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“Sharon Mulvaney,” I say, stepping back a little. “You owe Valor Savings the sum of $3,455.20. Can you pay this sum in full?”

Sherry giggles madly, and it builds into this rasping, choking laugh that shakes her whole body like it might fall apart. I notice that her toenails are painted bubblegum pink, and that one of her big toenails has flat-out fallen off. The sausage biscuit rises in my throat, and I hope to God I don't puke in here.

“Pay off a debt? Are you shittin' me?” She grasps at her heart, at where her heart should be. “Only people who pay off debts are
dumb bastards who think the big banks give a crap. They can't do shit! I got more credit cards than I got fingers, and I just let those goddamn bills pile up behind the door. Nothin's fuckin' happened. And every time I apply, damn if they don't send me a new one.”

I angle my chest toward her as I read from the card, fast and with as little breathing in as possible. “By Valor Congressional Order number 7B, your account is past due and hereby declared in default. Due to your failure to remit all owed monies and per your signature just witnessed and accepted, you are given two choices. You may either sign your loyalty over to Valor Savings as an indentured collections agent for a period of five days or forfeit your life. Please choose.”

“You are just a piece of work, honey,” she says, her scrawny chest still shaking with laughter. “You think I don't remember you, but I do. You just about broke my Annie's heart. Y'all rolled up our driveway in your piece-of-shit car, and your mama looked at my house like her crap didn't stink, and you didn't even get out. Annie watched you from the window, and she cried all night. That was some cold shit, girl. She never forgot that. And now you think you can show up and tell me what to do? Well, screw you, kid. The bank can't do shit. And you can't, either.”

“It wasn't my choice,” I say, and my voice is raw, because it's bothered me. For ten years, it's bothered me. I saw Ann in the window while we drove away that night. I saw her crying, but I didn't
stop my mama. And I didn't apologize to Ann at school the next Monday. We never spoke again.

“You always got a choice,” she says, mean and sharp as barbed wire.

“Wrong.”

She throws her head back on her skinny neck to laugh at me, and I pull out my gun and shoot her, right where the bird bones meet over her chest. Her eyes go round with surprise, but she keeps laughing, blood burbling out of the hole in her chest, out of her mouth. I throw her card at her, scared to get too close, like she might grab me and yank me into her diseased death hole of a bed, the skeleton in a haunted house that really is haunted. The card sticks in the blood, slides down to that dark spot on her pillow. Holding my wrist over my nose to keep the smell out and the puke in, I rush out the door and down the hall. There's nothing I want more than to fly down the stairs and out into the truck and back to Wyatt's secret place, back to where things feel safe, even if they aren't.

But something stops me. I have to see what's behind that closed door.

My hand curls around the cold doorknob, and the door glides open. Inside, it's like a wormhole to another dimension. This room is the only clean, pure, pretty place in the entire house, maybe in the whole neighborhood. Light pink walls, filmy curtains that let
the sun in with a delicate glow, pure white carpet, and a bed covered with bows and ruffles. The pillows and stuffed animals, though ratty, are arranged just so, just like the stuffed turtles on my mail truck cot. There's even an air freshener plugged into the wall, coating the whole room in a candy-vanilla cloud. Little photos are stuck under the frame of the vanity mirror, Ann smiling with her friends, the second-tier popular girls. I had forgotten that she was on the JV cheerleading squad, that she was on the homecoming court and the student council.

It's beautiful, this little sanctuary. It's amazing how it can stay pristine surrounded by such decay. And it strikes me to the heart that her mother kept this door shut, this room fresh, like her Annie might come back and make everything better.

I open drawers in the vanity until I find a pad of pink, star-shaped notepaper and an old ballpoint pen. I scribble,
Ann, I'm so sorry about that day. My mom made me leave. I always thought you were a really nice person.
And I sign it with my name.
Patsy.

I leave the note on her bed and let myself out the door, closing it gently behind me. And that's when I hear a sliding glass door whisper open down below.

“You in here, little
chica
?” a mocking voice calls.

“Her boy still out front. She in here,” says another.

