Page 7 of Stay in Your Lane!

“Ah.” My glove was still clean, so I accepted the handshake. “So you were here when the scene was fresh.”

He nodded. “Yeah, and it was fucking weird, man.”

I leaned against my truck and folded my arms. “Go on.” I had my suspicions too, but I wanted to hear his theories first.

“The body had a bruise.” He gestured at his midsection. “Big one. And it was a footprint. You could see the tread and everything. It was an Air Force 1. Ithadto be.”

I blinked. Maybe I’d been too presumptuous, thinking this guy was a dumbass. “So a suicide… had a distinctive shoe impression on his body.”

“Uh-huh. And there’s a smear of blood in the hallway. But like, how’s a guy going to get blood on the wall in another room after he’s blown his head off?”

“A smear of…” I peered at the trailer as if I might be able to see through the cheap siding and into the hallway. I’d been focused on the carpet and distracted by the pizza, and I hadn’t even noticed blood on the wall. Not yet, anyway.

“I tried to tell the cops,” Everett went on. “They wouldn’t listen, but—I don’t know. I couldn’t get it out of my head, so I came back to take another look. I was hoping to get here before you did.” He laughed. “Didn’t quite beat you here, but at least I got here before you’d started cleaning!”

I nodded. Yeah. Yeah, he had. If I’d gotten here on time…

I absently scratched at the bandage on my arm through the Tyvek sleeve.

Maybe Steve wasn’t such a bastard after all.

CHAPTER 3

EVERETT

“Ido need to clean the scene, though.”

“Huh?” I stopped staring at the guy’s hand and looked back up at his face. His super-hot, semi-scruffed, kind-of-annoyed face. It was an expression I saw a lot on people when they were around me. When I was around someone I found attractive, I saw it even more than usual.

Mulligans weren’t smooth. It was the family joke—the second we saw somebody who pushed our buttons, we kind of turned into idiots. Jackasses like my brother would say that was my natural state, but excuse me,Iwasn’t the one who, two minutes after meeting the person who would become my girlfriend, backed my precious classic car into a fire hydrant because I couldn’t look away from her after delivering her Door Dash. Even better, the fire hydrant was right in front of her house, so in addition to wrecking his rear bumper he did damage to city propertyandflooded their yard.

And Penny was still with him. Wild.

Anyway, the point was?—

“So if you want any more pictures, you’d better get them now. Or better yet, letmeget them,” he went on. “But I’m not using my phone.”

“Oh, right, no,” I agreed. That was a good point. “I, um, yeah, I went and bought a disposable camera. Or, kind of? It’s the closest thing I could find.” I passed over the cheapest camera I’d been able to get my hands on at Walmart.

The guy—darn it, I needed to know his name, referring to him as “the guy” was making my head spin—stared at the hot-pink MLP3. “What the hell is this?”

“It’s a camera. For kids.”

“Why is it…”

“It’s the Pinkie Pie version of the camera,” I told him. “I wanted an Applejack but they were out, and if it’s a toss-up between Pinkie Pie and Rarity, Pinkie wins every time.”

He stared at me, his eyes really wide behind his glasses. I could see what he was thinking—I’d been there with people before.Is this guy for real?I crossed my arms. “It was twenty-five dollars,” I said defensively. “And it prints its own copies. And it’s sixteen megapixels, dude, so I don’t think I could do any better for the price, you know?”

“You…” He shook his head after a second. “Okay. No, fine, I’ll just go snap pictures of a crime scene?—”

“Not a crime scene anymore,” I reminded him.

“Of a gory, filthy,formercrime scene with a camera that looks like it belongs to a five-year-old. No cognitive dissonance there,” he muttered. “Sure. Whatever. I’ll get the blood smear on the wall, and I’ll look for any other things that stand out to me as I go. As for you?—”

“I’ll wait here.” I knew I couldn’t go in with him, even now that itwasn’ta crime scene. I wasn’t trained for cleaning, and he needed to be able to focus instead of telling me what not to do.

The guy had started turning away, but he swiveled back to me fast after I spoke. “Why the hell would you want to wait here? This is going to take mehours.”

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