Evil all along, p.21
Evil All Along, page 21
part #8 of The Last Picks Series
(It was one of Fox’s favorite words; it just slipped out.)
Tripple’s silence suggested he was on unfamiliar ground. For that matter, so was I—I hadn’t done a lot of yelling-at-murderers in my life, so I figured we were both figuring this out as we went along.
“And for that matter—” I said.
And then a loudspeaker boomed: “HEY! OVER HERE!”
My horrified realization came a heartbeat behind: it wasn’t a loudspeaker.
It was Millie.
I opened my mouth, but when I tried to simultaneously scream “What are you doing?” and “Get out of here!”, it all got caught in my throat.
Tripple started to turn in the direction of Millie’s voice.
I mean, you can’t really blame him, can you?
And then Keme launched himself out of the dark. Somehow, he’d circled behind Tripple, and now he sprinted toward him and jumped on his back. Tripple shouted and staggered under the impact. Keme rained down blows on Tripple’s head, and Tripple stumbled, rocking under the unfamiliar weight of a second body. The gun went off. Muzzle flash lit up the night in a single stroke of flame, and then the dark descended again. Keme did something—I didn’t see what—and Tripple screamed. He tried to run, lost his balance, and fell. And Keme stayed with him, clobbering him as he rolled with him.
My feral wolf-child. My beautiful, brave, tremendously stupid feral wolf-child. Who was also, if you asked anybody else, apparently my big brother.
I ran. I didn’t even think about it. Tripple had dropped his gun when he’d fallen, and I scooped it up. He was still trying to roll away from Keme, and Keme was still beating the stuffing out of him. I wasn’t even sure Keme was seeing him—the boy’s eyes were huge, his pupils dilated, and he was screaming—which hadn’t registered until now. The little armchair psychologist inside my head suggested maybe—just maybe—this wasn’t entirely about Tripple for Keme. Maybe Keme had a lot of feelings he was getting out. Maybe this was catharsis.
It also looked like if I let it go on for too much longer, it might end in a very cathartic manslaughter. (Not to mention, Millie had appeared, and she was carrying a paving stone almost as big as her head, and it looked like she might want some catharsis too.)
“Keme, that’s enough.”
Apparently, it wasn’t.
“Keme! Hey! Get off him! Millie, put that thing down.”
Keme just kept punching.
Genius struck. “Keme, stop it right now, or I’m telling Indira!”
Mid-slam, Keme froze. He looked over at me, eyes wide and unseeing, his thin chest rising and falling frantically. One hand was still tangled in Tripple’s hair.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We’re all okay. You can stop now.”
A second passed. And then another. A hint of awareness flickered deep in his eyes, and with what looked like a surprising amount of effort, he released Tripple’s hair and flexed his fingers stiffly. Tripple’s head fell to the pavement; if the deputy was still conscious, there was no sign of it. Hey, at least he was alive.
Millie took Keme by the arm and helped him up, and I reached them a moment later. I didn’t even know I was going to do it until it happened and I pulled both of them into a hug. After a heartbeat, Millie started to cry—not exactly a surprise. What was a surprise, though, was that Keme did too.
“Everybody’s okay,” I said. “You guys did so good. You’re idiots, and I’m going to yell at you later, but you did a fantastic job, and I love you so much.” Pushing back from them, I said, “Millie, scream if Tripple moves. I’ve got to find Bobby.”
Keme was still sobbing, and I wasn’t sure he heard me. Millie, though, for all her tears, had a look of grim resolve. I figured if Tripple moved, he might get the paving stone first—and then she’d scream.
I raced through the gate. On my way, I passed Dahlberg, who was standing by her car, hand on her holstered service weapon.
“Tripple,” I said. “You’ve got to arrest Tripple, he’s—”
And then I saw Bobby. He lay on the ground in a crumpled heap next to the Pilot.
That blunt, ugly thing in my chest doubled in size. It was too big for my lungs to expand. Too big for my heart to beat.
I might have stayed like that forever if Bobby hadn’t moaned and rolled onto his back.
