Page 61 of Stay in Your Lane!

Where were your listening skills when I had to pick up Mrs. Castellara when she was spread over a five-hundred-foot diameter?

That had been a rough one; the Castellara house had literally blown up, and five people had died as a result. It turned out a nearby fracking well hadn’t been properly sealed once it was“exhausted”and had leaked into the basement. I’d had to take myself off the property to throw up twice, and Dwayne hadn’t done anything other than chuckle and slap me on the back with a“man up, Mulligan.”

Needless to say, he could get fucked right now. “It’ll all work out,” I said, projecting as much confidence as I could. “But the sooner I get back home the better, so…”

“Yeah, sure. Go for it, man.”

The scene was less than four hours old, and I was already taking the body away. Incredible. I stared down at Leon and tried to ignore the feeling of goosebumps sweeping across my body as I rolled him into the bag, sealed it, tagged it, and got him onto the stretcher. I wondered if the bottles nearest to his corpse had even been checked for his fingerprints. I wondered ifany of the shoeprints in the gravel were Air Force 1s, and if they were, whether or not they were Leon’s size, or someone else’s. I wondered what Kyle would say about everything.

God, I wanted to be with him. I wanted to be with someone who’d understand how I was feeling. Even more, I wanted to be with someone who’d make me feelbetter.

Focus, Ev.

I rolled Leon out to the hearse, happily not needing to interact with Dwayne again, since he’d been pulled into conversation with Detective Jackass. I glanced at the pair of them and finally made out the name on the cop’s badge—Adams.

Detective Adams was officially on my shit list.

I secured Leon in the back and checked my orders one last time. He was to go straight to the morgue, no stopover at Mulligan’s Mortuary. If he were really a suicide, that would be suspicious in and of itself. The morgue didn’t have a lot of space, and they served the entire county, so usually only the most pressing cases went straight there. But knowing—well, fine, not completely knowing, but almost as good as—that he’d been murdered, it made a lot more sense.

Did Dr. Klinger know what was going on? Was he in on it? Or was he so busy that he didn’t even have the bandwidth to announce the time of death, and left the investigation side of things up to the cops? But no, M.E.s had to be the ones to give the final verdict when it came to cause of death, didn’t they? So maybe hewasinvolved, or maybe he was being blackmailed, or maybe?—

My brain spun in circles like this all the way to the city morgue. I had half a mind to ask Dr. Klinger about it. Not if he was a member of a police conspiracy covering up murders—I wasn’tthatdumb—but whether or not he actually thought Leon’s death was a suicide. Would that be suspicious? Thatwould probably be suspicious, wouldn’t it? Maybe I shouldn’t do that.

I didn’t get a choice in the end. The morgue tech met me at the back of the building, signed the handover paperwork with hardly a glance, and got Leon transferred before the engine cooled. “Thanks, I think that’s it,” she said blithely before turning away and leaving me there in the parking lot, practically paralyzed.

What did I do now?

Go back to Kyle. Talk to him and Colin about this. Tell them who was working the crime scene, who to add to our shit list, who we need to look into. Snuggle up next to him on his oversized couch and see if he’d take a couple of hours to just watch some mindless entertainment so you can finally stop thinking. See if you can convince him to spend the night again, or if you can stay at his place. You want to be with him? You’re an adult, and you don’t have anything else scheduled for the rest of the day. So go be with him.

The part of me that still reflexively obeyed my father’s orders flinched, but all the other parts of me were on board. Maybe I could get stop for some groceries and cook something for him—prove to him that I could make food instead of ordering it all from apps or Waffles?. He probably still had leftover apple pie. What would go good with apple pie? Mom always used to make chicken and dumplings on the nights we had apple pie, so that could be nice.

My phone buzzed with an incoming message as I got into the front seat of the hearse. I checked it, anticipating something from Kyle, but no.

We need to talk. Can I call you?

It was nice of Leanne to check first. Stuart would have just called and left a passive-aggressive message. I called her instead of messaging.

“Hey,” I said, probably too eagerly but I was grateful to have something to take my mind off of my day so far. “What’s up?”

“Bullshit is what’s up.”

Uh-oh.“What kind of bullshit are you talking about?”

“You didn’t pull our business license paperwork, did you?”

“Uh…no?”

“Yes or no, Everett.”

“No!” I had nothing to with the licensing. That was all Dad. “Why?”

“Because there’s no record of the originals at the clerk’s office. Iknowwe got it in weeks ago—I made sure Dad signed off on everything—but they can’t find any evidence of it here.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Yeah,” Leanne said, sounding stressed. “I’m supposed to meet with Theo in half an hour, and instead I’m stuck in this fucking office arguing about paperwork Iknowwe turned in, and the only thing in our file she’s willing to show me is a series of anonymous complaints againstyou,of all people.”

People could make anonymous complaints about me? I mean, I guess there had to be a mechanism for complaining, but why not just leave the complaints with my dad? It didn’t make…sense…

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