“You got… fired?” I said. “Laid off?”
“I gothurt,” Jim said.
I’d insulted him. “Sorry.”
“Hurt on the job—God forbid you have a human body. At the hospital, they put me on pain meds I didn’t ask for and sure as hell couldn’t afford.”
I wouldn’t look at Quin now. Once it’s under your skin, he’d said, talking about Alex. It was a truism I couldn’t allow to get under mine.
“I looked up four years later,” Jim said, staring at the bar, “and it was all gone. Job, prospects. My family. The pain, though. Still know where to find that.”
The stiff way he walked into the pub. I leaned over the bar and said gently, “If you needed some help with addiction…”
Jim looked up sharply. “I don’t.” He caught sight of the pile of cash Quin had stacked on the bar, and added, “And I can pay for my own beers.”
He pulled out his wallet and proved it by putting down a fewgrubby tens. He’d overshot the price of the one beer he’d ordered for himself by a good amount, but refused the change. He slid awkwardly off the stool and strode to the door as quickly as his cramped-hamstring stagger could take him. When the vestibule door banged closed behind him, I glared at Quin.
“What?” he said. “Didn’t you wonder?”
His fault, for digging at Jim’s history, even though the tender spot was visible fromspace. His fault, for reminding me how precarious all this was, balancing on the knife’s tip of Alex’s sobriety.
Maybe Quin never had to come up against the reality of loss, devastation. All his money laid out, his good cheer as relentless as that mole in the arcade game offering its head for thwacking. He sure didn’t act like a guy run off the road toward upward mobility.
“So,” he said now. “No word from Alex?”
“We weren’t actually open,” I said.
“What? Oh. Right.” Quin nodded to himself a second. “Right. I’ll leave, then? If you’re okay?”
“Innouniverse am I okay,” I said.
“Right.” But he gathered himself up, leaving the cash on the bar. I followed him to the door and made sure, this time, both of the locks were bolted, good and proper.
27
I’d forgotten the burger Ned had put on the grill for me. By the time I remembered and raced to take it off the grill, it was a puck, hard and black. I tried to pick off the burnt edges. It was nothing but burnt edges.
Come on,life. Could I not even have one thing?
I stared at the hard lump of former meat, fully regretting the plastic bag of unclaimed takeout I’d passed so casually back to Ned.
I scavenged through the kitchen cold storage. All the other burgers were frozen, but I discovered some bacon Ned had precooked for club sandwiches and stacked a heavy serving on a bun with lettuce, mayo. I took a big Shark Week chomp.
When was the last time I’d had real food? A dusty granola bar this morning, predawn, as I’d rewatched the video footage?
At the thought of Alex herding Joey out of the alley, the bite I’d taken turned heavy in my mouth. I had to spit it out.
I grabbed a plate and carried the rest of my sandwich back to the office. Unopened vendor bills still sat in a stack on the desk, alongside Michael Jordan’s misdirected second and last notices. If nothing had been touched since I’d last been in, then no bills had been paid, either.
I sat at the desk, hit the power button on the computer, and gnawed at my sandwich while the hard drive churned slowly to life and I could check for the stashed copy of Wednesday’s security video.
It was still where I’d hidden it—but there was no real way to hide a massive media file on this antique toaster of a computer. One click to sort the files by size…
I tried it, and sure enough, there were the two copies of the footage I’d stowed of Wednesday’s pub traffic, top of the list, slurping down all the storage space on the hard drive.
If Alex hadn’t been ignoring his business entirely, he might have noticed.
But if Detective Aycock showed up to take a closer look, it wouldn’t take any expert to find the files. It wouldn’t take asecond, and that clip of Joey being bounced toward his death—byAlex—would be all over the internet. It would be all the proof against him anyone would need, if not in court, then in the court of social media.
