Page 11 of The Evening Wolves

“I don’t care how bad it is. And I don’t particularly care how you got it. I want to know what they’ve got on me.” She opened her mouth again, and he said, “Even if you’re not sure, I want to know what someone told you. I’m your client. I’m telling you to tell me.”

Her shoulders sagged. “It’s important that you understand that my information might not be correct.”

“What do they have?”

The only sound was her breathing, the soft whisper of wool as she shifted in her suit and her jacket rubbed against her. “They have a man who claims you tried to buy child pornography from him.”

“That’s a lie.” He held up a hand. “Sorry. I—sorry.”

“He seems like a solid witness. He’s ex-military, a few medals.” She brushed at her skirt. “He works with an anti-trafficking organization.”

John-Henry shook his head, but he managed to clamp down on the words.

“He played a recording for the grand jury. It was…convincing.”

“And a bunch of people sitting in a room thought it sounded like me? You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s their case? If I’d taken something like that to Diana, she would have served me my ass.”

Aniya drew a deep breath. “No, that’s not all. The Wahredua PD’s IT department conducted a search of your computer. And yes, a warrant was served, John-Henry.”

He grappled with what that meant. With the people who had known about this and said nothing. With the fury that no one had told him, no one had even hinted, and, at the same time, his awareness that they had been doing their job, doing what they thought was right, doing what the court had ordered.

“They found images and videos, John-Henry. Over ten thousand of them.” She sounded weary as she said, “I’m so sorry.”

Somewhere far off in the jail, a door slammed again, and a man screamed. Jailhouse sounds. Inmates screamed all the time. Shouted. Cried out. At times, John-Henry knew, it sounded like a madhouse. “They aren’t mine.”

Aniya nodded.

“I didn’t—those aren’t mine.”

She nodded again. “Let’s wait for discovery and see what they have.”

He couldn’t bring himself to answer. She said something else, another reminder about trying to sleep, but he barely heard her. She said something after that, and something else, and he knew he was responding, knew he was keeping up his part. And then it was over, and she left, and he was still sitting there, alone. He noticed now, like someone waking up, the blue-ink graffiti on the steel table: Bart Simpson strapped into an electric chair.

He had grown up with parents who had bulldozed his every wrongdoing. He had paid a steep price to learn he wasn’t perfect, that perhaps he wasn’t even a particularly good person. And since then, he had struggled not to be the boy his parents had raised. He knew that he was being framed. He knew it had something to do with the Cottonmouth Club, with his search for whoever was hiding in the shadows. He knew that someone was doing this because he was a threat, and because he had to be neutralized, and in one stroke, they had removed him from the game completely. He knew all of that.

But in the silence of that cinderblock room, his willpower faltered, and for one hot, vicious moment, he thought the thing he had trained himself not to think: How fucking dare they?

4

Emery did another lap of the house.

Monday evening, dark came early, shuttering the house in the cold glitter of snow and stars. The house itself was full of light and warmth and bodies, but Emery was only distantly aware of it all. His mind was out there, in the darkness beyond the ice, and his body moved mechanically: entry hall to living room, living room to kitchen, kitchen to dining room, dining room to entry hall.

“Don’t you want a slice of pizza?” Auggie tried.

Theo murmured something that made Auggie drop his head.

“We’re having pizza, Dee,” Evie told him as he moved through the kitchen again.

“He’s busy,” Colt said, stroking her hair. His amber eyes followed Emery, though, and Emery was grateful when he passed into the dining room again.

Pacing was a waste of time and energy; Emery knew that. But in the last twenty-four hours since John’s arrest, he’d managed to accomplish absolutely nothing, so it wasn’t much of a change. Even the initial, panicked calls—first to John’s father, and then to Aniya Thompson—were things someone else could have done. Things John could have done for himself, as a matter of fact. After that, Emery had been useless. No one would talk to him at the sheriff’s station. Nobody in the police department would answer his calls except Dulac, John’s former partner, and the detective knew less than Emery. All the contacts he had made, all the inroads, the entire network he’d crafted both as a detective with the Wahredua PD and as a private investigator—it had all been worth nothing.

That night had been worse. Theo and Auggie had offered to stay over and keep an eye on Colt and Evie, but Emery had sent them home. He was aware that it had been an old response, instinctual, his desire for solitude the way injured animals holed up in their dens. He had seen the need in Colt’s eyes, the silent plea for reassurance, and the best Emery had been able to give him had been a hug, stiff and unfamiliar, as though they were strangers, before asking him to go to bed.

Then he had lain in bed, and the room had seemed unfairly bright. He had made the mistake of looking at his phone, at the notifications piling up on different social media platforms. Then he had deleted the apps and lain there, staring up into that too bright room. Ambient light reflecting off the snow on the ground, perhaps. More likely, nothing but his imagination. So much light that it was impossible not to see the emptiness of the bed.

He had not cried. He had lain there, and thought, and planned, a cat’s cradle game he was trying to play one-handed. Over and over again, the same phrase breaking through the storm: They’re doing it again.

---