Something was moving in the hallway, just beyond the faint rectangle of light spilling through the open office door. My breath caught in my throat, then came out in a little whimper as the cat appeared, padding silently out of the dark and across the floor toward me.
“Adrienne?” Kurt Geller’s voice was sharp. “We should end this call now.”
The cat hopped into my lap, purring, and stretched up to rub his face against my chin. I drew another breath. Slow, steady, even.
I wasn’t going anywhere.
“I understand.”
I don’t know how long I sat there, petting the purring cat, listening for the sound of sirens or pounding on the door. I was on my own tonight, but I would meet Kurt Geller tomorrow, and I wondered how much contact he’d had with Adrienne, how long it had been since he’d seen her. If he knew her well enough to notice that something seemed off. I tried to imagine what she would say. You’d seem different, too, if you’d just been attacked by a maniac in the middle of the night.
Eventually, I stood, clutching the cat in my arms, and walked back to the office. I stood in the doorway, in the same spot Dwayne had been in the moments before I shot him. The last thing he ever said, the last word that passed his lips, was my name.
I tried not to think about that, either.
I told you I never wanted to kill Adrienne, that I never thought about it even once, and that was true. But I promised to be honest, and honestly, I thought about Dwayne dying. I did. I thought about it all the time. There was the time I imagined pinching his nose shut and letting his drugged-out sleep turn into something more permanent, but it didn’t stop there. His death was a constant what-if thrumming away in the back of my mind. It didn’t have to be that I killed him myself. Sometimes, I imagined standing on our doorstep while a police officer approached with his jaw set and his hat in his hand, the surest sign of bad news. I thought about hunting accidents. Overdoses. A brake failure on the same icy stretch where my mother spun out and crashed. I imagined myself putting a hand on the doorjamb to steady myself, as the officer asked if there was someone I could call. You shouldn’t be alone at a time like this, he’d say, because that’s what they always say.
Nobody ever stops to think that “alone” can also mean “free.”
And free was what I felt. All those years I had drifted along with Dwayne, the two of us clinging to our shitty life like it was the only thing to stop us from drowning. There was nothing left to cling to now. I was unanchored, already moving much faster than I ever had before, carried away by an unseen current. Alone, but afloat.
Free.
Downstairs, someone began pounding on the door. There were shouts—“Police!”—and the cat startled, leaping out of my arms and darting away, disappearing into the darkness of the house. I turned.
“I’m here!” I shouted. “I’m coming out.”
I’ve never been a sentimental person. I felt no desire to pause for last looks, or plant a kiss on his cooling temple. I would leave him behind the way I’d left everything else: without saying goodbye. I was grateful that he’d died facedown, so that his eyes wouldn’t follow me when I left. So that I wouldn’t have to see the permanent surprise etched on his face. Except for the awkward slump of his body against the floor, he could have been asleep. There was hardly any blood at all.
That’s what happens when you hit your target in the heart.
Chapter 23
Bird
Bird had gotten back on the road just shy of eleven o’clock, and just in time to hear the Sox nearly blow a four-to-one lead in the ninth inning. He white-knuckled the steering wheel, the lights of the city fading behind him, the smooth, dark highway opening up ahead. In New York, a sold-out crowd roared their approval as the Yankees closed in.
He was only a few miles up the interstate when Kimbrel, who was supposed to close, for fuck’s sake, clocked a batter with the bases loaded and forced in a run. He wondered if the Sox would somehow manage to lose in spite of themselves, clutching defeat from the jaws of victory—and when the Yanks scored again, bringing the lead to a single run, he allowed himself to briefly consider that a loss might be some sort of bad omen. Not just for the Sox, but for him, personally. Speeding back to Copper Falls with his tail between his legs, cursing the waste of time that the long drive to Boston had been. Adrienne Richards: a promising lead–turned–wild-goose chase in the span of a single text message.
Bird grimaced. He should have known. The fire at the junkyard was just too weird to be a coincidence, and yet he’d almost come around to accepting that a weird coincidence was all it was. Junkyards burned down all the time, after all. It was just his luck that Earl Ouellette, surveilling the wreckage with a flashlight in hand, had spotted Dwayne Cleaves’s truck partially buried by a pile of scrap. The truck was a burned-out husk, practically unrecognizable unless you knew, as Earl did, that he’d never had a pickup parked in that particular part of the yard. The driver’s-side door had fallen open, and the high-pressure blast of the fire hoses had washed out what was in the cab, including a piece of the charred body that had been perched inside. When Earl walked up to investigate, something crunched in the ashes under his feet; he told the police he thought it was glass, only all the glass had melted, and when he turned the flashlight toward the sound, he found himself standing on the snapped pieces of a human femur.