Page 29

I drove a couple of blocks and pulled over again. My head was buzzing, and I had no idea what to do, but I knew if I sat in front of John-Henry’s house and vaped, he would have come outside, and then there would have been more caring and concern and talking, and eventually, I would have lost my nerve. I wondered if I should have said something else at the end, something better. He had told me he loved me twice. This, I thought, was why it was so fucking difficult to stay angry at John-Henry Somerset. I wondered if I should have told him, in the middle of the hug, I was getting a chub.

My phone told me my fight with Darnell had barely been an hour ago. That seemed impossible; it felt like it had been days. Long, sleepless days. In the heat of the car, the aches from the fight with John-Henry were making themselves known again, and when I settled back in the seat and closed my eyes, I felt myself on the verge of slipping into sleep.

I forced myself to sit up, peel my eyes open, adjust the vents. I needed to do something. I needed to talk to Darnell. A real talk. Maybe the first truly real one in our relationship, if you didn’t count the ugly things we’d said to each other in the fight. But John-Henry had been right about one thing: not yet; we both needed time to cool down.

A notification on my phone showed a voicemail from Peterson. Waiting wasn’t going to make it any better, and it was strangely reassuring to know that John-Henry dreaded these phone calls as much as I was starting to. I played the message, and Peterson’s voice filled the car.

“Detective Dulac, call me back as soon as you get this message. Better yet, get over to the station. I want to look you in the eye while you explain to me why two of the sheriff’s detectives are screaming that you blew up their investigation and scared their lead suspect into running. If you know where Jordan Hodge is, you need to call that boy and tell him to come back to Wahredua right now.” I thought that was the end of the message, but it turned out Peterson had only stopped talking because—it sounded like—he was so angry he actually couldn’t speak for a moment. “And why,” he finally continued in a buckled-down voice, “am I getting calls from a very expensive law firm accusing you of assaulting a citizen in his own home?” He had to stop again, and his voice was a slap when he said, “Get over here right now.”

I deleted the voicemail. The air conditioning was starting to catch up with the heat. I vaped for a while and stared out the windshield. In the mid-afternoon, the sunlight had such a fine edge that I felt like I could see every detail—like each blade of grass had been cut with a diamond tip and pressed neatly into place. I thought maybe I needed to get high.

Something was nagging at me. Something I couldn’t quite pin down. I vaped some more, got comfortable in my seat again, and tried to chase it. It was something John-Henry had said. At the end. Not the part about not doing anything stupid—a little late for that, and what kind of fucking big bro advice was that anyway? No, something else. You’re my brother .

That was nice and sweet and all that, but it reminded me of something I couldn’t put my finger on. Something from the case. I tried to run through it in my head. I still hadn’t had time to think about what Jordan had told me—about his fight with Tip, about the lie they’d cooked up together, about how they’d fucked up this whole investigation from the very beginning. And how they’d accidentally put Darnell—and me—in the hot seat.

It was an accident that the killer had been more than happy to take advantage of. Darnell and I had been the perfect fucking patsies. We’d been so caught up in ourselves, we did most of the work for him—Darnell with his lies, doing whatever he was doing; and me tripping over my own dick every time I turned around.

And while I believed Jordan when he said he hadn’t killed Tip, I also recognized that my own judgment wasn’t exactly trustworthy right now.

Rory. That was part of what was bothering me. Jordan had told me that Rory and Tip were…what? Rivals? Not exactly. Competing with each other. That stupid body count thing. And that was interesting, because Rory hadn’t mentioned it. He’d told me that he and Tip were like brothers—that’s why John-Henry’s comment had sounded familiar. Maybe scorekeeping your sexual encounters wasn’t the kind of thing you brought up when the police were interviewing you about your roommate, but then, most interviewees didn’t fall ass-up on a couch halfway through the conversation either. The competition added a new angle to the relationship between the boys. Maybe it hadn’t been friendly; maybe they’d argued. It was something worth asking, anyway. I needed to talk to Rory, I decided. Hell, maybe he knew where Jordan had gone—if I could track him down, maybe Peterson wouldn’t shit-can me. And if nothing else, I wanted to get that fucking picture of me off the body count board.

