Detective Evans
“Do you mind if I text you sometime, to see how you’re doing?” she asks. We’re at the hospital, standing just outside the
main entrance doors, the four of them with their bags. Beside us, my car still runs, rain coming down hard though, under the
covered entryway, we don’t get wet. “You can say no,” she says, rambling now, her smile nervous. “I don’t want to cross a
line or make you feel like you need to stay in touch with me. I’m sure you have boundaries when it comes to your work.”
I say, “Of course you can text me. I’d like that.”
Mrs. Gray grows quiet, her light brown hair moving in the wind, though she holds it back from her face. “I guess this is it
then,” she says when she speaks, setting her bag down on the sidewalk and coming in for a hug that surprises us both.
She lets out a sigh as she pulls back. “Sorry,” she says with a sad little smile, struggling to find the right words. “I just
can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve done for us, Detective. If it wasn’t for you, I don’t know how we would have
gotten through the last few days.”
“Call me Josh, please. And I should be thanking you, Mrs. Gray. You’re the one who figured it out. You found Reese.”
She nods, knowing she did. I, myself, was on the wrong track. I don’t know how long it would have taken me to figure out that the Matthewses did it, though I’d like to believe I would have eventually gotten there.
“Courtney,” she says.
“Pardon?”
“If I’m going to call you Josh, you’re going to have to call me Courtney.”
I nod, thinking we’re having a moment. She glances back to make sure the kids aren’t listening, and then she looks at me again,
leans in, confessing, “I’m not sure I’m ready to go back home and deal with everything that comes next,” and I honestly wish
I could say something to make it better, something more genuine than what I say.
“You can do this. I know you can.”
She’s quiet. Then she nods, reaching for her bag. “Say goodbye to Detective Evans,” she tells the kids, and they mumble their
goodbyes.
“Bye, guys,” I say. “Be good.”
I give them a little wave as I get back in my car. I pull away, watching them get smaller in my rearview mirror until they
disappear. I breathe out a sigh of relief when they’re gone. Because their perception of me won’t be altered. Because after
they leave, Mrs. Gray will still think of me as one of the good guys. She won’t know what I did.
It’s a twenty-minute drive back home. The rain is coming down even harder now, hammering the windshield, the wipers whipping
back and forth but hardly able to keep up.
I spend most of the drive mulling over something Ms. Dahl said this afternoon in the interrogation room, when she was describing
what she saw that night. How she said she watched Daniel dig that hole in the cemetery with an energy and determination she’s
never seen before or since from him.
I looked up at the time, reading the expression on her face and trying to decide if there was some hidden meaning in there, but there wasn’t, which made it all the more ironic.
Because it wasn’t Daniel she saw.
It was me.
When I get to my house, I pull into the driveway. I park the car and then make a run for it, getting wet from the rain, thinking
of that night, of the cemetery, which I only knew the way to because of the times Daniel and I met there to get high, sitting
on his mother’s grave, smoking a joint. Daniel wasn’t just someone I knew of. He wasn’t some random kid a couple years younger
than me in school. We might not be friends anymore, because people change (although Daniel never changed, he’s still that
sad sack I knew in high school), but I knew him my whole life, because he grew up across the street from me.
I flip on the living room light. I make my way to the bathroom, unbuttoning my shirt as I go. I peel it off and then set it
on the counter by the sink, staring at my face in the mirror, which has changed, become more defined these last few years.
I’m not that same round, baby-faced kid that Daniel knew, who could barely grow chin scruff.
It all changed the night that Kylie Matthews died. I changed that night.
I reach down, set my hand on the short sleeve of my t-shirt, still wet from the rain. I hike it slowly up, exposing my bicep,
which I manage to keep covered in public. To this day, I have a hard time looking at it, though I force my eyes to lower,
to make contact with the snake’s fierce white eyes, which stare back into mine.
There were four of us who grew up on the same street and went together to get them, Daniel, Jeremy, his kid brother Adam and me.
We used fake IDs and blew money we stole, because we thought we were cool at the time and we wanted the world to know it.
We made up some fake gang—the King Cobras—and told everyone we knew we were in it, spending our free time when we were kids smashing mailboxes and robbing gas stations, stupid shit like that.
We never got caught; we always got away with it, which gave us a high like we never had at any other time in our lives.
We were invincible, untouchable. We had power.
People listened to us. They were scared of us. We meant something.
The rest of the time, we were nobodies. We meant nothing to anyone, not even our own folks.
I didn’t mean to hurt Kylie Matthews. It was an accident.
My kid sister had her over all the time. They were practically joined at the hip. She’d come over and the two of them would
make fun of me. It was relentless. They’d sit in the same room with me and laugh about everything I said and everything I
did. The way I walked, the fact that I was tall or that I had some patchy facial hair coming in. It made me angry.
