Finally I pulled into the parking lot of a closed-up diner and stopped the car. “Everybody out,” I said as sirens sounded in the distance. “Ride’s over.”
We ran.
We each took a different direction. The sirens were closer now, closer. I ducked behind a closed strip mall and onto the disused train tracks, following them through the trees. Back toward Shady Oaks.
Because, in the darkness after the worst job of my life, I had nowhere else to go.
Chapter 6
Olivia
I was deep in the zone, sitting at my sketchbook doing a drawing, when the knock came at my door. It was late—at least eleven. Nothing good ever came from a late-night knock at the door.
I checked the peephole and saw a man I didn’t recognize. “Police, ma’am,” he said when he heard me on the other side of the door. He held up a badge to the glass.
Devon, I thought.
I pulled my zip-up sweatshirt tightly around myself and opened the door. “Yes?”
“You seen your neighbor tonight?” he asked, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “Across the way.”
He was gesturing to Devon’s apartment. The light was on in Devon’s window, and as I watched, the door opened and a uniformed cop came out. They were inside his place—the cops were inside Devon’s apartment.
For a second, I ran through all of the things crime TV had taught me over the years. Could they do that? Didn’t that require a warrant? What had Devon done that got the cops a warrant?
I looked back to the cop to see him watching my shocked reaction. He looked bored. He’d probably seen a lot of dumbass civilians with the expression I wore on my face right now.
“Your neighbor,” he prompted. “You know him?”
I shook my head, my face numb. “No.” That wasn’t entirely true, and I didn’t want to lie to a cop, so I added, “I’ve seen him around, in the corridors, the parking lot. That’s all.”
The cop nodded. “You seen him tonight?”
“Tonight? No.” God, I felt like I was lying. Why did I feel like I was lying when I wasn’t?
“Today?” the cop prompted.
“What did he do?” I blurted.
He barely bothered to acknowledge this. “Today?” he asked me again.
“Um.” I thought about it. “This morning. When he was leaving for work.” When I was standing at my window, watching him leave and wondering whether I should talk to him.
“Mm-hmm.” The cop pulled out a notebook and flipped a page. “How did you know he was going to work?”
“What?” Oh, God, he was right. If I didn’t know Devon, I didn’t know he had a job. Then again, maybe he hadn’t been leaving for work—I had no way of knowing. “It was just that it was eight o’clock in the morning, and I was going to work myself, so I guess I just assumed.”
“Huh,” the cop said, still looking down at his notebook. I wondered for a crazy minute if it was a prop. “And not since?”
“N—no.”
“He ever talk to you?”
Lie, Olivia, lie. Just do it. “No.”
“He have friends in the building that you know of?”
“No.” I’d never seen him talk to anyone except me. “I don’t think so. No.”
“Uh huh. And how long have you lived here?”
“Um.” If I wanted to sound stupid, I was doing a convincing job. “Two months.”
He nodded, glanced at me, then down at his notebook again. “You ever go to Pure Gold?” he asked.
My jaw dropped open. I passed the place every day—it was half a mile up the street. “The strip club?”
“Sorry, I have to ask,” he said, breaking the shell of his boredom for a minute. “Some of the girls in this complex work there.” He eyed me up and down—jeans, t-shirt, zip-up sweatshirt, no makeup, hair down—and looked at his notebook again. “I need to know if you’re one of them.”
A stripper? Was he asking me if I was a stripper? Well, strippers wore jeans and sweatshirts sometimes. Still, I’d never been asked that question in my life. “No,” I said. “I’m not a stripper. I work at Gratchen Advertising.”
What the hell did Devon have to do with the Pure Gold strip club? I felt like an idiot, a sheltered child. I’d had a crush on him, but the cops were at his place and he had something to do with strippers. Devon wasn’t some sweet harmless boy in a boy band. He’d never pretended to be one, either—he’d warned me almost from the minute I got in his car.
The cop seemed satisfied. He took down my information, then let me go and moved to the next door.
I stood for a long minute behind my closed door, my mind spinning. What the hell had Devon done? And where was he?
I should be angry. I should dismiss him from my thoughts, from my life, and get back to work. I didn’t need to have anything to do with a criminal. That wasn’t me.
I walked back to my sketchbook, but I couldn’t sit down. I couldn’t even stay still. I paced around the apartment, scraping my thumbnail over my lip, thinking. Damn it, I was worried about him. I didn’t have a phone number to warn him that the cops were at his place. If he came home, he’d walk right into it.
Which he probably deserved, because he was a criminal. I shouldn’t care about this. I really shouldn’t.
I couldn’t be inside anymore, pacing and staring at the walls. I grabbed a beer from the fridge and left, walking down a side set of stairs to the patio.
When Shady Oaks was built decades ago, the patio was probably imagined as a fun place for parties spilling over from the pool. Now the pool was dry and empty, and next to it the patio was dark and cold. No one ever used it, which made it a good place to be alone.
I sat on the hard fence that surrounded the patio, sipping my beer and looking out past the gravel parking lot to the tired straggle of trees beyond. This was a wakeup call—it was time to forget Devon. If he didn’t walk into the trap that was his apartment, it was only a matter of time before the police tracked him down. He wouldn’t escape, unless…
My stomach clenched. Maybe the police were here because something had happened, and Devon was dead. I took a breath. Either way, it was over. I had to get used to it. One way or another, Devon was gone. I took another swig of beer, forcing my brain to stay on the thought until I got used to it.
There was a shadow in the trees.
I put down my beer and stared at it.
It emerged silently into a silhouette. One I recognized right away. Devon was on foot, crossing the scraggly field in the dark, coming toward the parking lot.
I darted a look behind me to make sure I was alone, then without thinking I stood. I needed to get his attention, warn him away. What should I do? Wave my arms? Would the cops see?
But I didn’t need to do anything. Halfway across the field, Devon stopped. Just as I’d seen him, he’d seen me. I couldn’t see his face in the shadows, but I knew he was looking at me, silhouetted against the lights from the building behind me.
Think fast, Olivia. I shook my head, trying to tell him there was danger. Then I pointed above me to the fire escape.
Devon started to move again, quicker this time. He knew the layout of Shady Oaks as well as I did—which meant he knew that if he climbed the fire escape, out of sight of his own apartment and the cops inside, he’d end up a few feet from my kitchen window.