9
Auggie woke the next morning, head pounding, and had to dedicate the first few minutes to not throwing up. Morning light came in under the curtains. Downstairs, the furnace chugged, trying to keep up with the heat. Theo’s house. And then, bits and pieces of it came back to him: the email from Maria Maldonado, their argument, the Pretty Pretty. After that, it became hazy. He remembered sex with Theo, kind of. The best sex they’d had—that was the gist, even though details were lacking.
After a few more minutes of trying to keep his skull from flying apart, Auggie got up. He saw the note on the table, the glass of water, and the ibuprofen. Theo’s precise script read: Drink all of the water with these pills, and then drink one more glass and lie down. In half an hour, take a shower. I’ll be back after class and office hours.
Auggie groaned, but he drank the water and took the pills. He couldn’t drag himself downstairs yet, so he dragged himself back to bed and dozed. When he woke again, his head definitely felt better, although his mouth tasted like he’d been licking carpet samples. He carried the glass downstairs, drank some more water, and started the shower.
He had started bringing clothes over, just a few things, but in spite of repeated hints, Theo had refused to surrender so much as a drawer. Auggie’s clothes were neatly folded—Theo’s contribution—and stacked next to the dresser. It had never become an argument. It had never been a thing they’d talked about, for that matter. But now, with the last of the water snaking between his shoulder blades and his feet leaving damp spots on the carpeted steps, Auggie thought about that. He thought about their fight the night before, what he’d said without even knowing he’d been thinking it: It’s never going to change, is it? And it wasn’t just his age. It was everything between them. It was the fact that Auggie wasn’t Ian. He wondered, for the first time, how long either of them could put up with this.
It put a bad spin on everything, souring his memories of his birthday, tingeing the fragmented recollection of their sex. He dressed in joggers and a Wroxall sweatshirt that Fer had given him, purchased after Christmas and shipped from the college bookstore—even though Auggie could have walked there in five minutes—as a kind of apology, even though Fer never said the actual words. It was the right kind of big on Auggie, the way you wanted a comfy sweatshirt to be, and that wasn’t really a surprise. Fer had been buying his clothes for him for a long time, pretty much up until he’d hit high school. Even then, Fer had been a good second opinion, if you filtered out the not-so-backhanded comments like, “Sure, you look great.” Pause. “If you want to look like a men’s-room jizz rag.”
Auggie was halfway down the steps when he remembered Maria’s email. He took out his phone, unlocked it, and scanned through the messages that had come in last night. His campus account was already stuffed with the usual junk—a message from Wroxall’s Center for Teaching and Learning, urging him to come in and learn better study habits; an automatic notification from one of his classes that the online discussion board had been updated; the weekly newsletter from the Communications Department, where Auggie was now officially a student. And buried in all that junk, Maria’s email waited.
He read it twice. No, Maria said, she didn’t know about any of her staff getting into an altercation with Harley Gilmore or a football player. None of her staff could have been involved in Harley’s disappearance. The worst thing in recent memory was one of the trainers, and all he’d gotten was a DUI and a night in the local jail on his way back from the lake, and that had turned out to be a misunderstanding, and the charges had been dropped. Oh, and furthermore, how dare you? (That part was the tone, not actually put into words.)
Auggie sat on the couch, trying to make sure he wasn’t overlooking anything. Then he got up, and without giving himself time to think about it, he hurried to the stairs. He grabbed socks, his Jordans, and the keys to the Malibu. Then, shrugging into his coat—his new North Face, a replacement for the Arc’teryx Ethan had been wearing when he’d been stabbed—he sprinted out into the cold.
He kept thinking about what Maria had said. The trainer had been on his way back from the lake, which around here, probably meant the Lake of the Ozarks. He’d gotten stopped for driving under the influence. But hey, great news, it was just a big misunderstanding. He thought about Theo, too, and what Auggie had realized the night before: that maybe they’d never be equal, not as far as Theo was concerned. Then Auggie started planning. The drive to New Harbor took forty minutes. Theo had class at nine, and that was fifty minutes. Then he had a three-hour block of office hours. And, if he was feeling particularly responsible—which, because he was Theo, he almost always was—he’d probably stay and get a couple of hours of work done on his dissertation. Now that he’d passed his exams, the pressure was on to turn his thesis into a longer project and get a tenure-track job. All of which meant that Theo might not be home for hours.
Of course, the devil on Auggie’s shoulder said, because he’s Theo, the responsible thing might be to come home as soon as office hours are over and check on you.
“For fuck’s sake,” Auggie said under his breath and drove faster.
It was almost eleven by the time he got to New Harbor, and when he pulled into the lot around the little brick city hall that also doubled as the police station, it was empty. Auggie parked and jogged up the steps and tried the door. It was locked. He knocked, but after a couple of minutes, he realized nobody was coming. He turned to go back down the steps. In the laundromat across the street, a dark-haired woman in a dark dress that ran to her wrists and ankles was staring at him, speaking on a cell phone.
