Page 73 of Evil All Along

Keme just kept punching.

Genius struck. “Keme, stop it right now, or I’m telling Indira!”

Mid-slam, Keme froze. He looked over at me, eyes wide and unseeing, his thin chest rising and falling frantically. One hand was still tangled in Tripple’s hair.

“It’s okay,” I said. “We’re all okay. You can stop now.”

A second passed. And then another. A hint of awareness flickered deep in his eyes, and with what looked like a surprising amount of effort, he released Tripple’s hair and flexed his fingers stiffly. Tripple’s head fell to the pavement; if the deputy was still conscious, there was no sign of it. Hey, at least he was alive.

Millie took Keme by the arm and helped him up, and I reached them a moment later. I didn’t even know I was going to do it until it happened and I pulled both of them into a hug. After a heartbeat, Millie started to cry—not exactly a surprise. Whatwasa surprise, though, was that Keme did too.

“Everybody’s okay,” I said. “You guys did so good. You’re idiots, and I’m going to yell at you later, but you did a fantastic job, and I love you so much.” Pushing back from them, I said, “Millie, scream if Tripple moves. I’ve got to find Bobby.”

Keme was still sobbing, and I wasn’t sure he heard me. Millie, though, for all her tears, had a look of grim resolve. I figured if Tripple moved, he might get the paving stone first—andthenshe’d scream.

I raced through the gate. On my way, I passed Dahlberg, who was standing by her car, hand on her holstered service weapon.

“Tripple,” I said. “You’ve got to arrest Tripple, he’s—”

And then I saw Bobby. He lay on the ground in a crumpled heap next to the Pilot.

That blunt, ugly thing in my chest doubled in size. It was too big for my lungs to expand. Too big for my heart to beat.

I might have stayed like that forever if Bobby hadn’t moaned and rolled onto his back.

My legs herky-jerked me over to him before I could even think about it. I dropped onto my knees as he propped himself on one elbow. It was a strangely sleepy movement, the way he roused himself in bed sometimes, when I came in late and he wanted to say goodnight. It was hard to see him all of a sudden. My eyes were hot.

“What’s wrong?” he mumbled. “What happened? Are you okay?”

“AmIokay? Bobby, areyouokay?”

He gave an almost imperceptible nod. But he didn’t say anything, and the tightness around his eyes told me hewasn’tokay, not entirely.

“DEPUTY DAHLBERG IS ARRESTING DEPUTY TRIPPLE!”

She was standing right behind me, and I almost shot out of my shoes.

Bobby murmured, “Who’s that?”

I stared at him. And then I caught the shadow of that ridiculously goofy grin. I slapped his shoulder. “Don’tdothat!”

He let out a wounded cry, which of course made me feel terrible, and then he grinned about that too. I thought about beating him up some more, but instead, somehow, I ended up sitting on the asphalt, Bobby’s head pillowed in my lap, insisting he not move until the ambulance got there. Keme and Millie sat with us as cruisers began to arrive, lights and sirens blazing.

And we were still sitting there, our shadows shifting in the spinning lights of the deputies’ cars, when Keme held out his hand.

It took me a moment.

And then, with a tired smile, I slapped him five.

Chapter 22

Believe it or not, we made it to Halloween.

It would be oversimplifying things to say that the investigation was over. If anything, the real investigation was only beginning. Tripple was under arrest (and, thanks to Keme, in the hospital), and the sheriff had informed me that they’d found Channelle’s fingerprints on the cruiser’s visor mirror—one place that Tripple had forgotten to wipe down, apparently. Now the sheriff had to start unraveling the mess Tripple had created. JT’s and Channelle’s murders would be bad enough; what would be even worse, though, would be the ripples that spread outward: all of Tripple’s arrests, all of his convictions, all of his work as a deputy—it would come under a microscope now. A lifetime’s work undone because he’d been selfish and violent and, in a word, evil. And because he’d been in love.

Bobby was okay, it turned out—although he’d had a bad headache for the next day. Tripple had used a chokehold to knock him out. It took, on average, nine seconds for someone to lose consciousness when a chokehold is correctly applied. Bobby had been unconscious before he’d even really had a chance to fight. The downside to chokeholds was that they could all too easily be fatal, one of the reasons modern police departments no longer trained LEOs to use them. An old-timer like Tripple, though, knew all the dirty tricks. I was just grateful Bobby hadn’t had anything worse happen to him.

Keme—to my absolute delight, and to his panicked embarrassment—had received a commendation from Sheriff Acosta for, among other things, saving my life. I suspected it was also meant to convey, implicitly, Acosta’s apology for theway Keme had been treated at the beginning of the investigation. The actual ceremony wasn’t for a few more days, and I cannot fully express my genuine pleasure in watching the boy swing from swaggering teenage machismo to terror at the prospect of standing in front of all those people. (In case you’re wondering, the swaggering teenage machismo tended to win out whenever Millie was around.)

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