“I got distracted by definitely not killing anyone,” I told him.
Secret let out a little gulp noise, followed by a laugh I couldn’t quite decipher. “You kill the guy on the bench?” Bryce had made his way down the center aisle and was leaning over Santiago. “I thought this one was with you.”
“He is.”
“So who stabbed him?”
“Deerling.”
“And where is Deerling?”
“Dust in the wind,” Secret said, and started laughing again.
“Is she okay?” Bryce asked me.
“No.”
“Well this guy definitely isn’t okay.” He pulled a radio off his belt and said, “Send in the crew.”
A moment later, two uniformed paramedics appeared with stretcher and a big medical bag. They shooed Bryce and I out of the way and set to work on Santiago, who was complaining enough about their pokes and prods I thought he was probably going to be okay. They did a few basic reaction tests with him before loading him onto the stretcher, and I could have cried when he wiggled his toes on command.
At least I hadn’t totally ruined his life by bringing him in on this. I wasn’t going to pat myself on the back, considering what had happened to his, but it seemed like Santiago would walk away from this, and that was about as close to good news right now as I could hope for.
We walked out to the parking lot and Bryce stopped me just before I reached my car, resting his hand on my shoulder. “Am I going to find a body when I go back in there?” he asked.
“No.”
“You didn’t have time to dispose of one.”
“I didn’t have to.”
He gave me a baffled, but serious expression. “I don’t even know how to interpret what you’re saying anymore.”
“I’ll put it this way. If you go in there with a Hoover, you can put what’s left of Deerling in a nice mason jar.”
He seemed to realize then what the dust on my shoulder—and now on his hand—really was, and recoiled with a disgusted expression as he wiped it on his pants.
“Are you kidding me?”
“No. But the point is, he’s gone, and he’s not going to hurt anyone anymore, and I think that should be enough to make us both happy.”
“What did you do to him?”
“I took care of it.”
“That’s not an answer.”
I rubbed the bridge of my nose, not sure I’d ever be rid of this migraine again. “Detective, I think we both know there are some questions you’re going to ask me that you don’t really want the answers to, and I can assure you this is as much of an answer as you want, okay?”
His mouth formed a tight line, but he didn’t say anything else. For the time being, we were okay with each other. But I had a feeling things had shifted between Bryce and I today. He wanted me to be someo
ne he could rely on as long as I followed his rules, and he’d just learned the hard way I wasn’t going to do that every time.
It wasn’t like I was planning to run wild killing anyone who crossed my path, and I hoped he knew that, but when it came to someone like Deerling, I couldn’t just let the guy keep posing a threat.
Sometimes there were cases where the law couldn’t help.
This was one of them.