Page 36 of Stay in Your Lane!

“So we should give up? Go hide?”

“No! We just need to be careful. That’s all.” I paused, then schooled my tone because this was escalating. I didn’t want tofight with Everett. “We won’t do Rick Leighton any good if we get ourselves killed.”

“But we won’t do him any good if we let the cops shut us down, either,” he said flatly.

“We won’t let them shut us down. You heard Colin—once we have the case files, we can go to the state bureau.”

“And then what?” He inclined his head. “Letthemshut us down because theyalsodon’t like ratting out cops?”

“Then we’ll go to internal affairs,” I said. “We’re not letting this go, Everett. I promise. I just want to be sure we don’t get ourselves killed in the process.”

I want to be sure you don’t get hurt.

He glared at me, jaw still tight. Then he sighed and let his arms fall to his sides. “Okay. Well. Let me know what your brother says.” He picked up his phone off the coffee table. “I need to get back to the funeral home.”

Panic surged in me because I didn’t think he was just trying to get back to work. “Everett, wait.”

He stopped and eyed me, all his Golden Retriever wide-eyed sweetness gone in favor of hurt and anger.

I showed my palms. “I’m not giving up on this. I promise. We’re going to see this through.”

He pressed his lips together. Then, “Text me when you hear from Colin.”

And then he left. I stood there stupidly in the living room, my heart thumping and almost drowning out the rumble of his engine and the squeak of his tires.

“Fuck.” I let my gaze drift to the fish tank. Steve was watching me.

Had it really been just like twenty minutes ago that he’d nipped Everett and we’d been getting gooey-eyed over the prospect of baby piranha and kitten photos?

Why did I feel like this amateur investigation wasn’t the only thing I’d fucked up today?

CHAPTER 11

EVERETT

Turned out feeling righteous about something wasn’t a substitute for feeling good about it.

Did I feel pretty righteous about insisting that we pursue what had happened to Ricky even though the cops clearly didn’t want to address it? Yes. Did I feel righteous about standing up to Colin on that? Yep. Did either of these moments make it okay for me to be angry at Kyle for trying to walk the line between getting along with his brother and getting along with me?

Not really.

I could act stupid sometimes, but I wasn’tactuallystupid, no matter what my teachers and family and…well, numerous people thought of me. I understood context. I knew that not every situation was cut and dry, and that of course it made sense to want to protect the people closest to you in a dangerous job—and I was under no illusions that being a cop couldn’t be a dangerous job. I’d picked up the bodies of two cops since I started working for my dad, and both of them had died in the line of duty. It wasn’t easy work. I knew that.

That didn’t make it okay for them to ignore a murder just because the victim seemed forgettable, or someone in power wanted them forgotten.

It also didn’t make it okay for me to be a little jerk to the guy whose fish I was falling in love with.

Fine. Not the fish. Steve and his tankmates were just a bonus. I wasmaybepossibly kind of falling for Kyle, something I might as well own up to because I couldn’t lie for shit and definitely not to myself. And I’d gone and told him off. Told off the guy who was the only other person prepared to really do anything about this case, who’d convinced his cop brother to look into it even when it was clear he didn’t want to.

Welp. That was pretty unkind of me. There were a lot of other words I could use to describe my mistake, including numerous four-letter ones, but my mom had made it a point to remind all of us to be gentle with ourselves when we could. She’d never raised a hand to us, or her voice. She hadn’t had to—my mother had been one of those people with her own gravitational pull, who tugged you into her orbit and made you better just by keeping you close for a while. I hadn’t inherited her ability to do that, and it was too late to ask her for lessons, but maybe it wasn’t too late for me to make amends.

I’d left in such a fucking huff, though. And it had already been more than a full day, and neither of us had reached out. I worried that Kyle might not think I was being genuine if I just called him up and apologized for being a dick at this point. Howdidsomeone apologize for being a dick? I decided to talk to my brother about it, since he was the biggest dick I knew and yet he’d somehow managed to keep a girlfriend for a while now.

I found him tinkering with the engine on the second hearse in the back. Stuart was an inveterate tinkerer—there was always a little more efficiency he could wring out of an engine, or a little more grease to add, or take away, or… Honestly, I didn’t knowwhat the hell he did most of the time. It just looked likebang-twist-turn-pull-swearto me, but it seemed to work for him.

“Hey Stuart?”

“Mm?” He glanced up at me. “Where’s my coffee?”

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