Page 101 of The Art of Dying

“What’s it doing?” I whispered.

“Just parked between houses.” The engine revved. “Leaving. Lights still off… now they’re on. Weird.”

“It was him.”

“You don’t know that,” she said, walking back to the bedroom.

We looked through the pages again, and I took notes in my own notebook, writing down timelines, patterns, locations. It made my blood boil to read that Mason had driven by our house in California. He’d even been inside my parent’s home. He documented how he’d used his mother to send the letters. How and who he’d used in Mack’s hospital on base to gain information. She’d mentioned the woman once or twice, a new tech in the radiology department Mason was fucking when he was in town. He’d specifically targeted her, manipulated her, told her lies about Mack and me. He wrote in the journal less as time went on, but when he’d come back to Quincy, more than a half dozen times, he mentioned a contact I didn’t recognize because it was in Russian: ??????.

At first I thought it was a noun, not a name, but then as the word kept popping up, I grew curious. I picked up my phone to translate, and when the answer popped up, the phone fell from my hands.

“We… gotta go.”

“Go where?” Vazquez asked, standing as she watched me scramble for my phone. “What are you doing?”

“Alecia’s.”

She looked at her watch. “What? Why? It’s the middle of the night.”

“The contact in Quincy he mentions.”

“It’s a contact? So, a Russian guy?”

“That’s what I thought at first, but the translation… Vaz, it’s Badger.”

“No,” she said, her mouth falling open. “Oh, fuck. Fuck…”

“I should call Alecia,” I said, raising my phone.

“No! No, you might tip him off, and if she’s not already in danger, she will be.”

“They have to know she took the journal. She’s been in danger this entire time.”

“Or they used her knowledge of it to draw you out.”

“Fuck,” I said, swiping my keys off the nightstand. “You should go home. You don’t want any part in what’s going to happen.

“Fuck you for even saying that to me. I can handle Drew.”

“It’s not Drew I’m worried about. If Mason is there… he’s different, Vaz. He’s not the same punk you remember. Go home, tuck in your boys, and forget about all of this.”

“I’m going. Get in the fucking Jeep. You’re wasting time.”

chapter twenty-seven.

Kitsch

“Slow down, you’ll draw attention to yourself. The last thing you need is your name going out over the radio to dispatch,” she said.

“You’ll just have to work your magic. If Mason is at Alecia’s… she might already be dead.”

“You think Badger would spend all this time with her and let that happen?”

“He’s not going to stop Mason.”

She sighed, staring at the streetlight ahead as it turned yellow. “Punch it, Kitsch.”

I stomped on the gas, blowing through the light and racing to Alecia’s. Two blocks away, I tried texting Grant and Gina. The second it said delivered, my phone rang.

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