Outburst by R.D. Zimmerman

No, really, I can't.”
    “You've got to.” The clerk giggled. “At least let me put it on hold for you. I can do it for, like, seventy-two hours.”
    Kris shrugged. “I don't know. Maybe.”
    “Great. I mean, you have nothing to lose. You've got three days to decide if you want it. If you come back before then, it'll be here. If you don't, then it'll just go back out on the rack.”
    “Well …”
    Well, why not, decided Kris. And so she followed the salesclerk to the checkout counter and wrote down her name and number. A few minutes later Kris tucked a claim check in her pocket.
    “Thanks,” said Kris, her voice hushed as she turned to go.
    “Oh, no prob. I'm sure you're going to come back. It's just too perfect on you.”
    And I'm sure I won't, thought Kris. No. She'd buy it only if she was going to go to Stuart Hawkins's, but there was no way that she could do that. Nope. Thank God she'd come to her senses. As she made her way toward the main ground-floor doors, she saw his face again. Not Stuart Hawkins's warm, charming face. But that of the cop and his look of horror just before the gun went off.
    Oh, God. He was dead and buried all because of her.

12
     
    The rest of their dinner was kind of a disaster. In fact, Todd stayed barely another five minutes at Café Bobino.
    “I've got to get back to work,” he said, excusing himself.
    “Like I don't? It's probably impossible, but among a hundred other things I've got to see if I can get a trace on that call,” said Rawlins. “Come on, Todd, sit back down. We can eat and be out of here in ten minutes.”
    “No, I'll just grab a sandwich from the machine at the station.”
    Janice took a sip of wine, then quipped, “Frankly, I prefer risotto to plastic.”
    “I'm sorry,” continued Todd, “I've just got to get back and figure out what I'm going to do for the ten o'clock.”
    Janice put down her glass. “So what
are
you going to do?”
    “I don't know,” said Todd, shifting in his seat because, after all, he didn't like lying, particularly not to the two most important people in his life. “A phone call like that kind of changes everything we had planned.”
    “No shit.” Rawlins shook his head. “I don't like this.”
    “Neither do I,” seconded Janice. “There are a lot of nuts out there, most of whom I come across on a daily basis in court. This guy's obviously really dangerous—he's already killed a cop, you know.”
    Todd looked at Janice, then Rawlins. The two of them were staring at him, pressing him to reveal how he might handle this. He had an inkling—more than one, actually—but he couldn't tell them, or at least not Rawlins. At first, just after the call, he was frightened, even shaken. Then, however, it started kicking in, that old sense, the one that pushed him to ask question after question and that caused him to hound a victim, to follow a drug dealer, to tail a judge, until he had the complete answer to a complex question. And this time he'd succeeded, at least so far, for he'd brought things more or less into the open. He'd poked at the story of the murder of Mark Forrest, and the killer had bitten back. Yes, the man who'd shot Forrest had peeped out of his hole.
    So what would Todd's next move in fact be? He looked directly into Rawlins's dark eyes, which were staring right back at his. But it wasn't Rawlins, his lover, studying him with worry. No, it was Rawlins, the homicide investigator. And this, once again, boiled down to freedom of the media. No, Todd couldn't reveal his thoughts, because, of course, what Todd was thinking of doing would piss off Rawlins every bit as much as it would the killer.
    Todd pushed back his chair, rose, then leaned over and kissed Janice on the cheek and said, “I'll talk to you tomorrow.”
    “Take care, sweetheart.”
    “Rawlins,” began Todd, wanting to at least hug the other man, “I guess I won't see you tonight, so—”
    “Just don't do anything stupid.”
    “I won't.”
    “I