I honestly couldn’t bring myself to think about the fact that it had been Rory and his buddies who’d taken me upstairs at Sunny’s house. Talk about rock bottom.

When I parked outside the single-story U of apartments, I didn’t see Rory’s car. That was okay; I didn’t have anywhere else to be.

It was mostly autopilot when I opened up Prowler—something I did because I was bored, the way sometimes, when I was scrolling Twitter, I tried to open Twitter from inside Twitter, because my feedwas boring and my brain thought there was some other, second-dimension Twitter that would be even more interesting. Not that I was going to go hook up with anybody. Not today. I mean, not right now.

The middle of the day wasn’t exactly the peak time for digital cruising, but I scrolled through faces and torsos and, yes, the occasional peen. The same old stuff, really—the guy whose profile only said taking loads , and vers for raw—bb vers looking , and the one who had chosen, as his pic, a cake pop. I stopped on unicorn_vomit, whose profile listed his major accomplishment as being permanently barred from ever entering a T.J. Maxx again.

It was cringey enough—and cute enough—that I sent the message without really letting myself think about it. Bro, please tell me you’re not for real.

To my surprise, a message came back almost immediately. Nah, banned from all T.J. Maxx’s for life .

I wrote back, So, gay hell.

Basically.

I was trying to think of something to write back. I was also doing some serious moral calculus. Like, a handy wouldn’t be wrong, would it? I mean, it’s not like I was doing it out of some fucked-up need for validation and approval because I had zero self-worth and because I had some seriously fucked relationship models. I was just going for a nut. That was, like, pure.

Before I could, though, a message popped up: This you?

A screenshot came through next. I could barely see at the top what appeared to be the name of the site—BangBoysWiki. It did look like a Wikipedia page—the layout, the fonts, all that stuff. But the title of the page said, BANG BOYS’ REAL NAMES . And then there was a list. My head felt like a drum, my heartbeat trapped and getting louder and louder.

It was halfway down the page; they were sorted by the titles of the videos, which were linked. Boot on neck, piss on face (01:34) - Gray Dulac – justaprettyprettyface . My profile name was linked too.

Another image came through on the Prowler chat a moment later: a still image from a video. It took several seconds before I recognized my face—cheeks puffy, hair wet, eyes glazed.

I closed the app. Then I stared at my phone. After a shaky moment, I locked it and got out of the car and headed for the apartment.

That video.

A horn blared, and I looked around in time to see a white pickup slam on the brakes. It came to a stop about six inches from me. It took me a moment to start moving again. Behind me, the guy was shouting curses.

My name.

My face.

My profile.

I misjudged the curb and stumbled getting up on the sidewalk. The glare of the afternoon sun made it hard to see, so I put a hand up, but that didn’t help. I was only distantly aware that I was still moving, like my body belonged to someone else.

Everybody would know.

I tried to box up the thoughts. I tried to push them to the back of my mind. I’d deal with it later. I’d deal with everything later. But there was still a voice inside me screaming, Everybody will know . When I got to the door, I had to put a hand on the jamb, my stomach clenching and spasming. I’m going to be sick, I thought. I’m going to shit myself.

Somehow, I forced the thoughts back again. I hammered on the door. No one answered. Of course not; Jordan was on the run, and Tip was dead, and Rory’s car was gone. I wiped my hands on my shorts. My gut clenched again, and I held myself up by clutching the jamb. And then the wave of nausea passed.

It’s okay, I decided. It’s okay. It’s just one website. You can get it taken down.

How?

There had to be a way.

And nobody was going to look at that website anyway. It had to be a super small subset of the population—not just the people who watched gay porn, but the ones who went the extra step to track down the guys in the videos. The creeps who would want to see a porn star doxxed. Or a Bang Boy. I laughed, and a college-aged girl carrying groceries past me turned to stare. I tried to wave, like I was all right, and that only made her adjust her grip on the plastic bags and work free a little can of pepper spray on her keychain.

