Sacred

“Jay,” she said, “will you just quit it? Give it a fucking rest, for crying out loud.”

He blinked and leaned back on his heels. “Okay,” he said with a sudden coldness. “No, when you’re right, you’re right. And you’re right, Angela. You are right.”

She looked at me and I shrugged.

“Right is right,” he said. “Right is definitely right.”

A black Mitsubishi 3000 GT pulled up with two young cops in it. They were laughing as they approached, and the tires smelled like they’d just had some rubber burned off.

“Nice car,” the driver said as he got out by Jay.

“You like it?” Jay said. “It handle well?”

The cop giggled as he looked at his partner. “Handled just fine, buddy.”

“Good. Steering wasn’t too tight when you were doing your doughnuts?”

“Come on,” Angie said to Jay, “get in the car.”

“Steering was just fine,” the cop said.

His partner stood by me at the open passenger door. “Axles felt a little wobbly, though, Bo.”

“That’s true,” Bo said, still blocking Jay from entering the car. “I’d get a mechanic take a look at your U-joints.”

“Sound advice,” Jay said.

The cop smiled and stepped out of Jay’s way. “You drive her careful, Mr. Fischer.”

“Remember,” his partner said, “a car is not a toy.”

They both laughed at that one and walked up the steps into the station.

I didn’t like the look in Jay’s eyes, or his whole demeanor since he’d been released. He seemed paradoxically lost and determined, adrift and focused, but it was an angry, spiteful focus.

I hopped in the passenger seat. “I’ll ride with you.”

He leaned in. “I’d really prefer if you didn’t.”

“Why?” I said. “We’re going to the same place. Right, Jay? To talk?”

He pursed his lips and exhaled loudly through his nostrils, looked at me with a burned-out gaze. “Yeah,” he said eventually. “Sure. Why not?”

He got in and started the car as Angie walked over to the Celica.

“Buckle up,” he said.

I did, and he slammed the gearshift into first and nailed the gas, dropping into second a split second later with his wrist flexed for another quick push into third. We cleared the small ramp leading out of the parking lot, and Jay shifted into fourth while the wheels were still in the air.

He took us to an all-night diner in downtown Bradenton. The streets around it were deserted, devoid of even the memory of human life, it seemed, as if a neutron bomb had hit an hour before we arrived. Blank, dark window squares in the few skyscrapers and squat municipal buildings around the diner stared down at us.

There were a few people in the diner, night owls by the look of them—a trio of truck drivers at the counter flirting with the waitress; a lone security guard with a patch for something called Palmetto Optics on his shoulder reading a newspaper with a pot of coffee for companionship; two nurses with wrinkled uniforms and low, tired voices two booths over from our own.

We ordered two coffees and Jay ordered a beer. For a minute we all studied our menus. When the waitress returned with our drinks, we each ordered a sandwich, though none of us sounded particularly enthusiastic about it.

Jay placed an unlit cigarette in his mouth and stared out the window as a clap of thunder ripped a hole in the sky and it began to rain. It wasn’t a light rain or one that grew heavy gradually. One moment the street was dry and pale orange under the streetlights, and the next, it disappeared behind a wall of water. Puddles formed in seconds and boiled on the sidewalk, and the raindrops hammered the tin roof of the diner so loudly it seemed the heavens had dumped several truckloads of dimes.

“Who’d Trevor send down here with you?” Jay said.

“Graham Clifton,” I said. “There’s another guy, too. Cushing.”

“They know about you coming to get me out of jail?”

I shook my head. “We’ve been shaking their tails since we arrived.”

“Why?”

“I don’t like them.”

He nodded. “The papers release the identity of the guy I supposedly killed?”

“Not that we know of.”

Angie leaned across the table and lit his cigarette. “Who was it?”

Jay puffed on the cigarette, but didn’t withdraw it from his mouth. “Jeff Price.” He glanced at his reflection in the window as the rain poured down the pane in rivulets and turned his features to rubber, melted his cheekbones.

“Jeff Price,” I said. “Former treatment supervisor for Grief Release. That Jeff Price?”

He took the cigarette from his mouth, tapped the ash into the black plastic ashtray. “You’ve done your homework, D’Artagnan.”

“Did you kill him?” Angie asked.

He sipped his beer and looked across the table at us, his head cocked to the right, his eyes swimming from side to side. He took another drag off his cigarette and his eyes left us and followed the smoke as it pirouetted from the ash and floated over Angie’s shoulder.

“Yeah, I killed him.”

“Why?” I said.

“He was a bad man,” he said. “A bad, bad man.”

“There are lots of bad men out there,” Angie said. “Bad women, too.”

“True,” he said. “Very true. Jeff Price, though? That fucker deserved a lot slower death than I gave him. I guarantee you that.” He took a good-sized slug from his beer. “He had to pay. Had to.”

“Pay for what?” Angie said.

He raised the beer bottle to his mouth, and his lips trembled around it. When he placed the bottle back on the table, his hand was as tremulous as his lips.

“Pay for what, Jay?” Angie repeated.

Jay gazed out the window again as the rain continued to clatter against the roof and boil and snap in the puddles. The dark hollows under his eyes reddened.

“Jeff Price killed Desiree Stone,” he said and a single tear fell from his eyelid and rolled down his cheek.

For a moment, I felt a deep ache bore through the center of my chest and leak into my stomach.

“When?” I said.

“Two days ago.” He wiped his cheek with the back of his hand.

“Wait,” Angie said. “She was with Price all this time, and he just decided to kill her two days ago?”

He shook his head. “She wasn’t with Price the entire time. She ditched him three weeks ago. The last two weeks,” he said softly, “she was with me.”