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messed-up kids for a reason.The person I’m worried about is you. You get in too deep. I’m afraid the next body part you chop off will make you bleed.”
    I wasn’t sure whether she was speaking metaphorically or not.
    “I don’t know any other way,” I protested. “And I always let them go.”
    “Maybe you watch them walk away, Tommie. But you never let these kids go.”
    I scooped my jeans up off the floor by the bed where I’d dropped them last night, smelled under the arms of the peach-colored Lucky Brand T-shirt I’d borrowed from Sadie because the clean clothes in my suitcase had run out, found my bra and one boot under the bed and another near the door.
    I tugged it all on and checked my purse for the pistol.
    A weapon didn’t seem like overkill even in the light of day. Then I called down and asked for a cab to take me back to Daddy’s pickup in the Stockyards. Victor, I knew, had a lunch date with a single mom he’d met online.

CHAPTER 5

    I decided to take the stairs because all the magazines say you should.
    Those same magazines also advise you never to walk into a parking garage alone, even in the daytime.
    Later, when I thought about what happened, I wondered if it was sweat or intuition that sent a prickly feeling down my neck when I placed my foot on the first step. I’m not one of those women who walk with their keys poking between their fingers, ready to combat a would-be rapist, but I’m more wary than average and my paranoia had hit Level Orange about eighteen hours ago.
    My father descended from a long line of federal marshals, soldiers, and Wild West lawmen, one said to have put a bullet into Clyde Barrow. My late grandfather—federal marshal, combat veteran of two wars, and one-time sheriff of Wise County—religiously trained Sadie and me in target shooting and hand-to-hand combat on Sunday afternoons when Granny took her nap. The combat part mostly involved lots of giggling and kicking the straw out of a homemade dummy’s private parts while we knocked it around the trampoline. The goal was to empower us and it worked. Boys’ private parts never scared us much.
    Halfway up the second stairwell of the parking garage, I heard noises above me. A symphony of muttering voices, percussive thwunks, and intermittent groaning. Someone was getting beat up.
    Should I go up? Down? Was I the hero type? My heart began a slightly faster pound, like I was five minutes into a treadmill workout with the incline rising.
    Was my imagination working overtime? Yes. It was probably a couple of construction workers. Or tourists. What kind of bad guys struck on Sunday morning in the middle of a tourist haven famous for expensive western wear, saddle bar stools, and the Cattlemen’s restaurant where J. R. Ewing ate his big rare steaks?
    Sweat dripped little raindrop streams down my chest, my neck, my back.
    Do not, do not, do not, DO NOT have a panic attack.
    I whispered this to myself like a mantra, as if it would actually help, while I slipped off my boots and padded cautiously up the stairs, dodging broken glass from Coors Light bottles. The stairwell door was propped open on the third-floor landing, making me an instant target, so I dropped to all fours, jamming my left knee into a jagged two-inch shard of glass. I pulled it out without thinking, wincing, feeling blood dampen my favorite jeans.
    Tourists.
    I was wet with perspiration. I guessed that it was about 110 degrees in the unventilated stairwell. The concrete barriers blocked most of the brutal sun, letting in only slivers of light. It took a second for my eyes to adjust. Daddy’s pickup was twenty feet from me, right where I’d parked it yesterday.
    Ten other cars were parked on this level, leaving plenty of scary open spaces.
    This was important to note because the action was taking place in the far corner of the garage, about seven car lengths away.Three guys. Two standing up, faces shielded by large cowboy hats. And one on the ground,