Colby frowned. “More suspicious than the four of us wandering the streets in the middle of the night like a bunch of hobos?”
Micah snorted. “Moran, if you’re too much of a pussy to do this, just say so.”
“Fuck you,” Colby said, glancing instinctively at Joanna before he could quell the impulse. “Let’s go.”
Alma got a little scruffier as they got closer to the tower, the sidewalk narrowing before it disappeared completely so they had to walk single file along the grassy shoulder, low-slung houses crowding close together like teeth in a mouth that was too small. A broad, stocky pit mix paced the length of a chain link fence, winter-crisped weeds nearly brushing his belly. Colby winced at the casual cruelty of whoever had left him out here, reaching his hand out for the little dude to sniff.
“Come on,” Micah said, kicking at Colby’s ankle to keep him moving as the dog barked and growled in response, suspicious. “We’re almost there.”
“I know where we are,” Colby muttered, digging the fuzzy end of a package of peanut butter crackers out of his inside pocket and slipping a couple through the chain link. “I grew up here, same as you.” Alma wasn’t the kind of place people left, as a general rule. Colby didn’t have to try real hard to picture them all in ten years, still living with their parents and working jobs that were mostly bullshit, spending every weekend trying to outrun their own boredom just like they had since they were little kids setting stuff on fire in the parking lot outside their Cub Scout meetings at the Knights of Columbus hall. Probably the idea should have bothered him more than it actually did, Colby thought, jogging across the blacktop to catch up. But there were worse things in life than knowing exactly what to expect.
Now they shimmied down into a shallow ravine, Joanna swearing under her breath as she almost lost her footing, then wriggled through a hole in a fence and picked their way through an overgrown lot full of empty beer bottles and shredded tires and, inexplicably, a corduroy armchair set to full recline. Colby was seriously considering telling Micah to screw himself and going home to jerk off in the shower when, finally, there it was: the familiar silhouette of it tall and black and imposing, proud against the purple-black sky. “Shit” seemed like the only appropriate thing to say.
Joanna stopped and gazed at it for a moment, her expression startled in the orange glow of the lone safety light affixed to the rickety-looking catwalk that ringed the water tank. “I didn’t realize it was that big,” she admitted, shivering once inside her jacket.
Micah shrugged. “It’s a water tower, Jo,” he said, like that should have been obvious. “Let’s go.”
Jo cut her eyes to Colby, who held his hands up in the dark. “Don’t do it if you don’t want to,” he told her quietly. He felt protective of her all of a sudden, though he told himself it was just because she was the only girl here. “I don’t know why the fuck I’m about to do it, if you want me to be honest with you.”
“I always want you to be honest with me,” Joanna said, but before Colby could reply one way or the other she was headed across the field, the white pom-pom on top of her hat the only part of her visible in the moonlight. “Come on.”
It took them a long time to scale the side of the tower. The ancient iron ladder creaked dangerously, the wind stinging Colby’s cheeks as rust on the rungs coated the palms of his hands with a rough orange dust. “Mike,” Colby muttered, glancing down and immediately getting dizzy, his fingers beginning to numb. All at once the magnitude of his own stupidity reared up at him—his dad would have skinned him alive for a stunt like this, had his dad still been around to have opinions on things like what Colby did or didn’t do. “Shit, dude, this is really high.”
“Don’t look,” Joanna warned from underneath him, her voice surprisingly calm. “If you look it makes it worse.”
“I’m not looking,” Colby promised, turning his face skyward. If he started thinking about his dad—that day in the garage in the rainstorm, how in May he’d have been gone a full year—he was going to lose the plot for sure, so instead he gritted his teeth and forced himself to think of nothing, hand over cold, clumsy hand on the ladder until finally he swung one leg over the guardrail. He pulled Joanna up after him, the two of them grinning at each other in dumb relief as Micah and Jordan fist-bumped beside them, all of them giggling like a bunch of stoners.
That was when the cops showed up.
Two hours later, Colby sat in a brightly lit holding room, a can of ginger ale going warm on the scarred wooden bench beside him. He had no idea why he’d asked for ginger ale, honestly, like he was flying on a fucking airplane and not sitting here waiting to find out if he was going to jail or not.
He’d never actually been on an airplane, come to think of it. Maybe this was the closest he was going to get.
Colby sighed, leaning his head back against the painted cinder-block wall behind him. They’d split all of them up into separate rooms; he’d craned his neck for a last worried look at Joanna as a lady guard led her down the pee-smelling hallway and Micah yammered on about his civil rights. Colby’s wrists were a little red from the handcuffs, which seemed like overkill. It wasn’t exactly like the four of them were a quartet of criminal masterminds here.
This wasn’t Colby’s first encounter with the Ross County Sheriff’s Department, though he’d never been carted down to the station in the back of a squad car until now. He hadn’t actually been in this building at all since his second-grade class trip. His dad had been one of the chaperones, Colby remembered suddenly; they’d all gotten plastic sheriff’s stars from a gallon-sized Ziploc bag at the reception desk up front.
He should try to stop thinking about his dad.
“Colby,” Keith said now, coming into the holding room and shutting the windowed door behind him. He was wearing his mustard-colored deputy uniform with Olsen stitched across the pocket, his hair cut short on the sides and slicked back with pomade or gel or something at the top. It was, Colby thought, an extremely try-hard kind of haircut. “How’s it going in here?”
“Fine,” Colby said, sitting up a little straighter in spite of himself, as if Keith were an actual authority figure and not the same boner he’d been since everyone used to make fun of him for eating his own boogers back in elementary school. “Is Jo okay?”
Keith raised his eyebrows, like he wanted to make it clear that he’d noticed Colby’s interest and was filing it away for later consideration. “She’s fine, too,” he said with a nod. “Her stepdad came and got her.”
Colby blew a breath out. Jo wasn’t his girlfriend—they’d never even kissed, though Micah never missed a chance to tell him how nutless he was for not having, in Micah’s words, hit that by now—but that didn’t mean he wanted her spending the night at the sheriff’s department just because the rest of them were a bag of smashed assholes. “Okay,” he said, relaxing a little. “Good.”
“He left Jordan here to sweat it out a couple more hours, though,” Keith continued, sitting down on the opposite bench and resting his slightly girlish-looking hands on his knees. “Can’t say I blame him. The hat alone should be a capital crime.”