The Arrangement

“A—Are you okay?” I asked.

“Better than okay.”

We shrank back from him a bit. Gave him some room.

“What the hell happened?”

“I went out and solved a problem,” Chase said evenly. “That’s what happened.”

There was a look in his eye that was almost frightening, but not in a dangerous way. Not to us, anyway.

“Wanna tell us about that?” asked Burke. He tilted his head toward the foreign laptop.

“That… is an insurance policy.”

“Against?”

“It belongs to Jay Summers,” I guessed, stepping forward.

“Belonged,” he corrected me quickly. “But yes.”

Nathan was incredulous. Burke let out a little grunt of approval.

“That his blood?”

“Sure is.”

“Feels good, doesn’t it?”

Chase chuckled for the first time all night. “After what he pulled? Fuck yeah it does.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a strange phone, too. He tossed it on the table next to the laptop. Nathan looked nervous.

“Uhhh, he’s not in your trunk or anything, is he?” When Chase didn’t answer right away, Nathan put his hands up. “Wait, don’t answer that. Nod once if he’s in there. Nod twice if he’s—”

“The little shitbag is fine,” Chase explained. “Except for his nose. I think I broke it again.” He let out a long, hot breath. “It bled like I broke it, at least. But yeah, he’s at home.”

“Sans laptop. Sans phone?”

Chase nodded. “Sans whatever pride he had left, too. What little there was.”

He went on to explain the remainder of his evening, which was long and strange. It included a trip out to Jay Summer’s house, a quick thrashing, followed by a late-night drive to the publishing office with Jay strapped in the passenger seat, a T-shirt pressed over his nose.

“My car’s going to need to be detailed,” Chase lamented. “He bled a lot.”

“And he just… went with you?” I asked. “Gave up his phone and laptop?”

“He gave me everything I wanted,” said Chase. “I didn’t give him much of a choice.”

Hope filled my heart, as I realized where this was going.

“So… you got everything?”

“All of the photos, yes. Everything he took that night under the pier. Some of us in the restaurant, too.”

Relief flooded through me. It felt astoundingly good.

“He kept the files on his phone, and on a thumb-drive in his desk. I deleted everything.”