Page 90 of The Pleasure of Panic

I shake her off and she lets go, her small face looking up at mine, anger, and fear, and… anger written all over it. “That’s not what this is.”

“Bullshit! Why do you still have that fucking burner phone then?”

“I can’t say, but—”

“You can’t say? I just told you the most fucked-up thing that ever happened to me. I just told you my stepfather raped me as a child. And you’re standing here telling me you can’t say why you’ve got an extra phone in your pocket?”

I want to tell her, but she’s never gonna understand. Ever.

“OK, then,” she says. “Get the fuck off my property, Agent Murphy.” She turns, walks away, and just when I think she’s never going to talk to me again, she stops. Looks back. And adds, “Great game, by the way. Congratulations. I guess you win.”

It’s like a gut punch. I can’t move. I can’t say anything. I can’t do anything but watch her unlock her door, open it up, step inside, and disappear.

Only then do I find my voice. “But what about Kansas?” I whisper to the cold morning air.

I realize there’s a shitload of people on the sidewalk in front of her house. The streets are filled with AM traffic. There’s sirens, and sounds of construction, and the whoosh of someone whizzing by on a bicycle.

But here, standing in her front yard, sheltered between these two tall apartment buildings, I go unnoticed. I am ignored. I am alone.

No one sees me. No one heard us fight. No one cares.

“Murphy.”

I turn at the both familiar and unfamiliar voice and see him over near the side of the house. He walks out from a tangle of bare bushes, his face familiar, his blue eyes narrow, his head shaved, his body bigger than I remember. Hardened from years of prison-yard workouts.

“Kelly,” I say back.

“It’s good to see ya again.”

And that hangs there in the air like a poisonous cloud. I can’t say it back. Won’t say it back.

But he doesn’t notice. He just walks towards me, smiling, hand held out, like we’re gonna shake. “I just called ya. Ya didn’t answer.”

And then his hand is in mine, and he’s clapping me on the back, and I’m dying inside. He called me?

He. Called. Me?

A scream from inside the house. I hear things crashing. I hear things breaking. But the worst thing I hear is silence when all that is over.

I look at Caleb Kelly.

I’ve known him since I was four years old and he was ten. His father and my father were friends when they were kids. We almost grew up together. If we’d lived in the same city and were closer in age, we’d probably be like brothers now.

I shake my head at him. “No,” I say.

Because we didn’t live in the same city. They moved away when I was ten and he was sixteen. He was in and out of juvie while I was doing my homework and planning for a future that never let me catch up with it.

I never saw him again. I swear to God I never saw him again.

But she’s never going to believe me.

Caleb smiles. “Yes. And, uh… thank you. For delivering her right into my hands.”

I open my mouth to protest, but the pain in my skull sends me reeling to the ground. Blackness, then blurry light, then blackness again.

I feel the blood trickling down my face as my head spins from the blow that came from behind. And it’s only then I realize… I was playing a game.

Different than the one I thought.