“Pops, there’s, um, more.”

  “More what?” Hazard asked.

  Colt stood and took back his phone. He tapped the screen a few more times.

  “Are you for real?” Gwen asked. “Do you, like, have any self-respect?”

  “Gwen, cut it out,” Ashley mumbled.

  “He’s tattling!”

  “I’m not tattling,” Colt said, his voice slipping close to a shout. “I’m helping with a murder investigation.”

  Gwen didn’t say anything, but she put a hand on Ashley’s shoulder, and her lip curled in a sneer.

  The phone’s browser now showed a website called Warzone. Several videos were loading below the banner.

  “Bubs, what’s this?” Somers asked.

  “It’s, uh, a place where people upload videos.” In a rush, he added, “Of fights.”

  Hazard’s mouth had compressed into a white line, and he shook his head.

  “You can search by name,” Colt said in a small voice.

  Hazard typed in Evan Pawloski, and a new page loaded. A single video appeared. Hazard tapped it to start, and then he turned the phone to landscape so that the video would play in a larger format.

  Somers recognized the high school commons. Teenage voices swelled with excitement and a hunger for violence that was painfully adult, and then two figures moved onto the screen: one white, one black. They were pummeling each other—wild body blows that had power behind them but no finesse, a furious mixture of rage and fear. Then one of them toppled, and still locked in the clinch, they both went down. The screams of excitement rose higher as the boys rolled across the linoleum, swinging blindly.

  Sweat broke out across Somers’s forehead. He thought maybe he needed to close his eyes before he threw up. His undershirt clung to his chest, pinched under his arms. He still remembered the warmth of Hazard’s chest under his hand. He remembered how shocking the definition of his ribs had been, the ridges of bone like something cut with a water knife. He opened his mouth to call out—stop, or maybe more honestly, I can’t.

  Then something on the screen caught his attention, and he leaned forward. An administrator had appeared, a burly black man who was separating the kids, shouting at a skinny white man to move the crowd back. Evan was rolling away.

  “Aundre called Evan a queer,” Colt said.

  “Ree, go back.”

  Frowning, Hazard scrubbed the video back.

  “Stop it there.”

  Hazard tapped the screen. Then, studying it, he swore. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “We’ll have to watch it on a bigger screen,” Somers said. “Maybe someone at the department can blow it up.” He looked at the teenagers. “Does Evan have a tattoo?”

  Colt and Gwen shook their heads, but Ashley nodded slowly. He mimed on his body as he said, “On his hip.”

  And it was there on the video, too: tiny black words inked where his waistband had slipped.

  “What does it say?” Somers asked.

  “I don’t know, Chief Somerset. I’ve just, you know, noticed it in the locker room.”

  But Somers thought he knew what it said, because he’d seen the same letters before, carved into Loretta Ames’s chest. Words from her book. Words the killer had left as some kind of message.

  Let us go down.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  MAY 16

  SATURDAY

  6:22 PM

  WHEN HAZARD GOT HOME, the garage was empty, which meant Somers was still working. He let the Odyssey roll to a stop, hit the button, and watched the door roll down behind him. The darkness in the garage wasn’t complete, but the relative dimness offered a pleasant softness. He drew in a breath. He visualized how he wanted the next few minutes to go. He had been reading about this all afternoon, on and off, in fits. After Somers had issued citations, after a round of shamefaced apologies to Theo and Auggie, after conversations with Ashley’s and Gwen’s parents, Hazard had gone to his office. He should have been working, and he intended to dig up information on the Pawloskis, and particularly on their son, Evan. But instead, he found himself opening new tabs, trying to find the one, definitive answer: a foolproof method. Ten easy steps to talking to your teenage son without, to borrow one of his favorite expressions, going apeshit. He drew in another breath. But nobody had a foolproof plan. Or, if they did, it was milquetoast bullshit. Don’t be afraid to tell him how you feel. Use I language. I hate this fucking article, Hazard thought. I hate feeling this fucking powerless. I hate how it feels like someone has cracked my chest open, and it hurts to keep breathing. But he took a third breath, and when he let this one out, he opened the door and got out of the van.

