that he’s alive somehow until I see maggots wriggling out of a tear in his skin. The abdomen slowly deflates as a horrendous smell fills the room.
Jamison gags once and then takes off across the room. He pukes into the fireplace, chunks of whatever he’d eaten earlier spattering against the grate and onto the bricks. Nausea turns my stomach. For the first time, I’m glad I’ve gone hungry, barely ate the breakfast I cooked. It’s the only thing keeping me from following his lead. He wipes his mouth on the back of his arm and then brushes the arm against his jeans. His face is pale when he glances up at me.
“Sorry,” he mumbles. Instead of coming over, he leans, palms on his knees. “He was a bastard, but I never thought I’d be tossing him in a hole to rot,” he says and I suddenly have a furious hope it’s not the smell that got to him. That the old Jamison, the one I trust with my life because he saved it, the one I’d do anything for, is in there.
“What happened?” I ask carefully. I don’t want to shut him down. If I work this right, maybe I can make him see how messed up all of this is.
“Allie and you. Figured things would go bad sooner or later. So, we were going to have to hold her until we figured things out. My apartment’s a shithole. Thin walls. I thought maybe the barn here would work. I don’t know,” he says. He stands straight and laces his fingers together before running them over his shaved head, the rubber of the yellow gloves squeaking against his sweaty scalp. “Once I got here it just seemed easier to kill him.”
My mouth opens automatically to spit out some answer he’ll want to hear. It’s the same thing I’ve been doing for years. This time though, nothing comes.
He’s quiet for a long time before a smile spreads slowly across his lips. “You and me,” he says. “You’re the only one I could ever count on. I got you out of your dad’s house. You know the police took me in for questioning? Never told them where you were,” he says, a bounce to his voice. I was the only one he could count on, but the examples he’s bringing up are things he did for me. I’m not sure if he’s doing it on purpose. If I’m supposed to get defensive.
“I never knew that,” I say, my voice deadpan, carefully void of emotion.
“Yup,” he says lightly. He rubs his hands once more over his head and then drops them to his sides. “Twice, but I didn’t break. You should have seen him at the station, your dad. Eye all bashed up where I hit him with the bat. I knew if he found you again, he’d kill you. Hell, for a bit there, I thought he was gonna kill me.”
My throat tightens. I don’t want to think about it.
“When I got my apartment, I saw him in the parking lot a couple times, just watching. That’s why I never said you could stay at my place.”
The words run through me like cold water. Some nights, Jamison had visited me at the boxcars. He’d told me about his apartment in an offhanded comment but never once invited me over. He brought me food. Gave me money to keep me in the basics. But he never offered me so much as floor space.
I followed him once. Peered in his windows feeling like some sort of messed up creeper, sure the cops would pull up any second. His place isn’t exactly in the kind of neighborhood where people bother calling the police, but I crouched in the shadows, shaking anyway, watching him inside where it was warm. He’d had a girl over, some brown haired girl he never introduced me to or mentioned. From what I saw through the window though, they were close. I left after that.
“Hey,” he says, snapping me back to the living room, the dead body and the tarp. “This is just a snag. We’ll sort it out, right? I mean, we always do.”
He’s asking me, needing reassurance. Maybe with the right words, the right tone, I can get him to let Allie go, Talia, me, without anyone else ending up a pussing mess on a tarp. But something in his eyes makes me hesitate. He’s watching me as if taking in every detail, every shudder of faith in him,