How to Disappear(73)

The guy in the Kevlar vest says, “It’s the Manx kid. What do you expect?”

“Do we know who knocked out this one?” He waves his arms at the cracked vase.

“I did.”

Jack says, “Nicolette, shut up!” Then he says, “Look at her. It isn’t physically possible. I did.”

At which point Rosalba, who can sleep through almost anything—except this, apparently—comes roaring out of her room in a bathrobe, calling out, “Nicky!” She hugs me, and then she starts yelling at people.

I end up in my room. A deputy from Kerwin is sitting on a dining room chair outside my door, waiting for the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation to show up.

I could go out the window, but there are guys outside, shouting. About the perimeter and hard targets and soft targets and attempted murder and murder. About Steve and the guy that I knocked out and Alex.

Alex Yeager.

I wish I could forgive him and pray for his immortal soul and mourn his loss and be a good person.

But I can’t.

I’m not.

Even Steve told me to keep quiet so the police wouldn’t figure that out.

I stick my head around the door. I ask the guy, “What happens now?”

He says, “Cool your jets.”

What does that even mean?

I try texting Jack, but either he’s someplace without reception or he’s more under arrest than I am.

I call over to St. Francis again and again to find out how Steve is. They tell me there’s nobody there by that name. I ask the guy outside my door if we can go over to the hospital, and he tells me I have to sit tight.

“I don’t want to sit tight. I want to go to the hospital.”

“You were supposed to stay with the police, remember? I’m the police. Sit tight.”

“Is Steve all right?”

“After your boyfriend shot him?”

“He’s not my boyfriend! And he was trying to protect me from the guy with the knife. Please. The hospital won’t tell me anything.”

The marshal smacks his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Listen, honey, in the morning, you’re going to have a lawyer. Your dad had someone call her. Until then, I need your phone.”

“Why can’t I have a phone?”

“This is for your own protection.”

“Where’s Jack?”





80


Jack


A man is dead.

His blood splattered in plumes. He was dead before he hit the floor. He’s turning to gray blue as Mendes goes white, his eyes staring straight up but seeing nothing. I’m bombarded with weird, fragmentary thoughts. How many coats of primer will they need to paint over the kitchen? How many times did I shoot him?

The shots reverberated like a rocket catapulting past the sound barrier, breaking it, blasting through eardrums as if they were tissue paper: the first blast, then the second, the third, and again, and again, and again.

I’m bent over Mendes, my hands sticky with blood. The corpse is maybe two, not even three feet away. There’s a scream coming out of Nicolette that won’t stop. Her dog is licking blood.

I can’t wrap my head around what just happened.

What I know is, I could have stopped it all—but I didn’t.

Nicolette got the gun away from me when I was on the ground in the Sierras, concussed, lying facedown in pinecones. But who am I kidding? I’m twice as big as she is and in better shape. I could have dragged her into any sheriff station between Primm, Nevada, and Podunk, Ohio. But I didn’t.

Instead: this. I marched along, not resisting, allowing myself to turn into the man I’ve known I was all along. Everything I wanted to believe about myself, it all disappeared into this murderer I’ve become.

There’s a dead guy I could reach out and touch with the same hand that held the gun that felled him.

I’m a killer.

It wasn’t the DNA or the sinister dad with his boxes of bullets, or the mother who sat there while he trained me to “think,” or the orders of my sociopath shit brother, that brought me here. It was my decision after my decision after my decision.

I’m tracking blood down the hall, tracking Mendes’s and his goon’s blood all along his carpet to the front door of Nicolette’s house. The cop protects my head, pushes me into the back of the black-and-white, and we drive away past a line of cars with government plates and, where the driveway meets the street, a red Camaro.

I say, “My name is Jackson Manx, and I want to make a statement.”





81


Nicolette


When all else fails, I pitch a fit. When I finish breathing into a paper bag, it’s one in the morning and they take me to see Steve.

There are tubes running in and out of him. A heart monitor beeping a rhythm just behind him. And his skin’s still the wrong color.

I am so sorry.

A security guard with a vintage crew cut and a Men in Black suit stands rigid just inside the doorway.

Steve opens his eyes. “What? Are you protecting me from my daughter? Go.”

Steve tells me, “Sit.” As if I were a dog. Or a girl who likes to be ordered around. The security guy looks back over his shoulder, checking to make sure I heel.

I sit in an olive-green plastic chair that squeaks whenever I move.