For a while after Dodge finished talking, they sat in silence. Sadowski appeared to be doodling, but Dodge knew this, too, was an act. He’d heard everything.
Finally Officer Sadowski sighed, set down his pen, and rubbed his eyes. “It’s tough shit, Dodge. Tough shit.”
Dodge said nothing.
Sadowski went on. “Bill Kelly was—is—a friend. He was on the force. Little Kelly went to Iraq. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“Not really,” Dodge said.
Sadowski stared at him. “I’m saying we’re going to figure out exactly what happened that night. And if we find out the fire was started on purpose . . .” He shook his head. “That’s homicide, Dodge.”
Dodge’s throat was dry. But he forced himself not to look away. “It was an accident,” he said. “Wrong place, wrong time.”
Sadowski smiled. But there was no humor in it. “I hope so.”
Dodge decided to walk home. He was out of cigarettes and in a bad mood. Now he wasn’t so sure that going to the cops had been a good idea. The way Sadowski looked at him made him feel like the cops thought he’d started the damn fire.
It was the judges—had to be, whoever they were. Any one of the players could squeal about the game, and that would be the end of that.
If Panic ended . . .
Dodge had no plans beyond winning Panic—beating Ray in the final round of Joust, and making sure it was a hard, bloody win. He hadn’t thought of his life beyond that moment at all. Maybe he’d be arrested. Maybe he’d go out in a blaze. He didn’t care either way.
Dayna, his Dayna, had been destroyed, ruined forever, and someone had to pay.
But for the first time he was seized with the fear that the game would actually end, and he would never get his chance. And then he would just have to live with the new Dayna on her plant-stalk legs, live with the knowledge that he’d been unable to save her. Live with knowing Ray and Luke were fine, going through the world, breathing and grinning and shitting and probably crapping on other people’s lives too.
And that was impossible. Unimaginable.
The sun was bright and high. Everything was still, gripped in the hard light. There was a bad taste in Dodge’s mouth; he hadn’t eaten yet today. He checked his phone, hoping Nat might have called: nothing. They’d spoken the day before, a halting conversation, full of pauses. When Nat said her dad needed her downstairs and she had to get off the phone, he was sure she’d been lying.
Dodge circumnavigated Dot’s Diner, checking instinctively to see whether he could spot his mom behind the smudgy glass windows. But the sun was too bright and turned everyone to shadow.
He heard a burst of laughter from inside the house. He paused with his hand on the door. If his mom was home, he wasn’t sure he could deal. She’d been practically hysterical when he came home with a hospital bracelet, and since then she’d been giving him the fish-eye and grilling him every .5 seconds about how he was feeling, like she couldn’t trust him even to pee without risking death. Plus, the news about Little Kelly was all over Dot’s Diner, and when she wasn’t demanding whether Dodge thought he had a fever, she was gossiping about the tragedy.
But then the laughter sounded again, and he realized it wasn’t his mom laughing—it was Dayna.
She was sitting on the couch, a blanket draped over her legs. Ricky was sitting in a folding chair across from her; the chessboard was positioned on the coffee table. When Dodge entered, there were only a few inches between them.
“No, no,” she was saying, between fits of giggling. “The knight moves diagonally.”
“Diag-on-ally,” Ricky repeated, in his heavily accented English, and knocked over one of Dayna’s pawns.
“It’s not your turn!” She snatched her pawn back and let out another burst of laughter.
Dodge cleared his throat. Dayna looked up.
“Dodge!” she cried. Both she and Ricky jerked backward several inches.
“Hey.” He didn’t know why they both looked so guilty. He didn’t know why he felt so awkward, either—like he’d interrupted them in the middle of something far more intense than a game of chess.
“I was just teaching Ricky how to play,” Dayna blurted. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were bright. She looked better, prettier, than she had in a while. Dodge thought she might even be wearing makeup.
He suddenly felt angry. He was out busting his ass for Dayna, almost dying, and she was at home playing chess with Ricky on the old marble board his mom had bought on Dodge’s eleventh birthday, and that Dodge had schlepped everywhere they’d moved since then.
Like she didn’t even care. Like he wasn’t playing Panic just for her.
“Want to play, Dodge?” she asked. But he could tell she didn’t mean it. For the first time Dodge looked, really looked, at Ricky. Could he be serious about marrying Dayna? He was probably twenty-one, twenty-two, tops.
Dayna would never do it. The guy barely spoke any English, for Christ’s sake. And she would have told Dodge if she liked him. She’d always told Dodge everything.
“I just came in to get a drink,” Dodge said. “I’m going out again.”
In the kitchen, he filled a glass with water and kept the sink running while he drank, to drown out the sound of muffled conversation from the next room. What the hell were they talking about? What did they have in common? When he shut off the sink, the voices fell abruptly into silence again. Jesus. Dodge felt like he was trespassing in his own house. He left without saying good-bye. Almost as soon as he shut the door, he heard laughter again.
He checked his phone. He had a response from Heather, finally. He’d texted her earlier: Heard anything?
Her text read simply: Game over.
Dodge felt a surge of nausea riding up from his stomach to his throat. And he knew, then, what he had to do.
Dodge had been to the Hanrahans’ house only once before, two years earlier, when Dayna was still in the hospital—when, briefly, it had seemed like she might not wake up. Dodge hadn’t budged from the chair next to her bed except to pee and smoke cigarettes in the parking lot and get coffee from the cafeteria. Finally Dodge’s mom had convinced him to go home and get some rest.
He had gone home, but not to rest. He had stopped in only long enough to remove the butcher’s knife from the kitchen and the baseball bat from the closet, along with a pair of old ski gloves that had never, as far as he knew, been used by anyone in his family.
It took him a while to find Ray and Luke’s house on his bike, in the dark, half-delirious from the heat and no sleep and the rage that was strangling him, coiled like a snake around his gut and throat. But he did, finally: a two-story structure, all dark, that might have been nice one hundred years ago.
Now it looked like a person whose soul had been sucked out through his asshole: collapsed and desperate, wild and wide-eyed, sagging in the middle. Dodge felt a flash of pity. He thought of the tiny apartment behind Dot’s, how his mom put daffodils in old pickle jars on the windowsills and scrubbed the walls with bleach every Sunday.
Then he remembered what he had come to do. He left his bike on the side of the road, slipped on his gloves, removed the baseball bat and knife from his duffel bag.
He stood there, willing his feet to move. A swift kick to the door, the sound of screaming. The knife flashing in the dark, the whistle of the bat cutting through the air. He was after Luke, and Luke alone.
It would be easy. Quick.
But he hadn’t managed it. He’d stood there with his legs numb, heavy, useless, for what felt like hours, until he began to fear that he’d never move again—he’d be frozen in this position, in the darkness, forever.