Page 55 of The Evening Wolves

“I’m going to teach you how to throw a punch so this doesn’t happen again.”

“I didn’t—”

Emery held up a hand. “We’ve been doing so well. Don’t insult me by lying.”

Colt gave an unsure nod.

“And I don’t want you overdoing it.”

“I won’t. Ash always helps me lift the heavy stuff.”

“Good Lord. Come on; let’s see what Tean has to say.”

12

At first, John-Henry just drove. He had to get out of the house. He had to get away from Emery, from the anger boiling up inside him. For a single, satisfying moment, he had a vision of driving straight out of Wahredua and never looking back. Emery and Colt and Evie could come join him wherever he ended up. Just not here. Anywhere but here.

Then, as he made his way down Market Street, he had to stop and wait at a crosswalk while people bundled in winter gear made the most of winter break. The street was lined with restaurants, with local shops, with bakeries and coffee shops. It was Wahredua’s historic downtown, running along the Grand Rivere, and people came for weekend trips and for a nice dinner and for a night out, hitting one of the bars. Snow dusted redbrick buildings, turning an already charming street into a gingerbread village. Everybody shopping and laughing, faces chapped with the cold, everybody happy. And you didn’t know, unless you lived here, that Barbie Hail, who owned the cookie decorating store, had put one of her kids in the hospital with a garden hose, or Aidan Sheppard, who played barista at River Coffee, had been driving drunk once and gone right through the wall of his own house, killing his wife in the process. You didn’t know Art Whitaker had gone up for molesting his nieces, and when he’d gotten out, his wife’s brothers had knocked every tooth out of his head. The heat from the vents was too much, and the world swam. John-Henry looked past the neatly kept storefronts and the antiquated signage, trying to find the horizon. Right then, with the sun already dropping, the river looked like an oil slick: black except where red and orange curled along the surface.

The crosswalk cleared. A horn blared behind him. John-Henry startled in the seat, sweat breaking out all over him, and his eyes fell on St. Taffy’s: just another redbrick building on Market Street, but this one with neon signs in the windows. The one that mattered—the only one that mattered—was the blue-and-red one announcing that the cop bar was open.

Slide onto a stool. Smile at the waitress. Start with a flight of tequila because today wasn’t about fucking around. Today was about fucking up. He could feel it, the instantaneous need as every cell in his body started screaming for it, his nerve endings ablaze.

And then the horn blared again, and John-Henry took his foot off the brake. The Mustang rolled forward. The heat from the vents baked him, made his skin feel dry to the point of cracking, but he was also aware of the flop sweat soaking him, the chill damp under his arms and across his back, dimpling his chest so that his shirt clung to him. He drifted past Festive Offerings, where two kids were tying each other up in garland. He braked on autopilot as a woman jaywalked, her terrier lunging at the end of its leash. The apartment he had shared with Emery, what seemed like forever ago, loomed on the right. And then the worst of it was over, the sudden pressing need. He could turn around. He could go back to St. Taffy’s, or to the Mill House, or he could pull a classic John-Henry and hit the Jack Flash, load up, and get blasted in the bleachers at the high school. That was part of his legacy too, wasn’t it? Partying. Getting wasted. Anything, back then, not to be who he was. But the need had passed, and what remained was mostly self-pity, so he kept driving. It was safer to keep driving, to get away.

His phone buzzed. He turned it off and kept driving.

Wahredua shrank behind him. Streets lined with houses gave way to the town’s fringes, the lots larger, homes and businesses jumbled side by side, barns and sheds, a single ancient corn crib from when this had been an agricultural community. Then all of that contracted, and John-Henry was driving through thick stands of hickory and oak, alongside clumps of pine, weaving his way over the rolling limestone hills. In places, when they’d built these roads, they’d blasted straight through the rock, and the raw face of the limestone was yellow as the sun fell lower.

He came around a turn, and the sun hit him in the face, and for a moment, he remembered another set of lights, their brightness hitting him, the intensity like standing in a spotlight. The smell of torn-up turf, of cleats heavy with dirt, of his own body warm and loose and alive, of the hot October day, when everyone had been hoping it would have been cool by then. His jersey chafed under his arms, soaked with sweat and pulled crooked from running, from tackles, from guys who grabbed him when they thought they could get away with it. The certainty of the knowledge that Emery was up in the stands, watching him, even though he couldn’t say to himself why it mattered, not back then. He remembered the feeling, although it had been later—much later—before he could put it into words. That this was his. Not his mother’s, who worried about injuries and accidents and anything that might damage the perfect toy she occasionally liked to take out to play with. Not his father’s, who couldn’t be bothered coming to games, not unless he needed to show off his son to a prospective client. This was his, John-Henry’s. He had worked for it. Fought for it. Poured every ounce of confusion and frustration and fear and self-loathing into it. It was, in a way, the first thing that was John-Henry and not the cocktail of commands and conditioning and expectations from his parents. And he remembered the determination that it would not be the last. That he would be his own person. That one day, he would be whoever he wanted to be.

The broken glass. The spray paint. At least, he thought with something approaching a laugh, I didn’t have to see the jersey.

