The following morning had come too quickly. I was too wired after the clubhouse and couldn’t get to sleep right away.
The air conditioner unit rattled in the window, coughing out lukewarm air and the smell of someone else’s cigarettes. I sat on the edge of the bed with Caleb’s hoodie bunched in my fists, my knuckles white. The autopsy printout was a crumpled snowdrift at my feet.
I was done waiting.
Jay had saidsoon. My parents had saidgo home. The cops had saidclosed case. Meanwhile, my brother was in the ground with a reaper grinning on his chest like a punchline.
I dragged the duffel close and pulled out the pill bottle they said he’d died with. I turned it, turned it again. The label had been scratched off, but a corner of adhesive clung on with grit and dust and . . . something else.
Under the gummy edge, my fingernail found ink.
Not a label. A mark. A single crooked line and half a letter, like someone had started writing and thought better of it.
‘K.’
It was nothing, or it was everything. ‘K’ could have been a dozen things, but the part of my brain I’d left in this town whispered one word.Kingsley. The old chop shop down by the tracks where Caleb used to rebuild engines for cash when he was clean and broke.
I shoved the bottle in my pocket, slid the gun at the small of my back, and laced up my boots. The burner phone went in my boot lining. Caleb’s hoodie went over everything like a shield.
“Screwsoon,” I told the empty room. “I’m going now.”
Kingsley’s lot looked the way it always did, like God elbowed that part of town and forgot to straighten it. Corrugated tin leaned into chain-link. Floodlights were burned-out.
A sign that used to say ‘KINGSLEY AUTO’ now read ‘ING LEY O,’ like it was trying to remember who it was. I parked crooked, to be petty, and stepped out into air that tasted like rust and hot rubber. A radio bled classic rock from somewhere in the belly of the shop.
A man in a grease-stained cap looked up from beneath a hood and squinted at me like he was trying to place why his day just got worse.
“You lost?” he asked, already reaching for a rag that was two shades darker than the oil on his hands.
“I’m looking for Kingsley.”
“You found him.”
“I need to ask about my brother,” I said, stepping closer. “Caleb Kane.”
Something moved behind his eyes, but it wasn’t grief. “Don’t know him.”
“That’s funny,” I said, not smiling, “because he knew you. Brought you a rebuilt carb three months ago. Said you paid him cash and ‘no paperwork,’ his words.”
He kept wiping his hands, which were not getting cleaner, but he wouldn’t look at me. “Lot of boys bring me parts. They blur.”
“Ghost,” I said. “His road name.”
The rag stilled. That’s all it took. Footsteps scuffed behind me, and I didn’t have to turn to know I wasn’t alone anymore. Two men fanned out, one to my left, one to my right, like they’d done this before. They probably had.
The one on my left had a scar through his eyebrow that didn’t heal right. The one on my right had a shitty tattoo of barbed wire that disappeared under his sleeve and reappeared at his wrist, like the barbs grew through him.
“You got a lot of nerve,” Kingsley said, finally looking me dead in the eye. “Walking in here and saying that name like it won’t mean trouble.”
“Trouble was already here,” I said. “Along with a fatal dose of Oxy and an insult for a funeral.”
Scar Brow laughed once. It sounded like a bark.
“You Caleb’s girl?”
“Sister.”
“Then you should know better than to be here alone,” Barbed Wire said, though his smile didn’t touch his eyes.
