Hold Me Closer, Necromancer - Lish McBride [59]
He didn’t comment or ask if I was okay. I guess as a cop he’d seen worse. “You pick a fight with Freddy Krueger?”
I shook my head and pulled my shirt back down. “I don’t know what he used.”
Dunaway leaned forward in his chair, squinting. “You mind if I take some pictures before I leave?”
“Suit yourself.”
“Can I ask why you didn’t come to us?”
I shrugged, a movement I instantly regretted as the pain shot up my back. “With what?” I said. “Some crazy guy jumped us? We didn’t see much,” I lied. “And, no offense, but most of our exposure to cops involves problems with us and our skateboards.” I kept myself from shrugging again. “We just wanted to go home and lock the door, you know?”
To my surprise, it looked as if he did. “Have you seen this guy since then?”
“No.”
“Why?” Ramon asked. “This guy hurt Brooke or something?”
Dunaway suddenly let out a breath that made him look five years older. “Your friend Brooke was murdered sometime late Tuesday night.” He looked at both of us. “We haven’t released her name or anything to the press yet, for the family’s sake among other things, so I want you boys to keep this to yourselves, okay?”
I closed my eyes and leaned into the couch, ignoring my back. Of course, Brooke’s death wasn’t a shock—her head was in my closet—but now that I no longer had to pretend I didn’t know about the murder, it felt like a release of sorts. My muscles let the secret go, and in its place I found a bone-aching sadness. Brooke was gone. Not completely, sure, but a talking head couldn’t fill the girl-sized hole in my life. I would never see her at work. I would never see her change and grow into the devastating woman we all knew she’d be. Ramon and I had both held a secret pride knowing that someday Brooke would be unleashed on the bar scene and that she’d take no prisoners. Our own little heartbreaker. And now that would never happen. Anger burned away the sadness.
“I’m sorry,” Dunaway said, and I could tell from his tone that he meant it.
I nodded with my eyes closed. Weren’t we all?
Dunaway took a few snapshots of my face and back before he left. He also took what was left of Ramon’s skateboard. He told us he’d probably talk to us again. Ramon, Frank, and I held the dubious honor of being the last people to see Brooke intact. They had a few shots of her on a camera at a self-checkout line in a grocery store after that, but that was it. Luckily, Mrs. W could vouch for us coming home. Though we could have followed her home, I think Dunaway suspected that the killer had been waiting for Brooke at her house. I suspected he was right.
Ramon went to class, promising Brooke he’d be back with Frank to keep her company. I called work. Going into Plumpy’s was the last thing I wanted to do right now. Brooke’s death made a pretty good excuse. I didn’t have time to waste at work anyway. Douglas’s deadline ticked away in my brain, and I was nowhere near a solution. But I did have a destination.
16
Papa was a Rolling Stone
I had to drive onto the ferry because I didn’t want to muck about with the bus system, if there was one, on Bainbridge Island. Bainbridge is a fancy place, chock-full of natural beauty and the kind of people who can afford natural beauty. The kind of people who don’t really need bus systems. Besides, I wanted to get in and out and on the next ferry as soon as possible.
I hadn’t talked to my biological father since the divorce, which was fine by me. He got a new wife, and I assumed new kids, and started over without so much as a backward wave in my direction. My mom doesn’t bad-mouth him; she thought I should form my own ideas about people, so she’d stuck to the old “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” routine. The fact that she never had anything to say about him told me that Kevin Hatfield was not a nice man.
I was angry at the abandonment, but it was an old anger—the calcified pain from when my life was broken. An emotional bone spur. I tried not to think about it. The fact was, all I had were hazy memories of him. I