nod. Then I shake my head. I exhale slowly and loudly as if my body is deflating. The headache stays. It pounds against the walls of my head. I pinch the top of my nose and close my eyes. “Jesus, Drew, I’ve messed up. I’ve really messed up.”
He puts a hand on my shoulder. “Maybe there’s a way we can fix it, but we need to call the sheriff. He ain’t gonna be happy, but . . .”
I slap one handcuff on his wrist and the other one onto the railing.
“What the hell, Noah?”
I take my gun out and point it at him. There’s no need for both of us to throw away our careers. We can’t keep doing this. But I can. “I’ll say it was my fault. I’ll say you tried to stop me.”
“Noah . . .”
“I’m going to need your gun and your keys.”
“Don’t do this, buddy.”
“Hand them over.”
“And if I don’t?”
I don’t answer him. I won’t shoot him, he knows that. He sighs. It’s hard seeing the disappointment in my best friend’s eyes. He takes his gun out and lowers it carefully, kicks it over, then tosses me his keys. I kick the gun over the edge of the landing and it hits the floor below but doesn’t go off. Guns don’t do that. I send the keys after it. I ask for his phone and he tosses it to me. I put it into my pocket.
“It can only go badly for you,” he says.
“I know.”
I head back into the office. I close the door. Conrad smiles at me. “Tick tock,” he says.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
He spits on the floor where his blood is forming all sorts of patterns of the type a psychiatrist might find interesting. “It means there’s only so long you can keep this up before my dad gets here. You know what he’s going to do to you. I’d bet the farm he’s going to put you in the ground.”
“Tell me where she is.”
“You’re a broken record, man.”
“We found her headband.”
“What headband?”
“The one that fell off her when she was abducted. It has your fingerprints on it. That’s what put me on to you, Conrad.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“I took a look in your car out in the parking lot before we came up here. Her school bag is in the trunk.”
“You’re lying, and if you’re not lying it’s because you put it there.”
I stretch out my fingers. They need patching up. They need ice. They need splints.
“You going to hit me again?” he asks. “You always were a pussy, Noah. Why don’t—”
“I know the kind of guy you are, Conrad. And you know that I know.”
His laughter makes me cringe. “Finally, the truth as to why we’re really here. That missing kid has nothing to do with any of this,” he says. “We’re here because you’re still holding a grudge, even after all these years. You’re pathetic.”
I take my gun out and shove it into his stomach. His grin disappears. “Listen to me, Conrad. I know you took her. She’s seven years old. Just an innocent kid. Tell me where she is, and this all ends.” I push the gun in tighter. “You don’t tell me, this still ends, only in a much messier way. My partner out there, he wants me to stop, but he’s cuffed to the railing and can’t do anything to help you. There’s nobody else coming. Your whole tick-tock thing, that’s really about me shooting you if you don’t tell me where she is. Could be in the arm. Could be in the leg. Maybe I’ll shoot you in the dick. You really want a life where you only have a tube to piss out of and legs that don’t work?”
“You don’t have the balls,” he says.
I grab a pair of invoices from the in-out tray and ball them into his mouth. Even when I shoot him in the leg it takes his mind a second to catch up. He thrashes around and spits out the invoices and they’re bloody and wet and stick to the floor. Drew is yelling at me to stop, and on this side of the door Conrad is screaming and my ears are ringing from the shot and the thing in my stomach is turning and turning and the thing in my head is banging and banging. Blood is pouring out of Conrad’s leg to join all the other blood on the floor. I can see a butterfly. I can see a pair of women’s shoes. I can see a missing girl, and I can see death.
“Where is she?” I yell.
“Go to hell.”
I think of Alyssa, scared and alone and tied up somewhere. I know Alyssa. She’s had a rough few years, first losing her dad, then earlier this year losing her mom. She’s a tough kid fighting a mean world. She’s gone through so much I refuse to let her go through anything else. The ringing in my ears starts to subside. I can hear blood dripping on the floor. I can hear my own heartbeat.
I jam the gun into the wound. I feel sick. I can’t do this for much longer. I need him to tell me. I need this to stop. He screams. “I’m not kidding, Conrad, I swear to God, I’m not kidding.”
“Please, Noah, please, don’t, please don’t.”
“Where is she?”
“Wait,” he says, and he’s caught between hyperventilating and crying. “Just a second, just . . . just wait.”
I wait, giving him the chance to compose what needs composing. It won’t be an insult. It won’t be a denial.
“What if . . . what if I didn’t take her, but I know who did?”
Relief floods my body. I can work with that. “And how would you know that?”
“What if — I mean, Jesus, my leg . . . it hurts, man, it really hurts. I need an ambulance.”
“Where is she?”
“You’re crazy, you know that? You’re a psychopath.”
“Where is she?”
“What if . . .” His eyes roll and he looks pale. I shake him. He looks right at me. “I don’t feel so good.”
“Tell me where she is and I call an ambulance.”
“An ambulance,” he says, and he starts to pass out again.
I slap him.
“What?”
“Alyssa.”
“Yeah, Alyssa, Alyssa . . . I overheard a couple of guys, right? They were talking at the bar last night. What if I told you what they said?”
“If what they said finds her, then I don’t have to shoot you no more.”
“They were search and rescue guys,” he says, “from out of town, here looking for that hiker who got lost recently. I’ve never seen them before, I swear.”
Search and rescue guys. The town of Acacia Pines is surrounded by an endless sea of forests and lakes that out-of-towners get lost in. Locals refer to that vast wilderness as The Pines. Search and rescue refer to it as the Green Hole — black holes absorb light, but the Green Hole absorbs hikers and campers. We’ll send out search parties, and sometimes search parties will come in from other cities to help, and most of the time we’ll find the missing campers, but sometimes we don’t. “You didn’t think of picking up the phone and calling your dad? You figured you’d do nothing and let a seven-year-old girl you knew was missing stay missing?”
His head droops. I put my finger into the bullet wound and he screams and I take my finger back out and wipe it on my shirt.
“Why didn’t you tell somebody?”
He