3. Everett
CHAPTER 3
EVERETT
“ I do need to clean the scene, though.”
“Huh?” I stopped staring at the guy’s hand and looked back up at his face. His super-hot, semi-scruffed, kind-of-annoyed face. It was an expression I saw a lot on people when they were around me. When I was around someone I found attractive, I saw it even more than usual.
Mulligans weren’t smooth. It was the family joke—the second we saw somebody who pushed our buttons, we kind of turned into idiots. Jackasses like my brother would say that was my natural state, but excuse me, I wasn’t the one who, two minutes after meeting the person who would become my girlfriend, backed my precious classic car into a fire hydrant because I couldn’t look away from her after delivering her Door Dash. Even better, the fire hydrant was right in front of her house, so in addition to wrecking his rear bumper he did damage to city property and flooded their yard.
And Penny was still with him. Wild.
Anyway, the point was?—
“So if you want any more pictures, you’d better get them now. Or better yet, let me get them,” he went on. “But I’m not using my phone.”
“Oh, right, no,” I agreed. That was a good point. “I, um, yeah, I went and bought a disposable camera. Or, kind of? It’s the closest thing I could find.” I passed over the cheapest camera I’d been able to get my hands on at Walmart.
The guy—darn it, I needed to know his name, referring to him as “the guy” was making my head spin—stared at the hot-pink MLP3. “What the hell is this?”
“It’s a camera. For kids.”
“Why is it…”
“It’s the Pinkie Pie version of the camera,” I told him. “I wanted an Applejack but they were out, and if it’s a toss-up between Pinkie Pie and Rarity, Pinkie wins every time.”
He stared at me, his eyes really wide behind his glasses. I could see what he was thinking—I’d been there with people before. Is this guy for real? I crossed my arms. “It was twenty-five dollars,” I said defensively. “And it prints its own copies. And it’s sixteen megapixels, dude, so I don’t think I could do any better for the price, you know?”
“You…” He shook his head after a second. “Okay. No, fine, I’ll just go snap pictures of a crime scene?—”
“Not a crime scene anymore,” I reminded him.
“Of a gory, filthy, former crime scene with a camera that looks like it belongs to a five-year-old. No cognitive dissonance there,” he muttered. “Sure. Whatever. I’ll get the blood smear on the wall, and I’ll look for any other things that stand out to me as I go. As for you?—”
“I’ll wait here.” I knew I couldn’t go in with him, even now that it wasn’t a crime scene. I wasn’t trained for cleaning, and he needed to be able to focus instead of telling me what not to do.
The guy had started turning away, but he swiveled back to me fast after I spoke. “Why the hell would you want to wait here? This is going to take me hours. ”
“I mean, I’ve got my phone?” I could easily spend hours on my phone. “And I bought some food for the cat.”
“ What cat?”
“The one that lives here.”
The guy seemed a little dizzy. “Are you fucking serious? There’s an animal on-scene? That’s going to complicate so many things. The cops should have told me that, and I need to?—”
“Whoa, hey!” I held up my hands in the universal “no worries” gesture. “No, I mean, there’s a cat that lives somewhere in this trailer park. It was kind of skittish earlier, but I think it was just hungry, so I got it a bowl and some food. I’m gonna see if I can get it to come out and let me pet it some more.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Dude, you’re kind of stressy, aren’t you?”
He looked as if he wanted to relieve some stress by clocking me in the head with the Pinkie Pie camera.
“What’s your name?” I asked in an effort to distract him.
“Excuse me?”
Maybe I’d asked too fast. “What’s…your…name?”
He stared at me in silence for a long moment, and my heart fell. Maybe he didn’t want to tell me because I was making him uncomfortable. Or angry. Or?—
“Oh. I should’ve—earlier, when we—” He shook his head and laughed. “Sorry. Kyle. Kyle Bowman.”
I beamed at him. “Nice to meet you! I’m Everett.” Wait. I’d already told him that. Damn. But then his name started bouncing around in my skull. Bowman, Bowman… “Are you related to Detective Bowman? Or Officer Bowman?”
The vaguely content expression on his face vanished, replaced by something bitter. “You know them?”
“Both of them. Not well, of course. I just pick up the bodies.” I shrugged. “They don’t care to talk with me much.”
His lips twisted. “Me either.” Then he turned around and went back into the house, and…I guess that was that.
Shit. That could have gone better. On the other hand, he’d taken the camera. He’d listened to my theory about the death not being a suicide. He’d believed me, which was more than most people ever did. Plus, he had glasses.
Glasses were so stinking cute. Chalk it up to my first crush being Mr. Moore, the high school librarian, but I loved a guy in glasses. Not that I loved this guy, but—anyway.
Cat food.
“Here, kitty kitty,” I said as I went back to my car and got out the kibble. It was organic and expensive as hell, but I wasn’t going to feed this poor little guy processed pig noses. He deserved better. “Helloooo.” I poured out a bowl, then went back to the bush where the little guy had been hiding earlier. Sure, lightning didn’t strike twice in the same spot, but cats were creatures of habit. Maybe I’d get lucky. “Pspspspspsssss…”
I called out to the cat for a few minutes before one of the neighbors shouted out their window, “Will you shut the fuck up? I’m tryna sleep in here!”
It was only…nine-twenty-seven at night, but who was I to mess with someone’s sleep schedule? “Sorry,” I called back.
“Fuck off!”
Okay, so. No pspspsps. But maybe the scent of the kibble would do the trick on its own. In the meantime, I went back to my car, took out my phone, and started browsing through my tabs waiting for something to pluck a chord in my brain.
