Page 43 of The Alibi Club

“I don’t know, kid. Things are different. Bureaucracy is making things harder. And there seems to be less crime, but it’s more violent.”

Jamie paused. She didn’t expect him to dissuade her from coming back. Jamie felt a chill run up her spine. “Max, what are you not saying?”

“Listen, I was going to call you. Make you aware before it happened so you could prepare. That’s why your timing is so strange.” He took a deep, heavy breath and exhaled. “They’re letting him out. He copped a plea to rat out another guy, reduced his sentence.”

No …

“Do you want us to put a detail on you for a few weeks after he’s out?” Max offered.

Max sounded far away. Jamie sat frozen, gripping the phone, unable to stop the flashbacks as fear crept in, cold, oily, and insistent. His rough, dry hands around her throat. His breath hot and stinking of tequila. His low crackle of a laugh, almost gleeful, while he was strangling her. The smell of gasoline on his clothes. The abject fear that he was going to set her on fire.

When she first assessed him, she’d noted that he was dangerously obsessive, murderous, and exhibited truly anarchist behavior. The more Jamie thought about it, the more she came to the cold, terrifying conclusion that he would most definitely come after her. She had to prepare.

“Jamie? You still there?”

She came back to the voice on the other end. “When? And how? How is he out? I thought it was fifteen to life?”

“He rolled over on two other guys who committed a double murder in Boyle Heights. He plea-bargained and reduced his sentence to seven years, and that shithead prosecutor got greedy.”

“I’ll take that detail, Max. Thanks for offering.”

“Copy. I’ll make sure the captain signs off on the budget. Hopefully, we will be able to send a couple of guys your way in a few days.”

Hopefully? “Okay.”

“Sure. Maybe I’ll stop by our place tonight on my way—”

But Jamie had already hung up. A deep chord of fear was struck inside her, like a swarm of bees in her gut.

Melvyn Ott was getting out.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Kyle Camden, Nerd Alert

LORNA

Pub Trivia Night at Hermosa Brewing Company was coming to a raucous end with a highly competitive crowd of geeks well-versed in Singers/Songwriters of the ’70s, Geography of the Ancient World, Sports & Gaming, a whole category devoted to Britney Spears, and Kyle Camden was killing it.

Lorna sat in the corner of the bar watching the tall, thin guy with dimples and glasses lead his team, Risky Quizness, as he submitted a team answer for a question about the video game Fortnite. When the answer was declared correct, Kyle and his team were victorious, soundly beating a rival team called The Smarty Pints, a group of wholesome, geeky girls clad in a lot of corduroy and patterned blouses who could pound beer faster than fraternity brothers.

With the pub quiz concluded, Lorna observed Kyle as he approached one of the Smarty Pints girls to congratulate them but he fumbled his opening line, then couldn’t recover, and the geeky girl with curly dark hair and a greasy forehead begged off and said she was joining her friends.

Kyle glumly headed toward the barstool right next to Lorna and ordered another beer. He was quickly joined by his pub trivia teammate, a thin, wiry, short guy who could not stop moving. The short teammate drummed his thumbs on the bar and bounced from one foot to the other.

“You’re out of her league, big guy,” the short guy said to Kyle as he motioned to the Smarty Pints girl who had rebuffed him.

Lorna shifted in her seat so she could more perfectly hear the conversation happening next to her. Information was everything.

Kyle sighed. “Rejection is my middle name, Ethan. No normal woman will ever have me.”

“First of all, normal sucks. We need, nay, we deserve extraordinary!” Ethan ordered two beers. “What happened with Shelly, that fitness instructor? I thought you were in a situationship with her.”

Kyle stared into his new pint of beer. “Ah, yes. I see I have not apprised you of that particular romantic disaster. Yes, we had been seeing each other for about a month when, over a plate of fish tacos, Shelly came out to me as gay, after which I awkwardly and abruptly rearranged my thinking about her sexuality. I mean a pretty sudden realization, right? By the time the flan arrived, I had pledged my full support for the LGBTQ+ community and wished her luck. I even gave her a hug. Then, a week later I find out Shelly was banging the very male owner of my gym.”

“Seriously brutal.”

“I know. I loved that gym.”