The town was called Mercy, though nobody who had lived there long enough truly believed there was any mercy in the place.

It sat somewhere between southern Illinois and all the places that seem forgotten by maps but never by bills. It had one main street with two bars, one diner open all night, a car wash that had shut down three years earlier and that nobody had bothered to take the sign down from, and a bus station that looked like a temporary structure from 1978 that had simply never left.