21. Everett
CHAPTER 21
EVERETT
T here was an argument going on in the car. Which, to be fair, seemed to be the way Kyle’s family rolled, so it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Compared to my own family, which tended to ignore problems until they blew up into something completely unavoidable and dramatic, it was maybe the better method. But listening to it still felt a bit like eavesdropping, even though Kyle and I were a…huh. What were we now?
“—because you won’t have space for it all! What part of pet sitter don’t you understand?”
“You didn’t say we couldn’t bring the cats, so we’re bringing them.”
“Did you have to bring a trunk’s worth of shit along for them too?”
“It’s a litter box and some litter, what?”
“It’s two litter boxes and?—”
“Well yeah, I’ve got two cats. They can’t?—”
I stared at my index finger, which still stung from Steve’s goodbye nibble. Kyle had covered the bite with a Star Wars Band-Aid. I didn’t even know they made Clone Wars -era Band-Aids anymore; it was pretty sweet.
A fluffy orange paw extended out of the cat carrier on my left and swatted at my hand. “Aw, Jeff.” I reached inside with a fingertip and was pleasantly surprised when he rubbed his big furry head against my skin instead of biting it.
Jeff: 1, Steve: 0.
“I know you don’t like it, buddy.” Everyone in the car knew, given how Jeff had spent the first half an hour of the drive caterwauling—pun intended. Kyle had said it was normal for Jeff in cars, but I still felt bad for him. Patches, on the other hand, had curled into a ball and fallen fast asleep.
I kind of wished she was awake too. Then I’d have something else to distract me from the argument and my own thoughts.
By now my family had been told I was gone. I had no idea what that was going to mean to them. Would Leanne feel guilty because she’d told Theo so much? Would she feel justified? Would my brother wonder if I was okay? Would he invite Penny over because for once he wouldn’t feel weird about them being really loud in his room with me right next door? And my dad…I didn’t have to think too hard about his reaction, at least. He’d be shaken, and mad, and inevitably disappointed in me for getting involved in something he thought I had no business being a part of. That was just how he thought when it came to me.
Jeff batted my finger again. “I know, buddy, I know.” I winced a little as one of his claws found purchase in the top of the bandage and ripped it slightly. “More paw, less claw, dude. I don’t have another of these.”
A second later we turned off the interstate. We were two towns away from ours, far enough that I didn’t know the streets very well, but Colin seemed to know where he was going as he turned into the first trailer park we saw. He confidently drove down the streets, and he finally stopped in front of a blue single wide that looked like it had seen better decades.
I shivered. The last trailer I’d been in had led to a complete overhaul of my entire life thanks to Ricky’s murder. The grim part of me wondered whether I was in for something similar, but the optimist in me told the other part to shut up and put on a smile as I got out of the car.
At least I wasn’t alone. Kyle was with me. We were together, which maybe wasn’t the best thing ever since I didn’t wish any kind of harm on him and this was a decidedly harmful situation, but I was so grateful not to be alone.
“Here’s your home away from home for the next few days until we get the situation under control,” Colin said as he opened the front door of the trailer. It was very compact inside—a combo kitchen and living room, then a tiny hall leading to the bathroom and…main bedroom, I guess. Did trailers have main bedrooms? This one had two, and the one at the far end was a lot smaller than the one I put Jeff’s carrier down in, so main bedroom was as good a term as any.
“There’s no internet and no phone,” Colin said, “but you can connect via the burners I brought you.” With a stern look at me, he added, “ No calls , though.”
“I won’t!” I held up my hands in mock surrender.
“You say that.”
“This wasn’t my fault.” It felt like my fault, but saying that would be taking agency away from my sister, who was perfectly capable of screwing things up without assistance from me.
“Colin, leave him alone.” Kyle pressed a comforting hand between my shoulder blades as he set Patches’s carrier down alongside Jeff’s, and I leaned into the touch. “No outside communication, we understand. And you’re sure no one else knows where we are?”
