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PROLOGUE

SOMETIMES, even when the roads are quiet and the others are asleep, she lets herself worry shechoice

It’s not that she doesn’t like the group—she does Really They stick together and they play it s on side streets as hways, with the open, endless fear those offer They’re never one without food or sleep or both for too long, or when they’re scared When they cairls like telling stories about the kids they knew in Virginia, at East River They all laugh, but she has trouble putting the faces to the names She can’t remember where the lake was in relation to the fire pit, and she wasn’t there that one time they all put on a play for one another She wasn’t there because she ith her friends She was in a different car, a better one, a happier one Because when the girls stop telling these stories, the saain, there’s only silence And she misses the war, lying and saying it would all be okay

Maybe it’s bad—she doesn’t know—but secretly she’s glad no one expects her to tell stories of her own That way she gets to keep theainst her heart She presses her hand there when she’s scared, when she wants to pretend it’s the around her, and not the others When she wants to feel safe

She keeps her hand there all the time Now

Thethat they need to go faster, faster, faster She sees the car through the back windshield of the SUV The er-sidelooks like he is aiun directly at her The driver has a face like he’d be willing to drive through a firestoret to them, and she hates him for it

She wants her voice to join with the others’ screaed in her throat The boy behind the wheel needs to stop the SUV, slaet out of their own car and think they’ve won We are five to their two, she thinks, and if we can catch them by surprise—

But their SUV is suddenly flying like it’s gone up a rah to steal her breath in that one second they’re in the air—then they’re spinning, the glass is s, and not even she can hold in her screams

ONE

LISTEN, no matter what anyone tells you, no one really wants this job

The hours are endless and the pay is crap No, I take that back It’s not the pay that’s crap There’s a sweet little penny in it for you if you can hook yourself a decent-sized fish The only thing is, of course, that everybody’s gone and overfished the damn rivers You can drop in as many hooks as you want, buy yourself the shiniest bait, but there just aren’t enough of them still in the wild to fatten up your skeletal wallet

That’s the first thing Paul Hutch told me when I met him at the bar this afternoon We’re here to do business, but Hutch decides that it’s a teaching moment, too Why do people constantly feel like they have to lecture me on life? I’m twenty-five, but it’s like the minute you take actual kids out of the picture, anyone under the age of thirty suddenly becomes “son,” or “kid,” or “boy,” because these people, the “real adults,” they have to have so to so up their sense of self-worth It est my own stomach I’m no one’s boy, and I don’t respond to son, either I’m not your damn dead kid

Soarette in one of the dark booths behind us I hate co here almost as much as I hate the usual suspects who haunt the place Everything in the Evergreen is that tacky emerald vinyl and dark wood I think they want it to look like a ski lodge, but the result is so closer to a poor eezers and fewer busty chicks holding frothy s of beer

There are pictures of white-capped mountains all around, posters that are about as old as I aood snow in fifteen years, or enough demand to open in five I used to run the ski lifts up all the different courses after school, even during the summer, when people fro in terees I tell myself, At least you don’t have to deal with the snotty tourists anymore—the ones who acted like they’d never seen a real tree before, and rode their brakes all the way down Hu road I don’t miss them at all

What I miss is the paycheck

Hutch looks like he crawled out of a horse’s ass—s at one of those tour group companies that let you ride the donkeys down into the Grand Canyon They closed the national parks, though, and the owner had to staff, before ulti them off There’s no work for Hutch to do there anymore, but I’m pretty sure the woman lets him sleep out in the stables

He’s been here for hours already; he’s looking soggy around the edges, and when I walked into the dark bar, he glanced up all bleary and confused, like a newborn chick sticking its head out of an egg His hair is so at once, the wisps halfheartedly tied back with a strip of leather

Trying to speed things up, I slide a crumpled wad of money his way The stack looks a lotoff tens and twenties for so long I’er bills

“It’s not that I don’t think you can do it, son,” Hutch says, studying the bottom of his pint “It just sounds easier than it is”

I should be listening harder than I am If anyone knohat the job’s really like, it’s him Old Hutch tried for six months to be a skip tracer, and the prize he won for that ered hand He likes to tell everyone soed to burn doo trailers by falling asleep with a cigarette in his hand, I’m inclined to doubt it Still, he ets hireen So a cup at the corner of Route 66 and Leroux Street, pretending his white ass is a military vet from the Navajo Nation Somehow he thinks that combination elevates him over the rest of us bums