Page 79

CHAPTER 79

“HEAR ME OUT,” Will Brogan said.

“Hear you out?” I snapped. My senses were returning; the numbness was fading. I was coming to the knife-edge of jittery, uncontrollable fury now, my flight reflex subsiding and my fight reflex taking over. My instincts were telling me to punch Brogan in the side of the skull. I could see myself doing it. But I tamped the urge down. We were going eighty miles an hour down the highway, and he had his gun in the cup holder by his left knee, out of my reach. I already had a bullet hole in my calf that was slowly filling my right shoe with blood. I didn’t need another one in the stomach or the chest.

“Imagine my life back then,” he said. The urge to punch him sizzled in me again. “I’ve been demoted at the precinct and we’re struggling for money. My wife tells me she’s leaving me. My second wife. Not the one I told you about before. I’d literally just walked out of our last marriage-counseling session in Burbank. She paid for a bunch of sessions and wanted to use them all, even though our marriage was in the toilet. The last one was supposed to be about us figuring out a way to stay friends. But she decided at the end that she didn’t want to do that.”

“Brogan,” I said, seething. “Are you really trying to tell me about your fucking divor — ”

“Shut up,” he said. He spoke the words calmly. Quietly. With a deadly finality. The eyes that cut toward me were hollow.

“She said that what had happened to me when I was a kid had killed all the feeling between us. And it was systematically destroying everything I touched,” Brogan said. “According to her, until I dealt with it, I was just going to continue on in one job after another, one marriage after another, one friendship after another. On and on and on, never finding an escape from the anger.”

I said nothing. The car slowed. Brogan turned off the highway onto a dirt road.

“I left the therapy session with that idea on my mind,” he said. “Deal with what happened, or you’ll keep destroying everything.”

“What happened?”

“Troy Hansen happened,” Brogan said.

Now we were climbing through rocky forest, the car kicking up dust. I could hear cicadas in the trees and the distant wail of emergency vehicle sirens. Someone must have called in the scene on the highway: Jarrod’s body on the road. My car standing there with the door open and the wheel off.

“I was five,” Brogan said. “Chelsea was six. She was a Hupp, and so was her mother. Me and my dad were Brogans. Both my mom and Chelsea’s dad had died, and our parents met when the two of us were just toddlers. They never got married. Not officially. But Chelsea was my sister, you know? I thought of her that way. We were just smitten with each other. We did everything together. I couldn’t remember my life before Chelsea and my stepmother. We lived in a farmhouse outside Ukiah. Same town as Troy. We were happy.”

A rabbit was startled out of the forest, froze in the middle of the dirt road. Brogan didn’t slow. I winced, waiting for the wet thump. It didn’t come. I turned in my seat and saw the rabbit rise from the huddled shape it had frozen into and skitter away.

I also spied the clothes in the back of the car, the leather belt lying coiled on the seat like a snake.