It didn’t matter; he knew that. Things didn’t matter. People mattered. His son, who was hurt and scared, mattered. His husband, who was terrified, mattered. At the front of his brain, where reason lived, John-Henry knew those things. The same way he knew he should turn back, go home, and start the work of patching things up.

But that part of his brain wasn’t in charge anymore. Another part was. An animal part. A part that remembered the feeling of Emery’s chest under his hand as he pushed and sent Emery falling down the stairs. A part that conflated that memory, blurring the lines, so that it was the same feeling as the thinness of Emery’s shoulder under his hand when he’d touched him in the locker room, when everything he’d fought against for so long threatened to slip free. He remembered the hatred. And the guilt that was so much worse—unbearable, and because it was unbearable, it was easier to retreat into hatred again. That was the same boy who had stood under stadium lights and promised himself he’d be whoever he wanted to be. The boy who had been so scared of what other people thought that he’d tried to kill a part of himself. And, when he couldn’t do that, he’d wanted to kill the boy who was like a living mirror, everywhere John-Henry turned, showing him himself in all his ugliness. The boy who had stood under the stadium lights, proud in that adolescent fantasy of independence, was the same one who had gone running to his parents every time it looked like there might be consequences for his cruelty, because he was John-Henry Somerset, which meant life always fell in his favor.

That’s not how life works, he thought. Life isn’t fair. Everyone has ups and downs. You’ve had your share of setbacks.

And another part of him, the rabid part of him, thought, How fucking dare they?

The clock on the dash had passed five when John reached Auburn. The sun had disappeared below the horizon, leaving only a blister of red that was shrinking steadily as he watched. He looked around and felt like he was waking up. He hadn’t meant to come here, not consciously. But here he was. Streetlights pushed back pockets of darkness. Strip malls shone like islands—a Walmart, a tattoo parlor, a Dollar Tree with its sign on the fritz, an empty anchor store at one end that had clearly, years before, been a Blockbuster. Even in the car, even with the heat going, he could smell the Chinese buffet—ginger and garlic and the sodium explosion of soy sauce. He passed the Epiphany of Light campus where, earlier that year, the search for a killer had ended in yet another tragedy. The campus was dark, and he wondered in an absent way if it had closed permanently.

I should turn around, he thought again. He wiped his mouth. He looked at his phone on the seat next to him, powered off, its screen dark. I should go home.

But at the next light, he turned onto a side street. He knew where he was going.

The homes were large and old, built long before the Lake of the Ozarks had been imagined, back when Auburn had been a farming community on the Osage River. Back then, the hot spot for Auburn’s wealthy families had been the bluffs that looked over the city’s high street and, beyond it, the river. And so he followed the road up into the bluffs, past big, old Victorian and Tudor homes. In the dark, with the streetlights spaced out and the porch lights too small to push back the gloom, the asymmetrical faces of the houses crowded around him, their dim yellow eyes following him.

Eric Brey—state representative, potential murderer, and sadist—lived in what had been the family home. He ran what had been the family business, a farm and tractor supply store. Old money, in other words. John-Henry had seen the house before, back when he’d been trying to get Brey on the hook for the double murder in the county jail. But it was one thing to have researched Brey, to have seen photos of the home, to have come here during daylight hours as an officer of the law. And it was another thing now to be a man out on bail, skulking through the frozen night, unarmed. He didn’t even have a pocketknife. Not that a pocketknife would have helped, since John-Henry had no idea what he was trying to accomplish.

Watch, he told himself. That’s all. Observe. The video that Masouda had shown them connected Brey to Vermilya. Maybe John-Henry would knock on the door. Maybe he’d see if Brey wanted to talk. Vermilya had been shot, and Ingra was dead. Another man who had once been connected to the Cottonmouth Club, Gideon Moss, had died by his own hand because he’d been so terrified of retribution. So, maybe Brey was feeling the pinch too. Maybe, watching his partners drop one by one, he’d be ready to talk. But for now, John-Henry would simply watch. That was all.

He parked half a block down from the house, where he had a good line of sight. The Brey family home was a Tudor—not quite a mansion, but close enough that you might miss the difference. It had half-timbering complemented by brick and stone, with a steeply gabled roof and the kind of tall, narrow leadlights that must have been hell on the heating bill. The trees were old and bare. The hedges were sprinkled with snow. There was even a row of perfect icicles hanging from the gutter. People probably stopped and took pictures.

Upstairs, light showed in several windows. On the ground floor, the windows looked dark, but with the curtains open, John-Henry occasionally caught a glimmer of a light from deeper in the house—the kind of blue-gray flash that suggested a TV. He turned off the car, settled into his seat, and immediately began remembering all the logistical realities involved in a stakeout, the kind of thing that—if he’d been acting rationally—he would have considered. Not freezing his fingers off, for example. And the fact that he hadn’t eaten since Masouda’s. And he needed to pee. And, maybe most importantly, that this was stupid. This whole thing was stupid, coming out here like this, with no plan, not even really thinking about it.

What am I doing, he asked himself as he reached for the keys. He’d call Emery on the way back—

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