Page 15 of Always Murder (The Last Picks #9)

Millie drove north, toward the commercial side of Hastings Rock. Cute, well-tended homes gave way to single-story brick warehouses and office buildings. This part of town wasn’t run-down, exactly, but under the dusty sheen of the security lights, it did look old. We passed a low, flat-roofed building with a sign that said Daugherty Asphalt Maintenance. Then a fence with a sign that said Hastings Rock Heavy Equipment, and a gravel lot where backhoes and bulldozers and other big, dangerous-looking machines were parked. (I imagined a young Bobby had probably owned little yellow-plastic toys of the same equipment; there was something intrinsically appealing about construction work to Bobby Mai, I was fairly sure.) Lance E. Anderson’s Heating and Sheet Metal had a wood-shingle bonnet roof and plank siding, and it looked like you could have dropped it into the background of a spaghetti western without raising any eyebrows. I even spotted Newsum Decorative Rock (owned by Brad Newsum). There was, as you can probably guess, a lot of decorative rock stored in the lot.

If Millie noticed I was following her, she didn’t give any sign of it. I stayed back as much as I dared, but the reality was that Hastings Rock was a small town, and this wasn’t a busy section of it, so we were the only two cars on the road. At this point, there wasn’t much I could do about it—either Millie knew I was tailing her, or she didn’t, and all I could do was see what happened.

What happened was: Millie turned in to a self-storage facility.

A chain-link fence with a barrier-arm gate surrounded the facility, but they looked nominal more than anything serious—I didn’t see any razor wire or gun turrets or bloodthirsty Dobermans. Behind the fence, cinderblock buildings had been painted white, with orange roll-up doors. A few security lights were positioned around the facility, but I guessed that these, like the fence and the gate, were mostly for show—they were spaced too far apart, and they left deep shadows. Identical signs had been posted on each of the cinderblock structures: THIS PROPERTY IS UNDER 24-HOUR SURVEILLANCE. I had my doubts about that too. When Millie’s headlights swept across the lot, they picked out a crumpled paper cup, winter-brown weeds, and a dumpster with a sofa’s hind end sticking out of it.

I could not—for the life of me—think of why Millie would have a reason to come to a place like this.

She drove straight up to the gate and punched in a code. The gate’s little wooden arm went up, and Millie drove on. She didn’t hesitate. She didn’t show any sign of uncertainty. I stuck to the road and slowed the Pilot so I could watch her through the fence. Millie drove to the end of the facility and turned down the far aisle.

As soon as her car was out of sight, I parked, jumped out of the SUV, and sprinted after her on foot. Damp cold met me, but I barely noticed; I was too focused on trying to make as little noise as possible, which is harder than it sounds when you’re in a full-on sprint.

I raced around the gate and toward the far side of the facility. The sound of the Mazda’s engine died, and then the distant glow of the headlights snapped off. The only illumination now came from the security lights, and they left long pools of shadow to wade through. Over the sound of my running, I strained to catch the rattle of a roll-up door. But either I was too loud, or Millie hadn’t opened her storage unit yet.

When I came around the corner, I got my first look at the final aisle of storage units. I registered Millie’s Mazda3 parked next to the fence. And then my attention fixed on the row of orange doors. One of them was halfway open.

Millie crouched beneath it. Weak yellow light came from inside the storage unit, painting her face in profile. Her jaw sagged, and then she brought her hands up, holding them in the air as though she didn’t know what to do.

“Millie?” I called.

She didn’t look over. She just kept staring at whatever was in front of her inside the storage unit.

I broke into a run.

By the time I reached Millie, she was pulling her phone out of her pocket. Her hands were shaking so badly that she couldn’t unlock it. I had the half-formed idea of taking the phone from her to help, but then I got close enough to see what was inside: the storage unit was small, with boxes and plastic totes and a workbench making the floor space even smaller. I had the impression of feathers and glue guns and approximately a million beads.

Paul lay on the floor, on his back, dressed in a coat and hoodie and joggers that wouldn’t have drawn a second look anywhere in town. His face was covered with blood. More of it matted his fair hair. A broken nose for sure. A laceration across his forehead, running up into his hairline. If you spend enough time at the dinner table talking about autopsy reports and forensic pathology, you get to become a kind of armchair expert on these kinds of things. That was how I knew I was looking at a wound delivered by a blunt object. Someone had hit Paul in the face, and the impact had shattered cartilage and split the skin wherever it didn’t have enough give.

Someone had gotten close enough to hit him in the face, I thought.

And then, more clearly, I thought: someone he knew.

Paul murmured something, and I realized his eyes were open—barely a crack in the mask of blood, but open.

“Yes, we need an ambulance,” Millie was saying into her phone, her voice thready. She rattled off an address. “I don’t know what happened. He’s hurt.”

“He’s conscious,” I told her. “He was hit in the head.”

She repeated those facts to the dispatcher—probably Jaklin Ruiz—while I crouched next to Paul. None of the visible injuries looked life-threatening. Head wounds bled a lot, and his nose was going to need some work. The real danger, though, was concussion, swelling of the brain, all the stuff I couldn’t see.

“Okay,” Millie was saying. “Okay, okay. Please hurry.”

I hurried to the Mazda3 and found Millie’s first aid kit under the driver’s seat. When I got back to the storage unit, Millie had one of Paul’s hands clasped in hers, while she kept the phone to her ear and murmured answers to whatever the dispatcher was asking. There was blood on Paul’s hand, too. Blood drying around his nails. When his limp fingers shifted, he left crimson marks wherever he touched her.

The first aid kit had several gauze pads, and I opened these and pressed one against the laceration on Paul’s forehead.

Paul groaned and shifted, and Millie pulled the phone away from her ear long enough to say, “Paul, STAY STILL!”

Believe it or not, that worked.

Settling onto the concrete slab, Paul began to mumble again.

“Hey,” I said, “it’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”

I couldn’t catch all of it, but words floated up out of the slurry of speech. Plaintive. Defensive. “—just playing, Millie, we were just wrestling—”

Tears spilled from Millie’s eyes, and she squeezed Paul’s hand harder as she shook her head.

I’m not exactly the most physically affectionate person—ask Millie sometime for her history of our first thirteen hugs, each of which was excruciatingly and somehow more awkward than the last—but I patted Paul’s chest and said, “You’re not in trouble. You’re fine. Just relax.”

Something inside his coat rustled under my hand.

In the distance, the first sirens began.

Millie turned toward the sound, answering another question in a low voice. I took the opportunity to reach into Paul’s pocket.

It was a long, narrow sheet of paper that had been folded twice, the kind that comes on a pad with a magnet so you can hang it on the fridge, the kind that always makes me think of grocery lists. I unfolded it. At the top, there was a flowery C, and it didn’t take a deductive genius to figure out whose fridge this paper had been hanging on. Below the C was a list of names done in an almost unreadable scrawl that had to be Paul’s handwriting. Most of the names had been crossed out.

The sirens were louder. Closer.

I worked my phone out of my pocket and took a picture of the list. Then I folded it and returned it to Paul’s pocket as flashing lights grew outside the storage unit, and the sound of crunching tires announced the first vehicle.