Wayward

by Gregory Ashe

  Melissa stared at him for a minute, breathing hard through her nose, and then pushed past him and headed for the Corvette. “Close the door and don’t talk to him.”

  It wasn’t a suggestion; it was an order.

  Hazard kept his eyes on Josh, although he angled his body so that Melissa moved in his peripheral vision. The blond man shrugged, his face coloring, and shut the door. The bolt thudded into the frame. Behind Hazard, the Corvette rumbled to life, and Melissa peeled away with a screech of burning rubber.

  Hazard had just gotten a lot more interested in this case.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MARCH 27

  WEDNESDAY

  10:42 AM

  SOMERS STARED AT HIS COMPUTER. When the monitor switched into power-saving mode, he wiggled the mouse, and it turned on again. Every once in a while, he’d put his hands on the keyboard and type a burst of letters. And then he’d pick at the bandages on his burned fingers and go back to staring.

  “A burger,” Dulac said from the other side of the desk. The younger detective’s face was screwed up in freckled worry, which was almost worse than the normal barrage of frattery that Somers had to endure.

  On Somers’s monitor, instructions for a baked Alaska displayed on the screen. He wasn’t really sure how he’d gotten to this page. He wasn’t a baker. Hazard had talked about trying to make a baked Alaska, but not recently. It had been January, maybe. They’d gone for a walk in Hampstead Park, which was barely a park at all, just a crescent of land capped by an eroded levee. But the levee made for good sledding, and Hazard had wanted to take Evie sledding, and something about the way their breaths had steamed in the air had made Hazard think of baked Alaska, and—

  “Ok,” Dulac said, “a drink. I know it’s early, but we’ll get food, and then it’ll be fine. One beer. Maybe two.”

  Somers made a noncommittal noise and wiggled the mouse again. He’d lost his place in the recipe’s instructions. For some reason, he kept drifting when he got to step four: make meringue. Every time he read through the recipe, he got to the part where he was supposed to be whipping egg whites with cream of tartar, and then his brain would fizzle, and he’d be nowhere, not in the station, not making a meringue, not even inside his own head. He started reading from the top again. Step one: coat a metal bowl in vegetable oil.

  “Maybe something sweet?” Dulac kept pushing away from his desk and then pulling himself back, the office chair rattling on its casters. “A donut? Oh, a piece of cake. You’re always buying that chocolate fudge cake. I’ll get you that.” He snatched up his keys and pushed off from his desk. “I’ll be right back. You’ll feel better, I promise.”

  “That’s Emery’s favorite cake. It’s not for me. It’s for Emery.”

  Dulac stopped, turned. “Oh, hey. You’re not comatose.”

  Somers dropped his head onto his keyboard, letters depressing under him, the square shapes of the keys digging into his face. He wasn’t comatose, not technically, but he wanted to be comatose. Or maybe he just wanted to be really, really drunk. In the past, when he’d felt this shitty, he’d just buddied up with Jose Cuervo and a few of the guys, because being drunk was better than feeling shitty about himself, and because feeling so hungover he wanted to die was also better than feeling this level of shitty about himself. But drinking had fucked up two of his relationships; even if Somers wasn’t an alcoholic in the extreme sense, abusing alcohol had cost him just about enough already, thank you very much.

  Except last night, his second night in the Hare and Tortoise, it had been hard to remember that. He’d been lying on the double bed in the cramped room—a decent size room, actually, just crammed full of Alice-in-Wonderland-themed plush toys. Lots of Mad Hatters. And, of course, lots of March Hares.

  On his first night, Somers had made the kind of discovery that nightmares are made of. He’d been poking around the room, feeling like shit and desperate for a distraction, when he’d knocked loose the register from the cold air return. Somers had gone to replace it, only to spot something in the vent. Someone—perhaps Mrs. Stead, who owned and ran the bed and breakfast; perhaps a guest, which seemed much more likely on Somers’s second night in the room—had stuffed a dozen Mock Turtles into the cold air return. One of them had a dinner fork through its head. Somers had emptied them from the air return and hidden them under the bed. He had fallen asleep almost immediately afterward, which seemed like a miracle in retrospect.