My legs herky-jerked me over to him before I could even think about it. I dropped onto my knees as he propped himself on one elbow. It was a strangely sleepy movement, the way he roused himself in bed sometimes, when I came in late and he wanted to say goodnight. It was hard to see him all of a sudden. My eyes were hot.
“What’s wrong?” he mumbled. “What happened? Are you okay?”
“Am I okay? Bobby, are you okay?”
He gave an almost imperceptible nod. But he didn’t say anything, and the tightness around his eyes told me he wasn’t okay, not entirely.
“DEPUTY DAHLBERG IS ARRESTING DEPUTY TRIPPLE!”
She was standing right behind me, and I almost shot out of my shoes.
Bobby murmured, “Who’s that?”
I stared at him. And then I caught the shadow of that ridiculously goofy grin. I slapped his shoulder. “Don’t do that!”
He let out a wounded cry, which of course made me feel terrible, and then he grinned about that too. I thought about beating him up some more, but instead, somehow, I ended up sitting on the asphalt, Bobby’s head pillowed in my lap, insisting he not move until the ambulance got there. Keme and Millie sat with us as cruisers began to arrive, lights and sirens blazing.
And we were still sitting there, our shadows shifting in the spinning lights of the deputies’ cars, when Keme held out his hand.
It took me a moment.
And then, with a tired smile, I slapped him five.
Chapter 22
Believe it or not, we made it to Halloween.
It would be oversimplifying things to say that the investigation was over. If anything, the real investigation was only beginning. Tripple was under arrest (and, thanks to Keme, in the hospital), and the sheriff had informed me that they’d found Channelle’s fingerprints on the cruiser’s visor mirror—one place that Tripple had forgotten to wipe down, apparently. Now the sheriff had to start unraveling the mess Tripple had created. JT’s and Channelle’s murders would be bad enough; what would be even worse, though, would be the ripples that spread outward: all of Tripple’s arrests, all of his convictions, all of his work as a deputy—it would come under a microscope now. A lifetime’s work undone because he’d been selfish and violent and, in a word, evil. And because he’d been in love.
Bobby was okay, it turned out—although he’d had a bad headache for the next day. Tripple had used a chokehold to knock him out. It took, on average, nine seconds for someone to lose consciousness when a chokehold is correctly applied. Bobby had been unconscious before he’d even really had a chance to fight. The downside to chokeholds was that they could all too easily be fatal, one of the reasons modern police departments no longer trained LEOs to use them. An old-timer like Tripple, though, knew all the dirty tricks. I was just grateful Bobby hadn’t had anything worse happen to him.
Keme—to my absolute delight, and to his panicked embarrassment—had received a commendation from Sheriff Acosta for, among other things, saving my life. I suspected it was also meant to convey, implicitly, Acosta’s apology for the way Keme had been treated at the beginning of the investigation. The actual ceremony wasn’t for a few more days, and I cannot fully express my genuine pleasure in watching the boy swing from swaggering teenage machismo to terror at the prospect of standing in front of all those people. (In case you’re wondering, the swaggering teenage machismo tended to win out whenever Millie was around.)
For the record, Bobby—and Indira, and I, and even Fox—had all performed the obligatory chorus of Don’t ever do that again. It had taken the wind out of Keme’s sails for about an hour, especially when no one seemed particularly impressed by his and Millie’s display of initiative. (They had apparently overheard Bobby and me leaving and assumed that I would somehow manage to get myself killed if they didn’t tag along. I mean, they weren’t wrong, but I didn’t feel like they needed to say it out loud.) All our hard work had gone out the window, though, when Millie had posted a long—and LOUD—video on social media explaining how my boyfriend, Keme, did the most amazing thing. After that, Keme looked like he had enough testosterone pumping through him to pick a fight with a bullet train.
Oh, and by the way: they didn’t even have the decency to tell us. Keme and Millie, I mean. We all would have gone on wondering and guessing and hoping if we hadn’t heard those magical words—my boyfriend, Keme. There was no elaborate courting ritual. They didn’t sit us down and gently explain it to us. Millie didn’t even ask me for Keme’s hand in, uh, boyfriendship? They acted like they always had. With way more kissing.
