Chapter 6
At Little Dick’s the next day, the morning was quiet.
Jem did what he usually did—pretended to work at his cubicle while he played on his phone.
Tried to play on his phone. He felt like he was moving through a haze, and sometimes, when he turned his head too quickly, the room tilted for a fraction of a second.
It didn’t help that the place was such a mindfuck.
The dealership showroom was a huge, high-ceilinged room with walls of windows and vinyl-tile flooring.
Everything echoed—every movement, every word, every squeak of a sneaker.
And the HVAC system was loud too, filling the space with white noise so that everyone ended up trying to make themselves heard over it, and it felt like they were always shouting.
The cubicles, with their nubby beige fabric walls, provided no privacy and even less of an escape.
Brian, who worked in the cubicle next to Jem’s, liked to stand, which let him see over the wall, and start up a conversation with Jem, like Jem wasn’t trying to watch YouTube or play PUBG or zone the fuck out and pretend he was literally anywhere else.
But Brian wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was Little Dick.
Little Dick, as far as Jem could tell, liked two things: money, and getting his ass sucked.
The money he got from padding payment plans and adding bullshit services like pinstriping and making his sales team pass the costs on to the customers—which, for the most part, Jem didn’t mind, except that the money was going to Little Dick.
The ass-sucking, though—well, Little Dick wanted that from his team.
“You should have seen this chick,” Little Dick was saying in the next cubicle. “Tits out to here. I swear to God. Tits out to here.”
Brian laughed. “No way. No way.”
“For real. And she kept looking at me, and I knew what she wanted, but I wasn’t sure, you know? Because she was like a four or a five and kind of fat.”
“Easy meat, man,” Brian said, laughing again. Brian was always laughing. “You’re a killer. You clean up out there.”
Little Dick’s little dick probably got hard as steel at that.
So much for zoning out. Before he could think about what he was doing, Jem grabbed his phone and did a quick search for body found in Uinta.
Except he’d never seen Uinta spelled before, and spelling was such a bitch—seriously, why didn’t English make any sense?
—and it took him four bad searches before Google figured out what he was trying to ask.
And how was he supposed to know that Uinta sometimes had an H at the end and sometimes didn’t?
The article was a stub from the Salt Lake Tribune, and the headline pretty much said it all: someone had found a body in a mesa cave in the Uinta Basin, and it had been identified as Brennon Lee of South Jordan, Utah.
But there were two things that made Jem pause.
First, the article said Brennon had bruising on his neck.
And second, it said a UFOlogist had found the body.
That was a new word, and once he looked it up, he felt dumb for not being able to figure it out on his own.
Jem dropped the phone in his lap. The problem was Ammon. So long as Ammon was caught up in this, Tean was caught up in it. And if Tean was caught up in it, then Jem was caught up in it.
He tried Ammon Young arrest—how was he supposed to know Ammon had two Ms?
A single article popped up from a few years ago about Ammon arresting someone, but nothing recent. Which was too bad. Because maybe, if there’d been an article, there would have been a mugshot too.
“Dumb as a sack of rocks, too,” Little Dick was saying. “I asked her if she wanted a Chevy in her garage, and she said her dad told her to always buy Hondas. Like, I wasn’t talking about a Chevy, you stupid bitch.”
Brian guffawed—that had been on Jem’s word-of-the-day calendar.
Maybe they hadn’t arrested Ammon. Maybe he hadn’t confessed. Maybe Tean had misunderstood. Or Lucy hadn’t known what she was talking about. Maybe.
Jem squirmed in his chair, trying to find a more comfortable position.
The confession, that was what bothered him.
Not the murder. It didn’t matter what Tean thought; Ammon was more than capable of doing some seriously violent shit.
Maybe not cold-blooded murder, but if what Tean had read in the search warrant was true—if some grown-ass man had been diddling Ammon’s son—yeah, it was possible Ammon could have killed the guy.
A fight that turned into something more than a fight.
And Ammon might have been nothing more than a skinsuit full of shit, but he was a cop, and he was big and strong and knew how to handle himself, and if he started something with some white-bread kiddie-diddler, he’d be the one to finish it.
But.
But Ammon was a cop. And if he’d killed someone, even by accident, in a fit of rage, he would have known, once he cooled down, what he needed to do. Get rid of the body. Destroy any evidence. And then play it cool.
