Page 108 of I Will Ruin You

“Understood.”

“Take out your phone and power it off.”

Slowly, I reached into my jacket, took out the phone, and did as he asked. He motioned for me to hand it over, and I did.

“Okay,” Stuart said. “Let’s go.”

He held the gun down at his side, tight to his leg, where it was not immediately visible. When we came out of the room, farther up the hallway people were starting to drift out of the library meeting.

“Quickly,” Stuart whispered, nudging me toward the main entrance.

We both walked briskly. As we passed a trash bin, Stuart tossed my phone into it. We were outside in no time. It was fully dark now, the school parking lot illuminated by towering lampposts.

“That way,” he said, giving me a shove, making a sniffing noise.

I saw his truck on the far side of the lot, the same one he’d been driving when he showed up at the end of my driveway... how many days ago? Time seemed to have lost all meaning lately.

Someone shouted, “There you are, you son of a bitch.”

I glanced over my shoulder and saw Herb running across the parking lot. I stopped, turned around, and raised a hand.

“Go back, Herb.”

He stopped about ten feet from me. He gave Stuart one quizzical glance, then looked back at me and said, “I guess you feel pretty clever, dumping that shit on me.”

“Herb,” I said calmly, “this is not the time. We can talk about this tomorrow.”

“No, we can talk about this now,” he said. “Okay, so maybe I poked the bear here, put an idea into that woman’s head. But you had it coming. You screwed me over, and I warned you, I warned you I wouldn’t take it.”

“Man, you need to back off and get the fuck out of here,” Stuart said, the gun still at his side.

“Who the hell are you?” Herb asked.

“Herb,” I said one more time, “for your own good, I’m telling you to walk away now, and if you want to ream me out tomorrow, then by all means.”

Now it was Stuart who was looking at Herb quizzically, as though he had seen him before.

“I know you?” Stuart asked.

And I thought: He saw him on the news.

“I never met you in my life,” Herb snapped. “And I’m not talking to you.”

“Yeah, well, we’re not talking to you anymore, either,” Stuart said. Then he raised his weapon and shot Herb in the neck.

Forty-Nine

“Richard’s in trouble,” Bonnie told her sister. “Or, at least, he was while Billy Finster was still alive. Now, honestly, we don’t know what to think.”

“What kind of trouble?”

Bonnie told Marta about the blackmail scheme. How Billy must have seen Richard on the news following the LeDrew incident and decided to victimize him.

“And before you ask, it’s not true,” Bonnie said. “Richard never molested anyone. Not Billy, not anybody else.”

“But he was prepared to pay him off anyway,” Marta said evenly.

“I know. Let’s say someone said you took money under the table to look the other way when some robbery or something was going down. There wouldn’t have to be anything to it, but there’d still be an internal affairs investigation. They’d turn your whole life upside down, wouldn’t they?”