“Other than Dad?” Colin shook his head. “This is an old safehouse he set up personally for a case two years ago. He handed it over to the Marshals; it’s off the books entirely as far as the department is concerned. You’re going to be fine here.”
Fine. Great. Fantastic. But because I’d watched way too many horror movies as a teenager, I immediately began searching for the backdoor. Which…didn’t exist. And the window appeared to be painted shut.
“Just in case, though…”
I turned back, hoping to hear about a secret crawl space. Instead, I watched as Colin handed over a gun…then another gun…then another gun, laying them out on the dusty bedspread like a seriously off-brand Vanna White. “Why?” was all I was able to ask.
Kyle and Colin both looked at me with surprise. “Why what?” Kyle asked.
“Why three guns? ” I demanded. “One’s got to be enough, right?” I knew Kyle had packed his, so this many more weapons had to be overkill.
Ugh, maybe literally.
“Better to have them and not need them,” Colin said. “Besides, there’s only one magazine apiece, so it’s not like you’ll get more than thirty-six shots out of them anyway.”
“Why would we need to shoot a gun so many times? Do you know how many accidental shootings happen in homes? We don’t even have a gun safe here.”
“Given that there are no kids here either, I think it’ll be okay,” Kyle said.
He was probably going for comforting. It wasn’t working. “What if Jeff steps on one?” If there was ever a cat that might accidentally shoot himself, it was Jeff.
“Jeff won’t step on a gun.”
“What if he does, though?”
“Oh my God,” Colin muttered. “Kyle, I’ve got to get back to work. Can you handle your boyfriend’s panic attack?”
I am not having a panic attack. Except maybe I kind of was, in an understated way. I thought I’d taken most of the shit Colin had revealed to us in stride, but possibly I was a little more concerned for my family than I was letting on. Possibly my sister wasn’t going to take this well at all; possibly my brother was going to go quiet the way he did when he got really upset; possibly my dad was going to flip his shit and start shouting at people and redirect the attention that should be focused on me, his cop-defying son, back on him and the rest of my family. Maybe they were going to lose the business, and I might not even know because I’d never see them again, and Leanne would never forgive Theo and they wouldn’t get back together after all and?—
“Whoa, Everett, it’s okay.” Kyle knelt down in front of me, and since when had I sat on the bed? Next to the guns , ugh, I didn’t want to be next to the guns, fuck. I slid down onto the floor so I was right beside Kyle, who pulled me into a hug that was awkward as hell from this angle, but also felt like the best thing in the world at the moment. “Sorry, I’m sorry, I know it’s a lot. I’ll put the guns away, okay? I didn’t know they bothered you so much.”
“They don’t.” I mean, they did, but not like that. It was… “It’s not the guns.” It really wasn’t, although I really did think they were too much. It was what they represented. It was all the ways in which our lives had gotten fucked up, all because of asking a few questions. I’d never thought things would get this far out of control, never. “I’m sorry.”
Kyle didn’t ask why. He didn’t have to. He just tilted my face up and gave me a kiss, then kept holding me until my breathing had gone back to normal and I was able to relax enough to straighten my legs out instead of holding them in close to my body like a pair of oversized springs. “It’s going to be okay.”
I believed him. I had to. “Yeah.”
Jeff meowed, loud and plaintive, and the last of my tension splintered and sank back into my spine.
Kyle pushed his glasses up his nose with a sigh. “Let’s get their stuff set up, then we can let them explore.”
“Okay.” Their litter boxes went in the tiny laundry room—at least, I assumed it was a laundry room from the linoleum flooring, but there was no washer or dryer in there, just an ancient hot water heater. Once freed, that was where both cats darted first.
As for us…
Kyle stowed the guns while I unpacked the bags of food Colin had brought along with him. The groceries were very box and can heavy, including several boxes of Hamburger Helper with no hamburger. I checked the cans, and—ah, tuna. Close enough. It felt almost like being a college student, or so I assumed.
We didn’t have a television, and the phones were sort of shitty, so once the cats settled and we’d had something for dinner, we passed some time staring out the windows and making up stories about the trailers on either side of us. “That guy,” I said confidently as I watched a heavyset man walk down the steps to his trailer and over to his car, “is definitely an axe murderer.”
