Page 27 of Stay in Your Lane!

I sighed into my respirator and kept chipping away at the semi-hardened sludge.

I liked Everett. He was charming in ways I didn’t know I could be charmed, and he was sweet and earnest. He was smart. He saw things differently than other people, especially cops, and he’d trusted his instincts about Rick’s death. Other people would’ve just assumed the cops knew what they were doing and moved on. Instead, he’d grabbed on like a dog on a bone, and he was determined to see this through.

I appreciated that a lot.

But it also worried me a lot.

Because Everettwasn’ta cop. And hedidn’thave those time-hardened instincts and trauma-driven cynicism. I wasn’t a cop either, but I’d spent my whole life around them. Enough to have a better feel for how they thought, how they operated… and how quickly shit could get dangerous even when it didn’t seem like it would.

How quickly the stick could turn into the venomous snake.

I sat back on my heels to stretch a crick out of my back, and I tilted my head from side to side. A knot coiled in the pit of my stomach. Yeah, I wanted to figure out what happened to Rick Leighton. But what if Everett got hurt in the process? What if someonehadmurdered Rick, and he came after us to stop us from finding out?

It wasn’t that I thought Everett was helpless or stupid. Not in the least. But there were certain types of survival instincts honed from being aroundreallybad people. There was a reason I carried a gun when I came to death scenes. There was a reason I was paranoid about locking doors and locking my truck.

Everett came to death scenes, too, but only when there was no immediate threat and there were still cops around. There wasstill an element of danger, sure, but he wasn’t thrown to the wolves and left on his own to?—

A tire squealed outside.

Even over the fans I had blasting in the hallway, the sound carried.

Then came the ka-chunk of metal scraping concrete.

A car door closed.

I stood slowly, staring wide-eyed at the bathroom door and listening over the fans as my heart slammed against my ribs. Who the fuck…

Someone pounded on the door, and my stomach flipped. Oh, shit. A relative, maybe? A neighbor? A cop?

I carefully stepped over my cleaning equipment and around the fan, then tiptoed down the hall. There was a living room window overlooking the front porch, so I got as close as I could and peeked around the corner.

What the—are you fucking kidding me?

I groaned, pulled off my respirator, and stalked to the door. I swung it open, ready to demand to know what he was doing here, when Everett blurted out, “I got in touch with Leon!”

I froze, mouth agape. “You… He… Wait, what? And how did you figure out I was here?”

“My brother picked up the body.” He half-shrugged. “I came to the address and saw your truck outside.”

“I…” Well, fuck. I did say he was smart. “Okay, but—wait, you said you got in touch with Leon?”

“Yeah!” He held up his phone like a prize. “I was curious about that spoofing thing. If it would actually work? And it did!”

“I thought we were doing this tomorrow.”

His expression turned a little sheepish. “I wasn’t going to be able to sleep unless I knew if it would actually work.”

Somehow, that checked out.

“Anyway,” he went on, “he wants to meet with us. Tonight.”

“Tonight? But it’s?—”

“Almost eleven, I know. Once he found out we were looking into what happened to Rick and that we’re not cops, he didn’t want to wait. He sounded pretty scared, to be honest.”

I once again worried that I shouldn’t be dragging Everett into this. Not that I was Rambo or anything, but I didn’t want him to get hurt.

And I also wasn’t going to talk him out of anything, not even if I promised to let him pet-sit my piranhas until the end of time, so… the best thing to do was just make peace with him coming along and try not to let him get hurt.

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