Page 40 of The Evening Wolves

Emery nodded and glanced at John. “Here we go.”

9

They spent the morning crossing off each place Vermilya had visited the day before, working their way backwards through the list Theo and North had compiled.

They went to Reasonable Grounds, a coffee shop not far from the police station, where a barista recognized Vermilya, even remembered that he’d tipped, but couldn’t tell them anything about him. He came in sometimes. He seemed nice. They tried the Kum & Go. They got lucky at first—the clerk on duty had worked the afternoon shift the day before—but their luck ran out. If Vermilya had come into the convenience store, the clerk didn’t recognize him. They hit a dry spell after that: a stub for an unmanned parking lot on Jefferson Street; a Super Lube, where a dead-eyed technician stared at them until John-Henry had to drag Emery away to prevent a murder; the Piggly-Wiggly, where they finally found a red-headed woman cleaning her nose with her apron, who remembered Vermilya.

“He tips the bag boys,” she said. “Don’t you think he should tip the checkers too?”

The day was clear and cold, so crisp that John-Henry thought he could hear it crackle when he got out of the Mustang, and an enameled blue like the inside of a bowl. The snow was dirty. When he wasn’t getting the cutting edge of the wind, the air smelled like car exhaust. By noon, his feet were wet, and two hard nights meant his head was starting to pound. He was surprised, as they got into the car after the Piggly-Wiggly, when Emery’s hand came to rest on the back of his neck, and he began to massage the stiffness there.

John-Henry groaned. “Give me two Tylenol, and I’ll do anything you want.”

Emery laughed quietly. “Why don’t you go home, get some sleep?”

“Because five minutes after I lie down, I’ll be ready to bang my head against a wall again.”

They sat like that for a while. John-Henry arched his back. Emery’s thumb scraped over the short hairs on his nape. He was painfully aware that they were in public, the pale winter light filling the car, and that what he wanted, right then, was to be touched and held. It felt like it had been years instead of days. The last person who had touched him had been the deputy who processed him into the jail, and the violation lingered in his body at a level below words.

John-Henry spread his legs until his knee bumped the shifter. Then he said, “Maybe a quick nap.”

Another of those quiet laughs. Emery’s fingers tightened, and he gave John-Henry a tiny shake.

“Is that a yes?”

“I’ll drop you off.”

“That’s not what I had in mind.”

“John—”

“I know, I know.” He started the car. Warm air began to pump out of the vents, carrying the smell of the car’s heater. “I’m just being needy.”

Emery’s thumb traced his nape again, came to rest on the vertebra there. The whisper of the vents had swallowed up the sound of his breathing.

John-Henry checked the spreadsheet, marked the address for their next stop, and pulled out of the parking lot. They drove in silence, the only sounds the tires hissing over ice, the occasional crunch of refrozen snow collapsing. The town was busier than it would have been on a Tuesday. Winter break, he reminded himself. No school. A gaggle of boys was horsing around in the Olive Garden parking lot—grabbing chunks of ice and chucking them at each other as hard as they could. The dummies were in shorts and t-shirts, of course. One kid kept having to haul his shorts back up, and they were all red-cheeked and laughing. Two women stood outside Morgan’s Music, waving their arms wildly—apparently giving directions to the men who were wheeling an upright piano out of the store. At the next red light, John-Henry glanced over at the minivan next to them. The man driving had unbuckled his seat belt and crawled halfway into the passenger seat. When he sat back, John-Henry saw the portable DVD player balanced on a cooler in the passenger seat. You know, so he could watch it while he drove. Something began to play, and as the light turned green, John-Henry saw just enough to hope desperately that he had misunderstood.

“Was that vintage Christmas-themed pornography?” Emery asked.

The minivan pulled ahead. It had a YOUR STICK-FIGURE FAMILY WAS DELICIOUS sticker on the back, and it showed a dinosaur eating stick-figures, of course.

“I’ve never seen Mrs. Claus depicted with crotchless panties before,” Emery said in what sounded like a thoughtful tone.

John-Henry decided to turn on some music.

They made their way north and east, the city bleeding out around them as they headed toward the older part of Wahredua. This section had been built years ago to serve the old MP line, and, as travel shifted away from trains, it had decayed into a never-quite-renovated mixture of commercial and light industrial. Traffic thinned. The buildings crowded together on narrow lots, tall enough to cast deep shadows, the old frame structures sagging under the weight of all those years. A Pepsi Max bottle rolled under the Mustang and popped when one of the tires went over it. The sound was like a gunshot.

John-Henry turned off Emmylou Harris. “I’m sorry about that.”

“Hm?”

“Back there, at the Piggly-Wiggly.”

Emery was looking at his phone. “What?”

“And at home, I guess. The other day.”

Lowering the phone, Emery seemed to take John-Henry in. “What are you talking about?”

---