  Inside, the kitchen lights were on, and the air smelled citrusy—more lemon than anything else. He spotted the source a moment later: a box of Fruity Pebbles on its side, spilling cereal across the counter, and a bowl with the dregs of orange milk. A long package, still unopened, lay on the counter next to Colt’s snack-dinner-whatever. On the kitchen table, the tub of muscle-building supplement powder waited next to a clean blender bottle. The supplement was a mix: creatine, beta-alanine, branched-chain amino acids, and protein isolates. They’d researched supplements together, the two of them, spending a whole weekend sending each other articles, talking through pros and cons at dinner, driving to the nutrition store for samples, diving into forums focused on teen athletes. By the end of the weekend, Somers had been surprisingly grumbly about the whole thing. When they’d started talking about the shake texture at Sunday dinner, he’d gone out to the garage and come back with Super Soaker and promptly doused both of them. Now, Hazard stood in the kitchen, hands wrapped around the back of a chair, and thought about that.

  Metal clinked and crashed downstairs. Hazard followed the sound. They’d replaced the carpet on the stairs, and it muffled his steps as he entered the basement. They had a utility room down here, a bathroom, a family room, and now—ever since Colt had started baseball—a dedicated workout facility. It consisted of a bench, a barbell, and a collection of weights. Right then, Colt lay on the bench, his face red and streaked with sweat as he grunted and strained to lift the bar again. His breath puffed out in explosive bursts. His right hand shimmied on the bar. Hazard crossed to stand behind the bench, and he brought his hands under the bar. Not touching. Not helping. God save you if you tried to help. Spotting, though, might be safe.

  “You got this,” Hazard said.

  Colt stared through him. A vein throbbed in his forehead. He’d been lifting long enough to get a pump, the muscle in his arms defined. He kept puffing out those furious breaths; his face was locked with ferocious determination.

  “You got this. Come on, Colt. One more.”

  More harsh, explosive breathing. His hand slipped again, and this time, the bar tilted.

  Hazard caught it, and between the two of them, they racked it. Colt dropped his arms, letting them hang over the sides of the bench. He stared up, eyes empty, blinking sweat away mechanically. Slowly, his breathing evened. He brought one hand up and wiped his face, and then his hand lingered on his forehead.

  “We talked about this,” Hazard said. “You don’t bench press unless someone is here to spot you.”

  Colt nodded and closed his eyes.

  “I’ll sell the weights, Colt.”

  He was still for a moment. Then he sat up, swinging his leg over the bench, and stood. “Fine,” he said as he moved toward the stairs. “Sell them.”

  Step one of the bullshit methodology of anonymous mommy bloggers: listen.

  What he heard was the clipped thunder on the steps.

  Hazard waited until Colt had cleared the stairs. Then he drew in a breath. And then another. And then he kicked the weight bench so hard that it rocked onto its side, the barbell screeched as it slid in the rack, and he had to scramble to catch the whole thing and right it before it crashed onto its side.

  Step two from the mommy bloggers: control your emotions.

  For a moment, that was too much; they were big, wild things, and their scale and intensity were more frightening than the feelings themselves. Hazard knew what it was to be afraid. He knew what it was to love. But this, when the feelings were so much huger than anything he’d ever experienced except with Somers and Evie, when everything he tried only made things worse, this was terrifying. He had a sense that this was what it would have been like hundreds of years ago, sailing the open sea, the vast troughs and swells, waves the size of cities crashing over you, your utter helplessness in the face of its savagery.

  Savage love, he thought. Somers had a t-shirt with something like that.

  He took the stairs slowly, making noise, a buffer of time. When he reached the kitchen, Colt was drinking from the blender bottle, his back to Hazard as he faced the window over the sink. His whole body was a stop sign. And Hazard knew, right then, that it was going to be the same thing it always was: questions, answers, words turning into shouts, shouts turning into screams, and then another explosion. Somers would have to come home and sift through the rubble. Why can’t we talk, Hazard wanted to ask, and the question was for himself, for Colt, for the universe. Why can’t we just talk?

