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FLORENCE

The call went through. I sit in the dark in a hospital bed with tears in my eyes, thinking about the gamble I took reaching for my phone instead of the gun, and they traced the 911 call even though I didn’t get to speak. They still found me. I’m alive.

They’re keeping me for a little while because my blood pressure and heart rate are high, and they need to cast my wrist. I asked them to call Herb and ask him if he’ll pick me up when I’m ready, but they won’t let me go until after I talk to the police and make an official statement. So I wait, worried my blood pressure and heart rate will never come down enough for them to let me go because I’m so worried about where Shelby is, I can’t think straight.

My heart pounds even harder when I see Evan. He’s standing, talking to a nurse who is handing him papers. Discharge papers it seems to me, and he’s freshly bandaged and perfectly playing the victim. I think the nurse might actually be flirting with him. He sees me watching him and gives me a wink before limping over to the elevator. No. He can’t be released. You have to be kidding me!

Then Riley appears in the doorway and gives a little knock on the door frame before he and Jones walk in and ask if now is a good time to hear my side of things.

“I told the other officer,” I say, and Riley pulls up a seat. Jones lingers at the door, looking bored by the whole thing.

“I know, dear, but why don’t you tell me again so I hear it from you?” Did he just call me dear? Is there no respect at all? I already know what Evan said. He got to talk first. He got to think the whole thing through and make me look unstable. He got to plot and plan.

“He says you just showed up at his door.”

“I did go to his place,” I say. “I took the bus because those hospital logs—the ones we gave you—the strange sign-ins. Blacklock. Remember? His video game name was Blacklock, and it was so odd that I thought, well, that had to be him signing in, but why?” I stop. I sound nuts because the whole thing sounds nuts. I’m embarrassed by how it’s all coming out.

“He told us that—that’s why you said you suspected him of being a…what? A mass murderer? Because of his video game name. He logged into his Xbox app on his phone right in front of us and his name was Evan_Charm75. Not Blacklock.”

“He changed it!” I say, louder than I mean to.

“When would he have done that?” Riley asks patiently.

“He did. He told me he did.”

“So besides the video game name that made you go over there, what happened?” I can hear the patronizing tone in his voice, and I don’t know whether I can fully blame him; this has been masterfully crafted for me to sound exactly like I do right now. Foolish.

“He tried to attack me and take my phone, but then I Tased him and…”

He interrupts me, holding up his hand in a “stop” motion. “So you brought a Taser with you but you are saying you weren’t the one attacking him. What about the gun? Whose is it?”

“It’s his! I brought the Taser for protection. I didn’t want to use it. It’s his gun!”

“The serial came back registered to Shelby. Did she give it to you?”

“What?” I sit up and the IV pulls and I wince.

“Take it easy, Flor,” Riley says, still in his patronizing, calm-this-crazy-lady-down voice. “I’m not here to upset you even more. Evan doesn’t want to press charges.”

“What?” is all I manage to cry.

“So you can go home when they release you,” he says.

“Well, I want to press charges!” I yell, and he looks to Jones and back to me.

“Flor, I would leave this alone. You took a bus to break into the man’s house and you shot him. Admittedly. I know you all have gotten carried away on this podcast, pointing fingers every which way, and I think it got away from you, and now people got hurt.”

“No,” I plead. “I think Shelby is in that house. You have to at least search the house. He has a room with her photos—like a shrine. He has Leo’s ID. I was in that room. I saw it. You have to at least look!”

“We will,” he says.

“You will?” I say, stopping to collect myself, very surprised.

“Yeah, he said he’d be happy to let us look around.”

“When?” I ask.

“I’ll send Officer Barlowe in the morning.”

“No. You have to go now . Please.”

Riley fixes me with a stern look. “Florence. I know you’re upset and that you’ve been through an ordeal, but we can’t issue a warrant because you say you saw something funny there and you think Shelby is there. Do you know what it takes to issue a search warrant? He said we can come by in the morning, so if he’s offering and it helps settle this on both sides, that’s the most we can do. We have limited resources here and frankly the lot of you are not making our jobs any easier.”

“Please. I’m telling you that it will be too late,” I say and he stands and sighs, closing his notepad.

“I’m off duty and Jones is headed to a DUI stop, but I’ll see what I can do,” he says.

“You have to go now,” I say, and he looks at me with pity—an old, confused lady in a hospital bed—and I know what he thinks. I know he won’t go.

“Good night, Florence,” he says, and then he’s gone.

I see Mack and Herb hurrying past the detectives and the nurse’s station, into my room.

“Flor,” Herb says, rushing to my side. “The bastards made us wait downstairs until the police talked to you first. Are you okay?”

“We got the call on our way to Evan’s place,” Mack says, pulling a chair up to my bedside. “But then we turned around and came here. We found his address in your room… I mean, what is going on?” she asks.

When I tell them both everything that happened tonight, Herb starts pacing and running his hands through his hair and Mack just sits perfectly still trying to absorb it all—all the stuff about Leo especially, I’m sure.

“A heart attack,” she finally says.

“I don’t think he’d lie about it because he admitted to everything else,” I say, and I hope that it helps her in some way to know he didn’t suffer terribly, being tortured at the hands of a madman. It was a merciful way to go, considering the alternative. Maybe slipping something into Otis’s IV and carbon monoxide were peaceful ways to go too, both poisoned. That sparks something inside of me. An idea.

“Why isn’t he arrested?” Herb asks for the third time.

“Otis was a natural death, Bernie was a suicide, Leo is inconclusive and not able to be determined, and none of it points to him. Not one shred of evidence.”

“That can’t be. Goddamn. I thought Evan was our friend. I just—” and Herb stops when he looks my direction and sees me carefully untaping my IV and pulling the needle out ever so gently, holding a cotton swab on top. “What are you doing?”

“What they won’t do.” I stand up and start pushing my feet into my boots. “Let’s go. We have to get Shelby.”