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about Steve?”
    This didn’t get the rise out of her he was hoping for. She looked at him calmly and said, “What about Steve?”
    “He’s into you. He wants to fuck you.”
    “So what? I’m not fucking him.”
    “But you want to.”
    “No. I don’t. You want to check my phone? See if I have any pictures of him on it? You want to see if I’ve sent him pictures of my tits? Go check it. It’s in my purse in the kitchen. Go.”
    He shook his head, but the temptation was real. Was she bluffing? Did she know that he wouldn’t do it? What if he surprised her and really looked? What would he find? “No,” he said. “I trust you. I wish you trusted me too.”
    “I want to trust you. But you’re fucking looking at something on some cunt’s phone and you’re acting guilty as shit!”
    Of course, she was right. Nothing about his behavior signaled anything good. He knew that. He retrieved the phone from the table and placed it into her hand. “You don’t want to see,” he said. “You really don’t. It’s awful.”
    “What is it?”
    He thought about the fingers. “I don’t know.”
    She sat down, and she opened the files.
    He watched it all a second time with her. When she was done, she returned it to him, her hand shaking. He stared at her face the way he would a television screen, waiting for something to happen on it, waiting for it to give him something to react to.
    “Is that Garrett? The one who was texting last night?”
    That thought hadn’t even occurred to him. “I don’t think so. These were taken earlier. They were already on the phone.”
    “Call him.”
    “What? No.”
    “Then give it to me. I’ll do it.”
    He clutched the phone more tightly. He felt as though they were debating opening the cage of a starving tiger. “Why, Carrie? It’s a bad idea.”
    “I want to know if he’s still alive. I don’t want to think about someone dying like that while you ignored him.”
    “Ignored him?”
    “He was asking for help! He was begging you!”
    “Oh, fuck that,” he said, a surge of guilt turning quickly to anger. “No one’s dead, for God’s sake.” He activated the screen and went back to Garrett’s last written text.
    PLEASE
    He summoned Garrett’s number and called it.
    Carrie stared at him as he waited for an answer, the phone trilling lightly into his ear. After a moment it stopped ringing. He brought the phone away from his ear a fraction of an inch, thinking at first that it had been disconnected, but something about the quality of the silence told him otherwise.
    “Hello?”
    Something was alive in that silence.
    “Garrett? Hello?”
    It spoke. It sounded broken and wet, like something sliding itself together in a slurry of blood and bones. A tongue testing the border of language. Liquid syllables collided and slipped past each other. It sounded too close, like it was already living in his head.
    He threw the phone across the room in a reflex of disgust, Carrie’s barked cry of shock lost in the echo of the voice leaking from his ear like a thread of blood. The phone came apart in two pieces, and Carrie was already racing toward it, leaving him to rub at his ear with the heel of his hand, tears he didn’t even know he was crying trailing down his cheek.
    Carrie crouched on the floor, fitting the battery back into the phone, snapping its shell back into place. “Was that him? Was that Garrett?” She sounded panicked.
    And why would that be, he wondered, the fear and the disgust of a moment ago settling into a thick soup of anger. She didn’t have to listen to that voice.
    “No,” he said. “It was nobody. Nobody was there.”
     
     
    W EDNESDAYS WERE ALWAYS among the slowest nights of the week, so there was plenty of time for the fear to grind away at the levees he’d built to keep the mounting panic at bay. He felt it threaten to breach every time the door swung open, and he hated himself for it. He didn’t know if he’d be able to recognize any of them