“That blue box back there.”

“Oh. I think it’s a call box or something. For police, back in the day.”

“There’s a phone in there?”

“Probably not anymore.” He laughed as they blasted through a mound of powder. “Why, you wanna call in to report a crime? Perhaps someone’s stolen your heart, Miss Mori?”

Something like that.

Morgan brushed the joke aside with another forced smile and took note of her surroundings. Her wrist itched where the key was kept. She would come back later. Alone.

40 HUDSON

Hudson was disoriented. It felt as though he’d never left Muntz’s apartment, and now he was back in the dingy unit, the reek of blood and feces potent enough to choke. His eyes watered, blurring the scene before him. Ronald Muntz had devolved into a gelatinous pool on his mattress, his left eye socket blown out by a .45-caliber bullet. A matte black Glock lay on the floor, just beneath Muntz’s meaty hand that hung off the mattress, his fingers bloated to resemble blood sausages.

A camera flash lit up the scene as an evidence technician photographed a note scrawled on a tear-away receipt book. I have seen and said too much.

ME Winthorp stood next to the corpse, measuring the state of decomp. He heard her say the words “possible suicide,” and “self-inflicted gunshot wound.”

Kole stood beside him. “Self-inflicted, my ass,” he muttered. He sounded rough, like he’d swallowed a cup of sidewalk salt. “This is not good.”

Hudson shook his head, agreeing. “At least there’s the interview with Kasper,” he suggested. It was their one saving grace. People would focus on the incident of Muntz’s arrest and subsequent snitching, which would all lead back to a motive of retaliation—the suspect being someone who wasn’t too happy about Hades’s incarceration. Because in Black Harbor, snitches got more than stitches. They got splattered on the walls.

The buck would stop at a motive for vengeance; no one would have to know that he and Kole had scared the truth out of Muntz just hours prior. It was selfish, he knew, but Hudson couldn’t help but feel relief in knowing the law’s eyes would be on someone in Tobias’s circle instead of himself. And then, like the answer to a math equation suddenly clicking into place, he knew that this was the kind of thinking it took to survive in Black Harbor.

Dog eat dog.

“Christopher?” Hudson whispered, out of earshot of the others. He and Kole had receded to the edges of the scene.

“That’d be my bet,” replied Kole. “I already sent Fletcher and Devine to bring him in for questioning.”

“But won’t they ask—”

“I’m their boss, Hudson. You know, not everyone questions authority figures. Believe it or not, some detectives actually just do what they’re told.”