Page 3 of Nobody's Fool

Rinse, repeat.

I don’t remember that last night well.

Isn’t that odd? I know we’d gone back to the nightclub where we first met, the Discoteca Palmeras, but I can’t remember leaving or walking up that hill to your high-rise—why did you stay at an apartment in Fuengirola anyway? why weren’t you staying at a hotel or a hostel like everyone else our age? why didn’t you have any roommates or friends or seem to know anybody other than this Buzz guy? why didn’t I push to know more?—but what I do remember is the hot Spanish sun waking me up the next day.

I was in your bed. I remember groaning when the sunlight hit my face, realizing that if the rays were hitting from this angle it had to be at least noon and we had yet again forgotten to close the shade.

I made a face and blinked and lifted my hand to block my eyes.

Except my hand felt wet. Coated in something wet and sticky.

And there was something in my hand.

I slowly lifted it in front of my face.

A knife.

I was holding a knife.

It was wet with blood.

I turned toward your side of the bed.

That was when I screamed.

There are scientists who believe that no sound ever dies, that it grows softer, fades, decays to the point where we can’t detect it with our ears anymore, but that it’s there, somehow, and if we could everbe silent or still enough, we would be able to hear that sound for all eternity.

That was how this scream felt.

And sometimes, even now, in the quiet of the night, I can still hear the echo of that scream.

CHAPTER ONE

Twenty-Two Years Later

I stand behind the tree and snap photos of license plates with a long-lens camera. The lot is full, so I go in order from the most expensive car—I can’t believe there’s a Bentley parked by this toilet—and move on down the list.

I don’t know how long I have before my subject—a wealthy man named Peyton Booth—comes out. Five minutes, maybe ten. But here’s why I take the photos. I send them to my shadow partner at the DMV. Said partner will then look up all the license plates and get the corresponding emails. She’ll email the pics and threaten exposure if they don’t transfer money into this untraceable Cash App account. Only $500. No reason to be greedy. If they don’t respond—and ninety percent don’t—it goes nowhere, but we make enough to make it worthwhile.

Yeah, times are tough.

I’m positioned across the park and dressed like what we used to call a vagrant or hobo or homeless. I forget the proper euphemism they use nowadays, so I ask Debbie.

“‘Unhoused,’” Debbie tells me.

“Really?”

“‘Unsheltered’ too. They both suck.”

“Which do you prefer?”

“Goddess.”

Debbie the Goddess says she’s twenty-three, but she looks younger. She spends a lot of her days standing in front of various, uh, “gentlemen’s clubs”—talk about a euphemism—with tears in her eyes and yells “Daddy, why?” at every guy that walks in or out. She started doing it for kicks—she loves the way some guys turn white and freeze—but now a few of the regulars say hi and maybe throw her a twenty.

“I do it as an exercise in capitalism and ethics,” she tells me.

“How’s that?”

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