Somers turned the problem over and over in his head, trying to figure out what the charges might be, and why anyone would believe them. He tried to tell himself to let it alone. He tried to tell himself it was a mistake—Hazard might have overreacted. It might have been something with his PTSD. Tomorrow, Somers would go to the park—with the cement vulvas, he thought, trying not to roll his eyes at Hazard’s description—and he’d see Hazard and Evie there, and Hazard would apologize and explain it was all a misunderstanding.

The only problem was the little niggle in Somers’s gut. The niggle that told him Hazard was right. The niggle that had made him run, when the right thing to do, the safe thing to do, would have been to stay and let them take him in to the jail, wait for the arraignment, post bail, and deal with this like an adult. Somers knew all those things. If anyone had come to him and asked his advice about a situation like that, he would have told them to go into the system and resolve it the right way, or risk having their life messed up forever.

But when it had happened to him, when he’d felt that niggle telling him that something was really, truly wrong, he’d run. Somers trusted his gut, and right then, his gut told him to keep running.

So he made his way to Smithfield, swatting mosquitos, fending off a horsefly the size of a baseball, and listening to the whistle and zing and pop of fireworks as people started celebrating.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

JULY 5

FRIDAY

8:03 AM

HAZARD WAS STANDING at the sink, staring at a bowl of oatmeal he hadn’t touched, when the knock came at the door. He sighed, dumped the oatmeal in the trash, and made his way through the wreckage of his house to answer the door.

The night before had been a total shit show, especially after Cora came and took Evie. Warrants, in theory, were limited in both the object and extent of their search. A warrant authorizing the police to look for firearms in a gardening shed, for example, would exclude much of the property. In reality, warrants could be much more flexible. The warrant on Hazard and Somers’s house, which authorized the police to search the house for drugs or drug paraphernalia or evidence of drug-related activity, had essentially meant open season for the police. Because drugs could mean something as small as a tenth of a gram in a tiny plastic baggie, they searched everywhere. They had torn the house apart—in some cases, such as the sofa cushions, literally.

Some of the cops, like Moraes, Norman, and Gross, had tried to be respectful. For the most part, though, the younger breed of assholes in the department, uniformed officers whom Hazard didn’t know, went through the place like they were determined to fuck everything up as much as possible, just on general principle. He kept a list of their names: Russell, Lansdown, Stina, Daughaty. Hazard kept his own record, too, of everything that had been taken from the house, and after the police finally left, sometime around four in the morning, he had sat in the chaos and checked his list against theirs, item for item. There hadn’t been much for them to take, of course: a few bottles of prescription painkillers, a tobacco pipe, a vape pen Hazard hadn’t even known Somers owned, a bottle of prescription cough syrup, and, of course, Somers’s phone.