You jerk your right hand free, going against his thumb, as an article in a magazine once told you to do. Gene grabs your hair and pulls, hard, and the pain burns, but your motion now is natural, fluid if desperate, full of purpose. You don’t see the knife pierce his eyelid, which has only squinted itself to cover the eye in the split second before the blade arrives: Gene’s mind is on subduing you, not protecting himself, and he doesn’t register the threat of your right hand until you’ve thrust it forward with a terrified, needful strength, and then jerked the knife free.
You scream, and the sound that comes out of you is low, more roar than shriek, a single vowel with no markable beginning or end; it degrades into panting and grunting as you rise to a standing position. Gene is screaming, too, a panicked falsetto, both of his hands covering his left eye, blood flowing down his cheek. He has to move his hands back into place over the eye, because they slip. You scream again, not as loud, and not for any reason you can later state—it just happens—and then you stab him in the neck. He hits his head on the kitchen counter as he falls, and he says, “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” landing on the floor as blood begins erupting in spurts from the wound in his throat.
Jesse is not prepared for this. He has one foot in the hallway between your bedroom and the kitchen when he hears Gene’s scream; he freezes. He needs Gene to tell him what to do; he’s afraid of making things worse, and he’s afraid of the unknown. The sounds reaching him while he ransacked your bedroom closet, looking for jewelry, locked boxes, or things that shine, began as unpleasant distractions from his work: Gene had warned him that you weren’t going to like this. But he hadn’t said anything about an actual fight, and he hadn’t gone over any contingencies: he’d sketched out a clear timeline that made no allowances for bumps in the road. Over the course of several minutes, the noises made it impossible for Jesse to focus on his task. You’re just a teacher. There are two of them, young strong boys. How dangerous could you be?
Gene is crawling toward the front door, trying to drag himself forward with his right hand while keeping the left pressed up to the wound on his neck. You lunge, stabbing him again, the blade entering this time at the base of his skull; this is the blow that will be most damning at trial. Pulling the knife loose for the third time proves hardest, but you manage it; he falls, face-first, onto the carpet, and his limbs begin to twitch.
Behind you, Jesse’s shock has finally spurred him to action: he grabs the nearest thing he sees, your vase, and hurls it, with all the strength his skinny arm can muster, at what he hopes will be your head. It connects instead with Gene, whose body does not react to the insult. Jesse’s eyes widen when he sees the vase land on his friend; he is terrified. He dashes for the door now, escape his only thought, but there’s so much blood, just everywhere, and he slips and falls, landing halfway on top of Gene, who is technically not dead yet.
Jesse cries out, just as Gene did when his moment came. Your mind is telling you that more noise will attract the attention of the neighbors, though in reality you’re the only one on your floor of the building at the moment; everybody else is still at school, or work, or out getting an early dinner. But Jesse, unlike Gene, does not scream in shock: his brief speech, at high pitch, is hastily calculated to save his own skin. “Please, Miss Crane,” he cries, his eyes shut tight, his hands crossed in front of his face. He’s lying on his side, his face on the floor in a still-forming pool of his friend’s sticky blood; his legs, supported by Gene’s torso, are in the air, his ankles crossed. He’s getting louder; his cries settle into an incantatory, desolate rhythm. “Please, Miss Crane, please, no. No. No! Please, Miss Crane. Please, no.”
You stab him thirty-seven times in total. The third strike, the one that enters his throat from the left side, is the fatal one, but you succeed in puncturing his lung during the ensuing overkill. There is blood on your hair, in your mouth, all over your face. On the floor of the kitchen, the oysters, some still in their shells, sit in pools of it.
You stand over the bodies of Jesse Jenkins and Gene Cupp until you feel certain neither of them is moving, and then you sit down in the still-gathering pool next to them, trying to think.
6.
CALIFORNIA’S IN BETTER SHAPE than a lot of places when it comes to labor laws, but protections don’t generally extend to part-timers like the line help at Taco Bell. At the San Luis Obispo location, Angie Gessler, the shop’s general manager, writes out the weekly schedule like a failing student filling in bubbles on a Scantron, making everything look tidy without much thought about what the markings might otherwise mean. Few of his workers complain, because most of them don’t expect to be around much longer. Angie’d been one of them, too, a few years ago, but then corporate promoted him before he got around to thinking about what else he might do with his life once he finished his BS at Cal Poly, and now here he is.
Within a generation nobody will be calling boys “Angie” anymore. Even now, people sometimes sound a little surprised, on the phone, to learn that the man speaking is the Angie they were calling for. It happens today: Gessler’s alone in the restaurant, wondering where Gene is. Gene was scheduled for the opening shift. Gene being late for an opening shift is nothing new, but it’s twelve-thirty now, and the lunch crowd is getting thick. Gene’s dad even called to see where he was, and hung up as soon as he got an answer; the interruption just increased the tension. It’s all too much to handle, especially for someone whose days on site are usually spent in a tiny office at the back of the building, filling out the schedule and monitoring the walk-up window. When, from the order window, he hears the office phone ringing, he’s immediately aggravated. You can’t call in an hour past the start of your shift, he thinks. It doesn’t work like that.
“Be right with you,” he tells the next customer at the window before dashing down the thin corridor alongside the grill to his office. When he gets to the phone, he assumes a managerial stance—it’s like an actor putting on his face. This is how you get the promotions, he knows. Days like these.
“Taco Bell,” he says cheerfully into the phone, “how can I help you?”
“This is Detective Haeny with the San Luis Obispo Police Department,” says a voice on the other end, sounding for all the world like he’s reading from a script. “Do you have an employee named Gene Cupp there?”
“Well, normally, yes,” says Angie Gessler, “but he hasn’t turned up today.”
There’s a pause. “Am I speaking with the manager?”
Gessler laughs. “Yes, and also the cook and front window man as of right now,” he says. “If Gene comes in I’ll be back to just being the manager.”
Another pause. “If he does turn up, would you please call me at this number?”
Haeny gives Gessler his direct line. “Sure,” Gessler says. “Is he in some kind of trouble? His father already called once.”
“He called us, too,” says Detective Haeny. “At this point that’s all I can tell you. Do give me a call if you hear from Gene, all right?”
“Sure thing,” says Angie Gessler, trying to picture what a kid like Gene Cupp’s father would actually look like, and then trying to imagine him as the sort of father who’d call the police because he was worried about his son’s whereabouts.
* * *
RONNIE CUPP, as you have always suspected but could not confirm, is not that sort of father at all. The reason Ronnie called the cops about an hour ago is that his son’s blue Torino is still missing from the driveway, and he needs it for the beer run. His biker friends will be turning up again sometime later this afternoon; it’ll take two runs to bring enough home if he ends up having to use the trunk bag on his Harley instead of the trunk of the car.