Who the fuck was I kidding? All it would take would be one person. One. And then everyone would know.

I rubbed sweat from my eyes. I took some deep breaths. I’d get it taken down. Or I’d tell people it was one of those things I’d seen on Reddit. Deepfakes. They did it with celebrities, swapping their faces in pornos. That’s what I could say.

Clutching at fucking straws, man.

But it was enough, anyway, to let me breathe again.

I tried the door, but it was locked. Mopping my face with my shirt, I headed back to the car. I got my kit out of the back and made my way down the alley behind the apartment. The old sash windows had been touched up so many times that the paint was probably a quarter of an inch thick, bubbled and peeling in places. I double-checked I was alone, and then I worked the slim jim between the sashes. I’d started carrying the slim jim when I’d been on patrol. You didn’t know how many people locked themselves out of their car until you worked third shift on a weekend in a college town. And now you’re breaking into a suspect’s apartment, I thought. And you’re crossing another line.

But it was better than thinking about that fucking wiki.

It took thirty seconds to get the cam lock to open—the longest, hottest, sweatiest thirty seconds of my life. Also, that totally would be the title of my porno. Wait, no, thirty seconds makes it sound like I have a problem. The window slid up. I did another quick sweep of the alley; still no witnesses. I hopped up and pulled myself through the window.

It was located over the kitchen sink, which was stacked with dirty dishes. I knocked over a few bowls and plates as I climbed inside, but nobody came to investigate the noises. I closed the window behind me and, still carrying the slim jim, headed for Tip’s room first.

Nothing had changed. It was hard to believe I’d been here only a few hours before; it felt like days—weeks—had passed. The flag still lay where Jordan had let it fall, and the body count wall was exposed. I took pictures of it with my phone, trying to get close-ups of each individual photo. I didn’t know for a fact that Tip’s killer was featured among the photos, but it was a strong possibility, and it was a pool of potential suspects that the sheriff’s department hadn’t even known about.

When I finished, I retraced my steps through the kitchen toward Rory’s room, on the other side of the apartment. The only sounds came from my sneakers on the linoleum—soft, sticky whispers. I wondered if Jordan really had gone on the run after his confession; he didn’t seem like he’d be able to make it last, if he had. He’d slip up. Or, more likely, the guilt would get to him. He wasn’t a bad kid, just a stupid one, and he’d made a mistake. I decided I’d check his room after I got done with Rory’s; Rory was the whole reason I’d come back, after all.

Rory’s door was shut, but it opened when I tried the handle. The hinges made a quiet protest, and the sound of my steps changed as I moved onto ancient carpet. His bedroom wasn’t much different from Tip’s. Neater, tidier, although not exactly clean—no clothes on the floor, no clutter of shopping bags and hair products and all the other junk that seemed to accumulate. But a litter of receipts covered the top of the dresser, along with a vape and what appeared to be empty pods. And a closer inspection showed a fair bit of dust. He hadn’t run the vacuum in a while either.

Unlike Tip, Rory had made no effort to hide his body count photos. He’d made a collage of them on a large mirror, leaving the space in the center clear. As I drew closer, my own face appeared in the glass, floating among all the other faces. Rory had a type, it appeared. For the most part, they were older men—ten, fifteen, even twenty years his senior. But not all of them. A few showed younger guys, and in those, I was surprised to see, there was regularly a third. No one consistent, but I started to suspect they were established couples, and that Rory had somehow managed to insert himself into the pairing. I heard that particular thought and wished John-Henry had been around to hear it. Or at least Emery.

I found the picture from Sunny’s. It showed a bare-chested Rory kneeling on the edge of a bed. The lighting was bad, and it was clear he’d extended his arm and taken the picture from as high as he could reach. The angle mostly captured my ass and back, but if you knew what you were looking at, you could make out the pillowcase they’d put over my head. Nobody else was featured in the photo. Had the other two guys been Tip and Jordan? That didn’t seem likely; Tip had been too busy getting wasted and looking for a hookup, and Jordan had been chasing after him. Two of Rory’s other friends, then. Maybe even whoever had told Rory about Sunny’s party in the first place. Or they might have been strangers; I’d been too fucked up by that point to make the distinction, and I wouldn’t have put it past Rory.

