We sit. And then we wait.
“He didn’t do it,” she says. It’s about the hundredth time I’ve heard it in the last two days. It seems to be her mantra. She seems a little shell-shocked and hasn’t talked much, but when she has opened her mouth, nine times out of ten, it’s been to utter those words.
It’s nearly an hour later when the ripple starts though the hallway and spreads like wildfire.
“No bail!” someone shouts, and suddenly all the crews are filming again.
Kate has been sitting next to me with her head in her hands, rocking herself, the whole time, so it takes me a second to realize she’s gone.
She’s well into the sea of reporters before I spot her, and I don’t dare follow her into the mêlée. When she grabs for the handle of the door to the courtroom, a big bailiff steps in her way. He says something, but she lunges for the door anyway. He grabs her before she gets it open and manhandles her face first against the wall.
And that’s when I hear her scream. “He didn’t do it!”
The scuffle catches the attention of the reporters nearest the courtroom and they turn their cameras on her. Some of them shrug her off as a rabid groupie and go back to their monologues, but the ones who catch her say, “I killed him! It was me!” on camera run it on the news that evening.
#
Tro’s cigarette shakes where he’s got it pinched between his finger and thumb. “She kept the fucking knife,” he says with a disbelieving shake of his head. “Why would she do that?”
I lay my hand over his on the kitchen table to stop the shaking. “Because she knew this might happen. She didn’t want you going to jail for something you didn’t do, and she knew that knife was the only proof.”
“She shouldn’t have done that.” He takes a long drag and stares blankly at the table with dead eyes. “I would have killed him,” he says through a stream of smoke. “I should have. She’s only sitting in that jail cell because I didn’t do what needed to be done. She was saving my sorry ass.”
He’s right about Kate saving him. She confessed everything—how she heard the fight and came upstairs. According to her story, when she found them, Tro was unconscious and his father was pulling the amp cord from his guitar so tight around Tro’s neck that he was blue. The knife Tro had kicked out of his father’s hand was on the floor near the couch. On instinct, she picked it up and brought it down on his back, just to get him off Tro. He fell away and she went to Tro, pulled the cord off his neck and made sure he was breathing. When she turned back to his dad a little while later and realized he was dead, she panicked. She wrapped the body in a blanket and dragged it down to the garage. She went back to Tro’s apartment and cleaned it and him. When he came to and she knew he was okay, she loaded his father in the Chevy he’d shown up in and drove him out to Lake Travis.
She did it for Tro, and for that, he will never forgive himself.
I get up and pour him a cup of coffee, hoping he’ll lay off the Jack bottle that’s open on the table in front of him. I’ve watched his slow self-destruction for the last three days, since they took Kate in and released him, and it’s killing me that I can’t seem to reach him, no matter what I do. I set the steaming mug down in front of him. “Drink that.”
He doesn’t look up at me as he says, “I booked you a flight back to California for tomorrow morning. There’s a cab coming at seven.”
The blood in my veins turns to ice. “I’m not leaving.”
There’s nothing of the Tro I spent two months touring with in the hollow gaze that meets mine when he lifts his head. All the playful recklessness that ultimately made me love him is gone. “The only thing that could make this worse is someone coming after you here. It’s only a matter of time.”
He’s right. I’ve been thinking the same thing. But I need to be here for him. “I’ll head back next week.”
The shake of his head is so subtle I barely see it, but despair coils tighter around my heart, like a python going in for the kill. “I want you to go now.”
“No.”
I nearly jump out of my skin when he slams his palms into the table and stands, knocking over the bottle. The only sound for the next several seconds is the contents of the bottle trickling onto the floor, but the venom in his gaze as he stares me down has the intended effect. That python tightens itself one last notch and snuffs out my heart.
“Don’t do this, Tro,” I whisper.
He turns and grabs his helmet and keys on the way out the door.
And that’s the last I see of Tro Gunnison before a taxi pulls up for me at seven o’clock the next morning.
Chapter 37
Tro