Page 113 of Trigger Happy

He pulls out his phone. “The street cams were useless. She’s good at covering her tracks, so she scrambled the feeds with a jammer. That’s how we knew something was off.” We? “Then her mom confesses out of nowhere and her prints are all over the crime scene? That’s too easy. You don’t leave DNA unless you want someone to find it.”

Can’t argue with that logic.

Still…

He pulls up a video on his phone and flips it around. I lean across the rowboat to get a better view. Walker’s Christmas flannel is on the bed. I know it because Ma gets us matching ones every year, and that’s the ’08 flannel with the ugly-ass, one-eyed snowman stitched onto the back.

I squint at the grainy phone screen as a woman in a balaclava steps into the bedroom and attacks him. During the fight, the black mask comes off. That’s Sabrina. It’s definitely her fighting with my brother. And he’s hitting her back. My fists ball at my sides. What the fuck is he doing? Ma taught us to never hit a woman. She’d kill him if he weren’t already dead.

I can’t tell why they’re fighting, but Sabrina’s winning. At first I’m glad, but then it gets ugly. Goddamn, she’s not even giving him a chance.

Then there’s some stabbing.

And Sabrina’s definitely the one doing the stabbing—no question about it.

I can’t watch anymore. “Turn it off.”

It feels like my chest has been run over by an eighteen-wheeler. She lied to me. All this time. I swallow around the giant lump in my throat. Cicadas chirp, filling the silence with a grating buzz like they’re trying to give me a pounding headache. I want to punch something. Kill someone.

Her.

No. Thinking it hurts. I dig my nails into my palms until they bleed. “Fuck.”

“I’m sorry,” Arch says, squeezing my shoulder. I think he means it. “For what it’s worth, I’m really fucking sorry.”

It doesn’t make a difference. There’s nothing anyone could say to make this let-me-jump-off-a-building-or-push-Sabrina-off-one feeling go away.

He clamps a hand around my shoulder and squeezes hard as he looks me dead in the eye. “You have every right to be angry. Sabrina betrayed you.” He nods toward an outcropping at the edge of the river. “We picked this spot on purpose. The girls are gonna be coming down that ridge soon, and there’s no cell service. No one around for miles…”

My ears start ringing. Sabrina really did this. She killed my brother and lied to me. She made me fall in—

I punch a tree.

My body is buzzing. I can’t think, and now my fist hurts like hell. The world feels lopsided. I don’t want any of this. My fist tightens around my phone until the screen cracks, the glass spiderwebbing out in all different directions.

“All right,” I say, looking up at him with a stiff jaw. “But if we do this, I’m the one who pulls the trigger.”

53Sabrina

What do you mean Walker tried to kill you?” Bobbi asks, gun pinned on my heart like we’re in some Western standoff. I wish we were. At least then I’d have my own gun with the Happy 16th, Sabrina! engraving instead of Bobbi’s hand-me-down. “You better explain like your life depends on the answer.”

Okay. I need to play this carefully. One wrong word and I’m getting a postmortem docuseries on Netflix called Predator. Or hopefully something with an equally badass title.

“I have proof on my other phone, but it’s in my backpack if I could just go and grab it,” I say, voice steady, but I can’t stop my palms from sweating.

She scoffs. “Right. Like I’m going to let you just reach into your overstuffed backpack full of ways to kill me. Tell me what you know.”

Well, there goes plan A.

Here goes plan B. I suck in a breath before delivering the buzzkill. “Walker was a monster who got off on scalping women’s heads and killing them. Well, technically he was killing them and then shaving their heads, but you get the point. He’d pretend to date them, and then…”

“What a fun story,” Bobbi sneers, short hair whipping wildly in the wind. “And you just happened to divulge this groundbreaking revelation while I’m pointing a gun at your face?”

“It’s true.” I shift slightly so if she does shoot, it will hit my bulletproof vest. “They called him the Barber of Bastrop.”

And every time Lawton said those three words, I had to school my expression into blank questioning. It hurt, lying to him, but it hurt less than telling him the truth. At first I didn’t tell him because I thought he’d kill me. Then, the closer we grew, the more the secret suffocated me, but I couldn’t hurt him like that. I didn’t want to be the one to ruin the memory of his brother.

Bobbi rolls her eyes. “And I’m the Virgin Mary.”