Sadie(57)

If he gives me a reason.

“A-are you l-like him?” I demand. He’s sweating, trembling and so am I. I tighten my grip on the knife’s handle and push into him with my hips. He yelps. “Are y-you like him?”

“What? Who?”

“K-K—” No, no. Not Keith. “D-Darren.”

“I—”

“D-do you fuck little girls?”

“What? No! No—” He almost shakes his head but the force of the knife stops him. He swallows, his Adam’s apple convulsing. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Where’d y-you meet online? In s-some sick fuck p-place?” I push again and Ellis’s moans, near unintelligible with the fear I’m putting in him. “F-fucking where?”

“It was—was—” He takes a deep breath. “Counterwatch. It’s a—it’s a game, like a, a—an online game! We were on the same team. I don’t…” His eyes frantically search the room and even in all its chaos, and with a knife against his throat, he spots the IDs and the smattering of tags on the floor. He says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I can feel my body shaking, my hand shaking against his throat and I wonder if I could kill him that way, by accident. Something about the way he said it, I don’t know what you’re talking about, is working through me in a way I don’t like because I can hear a lie a mile away, and Ellis …

Ellis isn’t lying.

“So why don’t”—he takes a shuddering breath—“why don’t you tell me.”

I shake my head.

“You’re hurt,” he says and I keep shaking my head, because I don’t want him to do what he’s doing, talking to me like I’m some wild thing, like I can be talked down with the gentleness he’s dressed his voice in.

“N-no,” I say.

He blinks, several times.

“Are you gonna kill me?”

I press my lips together and feel the tears forming in my eyes.

I’m dangerous, I want to tell him. I have a knife …

The gravity of how fucked I am hits me.

My breath catches in my throat.

“I don’t think you want to do this,” he says.

“Don’t,” I beg him because what’s going to happen to me when I move my hand. He’s going to call the cops, he’ll call the cops and all of this will have been for nothing. “D-don’t—”

“Look,” Ellis says. “Just put the—put the knife down. You’re hurt. Let’s look after that, okay? We’ll just fix up your arm and you tell me … you tell me about Darren, okay?”

“N-no.” I push the knife a little, like a promise to myself. I could do this, if I have to. I can. I will. “You’re his f-friend. You’ll c-call the c-cops and—” No, no, no. “It has t-to be me. I have t-to b-be the one—”

“Let me help you.” He looks like he’s going to cry. “Please.”





THE GIRLS





S1E5


WEST McCRAY:


Langford is an in-between sort of place. In fact, you wouldn’t think it was a town, driving through it. It’s a smattering of houses and a few businesses here and there, no real order to it. Just a stop along the way. The address Cat Mather gave me—the one Sadie was headed to—turns out to be a motel called The Bluebird. The most diplomatic description I can give it is rustic, but really, it’s holding on by a thread, the building doing a slow collapse in on itself. The siding is grimy, the roof badly in need of repair, if not outright replacement, and I spot a few cracked and broken windows here and there. It’s got no avian aesthetic to earn it its name and in sixty days, its owner, Joe Perkins, will hand the keys over to Marcus Danforth, who will begin demolition. Joe will say a final good-bye to the place he’s called home for more than fifty years. So I guess it’s lucky I arrive when I do.


JOE PERKINS: Well, it used to be called Perkinses’ Inn before I took it over. My parents owned this place, my grandparents owned it before them, and my great grandparents owned it before them. It’s been in the family so damn long, but it just got to the point where it was more’n I could keep up with. It started getting away from me. Maybe it’s more than I ever wanted to keep up with, if you want the truth. It was just handed to me, you know? I was a kid.


WEST McCRAY: You never really knew what you wanted to do?


JOE PERKINS: That’s exactly it, man! I mean, I never got the chance to think about it. I don’t want to sound ungrateful … I know it’s fortunate I was never in want of a job for most of my life. It’s just, straight out of high school, I had this and I wish maybe my parents—God rest their souls—had asked me if I even wanted it. I don’t mind it, but it was never my plan.


WEST McCRAY: Joe Perkins is fifty-five. He has a shock of white hair, a weather-beaten face and tattoos covering both his arms and legs. Each one of them means something, he tells me, but what they mean is between him and the ink.


JOE PERKINS: I’ll let you in on this one here, though …


WEST McCRAY: It’s a small bluebird on his left bicep.