I am my mother, and everyone that I love dies. I look up into her red face and smile. “I’ll be up there once they clear me.”
She takes my lie and swallows it with my smile of sugar. “Great. Thanks.”
I watch when she opens the door, but do not see a cop.
CHAPTER 88
Present
SO IT WAS all you?” David settles into the chair, the metal creaking from his weight. Across from him, Simon Evans glances nervously up at Brenda.
“That’s right. But I told you, it was an accident.”
“The push out the window.”
“Well… everything.” He raises his hands, and the cuffs clink loudly, the boy jumping just from the sound. He lowers his hands to the table and she watches the tremble in his fingers. Not an essential tremor, not nerves, this was something more. Drugs. She steps forward.
“You don’t accidentally stab a person, then drag his body to a Dumpster, Simon.”
He swallows, his eyes darting away, his mouth flipping his lips in and out in an obsessive cadence. “Yeah.”
She leans on the table and stares at him. “Unless you start talking right now, we’re going to book you, take you down the hall, and lock you up in one of the cells. Whatever habit you have going on, you’re going to go through weeks and months of withdrawal. Your skin is going to crawl all night, your head is going to turn inside out from insanity, and you’ll be Big Earl’s ass bitch within hours just for a snort of some backwoods shit that will cause you to piss blood.”
His eyes flip to David, his face paling. “It’s true,” David says quietly, and he always can manage to communicate more with a calm tone than she can with screams. “It’d be in your best interest to just tell us the truth.”
Simon swallows, his eyes dropping to the table, his fingers dragging a slow set of lines across the wood. “When he fell… I didn’t know what to do. Deanna… she was just lying there, for all I knew she was dead. And he…” He lifts a hand to his mouth and chews on the edge of his finger. “He was down there and it was an accident! I was just trying to get him away from her—”
“Yes, Simon. We know that part.”
His eyes twitch up to her. “So I called Chelsea. And she came.”
“And did what?”
His shoulders rise, his fingers spreading slightly, a shrug that stretches into unease. “She fixed it. Like she always does.”
Brenda is out the door, her shoes slapping on the floor, Simon’s final statement ringing in her ears as she fumbles for her phone, dialing into dispatch, then requesting the head of crime scene. Chelsea Evans. She should have known. She should have freaking known. “She fixed it. Like she always does.”
Like she always does.
Like she always does.
Like she always does.
CHAPTER 89
Past
WHEN SIMON EVANS tackled Jeremy, it was an act of chivalry. You don’t hit a woman, especially one like her. A man who made that mistake deserved to be beaten to a pulp.
That was how it began: chivalry. Chivalry paired with 800 milligrams of oxycodone and a line of coke. The drugs pushed the chivalry into hatred, three years of animosity pushing him further further further until he was swinging at the man’s face with wild abandon, chivalry a forgotten stimulus that was already packing its bags and taking the next bus.
Poof. When the deliveryman’s fist connected with his stomach, it hurt, the breath whooshed from him, stars dotting his vision for a moment before he staggered back, his hand out, asking for a moment from the man. Remarkably, Jeremy straightened, wiping his mouth, and stopped. Rested his hands on his hips and turned his attention back to Deanna, who remained on the floor, still and silent.
They both saw the knife at the same time, Jeremy’s head turning the wrong way, then right, Deanna’s outstretched hand acting as an arrow to the blade, which had skidded over to the wall, still open. Simon lunged for the knife at the same time Jeremy stepped toward it, the reach suddenly a race, Simon’s jump over Deanna’s body awkward, his boot landing on something delicate that gave beneath his heel, his body pitching forward and once again plowing into Jeremy. Only this time he hit Jeremy’s back instead of his side. And this time Jeremy was in the act of leaning forward for the blade. And this time there wasn’t empty floor behind him, but an open window. Jeremy fell, and Simon expected a scream, but there was only silence and the occasional whistle of the night air.
He hadn’t wanted anything more, had dry heaved when Chelsea had pushed the knife into his hand. “We have to do it right,” she had instructed. And then, when he couldn’t do it, couldn’t stab the man just to make sure he was fully dead, she had taken over. Punctured his chest a half dozen times with quick and efficient strokes, then called him a pussy as they’d lifted his body, one of Jeremy’s arms around each of their shoulders, their drag across Glenvale and behind the Quik Mart fairly painless, if you ignored the fact that it was a dead body in their arms.
Simon had felt a sigh come from Jeremy, a twitch in the hand that he gripped around his neck. But he hadn’t said anything, had prayed a silent prayer that the man may live, had hesitated before his body once it was pushed into place behind the Dumpster.
His sister was right; he was a pussy. But not for the reasons she thought.
CHAPTER 90
Present
WHEN MY HOSPITAL room phone rings, I pick up.
“Hey, killer.”
I smile weakly, the nickname suddenly sour. “Hey, Mike.”
“Ready to get out?”
“Am I clear?”
“Babe…” His confident drawl makes me smile. “I got you out of Alcatraz. You think I can’t handle an overworked hospital?”
I laugh. “It wasn’t exactly Alcatraz.”
“Easy. You don’t want to offend the hand that frees you.”
“Good point. And yes, I’d love to get out of here.”
“I’m putting in discharge instructions for you now.” I can hear a chorus of keystrokes, the sound of freedom with a new ring.
“Am I heading back to jail?”
“God, they don’t tell you anything in that place, do they?”
“Meaning?” I pull at some lines leading to my cast and wonder if I can remove them.
“Simon confessed, blamed the psychotic shit on his sister, some chick named Chelsea. You know her?”
I forgot the cast and sank back against the pillow. So the police got the confession I was gunning for. I should be happy, but a part of me feels cheated. “Yeah. I know her. But I’m still in trouble, right? I mean… I did break out of Alcatraz.” And stab Simon. That pesky little detail.
He laughs. “You’re in a little bit of trouble. You’ve got to report for a hearing, and you might have a short stint in for assaulting an officer, that type of thing. But we’re talking weeks, not months. And if you hire some hotshot attorney, they can probably get most of that gone.”