(I was starting to understand how Keme felt about me and Bobby. I was also starting to knock—loudly—every time I entered a room.)
Hemlock House was always busy on Halloween—not only because it was the only fully operational Class V haunted mansion on the entire Oregon Coast (don’t quote me on that), but also because over the years, Vivienne had created something of a tradition, which could be boiled down to: full-sized candy bars, and plenty of them. This year, with money tight, we’d had to resort to fun-size options, but honestly, the kids didn’t seem to mind (aside from one little cowlicked runt out of the Archer clan who clamored for his full-sized Snickers—his mom had to drag him away, vamping off-stage to her own embarrassed laughter).
Eventually, it was time for me and Bobby to head upstairs and help Keme get ready for the dance.
“And maybe change into your own costume while you’re up there,” Fox said, giving me an appraising look. “Or are you going as a disheveled stoat?”
“I’m already in my costume, thank you very much. And I’m not going to engage with this—with this abuse. My costume is cute and clever and cute and—”
“Clever?” Fox said drily.
“Bobby!”
“Here we go,” Bobby said with a squeeze to my shoulder that I was sure was supposed to convey his boundless support and his wholehearted agreement that my costume was, in fact, cute and clever. Bobby, for his part, was definitely cute—the Marty McFly getup had made a second appearance, and the word of the night was yum. (When he’d cuffed the sleeves of the denim jacket, something had happened inside me, and I’m not ready to describe it.)
“We shan’t let you down,” Fox informed me as they opened yet another fun-sized Kit Kat. Tonight, Fox’s ensemble included a knee-length dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves; a white pinafore; and ankle-strap shoes. They’d added a featureless metallic mask that made their voice boom oddly, and they’d tripped over the hassock twice, going, uh, ankle-straps over pinafore. The whole effect was Battlestar Galactica meets Alice in Wonderland, and when I’d wondered aloud to Bobby (a little too loudly, it turned out) if it was a costume or an ordinary outfit, Fox had let out an indignant huff and walked straight into the fireplace.
Indira, in a version of her hippie costume she’d worn on Sunday, gave me a small smile. She was good at controlling her expression, but I knew her well enough to see the worry and hope battling in her features.
“He’s going to want you to give him your seal of approval when we’re done,” I told her. “You know he will.”
Her smile got a little bigger, and Bobby and I headed upstairs.
In keeping with all the other recent developments, I’d finally put my foot down about Keme’s “secret” (notice the liberal use of air quotes) bedroom. I’d been willing to play along and let Keme sleep in one of the secret passages while his own living situation was…well, unstable, to put it politely. But now that his mom had been evicted, and since Keme was eighteen and a legal adult, I’d decided it was time to put an end to the charade. He hadn’t liked it. And it had almost threatened to tip over into a fight—if you can fight with somebody who just hunches his shoulders and won’t make eye contact and keeps trying to sneak past you so he can slip out of the house.
And then Bobby had looked around the secret turret, scanning Keme’s dirty clothes and his half-empty boxes of breakfast cereal and the jumble of mismatched furniture Keme had pilfered, and said in his usual I’m-Bobby-so-I-actually-am-honestly-asking-this tone, “Are you going to bring Millie up here?”
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was that.
We found Keme in his new bedroom. He was dressed in black trousers, a white shirt, black suspenders, and a black bow tie. A pair of Chucks (mine, for your information) rounded out the ensemble. He was staring at himself in a cheval mirror, his face dark.
When Bobby and I stepped through the door, he looked over and said, “I look like a wiener.”
Boy, if you wanted to hear a nervous laugh. “Uh, Keme, Indira is right downstairs, and I don’t think you can say—”
“You look handsome,” Bobby said. He moved over to Keme and adjusted the bow tie. Then he tugged on the tight knot of Keme’s hair. He did something with his eyebrows that was apparently the way straight boys asked each other questions. (Bobby was an honorary straight boy.) Keme made a disgruntled sound and nodded, and Bobby set to work undoing Keme’s hair and starting over.
