“How did you know I was here?”
“One of my buddies knows Stephanie, the shelter manager—he does her tattoos. She was talking to him about you today, said you were looking for work and staying at one of the campsites. I drove around today, checking them out and looking for your truck. I saw you walking on the beach earlier.…”
I remembered the thoughts I’d sent him on that walk. He’d felt it. I knew it. Our eyes locked. I looked away first. “Hang on a minute.”
I shut the door, pulled on a hoodie and some jeans. One of the things I liked about the cabin was that it was set in the far back of the campsite, surrounded by a dense wall of trees. No one could see it, but I could still hear campers talking in the distance, their laughter carrying in the breeze along with the smoky smell of their fires, and I didn’t feel comfortable talking to Ryan outside.
I opened the door and made a motion. “Come in.”
Ryan sat at the table, looked around. “Not bad.”
“It’s a shithole.” I sat down across from him. This was the closest I’d been to him in years and it made me uneasy, self-conscious, aware of my messy hair, my unmade bed, my clothes draped over a chair. We’d never been alone in my bedroom at home, and now he was in my space. He was a stranger but he was also so familiar to me, the way he moved, his voice. He looked good, his hair damp, like he’d washed it before he came over, but he hadn’t shaved and had a dark shadow covering his face. I remembered how when we were teens he barely had to shave. He was wearing faded jeans and a fitted white shirt under a black sweatshirt, unzipped. One of his tattoos peeked out at his wrist. An eagle claw.
“We’ve seen worse,” he said.
“Yeah.” I didn’t want to think about that, what he may have gone through, didn’t want to talk about prison. “Where’s your truck?”
“Down on the back road, hidden in the bushes. I hiked in. I got some work on one of the tugboats with an old buddy of my dad’s. He also has a sailboat down in the marina and he heard you got evicted.”
“So what did you want to talk about?” I said.
“You smell like the ocean.”
That caught me off guard. A warm heat spread through my stomach. I flushed, angry at my reaction. “That’s what you came here to tell me?”
Our eyes met again. This time he looked away, saying, “I’m sorry about you losing your job and everything.”
“I didn’t lose everything. Not yet.” I glanced at Captain, who was staring out the window, his ears twitching at a sound here and there, bunnies and mice scurrying in the night. I turned back to Ryan.
“I’m pretty sure Shauna set it up. She’s pissed that her daughter is crushing on me.” I told him what had been going on, about the confrontation with Shauna, how she’d warned me to stay away from him.
“I’m positive it was those bitches who killed Nicole,” he said. I was caught by the deep anger in his voice, the hatred in his eyes. I felt the same way, but it concerned me, the rage barely contained. What would it take for him to explode? He took a deep breath, like he was trying to calm himself.
“They found Cathy today. She’s dead.”
“Shit.” I sat up straight, thoughts crashing into each other. I glanced at the door, half expecting the cops to break it down and start screaming orders at us.
“Yeah, that guy who works on the tugs with me, he was down at the pier when they brought up her body and he overheard the cops talking. They said it was a known drug user, Cathy Schaeffer.”
“Did she OD?”
“Don’t know yet, but it sounds like they had a lot of cops down there. My gut tells me it was murder and we’re going to be hearing about it.”
“There has to be a lot of people she’s pissed off.” I could hear the panic in my voice.
“Probably, but we’re the only ones with a murder conviction.”
He was right. We were screwed. I sat back in my chair, the hard edges digging into my calves and thighs. I’m not going back. No way. I can’t go back.
“Even before this, Hicks has been following me everywhere,” Ryan said. “The fucker even walked in when I was taking a leak at the gas station. He asked if I liked hanging out in men’s rooms, said he sure hoped so because I was going back to prison soon. He’s been pushing me, trying to get me to snap.”
“Why does he care?”
“He’s never liked me. He hated my dad too. And I tell you, Toni, I wasn’t scared of him before, but I am now. I’ve got a bad feeling we’re going back in.”
I had a bad feeling too. “I made an enemy at the halfway house—she’s got friends on the inside, and they’ll be waiting for me.” I told him about Helen.
He was quiet, thinking, his face worried. He fingered a scar on his arm, the ridges still red like it was fresh.
“That’s fucked up. Will you be all right? Do you have friends inside too?”