Page 30 of Stay in Your Lane!

“A little bigger than a regular bar,” Kyle said, already scanning the room for Leon. “Did he tell you anything else we can use to identify him? What he’s wearing?”

“Um.” Shit, there totally was a description to go with this guy, but I didn’t remember it. Good thing I wasn’t trying to make it as a detective. “He did say…something, but…let’s just go look,” I said, and led the way through the rather thin crowd of patrons toward the back wall—which was disappointingly flat, I’d kind of been hoping for a circle at this point, or at least a pentagon—and started searching for someone who was as squirrely as Leon had sounded over the phone.

That ended up being a good way to identify him. Most of the patrons were leaning back in the armchairs and couches, which, oh my God, had to be anightmareto clean. I bet Kyle was dying a little on the inside. They were relaxed and drinking and laughing with their friends, but one man was sitting in front of a low table, manspreading to keep the couch he was on to himself and tapping his fingers against the drink in his hands but not bothering to drink it.

He was a lanky white dude with tattoos all over his skinny arms, not to mention his face and neck and even between some of his bleach blond cornrows. He carried himself with the kind of swagger that said he envisioned himself on the cover of a rap album.

A rap album in the ninety-nine-cent bin at Walmart, maybe.

And even from a distance, it was clear he was wearing Air Force 1s. The black kind. “Ooh look, Black Air Force energy,” I murmured as I pointed him out to Kyle. “That’s probably him.”

Kyle actually laughed. “I never thought I’d hear that meme used in person.”

“It doesn’t even really fit,” I said. Leon didn’t come off as aggressive, despite his larger-than-average size. On the contrary, apart from the shoes, he was sort of schlubby even in a branded basketball jersey, like even if he owned a nice suit it would probably be made of polyester and any tie he owned would inevitably be brown. Not that there was anything wrong with a brown tie every now and then, but?—

“Let’s see what he has to say.” Kyle walked over with all the forthrightness of a man who made a habit of not being intimidated by weird situations. He stopped in front of the table. “Hey. Are you Leon?”

“Yeah.” He looked Kyle up and down. “You Everett Mulligan?”

“No, that’s me.” It took everything I had not to raise my hand like a dweeb. “Dude, can I just say, your shoes are awesome?”

“My…” Leon glanced down at his feet and something like a smug expression came over his face. “Limited edition,” he bragged, some of the tension going out of his shoulders. All of a sudden he went from schlubbly to full of chutzpah, and wow, how many Yiddish words did I know? Schlub, chutzpah, putz?—

Focus, Everett.

“Do you mind if I get a picture of them?” I asked. “My brother is going to be so jealous I actually saw some in the wild.”

Leon shrugged, drained his beer bottle, and set it down on the table as he hoisted his feet up onto it. “Knock yourself out.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” I said as I snapped pictures from several different angles. I even had the beer bottle to measure against now—sweet.

“Sit.” Leon pointed at the couch across from him. We sat. “So you’re Everett. And you?”

“Kyle.”

“Kyle what?” Leon asked. “I like to know the full names of people I talk to.”

I could tell that Kyle wanted to turn the question around—he got this little twist in the side of his mouth when he felt put upon—but he finally said, “Kyle Bowman.”

Leon’s brow dropped and his hands clenched into fists. “I thought you looked familiar,” he snarled. “Another fucking Bowman, after I specifically said ‘no cops.’ You look a lot like your old man.”

“Well, that’s as far as the similarities go,” Kyle snapped right back. “I’m nothing like the rest of my family. I run a crime scene cleaning business, for shit’s sake—that’s how I learned about Rick’s death, and that’s why I think there’s more to it. I know better than most people how quick cops are to brush off anything that doesn’t look right when the victim is a drug user, butwe”—he gestured at me—“believe Rick deserves justice. We don’t think he killed himself.”

“Ricky is not a user,” Leon snapped.

Kyle peered at him. “But at his house, they found needles and?—”

“Not his.” Leon shook his head. “He don’t let no one use at his place or even bring their stuff over. Not since his baby was born.”

“Okay,” Kyle said. “So that stuff wasn’t his, then.”

“No.” Leon relaxed slightly—just a little bit, but it was enough to make me think he wasn’t about to smash the bottle on the edge of the table and try to cut us. Or something. Did people actually do that with bottles? It seemed like the odds of it shattering in your hand and causing you as much damage as the person you wanted to hurt was too high to make it an ideal weapon.

“Why don’t you think he killed himself?” Leon asked, drawing my attention back where it needed to be.

“The angle of the gun was wrong for Rick to have managed setting it off himself,” I said, which—I didn’t know that for sure, but it didn’t really matter what I said at this point. All I needed was to say something that seemed credible to this guy. “At least not without some serious luck. There was also some blood in the hallway that the cops didn’t seem to care to explain.”

“Or even document,” Kyle muttered.

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