Gathering Dark, Candice Fox [inspirational books for students .TXT] 📗

her handbag and heaved it onto the dashboard. She plugged it into the car’s cigarette lighter socket and flipped it on.

“A police radio scanner?”

“You thought I was out all night getting high, suckin’ dicks, stocking up on energy pills? That was the night before, Neighbor. Last night I got this, and a few other useful bits and pieces.”

We sat and listened to radio calls coming through. It was warm in the car, getting warmer. Desert heat carried between the mountains on a heavy breeze. The voices were too old or too female to be Lemon for the first twenty minutes.

“How are we going to know when it’s him?” I wondered aloud. “They’re all reporting car numbers, not their names or badge numbers.”

“Here’s a contender,” Sneak said, holding up a hand to silence me as a young male voice came on the line.

“Dispatch, this is L81, I’m stopping for a possible 11–25 on Wilson and Harlow. No assistance needed. Over.”

“Copy that, L81. And did your grandma get on to you? Over.”

“My grandma? Over.”

“That’s our boy.” Sneak smiled.

On the corner of Wilson and Harlow Streets, not far from the San Jasinte surf shop, a large pane of glass had slid from its holdings on the side of a truck and shattered on the road. Sneak and I watched from a distance as Officer Lemon put out road hazard cones that he extracted from the trunk of his cruiser.

“He certainly looks like the guy from the video,” Sneak said.

“So what’s our play here?” I asked. “One of us just goes up and starts questioning him?”

“I don’t know about that. I mean, all he’s got to say is, ‘We were dating. She dumped me and moved to Alaska,’ and where do we go from there?”

“He doesn’t even have to say that,” I reasoned. “He could just say ‘fuck off’ and we’re in the same position. We’ve got to get this right, because the moment we let him know we’re snooping around, we’ve played our hand. We have to know that if we speak to him, he’ll talk.”

“We don’t have anything on him to make him do that,” Sneak said.

“Well, I’m not putting him in a hole in the desert, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Sneak tapped the door of the car, a rhythmic strumming. Lemon was standing in the middle of the sunbaked road, adjacent to his cruiser, lazily directing traffic.

“Look at that ass,” Sneak said suddenly.

I frowned. “Are you checking out your daughter’s possible boyfriend or killer right now?”

“Look at his ass, though,” she said. “Those pants are tight. I don’t see the outline of a cell phone in that back pocket.”

“So?”

“So if the phone’s not on his body, it’s in the car.” We watched Lemon for a while before Sneak unclipped her seat belt.

“All right, here’s the play,” she said. “You pull out, drive past him slowly, drift over, and ram the front of the car into that traffic light.”

“What?”

“Don’t ram it hard. Just bunt it. Enough to cause a distraction. The front’s already scratched up from me busting into that hangar.” She was pulling wads of tissues from a packet in her purse. “You ever faked a car crash before? Bite down on these as you make impact but try to let the rest of your body go limp. A good bump can rattle a tooth out real easy at your age.”

“I’m two years older than you!”

“Get out and make a scene if you can. Maybe cry. Yes, definitely cry.”

“This is—”

“Just do it.” She got out and I watched her walk to the surf shop and browse the windows, only feet from Lemon’s car. Seconds ticked by in which I waited for her to return to the vehicle and admit that her idea was ridiculous. She turned around and looked at me, raised her eyebrows. I shook my head. She made a menacing fist.

“I’m the best friend in the world,” I told myself aloud, pulling my seat belt tight across my chest. “I’m the best possible friend a person could have.”

I pulled out into the street, slowed by the hazard-cone ring Lemon had made in the right-hand lane. I made eye contact with the young man so that he would know I was gawking at the scene. In the rearview mirror, I saw Sneak push off the surf shop window, heading for the cruiser.

The car behind me beeped at my slowness as I passed the glass crash zone. The perfect form of encouragement. I stuffed the wad of tissues into my mouth, bit down, and hit the accelerator as I aimed for the traffic light pole.

A whump, dull and heavy in my center mass, like a punch to the sternum. The air left me and I doubled over, slamming my head into my arms, which I managed to cross over the steering wheel at the last second. The car had hopped the curb unevenly, the left-side tires still on the road. I flopped into the passenger seat and spat out the napkins.

Shrill, all-consuming pain hit me. It was not only my tensed muscles spasming, grinding bones and joints, and awakening sleeping, rarely used muscles; but also a mental flash of myself as Adrian Orlov, the bullet I had fired at the man slamming into his middle, folding him in half, sprawling him on the hard floor of his home.

I righted myself, grabbed the radio from the dashboard, and threw it into the passenger-side footwell, dragging Sneak’s jacket over the top of it. I kicked open the door of the car and slid out. Marcus Lemon was on me immediately, his hands under my arms, guiding me back into the driver’s seat.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said. “Try to take it easy, ma’am.”

I burst into loud, hysterical tears.

“Oh my god! Oh my god!” I wailed. “I hit something. I hit someone! Someone call nine-one-one!” I folded my arms and leaned on the horn, buried my face in my arms.

“It’s okay.” Lemon laughed, easing me off the horn. “I’m a police officer. You’ve barely