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I walked across to the nightstand where his phone was charging, faceup, glowing gently in the dim light, and switched on the bedside lamp.
“Wake up, Cole.”
“Jus’ sec,” he slurred, and turned over, hiding his face from the light.
“Wake up, Cole,” I said more insistently. “You’re going to want to see this.”
I don’t know what was different about my voice that time, but something got through to him, and his eyes shot open. For a second he simply stared at me, completely nonplussed, and then he jerked onto his back and scrambled backwards up the bed, clutching the sheets to his crotch.
“What the fuck?” he gasped. “How did you get in here?”
“Check your phone, Cole.” I nodded at the phone lying on the polished wood.
“I’m not checking anything, what the fuck are you doing in my apartment?”
He was staring at me, but I saw that he had inched across the bed, and that one hand was reaching for something in the drawer of the far nightstand. Before I could react, his fingers found what he was searching for, and he sat up sharply. I was staring down the barrel of a small pistol. There was a click as he removed the safety.
“Get the fuck out,” he said, with a kind of snarl of satisfaction. There was a you messed with the wrong person edge to his voice. “I don’t know what you’ve come here for, Jack, but get the fuck out.”
“Check your phone.”
“How hard is this to understand? Get out or I will shoot you.” He said the last words very slowly, like I might be too stupid to understand them. I couldn’t tell if he meant it. The pistol was still pointing at me, trembling very slightly, but he was close enough to kill me no matter how shaky his aim.
Either way, it didn’t really matter.
“Shoot me. I don’t give a fuck, Cole. Don’t you understand? You’ve taken everything from me and I genuinely don’t give a shit if I live or die. Shoot me and explain that to the police.”
“I don’t have to explain anything,” he snapped back. “Someone burgled my apartment in the middle of the night. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to take—”
“One,” I broke in, ticking the objections off on my fingers, “I highly doubt that gun is registered; it doesn’t look very legal to me. Two, check your phone. It puts a pretty big hole in your story.”
“I’m not checking my fucking phone,” Cole ground out, but in spite of himself, his gaze flicked to the phone sitting on his bedside table, and I saw his eyes widen involuntarily at the sight of the notifications blinking on his lock screen. Twitter mention. Twitter mention. Discord call. Instagram tag. Twitter mention. They had already maxed out the counter and were showing as 99+ which, as anyone on social media knows, could mean only one of two things: either something very good had just happened… or something very bad.
Cole didn’t need to open the screen to know which it was. He had already begun shaking his head, his face ashen.
“No. No, no, no, no, fuck… Jack, what have you done.”
“Check your phone,” I said, quietly now, for the fourth time. And this time Cole put down the gun and picked up the phone.
His gasp sounded like a man who had been smacked around the face, and when he looked up at me, his skin had gone the color of skimmed milk—ghostly blue-white in the light from the screen.
“What the fuck have you done, you stupid bitch?” His voice cracked. “Don’t you know we’ll both be killed?”
“Don’t you know—” I put both hands on the bed, leaning in as though to confide a secret—though the truth was, my legs were shaking and I needed the support. “I. Don’t. Care?”
“What do you want from me?” He pushed past me, frantic now, searching around for his clothes, not caring that he was naked and I was standing right there watching as he dug in the drawer for his jeans and pulled them on. “What do you want? Do you want me to die?”
“I don’t care what you do. Everything I want is in the past. You can’t undo what you did. You can’t bring Gabe back. I just want you to admit to my face what happened. I want you to tell me you’re sorry.”
“Okay, I’m sorry,” he said, but the words sounded forced out, each one spat like something that tasted rank. He picked up the gun from where he’d left it on the pillow and stuck it into the waistband of his jeans. “Okay? I’m sorry Gabe died.” He yanked a T-shirt down over his head, so hard the material ripped at the neck. “I’m sorry he went poking around in files no one asked him to check, finding exploits no one wanted him to know about. I’m sorry he didn’t listen to me when I said I’d deal with it. I’m sorry he was a fucking puritanical shit who’d never have done the sensible thing and taken a payoff to shut the fuck up. I had no choice—whatever I did, whether I patched the app or not, if he lived, he was going to tell Cerberus, and then we’d both be dead. I couldn’t save us both, so yes, I picked me. And I know what kind of a friend that makes me. But I didn’t kill him, okay? I didn’t, Jack. So stop trying to make this my fault.”
“So, tell me,” I said, making my voice as persuasive as I knew how. “Tell me, Cole. If you didn’t kill him, who did? Who are you working for?”
“I don’t know!” He was crying now as he searched through his drawers, pulling out a laptop and a bundle of cash. “They came to me—I’d only just started at Cerberus, I was working on some crappy app that never even launched, and they said they were government agents, they had this whole spiel about doing my bit for my country and getting paid for my service. It was small stuff at first. Not much more than what we tell advertisers. But then later…”
“Later they came to you about Watchdog, and Puppydog, and you were in too deep,” I said, feigning a sympathy I didn’t feel. I just needed him to keep talking. “Were they really government, Cole?”
“I don’t know,” he repeated. His voice throbbed with a desperation that wasn’t faked. “Maybe some government—not ours, though. I realized that fairly fast. These people are very well funded, very organized, and they’re killers, Jack. We’re both utterly fucked.”
