Shine Read Free

trees bordering Patrick’s yard faded as well. I looked past them and squarely into Patrick’s pain.
    I pictured him alone at the Come ‘n’ Go, my onetime best friend who didn’t care for the dark. It would have been pitch-black outside. No one would have been around for miles except pitiful, messed-up Ridings McAllister, who lived in a trailer on the side of the highway. But Ridings would have been asleep, and even if he wasn’t, he couldn’t save himself from danger, much less someone else. Patrick would have known that. He would have known exactly how helpless he was when whoever attacked him roared into the dirt pull-off outside the store.
    Except most likely Patrick didn’t feel helpless, not at first. He wouldn’t have seen the wolf in redneck’s clothing.
    I wasn’t there that night, but I could imagine how things played out. The shadowed woods surrounding the store. The flickering bulb by the single gas pump. The too-bright lighting within the store, illuminating Patrick as he went about his work.
    Then what? A truck engine abruptly cut off? The slamming of doors layered over boisterous, drunk laughter? A male voice—one Patrick knew, if my suspicions were correct—calling, “Patrick. Bro. Get your butt out here!”
    And Patrick would have shaken his head and grinned as he pushed through the store’s door. He wouldn’t have realized howwrong things were until he spotted the baseball bat bouncing against someone’s palm.
    Then
the fear would have kicked in. Too late, he would have grasped what he was up against: a predator, or a pack of predators, there to do what predators do.
    Angrily, I curled my hand into a fist and slammed it backward against Patrick’s house. The pain helped, but not enough.
    I leaned over, flipped the hook-and-eye latch on the door to the crawl space, and jerked it open. I squinted into the gaping hole. It took my eyes a moment to adjust, but then I made out the milk crates, the candles, the tufts of pink insulation drooping from the floor joists.
    It was a postcard from our childhood, and it made me ache. Because Patrick wasn’t a child anymore, but he wasn’t yet a man. Because someone beat him up and jammed a gas nozzle down his throat. Because on top of everything he’d already lost, he was seventeen years old and more alone than I’d ever been, trapped in the deep sleep of a coma.
    It enraged me.
    But I’d lost out, too, and the realization fed my rage. I lost the strength to face the world head on. I lost my friends, I lost my brother, and I lost Patrick, which was like dying, since losing Patrick was nearly the same as losing myself. And what if Patrick never woke up? What if I’d lost him for good?
    My fury sizzled and popped until I wasn’t just mad, but crazy mad, as if I’d struck a match and lit myself on fire. What happened to Patrick was wrong. What happened to me waswrong. Every single thing was wrong, and when that great blaze of wrongness reached my core, my heart swelled and roared and cast it back out, leaving behind a white-hot clarity like nothing I’d ever experienced.
    What I knew was this: Once upon a time, everything changed. Now things had to change again. Someone needed to track down whoever went after Patrick, and that someone was me.
    It had been a week since Patrick was attacked, and Sheriff Doyle hadn’t done squat. He claimed he was looking into every lead, but I felt certain he’d buried those leads instead. Slogging around in the muck of our godforsaken town would only bring Sheriff Doyle trouble, especially if I was right about what happened that night.
    He would draw out the investigation a little longer for show, but eventually he’d pin the crime on drunk college boys from out of town. That was my guess. “We might never find out who done it,” he’d say, shaking his head. “I can tell you this, though. Nobody from Black Creek woulda stooped so low.”
    But I’d seen things in the week since Patrick’s attack that didn’t