“I’ll drive you to the ER.”

“For godsake, Crystal, will you give it up? I can’t go right now.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t.”

“What happened?”

“Your boyfriend happened, that’s what.”

“Ledge?”

“Ledge,” he repeated, mimicking her astonishment. “You gotta have a fucking aspirin.”

“Shh! All right.”

She left the room and slipped down the hallway, moving as silently as possible past her mother’s closed bedroom door. Using only the nightlight in the bathroom, she took a bottle of Advil from the medicine cabinet and rinsed out the toothbrush glass. She made it back to her bedroom without being detected.

In her absence, Rusty had switched on the bedside lamp. In its dim glow, he looked ghastly. He had smeared the blood dripping from his mouth across his chin. Drops of blood speckled the front of his shirt. He continued to hold his left forearm against his middle.

With his uninjured hand, he lifted his shirttail and inspected the damage done to his midsection. There were abrasions. A large, dark bruise had blossomed between the bottom of his rib cage and his pelvic bone.

“Rusty, you need to go to the emergency room.”

He dropped his shirttail and reached for the bottle of Advil. He popped off the top with his thumb and shook several tablets into his mouth. Crystal passed him the glass of water. He drank it all and set the empty glass on the nightstand, where there was a framed school picture of Ledge.

“Sweet,” Rusty said, glowering up at her.

She had always tried her best to avoid Rusty and the sly manner in which he looked at her, implying an intimacy that had never existed. Gossip about her sexual escapades had been started by him. He had boasted of encounters that had never occurred.

All of that now made her self-conscious of her dishabille. She pulled a cotton housecoat on over the short pajama bottoms and t-shirt she’d been sleeping in. She clutched the robe to her, arms folded over her torso. “What did Ledge have to do with this?”

“Everything. The bastard.” He looked at her with mad, feverish eyes. “But I can’t report his assault on me without incriminating myself. So he’ll get away with it and only be charged with selling weed.”

“He doesn’t sell weed.”

“And the pope doesn’t wear a beanie.”

“Ledge smoked that one time and got caught. That’s it.”

“You believe that? He only tells you what you want to hear so you’ll fuck him.”

“That’s not true.”

He snorted a dismissal of her incensed denial. “Tonight, he was dealing out of his car on the parking lot of his uncle’s shitty bar. I…I…” He looked aside, then came back to her. “I had supplied him some of the goods.”

Her lips parted in dismay.

“Surprise!” he said. “The sheriff’s kid peddling pot. Who’d’ve thunk it?” He shifted his arm slightly, winced, swore, took several stabilizing breaths. “Anyhow, Burnet and I got into a dispute over the division of our profit. When we couldn’t reach a fair and reasonable agreement, he came at me with fists flying. I guess it comes from being raised in a pool parlor, but he doesn’t fight fair.”

“You’re saying Ledge did this to you?”

“Haven’t you been listening?”

“I don’t believe you.”

But despite her assertion, she did. She believed him, and that made her apprehensive and afraid for Ledge. She sat down on the same side of the bed as Rusty but kept her distance.

She thought back to what Morg had looked like the night she and her mother were summoned to the hospital and informed that he’d undergone emergency surgery to repair a ruptured spleen. Their assumption was that he’d been in a terrible car wreck, but when told that he’d been attacked on the parking lot of Burnet’s Bar and Billiards, she’d known who had thrashed him.

Only a few hours earlier she had told Ledge about Morg’s abuse. Ledge hadn’t ranted, hadn’t taken an oath of vengeance for her, hadn’t pledged he would put a stop to it.

Rather, he’d remained motionless and silent, simply staring into the near distance, his eyes radiating an intense, white heat. Then he had come to his feet and offered to walk her as far as the corner near the school where Morg was due to pick her up.

In the hospital waiting room, she and her mother were questioned by a sheriff’s deputy. When asked if she knew anyone who held a grudge against her stepbrother, she was trembling on the inside but had lied with remarkable composure. “No, sir. No one.”

Now, as then, her concern was more for Ledge than for his victim. “Is he as banged up as you are?”

“You’re worried about him?” He looked at her with contempt. “I told you, he doesn’t fight fair. He walked away with barely a scratch, if any.” He reached for the glass on the nightstand and spat bloody saliva into it. “He left me there like this and sped off with what was left of our stash and the money we’d made. But I got the last laugh.”

When he chuckled, it was an ugly, evil sound. Pinkish bubbles formed between his swollen lips. “Not long after he left me bleeding, he got busted. Caught with what we hadn’t sold. As we speak, he’s in lockup.”

She made to leave the bed in a rush, but Rusty’s good arm shot out and caught her wrist. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“To the jail.”

“Like hell you are.” He pulled her back down onto the bed. “You and I are staying right here. Where I’ve been all night.”

“All night? What are you talking about?”

“Why, Crystal, honey, I’ve been with you since around nine-thirty, when your mama turned in for the night. No more than five minutes after her bedroom light went out, I tapped on your window, and you let me in. The prints of my boots will be outside your window under those scraggly bushes, and right there under the window on your rug.”

She pulled on her arm, but he held fast. “If your jailbird sweetheart tries to implicate me in his little sideline business, I have a rock-solid alibi. You. We were screwing each other’s brains out.”

“You filthy piece of crap. We were doing no such thing.”

“Okay, then. We weren’t screwing. You were sucking me.”