Page 88 of Haunted

“Please,” I beg. “If they take you away I don’t know what I’d do. Please let him go.”

Lance takes a deep breath and releases Roger’s neck. Roger takes a whooping, rushing breath and starts to cough. Lance reaches down and pulls out the barbs from the taser out of his chest. It pops out with a bloom of blood the size of a coin. Then he drops both of them on the floor.

Lance leans down close to his ex-husband’s ear. When he speaks it isn’t the red-mist snarl of a moment ago—it’s quiet, and level, and absolutely certain, which is so much worse. “You come near my family again,” he says, “and I will put you in the ground like a god-damned dog.” And he spits in his ex-husband’s face.

Chapter thirty-one

Lance

“Of course he’s pressing charges!” I shout.

Detective Van Hoek doesn’t look like the kind of person who gets shouted into agreeing with people. Her eyes cut to Jonny, then back to me. “If he wants to press charges,” she says, “I need to hear it from him, sir.”

We’re in a classroom across the hall from the auditorium. Through the wall I can still hear somebody talking into a microphone, the words sanded off to nothing. I’ve already logged the room: one door, two windows, second-floor drop, the cop between us and the hall. Nash three doors down in cuffs. Threat contained, but my body hasn’t gotten the message yet because I’m still running the perimeter.

“Yes, I would like to press charges.” He sounds completely calm. Why is he acting so calm? Does he even know what the fuck could have happened out there? How has he managed to sit down at all?

I go to the window again and start cataloging the lay of the land outside, drumming the adrenaline out of my fingers.

“Okay. That’s what I wanted to hear,” she says. I turn around and look at him. He’s seated in the front row of this empty classroom, at a metal desk, and Van Hoek has pulled up the only solo plastic chair to do her interview from.

I can carry this for him. That’s the thought going around in me on a loop while I walk the room. Nash is going to jail. He killed Alice. I don’t know why, and I don’t much care. He’s a mean sadist. It doesn’t matter. The mission is Jonny and Jonny is upright and breathing eight feet away from me. Nash is never going to touch him again.

The adrenaline starts to ebb fast, and suddenly I need to sit down. I take the desk next to him. My ribs light up where the risers caught me; something in there is cracked or close to it. My neck throbs where the taser kissed it. My left arm has come back as far as pins and needles and no further. Every muscle I own starts filing its complaint at once.

I look over at Jonny, still perfectly composed. If I feel like I got hit by a truck, what does he feel like? He’s a civilian. He has never in his life had a body come at him meaning to end him, and he had no way on earth to stop it. If I had gone to that conference an hour later—

I don’t finish it. I can’t. My hands have started to shake.

Van Hoek sighs and turns to Jonny. “And you’re certain you’ve had no contact with this man before today?”

“I met him a few days ago. He was two tables over while I was having lunch with my aunt. He was staring at us, so I went over and introduced myself. I thought he was somebody I ought to remember. He told me his name was Roger. He said we had met indirectly, so I thought it was because of the fires.” He looks at me. “Why did everybody call him Nash when that’s his last name?”

“It’s Marine Corps culture. I mean, you don’t want to make a mistake in public and get yelled at, so I just kept it up. Nash introduced himself to my parents as Nash so we went with it.”

“Anything else you remember about that meeting?” Van Hoek prompts.

“He knew who my aunt was,” Jonny says slowly. “I never once thought to ask him how he knew she was my aunt and not my mother or my friend.”

Something goes through me like a current. “He stalked you.” I turn to the officer. “I want a restraining order. On him, on his aunt Shelley, on my mother and father and sister, me. Everybody.”

“You do that at the courthouse, not through me, but, noted,” she says.

“And he came to the lecture hall on Thursday,” Jonny continues.

“When were you going to tell me this?”

“I thought he was a student! Maybe a little old but people go back to school all the time.”

I stand up. “How long has he been walking around this town looking at you?”

“Mr. Broussard, sit down.”

I put both hands on the back of a chair and hold onto it until the plastic bends under my fingers. Jonny puts his hand on my leg. “Lance, it’s okay. You can sit. It’s all over now.”

I look at him and decide to trust that he’s right.

“This is my fault. Nash found him through me,” I say. “He’s been furious since the divorce. He came here two weeks ago asking to be taken back and I threw him out.” I have to stop for a second. “If I had thought for one minute he would go near him, I would have dealt with it.”