Val gripped the sides of the police station chair until her knuckles turned white, but her body wouldn’t stop shaking. She swept a continuous flow of tears from her eyes as a detective handed her a Styrofoam cup of water.
“We can’t find another witness to the hit-and-run,” the detective, Johnson, said. He sat down across from Val. “But we’ll keep canvasing the neighborhood and see if any security cameras in the area picked something up.”
“Chet saw it happen,” Val said, her voice hoarse. With a trembling hand, she set the cup down on Johnson’s desk, water untouched. “Chet can confirm that Robby was murdered. Find Chet.”
“A first name and a vague physical description aren’t enough to go on.”
“Then get the phone records from his office! Chet called Robby’s work phone two days ago to say he had information about the Carressa case. Robby works”—she swallowed hard—“worked at Bombay and Price. His father is one of the partners. Trace the call back to Chet’s phone. Do I really have to tell you how to do your fucking job?” God, did Robby’s father know yet? She couldn’t imagine calling him with the news. She couldn’t…
Sten ambled over from where he’d been watching off to the side. He leaned against the wall next to Johnson and looked down at Val. “Slow your roll, Shepherd. South Washington Street is crawling with junkies and gang bangers. People get shot and run over and stabbed there all the time. Robby Price was probably mowed down by some crack whore high off her ass. He wouldn’t be the first. In fact, he wouldn’t even be the first this month.”
Val slammed her fist down on Johnson’s desk, causing water to slop out of the foam cup. “Robby was murdered. There’s no way it’s a coincidence that Robby was run down right as he was about to talk to someone with important information about the death of Max Carressa’s father. Someone didn’t want that meeting to happen. Someone—”
Someone who knew exactly when and where Robby and Chet would meet that evening, something only Robby and Val knew. She’d told Sten about the clown—maybe he’d somehow pieced together what was happening and lain in wait for the right moment to run Robby down? But why? To Val’s knowledge, Sten wasn’t involved in the investigation into Lester Carressa’s death. And Val had seen multiple images of the creepy clown spray painted on buildings around the Seattle waterfront. There was no way he could’ve known which specific image she was looking for.
And why hadn’t she seen Robby die? She might have been able to stop it if she’d known. Val put a hand over her mouth to stifle the sob that jumped up her throat.
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” Johnson said. “We’ll do everything we can to find who did this.”
“You think Robby’s death was a tragic accident, so excuse me if I think you’re full of shit.”
“We’re all sorry your boyfriend died,” Sten said, “but there’s no reason to be rude.”
Val fixed him with a glare that could have melted glass.
“Want me to give you a ride home?” he asked.
The thought of Sten knowing where Val lived turned her stomach. “Screw you,” she said and shot up from her chair, knocking it over. She didn’t know if Sten was involved in Robby’s death, but she definitely didn’t trust him.
“Call me if you want to talk about your feelings,” Sten said to her as she stormed out of the police station.
She thought she heard him snicker.
* * *
Val drove home in a daze, exhausted from the effort to keep her brain functioning enough to make the trip. Hands still shaking, she fumbled with the lock on the front door until it clicked open, then she stumbled over the threshold and up the stairs to their bedroom—just Val’s bedroom now. She collapsed onto the bed and sobbed into Robby’s pillow, still ripe with his smell.
Why hadn’t she seen him die in her vision? She’d seen hundreds of people die, some people she knew and some she didn’t. None of it she’d wanted to see, but she’d seen it nonetheless. The vast majority of it she couldn’t change, but sometimes, very rarely, she could—she still felt a rush of anxiety every time Stacey mentioned getting on a boat for any reason. But like her poor sister’s death, Val hadn’t seen this coming. Maybe she hadn’t wanted to see it. Maybe she hadn’t seen him die because subconsciously she couldn’t stand to know. Just like she’d done to her sister, she’d let him die because deep down she was a coward.
Val curled into a ball on her bed. She stayed there until the sky went dark and then light again, and didn’t move even as her phone began to ring off the hook. At some point she heard a knock at the door, then a click as it opened, followed by Stacey’s trembling voice.
