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about the explosion and everyone was calling it a drug deal gone bad. One report said there were two casualties. But the next report said there were none. I caught the tail end of an update that claimed three men were in custody and they were looking for the fourth. But the news changed to weather and I didn’t hear anything else about it. I turned the dial searching for word on casualties but couldn’t get anything. And then, the farther south I went, the stories dried up. And then they just stopped. The news wasn’t talking about it anymore.
    There were no more cops on the highway.
    If it weren’t for the biker in my backseat, I could have pretended it never happened.
    “Hey, Max,” I said, reaching back to give him a shake. “How you doing? Rise and shine!”
    “Fuck off,” he groaned.
    “And hello to you, too. Do you know what year it is?”
    “Let me sleep.”
    “Can’t do that. I need you to answer some questions. Do you know what day it is?”
    “Wednesday.” Well, Thursday at this point.
    “Do you know your name?”
    “Max Daniels.”
    “My name?”
    “Joan-the-crazy-fucking-bitch.”
    “Good enough. How are your ribs?”
    “Hurts…to breathe.”
    I glanced in the rearview and saw him sprawled out back there, breathing shallowly. One hand pressed to his side. Under the blood his face was turning dark with bruises.
    Those assholes.
    “You kidnapping me?” he asked.
    “Only a little.”
    I caught his gaze and tried to smile, but it felt all wrong. His eyes slid shut.
    “Hey, hey, Max. Stay awake. Let’s…let’s talk.”
    “Talk.” He shifted and grimaced and I grimaced too in sympathy. “You took me to my brother.”
    “Actually, I took you to my stuff. Your brother just happened to be there.”
    “He could get in trouble…because of…me.”
    “I don’t know. I think your brother and dad can get in trouble just fine on their own.”
    “Annie…”
    “Yeah, she’s nothing but trouble. Trust me.” I was only half-joking.
    “Jealous?”
    I looked back in the rearview mirror to see if he was fucking with me.
    “No,” I said definitively. But I was…a little. It would be nice to have some dude fall over himself to help me out. I mean, it would be weird. But there were days I could use some help.
    “What’s with the fake badge?” he asked.
    “The DEA thing?”
    “Yeah.”
    “You know, on second thought, why don’t you go back to sleep?” Because I didn’t want to talk about Bad Boyfriend #2. I don’t want to give the impression that it was all bad boyfriends. There were only two. And there had been one really good one sandwiched between them.
    “Why don’t you tell me about the fake badge?”
    “I had a boyfriend who used them to get out of traffic tickets and get free shit.” There were other crimes, things I didn’t like to think about.
    “That’s stupid.”
    “Says the straight up criminal.” I smiled at him in the rearview mirror, but he did not smile back.
    “Where’s the boyfriend now?”
    “He left me about a year ago. Took all my money, but left me the badges. They come in handy every once in a while.”
    “You run cons?”
    “I do what I have to to survive.”
    He grunted but was otherwise silent, and my desire for conversation was gone.
    —
    Hours later, outside of Atlanta, there was a truck stop, a neon planet in the dark space of the freeway. I pulled off at the junction of I-285 and I-75 into a raft of lights and concrete, and I drove to the farthest edge of it, where the light battled it out with the dark.
    Perfect spot for a little backseat surgery.
    I popped the trunk and rifled through my black plastic bag until I found the first aid kit Aunt Fern gave me years ago. The stuff she’d filled it with was long since gone. And I’d replaced what I could by hoarding materials during my brief stint as a nursing student. The rest I picked up here and there because one of the few lessons Aunt Fern taught me that stuck was always keep the first aid