Page 35 of A Friend in the Glass

After Rufus hung up, he tossed the cell onto the pizza box, but it slid off the cardboard and fell into the sink with an obnoxious clatter.

He left it there. “Come eat something.”

“Someone shot him,” Sam said. He pushed a hand through his hair. “Twice. What the fuck is that?”

Rufus cast his winter garments to the floor. He flipped open the lid on the box and removed a slice. He folded the pizza, took a big bite, then asked between chews, “How relevant is the argument the colonel had with Del in the hotel bar, you think?”

Sam didn’t appear to have heard him. He rubbed his chin, expression distant, and then said again as though speaking to himself, “What the fuckisthat? What does hewant?”

Rufus had started to raise the pizza to his mouth again, but stopped. “He who? Del?”

“Del? No, Lew.”

Rufus dropped the slice back into the box and wiped his hands on his jeans. “What the fuck’s Lew got to do with the dead colonel?”

“What the fuck does he have to do with it? What does that mean? He’s been up to his ass in this from the beginning, Rufus. She said his name—Shareed, I mean. And Stonefish, Went—do you want me to draw you a map?”

“We talked about this already. Before accusing Lew like we’re in a game of Clue, you’ve got to look at the available evidence objectively.”

Sam drew a deep breath. Then he shucked his coat and sat on the bed to undo his boots.

At Sam’s non-answer, Rufus rolled his eyes. “The silent treatment. Cool.”

“I think we could use some silence,” Sam said. He scooted back along the mattress until his back was pressed against the wall, flattened the emails Rufus had taken from the colonel against his thigh, and bent over them like a man who was choosing to read instead of commit murder.

Rufus stood at the sink, his back to Sam. He finished the slice of mostly cold pizza. After, he retrieved his phone, got a drink from the tap to wash the wedge of crust down his throat, and took the box to the bed. He dropped it on the floor, motioned to it like Sam could help himself, then sat on the mattress. He held a hand out. “Can I read those too?”

Sam grunted and slid the pages he’d already read toward Rufus.

Rufus read the entirety of each printed email twice, from header to footer, because he didn’t want to keep feeling ignorant about military whatchamacallits and thingamajigs. The back and forth between Del Jolly and Colonel Leslie Bridges, in his uneducated opinion, seemingly amounted to: Do me a big favor? Stonefish got a little fucked. Can you keep that on the DL so Conasauga keeps getting government contracts? Thanks, babe, I owe ya.

Rufus didn’t need a college degree to recognize blackmail material. He understood now what Shareed had been doing in the elevator, what she’d been delivering to the eighteenth floor. Looking sideways, Rufus couldn’t tell if Sam was still reading or pretending. So he just stated, “If the colonel knew about Conasauga’s past fuckups, would that be enough reason to consider him a danger to the company’s future? Enough of a danger to Del’s success?”

“Maybe.” Sam was staring off into space. “He said, ‘We had a deal.’”

Rufus tapped the pages he held in one hand. “This.”

“Yeah, of course, but—” He stopped again. “That’s not how it sounded. He said—how did he say it? ‘I did what you wanted.’ That’s not quite it. Del was practically begging. He didn’t sound like a man who was about to kill someone.”

His voice low, Rufus murmured, “People kill when they’re afraid, Sam.”

Sam rubbed his thumb between his eyebrows. After what felt like a long time, he said, “He kills the colonel, but he leaves incriminating paperwork on the body. What’s that about?”

“I don’t know,” Rufus said, doing his best to keep irritation from coloring his tone. “So Del’s an idiot. Maybe he’s not good at killing people and freaked out. Like a panic attack.”

“He killed him in the shower. Two shots to the chest. That’s not a panic attack, that’s an execution.”

Rufus set aside the papers and climbed to his feet. “We both know I’m an idiot, so explain to me why you don’t believe, based on the content of those emails, that Del wouldn’t have reason to kill the colonel.”

“You’re not an idiot. That’s not what I meant.” Sam pulled on his shirt the way he did sometimes when the sensory overload got to be too much, but his voice stayed level—or close enough. “What if it was Lew? What if it was someone else, I mean. Someone trying to make it look like Del did this. Isn’t that at least a possibility?”

Rufus reluctantly leaned down to be eye level. “It’s a possibility,” he agreed. “It’s just… I hesitate to believethatlevel of subterfuge is actually going on.”

Music filtered into the apartment—AC/DC. And, right on cue, a moment later Pauly Paul began to sing. Badly.

“All right,” Sam said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t?”

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