“Please don’t kill me,” Auggie whispered as he started the Malibu. “Please don’t use my skin to make throw pillows and turn my guts into sausage casings and make my teeth into a necklace. Please let me just get what I need and go home so my boyfriend can lovingly murder me.”
He cruised the stretch of state highway that constituted the run-down strip of New Harbor, and on his second pass, he spotted the brown Ford Escape. It was parked in the gravel lot of a diner with a sign that said only DINER. Auggie pulled in and parked. He studied the building: it was a long, aluminum husk, its windows dirty with the accumulated spatter of rain and mud and bird droppings. A plywood accessibility ramp sagged noticeably in the middle, and Auggie didn’t want to be the next person who tried to get a wheelchair up it. He tried to see inside, but the bright February day worked against him; all he could see were dark shapes moving on the other side of the glass.
“Please, please, please,” he whispered as he silenced his phone and set it to record, “just let Theo kill me when I get home.”
The bell on the door jingled when he stepped inside. It wasn’t like a movie. It wasn’t like everybody stopped talking, everybody turned to stare. But Auggie had spent a good part of his life trying to get attention and then trying to keep it—first, trying to entertain his mom and the parade of indistinguishably good-looking men she brought home; then with stupid shit—which had eventually culminated in that first, awful car accident; and then with social media, jokes and videos and photos that sexualized him and, of course, now, all his boyfriend content with Theo. So, Auggie was an expert on being the object of attention. And he could tell, within ten seconds, that everyone in the diner was aware of him, observing him. The man with the trucker hat and the mustache who was drinking his coffee and pretending to read the newspaper. The two hard-faced women in matching polos and khakis, who looked like they were either about to go on shift somewhere or just coming off one. The older woman in the hibiscus-print housedress petting a Shih Tzu that was sticking its head out of her purse. And, of course, Chief Pitts, who sat in the corner booth, alone, looking at his phone.
“Hi, hon.” The waitress wore her blond hair piled high on her head, and she had a nice smile, a stack of menus under her arm. “Counter or booth?”
“I’m meeting someone,” Auggie said, and he started walking again before she could ask anything else.
When Auggie slid into the booth opposite the chief, he didn’t look up from his phone. He was scrolling sports news—Auggie recognized the site because he had, on more than one occasion, caught Theo reading it on his laptop after telling Auggie he couldn’t talk because he needed to work on his fill-in-the-blank. Auggie tried to count the seconds. He shifted, and the booth’s vinyl squeaked. The chrome banding on the table was foggy with grease and fingerprint smears. Auggie ran his thumb along it. Then he started tapping his nail against it.
The chief looked up. His eyes were black and unreadable. He asked, “May I help you?”
“I need to talk to you,” Auggie said. He lowered his voice. “About Harley Gilmore.”
The chief didn’t look around. He didn’t pretend to stretch and scan the seats around them. The booth behind Auggie was empty, and because the chief had the corner seat, a good three-foot walkway separated them from the next booth, which Auggie now realized was also conveniently empty. People in New Harbor, he thought, were smarter than they looked.
The waitress who had stopped Auggie appeared again, and she slid a platter in front of the chief: chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes, white gravy, green beans. She added flatware—a stamped-metal fork and one of those thin, restaurant-quality steak knives. Then she turned to Auggie. “Can I get you something, hon?”
“I’ll take care of him, Marcie,” the chief said.
Marcie smiled at both of them and left faster than she needed to.
“I know what you were doing,” Auggie said in that same low voice. “With Harley.”
The chief picked up a green bean. He dipped it in the white gravy, and then he took a bite. He chewed slowly, his eyes focused on Auggie. Those eyes didn’t move. As far as Auggie could tell, they didn’t blink. The clatter of knives and forks on ceramic plates, the clink of glasses, the kitchen sounds, the bell at the door, the murmur of voices—it all faded with those eyes on Auggie.
“They get them out of a can,” the chief said.
“What?”
“The green beans. I hate them out of a can, but I eat them because Marcie says I need some vegetables or I’ll keel over. How about that? Eating them out of a goddamn can. Hand me a napkin, if you would.”
Auggie glanced right, spotted the stainless-steel napkin dispenser, and reached.
As soon as he moved, he knew he’d made a mistake. The chief was faster. He grabbed Auggie’s hand and, with his free hand, brought up the steak knife. He forced Auggie’s hand onto the tabletop, and then he dug the tip of the knife into the back of Auggie’s hand. The knife had a thin, serrated blade. It hadn’t broken the skin, but even so, pressing into his flesh between the bones of his hand, it hurt.
