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Auggie glanced over his shoulder, as though only now realizing Tean and the others had emerged from the station. He tapped his phone and shoved it in his pocket. “Sorry.”
North directed a furious—maybe even murderous—look at Shaw, but he turned toward the recently released inmates (Tean needed a word like felons, only for misdemeanors), and choked back whatever he’d been about to say. Shaw, who was wearing what appeared to be some sort of extremely short cloak—and nothing else—tugged his cloak up and looked extremely pleased with himself.
“Why is he about to hang dong?” Jem whispered.
“It’s called a chlamys,” Shaw announced and hitched it up again. “I made it myself on account of time travel.”
No one seemed to have an appropriate response to that.
“We thought you might need a ride,” Theo said after a moment.
“So, the four of you rode together in one car,” Emery said. “Brilliant.”
Theo breathed deeply through his nose. “North parked up the block.”
“And just for that, you’re not riding with me, motherfucker,” North said. He jerked a thumb at Auggie. “You can ride with iCarly.”
“In the first place, iCarly was a girl—” Emery began.
“Wait,” Jem said, and when Tean looked at him out of the corner of his eye, he recognized the shit-stirrer expression. “I thought iCarly was the computer.”
“Then you are as stupid as I already suspected.” Emery turned to face him. “Don’t talk from this point on.”
That other smile, the dangerous one, cut across Jem’s face.
“Hey,” Tean said. For a moment, that’s all he had. Everyone looked at him. It took an extra second to summon up, “Don’t talk to him like that.”
“I’ll talk to him however I feel like talking to him,” Emery said.
“Go on,” Jem said. “Keep talking.”
“Ree,” John-Henry said, laying a hand on Emery’s shoulder, “we’re all tired—”
Emery shook him off. “Are you going to do something about it?”
Jem’s smile became a slash of teeth, predatory, amused. It made Tean think of a wolf.
“I’ll do something about it,” Tean said. “I’ll tell you that I don’t want to hear you talk to my husband like that after everything we’ve been through—”
“Everything you’ve been through? We finally had a solid lead, and you had to stick your cocks in it because you couldn’t wait a few fucking hours!”
The shout echoed up the street. A white lady with a stroller who was coming down the sidewalk toward them turned and headed the opposite direction. An older guy with the perpetual flush of a drinker stared, fumbling his keys as he tried to get into his car. Two boys fishing at the tiny harbor looked like painted miniatures, motionless as something took the bait off their lines.
“She was going to run, dumbass,” Jem said. “She was loading up her truck, and she’d have been gone.”
“She had no money; where was she going to go? Think. Think with your fucking brains if that’s not too much to ask.”
“Emery,” Auggie said, “calm down—”
Emery turned toward him, and Auggie shut his mouth. Theo’s face darkened.
“I still think it’s not fair,” Shaw said, “that nobody but me cares about the fact that Chief Cassidy and North Cassidy McKinney—”
“Shut up!” Emery shouted at him. And then, to North, “Put a fucking muzzle on him. You two were supposed to find Yesenia, and you couldn’t do one fucking thing right, as usual.”
“What the fuck crawled up your ass and died?” North asked.
“These two,” Emery said, pointing at Jem and Tean. “Here’s my fucking problem.”
