Night Tremors

by Matt Coyle

  “Sometimes you have to do what’s right, even when the law says it’s wrong.”

  Reitzmeyer had followed that credo to help put a murderer behind bars. I’d ignored it to free him so he could murder three more people. I’d done it because I thought I was right, but also because I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to come out on the winning side of a case that mattered.

  EPILOGUE

  Jack and Rita Mae Eddington hired me to find Randall. They weren’t happy with the progress that LJPD was making. Moretti hadn’t shared with the press or the Eddingtons what he’d shared with me the day of Buckley’s funeral.

  I tried to convince myself that prolonging the fiction was much less cruel than revealing to the Eddingtons the monster that was their grandson. But survival instinct had played a bigger role. If I didn’t investigate the disappearance, someone else would, and they might find the truth that Chief Moretti was searching for. Truth or fiction, both were unfair to people who deserved some joy at the end of their lives after so much sorrow.

  I’d check in with them once a month and report no progress. I wouldn’t accept any pay except for Rita Mae’s chocolate chip cookies. After each meeting, I’d take the cookies home and give them to the next-door neighbor’s daughter who sometimes watched Midnight.

  To eat them would be too much of a betrayal, even for me.

  I sleep through most nights now. The nightmares left me the night I killed Randall Eddington. Like the man in my earlier nightmares, he’d deserved to die.

  Now the only nightmare I fear is a waking one. The day that Chief Moretti knocks on my door with an arrest warrant for murder.