War of the Roses, echidna genitalia, the Roman empire during the time of the triumvirate, how to wash your hair in zero gravity—ooh, cool, yes. Start there.
The video I watched on washing hair in zero gravity sent me down a rabbit hole of a dozen new tabs, open to things like “best movie depictions of being in space” and “dry shampoo” and “how female astronauts deal with their menstrual cycles in zero G,” which was fascinating but also a little bit overwhelming. Dude. Just living was so hard sometimes.
I glanced over at the house where Kyle was still cleaning up from the death. Living was hard for a lot of people, and I wondered what had been too much for this poor guy— Richard Leighton , I knew because I’d had to write it on the bag, the spelling of his last name had given me some trouble. What had driven him to kill himself? Maybe his addiction? It was hard to say. He had a nice trailer…for a given value of nice, but it could have sucked way more. He had a friendly neighborhood cat. He had pictures of a pretty girl holding a baby on the wall—his baby, I assumed, even though it didn’t look like either girl nor baby lived here. He had things to live for. So why was he dead now?
Kyle would just have to help me figure that out.
Don’t be weird . I had to remind myself sometimes that “normal” was a moving target when it came to what other people thought. My family was used to me, to the point where I think they forgot I was anything other than naturally adept at annoying them, but I couldn’t even count how many group projects I’d been kicked out of in high school and college for being “too random” and “unable to focus.”
I was going to focus on this. I was! I just needed to read about echidnas first. Like, why? Why was their business shaped that way? How did that help?
A rustle in the bushes caught my attention. “Kitty kitty,” I murmured, a swell of well-being spreading out from my chest as I realized I’d done it—I’d lured the cute cat from earlier in! “Come on out…kitty kitty kitty…”
A dark shaped waddled out from under the bush and over to the bowl of cat food. For a second, I thought the cat from earlier had gotten into some kind of fight—this wasn’t the normal stride of felis catus.
But it was very normal for Procyon lotor.
“Aw, raccoon,” I muttered. “Dang it.” Not that I had any problem with feeding a raccoon if the circumstances called for it—nobody deserved to starve, after all—but if it was here, then the cat definitely wasn’t coming back. “Dude, come on.”
It stared at me balefully before scooping up a double-handful of food and waddling back into the bush on its hind feet like the hateful little food-stealer it was.
“See if I buy the good stuff for you again,” I shouted after it.
A nearby window banged again. “I thought I told you to shut the fuck up!”
“Sorry!”
Great. No kitty for me. That made me kind of sad. I should proooobably go and retrieve the bowl before the raccoon got back to it, but I was a little wary about handling it now that it had been touched. Gloves. Obviously. I reached into the box in my backseat for a pair of gloves—you never knew when you’d need them—then got out and walked back over to the bowl. I knelt down next to it and…
Huh. Was that a circle? And another circle, and the straight lines looked just like?—
It was a shoe imprint. An Air Force 1 shoe imprint.
Huh . Was that important? Like, it seemed like it should be? Except I wasn’t a crime scene tech, and surely they’d gotten a picture of it earlier. Then again, they hadn’t cordoned off the yard, only the trailer itself, so maybe not? Well, just in case they hadn’t, maybe I should…yeah, I should take a picture of it.
I should put something in for size reference. Hmm. Oh! The bowl of cat food ought to be okay.
It was a standard size, easy to measure out. I turned my flashlight function on and snapped a picture, then took another from a different angle for good measure. I looked around for more, but the ground was too disturbed. My guess was this one had survived because it was so close to the bush. What had the person wearing it been doing over here? Peeking through the window? Smoking? Smoking would be good—they might have left a cigarette butt around. I checked to be sure, but didn’t find anything.
Still. Not bad. I put my phone away and picked up the bowl, then headed back to my car, only to see?—
“Hey!” There were three raccoons— three —in my backseat chowing down on the open bag of cat food. “Dudes! Quit it!” I ran toward the car and they booked it, knocking the bag over and spreading kibble all across the footwells. I stared at the mess and imagined those little assholes snickering to themselves as they ran off. Freaking hoodlums. And I still hadn’t seen the cat.
“Are you okay?”
I spun around to see Kyle coming out of the house. He chucked his Tyvek suit and pulled off his respirator over by his truck, but his eyes were on me.
Probably because I was staring at my car like it had personally disappointed me. “Yeah,” I said as casually as I could. “Just a kibble issue, no worries.”
“A…sorry, a kibble issue?”
“Fucking raccoons,” I muttered. “But I’m fine.”
“In a fight between you and raccoons, I’d certainly hope you were fine.”
I laughed. “You’d think so, right?” But raccoons were tricky little shits. With over sixty percent of their cerebral cortexes dedicated to touch, I wouldn’t put it past them to be able to open a locked door or…
My brain gradually pulled me back on track. “Are you done?”
“I’m done,” he confirmed. “I just need to load up the trash bags and I’m good to go.”
“Can I help with that part?”
He rolled his eyes. “If you really want to. I don’t know why you would, but?—”
“So you don’t have to do it all by yourself.”
Kyle’s jaw tightened. “I can handle it.”
“Um…of course?” He wouldn’t have the job if he couldn’t do it by himself, but… “I’m here, though, so I might as well help out. Then we can get some food!” I was starving.
“It’s one a.m.,” Kyle pointed out. “Where are we going to get decent food at this time of night?”
I beamed at him. “Oh, dude, I know just the spot.”