Page 95 of Make Them Bleed
“South,” Render whispers. “Left at the dumpster, straight for the lot.”
We fan without looking like we planned it. Knight peels wide, parallel on the street. Ozzy drops behind a parked SUV and gives us a thumbs-up nobody sees. Juno and I move like two pieces of fabric in the same wind.
Merritt doesn’t run. Men like Merritt don’t run unless someone tells them it’ll look good on a security camera. He brisk-walks to a black sedan and tosses a look over his shoulder that lands a foot to my left. He gets in. The taillights flare. He pulls out like a person who wants to believe he’s not being followed.
We follow. Not glued to his bumper. Not sloppy. Knight slides in behind him two cars back, and we drift one lane over like we’re going somewhere less important. Ozzy calls out green lights like a baseball announcer trying to be subtle. Render ghosts us on side streets.
“Pinecrest,” Knight says after eight minutes of nothing. “He’s boring himself home.”
He is. Merritt’s split-level is the kind I could diagram in my sleep—slate-gray siding, too-big potted shrubs, a porch light controlled by an app that pushes smug notifications. He eases into the drive. We glide past like good citizens and find a spot a house down where no one will burn if anyone asks later.
Juno’s breath is steady, which is wild considering I can see the memory of a finger gun reflected in her eyes like a bad sky. She doesn’t wait. She gets out. Ozzy tosses me the bag with the masks and a pair of thin gloves we pretend are not ridiculous. Knight rolls his shoulders and exhales like he’s about to do something he’ll pretend not to be good at.
“Gage?” I murmur into the comm. “We’re at Voss.”
His voice arrives through my earpiece. “Phone lines quiet. No calls out from his number since Stonehouse.”
“Copy,” I say, because he’s on the hook for a thousand plausible deniabilities and I’ll thank him for it later.
We mask up. Ozzy hands Juno the Ghostface she ordered off Amazon in a moment of gallows humor. She lifts it, pauses. I can see her mouth—the mouth that just told me she loved me—set into a thin line.
“Ready?” I ask, Hoover’s rubber jaw stupid and grave.
“Not remotely,” she says, sliding the mask on.
Merritt’s front door opens, then closes. He moves through his house like a man on rails—hallway, kitchen light, bar cart. He thinks he made it. He thinks seeing Juno was a coincidence he can spend tomorrow forgetting. He doesn’t know that tonight is a different math problem.
We don’t break the door in; there’s a version of us that would, and we’ve decided not to meet them. Knight taps and then does the kind of not-waiting that reads as authority. The door swings back on the latch he didn’t set. We enter like fog, not force.
Merritt is halfway through a pour when he hears us. The bottle clinks glass, and he looks up. He sees four presidents from the discount bin and one ghost with a knife-mouth.
“What the—” He stumbles back, sloshing whiskey on hardwood that cost more than my first car. His eyes go wide. “Is this a… prank? Because I will— I will call?—”
“That’s a lot ofI wills,” Ozzy says, Arthur grinning idiotically.
Merritt’s gaze bounces from mask to mask and lands on Juno like he just recognized the monster under his bed is real and also arrived in a hoodie. “You,” he says, and the word contains a weather system.
Juno steps forward. No hesitation. Ghostface turns her into something half-mythic. Her voice is her own—steady, sharp. “You were there,” she says. “You killed my sister.”
“I— I don’t— that—that is—” He laughs, high and brittle. “Insane. This is insane.”
“Say her name,” Juno says, and somewhere the house decides it isn’t going to breathe for a second.
He blinks. He tries to be clever. “Which one?”
“Arby,” she says, and the name lands like a blade point-down into a map.
Something inside me strains at its leash. I keep still. Knight takes one step left and blocks the hallway. Render takes one step right and blocks the sliding glass door. Ozzy leans on the edge of the island like a man considering countertops.
Merritt swallows. He sets the tumbler down with a clink that’s fifty percent flourish, fifty percent stall. “You accuse, you break in, and you wear… Herbert Hoover?” He gestures, hands shaking. “What is this? Halloween for the under-informed?”
“Chester A. Arthur is hurt,” Ozzy says in a fake offended tone. It wrings a strangled laugh out of me that shouldn’t exist in this room and yet does.
“We can do banter or we can do names,” I say, voice low enough that Hoover might vibrate. “You choose.”
Merritt tries for dignity, settles for smug. “I choose my lawyer.”
“You can call him when we’re finished,” Knight says, friendly and incorrect.
