“What time is it?”

“Seven twenty-two, sweetheart,” Remy said. “And people are dead.”

“Good dead people? Or bad dead people?” I asked.

Which were the opening words of a game Remy and I played sometimes.

“Double murder,” my partner said. “I’m fifteen minutes away. Get dressed.”

I hung up and jumped in a cold shower. Let the water shock my system before turning on the hot. Tiny bumps on my arms disappeared, and my skin became more malleable under the warm water.

Getting dressed, I popped a K-Cup in the coffee machine and stepped outside. Lit a half-smoked Marlboro Red that I’d left by the front windowsill.

The last two days had been surreal.

The school shooting. Opening up to Remy about what happened in May.

I felt renewed somehow and took two long puffs before stubbing out the cigarette and leaving it there.

The air was muggy, but you could almost feel the heat burning it off. And you could sense that by afternoon it would be one of those days when you could smell the nitrogen sticks in the flower beds as you drove down residential streets. And that everything would be okay.

I grabbed the coffee and dumped it into my silver cup, seeing Remy’s Alfa pull up toward the curb.

As I locked the front door, I noticed my reflection in the window: my wavy brown hair had gotten long, and I wore a dark sport coat over a white button-down and black pants. One of my go-to outfits.

I got in Remy’s sports car, and the Alfa guzzled loudly away from the curb, its signature dugga-dugga-dugga rising from the back of the car.

“A new case,” I said aloud. A little surprised I hadn’t been moved to paid administrative leave. “Are we just vetting it, or is it ours?”

“Ours,” she said. “I got the call from the chief myself.”

I stared at Remy. Of the two of us, she was the junior detective and yet the call had come from Senza directly.

“I assume it came with a request to keep an eye on me?”

My partner’s face tightened. With the school shooting still not handed over to the state, Abe and Merle couldn’t take this one on.

“It’s okay, Rem,” I said. “So what do we know?”

“Patrol found a ’96 Chevy Caprice,” Remy said, “abandoned on the side of SR-914. Driver and passenger both shot to death, execution style, most likely from someone in the back seat.”

“Jesus.”

Remy glanced at her phone and then at me. “The driver’s name is Juan Vinorama. No I.D. on him, but he owns the car. His buddy in the passenger seat is still a John Doe.”

Ten minutes later, Remy steered her Alfa to the side of 914, about six miles northwest of Mason Falls. Ahead of us we saw the abandoned Chevy Caprice, a boat of a vehicle. Long and midnight blue, with a tan interior and a back seat big enough to deliver a baby in.