He looked at Arlo’s devastated face. He had to be ready. He had to take care of Arlo.
“I’m ready.”
Arlo sat frozen as Dimitri hit the speaker button and his mother’s voice filled the chilly night air. “Okay, we need to make it look like you two are in one place and he is in another. I can spoof your GPS location from here forward, but I can’t hide the fact that you were all at the same place at the same time should the cops come calling. Did anybody see him talking to Arlo? Was there anybody there to witness you threatening him, D?”
Arlo was somehow both hot and cold. Perspiration formed at his hairline and lower lip, but the gravel and dirt beneath him were icy, the frigid cold settling into his bones. Was this what going into shock felt like?
“We were alone in the restaurant,” he heard Dimitri say, his words barely penetrating the fog in his head. Would they send Arlo to prison…or would he go to a mental institution like last time? He’d rather go to prison. There was no Melvin in prison. Melvin with his dirty fingernails and yellow teeth. Arlo shuddered. Yeah, he’d rather rot in prison.
“Arlo?”
Arlo jerked his head upwards, only then realizing he’d drifted away, his thoughts untethered. “What?”
“Did anybody know about the two of you?” Dimitri asked.
Right. Like Holden would tell his football player bros about his twinky little coffee shop hookup. They would have laughed him off the field. That was what Holden had said anyway.
“In what world could somebody like me ever want somebody like you? We’re not even close to being in the same league. Of course, you want to be seen with me. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. I have a career to think about.”
“Nobody saw us together. Nobody haseverseen us together. I was his dirty little secret,” Arlo said, voice dull.
There was a slight pause, then Dimitri’s mother said, “I’m sorry, sweetheart. He sounds like a real shitbag.”
Her disgust loosened something in him, and he nodded in agreement. “Holdenwasa real shitbag.”
“Well, hopefully, that means nobody will miss him.”
“His family is going to miss him,” Arlo swore, swallowing the sudden lump of fear in his throat. “He’s rich. Rockefeller rich. And his dad is a federal judge.”
Once more, there was a slight delay, and then Dimitri’s mom exploded. “You’ve got to be kidding me. What the fuck, Dimitri? The president wasn’t available to assassinate? There wasn’t a royal in town you could publicly guillotine?”
Dimitri tried to interject. “Mom—”
“I’ve worked so hard to keep you on the right side of prison bars. Do you know how hard it is to raise a psychopath? Is this you acting out? Did I not give you enough attention?”
“No, Mom,” Dimitri said, rolling his eyes, as if his mother was berating him over a report card and not the corpse between them, who was rapidly turning an alarming shade of cyan blue.
“Listen, if you’re about to go all Avengers on me, we really need to talk in depth about target selection and preparation. Lesson one: you cannot kill the kid of a goddamn federal judge. Not on a whim, anyway.”
“Mom… You said we’re on the clock.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she muttered. “Fuckin’ fuck, Dimitri. You’re lucky I love you.”
“It’s my fault,” Arlo blurted. “It was me. I did it.”
Dimitri’s head jerked up and he gave him wide eyes that screamed ‘shut up’ before practically yelling into the phone, “No. He’s lying. He doesn’t want me to get in trouble.”
“That’s not true!” Arlo cried, glaring at Dimitri, tears welling in his eyes.
He didn’t want Dimitri suffering because of something he did. Holden had deserved what he’d gotten, but nobody would ever know that because his father would paint his son as an angel who fell victim to a boy from the wrong side of town. A boy who made up vicious rumors about his son. They’d probably say he’d tried to rob Holden or something. Would that help him when he went to prison? Would they think twice before fucking with him?
“Boys, none of this matters anymore. I’m not letting either of you go to jail for some domestic abusing fuckboy, federal judge’s son or not. But we really have to move fast. We’re on borrowed time, so save the blame game for your honeymoon or wedding anniversary or something. I’m going to hack into the cloud and find footage of you closing so I can clone it.”
“We worked together last night,” Arlo said, perking up.
Dimitri’s mother made a noise. “I’m going to go back further than that. I don’t want some spunky detective looking at a week’s worth of footage and noting a pattern.”
What was Dimitri’s mother’s name? Something Greek. Something magical. Persephone? Penelope? Calliope. That was it. Calliope.
