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wiggled its way along the outside of his thigh where army surgeons had put his bone back together.

    A spiral fracture, the doctors called it. Because the heavy bone had been twisted like a madman twists the neck of a chicken. It had splintered as a result. Worst of all, this had happened because of me. Because Barrett had had my back when plenty of other folks would’ve been happy to see me dead.
    As a result, I owed him—whether his grandmother had asked me to check up on him or not.
    Not that Barrett was giving me much of a chance to pay him back.
    Like I wasn’t even there, he plowed past me and into an adjacent bathroom. Flicking on the light, he slammed the door in my face. I grabbed the knob, turned it. It didn’t budge. Because Barrett had locked it.
    I heard the shower snap on. And I tried not to imagine Barrett—with his amazing muscular body—naked under the spray. Instead, I told myself to get busy snooping through his things.
    I searched Barrett’s duffel bag and the dresser’s drawers, inspected the loveseat’s cushions and the kitchenette’s nooks and crannies. I checked every crevice in the armchair and even shifted the mattress from its box spring. To my relief, I didn’t find what I was looking for.
    And what was that?
    Drug paraphernalia.
    Vance McCabe, I was certain, had a drug problem. And during the course of the morning, I’d begun to worry that Barrett, too, had developed a problem in the weeks he’d stayed with me. Because when he broke his leg, his army docs had prescribed plenty of prescription-strength painkillers. As medically necessary as they may be, pills like Percocet and Vicodin can be addictive. Maybe he’d turned to Vance to acquire some self-medication.

    That would certainly explain his erratic and aggressive behavior.
    But just because I didn’t find any drugs didn’t mean I was done searching for explanations.
    A rotary telephone predating the Vietnam War squatted on the desk against the far wall. Under it lay the Fallowfield phone book. The directory was as skinny as a cheap magazine and a far cry from the fat tome that contained Washington, D.C.’s phone numbers.
    I snatched it up, flipped to the M section—and found at least two dozen McCabes listed in its pages. None of them sported the first name of Vance or even the first initial V. Still, I scanned each notation, but the street addresses and county roads meant nothing to an out-of-towner like me.
    Before I could hunt up the name of Eric Wentz, the shower cut off. The bathroom door banged open and Barrett emerged—in jeans this time—with a damp towel looped around his neck. His shaggy blond hair was dark with wet and it curled at his nape and at his ears. He bypassed me, began digging in the duffel I’d heaved onto the bed. He found a tatty flannel shirt in the bottom of it, shoved an arm in the sleeve.
    “Look,” I told him. “Your grandmother’s worried about you. Tell me what’s going on between you, Vance, and Eric Wentz, and I’ll soften it up for her.”
    Barrett tossed his damp towel at the bathroom doorknob. It missed by a mile, landed on the floor. He didn’t pick it up.

    “I’m worried about you, too,” I said, and could feel my face heat with the admission. “If you’re in trouble, I don’t want to leave you here in the middle of it.”
    Outside, a horn honked twice. Barrett barreled through the door. I followed, froze on the landing. A pickup truck that had seen better days idled in front of the garage. It might’ve been a bright butterscotch color at one time. Now its paint job had faded to the shade of a butternut squash and its body was patchy with rust. Through its windshield, I spied Vance McCabe at the wheel.
    Barrett climbed into the truck’s passenger side. Away they went, tires spitting gravel as Vance stomped on the accelerator. And across the lawn, I saw Miranda Barrett hovering on the threshold of the house’s back door.
    I shambled down the stairs, crossed the yard to