Page 13

Outside, I leaned up against one corrugated wall while I vaped. My stomach hurt, and the blue raspberry ice flavor of the vapor gave me a headache, and thenicotine only made me feel jittery as well as sour.

It was dark now, but even with the sun down, I sweated in the muggy summer night. The thud of the club’s music ran through the wall and into me, into my joints and bones. Cars and trucks sped along I-70, headlights slicing arcs out of the darkness, the sound of their tires steady and humming. The air displaced by their passage made the roadside weeds bend and whisper. A mosquito buzzed by my ear. Behind the club, the cleared ground ended at a wall of trees. Something moved back there once, breaking a branch, rustling leaves. And then the stillness settled again, andthe night was quiet and hot and deep.

Lola Wheeler had been rented out, for lack of a better word, to a man named Sunny. He’d hurt her. For fun. Tip had found out, and he’d come to the Beaver Trap and argued with Marla. The argument had ended with one of Marla’s staff, a guy named Brock, roughing up Tip and throwing him out of the club. And then, a few months later, Tip had gone to a party at Sunny’s lake house. And that’s where Tip had gotten hurt. He’d told me a bullshit story about a BDSM orgy, about a white-power dickhole, about everything. But the bottom line was that Tip had gone there, and he’d gotten hurt, and now he was gone.

It didn’t tell me anything. It didn’t answer any questions. Sometimes, detective work was like that—you pulled one thread, and when it seemed like you were finally getting somewhere, you ran into a snarl of a dozen other threads.

Had Tip known he was going to Sunny’s house? He must have; I wasn’t willing to believe it had been a coincidence. Had he gone to confront Sunny? To pay him back for the rough treatment his mother had received? That seemed like the most obvious explanation. But what had happened? If Sunny had been the one to hurt Tip, why hadn’t Tip told us? Why lie? And if he hadn’t—more questions.

And I still didn’t have an answer to the question that had brought me out here in the first place: where was Tip? Lola Wheeler hadn’t known her son was going to disappear. And when he hadn’t answered her call, when she’d left him a message, she’d sounded afraid more than anything else. It didn’t matter how many times she tried to convince me that Tip wouldn’t have gone anywhere or done anything without telling her; obviously Tip did do things without telling her.

I toyed with the idea that somehow the Beaver Trap was involved, but it seemed more like a connection than anything else: Tip and the Beaver Trap, the Beaver Trap and Sunny. I hit my vape again. The humidity soaked into my clothes and hair, and a few more mosquitos had joined their friend, buzzing around my head no matter how many times I waved them away. Time to start pulling another thread.

More headlights, grainy in the moisture-heavy air. The murmur of the roadside weeds.

My car was right there. And it was time to go home.

I took out my phone. Grindr, Scruff, Prowler. A rope bunny. A guy jerking off in a Batman costume. Some bozo who wanted to be my maid. Dicks on dicks on dicks. No faces.

I was still scrolling when a message came through from hung_daddy_9: hey

Every time, I thought. Or a dick pic. Or sup. Or a hole pic. How long could somebody do this before getting sick of it? Maybe next time, I’d start off with a joke. MaybeI’d write a fucking sonnet.

hung_daddy_9 was following the script. A dick pic came through a moment later, and the words: wanna ride

Hadn’t anybody taught these sons of bitches about question marks?

It was a nice enough dick. It looked like one of those popsicles you can get from the ice cream truck, thicker at the base and thinner at the top. A bit of a curve—it gave it some personality, I guess. The nine in his profile name seemed a little optimistic.

I closed the apps.

Time to go home, I told myself.

The heavy beat from the club vibrated through my body: my spine, my shoulders, at the base of my neck.

The sound came of a door opening, and light spilled out to break the night. Steady, yellow light—not the lights from the club proper, but some sort of back area meant for the staff, I guessed. When I glanced over, a door in the side of the building was swinging shut, folding the light back inside the club. I caught a glimpse of his face before the dark rolled in again. The slicked-back hair. The glint of silver at his neck.

A lighter sparked. And then the tip of a cigarette glowed. A Marlboro Red, like the one Lola had taken from behind the bar. Ten seconds passed. Twenty. The ember looked a long way off like a red star. Then he came toward me, trampling a path through the overgrown grass.

When he reached me, he looked me up and down. The security lights from the parking light were reflected in his eyes in tiny white slivers. He did that little nod he’d done inside and said, “Hey.”

I almost burst out laughing. “Hey.”

He smoked. I stood there and wondered what I was doing.

“She’s a lot, huh?”

“What?”

He tipped his head toward the club.

“Oh. Yeah.”

The cigarette’s cherry flared. Even in the thick heat of the summer evening, he stood close enough that I could feel the warmth of him.

“Gray,” I said.

He blew smoke out and went back to looking at me.Those little slivers of white made it hard to read his eyes. He stubbed out the cigarette on the side of the building and returned it to the pack.

“Tres butch,” I said.

He stepped in closer. One of his fingers touched the placket of my shirt.

“Is Ricky really your name?”

