Page 73 of Stay in Your Lane!

“Colin, leave him alone.” Kyle pressed a comforting hand between my shoulder blades as he set Patches’s carrier down alongside Jeff’s, and I leaned into the touch. “No outside communication, we understand. And you’re sure no one else knows where we are?”

“Other than Dad?” Colin shook his head. “This is an old safehouse he set up personally for a case two years ago. Hehanded it over to the Marshals; it’s off the books entirely as far as the department is concerned. You’re going to be fine here.”

Fine. Great. Fantastic. But because I’d watched way too many horror movies as a teenager, I immediately began searching for the backdoor. Which…didn’t exist. And the window appeared to be painted shut.

“Just in case, though…”

I turned back, hoping to hear about a secret crawl space. Instead, I watched as Colin handed over a gun…then another gun…thenanothergun, laying them out on the dusty bedspread like a seriously off-brand Vanna White. “Why?” was all I was able to ask.

Kyle and Colin both looked at me with surprise. “Why what?” Kyle asked.

“Whythree guns?” I demanded. “One’s got to be enough, right?” I knew Kyle had packed his, so this many more weapons had to be overkill.

Ugh, maybe literally.

“Better to have them and not need them,” Colin said. “Besides, there’s only one magazine apiece, so it’s not like you’ll get more than thirty-six shots out of them anyway.”

“Why would we need to shoot a gun so many times? Do you know how many accidental shootings happen in homes? We don’t even have a gun safe here.”

“Given that there are no kids here either, I think it’ll be okay,” Kyle said.

He was probably going for comforting. It wasn’t working. “What if Jeff steps on one?” If there was ever a cat that might accidentally shoot himself, it was Jeff.

“Jeff won’t step on a gun.”

“What if he does, though?”

“Oh my God,” Colin muttered. “Kyle, I’ve got to get back to work. Can you handle your boyfriend’s panic attack?”

I am not having a panic attack.Except maybe I kind of was, in an understated way. I thought I’d taken most of the shit Colin had revealed to us in stride, but possibly I was alittlemore concerned for my family than I was letting on. Possibly my sister wasn’t going to take this well at all; possibly my brother was going to go quiet the way he did when he got really upset; possibly my dad was going to flip his shit and start shouting at people and redirect the attention that should be focused on me, his cop-defying son, back on him and the rest of my family. Maybe they were going to lose the business, and I might not even know because I’d never see them again, and Leanne would never forgive Theo and they wouldn’t get back together after all and?—

“Whoa, Everett, it’s okay.” Kyle knelt down in front of me, and since when had I sat on the bed? Next to theguns, ugh, I didn’t want to be next to the guns, fuck. I slid down onto the floor so I was right beside Kyle, who pulled me into a hug that was awkward as hell from this angle, but also felt like the best thing in the world at the moment. “Sorry, I’m sorry, I know it’s a lot. I’ll put the guns away, okay? I didn’t know they bothered you so much.”

“They don’t.” I mean, they did, but not like that. It was… “It’s not the guns.” It really wasn’t, although I really did think they were too much. It was what they represented. It was all the ways in which our lives had gotten fucked up, all because of asking a few questions. I’d never thought things would get this far out of control, never. “I’m sorry.”

Kyle didn’t ask why. He didn’t have to. He just tilted my face up and gave me a kiss, then kept holding me until my breathing had gone back to normal and I was able to relax enough to straighten my legs out instead of holding them in close to my body like a pair of oversized springs. “It’s going to be okay.”

I believed him. I had to. “Yeah.”

Jeff meowed, loud and plaintive, and the last of my tension splintered and sank back into my spine.

Kyle pushed his glasses up his nose with a sigh. “Let’s get their stuff set up, then we can let them explore.”

“Okay.” Their litter boxes went in the tiny laundry room—at least, I assumed it was a laundry room from the linoleum flooring, but there was no washer or dryer in there, just an ancient hot water heater. Once freed, that was where both cats darted first.

As for us…

Kyle stowed the guns while I unpacked the bags of food Colin had brought along with him. The groceries were very box and can heavy, including several boxes of Hamburger Helper with no hamburger. I checked the cans, and—ah, tuna. Close enough. It felt almost like being a college student, or so I assumed.

We didn’t have a television, and the phones were sort of shitty, so once the cats settled and we’d had something for dinner, we passed some time staring out the windows and making up stories about the trailers on either side of us. “That guy,” I said confidently as I watched a heavyset man walk down the steps to his trailer and over to his car, “is definitely an axe murderer.”

“Huh.” Kyle looked him over as he stroked a calming hand across Patches’s back. “Why do you say that?”

“Are you kidding me? Look at the front yard!” It was the sort of lawn you saw in Florida. At least, I assumed that hot pink plastic flamingoes were more popular for decorating with in Florida than they were here, this trailer notwithstanding. Plus there were gnomes, including several who weren’t wearing pants, as well as a windmill farm’s worth of metallic pinwheels in various fanciful shapes, from fairies to hummingbirds. “That’s not the front yard of a guy in his fifties with a drinking problem.”

Kyle smiled at me. “How do you know he’s got a drinking problem?”

“Rhinophyma.” The huge blood vessels giving his nose and cheeks a reddish cast was a dead giveaway.

---