“Huh.” Kyle looked him over as he stroked a calming hand across Patches’s back. “Why do you say that?”
“Are you kidding me? Look at the front yard!” It was the sort of lawn you saw in Florida. At least, I assumed that hot pink plastic flamingoes were more popular for decorating with in Florida than they were here, this trailer notwithstanding. Plus there were gnomes, including several who weren’t wearing pants, as well as a windmill farm’s worth of metallic pinwheels in various fanciful shapes, from fairies to hummingbirds. “That’s not the front yard of a guy in his fifties with a drinking problem.”
Kyle smiled at me. “How do you know he’s got a drinking problem?”
“Rhinophyma.” The huge blood vessels giving his nose and cheeks a reddish cast was a dead giveaway.
“He might just have rosacea.”
“He has a neon Coors Light sign in his front window.”
“Point,” Kyle agreed. “But that doesn’t mean he’s an axe murderer. Most alcoholics aren’t.”
“That whole setup screams ‘little old lady,’ which he definitely isn’t. And there’s an axe on the front porch.” It was missing half of its shaft, but you could still cut a bitch with that.
“Too obvious for a murder weapon, though. Nah. I think he’s a middle-aged guy who drinks because he lives with his mother and can’t stand it but doesn’t have anywhere else to go.”
I was going to object to the sheer boringness of this idea when a tiny old woman with bright red hair and gimlet eyes hobbled through the front door and shouted at the man, who’d just started the old Buick in the driveway. “What’s she waving around?” I asked, unable to make out the object in her hand.
“Um, nail clippers, I think.” We both watched in silence as she berated her son—yeah, this was definitely her son—as he drove away, flinging the middle finger at the car before it vanished around the corner.
“Never mind. She’s probably the axe murderer.”
“Maybe. That’s a shitty way to kill someone, though.”
I grinned at him. “You know this how?”
“I once cleaned up a scene where someone accidentally got themselves in the leg with an ax while they were cutting firewood. It was—” He paused and looked at me sheepishly. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”
Did the sun rise in the east? “Tell me everything.” I might be bothered by guns, but I wasn’t squeamish .
It was so easy to be with Kyle and the cats, I managed to forget for a while that we were hiding away from the world and not on vacation. Getting ready for bed made things strange again, but curling up next to Kyle in bed, even if it had a terrible mattress and smelled musty, was soothing in a way I could hardly ever remember feeling.
I was on the verge of falling asleep when the sudden, sharp beep of a horn startled me back to fully awake. Why was someone honking their horn in a trailer park this late at night? Not just once, either. That was the prolonged honk of the very angry or very drunk, and it only cut off to be replaced by someone shouting indignantly.
“Mm, stay,” Kyle said muzzily as I slid off the bed.
“I’ll be right back,” I assured him. I needed a glass of water; I could grab it and satisfy my curiosity at the same time. I walked into the kitchen and felt around for the light switch, but didn’t find it. Whatever, I’d drink straight from the tap. I glanced out the window first, unsurprised by the sight of our drunk/axe-murdering neighbor pulled to a stop between our trailers, shouting at a broad-shouldered, vaguely familiar silhouette who held something up to the guy’s window.
The noise cut off, and so did my breathing.
He was displaying a badge. That was a cop.
What was a cop doing here? Had he followed the drunk in after catching him driving like a, well, a drunk idiot on the road? Was he going to arrest him? Ticket him, at least? Or was he going to…
Turn toward our trailer and…
Walk up to the door and…
I darted back into the bedroom as quietly as I could. “Kyle,” I whispered frantically. “Someone’s here.”
Kyle was instantly upright. “Who?”
“I don’t know. It’s a cop, I think, but I haven’t gotten any texts, have you?”
He checked his phone. “No. Not for a few hours. No one’s supposed to be here. Should we?—”
There was the faint rattle of someone trying the front door, which we’d locked. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit?—
“Quiet,” Kyle hissed, and I realized I’d been saying those parts out loud. “We need to get the cats and go! Now!”
