SILENTLY, QUICK AND fluid, I swept through the woods toward the parking lot, trying to formulate a plan, but none would come when I didn’t know what the threat was, or even if there was one at all. When I’d almost reached the gravel, I veered off toward the Dumpsters. I found them and crouched behind, ignoring the stench of who-knew-how-old garbage that lined their insides.
Squinting through the crack between the two Dumpsters, and past the gold sparkles that were now blooming in the air like fireflies, I was able to see my car. It wasn’t that far away. I could close the gap in just a few long strides. I moved to the far end of the Dumpsters and poked my head around the corner. I didn’t see another car anywhere.
I no longer heard footsteps, either.
I let out a breath and eased out from behind the Dumpster.
Two steps away from it, someone slammed into me from behind. A hand closed over my mouth, an arm snaking around my throat, forcing out a muffled grunt. I was instantly paralyzed with surprise and fear.
“Don’t fight me,” a man’s voice said right behind my ear.
There was something about the word fight that must have kicked my subconscious into motion. The part of me that had been kicking the shit out of sparring dummies for five years took over.
I stomped the arch of his right foot with everything I had, then immediately followed it with a mule kick to the groin. A burst of air flew past my ear as his grip loosened around my mouth. I could just about hear Gunner in my head, shouting, Move, move! You have the momentum now, don’t give it up! Without giving the man even a second to recover, I jammed my elbow into his ribs, hard, then peeled his hand off my mouth.
“Fuck!” he wheezed.
But he was saying this on the way down. I twisted his hand into a wrist lock, popped his jaw with my elbow, and dropped him to the ground.
That was when I saw who I was dealing with.
Gibson Talley.
My insides turned to jelly, but I didn’t stop. Instead, dread gave my muscles an extra burst of energy. Growling, I forced his arm into an arm lock and flipped him over to his stomach, leaning into him with every ounce of body weight I had.
He yelled again, struggling against me. I jammed the arm up higher, using pain to equalize our size difference.
I was out of breath but felt strangely invigorated. “What do you want?” I panted. My eyes darted toward my car. The scuffle had taken me several feet away from it, and what was worse, my keys were still in my pocket. I didn’t know if I could outrun him. I would have to fight him if I let him go.
He turned his face to the side, his eyes squeezed shut in a wince, blood wetting his lips where I’d elbowed him.
“Answer me,” I said, giving his arm an extra shove. I thought I might have felt a pop in his shoulder. “Why are you here?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing,” he said. “And why were you at the studio? And my apartment? Stop! Stop!”
I laughed in his face. “You attack me from behind, and now you want me to stop? I don’t think so, dude. You’re lucky I left you conscious.” I thought I could probably knock someone unconscious, but I’d never done it before, which made my threat mostly bravado, but he had stopped squirming, so it must have been believable. I supposed any threat was believable when someone had your shoulder half out of its socket. “Now answer my question. Why did you come here? Did you follow me?”
“Okay, okay,” he said, going completely limp. “Yes. I followed you.”
“Were you going to beat me up like you did Peyton?” I shifted my weight so that my knee was on top of his twisted wrist.
“No.” He stopped, swallowed, squeezed his eyes shut with pain, opened them again. “I was going to threaten you. I didn’t touch Peyton. I had nothing to do with what happened to her.”
I laughed again. “You expect me to believe that? I saw what you said on Facebook. I saw Peyton’s email. I heard what you said about her. ‘She’s nothing’? ‘What more do you want me to do about her?’ Sound familiar?”
“I know,” he said. “You sicced the fucking cops on me, too. Vee told me all about it after that detective showed up at my apartment. Storming in all questions and bullshit.”
“Martinez arrested you?”
“No, man, he didn’t have anything on me. I didn’t do it. I have an alibi. Two of them, actually. I was at band practice that night.”
