Hannibal Lecter,” Jade fills in. “Bzzt, not a slasher either, but partial credit because he also wears a face of human skin.
He just likes how people taste, right? Anybody else before we move on? Terminator, Alien, Fatal Attraction?”
“You can do this all night, can’t you?”
“What I was saying,” Jade tries to continue, “is that I already explained all this slasher stuff to who needs to know the most.”
“Did he buy into it?”
“She.” Jade shakes her head no, sadly, Letha didn’t. “Wait, though. I think it’s gonna be someone dressing up like our local legend, Stacey Graves.”
“Good name,” Shooting Glasses says, having to rush the Dr Pepper can in to wrangle a grainy line of spit that won’t break.
“Speaking of good names…” Jade says, looking past his current situation with the can to his yellow-tinted eyes.
He gets it, smiles, says when he can, “Greyson?”
“Greyson Brust,” Jade completes, showing off that she still has that rattling around in her head. “I never heard the end of that story.”
“I told you the beginning?”
“Never heard any of it.”
“Because you… jumped out of the car?”
“Had to,” Jade tells him. “You were about to spill, and I couldn’t know this particular backstory yet.”
“Because it matters?”
“At this stage we don’t know what matters.”
“But you think what happened to Greyson does?”
“I think you’re stalling,” Jade says. “What happened to him? There any reason not to tell me?”
Shooting Glasses looks down into the crusty mouth of his Dr Pepper can, kind of shrugs, says, “Sort of?”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that one way to look at it is that—it’s that we sold him, I guess.”
“How much?”
“Eight hundred each. That church guy, he counted it out in cash. We had to sign the accident report the way he wrote it up.”
“Church guy?” Jade has to ask. “Old-timey preacher, white hair and crazy eyes, big-ass hands, name rhymes with Bezekiel?”
“What? No, no—the… his name. That one the bear—”
“Deacon Samuels,” Jade fills in. “The church of the flipped house.”
“He paid us off. Now if we say anything, it’s like perjury.”
“Not sure that’s really how it works.”
“That’s how he’ll make it work.”
“He told you this?”
“Didn’t have to.”
“But he’s dead now.”
“And my signature’s still on that report,” Shooting Glasses says, leaning forward to rest his chin on the top of the padded steering wheel.
“So the report’s a lie, I take it.”
“It wasn’t supposed to matter,” Shooting Glasses says. “We thought he was gonna be dead on the ambulance ride, I mean.
But Greyson—”
“I really do like that name.”
“You can have it,” Shooting Glasses says, leaning back and looking out his window, his face right there in the reflection for Jade. “He’s pretty much done with it.”
“This is the part where you tell me,” Jade tells him.
“What, am I hypnotized?” Shooting Glasses asks.
“I’ll trade,” Jade hears herself tell him back.
He looks over to her, says after a beat, “Trade what?”
“Not what you’re thinking,” she says, sure to hold his eyes for that. “Ever since… since we first met. That night. You’ve been wondering why I did it.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” he says. “It’s—I know there’s never just one reason, I mean.”
“Try me.”
He considers this, considers it some more, then nods to himself, spits again, taking his time with it, and starts: “He could have been any one of us, right? Greyson, I mean. It was —we were leveling that lot on the point where the big house is going in. The dragon one.”