“Go how? There’s no back door!”
“The window in the bathroom opens.”
The window in the bathroom…the half-sized, tiny-ass window in the bathroom that looked like it would maybe fit a cat carrier through it, much less an adult? I didn’t have a better idea, though.
Gumbifying myself out a window it is.
We were lucky that whoever this was had decided on stealth. It kept them cautious, which meant we were able to put our shoes on and get the cats into their carriers before the banging started to get loud. Then Jeff began to yowl, the indignity of being back in the carrier and the noise on top of that too much for his feline pride to handle.
“You go first,” Kyle said, pushing me toward the bathroom. The window was intimidatingly tiny. “Go! I’ll pass the cats to you!”
“Kyle Bowman? Everett Mulligan?” Holy crap—that was Reardon . “Open up!”
Not happening. I climbed on top of the toilet, slid one foot through the window, then the other, until I was in an awkward sitting position. My hips went through okay, but my shoulders got caught.
“Arms up,” Kyle whispered loudly at me. “Streamline your body!”
I am streamlining my body , I wanted to shout, but that would be extra dumb. It was already going to be the stupidest thing ever if Detective Reardon got tired of shouting at the front door, came around to the back, saw me like this, and decided to shoot me. The person who had to clean up that crime scene…
Fuck that.
I lost both skin and dignity squirming through the opening, but I landed pretty quietly. A second later, the first carrier came through. I lowered Patches to the ground and waited for Jeff, but?—
Crash went the front door, followed by a hideous staccato noise.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Oh my God, that was coming from just inside. That was Kyle shooting. A second later he passed not a cat carrier, but a gun down to me.
“I don’t want this!” I said to Kyle’s pale, set face.
“Take it anyway!” Kyle snarled. He vanished as shots rang out from the front of the house. One tore through the wall not two feet above me.
Detective Reardon was trying to kill us.
I took Jeff’s carrier in a daze, then waited for Kyle. “Come on!”
“Take the cats and go!”
Oh, fuck that. I wasn’t leaving him to be the next man murdered by a killer cop. Besides, where would I go? We didn’t even have a car…
Except maybe we did.
I could hear an engine still running. I backed up to look and saw that Reardon had come in a patrol car, and that patrol car was, in fact, on right now. Evidently he’d come primed for a quick getaway.
“Get out here now,” I said, then picked up the carriers and ran for the car. The cop car. Oh my God, I was about to hijack a cop car. Did it count as hijacking if there was no one in it at the time? Was that simple theft?
A flurry of gunfire went off behind me, and my heart leapt into my throat as I jerked around toward the trailer, but there was no one at the front door. Reardon had gone inside. Inside, where Kyle was. Fuck! I put the cats into the back as fast as I could, then deliberated going in after him. The odds of getting through the next minute without being shot weren’t great, and getting worse all the time, but I couldn’t leave Kyle in there alone with that psycho.
My breath whooshed out of me in a gasp as Kyle came booking around the corner of the trailer, gun in hand, glasses askew, looking like a superhero who’d been caught in alter-ego form.
“Come on!” I yelled, and he skidded into the car a second later like he was on skates.
I got into the driver’s seat and backed us down the drive and onto the road in front of the trailer right as Detective Reardon scrambled out of the trailer. He raised his gun and fired at us, splintering the windshield. I ducked, afraid and furious and why did my lap hurt, and—oh right, I had a gun on my lap.
I couldn’t point it at a person—I just couldn’t—but I could use it as a distraction. I aimed for the drunk’s car, pulled the trigger, fought against the kickback of the tiny explosions happening in the barrel as the bullets sped away, and then…
The other car caught on fire.
Then it blew up.
Blew. The fuck. Up.
“Cars don’t do that!” I shouted, feeling a little betrayed. “They tested it on Mythbusters !”
“Just drive!” Kyle screamed, and oh right.
I slammed my foot down on the gas pedal, and we took off into the night.