  On the second night, though, he had lain there, thinking. About Hazard, of course. And Somers’s parents. But it was like his brain was one of those old slide projectors, the kind a few of the teachers had still used when he’d been in high school, and for a while everything would work right, the images clicking and shuttling through Somers’s brain—Hazard’s face, the look of shock bleeding into betrayal—and then a slide would get jammed, caught at an angle, so that his brain held only the distorted image of a tiny bottle of Tanqueray, squirreled away in the mini bar across the room. And, of course, it wasn’t tequila. But it was better than nothing.

  Somehow, though, Somers had made it through the second night of listening to the old house, listening to Mrs. Stead’s clunking steps, the low murmur of the television in the common room. Once, Mrs. Stead had banged something—a pan on the stove, he had guessed later—and Somers had sat up, heart wild in his chest, sweat breaking out all over him. He had almost done it then, almost gone across the room and ripped the door off that mini fridge.

  And now, this morning, he had to deal with Dulac.

  “Head up,” Dulac said. “Come on, quick, before someone sees. You got yourself on one of those tentacle porn sites.”

  “What?” Somers said, coming up to stare blearily at the screen. It was still the baked Alaska recipe.

  “No, no more falling down. You’re up. Stay up. Let’s talk about this like adults. You don’t need to feel bad for choosing to help your dad with something important. Emery doesn’t have any right to make you feel awful about yourself, ok? He’s treating you like shit, and you don’t deserve that.”

  “Are you the same guy who refused to tell me how he’d gotten himself kicked out of his boyfriend’s trailer?”

  “Yep.”

  “And the same guy who told me it sounded, and I quote, ‘fucking awful’ to do basic relationship maintenance like talking, taking responsibility, and apologizing?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Then fuck off, Gray. I want to have a pity party. I’m going to have a pity party.”

  Dulac’s eyes widened, and he stepped back, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Yeah, dude. Um. Sorry. I just—you’re upset, and I don’t like seeing you like this.”

  Letting his head settle on the keyboard again, Somers closed his eyes. It didn’t make any difference; he could keep track of Dulac just by the noises the other man made: the soft scuff of his shoes as he crept away, the creak of his chair, the rattle of the casters hitting an uneven spot in the linoleum. Those noises mingled with all the normal sounds of the station: the coffee maker percolating, the whir of the copier, the fax machine’s garbled screech, and from the front, querulous voices. Dick Greaves, maybe. Sixty-six years old and the proud new recipient of Social Security, Big Dick—which is what Somers and his friends had called him when they’d been growing up and Dick’s Electronics had occupied a storefront on Jefferson—had found a new hobby in retirement: enforcing municipal codes that had to do with leaf and lawn care. He’d probably been out with a ruler again, measuring his neighbor’s grass.

  After a few minutes, though, the angry voices moved closer, coming into the stationhouse proper. Toward the bullpen, actually. It must have been something more serious, something that required the use of one of the vacant desks—a more in-depth conversation or consultation. Words became clear as the voices came towards Somers.

  “I won’t have that cum-breath private detective messing up my whole life, ok? I’m just not going to have it. I’m a nice guy, ok? I
haven’t done anything wrong. And he showed up on my doorstep, out of nowhere, like, I’ve never seen this asshole before, and he threatens me. Threatens me. I should be suing him, right? That’s like emotional damages or something like that. I mean, you tell me. You tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

  Somers raised his head and glanced over his shoulder. He recognized Joshua Dobbs from the custody transfer two days before; today, the blond guy wore joggers and a Mizzou Tigers sweatshirt, and he kept adjusting his Blues hat, tugging it from side to side by the bill.

  “Mr. Dobbs,” said Janie Carlson, a slim, dark-haired uniformed officer who held a clipboard to take down Josh’s complaint. “I can’t offer you legal advice. I can take down your complaint and look into it. I can also talk to you about some other options you might have. If Mr. Hazard—”

  Somers almost shot out of his seat, but somehow Dulac had already come around the desk and pressed him back into the chair.

  “Be cool, dude,” Dulac whispered. “He knows you. Let me.”

  It was hard; the welter of thoughts and emotions stirred up by Hazard’s name made it hard for Somers to think anything clearly. But after a moment, he nodded.

