Chapter 6
from a wrecking yard. It had been parked out front with a hissing serpent drawn on the windshield in soap, next to the words
up out of the dark every time she passed under a streetlamp. Rust had eaten half a dozen holes in the roof, and when Daphne
got it up to fifty, those perforations began to scream. They sounded like a chorus of lunatics shrieking in delighted harmony. Cold air whistled in, so she drove with a blanket
across her lap . . . and her Sig under the blanket.
She liked traveling at night the best, liked chasing her headlights into the dark. The car was barely road legal: there was
no hood, the rear bumper was held on by coils of barbed wire, and the radio didn’t work, except when it did. Sometimes, when
the Boss Snake struck a pothole, the face of that radio would light up a lurid, radioactive green, and for a minute or two
she’d hear voices: a gospel preacher attesting that Jesus would return not to bring peace but the sword, a newscaster who
said 80 percent of long-haul truckers reported hallucinating while behind the wheel. Then, slowly, the radio’s fey green light
would dim and fade and take the voices with it. But even then, she was not without company. Daphne Nighswander roared north
in the Boss Snake, and in the wee hours, her daughter Jayne traveled with her.
“Listen to this old shit-box scream,” Jayne said.
“You know what would make me want to scream? It’s not just that they burned up your oldest and best daughter.
That’s bad enough—and believe me, I took it personally.
But the other thing, Gwen Underfoot? She helped herself to your own grandson.
Took him away. Poisoned Tana and the boy against you and raised him like her own child while you spent the best years of your life in a West Virginia lockup. ”
It was drafty in the Boss Snake and Jayne’s clothes were charred tatters blowing on her gaunt frame. Her face was a blackened,
grinning mask.
“I think about it,” Daphne said. “I heard him screechin’ once, little Jett. I called Tana up not long after you died. Only
time I ever heard his voice, screeching in the background. That’s all I got of him. Tana wouldn’t take my calls after that.
Told me she’d never let me get close to the kid after what I did to her. She wouldn’t have that child if not for me. I introduced
her to the father, fuck’s sake.”
“Damn right,” Jayne said.
To be fair, Daphne had set her daughter up with several men, beginning when Tana was thirteen.
“I’ve been thinking about how that gun of yours carries fifteen in the mag,” Jayne said. “You’re going to have some left over.”
“For Tana?”
Jayne said, “I was thinking more about her brat. That’d teach her a thing or two about disrespect. That’d teach Tana and Gwen
both. They took the boy away from you. You’ll have plenty of shells. No reason not to take the boy away from them.”
“Huh,” Daphne said, a sound almost like a laugh. And the wind shrieking through the roof of the car—that sounded like laughter
too. “Okay. Summin to do. But only after the others.”
“Only after the others,” Jayne affirmed.
The Boss Snake hit a metal bridge, the grooved iron grill humming under the tires, and when she bumped down off the other
end, the radio came back on. Through a blast of static she heard a beloved song from her youth, the guitar and drums of an
old Judas Priest number rumbling along like a line of Panzer tanks rolling over dead bodies.
“Allison Shiner,” Daphne chanted to herself.
“Colin Wren. Donna McBride,” Jayne said along with her. They were like two old ladies, counting the beads of their rosaries together.
“Gwen Underfoot,” Daphne said. “And Jett Nighswander, if it’s not too much trouble.” She rocked back and forth in her seat.
If she had looked in the rearview mirror and seen herself lit by the fading glow of the radio, she would’ve seen a face like
a skull, eye sockets glittering with an elvish, unnatural light.
“If you think I’ll ever let it go,” Daphne whispered to the night, “you got another thing coming.”