Maybe he’d tried. Maybe ditching the body in that cave had been his best plan, and maybe it had been plain old bad luck that someone had found it.
But if that was the case, then why had Ammon confessed? Why not deny everything and wait to see if they could put a case together? Hell, the warrant’s probable cause had sounded pretty thin.
“Oh yeah, I fucked her,” Little Dick said. “She was all right. You know chicks like that. They go crazy once they get a dick in them.”
“Damn, man,” Brian said. “I get it. Sometimes you just need to nut.”
Brian had minoxidil hair and wore a white shirt and black trousers every day like a fucking mortician.
Brian had six kids, all girls, and a wife who picked him up from work every day by pulling up at the service entrance and laying on the horn.
The last time Brian had nutted, it had probably been his birthday.
Little Dick poked his head over the cubicle. “Is that a thing with gay guys too? Like, you just need an easy fuck, so even if he’s a fatty, you know?”
A soft chime, barely audible over the air conditioning and the magnified echoes of dozens of tiny sounds, signaled that someone had come through the front door. Jem stood and saw an old man in a saggy sweater. He was looking around, blinking, like he was lost.
“Nope,” Jem said.
“Fuck off,” Little Dick said with a laugh. “You guys will pound anything that moves.”
“I meant, nope, I’m not talking to you about this,” Jem said as he moved out of the cubicle. “I’m going to go sell a car.”
The old man had his phone in his hand, and he was peering at it as he tapped the screen with a trembling hand.
“Good morning,” Jem said, plastering on his best smile. “How can I help you?”
The old man turned, bringing into view a bandage on the side of his head that hadn’t been visible before. “Oh. Hello. Yes, I’m looking for—” He fumbled with the phone again, squinted at the screen, and held it up. “I’m looking for this one.”
It was an Impala—three years old, under thirty thousand miles, and priced a couple thousand below Blue Book. It was a great deal. The perfect affordable sedan. It brought people through the door every day. It was also complete bullshit.
Okay, maybe not complete bullshit, because there was, technically, a car on the lot with that VIN, and yes, it was even an Impala. But that car had close to ninety thousand miles on it, and it was missing a side mirror and the rear bumper. That car was always in the shop.
But Jem had to say, “Let’s see if we can track that one down,” and then he pulled up on his phone and died twice before he made a disappointed sound and said, “I’m so sorry, that car is in our shop right now. But I can show you a few others—something similar, maybe?”
The old man’s bleary eyes didn’t seem entirely focused. “Hmm?”
“It’s in the shop,” Jem said more loudly. “Let me show you what else we have.”
Nodding, the old man said, “I was in an accident. Young guy. On his phone.” He touched the bandage. “They said they couldn’t even use my car for scrap, that’s how bad it was. Nobody’s ever told me that.”
Jem whistled. “Hey, anything you can walk away from, though—right?”
The old man nodded and blinked as he fingered the bandage again.
Instead of looking at a car in the same price range as the bait, Jem steered the old man toward one that was almost twice as much.
When the man—Walter—fretted about the price, Jem talked about insurance checks, payment plans, the magical word affordability.
Just to tilt the scales, Jem showed him two junkers that looked like they’d fall off their wheels before they made it out of the lot—these two around the same price as the magical bait car that would never, ever reappear.
The worst part was how easy it was. Walter wasn’t happy, but he didn’t make it hard, either.
He talked a lot, and Jem listened and nodded and answered appropriately.
About the accident. About his kids. About his grandkids.
None of whom, Jem noticed, could be bothered to help a man who’d just been in a bad car accident buy his next car.
More than the car, what Walter really wanted was to tell somebody about it.
That was true more often than people realized.
In that way, selling cars wasn’t any different from selling anything else.
The people did the work for you, if you let them; you just had to stay out of their way.
“It’s a lot more than I wanted to spend,” Walter said, looking at a five-year-old Impala that was a good seven grand higher than what he’d walked in hoping to pay.
“It’s a tough market,” Jem said. “Used cars are in high demand. I’d offer to hold on to this one for you, give you a day or two to decide, but my manager would wring my neck. We can’t keep cars like this on the lot right now.”
And that did it.