I pulled the photo from the mirror and considered it for another moment. Then I peeled the tape from the back, rolled it into a tight little wad between two fingers, and pitched it in the trashcan next to the bed. The photo went into my pocket.

My plan was to take pictures of all these photos as well. Not because I thought they had something to do with Tip’s murder, but because I wanted a record of them before I asked Rory about them, in case he got rid of them. I stopped after a few seconds, though, and lowered my phone so I could get a better look at one photo in particular. The shot was unusual—Rory had taken the photo from a lower angle, and it showed a naked man standing at the foot of a bed. His back was to the camera, and it seemed obvious that Rory had snuck the photo while he was still lying down, trying to be discreet. The guy was in decent shape, with the kind of build that suggested he’d hit middle age—solid, instead of cut. A daddy type, like so many of Rory’s other hookups.

And then I realized his face was visible—in a mirror. It was a small photo. The details were almost too fine to make out, and all of it was made worse by the angle and Rory’s furtive attempt to take the picture without being caught. But I knew that face. It was Tip’s dad, Eddie.

Other details crowded in. Eddie’s overly aggressive homophobia. His anger about Tip’s little gaycation at the truck stop glory hole. The strangely emasculating way Lola had continued to work as a stripper, whether her Highway Patrol husband liked it or not. Jordan’s bizarre comment about Eddie being jealous of Tip. At the time, I’d taken it to be a reference to Lola; I’d thought he’d meant Eddie was jealous of the attention and affection Lola so clearly reserved for her son. But now, looking at the photo, I understood. And then more pieces started to fall into place. The day after Tip had been injured, at the hospital. The fight between Eddie and Lola that I’d interrupted in the hallway. Lola’s insistence that Rory leave, which was why he’d been here, at the apartment, instead of with Tip. The fresh set of scratches Rory had been wearing that day.

The sound of a key in a lock jolted me out of my thoughts. I pulled the photo of Eddie from the mirror and turned to face the kitchen. From the front of the apartment came the rattle of a handle turning, the squeak of hinges, steps moving inside. It wouldn’t be Jordan; I already knew that. And a moment later, Rory stopped in the doorway, staring at me.

He wore a tank and shorts and flip-flops, and he smelled faintly like chlorine and sunscreen. He shifted his weight. And then he said, “What the fuck?”

“Hi, Rory.”

His gaze moved past me, an automatic check of the body count photos. I wasn’t sure if he could tell I’d taken some or not, but color rose in his face as his eyes came back to me and he said, “What the fuck is going on? How did you get in here?”

“I think we need to have a talk.”

He looked at the body count photos again. “Did you break into my apartment?”

“Did you take a photo of me the night you fucked me at Sunny’s house?”

An unfamiliar combativeness tensed his expression, but then he shrugged and plastered on a smile. “Let me guess: Jordan told you.”

I didn’t say anything.

“It’s not a big deal,” Rory said. “You were hot. It was a good fuck, right?”

It was a strangely earnest question, and I found myself remembering the top’s frantic, breathless thrusts. To my own surprise, I almost smiled.

“You’re still hot,” Rory said, breaking the silence. He grabbed the tank top at the hem and pulled it over his head, arms crossing. He was lean, smooth, tan from the pool. The smell of the sunscreen went straight to my balls. He pushed the shorts down enough to show freshly trimmed pubes, the fabric drawing tight across his cock. “I’m always super horny after a swim.”

“I’m starting to get the feeling you’re horny all the time.”

He grinned. The best word for it, I decided, was cheeky—aware of what I thought, and reveling in it. Even beneath the shorts, his dick was visibly filling out. “You want me to top you this time?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Did you top Eddie?”

He stopped breathing. At least, that’s what it looked like. And then the moment moved on, and he pushed the shorts down further. His dick flopped out. It was still a pretty nice dick. “Is that really what you want to talk about right now?”

