Page 109 of The Evening Wolves

“I knew what we were doing when I said yes, Emery.” Shaw considered him and something softened in his face. “If this is too much, I can handle the rest of it.”

Emery let the words fade away into the darkness. He couldn’t hear the music anymore, and he wasn’t sure if it had ended or if that was him, and the rush of his own thoughts. But he shook his head.

Vermilya mumbled something, and the door opened. He made his way inside, pushing the door shut behind him as he went, and Emery sprinted to catch it. He grabbed the knob before the door could shut completely, and he held it so that the door was almost closed. He counted to a hundred in his head. And then he inched the door open.

Facedown on the bed, Vermilya was still bundled in his coat. Emery stepped inside. He spotted the laptop and phone right away, handed them to Shaw, and shut the door. It was like any motel room anywhere—the smell of bleach on the bedding, the carpet that felt slimy under his boots, the chipped furniture and speckled mirror. He took off his winter gloves and pulled on a disposable pair. Then he took out the hard plastic case from his back pocket. He’d prepared the solution in advance, made from crushed-up pills prescribed to John after the fight at Tucker’s. He set out the syringe and the hypo. Then he moved over to Vermilya.

He rolled the man onto his side and caught a whiff of yeasty breath. The man was heavier than Emery had expected, and he made a faint sound of discomfort as the rough movement jarred his injuries. His eyes flickered, but they didn’t open. Emery slid one arm out of the coat. Then he let Vermilya fall onto his back, eliciting another groan. He freed the man’s other arm and pushed the coat across the bed. Then he pushed up one sleeve of Vermilya’s Henley. The story would be simple. He got drunk. He came back to his room to get high. He overdid it, the way so many people did every day.

Emery went back to his kit. He opened the two unlubricated condoms and pressed the wrapper for each against the pads of Vermilya’s fingers. Then he left the wrappers on the nightstand. He didn’t expect anyone to check, but it was often the little things that came back to get you. He tied the condoms together and then used them as an impromptu tourniquet, tying it off above Vermilya’s elbow. He squeezed Vermilya’s hand a few times until a vein emerged, blue against the pale skin of his inner arm.

The needle went in easily, and Emery depressed the plunger. When the syringe was empty, he repeated the process of pressing the syringe and plunger against Vermilya’s fingers. Then he set the syringe on the mattress, where it would look like it had fallen after Vermilya shot up. He passed the next five minutes walking himself through what he could remember of the general pharmacology of opioids, including adverse effects. Nausea and vomiting. Itching. Constipation. Respiratory depression.

After one minute, he couldn’t hear Vermilya breathing, but he waited the full five before he checked for a pulse. Nothing. He finished setting the scene by pouring the dregs of the solution into a plastic cup from the bathroom. He transferred fingerprints to the cup too. He left a plastic baggy, used to crush the pills and still lined with their residue, and he got Vermilya’s prints on it as well. The smell of piss began to rise, a sign that Vermilya’s sphincters had relaxed. Emery gave the room one last look and let himself outside.

He walked down the interstate, the wind at his back, the sky black with stars. He got into the Odyssey. When he reached an emergency pullout, he turned around and headed back toward Wahredua. His phone buzzed, and he answered by saying, “It’s done.”

Shaw’s breathing came across the line. Then he said, “Good.”

“Did you get what you needed?”

“I got something,” Shaw said.

He was looking for someone, he had told Emery. A boy named Nik.

“We’ll see if it gets us anywhere,” Shaw added. “I put the phone and laptop back when I was done.”

Silence made him aware of a white hiss on the call.

“Even if we’d turned him in,” Emery said, “there’s no guarantee he would have gone to prison.”

More silence.

“Even if Koby and Cassidy turn on him, there’s no guarantee.”

The silence met him like a held breath.

“He arranged for murder inside a secure facility before. Koby and Cassidy might both be dead before they had a chance to testify. He ruined John’s life with these fucking allegations, and he managed to make it happen in a town where John has friends, where his dad is the fucking mayor.”

Ahead of him, the Big Muddy huddled under a canopy of silver light.

“He was simply too dangerous,” Emery said, and he thought his voice might break. “We didn’t have any other choice.”

“We did the right thing, Emery,” Shaw said gently.

Emery swallowed against the knot in his throat and disconnected. He drove another mile, and then, at a cloverleaf interchange, he pulled off again and sat on the side of the road. Cars passed him, lights moving in the dark. Air displaced by a semi rocked the minivan. He told himself to drive home. He told himself to signal, to merge onto the highway, to go back to his family. But he didn’t. He sat there under a map of stars. And he remembered reading somewhere, a long time ago, that all our mourning, we do for ourselves.

26

“No,” John-Henry said, “absolutely not.”

Colt perked up with indignation to peer at him over the back of the sofa. “J-H!”

“The last time I let you and Ash order level four kung pao, the two of you laid on the floor and moaned after you were finished.”

“Because it was so good!”

“Because you made yourselves sick. I’m not joking, Colt, I think Ash was crying.”

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