—pressed down on him.This sick-sour heat flared to life every time he inhaled, and it reminded him of—
Ammon.
—what it felt like when he needed to puke.
Heart racing.Sweat popping out.The room tightening.Get up.Move.Run.
It was too much.
And then it was like a fever breaking, and the worst of it washed away.What was left, he packed up.He wanted to laugh.Fucking Ammon.
Hours later, when Tean got out of bed and dressed quietly, when Scipio’s tail thumped with sleepy interest and Tean whispered a command, Jem rolled over, eyes closed, until the back door shut.He wasn’t asleep.He wasn’t awake.It was some middle ground where thoughts ran round and round his head.And what he thought was that one day, his mom had just been gone.She’d never said goodbye.
6
At Little Dick’s the next day, the morning was quiet.Jem did what he usually did—pretended to work at his cubicle while he played on his phone.Tried to play on his phone.He felt like he was moving through a haze, and sometimes, when he turned his head too quickly, the room tilted for a fraction of a second.
It didn’t help that the place was such a mindfuck.The dealership showroom was a huge, high-ceilinged room with walls of windows and vinyl-tile flooring.Everything echoed—every movement, every word, every squeak of a sneaker.And the HVAC system was loud too, filling the space with white noise so that everyone ended up trying to make themselves heard over it, and it felt like they were always shouting.The cubicles, with their nubby beige fabric walls, provided no privacy and even less of an escape.Brian, who worked in the cubicle next to Jem’s, liked to stand, which let him see over the wall, and start up a conversation with Jem, like Jem wasn’t trying to watch YouTube or playPUBGor zone the fuck out and pretend he was literally anywhere else.But Brian wasn’t the real problem.The real problem was Little Dick.
Little Dick, as far as Jem could tell, liked two things: money, and getting his ass sucked.The money he got from padding payment plans and adding bullshit services like pinstriping and making his sales team pass the costs on to the customers—which, for the most part, Jem didn’t mind, except that the money was going to Little Dick.The ass-sucking, though—well, Little Dick wanted that from his team.
“You should have seen this chick,” Little Dick was saying in the next cubicle.“Tits out to here.I swear to God.Tits out to here.”
Brian laughed.“No way.No way.”
“For real.And she kept looking at me, and I knew what she wanted, but I wasn’t sure, you know?Because she was like a four or a five and kind of fat.”
“Easy meat, man,” Brian said, laughing again.Brian was always laughing.“You’re a killer.You clean up out there.”
Little Dick’s little dick probably got hard as steel at that.
So much for zoning out.Before he could think about what he was doing, Jem grabbed his phone and did a quick search forbody found in Uinta.Except he’d never seen Uinta spelled before, and spelling was such a bitch—seriously, why didn’t English make any sense?—and it took him four bad searches before Google figured out what he was trying to ask.And how was he supposed to know that Uinta sometimes had an H at the end and sometimes didn’t?
The article was a stub from theSalt Lake Tribune, and the headline pretty much said it all: someone had found a body in a mesa cave in the Uinta Basin, and it had been identified as Brennon Lee of South Jordan, Utah.But there were two things that made Jem pause.First, the article said Brennon had bruising on his neck.And second, it said a UFOlogist had found the body.That was a new word, and once he looked it up, he felt dumb for not being able to figure it out on his own.
Jem dropped the phone in his lap.The problem was Ammon.So long as Ammon was caught up in this, Tean was caught up in it.And if Tean was caught up in it, then Jem was caught up in it.
He triedAmmon Young arrest—how was he supposed to knowAmmonhad two Ms?
A single article popped up from a few years ago about Ammon arresting someone, but nothing recent.Which was too bad.Because maybe, if there’d been an article, there would have been a mugshot too.
“Dumb as a sack of rocks, too,” Little Dick was saying.“I asked her if she wanted a Chevy in her garage, and she said her dad told her to always buy Hondas.Like, I wasn’t talking about a Chevy, you stupid bitch.”
Brian guffawed—that had been on Jem’s word-of-the-day calendar.
Maybe they hadn’t arrested Ammon.Maybe he hadn’t confessed.Maybe Tean had misunderstood.Or Lucy hadn’t known what she was talking about.Maybe.
Jem squirmed in his chair, trying to find a more comfortable position.The confession, that was what bothered him.Not the murder.It didn’t matter what Tean thought; Ammon was more than capable of doing some seriously violent shit.Maybe not cold-blooded murder, but if what Tean had read in the search warrant was true—if some grown-ass man had been diddling Ammon’s son—yeah, it was possible Ammon could have killed the guy.A fight that turned into something more than a fight.And Ammon might have been nothing more than a skinsuit full of shit, but he was a cop, and he was big and strong and knew how to handle himself, and if he started something with some white-bread kiddie-diddler, he’d be the one to finish it.
But.
But Ammonwasa cop.And if he’d killed someone, even by accident, in a fit of rage, he would have known, once he cooled down, what he needed to do.Get rid of the body.Destroy any evidence.And then play it cool.
Maybe he’d tried.Maybe ditching the body in that cave had been his best plan, and maybe it had been plain old bad luck that someone had found it.
But if that was the case, then why had Ammon confessed?Why not deny everything and wait to see if they could put a case together?Hell, the warrant’s probable cause had sounded pretty thin.
“Oh yeah, I fucked her,” Little Dick said.“She was all right.You know chicks like that.They go crazy once they get a dick in them.”