“Val? Are you here?”
Val didn’t answer. The stairs creaked as Stacey ascended them and appeared in the doorway to Val’s bedroom.
“Oh my God, Val, I am so sorry.”
Stacey lay next to Val and hugged her. Val cried into her friend’s chest until it seemed all the liquid in her body had escaped through her tears. The sky grew dark again, and finally Val couldn’t ignore the call of nature. With the effort of a person half dead, she dragged herself out of bed and into the bathroom. Stacey helped her undress and she took a long, hot shower, letting the water scald her skin as if it had the power to wash her guilt away. Afterward, she pulled on a pair of pajamas and fell into bed again. She heard Stacey talking on the phone to Val’s father, then Robby’s sister, then Stacey’s girlfriend, until the house was once again cloaked in night.
Through a haze, Val awoke with the rising sun in her eyes. The gnaw of hunger pulled her out of bed, and she descended the staircase feeling like a popped balloon floating down through the clouds to the ground. Stacey sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, playing with her cell phone. Her head snapped up when she heard movement at the kitchen’s entrance.
“Val,” Stacey said, and rose to hug her. “Are you hungry?”
“I don’t know.” Val’s throat felt like she’d spent the night swallowing sand. “I think so.”
“Sit down, I’ll make you some toast.”
Val slouched into a chair and watched her friend shove a couple pieces of bread into the toaster oven. Stacey’s phone vibrated against the tabletop and she scowled at it.
“Goddamn Natasha’s going nuts,” Stacey said. “She doesn’t understand this whole ‘friend in need’ thing. Thinks I’m cheating on her and keeps calling. If she weren’t smoking hot, I’d have dumped her crazy ass by now.”
Val’s face twitched into a slight smile. “I am technically your ex.”
“She doesn’t need to know that. She’s jealous enough as it is.”
“And I thought your girlfriend’s name was Kat.”
“That’s the other one.”
“How am I supposed to keep track when their names change every couple months?”
“I use mnemonic devices. ‘At the coffee shop for a chat is where I met Kat.’”
The toaster dinged, and Stacey buttered the warm bread, put it on a plate, and placed it in front of Val.
“How are you?” Stacey asked in a hushed voice. She took a seat next to Val.
“Still alive.” Biting into a corner of the bread, she savored the melted butter that slid down her throat.
“What do you think happened?”
Val shook her head. “I don’t know. In my vision, Robby crossed the street safely and talked to Chet. My visions don’t always happen exactly like I see them, but I can’t believe that of all the death I foretell, I didn’t see his. Just like my sister.” Her eyes blurred with tears.
“This isn’t your fault,” Stacey said, taking Val’s hand.
“He wouldn’t have been on South Washington Street if I didn’t tell him to be there.”
“You can’t save everyone. Sometimes the universe just decides it’s your time.”
For a moment Val saw Stacey’s face suspended in water, lifeless eyes wide open and mouth locked in a silent scream.
“No,” Val said, wiping the image from her thoughts. “It wasn’t random. Robby was murdered. I don’t know how someone could have known exactly when and where he’d be in order to run him down, or why they’d want him dead, but I’m going to find out.”
Val finished her toast and realized she was hungry for more. With food in her belly and a sense of purpose came a newfound energy. The fog lifted from her mind.
“I’d like some time alone, Stacey.”
“Do you need help?” she asked with a hint of enthusiasm. Natasha would’ve flown into a rage if she knew Stacey meant the kind of help that might jumpstart a useful vision.
Val declined, and Stacey shrugged. “Okay, if you’re sure,” she said like it was no big deal, though Val saw a hint of disappointment in her eyes. Their old intimate relationship was long dead, but it was hard not to idolize your first romantic experience. They’d almost rekindled it once before, and now Stacey held a candle for what could have been. It was Val’s fault. At the time, it had been the only way to save Stacey’s life without ruining it. But changing the future came with a price, and the consequences lingered.
