Page 25

I waited in the car halfway down the block from the apartment Tip, Jordan, and Rory had shared, and I watched.

The day was shimmery-hot, the air boiling over the asphalt and thick enough to stick to your tongue. Even with the AC running in the car, it was uncomfortable. The smell of melting tar filtered through the vents. Cars passed, slowed, parked, drove away again. Nobody looked at me; the glare of sunlight on glass and metal made everyone in a hurry to be somewhere else. A dog padded around listlessly in the shade of a house for about five minutes before his owner, a woman who’d just had her eyes done, called him back inside. It was the kind of day that made guys get in parking lot brawls and women ram each other with their cars and teenage psychos light things on fire.

I sat there and felt the old, familiar excitement building.

Two hours and change went by before I saw a familiar face. Rory wore a tank and shorts and running shoes, and he looked like he was either going to the gym or to get plowed. The way he walked, though, said something different. His face, too. He dragged himself down the street. His eyes were sunken, and his expression was vacant. Grief, maybe. Or guilt. Or both. How long had it been since I’d found Tip? Two days? Three? That seemed impossible. It felt like it had been years.

Rory climbed into a cute little Mazda and drove away. As soon as his car was out of sight, I jogged over to the apartment and knocked.

Ten seconds.

Twenty.

The door opened, and Jordan looked out at me. Like Rory, he was a wreck: he hadn’t combed his hair, and his eyes were bloodshot and ringed with shadows, and his nose was red. He was dressed in a Freddy’s t-shirt that looked too well-worn to be anything but a comfort wear, with frozen custard featured prominently on the front, and he had a blanket draped around his shoulders like a shawl.

Shock at seeing me made his eyes go wide. And then his color dropped as shock changed to fear.

That was what I’d wanted to know.

“You lied to me, Jordan. You know what that means? That means you’re in deep shit—”

He slammed the door.

I’d thought I was ready, but he was faster than I’d expected. I grabbed the handle and turned it before he could set the lock. Then I put my shoulder to the door and shoved inward. Jordan grunted, but he was a kid, and he was panicking. He stumbled back.

I moved into the apartment. Jordan was breathing harshly, and the sounds were explosive in the darkened apartment. The place was even more of a sty than it had been last time I’d visited: the bifold doors were open, and in the washing machine, wet clothes had been left in the drum until they’d gone sour; glasses and bottles covered the coffee table, the TV stand, the kitchen counter; takeout containers were piled high in the trash can, and next to it, a black garbage bag that was already full explained the stink of food gone bad.

“What are you doing?” Jordan asked. His voice was high. He backpedaled toward the kitchen, his bare feet making sticky sounds against the floor. “What do you want?”

I shut the door and threw the deadbolt.

“You can’t—you can’t come in here!” If anything, Jordan’s voice had gotten higher. “You have to leave!”

I made my way to the apartment’s front window and closed the blinds.

“Don’t do that!”

I crossed toward the kitchen. Jordan scrambled back to keep his distance, the blanket slipping from one shoulder now. I lowered the blinds in the kitchen window too. The lights were off, and the slivers of light that managed to make their way inside gave the apartment a dusky, midday gloom.

“What are you doing? Why are you doing that?” Jordan seemed to make an effort to pull himself together, but his eyes kept darting around the room—away from me, back, away again. “You’re not supposed to be here! Those detectives said so. You need to get out of here right now, or—”

“Or what?” I asked.

His jaw hung slack. He was breathing through his mouth. The poor kid was probably thirty seconds away from a full-blown panic attack.

“Or you’ll call the police?” When Jordan didn’t say anything, I said, “Go ahead, Jordan. Call the police.”

I bent to open one of the cabinet doors. It looked like particleboard. I gave it a few experimental swings, open, closed, open, closed. I slammed it, and the cabinet door banged. Jordan jumped and let out a whimpering breath. Hard to tell, but I think maybe he peed a little.

“What are you doing?” he moaned. “Rory’s not here. Can’t you just go away?”

“I don’t want to talk to Rory. I want to talk to you, Jordan. And this time, I want you to tell me the truth.”

“I already told you! I told you the truth! I told you everything!” Hysteria tinged his shouts. “If you don’t get out of here right now, I will call the police. I’ll—I’ll show them that picture!”

That stopped me. “What picture?”

“That picture of Rory fucking you. You’ll get fired. Or arrested. Or something.”

I nodded. “This is going to be a real bummer, Jordan, but they already know I fucked Rory. Fuck, at this point, the whole town probably knows. So, if you want to call them, go ahead.”

But he didn’t go for his phone. He didn’t move at all if you didn’t count those shallow, trembling breaths.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” I said. “We’re going to have a conversation. I’m going to ask you questions, and you’re going to answer them. If I don’t like what you say, I’m going to break one of your fingers.”

I slammed the cabinet door again to demonstrate. The bang shot through the room. Jordan flinched, and another of those desperate little noises slithered out of him.

