Page 128 of The Bright Lands
Whiskey bent down to grab the handgun that Mitchell had dropped and stuck the pistol down the back of his pants.
Bethany lowered the toilet seat to the floor. She looked first at Whiskey and then at Ricky Turner, bent over one of the trailer’s many toilets, tears in his eyes, a rubber douche trembling in his hands.
Whiskey shouted “Clear!” through the open door.
Mitchell groaned in the urinal trough. Bethany crossed the narrow trailer briskly and slammed the toe of her shoe into his groin. Mitchell let out a yelp of pain and stared at her, aghast. She smoothed the hem of her Bisonette singlet.
“Now,” Bethany said. “Does anyone want to explain what the fuck is going on here?”
JAMAL
Jamal wasn’t entirely certain what a generator was supposed to sound like, but he didn’t care one bit for the wet sputtery noises the Bright Lands’ generator was coughing up. The trailer park appeared to be run entirely off a single massive black box that stood taller than Jamal by a good six inches. The name on its face—MITSUBISHI—was dancing violently a few inches to his right. He wondered if the thing had been hit in all the gunfire. Frankly, he didn’t want to find out.
“I hope you understand the arrest weren’t nothing personal, Reynolds,” Coach Parter said, hands over his head. “When Boone told Mason to hold on to Whitley’s socks I never thought we’d find a use for them. But once Staler started setting you up with the cops, saying you was mad at Dylan for some reason, well...”
Jamal said nothing. The big man stood a few feet away, just past the front of the triple-wide, the shotgun somewhere in the dirt. Parter had dropped the .38 easy enough when Jamal had come around the back of the trailer a moment before. The warning shot Jamal had fired had certainly helped the coach over any hesitation.
Ahead and to the left of Parter, on the steps of the orange RV, Luke Evers lay in blood.
Parter glanced back at Jamal over his shoulder. “It was all just bad luck.”
Jamal cocked the hammer of the revolver and felt the gun tremble in his hand with a supple, satisfyingclunk—why didn’t every black man in this state own a gun? Jamal wondered—and Parter froze at the sound.
“You ever notice the only brown kid here is light enough to be white?”
Parter swallowed.
Jamal shouted to the others. “We doing this or what?”
CLARK
She pressed herself to a corner of the black camper and trained her gun on the windows of the silver Airstream into which she was certain—ninety percent certain—she had seen Garrett Mason and his military-issued assault rifle flee earlier. Ninety-five percent certain. Ninety. It had been so hectic when the bullets had started flying a few minutes ago, young men had been running in every direction, but surely she wouldn’t have mistaken Mason making a break for the Airstream. In his pads and his helmet he couldn’t have been that hard to miss, could he?
“We doing this or what?” Jamal shouted.
Or had he been bolting for the green trailer?
Silver or green. Silver or green.
Nothing moved in either window.
Silver. She trained her gun on the Airstream and shouted, “Clear.”
KIMBRA
Kimbra took up a place by the camper’s door. She eased it open, taking in the trailer park, judged the distance to Luke’s orange RV and wondered for the first time if she weren’t making a colossal mistake. Hadn’t Luke come out here of his own accord? Hadn’t he had sense enough to know that nothing good came of boys like Mitchell Malacek or Garrett Mason (or, for that matter, their good friend, poor broken KT Staler)?
Too late. When Kimbra saw Luke struggle to rise again in his pool of blood she knew she couldn’t do anything but try to help him. Luke could be aloof, could be embarrassingly alone, but he didn’t deserve to die here.
And besides: Kimbra suspected that if it weren’t for all her plans and tricks over the summer Luke probably wouldn’t have been brought here in the first place.
“Good luck,” Joel said.
Without looking back, Kimbra said, “I think you need it more than me, man.”
A brief silence. The night held its breath. She tightened her grip on Browder’s knife, just in case any of the frightened boys she saw watching her from their windows suddenly decided they wanted to get in her way. Better safe than sorry.
Clark shouted, “Clear!”
