Page 10 of Stay in Your Lane!

“Um…of course?” He wouldn’t have the job if he couldn’t do it by himself, but… “I’m here, though, so I might as well help out. Then we can get some food!” I was starving.

“It’s one a.m.,” Kyle pointed out. “Where are we going to get decent food at this time of night?”

I beamed at him. “Oh, dude, I know just the spot.”

CHAPTER 4

KYLE

Idon’t know why I was surprised. In the very short time I’d been acquainted with Everett, I’d learned to just… not be surprised by much of anything.

And maybe I really wasn’t surprised that he’d picked this place. If anything, I was amazed it was still open. I don’t mean open at one-thirty in the morning—I mean still in business at all.

Waffles? was this bizarre little local establishment that had been here since at least the 1950s. The building, anyway; I was pretty sure it had changed identities a few times before becoming this place in 1974 (I only knew that because their logo, which included their established date, was etched, printed, or painted onto every imaginable surface). The name was actually Waffles! for some reason. Maybe the owners thought breakfast was the most exciting meal of the day? Either way, everyone called it Waffles? because the font on the sign was all scripty and weird, and the exclamation point looked more like a question mark. They used that font for everything, too, so their logo seemed to read,“Waffles? Established 1974?”

I thought the implied uncertainty was fitting. Did they even serve waffles? I’d wondered a few times if they served food at all,or if this was just where all the shift workers and Goth kids came to drink coffee in the middle of the night. When the cops weren’t here, anyway. “Here” as in, with their lights on. Which happened a lot. What the fuck happened in this place? I was skeptical that any waffles—never mind their consumption—really occurred in this building, butsomethingwas going on.

The place was situated in a sea of strip malls and big box stores like a little oasis of shittiness, its parking lot cracked and full of weeds while everything around it was smooth asphalt with crisp, freshly-painted stripes. All the other buildings had more modern designs, from their plain beige exteriors to their uniform archways and windows. Waffles?, on the other hand, still had that chrome-and-neon aesthetic from a bygone era. Not the shiniest chrome or the most functional neon, either, which gave it almost a post-apocalyptic vibe.

So of course Everett had picked it, and of course that was where we were now sitting twenty minutes after we’d left the trailer park. One of the not-so-functional neon lights buzzed erratically above us, casting an intermittent green glow on the cracked Formica table.

Outside, my truck was slotted neatly into one of the barely painted spaces. Everett’s car—well, after trying to keep up with him on the road and seeing how he drove, I was amazed heonlyhad one tire perched on the sidewalk. For someone with such incredible attention to detail that he might’ve caught on to a murder where cops had read suicide, he seemed to be completely unaware of inconsequential things like painted lines or traffic lights. At one point, he’d left his turn signal on for like a mile and a half. A few blocks after that, he’d made a turn without signaling at all.

And this after he’d had a“kibble incident”at a crime scene, because he’d brought cat food, and…

Maybe I was imagining all of this. Everett. The racoons. That ridiculous camera. Voluntarily setting foot in Waffles? Had I just inhaled too many cleaning products? Was I currently lying on the bloody floor of that trailer, tripping balls while my last few brain cells succumbed to chemical fumes? That would be the most logical explanation for all of this.

Across from me, Everett put his laminated menu down with a slap and shoved it to the end of the table, as if to signal to our server that he was ready to order. Wait, he was actuallyeatinghere?

“So while you were inside,” he said, “I saw a shoeprint out by the flowerbeds. I was looking for the cat and putting the food dish down, and—anyway, it looks almost exactly like the print I saw on the body. An Air Force 1. I got a picture of it, because like, what are the odds?”

“You got a picture?” I asked.

“Yeah!” The Waffles? question mark must’ve been floating over my head, because Everett stared at me. “What? Did I leave something out? Sometimes I ramble and go too fast, and I leave out details like?—”

“No, no, no.” I shook my head slowly. “I don’t think you left—just, back up a second. Did you say you took a photo of the shoe impression?”

“Yeah! It was pretty clear, too.” He took out his phone. Unaware of my exasperated groan, he started tapping the screen. “I used the cat food dish for scale in case they need to measure it or whatever, but?—”

“You used yourphone?”I squeaked.

“Well, yeah?” He shrugged and looked up at me with wide eyes. “You had the camera.”

“Yes. The camera that we were using so neither of our phones would be confiscated by the cops. As evidence.” I facepalmed. “Dude.”

He blinked, then shifted his attention down to his phone, reality seeming to dawn as if he’d picked up the kittycat at the scene only to realize too late he’d grabbed a raccoon.

I pinched the bridge of my nose and sighed.

Was this guy forreal?

I dropped my hand onto the menu I was absolutely not going to order from and stared at Everett. “I hope you have all your shit backed up on the cloud.”

“Well.” He tapped the sides of the phone case with his fingertips. “The print is probably still there. One of us could go back and get a photo with the Pinkie Pie camera.”

Pursing my lips, I grunted. Okay, so he had a point. And I did have a ruler in the truck that I could use for scale; that might hold up in court a little better than“cat food dish for comparison.”Though credit where it was due—at least he’d thought to usesomethingfor scale.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go back afterward. I’m authorized to be there, and if the neighbors or the landlord get spicy about it, I can just tell them I forgot something.”

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