Page 50 of Running Feral

Tobias’s grandmother is as safe as she can be while she’s here, at least. Tristan dealt with that, talking to the charge nurse from before about limited visitors until Tobias is found.

I feel like I’m going to unravel. I’ve never felt this impotent in my entire life. Not during all the times I’ve tried to help people get their lives back together, with varying degrees of success.

Not even the first time I experienced this kind of disaster, when my family imploded before my eyes, and I did absolutely nothing to stop it. Memories of all that violence and misery—ones I’m normally so good at stuffing into the dark crevices of my mind where they belong—are trying to peek out at me. I don’t have time for it, though. I can’t change anything that happened back then.

I can’t change what’s happening now, either. But I can pretend. I wait for the cops and I look at every person walking through the lobby to see if maybe—if there’s even the slightest chance—I’ll snag Eamon and Tobias. Over an hour since he went missing. Wandering around in front of everyone.

At some point, I call Sav and wake him up. He doesn’t know anything but promises to do some digging. Tristan seems to make some calls of his own in the same vein. I want to go back to Possum Hollow and look for him, but where? It’s a small town, but not that small. Where can you look if someone wants to hide aperson?

It’s a good thing I don’t, though. Because boy, do the cops have some questions for me.

I know Tobias wouldn’t believe me, but I hate cops as much as he does. I’m only doing this out of desperation. As soon as they arrive at the hospital, they want to take this conversation to the station. Tristan and I begrudgingly agree, but once I step into the station, the flashbacks hit me with brute force.

I was nineteen years old when I spent twenty-two hours being questioned about my father’s murder. The whole thingis a blur, but somehow also etched into my memory. Like something that’s been scrubbed down and faded with time, but still permanently warped the surface there.

The memories aren’t linear. It’s more impressions. The coldness inside the holding cell was a big one, as well as the hunger. It was long enough ago that they fingerprinted me with ink, not digitally, and I remember how the ink managed to coat every last inch of my hands. It almost seemed deliberate, like another way to dehumanize me. It didn’t have to be that messy, but they were so determined to make it impossible for me to get clean.

Getting poked and prodded and harassed was bad enough, but for some reason that ink was the worst part. I hate being dirty, and it cast this film over my fingers that I was constantly aware of, which contaminated everything I touched. Eventually it got on my face and my clothes, and the rest of my skin, making every part of me nearly burn with this tacky, grimy, indelible sensation. It became so uncomfortable, it even overrode my grief, after a point.

Although maybe that was just the easier way to think about it.

“So, you’re not related to him?” Officer Bumblefuck asked.

His real name isn’tBumblefuck, but I don’t remember, and I don’t care to squint hard enough at his badge to figure it out. It’s close enough.

“No, he’s my friend. He was staying with me to get away from his abuser.”

The officer makes some more notes with an impassive face.

“Yeah, I’m familiar with Eamon. I’ve seen the two of them together before. I’ve seen the kid hanging around all those guys a lot. Also high as a fucking kite at your bar.” He gives me a serious look. Not unsympathetic, but the condescension in it is undisguised and I bristle before he even speaks. “How do you know he didn’t just leave? You know what these guys are like. Akid like that is going to be flighty. He runs, he stays. Is Eamon really abusing him, or are they just getting high and fighting? There’s no way to know what’s going on in these people’s heads.”

The layers upon layers of things he just said that make me enraged… I want to flip the table. I want to flip the fucking table and then pin him to it by his throat while I explain—in explicit detail—how cruel and incorrect his attitude is.

Instead, I take a deep breath, and I try to release a tiny bit of tension with it when I exhale. I know I have no power here. I already know how this is going to end.

“When he came to me, he’d been beaten half to death. I know him. He’s been physically, sexually, and emotionally abused by this man for months at the least. It’s getting worse. Eamon is a violent criminal. Tobias chose to leave him, and now Tobias is missing. This seems pretty cut and dry.”

The condescension I’m getting from the cop doubles, but now it’s coated in a layer of misplaced pity. Like I’m some poor schmuck who got the runaround and is too naïve to know it.

“Young, damaged guys like him change their minds. From where I’m standing, they’re both criminals. I’ve got no crime scene, no evidence of violence, and you’re telling me he was so badly abused before, but there’s no hospital record and neither of you bothered to file for a protective order or even an assault charge. What am I supposed to think?”

I slam my fist on the table. It’s a burst of anger, white-hot and then immediately smothered, like all the other emotions raging to come to the surface right now.

“He was too fucking scared,” I snap. “He begged me not to.”

The cop takes it in stride, though. He clearly doesn’t see me as a threat.

Instead, he just holds out his hands, like I’m a horse he’s trying to settle.

“I understand where you’re coming from.”

I beg your finest fucking pardon, Officer Bumblefuck, but you clearly don’t.

“I know you’re worried about him. But I have to go by the evidence, and there’s no evidence to say this is anything other than interpersonal squabbling among some low-level criminals and you getting caught in the crossfire. Are you sure you and Tobias didn’t have a fight? Something that might have pissed him off and sent him running back to his old friends?”

I snort. No matter how many times I describe Eamon and Tobias’s relationship explicitly as intimate partner violence, he keeps defaulting back to whatever language he’s used to. Friends. Buddies. Criminal associates. It swings back and forth, but he’s incapable of calling anything what it really is, because that wouldn’t help sell his theory that this is all just one big misunderstanding, and Tobias is an indigent criminal who can’t be expected to stay in one place under any circumstances.

“Look, Officer,” I say, steeling myself to appear as rational as humanly possible. “Tobias isn’t a drug addict. If you’ve seen him high, it’s because Eamon forced him. He’s only associated with criminals because Eamon forced him.” Okay, that’s technically not true, but we’re going for the big picture here. “He’s an adult, but he’s been manipulated and controlled by a powerful, violent criminal since he was still a teenager. He’s refused to leave my apartment because he’s so terrified of this man—so terrified that Eamon will kill him the next time he sees him—and the only reason we left tonight was because his grandmother is in the hospital. He barely even got to see her before he spoke to a nurse who wasn’t really a nurse and then disappeared. How is this not evidence of foul play? He’s been taken. He’s missing. He’s being held against his will, and god knows what is being done to him. He could already be dead, and you—”

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