  Dulac drifted across the room, cool and casual, to stand by Carlson. “What’s the problem?”

  Josh repeated the complaint, expounding on why Hazard was such an asshole, but all Somers could really get out of it was that Hazard had approached Josh, asked to talk to him, and then left after Josh slammed the door in his face.

  To his credit, Dulac did a good job handling the whole situation. He nodded. He made conciliatory noises. At the right moment, he muttered under his breath, “Jesus,” like he’d never heard anything that shocking before. Josh cycled for a while, the whole performance on the edge of hysteria, and Dulac coasted there with him: not encouraging, not exactly, but letting it play out. Even in the midst of his own personal turmoil, Somers could appreciate the deft handling.

  “Listen,” Dulac said when Josh finally wound down. “We take this kind of thing very seriously. Look at Officer Carlson; she’s taking this very seriously. I’m taking it very seriously.”

  Carlson nodded very seriously.

  “I’m going to keep a record of this conversation. And I’m personally going to have a conversation with Mr. Hazard about this, understand?”

  “Is there some sort of paperwork—”

  Dulac shook his head. “We’ve got everything we need right now. If Mr. Hazard’s not cooperative, we’ll talk about next steps.”

  “My friend said—I mean, I was thinking about taking out an order of protection.”

  “Hey, that’s something,” Dulac said. “Most people just call them restraining orders.”

  “Can you just tell me how to do that? I think there’s just a form, right? And then—”

  Interrupting him with a low whistle, Dulac shook his head. “Hold on. You don’t want to open the big guns, not yet. The judge is going to take one look at it, he’s going to see a single incident, and he’s going to ball it up and make a three-pointer with it, get me? So just hold on. If it comes to that, you want to do it right.”

  “Yeah, I guess. My friend was just saying—I mean, I think I read that you can get like an ex parte order, and it’s kind of automatic, fifteen days or something. I just want some breathing room.”

  “Walk with me,” Dulac said, buddy slapping Josh’s shoulder and taking a step toward the front of the building. “Let’s talk about it. You’re getting pressure at home, huh? No, you don’t have to say anything. Just picture this, though: you head down to the county courthouse. You stand in line until a clerk can help you. You get the form. And you know this is a small town, right? I mean, everybody’s walking around, checking you out. Somebody asks the clerk what you were filling out.”

  “But that’s confidential,” Josh objected, the voices growing more distant as they left the bullpen.

  “Sure,” Dulac said with a laugh. “Until she’s under a hair dryer at Roberto’s. I’m just pointing out . . .”

  By then, the voices had thinned past the point of hearing; as soon as Somers was sure Josh wasn’t going to double back, he got up from his seat, grabbed his jacket, and headed for the side exit.

  “You want to be the one who arrests Hazard?” Carlson called after him. “I wish I could arrest some of my exes.”

  Somers ignored her; he wished he could ignore the sting in his gut as easily. Wahredua was a small town, and gossip spread like a gasoline fire in a small town. He wasn’t sure who his father had told to get the story rolling, but word of the separation had raced ahead of Somers. Everywhere he’d gone in the last two days, he’d gotten a mixture of superficial sympathy, self-satisfied amusement, and satisfaction. After all, seemed to be the general consensus, you couldn’t have expected it to turn out any other way.

  Hitting the side door with his shoulder, he emerged onto the smoking pad tucked up against the side of the stationhouse, complete with two mildewed vinyl chairs and a planter of dead mums, the brittle stalks ornamented with cigarette butts. The spring day was warm and clear, a few cotton-candy clouds hanging over their reflections in the river. When Somers took a deep breath, instead of the smell of hot toner and burnt coffee from the station, he got clean spring air laced with old tobacco. He jogged across the lot, opened the trunk of his car, and pretended to move things around until he heard footsteps behind him.

