A Friend in the Dark - Gregory Ashe Page 0,32

with Jake’s death. And that means she already wanted you dead.” Sam stepped away from the blinds; they swooshed back against the glass. His gaze roamed the apartment: the books, the clothes, the books, the bathroom, the books, the fridge, the books. “Now we’re witnesses to a murder. She has to remove us.”

“Heckler doesn’t know we saw it, though.” Rufus yanked his high-tops off and took a seat on the edge of the mattress.

“Really?” Sam said.

“Really,” Rufus echoed before glancing sideways. “Wait, what do you mean? Yeah, really. We could have been taking a stroll around the neighborhood.”

“Ok. Fine. Let’s pretend that’s what it was. You’re Heckler. You just killed a guy, shot him in cold blood in a public park. And that guy, he just happens to be carrying the cell phone of a dead cop. She grabs the phone, leaves the park, and sees—well, fuck me backward, in the sheerest of fucking coincidences, it’s Jake’s informant. The one who was supposed to be dead. But, hey, he’s probably just out for his evening fucking constitutional.”

Rufus’s hands were tingling, the blood leaving his extremities and his vision morphing like he was going through a tunnel. God help him if his anxiety actually caused him to pass out in front of Sam.

Tucking his hands under his arms, Sam paced. Tried to pace. The small room made it difficult, and even with black spots whirling in his vision, Rufus felt a moment of—pity? compassion?—watching Sam struggle to control the tremors.

“I can’t prove it,” Sam said, his voice locked down again. “I’m telling you I saw her face, and that woman knew who you were and was surprised to see you walking around.”

“I might vomit.”

Sam glanced around the apartment, grabbed a popcorn bucket off the counter—purchased on one of Rufus’s rare mother-son outings, vintage plastic, circa 1999—and pressed it into Rufus’s hands.

Rufus held on to the bucket for a moment, gripping the plastic hard enough that his fingertips squeaked against it. But he didn’t have anything to clean it out with if he upchucked, and then the smell would permeate the plastic and it’d be one more moment in his life when everything turned to dogshit. Rufus carefully set the bucket on the floor beside the bed, planted his hands on his knees, put his head down, and took a few breaths. Strangled breaths at first, but then he thought of the yoga book on the floor in the return pile. Not that Rufus had been interested in taking up the practice, before or after reading the text, but there’d been a segment on the art of breathing in chapter two.

He walked himself through those paragraphs from memory. Notice you are breathing. Be aware of it. Is your breath fast? Slow it down. Deeply now, from your toes, through your core, then release. The topic had gotten more complex after that. Something about classic pranayama techniques, alternate nostril breathing, (which, aside from when he had a cold, Rufus had no idea how to do), but the principal remained.

Be aware.

He felt a little better after a minute or two.

“I don’t know what to do,” Sam said, and somehow the tank managed to perch on the edge of the mattress like a bird on a birdbath. “Can you tell me what you need?”

“I’m ok,” Rufus insisted, slowly raising his head to look at Sam.

“You need to disappear for a few days. Maybe a week, tops. Do you have somewhere you can go? Somewhere no one will find you?”

“What about you?” Rufus asked.

“What about me?”

“She saw you too.”

Sam just shrugged.

Rufus tugged at his hair with one hand. “So what does that shrug mean? I run away and you go stomping around New York, throwing your dick around?”

“You stay safe,” Sam said. “You did your part, getting us this far.”

Keeping his hand stuck in his hair, Rufus said, “You have no idea the level of depravity you’d be walking into. You don’t know anyone, what some of these people are capable—”

Sam kissed him. Then, pulling back, he screwed up his face almost like he wasn’t sure what he’d done. He must have figured it out pretty fast because he leaned in for another kiss. This one was better, in Rufus’s limited experience: softer, slower, more assured. Not tender. Not even close to tender. More on the demanding end of the spectrum. But, like everything with the tank, it was a confusing mix.

Sam’s hand found Rufus’s waist as he kissed him again, rolling him onto his back,