One night, not long after it happened, my sister, Abby, knocked on my bedroom door. “Josh?” she asked, poking her head in.
“What do you want?”
She came into my room without saying, sat down on the edge of the bed, picking imaginary fuzzes from the quilt. By then, it
had been a couple weeks since it happened. For the first few days, I was convinced I was going to get caught. It wasn’t so
much an if but a when. The police questioned me that first night, same as they did Mom, Dad and Abby, and I kept imagining them coming back, taking
me away in handcuffs, locking me up.
But at the one-month mark, when the police seemed to have no leads and I started to think I might actually get away with it, the fear morphed into guilt, into nightmares, into me not being able to think about anything else but running Kylie Matthews over with my car.
I hated myself for what I did. I hated the person I was.
I made the decision to change, cutting myself off from Daniel, Jeremy and Adam because I didn’t want to be like them anymore.
After high school, I joined the academy because I thought that if I could help other people, it might make up for what I did to Kylie, and in some effed-up way, it did.
Those times I broke up domestic disputes or talked a man down from a bridge, the guilt would let up, if only for a time.
I wasn’t a murderer. In those moments, I was a hero. I was the good guy.
Still, when I’d see her folks around town, I’d think about confessing, because if I did, I wouldn’t have to keep my secret
anymore. It weighed on me, it preoccupied me to the point that there were physical effects. I couldn’t sleep, I could barely
eat.
But then I thought of everything I’d lose if I told them the truth. My family, my freedom, my future. In other words, everything
I took from Kylie.
I kept my mouth shut. I told no one.
“She liked you,” Abby looked up from the bed that night and said.
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t be dumb,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You know what that means.”
“You’re lying.”
“Am not.”
“Then why was she always ragging on me if she liked me?”
She gave a little snort. “Are you really that dense?”
Over and over again, I relived that day in my mind.
I still do, trying to change the outcome every time.
I remember watching from my bedroom window as Abby and her friend left our house, riding away on their bikes.
I got in my car, thinking I’d follow them, maybe try to scare them or something, to teach them a lesson.
I didn’t get far when I saw Abby pedaling back, alone.
I could’ve turned around. I should’ve turned around and gone back home.
But for whatever reason, I didn’t; I kept going.
I found Kylie not much further up ahead.
I remember that I honked and she looked back over her shoulder and smiled.
I kept swerving the car, pretending I was going to hit her, and then swerving back.
She was laughing at first. She thought it was funny, until I cut too close once and she got scared, calling me an idiot through my open window, shouting about how I was so dumb and how I was so stupid.
I did it again, to scare her, cutting even closer this time.
I didn’t mean to hit her. It just happened. I clipped the back bike tire with my car. She fell off and into the street just
ahead of me. I couldn’t hit the brakes in time. To this day, I still feel what it felt like to run her over with my car. It
nags at me. It haunts my dreams.
It was all adrenaline then. I didn’t think. I reacted, lifting her from the street and setting her in my trunk. I hid the
bike and then I drove back home and crept into my family’s shed for a shovel when no one was looking, and then I drove out
to the cemetery.
I just didn’t know that someone else was there, that someone was watching. Ms. Dahl.
Tomorrow morning, I’ll pick Daniel up. Daniel and I haven’t been friends in years, not since I cut things off. He thought
I believed I was better than him. It wasn’t that. It’s that I wanted to be different, I wanted to change. I wanted to make
up for what I did, to atone. Daniel broke into my house and stole my things. I caught him in the act. I was a cop by then.
I could have shot him or, at the very least, brought him in, but I didn’t because we were friends once and I owed him that.
Instead, I told him to get his shit together and do something productive with his life, but he chose to do neither.
He had his chance. I don’t owe him anything anymore.
Justice will be getting Daniel off the streets. He’s done enough bad things already—stealing from people, chasing after young, pretty girls and then hurting them—even if he didn’t lay a hand on Kylie Matthews.
Tomorrow I’ll take him in and ask him what happened that night. I’ll tell him what Ms. Dahl saw, how she identified him digging
that hole in the cemetery. There will be no way to prove it was me because, even if they exhume Kylie’s body, any forensic
evidence will be gone by now. If Daniel tries to make the argument that there are four of us walking around town with the
same tattoo, no one will believe him because he’s done nothing with his life, while I’m a detective. I protect people.
I’m one of the good guys.
It’s a mantra I repeat to myself before I fall asleep at night, as I lie there in bed seeing Kylie’s face in my head, in the
trunk of my car, her pale, unmoving body beside jumper cables and a lug wrench, her knees bent, her eyes glassy. I say it
over and over again until one day, I might actually believe it.
I’m one of the good guys.
* * * * *