  He didn’t have a plan, not exactly. This was the kind of thing that would have made Hazard groan if they were still partners. But Josh’s reaction to Hazard showing up to question him didn’t sit right with Somers. Somers’s first assessment of Josh Dobbs had been when he’d finalized the custody transfer and delivered Josh’s daughter to her new home. Josh had been lying on the sofa in the great room, legs hanging over the arm of the sofa as he scrolled on his phone. Josh hadn’t sat up to greet his daughter. Josh hadn’t sat up. Period. He’d just kept scrolling through the phone. He had leaned over to kiss the little girl when she came running over to him, but that had been it. It had been Josh’s parents, the icy petite blonde and the painfully overweight ex-athlete, who had pretended to be thrilled to have the little girl back.

  For a guy who couldn’t be troubled to get his ass off the couch after winning a custody battle, Josh sure had his panties in a knot. What had gotten him so worked up today? Obviously Hazard and the possibility of questions, but Somers didn’t even know why Hazard had wanted to talk to him. Whatever it was, Somers wanted to figure it out. Not just because it gave him an excuse to talk to Hazard—or, at least, not primarily because of that. Somers wanted to know because he hadn’t liked moving Dolly Dobbs out of her home with her grandparents. He hadn’t liked it at all, in fact.

  The footsteps moved toward the public lot, coming even with Somers and then moving past him. Somers risked a glance; Josh was walking fast, tapping on his phone, his attention fixed on the screen. Somers left the trunk open and hurried after him; he kept his steps as quiet as possible, but he didn’t think it mattered. People and their phones; Samantha Vore, fifty-three and with a bad case of gout, had walked into a bus on Market Street just the week before. Not in front of. Into. She’d been on her phone, and the bus had been idling, and she walked smack into the side of it. In case Josh glanced back, though, Somers took out his phone and pretended to pay attention to it. He opened a text message to Hazard and typed Hey!

  Ahead of Somers, Josh put the phone to his ear and said, “I said I didn’t want to talk about it.” Angry breathing. “No, you never listen to me. You think just because of your job, you know—” On the street, an aging Silverado drove past, the suspension groaning in time with the Lil Yachty song blaring over its radio, and Somers swore under his breath as the noise drowned out Josh’s conversation.

  When the truck cleared the next intersection, Somers caught the fragment of a sentence. “—you’re my best friend. I don’t care. I don’t. And you shouldn’t either. Stuff like this, we’re suppos
ed to have each other’s backs. Yes, I told them. I know you think you’re the expert on legal stuff, but—you’re not listening to me. They didn’t really seem like they cared. I mean, they put on a good show, but—no, I’m not getting the restraining order. That’ll just make him look at me more closely. Will you stop it? You’re supposed to be my best friend. Can you have my back on this, please?” They were passing a café with patio seating, and Josh froze at whatever he heard on the phone, and then he delivered a hard kick to the closest chair and sent it skittering across the sidewalk. “Great, well, I hope you feel ‘really calm’ about this when he wants to talk to you. Because he will. He’s the guy that’s solved all those murders. He’s not stupid. No, don’t you—” He cut off with a strangled scream and dropped the phone to his side.

  Somers kept going, head down over his phone, and passed Josh without looking up. It was hard to tell in just his peripheral vision, but Somers was pretty sure Josh hadn’t even noticed him. He looked too distraught from the phone call to notice anything else.

  Still no reply from Hazard; Somers checked the intersection, jogged across, and cut down toward Market Street and the Grand Rivere. He needed to circle the block and get back to the stationhouse, but the spring day was too nice, and his blood was up after following Josh and catching the conversation. He sent a quick message to Dulac, telling him he’d be back in a few, and then he caught a break in traffic on Market Street—one of the main thoroughfares in Wahredua, with historic brick storefronts that blended shopping and dining and drinking. Hazard’s office was on Market Street near the end of the stretch of businesses; their first apartment was on Market Street too.

  On the bank of the Grand Rivere, the ground sloped gently toward the water: neatly trimmed grass ended where a low bluff tumbled into cattails and nettles and a strip of sand and stone. Ancient wooden park benches were spaced evenly here, facing the rippling mirror of the water. Up close, the clouds were bigger in their reflection, like a whole separate world was tumbling along underneath the river. People had felt that way about mirrors for a long time, Somers knew. Underwater cities; alternate dimensions. Through the looking glass—was that Carroll? You could look in a mirror, see yourself, really see yourself, and somehow that seeing was your undoing because you came away different. Your whole world turned inside out.