As I sat on the stool, my elbows on the bar top, my head in one hand, the empty shot of whiskey in the other, logic and the luxury of time had me backpaddling from my earlier assumptions.
Diane had said Twilight spoke to someone inside the car after he’d shot Kip. A woman. And that woman had run off, with Twilight in pursuit. Really, I was too old to be staying up all night. My brain was tired, slow. If I’d been well rested and not hungover on adrenaline and misery, I felt certain I’d be able to suss out the puzzle.
“Repo.”
Lifting my head, I blinked bleary eyes until Twilight’s face came into focus, standing to my right, wearing a pissed off frown that appeared permanently carved into place and staring twin daggers down at me.
He looked at me as though I was his own personal Judas. “You and I need to have words. Now.”
I stared at him, at the set of his jaw, the violence in his expression. He was angry. With me. Close to irate. But more importantly, he was here. He hadn’t run off.
“I reckon we do,” I said, standing slow, suppressing a grunt as my bones and muscles resisted. Gesturing for him to exit out the way he must’ve just walked in, I picked up my jacket and keys from the bar. We weren’t discussing Diane here. These walls had ears.
Some of the brutality behind his features waned. “You okay to ride, old man?”
“No,” I said, tossing my keys over. “You’re driving.”
He seemed surprised—still pissed, but also surprised—and he nodded.
Soon we were in the Mercedes, and he pulled out of the Dragon’s parking lot. I studied him for a bit, just long enough for us to make it to the Parkway, before I said, “Start talking.”
“What the fuck are you doing with Diane?” The question exploded out of him.
It was a fair question. But I wanted my answers first. “Why did you shoot your father?”
The younger man flinched, blinked. The angry cloud dissolved, punctured by shock.
“I—” Twilight’s mouth opened and closed.
I really shocked him.
“And why did you frame your mother for it?”
He flinched again, looking at me like I was crazy. “What? I didn’t!”
“She saw you. She recognized you.”
His eyes now pointed out the windshield—but maybe focused more in his own mind than on the road—and he croaked, “When?”
“Obviously, last night. When you shot Kip Sylvester in front of her.”
He sucked in a breath, his eyelashes fluttering, clearly putting two and eight together. “She was there?”
Working to clear away the cobwebs, because this next part was important. I watched him carefully as I said, “You know she was there. You messaged her, using Jenn’s phone.”
A choking sound arrived before he blurted, “I certainly did not.”
‘Certainly did not.’ Well now, don’t he sound so proper. He barely had an accent. I squinted at him, looking at this new person behind the crude, surly mask he’d always worn. This here was Isaac, the real him. Not Twilight, the Iron Wraiths recruit.
But the discovery of his mask was irrelevant. I needed to stay focused.
“Well, someone did frame her,” I said, sighing tiredly. “Who else could it be?”
“I thought I . . .” he said on a breath, and I knew he wasn’t here in the car with me anymore, he was somewhere else, thinking through his assumptions. “What did she do? Is that why they brought her in?”
Convinced he told the truth, that he hadn’t framed Diane, I filled him in on everything as I knew it to be true. “This is what happened—your mother received a text from Jennifer to meet her at the bakery parking lot. She arrived and saw you shoot into your father’s car. You then yelled something at someone, and that someone left the car and took off. You followed. Your mother ran to your father’s car and tried to save him—”
“Fuck!” Isaac banged on the steering wheel.
“She opened the car door—so they got her prints on the car now—and she did her best to compress the wound.”
“He was already dead. When I shot him, he was already dead.”
Rather than ask the obvious, which why Isaac would shoot a dead man, I said, “Start. Talking.”
“It was Elena, she—she hated my father. She wanted him dead, and she wanted to pin it on my mother. She asked me to help. She thinks I hate my mother. I don’t.”
“So what happened?” The parkway was long and without tight curves. We’d be able to stick to this road for a while.
“I knew she was going to do it, and I knew when. I told her I wouldn’t help, but that I wouldn’t stand in her way.”
Anger did a great job of clearing my head. “You were going to let her frame Diane?”
“No!” He sent me another look like I was crazy. “I was there, waiting for her—for Elena—to make sure she couldn’t frame my mother. To make sure the police caught her and only her.”
“What?” That didn’t make any sense. “Why didn’t you just stop her?”
“I wanted him dead.”
I leaned my elbows on my knees, my face in my hands, and shook my head. Sons and fathers. I’d never had one. Isaac had wanted his dead. What a fucked-up world for little boys like us.
“Okay.” I leaned back in my seat, shaking off the odd moment of melancholy. “Fine. You wanted him dead. Take me through what happened last night.”
“I got there.” He sent me a brief, hard glare. “I saw your bike.”
“Okay, then what?” I asked dismissively. I didn’t have time to explore that road with him right now.
“I walked up the side of the hill. Elena had told me what she was planning to do and when. She was going to strangle him and then throw the rope in the pond at the Lodge. Then she’d give an anonymous tip where to find the murder weapon. She’d said she’d already put the rope in my mother’s office—a big roll of it—and had cut off a length to use.”
I struggled to think, piece it together. “Is the rope still there?”
“As far as I know, yes. But it wouldn’t matter. Because my plan was to wait until Elena had done it, then shoot him in the chest. Then I’d put Elena’s prints on the gun and leave her there to be found.”
“But that’s not what happened.”
“No. I changed my mind. I didn’t want him to die. When it came right down to it, I couldn’t do nothing. But I was too late. She changed the plan. She made it all happen quicker than she’d said. When I got there, she’d already strangled him.”
“You shot him anyway?”
“I did. I couldn’t let her pin it on my mother. He was dead when I shot him. I told her to get out of the car—that’s what my momma heard—and Elena ran. I chased her down and knocked her out in the forest. I took her glove off, fired again while she held the weapon, and left her there to be found with the gun.”
“Huh.” I rubbed my jaw. “I don’t understand. If you left Elena with the gun, with her prints on it, where is the gun?”
He made a frustrated, grunting sound in the back of his throat. “It’s missing.”