His hand followed my chest down, and he laughed.

Sweat made my hair damp at my nape. Sweat made my shirt cling under my arms. I wanted a shower. I wanted a drink. I wanted to stand naked in front of a fan.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked.

He curled his fingers over my waistband. He slid them back and forth. And then he undid the button.

I caught his wrist. “A husband?”

He laughed.

“A girlfriend? A wife?”

“Is that really what you want to talk about?”

Under my hand, his arm was strong, scattered with hair, undeniably male. I didn’t know how much of me he could make out in the shadows, but he was still looking at me.

“I think I’m going to call it a night,” I said.

His free hand touched my dick. The touch turned into a caress.

“All right,” he said.

The corrugated metal rang out softly as I let my head fall back. “Fuck.”

His breathing sounded like another laugh.

“You’ve got to tell me something,” I said.

“You’re pretty,” he said as he drew down my zipper. “And I want to suck your dick.”

He didn’t mess around. He knew what he was doing, and it only took him a couple of tries to take me in his throat. I lasted a few minutes after that. He must have known I was close because he pulled off, jerked me a couple of times, and then forced my dick down. It ached—close to hurting—and I came. My breathing was harsh. My load spattered against the grass.

He slapped my dick a couple of times, making it bob up and down, and I thought distantly it was like a weird congratulations. The way straight guys clapped each other on the ass and said, Good game . Or like I was a toy. A bobble-cock.

When he got to his feet, he touched the bulge in his pants.

“You going to do something about that?” I asked.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Nah. Break’s almost over.”

Then he hocked a loogie, smirked, and headed back inside.

I got in the car. I pulled out of the lot. It took me a quarter of a mile before I realized the headlights weren’t on. I left the stereo off. Anything louder than the hum of the tires, the hiss of the air conditioning, the breath high in my chest, and I thought I’d blow my brains out.

When I got home, I parked. I turned off the car. And then I sat there, the sticky warmth of the night crawling in as the air conditioning died. I closed my eyes. I saw the ember flaring when he drew. Nice teeth. The way his bone and muscle and flesh had felt solid under my hand. Real. The intensity of the orgasm, the ache of him forcing my dick between my legs, the way my whole body felt like it was being undone, coming apart at every joint. And then the soft, splattering sounds that, even alone in the car, made my face hot. I could smell the Marlboro Red on me. I thought, Thank God he didn’t try to kiss me.

I pulled down the visor. The little mirror on the back had a light. I looked at myself. The rivers of blood in one eye. The scars that had flattened but were still pink, impossible to miss.

The thing is: when something terrible happens, everyone thinks that after, you’re going to be different.

I flipped the visor up and got out of the car. I made my way around the back of the house. In the dark. I knew my way, avoiding the trash cans, my feet finding the paved path that led to the back door.

Everyone thinks you couldn’t possibly be the same. Even you think it. You believe it. This thing happened, this life-changing, world-ending thing, and there’s no way you could be the same.

Darnell had left the door unlocked for me again. We’d have to talk about that eventually. It was a small town. It was—if you didn’t count all the murders—a safe town. But you didn’t stay safe by making dumb choices like that.

He hadn’t left the lights on. I guessed I was still being punished.

I made my way to the bathroom in the dark. I’d leaked the last of my load into my briefs on the drive, and when I undressed, the cum spots were slimy and cold. I showered. I thought I could still smell the smoke in my hair, so I shampooed a second time.

You believe it—that everything’s going to be different. That life as you knew it was over, that it couldn’t possibly go on. But it did. And you were the same person you’d always been.

Just worse.

I dried off, hung up the towel, and left my clothes where they were. I’d get them in the morning before Darnell picked them up.

My bedroom door was closed. When I opened it, the air was foul. We’d had a snake die in the wall the summer before—they wanted to get into the basement, where it was cool, but sometimes they got stuck. Of course, sometimes they made it into the basement alive , and that was worse—that was Darnell’s job. I’d have to talk to him tomorrow. I’d have to ask him to check. Or fuck it, maybe I’d just call pest control and they could fish it out. The smell was bad enough that I thought maybe I’d sleep on the couch. Wouldn’t Darnell love that?

But I didn’t. I was exhausted. I’d pass out as soon as I hit the bed. I didn’t bother with the agony of turning on the lights. No point putting myself through that when I was just going to fall asleep. By this point, I knew how to walk in the dark.

When I reached the bed, I knew something was wrong. It was an impression more than anything else. A sense of something that shouldn’t have been there—the familiar geography of the blacked-out bedroom changed somehow.

I put out a hand.

It was cold, and that was why it took me a heartbeat to realize I was touching flesh.

I scrambled back. I slapped the switch. Lights blazed to life.

Tip Wheeler was in my bed. He looked different in death, but people always did. His underwear was tangled around his legs, and his sprawled-out pose suggested, in a perverse way, the aftermath of sex. The cop part of my brain was already thinking, already processing—the feel of him, the temperature, the plastic give of his flesh, even the stink:he’d been dead for days.