“You can’t,” he whispered.

“I can. And I will. And when we’re done, you’re going to tell the nice people at the hospital that you slammed your hand in your car door. It happens all the time, Jordan. They won’t even blink.”

“But you’re a police officer.” It had a strangely childlike quality to it.

I smiled and nodded. “I am. But not a very good one. Now come over here. If you make me chase you, I’m going to hurt you, and that’s going to be harder for you to explain.”

It was like a lot of things with people. Like how if you’re at their front door and start to let yourself inside, most of the time, they won’t stop you. Like how they’ll get in the back of a cruiser even if they’re not under arrest. The good citizen gene. The pack animal mentality. Go along to get along. If I’m nice and play by the rules, everything will be okay, until some psycho blows you up with a bomb. When people don’t know what to do, they revert to default and do what they’re told.

But ten seconds passed. And then twenty.

“All right,” I said.

I took a step.

Jordan flinched backward, but he recovered quickly. Before I could process what was happening, he grabbed a bottle from the table and chucked it at me. I brought my arms up reflexively to block it, and the bottle hit my arm and fell to the floor.

“Big fucking mistake—” I began.

But Jordan threw another bottle while I was still speaking. I shielded myself again, and this one hit my hand. The impact was sharp and buzzing, and then my hand went numb.

“Stay away from me!” Jordan screamed.

He threw a mug this time, and it hit my shoulder.

Those first few seconds of surprise had kept me motionless. Now, I charged forward. Jordan retreated, throwing whatever came to hand—the TV remote, a phone charger, a fucking Yankee candle. A bottle of brown glass whizzed past me and shattered against the wall.

The crash of breaking glass.

The darkness. The smell of that tiny, shitty little storeroom. The way my body had felt, loose and warm and hungover, my hand sweaty on the grip of my gun.

Light blooming.

It was a trick of memory. They told me I couldn’t have possibly seen the light. They said there was no way I’d seen the shards of glass spinning through the air, edges glinting.

And then I was back in Jordan’s apartment, breathing raggedly—gulping air, shaking, burning up like I was on fire because my body was craving oxygen and unable to get enough. Jordan was staring at me, confusion and fear battling on his face, another empty hanging from one hand as he tried to decide whether to throw it. How long, I wanted to ask. A few seconds. Maybe even less. Long enough for him to see, though.

“You stupid piece of shit,” I said and charged.

The bottle caught me on the side of the head. It was like gasoline thrown on my panic—my eye, a part of me screamed—but I kept moving. The bottle didn’t break. It hit the floor behind me with the muffled clink of solid glass.

By the time I reached Jordan, he’d found a shoe. He swung it at me like a club.

I batted it out of his hand. When he swung bare fisted at me, I slapped him. He staggered, and I grabbed his hair and yanked him off-balance in the other direction. I kicked his feet out from under him, and when he landed on his knees, I slapped him again. My hand came away with a red streak, and more blood was smeared across his cheek. His lip had split, and now blood ran toward his chin.

“You stupid, cowardly piece of shit,” I said. “I’m not your candy-ass boyfriend.” I twisted my hand in those stupid fucking blond curtains until he screamed. “You can’t hide! You can’t run away and hide!” For a moment, I was in that other place again: the warmth of the light rising, the spin of glass. I heard myself, heard the words that didn’t make sense, tried to think, It’s not her. He’s not her. But it was like catching the tail of a kite, and I could barely hold on. “I’m not a dumb kid you can stab in the back. You want to fuck around? Let’s fuck around.”

Blood from his split lip dripping from his chin onto that fucking Freddy’s T-shirt. Jordan stared up at me, dazed.

I took out my phone and turned on the voice recorder. Then I said, “Detective Gray Dulac of the Wahredua PD. It’s June thirtieth, twenty-twenty-one, uh—” I found the clock on the microwave. “—eleven fifty-one A.M.,talking to Jordan, uh—” It came back to me through the red haze. “—Hodge. Jordan Hodge.” I released Jordan. My hand was aching, my fingers stiff. I’d pulled out a few strands of hair, and they clung to me. I wiped my hand on my pants to get them off. “Now tell everybody why you killed Tip, and how you did it, and why you put him in my fucking bed. Tell them everything.”

Jordan’s head wobbled. His eyes filled slowly with tears. He shook his head.

“Tell them,” I said.

He shook his head again. Tears fell. They mixed with the blood on his face, and when they dripped from his twenty-year-old jawline, they spattered the floor pink.

“Tell them!”

“I didn’t kill him!” His shout was mangled, the words almost too thick to understand, but he repeated himself: “I didn’t kill him!”

I stared at him for a second. Then I reached to turn off the recorder.

Before I could, though, Jordan spoke again. More softly this time. The words still muddled, catching in his throat, but clearer. “I hurt him.”

“What?”

“It was me. His face. His eye. I did that.” He started to cry in earnest. “It was me.”