Page 65 of Nothing Ever Happens Here

“What?” I sit up and the IV pulls and I wince.

“Take it easy, Flor,” Riley says, still in his patronizing, calm-this-crazy-lady-down voice. “I’m not here to upset you even more. Evan doesn’t want to press charges.”

“What?” is all I manage to cry.

“So you can go home when they release you,” he says.

“Well, I want to press charges!” I yell, and he looks to Jones and back to me.

“Flor, I would leave this alone. You took a bus to break into the man’s house and you shot him.Admittedly.I know you all have gotten carried away on this podcast, pointing fingers every which way, and I think it got away from you, and now people got hurt.”

“No,” I plead. “I think Shelby is in that house. You have to at least search the house. He has a room with her photos—like a shrine. He has Leo’s ID. I was in that room. I saw it. You have to at least look!”

“We will,” he says.

“You will?” I say, stopping to collect myself, very surprised.

“Yeah, he said he’d be happy to let us look around.”

“When?” I ask.

“I’ll send Officer Barlowe in the morning.”

“No. You have to gonow. Please.”

Riley fixes me with a stern look. “Florence. I know you’re upset and that you’ve been through an ordeal,but we can’t issue a warrant because you say you saw something funny there and youthinkShelby is there. Do you know what it takes to issue a search warrant? He said we can come by in the morning, so if he’s offering and it helps settle this on both sides, that’s the most we can do. We have limited resources here and frankly the lot of you are not making our jobs any easier.”

“Please. I’m telling you that it will be too late,” I say and he stands and sighs, closing his notepad.

“I’m off duty and Jones is headed to a DUI stop, but I’ll see what I can do,” he says.

“You have to go now,” I say, and he looks at me with pity—an old, confused lady in a hospital bed—and I know what he thinks. I know he won’t go.

“Good night, Florence,” he says, and then he’s gone.

I see Mack and Herb hurrying past the detectives and the nurse’s station, into my room.

“Flor,” Herb says, rushing to my side. “The bastards made us wait downstairs until the police talked to you first. Are you okay?”

“We got the call on our way to Evan’s place,” Mack says, pulling a chair up to my bedside. “But then we turned around and came here. We found his address in your room… I mean, what is going on?” she asks.

When I tell them both everything that happened tonight, Herb starts pacing and running his hands through his hair and Mack just sits perfectly still trying to absorb it all—all the stuff about Leo especially, I’m sure.

“A heart attack,” she finally says.

“I don’t think he’d lie about it because he admitted to everything else,” I say, and I hope that it helps her in some way to know he didn’t suffer terribly, being tortured at the hands of a madman. It was a merciful way to go, considering the alternative. Maybe slipping something into Otis’s IV and carbon monoxide were peaceful ways to go too,both poisoned. That sparks something inside of me. An idea.

“Why isn’t he arrested?” Herb asks for the third time.

“Otis was a natural death, Bernie was a suicide, Leo is inconclusive and not able to be determined, and none of it points to him. Not one shred of evidence.”

“That can’t be. Goddamn. I thought Evan was our friend. I just—” and Herb stops when he looks my direction and sees me carefully untaping my IV and pulling the needle out ever so gently, holding a cotton swab on top. “What are you doing?”

“What they won’t do.” I stand up and start pushing my feet into my boots. “Let’s go. We have to get Shelby.”

30

SHELBY

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