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Billie can see—and there’s no one down here, no Blood Hood or dead Kate.
Her haggard breaths hitch, tears falling freely down her blotchy cheeks. Those breaths turn harsher, pitchier, and it’s only a few moments before she’s succumbed to the sobs.She’s safe.
The blood on her feet squelches against the carpet as she takes off at a run. She raises her arms above her head and shouts, but what exactly she shouts she can’t know for sure. ‘Help’; ‘Kate’; ‘In here!’
Whatever it is, the sheriff hears it as she comes barreling out the front door and down the path.
He lowers his gun, already raised, and motions her out.
That’s all it takes.
That’s all it takes for everything to hit her all at once, bulldozing her completely. Billie crumples to the sidewalk, distantly aware of some cop reaching out to grab her. And she releases it—
A wail louder than the sirens.
A wail for Carmine…
And for Preston, the hope, the need for him to be the one holding her right now, not some nameless cop.
Still, she sinks against the officer and lets him scoop her up.
He guides her into the cop car.
And when she looks through the window with dead eyes, she can’t see any sign of Kate.
3
It’s a fucking orchestra in here. A bitter symphony of ringing phones, humming coffee machines, shouting parents, and radio static.
The cop station is a level of hell, Billie’s convinced of it.
This time around, she’s not in an interview room (or interrogation, whatever those one-way-window, cold, metal rooms are called). Before Deputy Wade even gave her an icepack for her head, he sat her at his desk tucked down the back of the open space where all the cop desks are. Through the daze of her pulsing head, she pressed the icepack to her head, somehow able to hear Deputy Wade over the dispatcher who omits a constant hum of radio static. Billie has the fleeting thought of shoving a radio down her damn throat.
That’s not a good look, though.
Billie isn’t as stupid as some might think. Most in town probably think she’s like her mom. School dropout, junkie, alcoholic, with not even two brain cells to rub together.
Billie knows she isn’tsmart, exactly. Not like those ones who go off to college and get fancy jobs. But she’stownsmart. Knows how to act in the middle of a cop station when she’s covered in her dead friend’s blood.
Was just over twenty-four hours ago that she was brought in here with Tonya, after they found Gigi’s body. Now, again, with Carmine?
Ain’t a good look.
So, statement given once, twice, thrice, clarified and clarified again, the icepack has gone warm and soggy in the towel its wrapped in. Deputy Wade has left her at the desk. Gone to the Sheriff’s office, abandoning her here without any kind of pain relief for her head… A vodka wouldn’t go down badly.
The itch for a drink has her all wound up like a steel ball. But the daze of seeing Carmine like that… it’s numbing enough that she’s not running outta here to the bar.
Billie sits on a stiff wood chair beside the desk, knees brought up to her chest, all cuddled up into herself, and she leans her temple on the edge of a stack of folders.
Guess that’s the reason they didn’t arrest her and throw her into the jail cells out back. She’s got some injuries on herself. That, and they found Grace first—running through town, smeared in blood, cuts all over her arms. Billie hasn’t seen her or anything—since she’s in the hospital—but she eavesdrops enough in the cop pit to get some puzzle pieces together.
Grace was the one who got out and alerted the cops.
No word on Kate, cops haven’t mentioned her name around Billie yet.
And the coroner has already collected Carmine’s body.
But Billie needs to know more.