For my part, I flopped on the bed.
“Everyone’s going to be wearing a suit,” Keme said into the silence.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” I asked. “We would have gotten you—”
Bobby gave me a surprisingly stern look.
I shut my yapper.
“You didn’t want a suit,” Bobby said.
“But everybody’s going to be wearing one.”
“Millie doesn’t expect you to wear a suit.”
“That’s what you’re supposed to wear to a dance,” Keme said with surprising stubbornness.
“You look very handsome,” Bobby said again.
And then he gave me another look—a look that said, quite clearly, that I needed to start carrying my weight in this conversation.
“Think about it this way,” I said. “Millie’s already been to a high school dance with an awkward teenage boy dressed in an ill-fitting suit. You know? Because she’s older than you, and she already went to all her high school dances, and she—”
Bobby was staring at me.
Keme was glaring at me.
The enormous horse in the giant oil horse painting was looking at me like it had freshly rediscovered the joy of trampling.
“Uh, what I mean is—”
“Nice save,” Bobby muttered.
“—you aren’t one of those boys. You’re an adult, Keme. You’ve been an adult for a long time. Why would you want to look like the rest of those—” I cast a glance at the door and, just to be safe, lowered my voice. “—wieners?”
That, at least, made a smile flicker across his face, but it went out almost immediately. Bobby finished re-doing Keme’s hair in silence; when he’d finished, it was a low, loose bun—almost messy, in fact, and even though it probably shouldn’t have worked, it made Keme look much more mature as a result. He inspected Keme, frowned at the lingering bruises on his face, and said, “I’m going to get concealer.”
I popped upright. “You have concealer?”
A beat. And then, slowly, “From Indira.”
“Oh. Right.”
Bobby and Keme traded a look that I couldn’t read but, I suspected, wasn’t exactly flattering, and Bobby left.
Turning back to the mirror, Keme fussed with his bow tie for a few minutes. I watched him. There wasn’t anything wrong with the bow tie, but sometimes, a guy just needed to fidget—that was something I understood completely.
After a while, I said, “I have a surprise for you.”
Fingers stilling, he glanced at me in the mirror.
“Bobby and I volunteered to be chaperones at your dance.”
His. jaw. dropped.
It’s not often I get a reaction out of Keme, and it’s even less often that it’s a big one.
He must have seen the amusement in my face because his expression solidified into a glower, and he stomped across the room and shoved me onto the bed. Then he shoved me a few more times, really getting it out of his system.
Apparently, we were back to normal.
I was still giggling as he returned to the mirror.
When he spoke again, it was a mumble, but I still caught the words. “Foster went back to his parents in Portland.”
“Oh. Oh! That’s good, right?”
Keme shrugged, staring at something on the other side of the mirror. “My mom asked me for bus money to go after him.”
“Oh Keme.” I tried about a million different possibilities out in my head. And then I said, “I’m sorry.”
“I gave it to her. It’s fine. She—she’s like a kid sometimes. She doesn’t listen when I try to tell her things. Or she listens, but then she does whatever she wants.” He sounded much, much younger when he said, “She’ll come back. She always comes back.”
I ran my hand over the bedspread.
Keme shook his head at something. Or at nothing. He ran his fingers over his eyebrows.
And then he started to cry.
Where was Bobby, I wanted to know. And how long could it take for Indira to find some g-d concealer?
But since I was fresh out of handsome, earnest, and emotionally intelligent deputies, I slithered off the bed and hugged Keme. At first, he cried harder. I rubbed his back. And somehow, I got him to sit down on the bed with me, but then he seemed to fall apart completely, sobbing into my shoulder. It made sense, in a way. He’d been holding himself together by sheer willpower for the last few days. He’d been through so much. And even though he was a boy who’d learned how to handle himself young, he was still only a boy, and sometimes, you just needed someone to tell you everything was going to be okay.
