Stay still," Strange said. 

John Norman lay on his back on the dirty trailer floor. He looked up at the once white ceiling that was now a dull brown and dotted with water stains from a leaky roof. His eyes glanced towards Strange as he placed his rough hands on John's cheeks. "Take a deep breath and don't flinch. I'm going on the count of three. One... three!"

Strange's hands squeezed John's nose and twisted it back into place. It made a loud pop and he yelled. The stabbing pain in John's face filled his vision with tiny black dots that danced and swirled around the water stains on the ceiling. 

"There we go," Strange said, patting John's shoulder. "You can sit up."

He did and leaned against the back cushion on the couch. Strange handed him a beer and a dish towel wrapped around ice cubes. John sipped the beer with one hand while he held the towel to his swollen and bruised face with the other. Strange walked around the living room cluttered with empty beer cans, cigarette packs, and yellowing newspapers. He sat down in the recliner facing the couch and lit up a cigarette. Strange was junkie skinny, wearing a light brown t-shirt and a pair of torn jeans. His auburn hair was cut short in a military style high and tight.

By John's recollection, Strange had only been home from prison for about six months. He'd shipped out with the Army right after high school, like a lot of young boys in Pickett did when they didn't have the brains for college or the skills for industry. The Army trained him as a medic and then his division had shipped out to Afghanistan. Something happened over there, John wasn't sure what, but he'd turned to morphine and pain pills for comfort. He got caught stealing from a field hospital and was sent packing. He'd served time at an Army prison somewhere out in Kansas before they sent him back home to Pickett. 

To his credit, he found a way to make his training work for him. He ran a backwoods clinic out of his trailer, helping people with various injuries for money or pills. Might not sound like a good idea, but the closest hospital was thirty miles away, and he always catered to the fringes of society that didn't like to deal with things like health insurance or police reports.

"Give it to me straight, doc," John said after a sip of beer. "Will I ever be able to play violin again?"

"Unless you're playing with your face, I don't see why not," he said in between cigarette puffs. "You got a mild concussion. That and the dislocated nose were the worse of it. Your face is gonna hurt like hell for a while, but it'll get better."

The screen door opened and Mike came in. He looked at John and then at Strange. "Got him fixed up?"

"Best as I could," Strange said. He leaned forward and looked at both of us anxiously. "Now, about..."

Mike said, "Here," and tossed a half-empty pill bottle underhanded towards Strange. 

Strange caught them with one hand and quickly opened the childproof cap. He eyed the tiny tablets inside the bottle the way a jeweler eyes a diamond, scrutinizing everything in sight. Strange looked up at Mike and then nodded. Then he took three tablets and tossed them into his mouth. Instead of swallowing, he chewed them up. Chewing instead of swallowing lead to a faster high, or so the junkies thought.

"I had those left over from my rotator cuff surgery," Mike said to John.

"When'd you have surgery?" He asked.

"Few months ago," Mike said with a shrug. "Wasn't anything to make a big deal about. He ready to go?"

"Oh, yeah," Strange said, his eyes already glazing over from the painkillers. "But he should avoid running into any fists from now on. Also, he should stay awake a few more hours just to be safe. Take my advice. I may not be a doctor, but that's because I'm not a major cunt."

Strange sunk down in his chair as the pills started to take effect. Mike looked over at John before heading out the door. He followed Mike out the screen door and down the porch of Strange's trailer. They walked across the cluttered yard filled with flat tires and fallen leaves towards his Cadillac.

"I got some more pills in case you need any," Mike said after starting the car. "Face doesn't look that bad once you got the blood wiped away."

"Yeah," he said, looking into the car's rearview mirror. His nose was swollen and his cheeks were puffy with a collection of small scratches and cuts on the forehead and chin. A shiner circled his left eye where Jed had connected with his fist. Strange was right that he was lucky to not be hurt worse. John was sure Jed could have made it a whole lot worse if he had wanted to.

They rode in silence back towards town. John told Mike the story on the drive up to Strange's trailer, everything from Parker's impressment of his services up until he got in Mike's car that night. He stayed quiet after that and hadn't said a word until coming into the trailer after Strange had fixed him up. John could almost hear the gears spinning in his head.

"We can be in Atlanta in two and a half hours," he finally said when they were halfway back to town. "Or Charlotte in three. I got enough cash to get you a one-way ticket somewhere. You can be off the plane and gone where ever you need to hide before the sheriff's department even knows what the hell is going on."

John put his hands up, a fruitless gesture in the dark. "Wait, I don't want to do that." 

"You think you got a choice, boy? They tried to frame you for murder. You may have chunked that weapon, but the fix is still on and you can't get out from under it if you're still walking around Pickett."

"Let them arrest me," John said. "They can do one of those gunshot residue tests on me and see I didn't fire a weapon at all."

"You think it'll get that far?" Mike asked with a hollow and bitter laugh. "That cop they sent after you was there for a reason, boy, as was the extra rounds they left in that gun. You cannot be allowed to live. They would have come up with some bullshit about you resisting arrest, say you took a shot at the deputy and then gun you down."

"Nobody would think I'd be that stupid to try and kill a police officer."

"You're a Norman," Mike said dissmissvely. "You wouldn't be the first one of us to take a shot at a cop."

John sat in the dark, stewing in silence while the car sped south on the winding highway towards town. Mike was right, and he knew that. Who better to set up with murder than a Norman? Wouldn't surprise anybody at all if John suddenly snapped and went to killing people. He was always the "weird one" of the family, the one who had to go his own way. In truth he should have been running so fast you'd see nothing of him but asses and elbows... but then again. 

"No," he said after a minute. "I want to see how this plays out. Jed and Jim Brown set me up, and I want to know why. I want to know what was so damn important about a shitheel like Beggs."

That was all true to a certain extent but he left out the real reason why he wanted to stick around: Carol. She was all mixed up in this some way, and he wanted to know how. He wanted to find her and make sure she was safe and protect her. He was high on some macho romanticism bullshit, letting it override his common sense. Then there was another deeper reason he wanted to say. He looked out at the pines as they passed by in the dark. Pickett County was all he knew. Save for a few stints in prison, he spent his entire life here. He was Pickett and Pickett was him, it was in his blood. Go to Atlanta or Charlotte? And do what exactly? Work at a fucking Dollar General? No. He had this town, his crop, and his name.

He didn't realize it, but he was as much a fiend as Strange. Instead of oxy and codeine as his drug of choice, it was a woman and a county. This world he lived in, this shadow world where Southern good ole boys and crime and violence all interconnect was his world. He kept chasing that high of a good drug deal, muscling a someone who owed him money, of running scams and pulling one over on as many people as possible.

And like a lot of junkies, he was now paying a steep price for that high.