Page 49 of (My Accidental) Killer Summer (Summers in Seaside)

forty-eight

. . .

Noah

FIVE MINUTES EARLIER

Elle’s breathing is slow and even, a soft hush against my chest.

Her thigh hooks over my hip like a promise I don’t deserve. I could stay. I could let the night harden around us and pretend the world outside this bed isn’t waiting with a clipboard and a body.

I don’t.

I ease my hand under her knee and slip free an inch at a time.

She murmurs something that sounds like don’t go and my heart stops like it heard its own name.

I freeze. Her leg tightens in her sleep, a slow, possessive drag that lights every nerve I just spent an hour trying to forget. Her breath evens.

I want to kiss her hair and make a vow I can’t keep. Instead, I don’t touch her at all. I can guess at how this all plays out. I can put the pieces in exactly the right place. But I can’t guarantee it’s going to work. That’s the part that kills me.

Clothes first, then gun, then badge—last, like a penance. The order matters tonight.

The floorboard beside the dresser still complains so I step around it like a man who’s learned where a house keeps its secrets.

At the back door I lean my weight where you have to, left of the latch, so it doesn’t thud. The porch smells like wet dirt and rosemary and us. I want to tell her.

I pull the door closed behind me and step into the hum of the street, keys cold in my palm.

Do the right wrong thing fast. Then live with it.

Screens. Steel. Dirt. Paper.

I start the car.

First stop: screens and the guy who can make a security frog go blind.

The strip mall is a long bruise of neon—vape shop, tax prep, a shuttered pho place, and NuVision Home Security glowing like a kid’s nightlight.

A bell tings when I push inside. The place smells like plastic and dust. The guy behind the counter looks up from YouTube with the reflexes of someone who lives online and smokes out back between firmware updates.

“Santos,” I say.

He blinks, then ghosts a smile. “Grant. You want the bundle? Doorbell, two cams, cloud sub, half off?”

“I want five minutes,” I say. “On a system you installed three doors down from me.”

He stretches, all elbows. “Man, you gotta be more specific. I’m basically the HOA of cameras in that neighborhood.”

“Frog,” I say. “Front yard frog cam. Motion activated.”

He laughs. “Oh. Mrs. Purvis. Yeah, her son bought the kit on discount. She calls him Norman. Says Norman watches the ‘riffraff.’ Which is everyone.”

I pull a folded twenty from my pocket and lay it next to the register. He raises an eyebrow. I lay another. Then two more. My wallet is lighter. My conscience is heavier. “I need a clip corrupted,” I tell him. “Tuesday morning sometime between six-thirty and seven-fifteen. Same angle.”

He looks at the money like it’s a test he’s already passed. “You a client now?”

“Tonight,” I say. “After, you forget you saw me.”

Santos drums his fingers once, then sighs and shuffles through a bin of stickers and zip ties until he finds a dog-eared card with the system ID. “They never change the defaults,” he says, typing, the screen reflecting in his glasses. “I tell ’em to. They think ‘admin/admin’ is an identity.”

His cursor floats through a cluttered interface. He clicks a calendar. “It’ll take a second. I gotta start a few hours before. Just the way it’s catalogued.”

I nod and watch over his shoulder as he flips through tiled grids of low-res images —a raccoon at two-oh-four, a yellow pickup at two-thirty-eight, a pair of figures at two-forty-two.

“Wait!” I stop him. “Go back.”

He scrolls back.

“Stop. That right there what’s happening there?”

He pulls up the images in succession. First, Doug parking his truck at that same crazy half-assed angle we found it at. Second, two figures that could be anyone, but are most definitely not the two women I am thinking about.

“What the?—”

We watch as the two figures, one short and one tall, fumble carrying the plastic wrapped body we later found in Doug’s truck to said truck and stashing it in the back.

Okay, that needs to go as well. Or my whole plan with Doug goes to shit.

I have a moment of indecision. I give the word, these two guy, whoever the fuck they are, go free.

“Throw in that one too, I’ll never bug you again.”

“Right there?” Santos asks.

I nod.

“How you want it?”

“Flare,” I say. “Lens flare. Lens artifact, corrupted partition. Make it look like bad luck and cheap hardware.”

He nods like I’ve ordered off-menu before. He drags a filter, drops a bloom on the night like a comet, then toggles the clip into a jitter of pixels that makes even my memory doubt itself for half a second.

“Now the morning,” I say.

He scrolls. My car, too far to read a plate.

The truck, banana yellow bright even in grayscale.

Two women pause beside it. One leans to look.

