After Sara and her mom left, Joni and I debriefed over stale coffee and a shared cigarette she fished from the bottom of her purse.
“Has anyone told you the department rumor?” she asks on a smoky exhale.
“About how Janice never contributes to the coffee, even though she drinks it more than anyone else?”
She laughs, the sound rusty after a day like today.
“No, but you’re not wrong,” she says, handing me the cigarette. “This is not unique to our city, but there have been rumors of a vigilante going around and killing really, really bad people in the Austin area for decades and getting away with it because there’s never enough evidence.”
My mouth falls open. “Are you serious? How could there not be enough evidence?”
She upnods me, and I hurry to take a hit of nicotine.
God, this tastes terrible.
“The crime scenes are immaculate. Never once has there been a single fingerprint, drop of DNA, or even a fucking hair follicle.” She takes the cigarette from me, another long inhale. “Though most of the assholes in question have much, much easier deaths than what you saw today,” she says through a stream of smoke.
“Easier how?”
She tries to hand the cigarette back to me, and I gesture for her to finish it off. She takes another puff and gives me a long look as she exhales all those lovely carcinogens.
“There’s a suspicious number of really bad people—the worst of the worst— suddenly dying of previously unrecorded health issues,” she says, popping her brows. “Think stroke, heart attack, aortic dissection, weirdly virulent cancers.” She drops the cigarette and stubs it out with her boot. “Or they fall off the face of the planet entirely.”
“Jesus.” I palm my forehead. “I’ve literally never heard of this. Not a news headline, not a podcast, not a rumor, nothing.”
“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” She lifts a shoulder. “Personally, I can’t tell if it’s a collective, unspoken collusion, or if there’s someone with their thumb on the scale.”
“Maybe all of the above,” I say, left to wonder if my father ever had a case like that, one where he looked the other way.
I doubt it, but if he did, it’d be because he thought it was the only way to keep the community safe.
“Given the scene you just witnessed, do you feel bad for the victims?” she asks, and I wonder, not for the first time, if she’s testing me.
“No,” I say honestly.
“Yeah, me either.”
4
HOPPER
Hopper pullshis lapel to his nose, inhaling the heady mineral scent of blood as Silas drives the getaway car under I-35 and out of East Austin. Hopper finds a lot of value in these extended visits to Austin. They really do wonders for his creative process.
“I love it when a plan comes together.” His New York accent is low and gravelly.
Silas shakes his head, even as a smile sneaks onto his lips. “Uncle, I’m not sure what we did there qualifies as aplan.”
“You know what I mean,” Hop says as a call comes in.
He digs his phone out from his back pocket and accepts the video call. A pale man with kohl-smudged eyes and a dark, see-through tank top appears on the screen.
“Jake! What a day! Thanks for the heads-up.” Hopper taps his temple. “I’ve been stuck on this latest sculpt, and that little side quest shook things loose for me.”
“I get it, Hop.”
Jake, internationally known multimedia artist, ethereal Gothic clothes hound, and WhiteHat guru, really does get it.
Jake darts a wary glance at the corner of the screen, where Sy’s inked elbow is visible.