“Now,” the chief said, “I can put this all the way through your hand before you can scream. They can do some amazing things these days, surgeons, but I’d say there’s still a good chance you wouldn’t ever use this hand again. Not the way you do now, anyhow. What do you think about that?”
The sounds in the diner rushed back in: the clamor of the bell, the roar of voices, the clink and clatter of people having a normal meal on a normal day. Auggie’s knee bounced, and he tried to still himself because even those tiny movements made his hand shift, making him doubly aware of the knife. He tried to keep his eyes on the chief, but they kept sliding down to the blade. It was like everything else in here, a slight cloudiness coating the stainless steel. Who’s doing the dishes? The question sounded manic in Auggie’s head. Haven’t they heard of rinse aid?
The chief rolled his wrist, and the blade slid into the back of Auggie’s hand. A punched-out noise escaped Auggie, and he tried, automatically, to pull his hand back. The movement pulled the blade, embedded in his hand, against the flesh, tearing the wound open. The pain was so much worse, and this time, Auggie couldn’t entirely swallow his cry.
“Well,” the chief said, “hold still then.”
Trembling, Auggie somehow managed to keep his hand in place.
“Now,” the chief said. “That’s better, isn’t it?”
Auggie wanted to squeeze his eyes shut. He kept them open, and a tear rolled down his cheek.
“That was a question,” the chief said.
Somehow, Auggie nodded.
“All right,” the chief said. “I’d say that’s about an eighth of an inch. Maybe a sixteenth. That’s not too bad. You go home, you put some Betadine on that and slap a bandage on it, you’ll be good as new.” The chief shifted, bringing his arm up to rest his elbow on the table. The movement made Auggie shudder, and a wave of nausea rolled through him. He was sweating now, cold sweat. He could smell himself, smell the grease in the air, smelled the canned beans. He tried to keep his eyes on the chief, tried to keep his head in the game, tried to think of what Theo would do. But all he could think about was the fact that this new position, with his elbow on the table, meant that the chief wouldn’t have to move hardly at all, just his elbow, really, to drive the knife the rest of the way through Auggie’s hand.
“So,” the chief said, “you’ve got something to say, I think. Let me guess: you’re going to tell me that you took a wrong turn. You never meant to come back here because you remember I told you never to come back here. You’re going to apologize, and you’re going to thank me for getting you back on the road and headed in the right direction.” The chief smiled then. He released Auggie’s hand, relying on the knife alone to pin Auggie in place, and picked up another green bean. He swirled it in the white gravy. “Unless you’re having car trouble. If you’re having car trouble, well, I could give you a ride. How about that? You want to go for a ride together?”
Auggie took a breath. The pain bore him up, filling his brain, until he felt like he was riding the crest of it. But he’d been in pain before, and he’d been frightened before, and he had learned—the hard way—that he wasn’t a kid anymore, no matter what Theo thought.
“I don’t think you killed Harley Gilmore,” Auggie said. He heard the tremors in his voice, but he couldn’t do anything about them, so he ignored them. “I think you did Harley favors. If somebody caused trouble, he found a way to get them out into your neck of the woods. And then they’d get a speeding ticket. Or they’d have car trouble. Or they’d get pulled over and fail a sobriety test. And then Harley’s problem would go away. Harley got what he wanted. I think you got what you wanted. That means Harley was good business for you. Why would you kill the golden goose?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the chief said. And then he smiled.
“But somebody killed Harley. It wasn’t you, but it was somebody. And now they’re trying to kill me because they think I know who did it. I’ve been trying to figure out who would have wanted to kill him, and the list keeps getting longer. The girls his players took advantage of and recorded. The doctors and the dealers who got Harley and his players all the drugs they wanted. The Varsity Club, who could have been implicated in the whole mess. Even some of his players. And now I’ve got to think about all the people Harley sent through Lake County.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, son.”
“Do you remember any of them who might have done this? Anybody who seemed like they might not let Harley get away with it? Even if you don’t remember a name, maybe a description, something they said, their car.”
The chief studied him. He was smiling again. He had rag-doll eyes, little sewn on patches of black. “Do you know something? I think I like you. You’ve got some stuffing in you, don’t you?”
“If you ask my brother, he’d say I’m full of shit, and if you ask my boyfriend, he’d probably say it’s half Doritos and half hair product.”
The chief’s smile faded. “Let me tell you something, son. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I really don’t. But if we’re talking about this little picture you painted, you know, just talking, playing it out the way you said, well, then, I’d say it sounds like Harley had a problem of his own making, didn’t he? See, Harley was a good coach in a lot of ways, but he didn’t keep his house in order. I’m talking about the daughter, who ran around wild, but I’m also talking about his players. As long as they won, Harley didn’t care what they did. That bit him in the ass in the end.”
