Impostor Syndrome by Mishell Baker

Author:Mishell Baker
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Saga Press

26

Phil drove me home in what had been Teo’s car. He was silent until we’d gotten a good distance away from the jail, and then he said, “We need to get Tjuan out of there.”

I tried to think despite a pounding headache. “Maybe we can. Elliott is in a facade of Tjuan at the moment.”

“I know.”

“We could send him to the police station. Shock may know where the weapon ended up. We could put the gun right in the facade’s pocket.”

“And send Elliott to jail?” said Phil.

“I don’t know, he could fake a heart attack or something, leave the facade once it was in there. Except . . . the body wouldn’t die. It would just . . . sit there, warm, without a heartbeat.”

“Are we caring about that?” said Phil. “Are we caring about the Code of Silence more than we are about Tjuan?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” I massaged my head. “I’ve had kind of a day.”

“Sorry,” said Phil. “You and Caryl figure it out.”

“Caryl? She’s all right?”

“She’s the one who called me, Millie. And the bail bondsman.”

Of course.

Another idea hit me. “Qualm. We have Qualm now. Shock can put Qualm into the facade!”

“And then Qualm will snap the kid’s neck. Great idea.”

“Oh. Right.”

We couldn’t actually make Qualm do anything. Only Winterglass could do that, and he wouldn’t do shit for me until I got him that vial.

We were silent after that on the long drive back to the North University Park district in the dead of night. When Phil let me back into the house, the clock on the wall in the living room said seven after three. The house was quiet.

“Where’s Elliott?” I whispered to Phil.

“In Arcadia,” he said. Good. I wasn’t sure I could stand to see him right now, walking around in my partner’s skin.

Phil’s room was downstairs, so I left him, heading straight to the upstairs bathroom to shower. I sat on my little plastic stool and let the water pound me, wanting it to scour off every skin cell that touched anything in that place.

I couldn’t wash off my record, though. Charged with obstruction of justice, arraignment set for mid-March. Even if Tjuan got cleared of all charges, I had broken the law, and that made me a criminal.

Maybe that should have made it easier for me to calmly pull off a heist, but without Tjuan I had no contingency plan, no exit strategy. If this had been a movie, I’d have gone ahead, called it additional motivation to do things right. But this was Caryl and Claybriar and Shock, people who had been (mostly) good to me, people whose lives I couldn’t just throw away.

I dried off, put on a T-shirt and shorts to sleep in, and wheeled myself back down the hall to my room, trying to make my exhausted brain think past the missing piece in my perfectly balanced plan.

I still had one “Tjuan”; I still had an Ironbones to use as a threat to the second standing stone.

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