I freeze and silently pull the gun back out of my jeans. It shakes in my hand.

“Maybe Sherry got her,” one of the guys says. “Sherry, you pop her ass?”

“Maybe she pop Sherry.”

“Maybe I pop that cherry.”

“Maybe you suck dick.”

“Maybe your mom sucked mine this morning.”

“Shut up, man. We get her, we get that truck. We get her alone in that truck . . .”

One guy beatboxes, and the other two grunt along like gorillas.

The first heavy foot hits a stair, and I realize that I have only seconds to become a victim or stay a killer. The choice is easy. I unbutton the top button of my shirt, letting the sides hang open so the camera is flopping against my shoulder. I'm pretty sure I'm allowed to kill these guys with no consequences. But if I know Wyatt like I think I do after only two days, he's going to show up as soon as guns start firing. There's no time to warn him. For the first time in my entire life, it's kill or be killed. I step around the wall and aim my gun down the stairs, both arms out straight and my finger on the trigger.

“Oh, here she is. Little bitch thinks she can pull—”

That's all he gets out before I shoot him in the neck. He falls backward, right into the next guy. They all look alike, just general thugs in oversized coats and pants and shoes, like cats puffing up their tails to look bigger. They're younger than they appeared from a distance, and I'm not falling for it.

“Oh, you gonna pay for that,
chica
,” says his friend, aiming a sideways gun at me, and a bullet ricochets off the wall over my head. I spin back around the corner, out of sight.

I'm breathing heavily, panting, my hands shaking. Every other assignment, I've had this certain confidence, like I couldn't be touched, like the blanket of silence radiating out from Valor Savings would protect me. Like my lucky locket would protect me. Like I was invincible and as long as I was doing it to protect my mom, I would somehow be safe too. Now I'm trapped, hunted, and scared. Down below, the first guy's body hits the floor, and the other two guys pound up the stairs. There's a crunching, ripping noise, and one of them screams, “Shit, man! My foot!”

The last guy keeps coming, and the front door slams open and bounces off the wall. A dog barks, and my heart sinks.
Please don't let Matty get shot. Don't let Wyatt get hurt
.

These guys that are after me, they're straight-up thugs. They have nothing to lose, and they steal and kill and rape for fun. And now they're mad. What I'm doing is business, necessity. What they're doing is just cruel. My hand stops shaking as I decide that I have to get my only two friends out of this corpse-house in one piece.

I spin back into the stairwell just as the next thug hits the top stair. I smash the gun right up to his chest and shoot him before he really knows what's going on. He mutters, “Fuckin' bitch,” as
he slumps over, and another bullet thumps into his back. The last guy is stuck on the stairs, his foot caught in a hole in the rotten step. His bloody ankle is comically small between the huge pants and puffy shoes, and I can see thick, jagged splinters ringing it. His face is screwed up, and he's holding his gun sideways as he shoots and screams, calling me every name in the book. But his shots keep going wild or just smashing into his dead friend as he falls away from me in impossibly slow motion.

I aim for the stuck guy, but he ducks at just the right time, and the bullet pings against the door, inches from Matty, who's planted all four fat feet and is barking like crazy. I can't shoot again—I can't risk hitting her, and I'm shaking too hard to aim. My head is nothing but barking and yelling and the high whine of too many gunshots, and each second lasts a million years, and I just want it all to be over.

Wyatt's right behind the dog, gun drawn, and I let him see me before I spin back into the hall and out of range of the thug on the stairs. The last one should be easy pickings for Wyatt now, with me out of the way. I hear gunfire, but I can't tell who is shooting at whom. Matty starts growling, and the thug curses and bumps around, probably trying to pull his foot out of the rotten wood. There's another gunshot, and Matty howls and whimpers. Something heavy thumps and rolls down the steps, and tears burn my eyes. Almost without thinking, I charge down the stairs and shoot the guy in the shoulder. Before he can fire off another shot, I put one
in his chest from point-blank range, screaming in his face so hard that my throat hurts.

He flops backward down the stairs, his foot still stuck. I know he's dead. I know it, but I kick him and scream, “Fuck you, you goddamn piece of trash! I hope you rot here!”

