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someone and ultimately, realizing it was an invitation for Sara to start dragging me back into whatever sort of drama she had going on in her life.

  “Nothing, just hanging out, the usual,” I breathed a sigh of relief as she continued. “Hanging out, having a drink. What’s going on, huh?”

  “Actually,” I said, as my food came, “I had a question to ask you, about someone.”

  “OK,” I could hear her shifting around, the sounds of a TV, of a clinking glass, someone talking, low. “Is it a girl, hmm?”

  “Sort of, actually. Do you maybe know a girl named Jane? Jane Kimball?”

  There was a pause. “How do you know her?” Sara’s tone had changed, a little on the defensive, but at the same time I could tell she was interested. I filled her in on the basics, and after another pause, she sighed. “Yeah, whatever. So, I sorta knew her? It was before you came around mostly, like we were always at shows, and I know that Terry and Anita knew her in school.”

  I could hear Sara on the other end moving around. “Hold on, gotta refresh.”

  I took it as an opportunity to start shoveling my own food in my face with one free hand, the other holding my phone still. If there was one thing I refused to do with my phone was get some hands-free nonsense. I guess I liked the idea of being able to broadcast that I was on the phone and not just an idiot with headphones.

  “Back!” she chirped while I was stuffing a whole dumpling in my mouth, chewing vigorously and gasping at just how hot it was. I tried to respond in a cheery response in kind, but all that came out was a weird breathy gasp in pain. “Nice,” Sara said, settling herself back down. “Anyway, yeah, at one point I heard she had some asshole boyfriend who was a complete controlling dick.”

  “Controlling dick, huh.” Things were starting to slowly line up now. “Like, track her down if she left controlling?”

  “I guess,” Sara said, sipping whatever she was drinking. “It was that guy, Greg DiTero, I think you knew him, actually. He was in, uhm, some band with John Franco. Everyone sorta knows him, he always asks about her, so I guess she’s not with him? I saw him out here last month with John when they came to visit.”

  That’s right, Sara lived in some tiny town in New Jersey in the middle of nowhere now, taking care of her mother. Enough trips back and forth to rehab and the hospital and fights with everyone you know will drive you to places away from everything you know triggers that kind of behavior, I thought. “So what, he was asking about her? Talking about her?”

  “Not really, not this time, but he was hanging out with Vicki and Joe.”

  “Joe? Joe from DGIS?”

  “Yeah, they were up here visiting.”

  DGIS had been, when we were all younger, the biggest band in the scene, and Joe, the singer with the big shock of hair that had a big skunk stripe painted through it, probably the most popular guy around. He’d seemed nice enough to me in the way one was to someone you didn’t know but your friends did, but I didn’t know too much about him and Vicki Scirocco outside of old punk circles.

  On the other hand, I knew even less about John Franco and his old band, other than they had been a drunken mess who didn’t do much besides attract people like my friend Ivan, who did a lot of drugs, into their fanbase. My head was hurting, all of a sudden this whole thing was opening up a big can of worms from what I considered a fairly-uneventful, albeit fun, chapter of my life.

  Greg DiTero.

  I tossed some bills on the table and motioned for a takeout container. I had a list of stuff to do for a client at home, and after that, more calls I realized I needed to make.

  “Look, I gotta go, but thanks, alright? You gonna come back and visit anytime soon? I owe you Chinese food.”

  -

  11

  Greg DiTero was nowhere to be found.

  I’d asked Brooks if he could ask his real cop friends if they could look him up as a favor for me. I’d asked Steve if he knew where he was. I even called asked Sara if she could ask around, though that had meant I’d promised to come visit and I was already regretting agreeing to that. 

  I was pacing around the apartment, from my desk where the real actual paying work I needed to do and the phone on the couch seeing if anyone was going to return my calls or text messages with some kind of answer. I didn’t know what had made me so interested in this, because every single clue along the way was more or less screaming “none of your business and over your head” in my ear. 

  The phone rang, & I snatched it off the couch. It was Kathy.

  The cat meowed, and I looked down at her at my feet. She was rubbing her face on my pant leg, and I realized she’d vomited, mewing proudly at her results.

  -

  12

  I hung up. There was someone hitting the bell to get in, and I walked over to the buzzer. I clicked the mic symbol for hearing whoever it was downstairs. 

  “…it’s me,” the female voice said.

  It was Jane. 

  -

  13

  “I brought your shirt.” She had blue hair now, heavy makeup, no nose ring, “I found it when I was looking for mine that morning, stuck it in the closet.” She laid my black button-up shirt on the couch, scratched the cat behind the ears when she hopped up onto the back of the couch to nose through it. “Cute cat.”

  “She’s a little shit and only behaves when other people around, but thanks.” I walked over to the desk. “Kathy told me everything,” I said, sitting.

  “Thanks. I got this, by the way,” I took the bracelet out of the desk drawer, handing it to her. “

  “Greg? No clue. Probably up his ass into stuff. You know…heroin, oxys, whatever.” She wandered aimlessly around the apartment. 

  “No shit?” I was surprised, but then again, I had a vague awareness of only being on the very edge of something, something I’d been flirting with the edges of and hadn’t really learned anything about.

  She actually laughed, a short sound, but her face opened up and she smiled. “That was me, sorry. I was trying to figure out if you were legit. I…didn’t really remember much of that night, and I tend to be a little paranoid these days, force of habit.”

  I thought a man called asking about it.”

  “Yeah, a friend.”

  “One of ours?”

  She didn’t answer for a while. went into a coat pocket, pulling out a cellphone, checking the screen absent-mindedly before dropping it back into the pocket. “No, though I could be lying. Sorry for the whole yelling thing he did, he…he told me about that, trying to basically act tough.”

  “Why?” 

  She sighed and looked down at her hands while I put the coffee cups on the table. “Force of habit, hard to shake. Not like it’s a…a dangerous thing, you know, like you don’t need to know…but Greg was…Greg was real shitty. Like, I had a hard time with him, with getting any time alone, with him constantly hitting everyone I know up whenever I wasn’t around…” I could see her hands twitching, and I decided to drop it.

  “So what brings you…well, brings you out here?” I didn’t really know how to go forward from here, Kathy had clued me in on what I really was too stupid to see, how my friends, before they knew me, knew someone else who was an abusive asshole to his girlfriend, and being a popular name and face in our scene of friends and acquaintances who everyone wanted to please, an effective stalker, so they basically all worked together to try to hide her, and the one time she comes out to come to a party, I meet her and I start worrying them that Greg is going to find her.

  I felt stupid. Like, incredibly stupid, Probably even moreso than when I went and got the bracelet.

   

  My phone beeped while Jane just sat there. It was Brooks texting me. Greg DiTero had turned up, dead in his mother’s house. The cops said it was an overdose. 

  The cat meowed, and I handed Jane my phone while I picked up my wallet before opening up the closet. Jane picked the cat up and sat on the arm of the couch, looking at the text message.�
�She looked up at me while I struggled into the coat before finding the scarf I’d stuffed into the sleeve and was keeping me from pulling my arm through. She continued, “I had fun that night, and…and thanks for the bracelet. I’d pawned it the night before the party, when Kath insisted that I come to her party. I needed some quick cash to get to Connecticut with a friend when I finally took off after Greg…well, after the last time. I didn’t really think about how much I’d miss it.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I smirked, putting my coat on from the closet “You can make it up to me…maybe coffee?”