“I need time to think,” Val said. “Thanks for everything you’ve done for me these last couple days. I don’t think I’d be out of bed if it weren’t for you.”
“That’s a lie. You were always the strong one. You’ll get through this.”
They hugged, and Stacey slipped out the door.
Val paced around the house for the rest of the day, watching TV and eating junk food, rebuilding her mental and physical energy. Finding Chet was her priority, but she had no leads on where he could be. She could try to backtrack from the clown graffiti to where Chet’s bike had been stolen, ask around for him and hope someone was willing to talk, but that was a long shot. She knew what she had to do. She wasn’t looking forward to it.
Val propped her laptop on her bedroom nightstand and stripped off her clothes. After rummaging through a box in the back of her closet, she found her old vibrator, confirmed the batteries still worked, and grabbed a tube of lube from the bathroom medicine cabinet. She worked hard to ignore Robby’s toiletries, still propped next to the sink where he’d left them. Then she lay down on the bed and cued up a porno video on her computer, Back Door Babes 3—a little vulgar, but she wanted quick and dirty, to get it over with.
Val hit Play on the video, lubed up her vibrator, and turned it up to max. She touched the head to herself and rubbed it against her outer folds to the moans of the movie. Robby’s caresses snuck into her thoughts, but she banished them. If she thought about Robby, she’d dissolve into a puddle of tears again, and she’d be no closer to finding his killer. No, she needed to pretend like she was someone else, one of the women in the video being rammed from behind by a hairy man with an eight-inch cock and loving every minute of it. She pushed the vibrator into herself and focused on the porn star’s squeals of pleasure. She licked her lips and thrust the vibrator in time with the movie, imagining she was the one bent over, his thighs slapping into hers, rubbing her clitoris, begging him to fuck her harder in a relentless rush to the climax. Val writhed on the bed and felt herself at orgasm’s sweet edge.
“Where are you, Chet?” she said with ragged breath as her body climaxed and her mind snapped away—
Chet sits at a table in a Chinese restaurant, a hole-in-the-wall with stained wallpaper and caterwauling music piped in through a scratchy sound system. He eats a dumpling with chopsticks and laughs with friends whose faces I can’t see.
Blur.
Chet pees in a filthy toilet in a nightclub, ripped posters and graffiti covering black-painted walls, while two men grunt in a stall next to him as they have sex.
Blur.
Chet sputters as the life drains out of him and into a shag carpet, pools of blood blooming from underneath his back, pawing at the bullet holes in his chest until his hands go still.
Val gasped and her vision cleared, back in her bedroom again. Funk music played as the porno movie credits rolled. Chet might live somewhere near a Chinese restaurant—there were several dozen in the Seattle area. He might frequent a gay nightclub—also dozens in the Seattle area. She’d seen nothing of value in her vision, nothing to get her closer to finding Chet, nothing to help her bring Robby’s murderer to justice.
“Goddammit!” Val threw her vibrator across the room. It crashed into a picture on the wall and fell to the ground amid shattered glass. A wave of hopelessness consumed her, and she burst into tears again. Why had she been given this horrible ability? It was a curse—a curse that killed a good person, a kind and decent soul, the man she loved.
She wallowed in her pain until a harsh voice from the back of her mind scolded her for giving in to despair. Moping around the house and crying all day wasn’t getting her any closer to finding Robby’s killer. She had to pull herself together, if only for Robby’s sake.
Val sat up in bed and took deep breaths until her tears abated and her mind focused like a keen blade on the real task at hand. She was a crack private investigator, dammit. Her visions were a convenient tool, but she didn’t need them to do her job, or to find Chet.
Val rose and bathed, threw on jeans and a long-sleeved V-neck shirt, then slipped on her vintage brown leather jacket on her way out the door. A glimpse of herself in the mirror confirmed her eyes were still ringed with red and her cheeks hollow, but her gaze was sharp enough to demand answers when she started asking questions. Her only connection between Robby and Chet was Maxwell Carressa. If she couldn’t find Chet, then she’d go to the source himself.