Strong hands link around me in a bear hug, and Wyatt hauls me, kicking and screaming, off the crumpled-up thug. As he drags me down the stairs, I can see now that the thug's even younger than me, maybe fifteen. He's so pathetically skinny, under all his puffed-up clothes.

“Are you cool?” Wyatt asks me once we're in the foyer. I dangle in his arms, limp and past fighting him.

“I'm fine,” I say, although we both know it's not true. “Where's Matty?”

Wyatt sets me down on my feet, and I almost trip over the first thug. This one's a little older but just as pathetic, and probably a tweaker, judging by how soft and crumbly his teeth look. When I think about what these guys would have done to me if I hadn't had a gun, I shiver. And I'm glad Ann moved away from here, hopefully very far away. I hope that when she still lived here, the doors were shut and locked. I hope she had a knife under her ruffled pillow, anything to protect her from all this goddamn decay.

I kick the thug over and scramble out the door, slipping on blood and trash. Matty's limping toward the truck like it's a real home.
Collapsing next to her, I stroke her head and look for the wound. She whines softly and licks my cheek, but her tongue feels dry. Dammit. When did I last give her water? I can't remember. Two days, and I'm already a shitty pet owner.

“It's okay, girl,” I say, petting her and feeling for blood. “It's going to be all right. Who's a good girl?”

Her tail thumps once before she whimpers and rolls over onto her side, and I force myself to stop sweet-talking her if it's only going to cause her pain. I run my hand over her side and find the sticky place, in her neck. When my fingers graze it, she lets out the most mournful sound I've ever heard, and it takes everything in me not to burrow my face into her shoulder and cry.

Wyatt squats beside me and says, “She's not going to die. It didn't hit anything vital. We can fix this.”

I meet his eyes and see nothing there but resolve. He's not trying to make me feel better; he actually believes it, the fool.

“I can't afford vet bills,” I say. “I can barely afford lunch.”

“I can.” But a look passes over his face that I can't quite figure out.

He scoops Matty up, and she whines, then growls for a second, then looks surprised at herself for growling at Wyatt and goes back to whining. When he tries to get a better grip on her bulky frame, blood squirts out of the hole, and her eyes roll white all around. I wish it had been me instead of her. At least I would understand what was going on. But her sweet face is just so scared and hurt and
shocked, and I can't even tell her not to worry about it because she'll start wagging again.

I lift the truck door, and Wyatt lays the black Lab carefully on the metal floor.

“I'll ride in back with her,” I say, scrambling up beside her on stiff legs. “You know the vet by the emissions place on Craley Bridge? Let's go there.”

He nods and rolls the door down, leaving Matty and me in the dark. I'm glad I don't have to watch Ann's house as we pull away. It doesn't seem possible that one rotting old building can hold four dead bodies, a meth lab, and a perfectly preserved girl's room. If the ground were to open up in a gigantic sinkhole and swallow it all down forever, I think I would feel better. And the neighborhood's so bad that not a single person came to investigate what had become a flat-out gunfight.

The truck pulls away, and Matty and I slide across the floor as Wyatt turns us around in a cul-de-sac. I've gotten so cocky that I forgot to be safe. We should have parked the truck facing out of the neighborhood for a clean getaway. If the thugs had been alive and chasing us, we would have ended up with busted tires and a truck full of bullet holes, and the rest of my assignments would have been screwed. So many things could go wrong at any moment that I kind of can't believe Valor would expect me to accomplish anything.

Shit, maybe they're counting on me to fail.

As I stroke Matty's head and hold an old sock over the bullet hole, I realize that I'm still wearing my Postal Service shirt. The camera flops uselessly against my shoulder, so hopefully it didn't see Wyatt, but the bottom of the shirt is speckled with Matty's blood. Guess I'll have to tuck it in from here on out. I look at it closely under the tap light before stuffing it into the fridge, but the tag inside doesn't say anything about how to wash it without damaging the special camera. When I turn back, Matty is either asleep or unconscious, her breathing shallow and quick.