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Janet lived in my apartment complex and normally let her dog poop wherever he wanted without ever picking it up.
Today, her bulldog was pooping right in front of my building. There wasn’t a poop bag in sight.
I tried not to stare pointedly at her dog’s mountain of manure as I walked toward her. Mainly because I would have thrown up, but also because I hated confrontation, even if it involved telling someone they were being an obnoxious walking dog turd by leaving their dog turds out to bake in the sun.
“Hey, Janet.” I faked the fakest smile of my goddamn life.
“Have you seen Will?”
“Huh? No, why?”
“I really need to give him back his video games, but he won’t pick up my calls.”
I shrugged. “I can give them to him. Just leave them with the office manager and I’ll pick them up this afternoo—”
“Is he upset at me?” Her question surprised me.
“I, uhm, what? Didn’t you two break up?”
“Yeah, but it was mutual. We agreed we wanted to stay good friends. He was clearly not into me, so whatever. But I won’t lie that I consider him a really close friend.”
“Will seemed pretty shaken when you guys broke up. He never said it was mutual.”
“Of course it was. I figured he wasn’t into me, or into girls, probably, after like the tenth time we tried having sex and we couldn’t. I offered going to a doctor with him and—shit, sorry. I’m talking too much. Just, you know, tell him I’ve got his games.”
“Uh, sure.”
Just then, another dog rounded the corner with its owner following. This set off Janet’s bulldog, who started barking and lunging, throwing its drool all over the place. I managed to dodge a few globs as if I were in the Matrix. I didn’t want to press my luck, and I hurried up the stairs while my work scrubs were still dry.
That was… weird. Will hadn’t talked much about Janet, but when he had talked about her, everything seemed fine. They weren’t going out for long, but they had spent a ton of time together. He seemed really smitten with her actually.
If Will was having some kind of issue, did he know he could talk to me about it? I trusted him with everything, so why hadn’t he trusted me?
I dug into my pocket for my keys. I unlocked my door and stepped inside.
Instantly, I knew something was off, all thoughts of Will and Janet and piling dog poop set aside.
Something was terribly wrong.
There was a smell in the air. Like iron. It stung at my nose. I thought that maybe Mason or Jar had an accident in the living room before we left and the sun cooked through it, making the apartment reek.
Seconds later and that theory was put to rest.
“Oh my God.” I grasped at my chest, shock hitting me like a lightning bolt striking down on a cloudless day.
My first instinct wasn’t to run or to hide or to shout.
I pulled out my phone and dialed Beckham’s number, my entire body feeling like it was drained of all blood.
26 Beckham Noble
Sweat beaded on my forehead. I wiped it away with the small white towel I had hooked in the side of my shorts. We were sitting outside of a popular pub, a happy hour special attracting all kinds of people to the beachside sports-themed spot. We had gotten here right after our kickball game and managed to dodge the mad rush, snagging a table by the far corner of the patio, underneath a palm tree that shielded us from the setting sun.
It had been a long day. Before the kickball game, I’d spent all day at the corner store that claimed they still had footage from the night of Oliver and Derrick’s attack. When I arrived, they spent a good hour explaining their system to me and how the videos were stored for years on the cloud. They showed me where all the cameras were set up, and they even went into an explanation of how they’d installed them. When they actually tried showing me the footage was when shit went south.
They opened up the folder labeled with the same year of the attacks. There, they clicked June. Once the June folder was open, they clicked on the seventeenth. A video for the day appeared on the screen.
They clicked on the video.
Clicked it again.
They clicked and clicked and clicked, and nothing was playing.
That was when we discovered the files were corrupt.
My hopes of catching the attackers on camera had been shot. None of the other stores around this area had installed this kind of system, so whatever footage they had lasted a month at most before it was deleted. And I knew that the attackers had fled down this very road because someone had reported two cars speeding off minutes later, and those cars were parked right around the corner shop.
