Lights in the Trees

Callum's phone was still in his hand, screen lit, Bright's name half-dialed. He pressed send and let it drop into the grass rather than lower his eyes from Grady's hand, from the dull shape catching what little light came off the streetlamp two yards over.

"Put the case down," Callum said, which was a stupid thing to say to an armed man, but it was the only sentence his mouth could build.

"You don't understand what's in here." Grady's voice had gone thin, almost pleading, a man arguing with the wrong audience. "This isn't about the money anymore. This proves I didn't know what Roland did to her. This is the only thing that keeps me out of a cell next to his."

"Then give it to the police instead of burying it back in the ground where you just dug it up."

"I can't. I can't have my name anywhere near this yard, near her, near any of it—"

Somewhere past the tree line, faint but growing, a siren.

Grady's head turned toward the sound, just for a second, just long enough for the gun to drift half an inch off true — and Callum went for him anyway, tackling low the way he hadn't done anything since college, both of them going down hard into the torn-up dirt of Corinne's rose bed, the case flying one way and the gun the other, and for three or four seconds that felt like several minutes there was nothing but breath and weight and the specific animal terror of not knowing which of them would come up first.

Red and blue light broke across the tree line.

Car doors. Voices. Bright's voice, sharper than Callum had ever heard it, shouting his name.

He didn't come up first. Grady did — bigger, angrier, a fist already swinging down toward Callum's face with everything a cornered man had left to lose —

And then the yard exploded in light, and someone was screaming for everyone to freeze, and Callum, flat on his back in the dirt with his arms up over his head, had no idea, in that half second, whose hand had actually reached him first.