“I’m not allowed in there.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because I can’t swim.”
Jessica stared at Jamie. He stared back.
“You know you’re in California, right?” she asked. She regretted it instantly. The boy looked away in feigned aloofness, gave a weak shrug.
“My mom doesn’t like the beach. She hates sand. And we don’t have a pool.”
Jessica stood and went to the glass.
“Come here. If you fall in, I’ll only let you flounder around for a little while before I pull you out,” she said, lifting the safety latch. The boy skirted the glass fence to the pool stairs, stood four feet back from the edge. Jessica put her feet back in the water and sat with her thigh pinning the file on the child’s mother shut. “Why do you think I’m a cop?”
“I saw you today outside the police station.”
“Oh, great.” Jessica nodded. “That’s just great.” She reached out a hand. “I’m Jessica. Nice to meet you.”
The boy shook her hand. When he did she dragged him toward the pool edge and forced him down beside her. He grabbed a handful of the waist of her shirt, then put his bare feet nervously in the water.
“I’ve got to talk to you about something important.”
“Okay.” Jamie huddled in, letting go of her shirt with effort. “Sure.”
“You’ve probably heard adults say it’s bad to keep secrets from your parents, right? If anyone ever asks you to keep a secret, it’s bad news, and you should tell them right away.”
“Yeah,” Jamie said. “They taught us that at school.”
“Well, I actually am a cop. So it’s … um. It’s okay in this case to keep a secret. But this is the one and only time, okay? These are what you call special circumstances.”
“Special circumstances.” The boy nodded again, wiggling his toes in the water. “Got it.”
“You ever talk to your mother?” Jessica watched the boy’s face carefully. “The one you were telling me about the other night? Who had the accident?”
“Sure, all the time.” He shrugged. “We have ice cream.”
“What do you mean, you have ice cream? At the prison?”
“No, at the pier.”
“She’s out?” Jessica turned her body and the Harbour/Orlov file almost slid into the pool.
“Yeah. She got out of prison like a year ago.”
“Oh, this just keeps getting better and better.” Jessica massaged her brow. “Look, it’s really important, under the circumstances—the special circumstances—that you don’t tell your mom that I live here.”
“My mom or my mother?”
“Blair.”
“Oh.” Jamie pursed his lips.
“I mean, I don’t actually live here…” Jessica glanced toward the house. “I just hang around here sometimes. And I’m going to stop doing that. But you can’t tell her about me at all. Not my name, not that I’m a cop, not what I look like. Nothing. All right?”
The boy was silent.
“You haven’t told her already, have you?”
“Nope.” He looked away. “How come I can’t, anyway?”
“It would just be easier all round, for everyone.”
“Why?”
“It just would.”
“But why?”
“Boy, you don’t need to know everything that’s going on in the world,” Jessica said. “I know you think you do, but you really don’t. It’s a life lesson I’m giving you here. Sometimes the Earth just turns a little more smoothly on its axis when a person shuts up and does what he’s told.”
“Okay.” The boy tested the water with his fingers. “I won’t tell, then.”
“Good kid.”
“So are those papers police papers?” he asked, leaning over. “With, like, scary photos of dead bodies and guns and stuff?”
“Sure are.”
“Can I see them?”
“I could show you,” Jessica said. “But then I’d have to drown you.”
BLAIR
I fixed Sneak’s ear at my apartment, telling the crew of kids who came to the door to play me a group rendition of Ed Sheeran’s “Castle on the Hill” that the blood on my shirt was tomato juice. When I’d showered and changed for my evening shift at the Pump’n’Jump I’d expected her to be making moves to leave, but instead she was standing by the front windows, talking on her phone and chewing her nails.
“I’ll be here for a few days at least,” she said, and gave my address.
“Who was that?” I asked when she hung up.
“Girl who takes my mail.”
“Did you just tell her you’d be staying here for a few days?”
“Don’t freak out. I need a home base,” Sneak said. “I haven’t had a fixed address lately.”
“What does that mean, exactly? Are you homeless? Where’s all your stuff?”
“I was living with a dude, kind of casual. We had an arrangement. All my stuff’s there,” she explained. “It was going great, but I think he got possessed by a demon, so I scrammed.”
“Sneak, honestly.”
“He was totally normal, and then he went out one night and got a tattoo of a weird symbol on his chest.” She sniffed, rubbed her nose. “Couple of days later I find him naked in the kitchen at midnight. He was, like, wriggling around on the floor, clawing at the tattoo and groaning. He started shouting, ‘You can’t take him! He’s mine! He’s mine!’ If that’s not demonic possession, you tell me what it is.”
“A drug-induced hallucination.”
“You weren’t there.” She waved me off. “I know a demon when I see one.”
“Sneak, you can’t stay here.” I went to the window and drew the curtain. “If you’re found in my place—”
“I won’t be,” she insisted. “Come on, Neighbor. You’re in this far.”
She was right. I was in dangerous waters up to my waist. Walking in further, letting the water rise to my neck, seemed like a small compromise. I knew the moment I left her there unattended she was going to ransack my possessions for anything valuable, and once she’d secured her stash she was probably going to pop some pills or snort some cocaine off my coffee table. But I was tired and anxious about Jamie, and the fight seemed more than I had the strength for. I went into the bedroom and packed the silver-framed picture of my son into my work bag, and hid Ada’s money
