A Detective Story

Pretty soon though, closer she got to home, there wouldn't be any trees and bushes around anymore. Just crummy houses and apartment buildings all crammed together. Always plenty of parked cars along the street. She could hunker down between them or crawl underneath one, if she needed to.

Still, this was gonna be really hard. Really scary. Gonna take forever, 'til she finally made it to her building. She wasn't used to being barefoot either. The filthy street would beat the hell out of them. Gravel and busted glass all over the place. God, this was gonna be torture. Icy cold, too. She hadn't noticed before how cold it had gotten. Last week that wouldn't have been an issue—it was still stinking hot all night. Now fall was getting serious finally. Perfect timing. She'd end up catching pneumonia or some shit.

She should just fire up her scooter and ride it home, fast as she could. Just as much chance of getting caught like this either way. Freeze her tits off in the wind, though. Then again they felt like they were gonna freeze off already, just standing here doing nothing yet in the dark.

Didn't care too much if drunken students or bums saw her. What scared her was police. Local cops were obviously no fans of her, after the cover-ups she made public. They'd only make a mockery of her, if they found her on the street in this state. Taking the opportunity to discredit her work and get back at her. Probably throw her in jail, pretending she was out of her mind on drugs. She'd get no help from those fuckers.

When Rick wouldn't tell what he knew, he kept telling her it was too dangerous and acting like he was trying to protect her—though obviously he'd really been more concerned with protecting his own ass, the whole time, not hers. Even if he'd been telling the truth, it would still have pissed her off. So patronizing, and cowardly too, and selfish. As a journalist and a detective, she had no patience at all with the idea of backing off from a mystery because it was too scary. That made it only more necessary to pursue and solve.

But now there were all these things Krissy just showed her ... Laura ended up learning a whole bunch of stuff from the psycho bitch tonight, and from her minions too—stuff about herself. Nasty things she never would have guessed about herself. Never in a hundred million years. Lots and lots of things.

She wasn't the girl she always thought she was. Not deep down. She was somebody else in there, turned out. A whole different sort of person. And pretty weak, and pretty damn nasty. Hell of a thing to find out, all the sudden. Hell of thing to have to carry around inside her head from now on.

Detective or not, cowardly or not, if she could snap her fingers and go back to not knowing any of this stuff, just like that, she would. Fuck yeah. In a heartbeat.