AN: I WILL NEED YOUR SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF
We were eating dinner when my phone went off.
I looked at the screen. Maddy. I stepped away from the table.
"Nate was in my room with a gun," she said. Her voice was tight and low, the kind of controlled that means the person is holding on by a thread. "He aimed it at himself like he was going to kill himself in my bed."
"Stop talking," I said. "Call the police in five minutes. Tell them what you were going to tell me. Tell them he stopped because you were crying too much."
A pause.
"Okay."
I hung up.
Mom looked at me from the table. "What happened?"
"You'll find out soon."
I walked to my room. Opened the drawer. Got my gun and put it in my hoodie pocket.
I took the bike. My car was too loud for the neighborhood at this hour and I needed quiet. The bike was fast enough and I could leave it anywhere.
* * *
I got to Maddy's street and saw Nate's truck. He was already gone.
I rode the direction it was pointing and kept going until I found him. Underpass on the far edge of the neighborhood. No streetlights. Nobody around. He was standing near the wall with a bottle in his hand. I could see the gun in his back pocket from where I stopped.
I came around the corner and hid.
I opened my backpack slow, one tooth of the zipper at a time so he couldn't hear it. Put Vaseline on my face. Wrapped my hair. Pulled on the black gloves. I did all of it without rushing. You do things right or you don't do them.
I peeked around the corner. His back was still to me. His shoulders were shaking. Crying, from the look of it. He had the bottle loose in one hand and his head down.
I moved out from the corner. Pavement, no gravel, nothing to announce me. I closed the distance before he registered anything had changed.
I took the gun from his back pocket in one motion and got it to the side of his head, right at the temple.
He froze completely.
"Fuck Nate," I said. "Your life sucks."
I pulled the trigger.
He fell.
I dropped the gun where it would land if a man had done it to himself. Stepped back. Looked at the scene for a few seconds. Made sure everything was where it needed to be.
Then I got on the bike and rode.
* * *
I knocked on Maddy's door and she opened it.
Her eyes were red. Her hands were steadier than I expected but there was something shaky underneath the surface of her, the kind of thing you feel in a person when you're standing close enough.
"Did you call the police?"
"Yeah."
"Okay. When they get here, tell them exactly what happened in your room. What he said, where he was standing, how he left. Nothing extra. You don't know where he went after. You were scared and you called."
She nodded.
I came inside and we sat in the kitchen. Her parents came down about ten minutes later, hair still messy, half-asleep, and Maddy told them. I watched both their faces run through the same sequence. Confusion first, then the full picture landing, then something that wasn't quite relief but lived right next to it.
The police showed up twenty-five minutes after she'd made the call.
I looked at the clock when they knocked.
When they came in I stood off to the side and let them work. One of the officers looked at me. I looked back at him and didn't say anything and he moved on. Maddy gave her statement cleanly — what Nate said when he came in, where he was standing, what the gun looked like, how she talked to him, how he left. She didn't add anything. She didn't stumble.
When they were done wrapping up I said, "A girl calls you about a guy breaking into her room with a gun and it takes you this long."
They apologized. Took her statement paperwork and left.
Her dad looked at me after the door closed. I didn't say anything. He didn't either.
I stayed until Maddy fell asleep. Sat in the chair in her room and watched the ceiling and didn't think about anything useful. When I was sure she was out I got up quietly and let myself out the front.
* * *
I put the bike in the Tahoe when I got home. Cleaned the whole frame with bleach — handlebars, seat, every surface I'd touched. I put the gloves and my shoes in a bag.
I drove to the junkyard before it opened. Left the bike and the bag. On the way out I burned the tires and the shoes separately. Watched them go.
I sat in the Tahoe in the parking lot of a gas station afterward and looked at my phone.
There was an alert from the local paper. I opened it.
Fezco and Ashtray. A police raid. A shootout. Both of them were dead.
I read it twice. Put my phone face-down on the passenger seat and sat there.
Fez had called me once when Rue was in trouble. That was the extent of what we had, but it was something. He was a real person. Ashtray was a kid. And now they were both gone because of the same neighborhood that had been trying to claim something from everybody in it for as long as I could remember.
I looked out the windshield at the empty parking lot.
I gotta get out of here.
Not eventually. Soon. The album, the label, the money — all of it pointed to the same conclusion and I'd been slow-walking it. The neighborhood had a long reach and I'd already felt it more than once. I wasn't going to keep sitting inside its range and acting surprised when it found me again.
I started the truck and drove home.
* * *
I think Maddy knew when she made that call that Nate was never going to be able to do anything like that again. The cops ruled it a suicide. It was the easy answer. She had her doubts. She never asked though. She liked the ignorance. And to be honest, Maddy was loyal to a fault. And she found someone as loyal as her. And she loved it.