Chapter 2
“Jesus Christ, dumbshit,” Jem said as he returned the barrette to his pocket. The bones in his hand already ached from the cold. He shouldered the bag again. “You scared the hell out of me.”
“Sorry about that.” The detective gave a half-hearted shrug. “I needed to talk to you.”
“Ever heard of a fucking phone?”
Ammon’s half-smile caught the light. “Would you have answered?”
Jem didn’t respond. The wind picked up. A Burger King wrapper skittered across the asphalt, and it sounded like dead leaves.
The tips of his ears stung, and the tip of his nose stung, and he was pretty sure he was starting to get snotty.
Finally, he said, “What about Daniel? Someone’s following him? ”
“I don’t know.” Ammon pulled at his coat. “Yes. I think so.”
It had been a long shift. It had been long and loud.
It was always loud in BoomTawk. A million people in a million cubicles, everyone trying to have a conversation, phones ringing and supervisors shouting shit you already knew across the fabric partitions, and that goddamn headset plugged into your ear with people yelling and eating and turning up the TV and more often than not, for some fucking reason, taking a shit, and on top of all that, the white noise machines in the ceiling, like this fucking invisible blanket pressing down on you until sometimes you felt like you couldn’t breathe, until sometimes, near the end of the shift, you had this feeling of pressure high in your nose, and your breaths tasted like pennies.
So, Jem took a deep breath and said, “You’ve got five seconds.”
“There’s two of them,” Ammon said. “A man and a woman. Different vehicles. The man drives an old pickup. The woman drives an SUV. Daniel thinks it’s green, but it was dark, so it could be something else.”
Walk away. Tell him to go find the biggest stick he can and fuck himself with it.
But a couple of months before, Jem and Tean had helped Daniel. Had saved him from a pack of lunatics wearing Halloween wolf masks. Men and women who had never been caught.
The goosebumps that ran up Jem’s arms and across his chest had nothing to do with the cold.
“You believe him?” Jem asked.
Which wasn’t a dig at Daniel; the boy was a hell of a lot more competent than most kids his age, and he’d gotten the drop on Jem and Tean not once but twice.
But Daniel had been through a lot. By the end, when Jem and Tean had pulled Daniel out of a dog crate in a dead man’s basement, the boy had been seriously traumatized.
Who wouldn’t be a little jumpy after that?
“I’ve seen the man,” Ammon said.
“What’s he look like?”
“White. Maybe six feet tall. He’s got a scar.” Ammon drew a hand along his cheekbone.
Jem rubbed one eye. “Fuck.”
“Is he one of them?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” He shook his head. “Yes.”
“Fuck,” Ammon said.
“What happened? Where was he?”
“We—we’ve been taking Daniel to this place. Rainbow House. It’s for LGBTQ kids.” A strange note of defensiveness entered Ammon’s voice. “It’s supposed to be a safe space.”
“Oh yeah? They’re not going to magically turn him straight for you?”
Ammon said quietly, “No.”
For a moment, Jem wanted to lean into it. Get nasty. Twist the knife. He made himself say, “And?”
“It’s in an old house. They get the run of it, and there are a couple of volunteers who supervise, but it’s mostly a space for them to—”
“Be safe,” Jem said dryly.
“Have fun. Enjoy being with other kids.”
“Sounds magical. I bet it makes up for all the years you told him he was fucked up and evil and all that other shit.”
Okay, so maybe he was going to twist the knife a little.
The muscles in Ammon’s jaw tightened. “I’m doing the best I can.”
“Fuck off with that noise.”
“Jem, I’m trying really hard here because I need your help.”
“I could have killed you, just so you know. Tonight. Earlier. But I didn’t.”
“God, you fucking psycho,” Ammon muttered, and he huddled deeper into his coat. “Never mind.”
“Quit being such a drama queen. What happened at the house?”
Ammon blew out a streamer of white breath.
Finally, he said, “One of the volunteers called me. A little more than a week ago. Daniel was freaking out—he’d locked himself in the bathroom; he was sobbing.
They were afraid he was trying to hurt himself.
When I finally got him calmed down, he told me he’d seen one of the wolves.
That’s how he said it, one of the wolves. ”
The hum of the highway filled the silence.
“I wasn’t sure what he really saw, but he wouldn’t go back unless I promised to wait in the car while he was inside. We had an appointment with his therapist for the next week. I was going to ask if this was normal.” He stopped. The muscles in his jaw tightened again. “Like a flashback.”
“But it wasn’t a flashback.”