I considered this. “Vee would give you a false alibi. She’s in on the threats, too. Besides, I saw you at the hospital. I heard the conversation at the studio. I know you want Peyton out of the picture for some reason. And I have the guitar strap with the blood on it. How did that get in her car?” His arm had begun slipping down again, so I renewed the grip, shoving it up farther and eliciting a new roar of pain from him.
“What the fuck are you talking about? Yeah, I showed up at the hospital. So did all her other friends. And I gave Peyton the guitar strap to celebrate her first tattoo. It’s got blood on it because the tat was fresh when she first tried it on. I’m telling you, why would I want to hurt Peyton?”
“She did something to you,” I said. My breath was coming slower now, and the gold fireworks had begun to subside, but the gray and black were still there, still undulating in the gravel. I still didn’t feel like I had the upper hand. As much as I hated to think it, even to myself, his story made sense.
“Yeah.” He spit a wad of blood onto the gravel next to his face. I leaned in on him harder. “God! Bitch! Yeah, she walked out on us, okay? She was our songwriter. And when she left the band, she took the songs with her. Even the ones I cowrote. Those are half mine—she had no right to take them. And I haven’t been able to write since. We have no singer, no songs. We had a meeting with a producer, and she fucked us. The guy worked for her dad. Big money. Huge. She said she didn’t want anything to do with blood money, and she walked away. We were going to make it to the big time, and she left us hanging. And now I’m stuck being a nothing in a shit apartment, and it’s all Peyton’s fault. So, yeah, I’ve been pissed. But not pissed enough to want her dead, man.”
“When?” I asked. “When did this happen? When did she take everything and screw you over?”
“I don’t know, about two weeks ago. Right around the same time she cut her hair and got the tattoo. She moved into my apartment complex, too, but she wouldn’t even fucking answer her door when I tried to talk to her. It was like she had this enormous freak-out all of a sudden. A nervous breakdown or something. I knew she was nuts. Should’ve never let her into the band. I have video of our band practice the night she got attacked. Time-stamped video. I was at practice. And now we don’t know what happens to those songs if she dies. Maybe it seems selfish or some shit, but I don’t want to be where I am right now forever. Dude, I was pissed, but I didn’t want her dead.”
It didn’t make sense. None of this made sense. But then again, it made total sense. Everything he said added up. Added up into blazing orangish-pink innocence.
“Jesus,” I whispered.
“Let me up,” he said. “My arm!”
“But what about the bracelet?” I asked, more to myself than to him at that point.
“What bracelet? What are you talking about?” he said, his voice laced with equal parts agony and anger.
“I found your bracelet in Peyton’s car. It’s got blood on it, and the clasp is smashed. You moved her car, didn’t you?”
“I’ve never owned any fucking bracelet!” he roared.
“Don’t lie to me,” I said. “I’ve seen it in the photo. . . .”
But as I said the words aloud, I flashed onto the photo that I’d seen the bracelet in. It wasn’t one of the band photos after all. It was one of the photos from Peyton’s suitcase. The man and woman embraced in a deep kiss, the man’s hand cupping low on the woman’s waist, his bracelet the only thing about him visible.
He might have been only a silhouette in the photo, but there was one thing about the man that was clear. He didn’t have a Mohawk. Gibson Talley’s signature look.
“Shit,” I said.
“Yeah, shit,” Gibson cried with another agonized grunt. He wriggled again, almost getting out of my grasp. “Now let me go.”
Someone else had been in Peyton’s car the night of her attack. Someone else had hidden it, had lost his broken bracelet in the backseat while removing the memory card from her camera. Someone else had moved her.
That someone else was the man in the photo.
But how on earth would I ever figure out who he was?
“I said let me up, goddamn it!” Gibson shouted, wriggling with such force now I could barely hang on. If I didn’t make a move soon, he would be out of my grip. And pissed. And gunning for me.
I resituated myself and put all my weight on my knee, which pinned his wrist in the high middle of his back. With my free hand, I reached over until I found a good-sized chunk of concrete that had been chewed up at the edge of the parking lot.
“Sorry,” I said. I swung the rock down on the side of Gibson’s head, making him go limp.