I sat next to the wreckage of my computer. Small shards of plastic here, bits of coiled wire there. I picked up a piece of meshed metal and held it to the light.
Rico’s voice was gentle. “Did you try calling?”
“He won’t answer his phone.”
I could hear music at the other end of the line. Rico was having a Snowpocalypse party at his apartment, gathering a charmed circle of poets and artists, singers and activists, maybe even a movie star or two. Once I would have been there with him. Instead I sat with my knees against my chest on the floor of my shop, ten minutes past sundown, all alone, with a rising storm outside.
I slumped backwards against the counter. “This sucks.”
“Of course it does. Y’all are all up in each other’s stuff right now. What did you expect?”
“I expected it to get better. But it’s not.” I thumped the back of my head against the wall. “It hurts.”
“Good.”
“Rico!”
“I’m serious. People take all this hard fake stuff and put it on the outside, and that keeps all the soft real stuff safe on the inside, and that is the exact definition of armor, baby girl. And you two have taken it off. And that’s where it gets real. Skin in the game real.”
“This was a little too real.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I was scared.”
“Of what?”
“Trey.”
No response. But the music got quieter, which meant he’d gone into the bedroom and shut the door. “Tell me exactly what happened.”
I explained as best I could. Sometimes with Trey, the rush of anger flared with a different kind of heat, and in the past, I’d responded with a matching, primal hunger. But there had been none of that red-blooded drumbeat this time. This time I’d felt only fear, cold and pure and irresistible. And now I felt a different kind of fear, the anxious kind, the kind that left my heart sore and my throat raw.
“I swear, Rico, I can’t think of him out there by himself, hurting and confused, and me here, stuck in this freaking shop. But I remember that look in his eyes, and I get…Damn it!”
The restless itch started in my legs again. I recognized it from before—the first twinge of a panic attack—and I tried to breathe it down, but that wasn’t happening.
“I have to get outside,” I said.
“What?”
I scrambled to my feet and shoved open the front door. A blast of cold hit me like a slap in the face. The square outside was sheened with snow, the trees heavy with ice, the streetlights tingeing everything a tawny amber. I sucked in a lungful of the crisp air, wet now, sharp as a razor. There wasn’t a single ounce of tobacco in the shop. I’d have smoked anything, even a scuzzy, stale, lint-pocked cigarette from the bottom of my tote bag.
I rubbed my arms. “Jeez, Rico, I gotta get it together.”
“You gotta get your ass back in that shop.”
“In a minute.” I took another breath, relieved when it went all the way in. “It didn’t feel like a betrayal when I did it, any of it. I knew Trey wouldn’t have liked me talking to Kenny by myself, but I didn’t know that was going to lead to the damn Russian mafia, and he had so much else on his mind this morning, and—”
“That’s not why you didn’t tell him, and you know it.”
I kicked the curb, sending a tiny plume of ice and snow into the air. I didn’t argue because he was right. I’d been laying claim like a gold rush prospector—my shop, my parking space, my A&D book, my investigation—all in an effort to control something that couldn’t be controlled, something I couldn’t fight any longer.
The tears started again, and I cursed softly. “Everything’s all mixed up, Rico—Trey and Dexter and the ATF and the cops and that poor girl’s bones. I can’t help thinking that could be me one day, a dusty skeleton shoved in the back of the closet, no name, no resting place, no people to miss me.”
“Careful, baby girl. You’re working yourself into a one-woman pity party.”
I tilted my head back against the brick and blinked back the tears. “I think he killed her, Rico.”
“Who?”
“Braxton Amberdecker. That girl died on Amberdecker land, I know it. What if they made up that story about him disappearing in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain and then hid him out until he died and then buried him in an unmarked grave in those woods? What if that’s why they put his sister in an asylum and destroyed her journals, because she knew the truth?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. That’s a whole lotta ‘what ifs’ there.”
I wrapped my arms tighter around myself. “I swear, once this city unfreezes itself, I’m going to prove it.”
“How?”
“By digging up Braxton Amberdecker.”
“You don’t know where he is.”
“I bet I do, thanks to a tip from a Russian mobster.”
“And where is that?”
“I’ll tell you if I’m right.”
In the square, I saw the headlights on the police car flare bright. Then the blue lights on the dash followed, a kaleidoscopic spin, as the cruiser pulled onto the street.
“So much for that,” I said.
“For what?”
“My sentry just abandoned his post.”
“No surprise, probably got another call. You think these people can’t drive on good days, wait till you see what happens with a little ice on the road.” Rico paused to take a swig of something. “Keep your door locked up there in the boonies. You don’t want things to get all Donner Party and shit.”
I laughed, even if it was half-hearted. Laughter echoed at his end of the call too, his poet friends coming in, wondering where he was. His community. His people. At my end, there was only a silence coming down like the night, and the rising cold.
I went back inside the shop and shut the door, stamping the slush from my feet. And that was when I saw it, the tiny red flicker behind the glass eyes of the stuffed deer. I walked over and stood under it.
Rico’s voice was concerned. “Tai? You still there?”
“I’m here. But I have to go.”
“All right, but you be careful up there all alone.”
“I will,” I said, and hung up.
I didn’t tell him I wasn’t exactly alone anymore.