Page 38 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

He looks at me.

“At two in the morning,” I say.

“I don’t sleep well,” he says, and I nearly laugh at that, a desperate, slightly unhinged sound I manage to keep behind my teeth, because neither do I.

The torchlight is doing what torchlight does, throwing everything into contrast, and that’s why I see it, his right hand, held at a fraction of an angle that my eye registers before my brain does.

I move the beam. There is blood on his hand.

He sees me see it.

“Cut myself on the brickwork,” he says. “Coming over.”

Silence.

My pattern recognition reads before I can stop it reading. The blood is more than a scrape would leave, sitting in a distribution across his hand that doesn’t quite resolve into the shape that brickwork would make. A climbing cut tends to live on the knuckles, on the fingertips, worn away by the grip. This is more of a splatter, deeper in between his fingers, as if the back of his hand is where most of the blood is. I could be wrong. I’m not often wrong about these things.

The silence between us stretches.

The fox has found something worth investigating in a garden nearby. The blue light still pulses ahead. Somewhere close, in whatever space is on the other side of that wall, there is a body I haven’t seen yet.

I think about Mrs. Osei and the photograph of Oliver on her phone.

I think about Callum Doyle’s name in an alley. Jordan Marsh on a football coach’s chest. Bilal, who nobody even reported missing.

I think about justice not being one person’s to decide. Courts, juries, rules of evidence, the entire structure of civilization resting on the agreement that we do not execute the people we have decided deserve it.

I think about the blood on his hand and the way it sits wrong.

I think about the fact that I am in love with him.

There it is. The word I’ve been circling for longer than I’d like to admit, and now I’ve used it, even just in the privacy of my own skull, and it doesn’t unsay itself.

I think about all of it at once.

Then I decide.

“Get out of here,” I say, and I turn the torch off.

In the dark, just enough ambient light bleeds in from the street at the far end to show me his face. He looks at me for a second, and then the corner of his mouth moves. The beginnings of a smirk. Then one eye closes and opens.

A devastating wink.

And then he turns, grabs the top of the wall with both hands, and vaults it in one clean movement, so graceful it barely makes a sound, and he’s gone.

I stand alone in the alley in the dark for a moment.

Then I walk up to the scene and prepare to pretend to do my job.

Chapter eighteen

Micah

Get out of here.

I run.

Not from fear exactly, or not only that. My legs are moving and my lungs are working, and the city is rushing past me in the dark, and all I can hear is those four words in that voice, low and wrecked, like they cost him something real to say. Which they did. I know they did. I watched him decide to say them and it was the bravest and most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen a person do.