Page 46 of The Face in the Water

“Recovering,” Emery said.

For some reason, that made John-Henry roll his eyes.

“And you?”

“I’m a wildlife vet,” Tean said.

“We know,” Emery said, but his eyes didn’t leave Jem. “Your paper on the effectiveness of coyote bounties had organizational weaknesses, and I’ll need to conduct more research, but I think I caught at least two factual errors.”

“Er—” Tean shot a confused look at Jem. “Thank you?”

“What about you, Jem?” John-Henry asked, and you had to have spent a lot of your life knowing cops, knowing them from the other side of things, to know this was a cop question, and a cop was asking it, and cop eyes were watching you, waiting for the tell.

Jem Berger was good at a lot of things, and one of the things he was best at was bullshitting. “Real estate.”

John-Henry waited a moment, and when nothing more came, he made a noise that could have meant anything.

Standing up from where he’d leaned against the Jeep, Emery broke the silence. “Well, I’m not sitting around here until those two bags of dicks come back. They know we’re following them now; they’ll either go to ground, or they’ll get nervous and fuck up. My money is on fucking up.”

“I don’t understand,” Tean said, running a hand through his hair. Jem winced internally; the movement only made Tean’s hair wilder.

“They’ve got shit for brains,” Emery said in the tone of someone explaining something very simple. “They know I’m following them—”

“No, I meant, I don’t understand why they came here. At first, I thought they were after us—because we’d run into them in the hotel, I suppose, although I still don’t understand why they were there.”

Jem kept his face as smooth as he could. John-Henry’s eyes cut toward him, and Jem pretended not to notice, his attention on Tean.

“But if they weren’t coming here to find us,” Tean continued, “I don’t understand why they were here at all.”

“Rod’s a creep,” Jem said. “He’s got a lot of smooth answers, but he gives me a weird vibe. I bet they were coming to see him.”

John-Henry’s gaze lingered on Jem. A half-formed question was written on the blond man’s face.

“Why would they come to see him in the middle of a public event?” Emery asked. “Why not arrange a meeting? Or if that wasn’t possible, why not wait until everyone else had left?”

“I don’t know,” Jem said. “Do you have a better explanation?”

“Of course. They were here to steal veterinary supplies, most likely to treat their injuries from the fight. Painkillers, I suspect. And then whatever else they could score.”

“In the middle of a party?” Jem asked. “Isn’t that what you said? Why not wait?”

“Because they’re shit-for-brains and they’re hurting.”

“Maybe that’s why they came here to see Rod, because they’re morons and they didn’t think about waiting until the party was over.”

Emery’s straw-colored eyes were cool and distant, and he gave a single, dismissive shrug, as though the argument—conversation—were no longer interesting. A prickle of a flush ran through Jem. He was distantly aware of Tean squeezing his wrist again.

“The important part,” John-Henry said, “is you’re ok. I know this is personal for you; you care about your friend, and you want to make sure she doesn’t get convicted of a crime she didn’t commit. But whatever happened to Yesenia, there are clearly some dangerous people involved.” He offered that best-friend-next-door smile. “It might be better if you stayed at the resort. Lie low. Don’t put yourself in danger. You don’t know what you’re getting in the middle of. Ree and I will see what we can do, and if there’s a way you can help, we’ll let you know.”

Jem tried to anchor himself to the feeling of Tean’s hand around his wrist. He tried to make himself be here, now. But as his adrenaline ebbed, the fear came creeping in: the collision with the Rangel brothers, how quickly things had gone wrong, the gun to the back of Tean’s head. And now this, to stand here, listening to this, being talked to like this. Like he was dumb, the way he felt when he drifted among the conference-goers. Like he didn’t know anything about this. Like he was a sheep instead of a wolf.

It might be better, Jem thought, if you go fuck yourself.

“In other words,” Emery said, “stay out of the way and don’t make our job harder than it needs to be.”

“It’s not that simple,” Tean said. “Last night, we agreed—”

“Maybe you can do something about this,” Emery said, gesturing broadly at the shadowed bulk of the sanctuary. “Get it shut down or something. One less fucked-up atrocity in the heartland. You’d think an organization of people dedicated to habitat conservation would at least pretend to care about shutting down a shithole like this.”

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