A Friend in the Dark - Gregory Ashe Page 0,45

was talking about most of the time.”

Rufus stared at Sam. It wasn’t a mean stare—more like disbelief. His entire life, no one had called him smart. Sure as hell not his mother. His teachers had all but given up on the redheaded punk in grade school. And as an adult, the wrong sort of people thought Rufus was clever—cunning, even—with a smart-mouth attitude in spades. But they never equated him with anything more. And then he’d met Jake. Jake had teased him relentlessly about the trips to the library—Plutarch’s Essays? Do you even know who Plutarch is?—but always in the end he’d say to Rufus, “I know you’re smart.”

And now, to hear that from Sam?

Rufus started to speak, but the words were tangled around a lump, so he cleared his throat. “You’re still not bullshitting me, right?”

Sam shook his head slowly. “This is what me bullshitting you sounds like: ‘Gee, Rufus, you’re so big and muscley.’”

Rufus laughed and felt some of the tension ease. “Why, thank you.”

“Those shoulders. Those arms. Those gams.”

“Don’t get carried away.” Rufus started to speak again, swallowed down a few words that didn’t taste right, then said simply, “Thanks.”

“Sure,” Sam said. “Now flex for me.”

Rufus rolled his eyes and began walking again. “Come on. We’re almost there—this has been a hotspot for business since the ’90s.”

“Not that you’d know personally, of course.”

“Nope.”

“Uh-huh.”

Rufus ignored the jab and led Sam around a bend before cutting off the main path and following an unofficial trail that took a sudden dip down a hill. The path was overgrown on either side, and the old forest created a thick green canopy overhead. Sycamore, oaks, and hackberry, Rufus told himself. A sweat broke out under his arms, on the back of his neck, and his gut churned uncomfortably as Rufus walked deeper into his memories. He shook himself of that nervous, flip-flop feeling and focused. Yellowwood and Black Cherry were aggressive and required constant upkeep from the Department of Parks and Recreation. Plant lists from the 1800s suggested that while native species had outnumbered the invasive by over seventy percent, most of those trees were found to have been long dead and rotted by the time another survey was conducted in 2006. The invasive trees now outnumbered native, and it was a whole thing with arborists.

A cigarette lighter briefly illuminated a man’s face just ahead, and a woman’s laugh echoed from somewhere deeper in the trees. Her voice bounced off a nearby rock face and filled the forest with a haunted chuckle.

Stopping a few feet short to give distance to the stranger, Rufus called, “Hey, is Juliana around?”

Branches trembled—yellowwood, Rufus thought again—and a figure emerged out of the shadows, light catching him at the waist: painfully thin, bare skin stretched tight over ribs showing under a pinstripe vest, track marks running up the inside of his arm. His face was lost in the darkness, but his voice had a saccharine layer as he cooed, “Juliana? Fuck Juliana, baby. You don’t need that old cooz. Come here. Let me get a closer look at you.”

Rufus held a hand out toward Sam. “I need money,” he murmured.

Sam pulled out of his stack of bills, peeled off some, and held them out with a raised eyebrow.

Rufus snatched the offering, tucked them into his front pocket, and moved toward the skinny guy. “I’m not interested, no offense. Have you seen Juliana?”

“What’d you got in there?” This close, Rufus could smell something like overheated electronics, or burning plastic—the smell of somebody tweaked out of his mind. “You playing pocket pool for Boy George?”

“Ten bucks if you tell me where she is.”

“Ten bucks? I wouldn’t spit on your dick for ten bucks. Big boy, over there, on the other hand….”

“Pass,” Sam said in a dry voice.

Boy George, or whoever the hell he was, rocked on his heels. “Why do you want to find that bitch so bad?”

Rufus cracked his neck to one side and huffed. “Twenty bucks, George. I’m not asking what you’ll do with Andrew Jackson, so don’t butt into my business with Juliana.”

“Come here. I seen you around here before?”

“Probably not,” Rufus answered.

Sam made a very asshole-ish noise in his throat.

“You’re kinda pretty. You sure?” Then George held out his hand and laughed. “Oh shit, your face. I’m just messing with you; Boy George is very discreet. Lemme see Andrew.”

Rufus pulled his hand from his pocket, the bills still clutched tight. He tugged free a twenty and waved it.

“You got plenty there,” Boy George said. “Your