  Colt unscrewed the cap from the blender bottle. He rinsed out the remains of the supplement, loaded the bottle and cap and blender ball, and closed the dishwasher. That was good; they’d been working on that. He was light-years ahead of Somers. When he turned around, those familiar scarecrow eyes were flat.

  “Are you going to stare at me like a creeper all night?”

  And there it was. It felt easy in its own way. As though, in some bizarre sense, Colt were throwing him a rope. They both knew how to do this. So why not do it?

  Hazard’s throat was tight. His eyes came to rest on the package on the counter. He cleared his throat, and his face felt hot, his hand pins and needles as he reached for the door to the garage.

  “Bring that,” he said, trying to keep his voice as neutral as possible.

  Then he went outside.

  He hit the button, and the garage door rolled up, and Hazard walked out onto the driveway. It was a beautiful evening: warmer than he liked, but the sky clear, the blue deepening until it made him think of how hard humans had worked to recreate that color, all the ores and dyes and plants and animals they’d tried. Crushed up lapis lazuli; that’s what they had used for a long, long time. It had been worth the work, all those years. Because of the sky. Because of nights like this.

  “What?” Colt asked again, his bare feet slapping the concrete.

  Hazard opened his mouth to say something about shoes. Then he let it go. Instead, he took the package and opened it. When he drew out a pair of windshield wiper blades, Colt’s expression brightened momentarily. Then he scowled. “Do you even know how to put them on?” Something must have passed across Hazard’s face because Colt added in a softer tone, “I mean, you don’t even like cars.”

  “I can do this instead of paying somebody else to do it, on top of a premium price for mid-range wiper blades. You can too. Grab the stepstool.” This time, he lost the struggle. “And a pair of shoes.”

  Colt came back with the stepstool; he had pulled on a pair of Somers’s old sneakers, sockless, and the look he threw at Hazard was an odd mixture of defiance and insecurity. With the stool in place, Colt climbed up and lifted the wipers.

  “How am I supposed to take them off?”

  “Usually, they slide off. There might be something you need to depress—a piece of plastic holding them in place.”

  For a silent moment, Colt struggled with the first blade. His face was dark with concentration, but then the mask slipped, and he said, “I don’t want to talk about anything.”

  “Try lower.”

  “If that’s what you’re waiting for.”

  “I’m waiting for you to try a little lower, Colt.”

  Colt frowned, his attention turning back to the truck. A moment later he said, “I think this is it, but it’s stuck.”

  “Doubtless because this is an ancient piece of shit. Hold on.” Most of the tools they kept downstairs, but a few of the more common ones had places on the pegboard in the garage. He found a pair of adjustable pliers and came back. When he handed them over, he said, “Only the tiniest amount of force. I know how to replace wiper blades; I don’t know how to replace an entire windshield wiper, and God help both of us if we have to explain this to John.”

  “He’s told me like twenty times he knows how to change the oil,” Colt said, and Hazard rolled his eyes at the exact same moment as his son. Colt’s expression flickered again with that uncertainty, but he took the pliers and turned back to the wiper.

  “And no beast mode,” Hazard said. “You’ve proven sufficiently how strong you are. I don’t need another demonstration.”

  “Oh my God,” Colt muttered.

  “I certainly don’t need a repeat of when I asked you and Ashley to reattach the leg to Evie’s toy table and, in a sequence of events that I’m sure is completely disconnected, I heard Ashley say, ‘Bruh, beast mode,’ and then two minutes later you were explaining to me how the table leg, quote, ‘just broke.’”

  Face pinkening, Colt bent over the windshield wiper, apparently deciding to pretend not to have heard. He adjusted the pliers and then tightened the jaws around the wiper. “Fuck yeah,” he said, wriggling the blade loose and then twisting to display it to Hazard. “Pops, it worked!”

  Language, Hazard thought, but all he did was nod. “Now the other one.”

