took a deep breath, rose into a hunch, and then dragged him by his feet into the hallway. At that moment, Jackson materialized from the darkness, fire extinguisher in hand.
“Get out of the way!” he yelled.
“I’m trying!”
I lugged Lex into the hall as Jackson shouldered his way inside the bathroom, spraying the extinguisher in wild desperate arcs. And then in the chaos of hissing foam and sheeting water and screaming noise, I dropped beside Lex.
“Get out!” Jackson yelled.
“I can’t leave him here!”
Jackson stood there dripping, like he was seeing Lex for the first time. The fire was a smoking sputtering mess, but it was out. I knelt beside Lex and placed two fingers against his neck, the floor hard under my stockinged knees. His eyes were glassy and staring, his face bruised, his lip split. No pulse beat under my fingers.
He was dead, very dead.
But not from the fire. In the center of his chest, a red bloodstain soaked through the thin layer of his white tee-shirt.
Jackson held the empty fire extinguisher. “Is he okay?”
“No, he’s not.” I straightened, throat burning. “Come on. We have to get out of here.”
“But you said—”
“That was before I knew he was dead.”
Jackson stared. The fire alarm still split the air. The sprinklers continued full force, up and down the hall, the stale metallic-smelling water showering down in torrents.
Jackson looked at me, bewildered. “So we just leave him like that?”
“We have to. It’s a crime scene.”
Or what’s left of it, I thought, as Jackson moved down the hall toward the parking lot exit.
“You go,” he said. “I’ve gotta turn off these sprinklers.”
“I don’t think—”
“I gotta shut the damn things off before everything’s ruined!”
He went back inside, and I didn’t argue. The first person I saw in the parking lot was Rico, phone out. He waved frantically at me, and I jogged over and hugged him. He smelled like mud and sweat and liquor. Behind him, Adam sat on the hood of Rico’s Chevy Tahoe, skinny arms wrapped around his knees.
“Are you guys okay?”
Rico nodded and kept talking on his phone. Adam stared. I put a hand on his leg, but he didn’t seem to notice.
Trey appeared from the doorway and headed my way, a dozen people in his wake, half of them on cell phones. In the distance I heard the wail of sirens.
“All clear?” he said.
I grabbed his elbow and dragged him to the edge of the parking lot. “We’ve got bigger problems. Lex is dead.”
He blinked. “What?”
“Dead. In the bathroom. Checked his pulse. Dead.”
“How?”
“Not from the fire. Fires don’t cause bloody chest wounds.”
My words ran together in a machine-gun patter. I shook myself, and my vision blurred at the edges. Suddenly it was hard to catch a breath. Trey’s hands went to my shoulders, and I heard him calling my name as if from very far away.
“Tai, look at me.”
I met his eyes. “What?”
“Take a deep breath, in and out. Slowly.”
I did as he said. He kept his eyes locked on me, cool and professionally detached. When he decided that I wasn’t about to pass out, he said, “Call 911. Report a possible homicide.”
“I know what a dead body is called.”
He turned to go. I grabbed his arm.
“You can’t go back in there!”
“I need to secure the crime scene.”
“No, you don’t. You’re not—”
But he’d already disappeared into the crowd without a backwards glance, as if he were a cop again, as if that were the side of the line he stood on. Clear the scene, secure the scene. Trey knew how to do this—he had the flow chart in his head. But I had nothing.
I heard the crowd babbling, growing, thronging. Wet people on cell phones everywhere, including Frankie, her hair wild about her face. Cricket sobbed in Jackson’s arms, and he rocked her against his chest, his eyes on the restaurant. Rico and Adam sat shoulder to shoulder on the hood of Rico’s car, shell-shocked.
The wail of sirens drew closer, like a live thing closing in. And all I could think was, please not this again. Not with me in the middle. Not again.
I wrapped my arms tight across my chest. Then I punched 911. When the operator answered, all I could think to say was, “Help. We really need help.”
Chapter Six
Detective Sandford Cummings examined my business card for Dexter’s Guns and More. “You’re Dexter’s niece, right? Weren’t you involved in that Beaumont thing back in the spring?”
This was a question I got a lot, especially from new customers at the