By that point, she would’ve met with Chuck, learned the truth, and he supposed she was so riled up that she didn’t want to talk to him. At 7AM the next morning, with the room illuminated by nothing more than dawn skulking through the ground-level windows, Randall spread a large, blue tarp across his basement floor. He straightened the corners and then lined the edges with sandbags. If they could stop a river from overflowing, surely they’d be able to stop blood from seeping onto the concrete. The Devil Himself lay quietly on his back, staring up at the flooring joists overhead. Randall had stopped the man’s shoulder from bleeding and offered a variety of painkillers, mostly as a joke, all of which were denied. He hadn’t bothered with a gag. On a fifty-acre parcel of land, a half-mile away from Lawson’s farmhouse, The Devil Himself could scream until his voice went ragged and nobody would hear him. Except for maybe Dempsey Jr. and his buddies, but the last time Randall had checked, hours earlier, the kids had moved on.