The other keeps watch in that casual way people do when they know they shouldn’t be there.

Norman the Front Yard Frog Cam stares with all the weight of suburban surveillance.

“That one I need gone.”

Santos glances up at me. “You sure?” he asks, so soft I could pretend he didn’t.

“No,” I say. “Do it anyway.”

He does. The image ghosts. A digital hiccup eats the middle fifteen seconds and spits back a “signal lost, reconnecting” banner that will outlive us all.

He sits back, palms flat on the counter, like we just buried something. Maybe we did.

“Anything else?” he asks.

“Traffic cam at Cypress and Third,” I say. “If anyone asks, their archive had a maintenance ticket today.”

He whistles. “You’re stacking IOUs.”

“I’m paying cash,” I say.

“Cash buys silence,” Santos says, shrugging. “IOUs buy memory.” He slides the twenties into the register. “You didn’t hear that from me.”

I leave before we can become friends.

Back in the car, I scrub my face with my hands until my skin burns. Then I drive to the impound like I’m headed for confession.

Second stop: steel, planting the evidence in Doug’s car.

The night shift gate guard is a bored kid named Kline who still thinks the badge will get him laid. He leans into the window and peers like I’m a fish he could throw back or keep.

“Working late, Detective?” he asks.

“Murders don’t punch out,” I say, and show the warrant for access that I pulled on Finch’s truck hours ago before I knew I’d need it like this. The paper has weight. Paper always does. “Second pass. Inventory discrepancies,” I add, because everyone understands inefficiency.

He waves me through with a yawn and a finger-gun. I hate him for being young and because he reminds me of me.

Finch’s truck is a sulking shape under a wash of light; bright yellow color turned into a grey smudge without the sun. The lot smells like rubber and ozone. Chain-link and sodium luminaires buzz like a hive.

I glove up. Latex. Powdered. The snap sounds too loud.

The cab is taped; doors locked with bright evidence seals. I peel the driver side with the care of a man who has practiced peeling off his own skin and pretending it’s a molting. The tape gives. I open. The smell is sweat, fryer grease, and Doug’s loneliness.

I sit where he sat. The seat is a saddle worn by one body, habits pressed into foam and fabric: wallet rut in the back pocket spot, heel dig under the brake. The glove box is empty except for manuals and a half-eaten roll of mints.

I take the rag from the door pocket—oil, salt, the ghost of a lime from somebody’s shift drink, Doug’s prints ground into cotton. I rub it between my fingers, let the grit tell me what it knows. Then I go to work.

The burner is a cheap brick wrapped in a rubber case with a skull that would have been funny when we were fifteen. I click it on. The text thread I queued earlier boots up like a fuse.

where’s my $500.

u shorted me yesterday.

u think i wont find u?

tonight 9 behind the 7. come alone.

i know where u park the banana.

It’s not art. It doesn’t have to be. I scroll, drop the phone to the floor mat, pick it up with the rag like I’m him. I thumb a reply with the rag on my hand—clumsy—but I only need a smear of Doug, not a novel.

relax. u get ur cut.

I let the phone slip down the side of the driver’s seat into that abyss where coins and sins go. Later, when I “find” it on a second pass, it’ll read like it always lived there.

Glove box next. I slide a crumpled gas station receipt under the owner’s manual. The date/timestamp nudges the window just enough that “Elle at seven-twelve” starts to sound like a red herring if you say it with confidence.

I take out a folded half-page—pay/owe scribbles, Doug’s name at the top, two first names underlined, six hash marks by one of them.

I worked too many narcotics cases to pretend this isn’t what it is.

It’s theater and it’s familiar. I rub the edges with the rag, breathe on it like I’m cold, and slide it under the seat where a man’s mess would spit it back if he braked too hard.

Center console: a receipt book from a big-box store. I tear a page cleanly, write a delivery number and “vinyl tarp 10x12” with the generic pen we all buy in bulk. I date it last week. I don’t leave it where it could be a gift; I jam it between the console and seat where lint lives.

I sit a second with my hands on the wheel and let my pulse flatten to match the truck’s dead heartbeat.

Outside the cab, the night is louder. I take a step back, another, look at the door seam where the seal sits a hair off. With the rag, I smooth it down, intimate as a hand covering a mouth. The tape goes back on like I was never here. The tape always lies for the first man who touches it right.

I walk away and feel the heat in my face that means I’m lying to myself. I let it burn. Then I let it go and turn back to the truck, camera on this time, to do my second pass and gather additional evidence.

Third stop: dirt and theater.