  Colt carried the stool around to the other side. As he fiddled with the second wiper, he looked up at Hazard, lightning fast, and then back at the blade. Up again. Then back. When he spoke, his voice had a familiar, sullen heat to it. “I’m not allowed to hang out with Ash anymore.”

  Hazard leaned on the hood of the truck; the movement had a small sound to it, the metal of the hood, the brush of bare skin. His next breath tasted like motor oil and their neighbors fresh-cut lawn.

  “His dad called me and told me that. He said Ashley has been making a lot of bad decisions, and—” His voice thinned, and Hazard watched as his son tried to stopper the rush of emotion. “And I know it’s not going to be forever, I guess, but it really fucking sucks.”

  Hazard nodded.

  Colt looked at him, blinking away unshed tears, and then back. The second blade came loose. Hazard took it, and then he passed Colt one of the new ones. “It goes on in reverse. You shouldn’t need the pliers this time.”

  Face fixed with concentration again, Colt fitted the blade on. The words came more quietly now, but more intensely too. “I bet Ash can still hang out with Gwen.”

  Down the street, a door opened, the hinges protesting, and a woman Hazard knew by sight but not by name shouted back into the house, “If the dishes aren’t done when I get home, Donny, you can find yourself a new fuck-maid.”

  Hazard’s mouth twisted, and he caught himself fighting a laugh. Colt’s eyes were huge, and then a giggle slipped out. Hazard had to cough into his hand, and when he checked, he decided it hadn’t fooled Colt at all.

  Colt fixed the blade in place and climbed down from the stool. As he brought it around again, he said, “Ash does her homework for her. I bet his parents don’t know that. He wrote her essay for World History, and he got an A- because he’s really smart, but Gwen always talks to him like he’s stupid.”

  Nodding, Hazard handed over the second blade.

  “And I don’t even care that he sits with her at lunch now.” Colt climbed up onto the stool and bent over the wiper. “He said I can sit with them too, but the whole time he’s just listening to her and her dumb friends and laughing at the dumb things they say.” He slid the new blade into place. “We were supposed to go fishing last week.”

  The pause that followed had a hook. Hazard decided to bite. “I remember.”

  “He said his parents weren’t going to let him go, but then Gwen posted like a million pictures of them on Instagram. They were fishing in his dad’s boat.” His breathing came more harshly now, his shoulders knotted with tension; when he looked back, he was trying to keep his face expressionless, and he held up the wiper for inspection.

  “Looks good to me, but you won’t know until you try.”

  Colt climbed behind the wheel and started up the truck. The hood rattled under Hazard’s arm. The machine smell, oil and metal, was stronger now. A moment later, the windshield wipers moved up and down, and a tiny, satisfied smile flashed across Colt’s face. Then the engine died, and he got out.

  “It’s not fair,” Colt said as he bent to pick up some of the paper scraps that had fallen from the packaging. “I made one mistake, and it wasn’t even my fault.” His eyes searched out Hazard, and the flush surged back into his face. “I mean, I know I made a decision. But—” He seemed to be digging for the right words, and frustration showed in his face when all he came up with was, “It’s not fair. J-H didn’t have to arrest us, and he didn’t have to talk to Ash’s and Gwen’s parents.”

  “John wrote you citations—”

  “Which are technically arrests!”

  “I suppose it says a lot about my approach to parenting that I’m inordinately proud of you for knowing that.”

  “I know up here that J-H was trying to be cool.” Colt tapped his temple. “He could have taken us in to the station. He could have, you know, really tried to scare Gwen and Ash. Or just Gwen. It was her idea, you know? Her parents are in this stupid Prayer Warriors group, and they had some sort of home security class, and she said the guy who taught it used to be a cop, and he showed them how to make dry ice bombs. She’s the one who picked that house, and I know she knew it was Dr. Stratford’s. I wish J-H would have taken her in and printed her and made her sit in that stupid cell and Foley could have slammed the bars with his nightstick.” Colt must have realized how vividly imagined that particular scenario sounded because he flushed and mumbled, “Or something.”