“I need to show you what I found in the storeroom. It’s not pretty, but I need your help,” Sanchez said calmly. “If you didn’t kill Shing… and no one here really thinks you did… we need to know if you recognize anyone else he hurt. They might have killed him and now think you should pay them for doing it. Do you know someone like that?”
“I didn’t pay anyone to kill him,” Miki protested. “I wouldn’t even know where to go looking for someone to do that.”
“We ran your financials, Miki. Hell, I spend more on gas and coffee than you spend in a month, so I know you didn’t dump a few thousand dollars to have him killed. I had to ask. It’s my job. But someone in these photos might have killed Shing. Can you look for me? Just to see if you know someone. Anyone.”
“You… fuck, you don’t know what you’re asking,” Miki whispered tightly.
The pain from his gouging no longer touched him, and he was left floating on the eeriness of his past rising up from where he’d buried it. He pushed the chair back from the table and leaned over, trying to breathe. His lungs seemed caught on his ribs, and no amount of pulling seemed to undo the pinch in his chest. Reaching up, Miki grabbed at the table, willing the room to stop spinning.
“I know it’s hard, Miki,” Sanchez said. He picked up his chair and moved it over to the side where Miki sat. Perching on the edge of the seat, the cop touched Miki’s shoulder lightly. “Do you want me to have someone else come in to talk to you? A counselor maybe?”
Miki sucked in some air, shuddering as he exhaled. The linoleum was beige with tiny specks of bronze and gold scattered through it. Laid down in tiles, the joints were beveled in, and bits of grayish glue poked up between the pieces.
That’s what my stomach feels like right now, Miki thought, like I’m being shoved in between two hard things.
“You doing okay?” Sanchez sounded far away, an echoing whisper in Miki’s ears.
No, I’m not fucking doing okay, Miki screamed in the frozen wasteland of his mind. I don’t want to fucking go there again. Not to Shing. Not to Carl. I just want to go home. Why the hell are you asking me to do this?
His body had his memories. Foul things rising up from under the surface to claw at his mind. His skin remembered the slime of tongues moving over his belly and hips and then the horror of pain moving out from the deepest, most intimate places inside of him. Miki hiccupped and pressed his knuckles to his lips, looking for some escape from the craziness closing in.
Miki found that sibilant tendril and grabbed hold of it to drag himself back to a sane world where a cop screamed at him because his dog was a thief and had a mouth that promised to rip him apart when they finally kissed.
A quick eternity passed before Sanchez leaned in again and touched Miki’s shoulder. Somehow, a bottle of water appeared under Miki’s face, and he blinked, startled by the sudden intrusion of blue plastic and white lettering.
“Here, drink some water, okay?” Sanchez said as the room’s door closed with a whispering click. “I need you to talk to me, Miki. I need you to tell me something. Anything at all that will help.”
“I don’t know if I can do this.” A strangled sob escaped with his words, and Miki choked it back, refusing to let loose the nightmares he kept inside of him. Everything he ever gained lay in ash around him, burnt up by the fiery disgust he held inside. “I just wanted to forget it happened. I just wanted to be normal, you know? Fuckers made me… not normal. I’m not sorry he’s dead. Fucking hell, I’m not, but I didn’t kill him.”
“I know,” Sanchez assured him. “But I need you to do this for me. I don’t have anywhere else to go with this. I wouldn’t ask you if I had a choice, okay? I’ve cropped in as much as I could so there’s only faces. There’s a few of you only because there’s someone else in the picture, a couple of boys that I’m hoping you know something about, but that’s all. Nothing else, okay?”
“Why?” The word broke into pieces as Miki spoke, scattering out like the glass from his front window.
“Because we think Shing’s death is somehow related to what he did in that storeroom… to you,” Sanchez replied, his voice low and quiet. “And because I don’t want the next person Kane calls in dead to be you, because that’s what I’m afraid’s going to happen if you’re connected to this in any way.”
Kane.
Miki hissed between his teeth. The cop had gotten to him. He couldn’t shake the man loose from his brain, and worse, he wanted to feel Kane on his skin.
“Fucking Kane,” Miki spat. He felt again. The numbness somehow leeched off, and the feelings he’d bricked up behind it were now exposed and raw. He didn’t like it. It felt too much… way too much for Miki’s liking, but he didn’t know how to put everything back away, especially since it looked like Kane had dismantled all of the walls he built up.
“Yeah, I say that a lot too,” Sanchez said with a chuckle. “Probably for different reasons, though.”
“I can do this,” Miki muttered to himself. “Just faces, right?”