I shrugged.

“I changed my mind,” he said. “I want you to fuck me again.”

“Lots of options.”

“Last time was so fucking hot; I came so hard. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.”

“Thanks.”

“I even jerked off to it a couple of times, and I never jerk off. I can’t stop thinking about you.”

“Is that why you went to my house and talked to my boyfriend?”

He was still doing a decent job—the cocksure way he had of standing, the smirk, even that nice, plump dick. But his eyes gave him away. The pupils were small and hard and roving, looking for a chance.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said, “but I told you, I couldn’t stop thinking about you, and then you wouldn’t message me back. I was desperate. Why don’t you fuck my face for a while? And then you can have my ass.”

That time, I did laugh. Red rushed into his cheeks. I kept laughing, and he dropped his hand. The elastic waistband of his shorts snapped back against his hips.

“Jesus, Rory,” I said. “I know I’m not really the one to talk, but seriously?”

The smirk had fallen away. The loose, confident stance had changed—his shoulders curved in, his arms folded across his chest. He glared at me, his face getting redder and redder. And then he snapped, “You broke into my apartment.”

“Yeah, dipshit. I’m carrying a slim jim.”

“I should call the police.”

“Go ahead, Rory.”

He took out his phone. But he just held it and stared a challenge at me.

“When did you and Eddie start hooking up?”

Several long seconds passed. Rory was breathing through his nose, and his nostrils were pinched and white. Then, by degrees, it all changed again. He stood straighter. He stopped trying to cover his chest and belly. He moved over to the bed and flopped down on it, stretching out, putting himself on display. The fuckboi hath returned. God, maybe I shouldn’t have watched those Lord of the Rings movies with Darnell.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Sure, you do. You keep a fucking scoreboard. When?”

“September.”

“The beginning of the school year.”

Rearranging the pillows to prop himself up, he gave a little shrug. “Tip took us over there for dinner. Eddie couldn’t stop looking at me. I jerked him off on the back porch while Tip and Jordan were doing the dishes.”

“A traditional family dinner.”

To my surprise, he grinned. “He’s a little bitch once he gets a dick inside him. Kind of like you.”

“Did Tip know?”

Rory opened his mouth to answer. Before he could, the yowl of a cat came from his phone—a Prowler notification. He smirked at me as he picked it up. “Sorry, I’m having a big, fat cock delivered. Should I tell him to plan for two?”

“Did Tip know?”

He ignored me as he tapped out a message, and then the phone made a little whooshing noise when he sent it.

“I’m not going to ask you again.”

“I don’t have to talk to you. I don’t have to tell you anything. I could get you arrested.”

“I’ll ask Jordan.”

Emotions warred in Rory’s face. He dropped the phone onto his bed; it yowled again, but this time, he ignored it. Finally, he said, “He knew.”

“What happened?”

“He lost his shit. You know how Eddie is. He’s a fucking asshole, treats Tip like crap, all that fucking big talk. And meanwhile, his wife’s out there, showing her cooch to strangers, and he’s bending over so a kid his son’s age can breed him in a park restroom. He liked that, you know? He wanted me to make him feel like shit.” Rory hesitated, as though realizing he might have said too much. “Tip saw the picture. That was stupid of me; I didn’t think he’d look, much less that he’d be able to tell.”

“Bullshit.”

Rory flipped his hair back. He looked like he was trying not to smile.

“You said he lost his mind,” I said. “What does that mean?”

“We got in a huge fight. He said he was going to tell his dad he knew. I wasn’t going to let him.”

Even with the air conditioning struggling against the heat, I began to sweat. It popped out in hot little spats across my chest and the back of my neck.

But Rory shrugged. “That was last semester, though, so I guess he never told him, because Eddie would have gone ape-shit.”

“That’s it?”

“I mean, Tip started fucking everything that moved. A lot of dad types, you know? And you know what’s funny? Tip used to be so goddamn picky. Nobody was good enough for him except sweet little Jordan until he realized I was coring out his old man.”