“The next time Daniel went to Rainbow House, I sat on the street. This piece-of-shit Ford drove around the block twice. You don’t know how it is, but if you do the job long enough, sometimes you—sometimes you just know something’s wrong. It’s hard to explain—”
“I know,” Jem said.
Ammon considered him. “Maybe you do. After the second time, it didn’t come back, but I couldn’t shake the feeling. I got out of the car and decided to walk around the house, just to see. It’s on a main street, so it wasn’t necessarily weird that somebody might drive by it twice, but…”
“But you knew it felt fucked up.”
Ammon hesitated. Then he nodded. “I was coming around the house when I saw him—the guy with the scar. He was trying one of the windows to see if he could get it open.” Ammon’s face twisted. “I said, ‘Stop! Police!’ And he ran.”
“Fuck.”
The detective ran the backs of his knuckles along his cheek, and the stubble there made a soft rasping sound.
When he spoke, it was almost like he was talking to himself.
“I shouldn’t have said anything. I should have walked over there and kicked the back of his head in.
” He stirred. His gaze refocused. “I called it in, but the truck didn’t have plates, so all the officers could do was come over and look around and tell me it was probably a crime of opportunity, nothing to worry about, they’d have patrol swing by for the next few days. ” He shook his head. Then he spat.
“Big help.”
Ammon didn’t take the bait. “I didn’t say anything to Daniel because I didn’t want to freak him out, but as soon as he got in the car, he asked me if I’d seen the woman. I asked him what woman, and he said the one who’d been watching from across the street.”
“You did a bang-up job on that surveillance, didn’t you?”
“Fuck you. I had my hands full.” Ammon took a breath. “White. Blond. To somebody Daniel’s age, everybody is old, but he thought maybe she was his mom’s age. In her forties.”
“I don’t know,” Jem said. “There was a woman in that group, and she might have been the right age, but she wasn’t blond.”
“It’s not hard to change your hair color,” Ammon said.
Jem shrugged, but he said, “He saw her car?”
“He said she was in a green SUV. Like I said, it was dark.”
One moment turned into another. Security lights buzzed overhead.
“So, what do you want?” Jem asked.
“I wanted to know if you recognized those descriptions.”
“All right.”
The buzz of the security lights seemed louder.
Struggle tightened Ammon’s voice. “And I wanted to know if you would help me.”
“What was that?”
It took several seconds. “I need your help.”
“In the form of a question, buddy. Jeez, haven’t you ever had to do this before?”
Ammon took in a sharp breath, but his voice was buckled down when he said, “Will you please help me keep my son, who never did anything to you, safe from these lunatics?”
Tell him no, he told himself. Tell him to fuck off.
But he opened his mouth, and he said, “Yeah.” He wanted to reach up and wipe his eyes, but he wasn’t sure why. He forced his voice to be light. “Sure, Ammon. All you had to do was ask.”
His mouth thinned into a line, and he looked away. But he said, “Thank—”
“But just me.”
Ammon cut his eyes back.
“No Tean,” Jem said. “No phone calls. No showing up at our house. No accidental run-ins. He’s worked really hard to get you the fuck out of his life. You’re not going to snake your way back in now.”
Jem waited for the explosion. It didn’t come.
Instead, Ammon watched him, nodding slightly—the movement so rhythmic that it almost seemed like he was bobbling, like it was a tic more than a voluntary movement.
The wind ran through his thinning blond hair and pulled it to the side. He said, “No Tean.”
There should have been more.
Jem was ready. The arguments. The insistence. The pleasure of shit-stomping whatever Ammon threw out there.
Instead, Ammon buried his hands in his pockets. “I’m taking Daniel to Rainbow House tomorrow,” he said. Then he glanced up at the low clouds. “Unless we get dumped on.”
“I’ve got a family dinner,” Jem said. “But next time.”
Ammon nodded. “Thank you.”
He turned and started away, and Jem watched him. Then Jem called after him, “It won’t work.”
Ammon looked back, but he didn’t stop walking.
“Whatever you think you’re going to do. However you think this is going to fix things. It won’t work.”
It was hard to tell in the dark. But Jem thought Ammon smiled. Only a hint of it. Just around his eyes.
Jem waited until the other man faded out of the harsh white glare of the security lights. Then he made his way to the Subaru. He sat for a while, the car warming up, hands balled into fists in his pockets.
I fucked up. That was a fuck-up. Somehow, I fucked up.
He made himself buckle his seatbelt. He shifted into drive and eased out of the lot. BoomTawk shrank behind him until it disappeared.
Jem was still trying to work his way through the conversation, trying to find what he’d done wrong, where he’d made a mistake, when he noticed a pair of headlights turn out after him.
And at the next turn, they followed again.