“He’s dead,” Dimitri said, falling back onto the ground to look up at the stars swimming overhead. Yeah, no. That was a bad idea. He rolled onto his side and puked.
All at once, Arlo became a flurry of motion. “Oh, God. I need to call an ambulance for you. I need to call the cops. I’m going to go to jail. Holy fuck. I’m going to jail. I killed somebody. I killed somebody. Holy shit. I killed somebody.”
Arlo’s voice grew increasingly panicked. Dimitri managed to turn his head just in time to see Arlo pulling his phone free from his pocket. “Give me the phone,” Dimitri said, voice sharp enough to cut through his frantic rambling.
Arlo’s gaze snapped to him, and he looked relieved as he handed over the phone. Until Dimitri stuffed it into his own pocket. “No cops.”
Arlo’s hands waved in a helpless gesture. “What do you mean no cops? He’s dead. You’re hurt.”
Dimitri shook his head. “Cops won’t fix either of those things. I probably just have a mild concussion.”
“Probably?” Arlo said, exasperated.
Dimitri rolled his head towards Arlo. “I mean, I don’t have a CT machine in my back pocket, but yeah, probably.”
“You’re making jokes now?” Arlo said, exasperated.
“I’m not joking,” Dimitri assured him. “Just let me think for a minute.”
Thinking was a tall order, but there was no way he was letting either of them go to prison for that dumb fuck Holden. Especially with Holden’s daddy being a judge. Arlo wouldn’t stand a chance at a fair trial. This would all be so much easier if the world wasn’t spinning on its axis.
Dimitri cleared his throat. “Okay. There are no cameras back here, so nobody has any proof of anything.”
Arlo made a strangled sound. “But there are cameras inside, and if they check them, they’re going to see you holding a knife to Holden’s throat five hours before he died.”
Fuck. That was a good point. It could be fixed, but fixing it meant calling the one person in the world he didn’t want involved. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. He hoped Arlo appreciated the amount of shit he was about to take for him.
He pulled his phone, scrolling to the number he needed and hit the call button.
His mother’s chipper voice was like an ice pick through his brain. “Hey, baby cakes. What’s shaking?”
Normally, Dimitri found his mother’s quirkiness hilarious, but he’d just taken a baseball bat to the head and there was a corpse a foot to his right, so he was low on humor.
“Hey, Mom. I…have a problem.”
There was a long pause. “Problem?” she asked tersely. “A problem with your trig homework or you need bail money, Dimitri?”
Dimitri groaned, looking at Arlo, who was staring down at Holden’s corpse like he was trying to will it back to life. “The kind of problem that requires an alibi and making part of a security tape disappear without disappearing.”
“Christ on a crackerjack, Dimitri. What the fuck did you do?” she stage whispered, her heels quickly clicking over a tile floor.
He took a deep breath and let it out. “I killed somebody.”
Arlo gasped at Dimitri’s words, shaking his head as if to make him take it back. Dimitri wouldn’t take it back. Arlo wouldn’t make it behind bars, and if this went sideways, that was where one of them would be heading.
“What? Who?” she snapped.
He wanted to lie to her, but there was no way he could. He needed her help. “Arlo’s dirtbag ex-boyfriend. In my defense, he was trying to kill me. It was him or me. I chose him.”
Silence stretched between them like a wire pulled taut before his mother asked, “Where are you?”
Something loosened in Dimitri’s chest. “Work. Around back.”
“Cameras?”
“Not around back, no.”
“Okay, good. Good. We can work with that.”
