Carl slouched in a waiting-room chair that had seen better days, chewing at his fingers and his eyes twitching as if someone had just kicked a bunch of sand into his face. He never much cared for Doc Pete’s office, because it was too quiet, and all the plants were made of plastic, and the pictures hanging on the walls were paintings of fields of flowers, and all the magazines were boring and out of date. The last time he’d visited Doc Pete’s office had to be twenty years ago when he busted his head open after turning over his dirt bike. Doc Pete put more than a dozen stitches in his skull and told him to come back in a few weeks to have them removed. Carl never came back. He ended up taking the stitches out himself.

Carl had to help load Danny into Lester’s truck and then drive over to Doc Pete’s with him. Sokowski stayed behind at Mindy’s, and when Carl left the trailer, Sokowski gave him a look that said it all: Don’t say a fucking word.

Oh, Jesus, they know what I’ve done.

Carl’s heart pounded like a jackhammer. He could hear the thudding in his chest and thought that Lester and Doc Pete would be able to hear it, too. He kept his gaze on the two men at the end of the hallway, whispering to each other and looking his way every few seconds.

Maybe I should run. Just run out the goddamn door.

But it was too late for that. Lester and Doc Pete came down the hallway and stopped in front of his chair.

Lester sighed, searched his pockets for his pack of smokes, and lit a fresh one off the one that was still burning. “Carl.”

Just a single word, but it scared the hell out of Carl. He stood up with a bolt, barely able to contain the twitching in his arms and legs. He wanted to confess. Wanted to blurt out his guilt and be done with it.

Lester pressed his index finger and thumb into the corners of his eyes and rubbed at them hard. “Do me a favor and stay here and make sure Danny doesn’t go nowhere. He’s a mess and probably can’t stand on his own two feet, but you never know. I’ll meet up with the staties over at the trailer and send them back to pick him up in a little bit. Doc Pete will be here, but just in case.”

“What did Danny say? He talking?” Carl asked, a little too quickly.

Carl found himself taking a step away from the sheriff. He forced his head to nod up and down. “Yeah. Just kinda in shock, I guess. Thought maybe Danny might’ve said what happened.”

“What’s to say? Pretty clear what he did. Besides, his jaw is so messed up, I don’t imagine Danny will be talking for a while.”

Carl glanced over at the door to the exam room. “You sure you want me to stay here? With Danny.”

“Don’t have much of a choice here at the moment. Once I get back to the trailer, I’ll send Mike on over. Shouldn’t be but a half hour or so.”

Carl’s big possum eyes blinked rapid-fire for a second. “But I ain’t a deputy or anything.”

“Well, I guess for the next few hours you’ll be an unofficial one. I don’t believe Danny will be doing anything else, but just in case it might be better to have someone here with the doc.”

Carl kept staring toward the exam room, opened his mouth to say something else, then just nodded instead.

Doc Pete showed Lester into his office and shut the door behind them, and Carl went back to gnawing at his fingernails again. Chewing at them until his fingers started to bleed a little. He kept glancing toward the door of the exam room, knowing he should just stay put, but finally started to move toward it. He got a few feet, stopped halfway down the hall, and checked back over his shoulder.

What the hell am I doing?

He helped. He helped Sokowski kill her for no good reason. He’d be going to jail for what he did. Rotting away in some cell all because of Sokowski.

Carl got to thinking about his kids, little Betty still tromping around the house in diapers. She went through about six or eight of them a day, and he wished he would have changed them once in a while instead of making the wife do all that kind of stuff. Baths, supper, bedtime—all that fell to Kelly to do. And Ben was an awful handful, always skinning up his knees, breaking everything he touched, and picking on his sister until she bawled louder than a coyote. Carl would sit right there in the living room chair, drinking beer and watching it all unfold and never lift a damn finger to help out his old lady.

Maybe he always bitched to Sokowski about Kelly, but she was a good woman—married his sorry ass. She was a good mama, too. Raising the kids the best she could. And what did she get in return? All he did was bitch and bellyache about having to always eat chicken-fried steak, that the trailer was a pigsty, that all she did was sit around and watch that stupid Wheel of Fortune. Maybe she’d gained a little weight since having the kids, but Carl knew he wasn’t any prize. Losing hair and gaining weight around the belly by the day.

It was now only because he faced a whole mountain of trouble that Carl got to thinking about all this stuff—taking his wife and kids for granted and treating them like shit. If he somehow got out of this whole mess, he promised himself all that would change. He’d help around the trailer, take some time for the kids, and treat Kelly like something other than a royal pain in the ass. If he got away with what he’d done tonight, he’d stop hanging out with Sokowski and get a real job over at Taylor Beef or up at Sylvania in Towanda. Hell, he would even be willing to give up the pot and slow down his drinking to just the weekends. Whatever it took.

Damn Mike.

Carl licked at his dry lips and reached for the door to the exam room.