Free Nitro Mountain by Lee Clay Johnson Page B

This phone’s his. He doesn’t know I took it. I’m going to throw it away.”
    Rachel started peeing.
    Jennifer touched my knee and walked her hand like a beetle up my thigh. “So,” she said, “maybe he was lying about the cameras.” Her hand went from my leg to her crotch. “He’s an asshole, but I do like watching this stuff. Doesn’t it kinda turn you on?”
    “No,” I said. “This is serious.”
    “I just can’t believe he was actually doing it behind my back. I mean,
you
’d never do anything like this.”
    “If I wanted to I would,” I said. “But I don’t. That’s the difference. Do you know who that is there?”
    Rachel finished, the last bit dripping from her hairs, no wiping, just a quick finger tap over her slice. “Some girl,” Jennifer said. “That ain’t the point.”
    “You’ve never seen her?”
    “Who?”
    “That girl,” I said, touching the phone.
    Rachel’s butt left the bowl and the video paused on her pulling her jeans halfway up, and like that she was gone. Jennifer said, “I can’t go around asking every woman I see, ‘Will you please pull your pants down?’ That might sound weird.”
    I thought about it. No cops this time. They’d had enough of me, and me of them. Jennifer was right. We could handle this on our own.
    “What are you thinking about right now?” she said.
    But I couldn’t tell her I knew that ass. “That girl could’ve been you,” I said. “That’s what I’m worried about. It could be any of these girls,” I said, pointing past the wall and out into the world.
    “Why would he video me?” she said. “He’s seen it all in person. Anyway, listen, the real problem’s this.” She showed me a wound on her hip that looked like a gigantic nightcrawler twisting out from under her skin.
    “I’ll do anything,” I said. “We got to get you away from him.”
    “I already told you. He likes drinking those slurpees from the station. He mixes vodka into that shit. It’s his cocktail. All we do is add a little something else.” She flicked the bottle, her fingernail clicking against the glass. “We could be safe loving each other. We can’t even love each other right, me and you.”
    She held her breasts in her hands and weighed them. Despite the scars from the pigs, the full round nipples were there, dark and unbitten. She lay back and told me to come heal her. It didn’t feel real but I did it anyway. I had no choice anymore, now that I was on her, outside my body, and inside hers.
    After, my head in her lap, her finger drawing on my ear, she said, “I seen shit like this in detective movies. The thing that gets you is the cops tracing the killing back to some kind of deal.”
    “You ever tell the cops about what he did to you?”
    “Never told nobody shit.”
    “But people know y’all were together.”
    “Are,” she said. “
Are
together. You got to do it. Get close to him. Get him in a situation where he sees you as the giving type. You call my phone and I’ll let you talk to him.”
    “But he’ll know something’s up if I’m calling your number.”
    “I’ll tell him tonight I met somebody looking for work. Ran into you outside the Hairport. When you talk to him, tell him that. And tell him about the trouble you been in. Lost your license. He’ll like that part. Tell him you’re needing work. Make everybody see you as being on his side.”
    —
    The Lookout was a four-story disaster, twisting clapboard siding and slate shingles sliding off the roof, the whole thing leaning just below the peak of Nitro Mountain. Arnett had set up ladders and scaffolding all over the place. I was using my bad arm to steady myself, climb, hold nails straight, even pull away siding. I spent most of my working hours up around the roof, beneath the sun’s nose. I could look down over my shoulder and see the scab that was Bordon, the infected area around it, and past that the curve of the earth.
    Stilted behind me on the last rocky incline was