“What does that mean? Did one of the players do this? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Don’t be dumb. I’m telling you that what happened, it happened because Harley didn’t keep those boys in line. I’m not saying one of them did it. I’m not saying one of them didn’t. I’m saying if he’d kept those boys in marching order, this wouldn’t have happened. But Harley liked to run wild, and he liked to let his boys run wild too, and it got him in the ass, just like I told you.”
“You said he warned you that someone might be looking for him.”
For a moment, Pitts’s face remained expressionless, and Auggie thought he wouldn’t answer. Then, slowly, Pitts nodded.
Auggie’s hand throbbed around the tip of the blade, but he forced himself to keep his voice even. “What happened?”
“He said there might be trouble, that’s what happened.” But Pitts frowned. “He was jumpy. He called me at work, and he never did that. It wasn’t part of our—” Pitts caught himself. “Kept stopping in the middle of what he was saying, like he was listening, or maybe he was watching out for something.”
Not something, Auggie thought. Someone.
“Was that the first time you noticed him acting differently?” he asked.
“The summer had been quiet.” The chief shifted on the bench. “I saw him once. By chance. Had to be around August. He was stumbling around the Fuel King. That’s not right. Not stumbling. But walking kind of funny. Harley had a lot of get-up-and-go, but that day, he looked like one of those zombie movies. He hurt his back playing football; you know about that?”
Auggie shook his head, but it did sound somewhat familiar, although he couldn’t say why.
“Anyway, that’s all I thought it was. We didn’t talk to each other. And I didn’t hear from him again until the end of the month. That’s when he called.”
“What did he say?”
“What I told you: somebody might come looking for him, and he didn’t want to be bothered.”
“When we came here the first time, back in September, you made a big deal out of the fact that we were from Wroxall. Did he tell you that this person, whoever it was, was someone from the college? Or did you assume it?”
Pitts tapped the hilt of the knife with his thumb a few times, and the vibrations made Auggie wince. Then he said, “I don’t recall.”
“Did anyone else come looking for him? Besides us, I mean.”
“Not that I heard. And I would have heard.”
Auggie tried to think through what Pitts had told him. He tried to think of the next logical question, the one that would be obvious to Theo. But the throbbing heat in his hand kept breaking his chain of thought.
Pitts leaned forward, and the bench moved under him, scraping the linoleum. “I’ll tell you something, and then it’s time to go. I’ve got to eat my lunch, and the good people around here don’t pay me to sit on my duff all day. I told you Harley seemed jumpy on that call. But now, talking it through, I think he was scared. And I don’t know who could put a scare like that into Harley Gilmore.”
“If one of the people he intimidated—”
The chief spoke over him. “It’s time for you to go.” This time, Auggie was ready for it; when the chief drove the knife deeper into Auggie’s hand, Auggie managed to convert the scream into a long, hissing exhalation between clenched teeth. A quarter inch, Auggie told himself. It can’t be more than a quarter inch. “Let’s get something real clear between us, how about? You come here again, whatever you think you’re doing, and we’re going for a ride. You stop long enough to pump gas in New Harbor, and we’ll take a ride together. Hear me?”
Auggie nodded frantically. Tears welled in his eyes. The chief grunted, and then he yanked the knife free. For a moment, the relief was everything. Then the pain came back, doubling, somehow even worse now that the blade had been removed. Blood welled up, making it hard to tell how bad the cut was. Auggie couldn’t resist flexing his fingers. It hurt like hell, but he could do it, and he let out a shuddering breath.
“Mind that you don’t get Marcie’s table dirty,” the chief said.
Grabbing a handful of napkins, Auggie slid out of the booth. He wadded the paper up against the cut.
“And ask her for a clean knife,” the chief said, “would ya?”
Auggie stumbled out of the diner, and he managed to bite out the request as he passed the waitress, ignoring the worried question she called after him. He got into the Malibu, managed to get the keys into the ignition left-handed, and then shifted with his left and got out of the gravel lot. He drove with his injured hand under his thigh, using the weight of his leg to apply pressure to the napkins. Half a mile outside of New Harbor, he saw himself, chalky in the rearview mirror, and the nausea hit. He stopped and puked in a drainage ditch on the side of the road, shaking. And then, when he didn’t have anything left to bring up, he drove home.
It had been a waste. The whole fucking thing. He’d taken a stupid risk, he’d gotten himself hurt, and it had all been for nothing. Sure, he’d learned that Trace was telling the truth—Harley had a whole system in place to make sure nothing happened to his best players. But it hadn’t gotten Auggie any closer to learning who had killed Suemarie or Harley or, for that matter, why.
He was still moving pieces around in his head, still trying to make some of it fit, when he pulled into Theo’s driveway. He was going to park in the garage, but the front door opened, and Auggie’s foot tapped the brake pedal reflexively. Then Theo stepped outside, staring at Auggie, hands on hips.
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