“This sucks.” He walks away from me and flops down on his cot.
“Sorry,” I mumble. It’s quiet for a second. “Listen, did you kill her or what?”
Colt rolls his eyes. “Oh, please.”
“Did you?”
He points a finger at me, looking legitimately riled for the first time. “You shut the fuck up.”
I shrug, trying to look casual. This is the only person who knew Ruth as well as I thought I did and for some reason I feel like I’m going to cry. “You weren’t even at the memorial.”
He stomps his foot. “Yeah, because they had me here. You want to know where I was when I found out about Ruth? I was sitting right fucking here. They had me on vandalism for some mailboxes, and next thing I know they’re telling me my girlfriend’s dead and I did it. How do you think that feels? So don’t you fucking tell me how to act—that I’m not sad enough or whatever. I’m not going to pretend to be some faggot crybaby like you just because that’s what everybody wants.” He rakes his fingers through his hair. “You’ll think what you think, and my parents are going to get me a lawyer, end of story.”
“You don’t have a lawyer yet?”
“It’s not exactly an easy case, is it?” He throws his hands up. “Someone planted a bunch of evidence in my car and they found my shotgun—well guess what? I didn’t shoot Ruth. Ruth and I didn’t pull guns on each other, we fucked.”
My palms are sweaty. He thinks she got shot. “Colt . . . that isn’t how it happened.”
“Nobody tells me anything,” he shouts. “I sit here, and nobody tells me shit. Meanwhile I’m going hoarse saying, ‘Yo, shitheads, everyone around here keeps a shotgun in their car.’ I’m going, ‘Yo, assholes, the night you have me murdering, I was actually rolling around Fang Road shooting up mailboxes.’ And they’re like, ‘Stop calling us assholes,’ and I’m like—”
“This is very cut and dry, Colt.” I’m about to explain that it’s a big deal that he doesn’t know how she was killed, and so he should probably tell a lawyer that—but he cuts me off by making a fart noise. Then he gives me the finger.
I sigh, feeling a little nauseous. From what he’s saying, he definitely sounds innocent. But at the same time he’s still so mean that it’s a little hard to say I’m on his side. Regardless of where Colt falls on the line between asslord and murdering psychopath, he’s still a total jerk.
“Listen, Tits McGhee, if you don’t believe me go check it out yourself.” He laughs. “Go talk to the witch—Klitch the witch—she’ll remember. I got her so bad her mailbox looks like a warzone, like fucking Afghanistan. She came out and screamed at me and I was yelling all sorts of funny shit at her for almost an hour. She was drunk but she’ll remember me.” He smiles. “Nobody forgets the Honeycomb.”
On the way out, I try to ask Sheriff Staake about the fact that Colt says he doesn’t know any of the details of Ruth’s murder. But Staake keeps cutting me off, looking more and more annoyed.
“Now I’m a thinker, see,” he says, leading me to the exit. “And I’m starting to wonder whose side you’re on—because you know what? I heard some of what you said up there with Colt and it didn’t seem like you were on the town’s side. No, ma’am.” He spins me around so we’re facing each other. His breath smells like bubble gum. “My daughter was right. You’re an outsider. And a rebel without a cause in my professional opinion.”
“You’re daughter’s a hoochie mama,” I blurt. “And you’re just mad because Colt did it with her.”
Staake doesn’t say anything. Just keeps a firm grip on my jacket all the way to the parking lot.
BUCKSHOT
Mrs. Klitch lives in a creepy house on an otherwise deserted street, and has all these homemade sculptures of dragons and dinosaurs and children in her yard. Kids call her Klitch the Witch. Well, kids and Colt call her that, I guess. It’s not very polite. I once had this sort of hippie teacher, Miss Winston, who was always teaching us about art, and equality, and recycling. After she heard us calling Mrs. Klitch the Witch, Miss Winston decided to take us on a field trip to Fang Road so we could do a tour of Mrs. Klitch’s sculptures and come to know her as an artist. The only problem was that when we showed up, Mrs. Klitch was sick or something, and wouldn’t come outside. Kids kept screaming that they could see her peeking out at them through the windows, casting spells. The whole field trip was over in about ten minutes.
I park near the edge of Mrs. Klitch’s property. Her mailbox is set back from the road, right next to her front gate. Over the years Mrs. Klitch has had to turn her house into sort of a fortress because kids like Colt kept vandalizing her statues. She’s added a steel gate, who knows how many alarm systems, and a ten-foot-tall fence—with shiny barbed wire coiled on top. I slam the car door. On the other side of the fence, a crudely made brontosaurus stares at me with eyes made of blue-and-brown sea glass.
I hear coughing and startle to see Mrs. Klitch sitting on a folding chair in the shadows, like, twenty feet away. She’s dressed for cold and sipping on a can of Beast. She looks ninety years old, all brown and crinkly, and her eyes are black and beady, sucked into her face like raisins on a Danish.
“Hello Mrs. Klitch! I’m just going to look at your mailbox a second, if that’s okay?”
In response, she burps, tosses her empty beer can on the grass, and crushes it under one of her snow boots—proving to be surprisingly strong for someone who resembles a mummified corpse.
“You should come in and have a drink with me,” she snarls. “I’ll tell you stories. I know everything about everything.”
“No thanks!” I shudder and make my way toward the mailbox, half expecting Mrs. Klitch to throw herself against the fence like a wild animal and coil her tongue between the chain links. “Actually, though, Mrs. Klitch, do you remember—” I stop in my tracks. The mailbox is riddled with holes. Its metal is bent and pockmarked with shotgun-size craters.
“Looking for these?” Mrs. Klitch digs into her snow pants, bringing out a handful of shotgun shells. “Last Friday, eight p.m. These shells were full of buckshot, and that boy was over raising hell against my property—that Lightning Bolt Skiddercrumb, or whatever the glory heck his name is. I was trying to watch infomercials!”
Friday was the night Ruth died. Eight p.m. was when she was supposed to be at my house—which means that if Colt was over here at eight o’clock he could never have intercepted her on Route 51. My stomach hurts.
“Someone should arrest him,” Mrs. Klitch snaps. “I told the cops but nobody believes me—not the witch!” She cackles a loud, witchlike cackle. I run back to my car.
“Balls!” I hurl myself onto the driver’s seat and start banging on the steering wheel, accidentally honking the horn. Then I lock all the doors. “Balls,” I hiss again—because, yeah, so sue me, but part of me was relieved for this to be over, just like Staake said. Then at least we’d all be safe. And now there’s a killer on the loose, and Davey’s not crazy like I told him he was, and no one at the police department wants to listen to reason. And all we’ve got for evidence is the word of a juvenile delinquent/alleged killer, the gut feeling of an attractive war veteran who probably technically has severe PTSD, and an alibi that consists of a certifiably crazy lady with an obvious drinking problem and a reputation for casting spells.
I look out at Mrs. Klitch laughing in her folding chair, gleefully kicking her boots against the cold grass. Certain people might be able to ignore this but I can’t leave Davey alone with the knowledge that things just aren’t right—because he isn’t crazy, and it’d be mean to pretend he is just because that’s easier.