Karin Slaughter - Skin Privilege

He'd opened his mouth to argue the point, but she put her fingers to his lips, shushed him. 'When I married you' – she allowed a smile – 'at least this last time, I knew you were the kind of man who runs toward trouble instead of running away from it.' She paused, her tone soft but firm. 'I can't stop you from trying to save the world, but I won't abandon you while you're doing it.'

He had felt like an absolute shit then – not because he still wanted her to go home, not because he'd put her in the line of fire, but because he had been lying to her face from the minute that dead body had been thrown into their room.

Jeffrey had seen the tattooed man on the floor, saw the dark, black blood flowering out from the pearl-handled folding knife in his back, and said nothing.

'I'm not leaving until you do,' Sara had told him.

There wasn't anything else to say after that. He closed his eyes but sleep wouldn't come so he found himself listening to Sara's breathing. She was obviously restless, and after a while she turned on her side, then laid flat on her stomach. At least a full hour passed before her breathing finally slowed and she fell asleep.

Jeffrey got out of bed and dressed, even though there was nowhere for him to go. He desperately wanted to take a shower, but there was only one bathroom in the house and he didn't want to wake anyone up. He didn't want to prowl around Valentine's home, either, so he pulled up a metal folding chair and sat by the window looking out at the street. He adjusted the blinds just enough to see outside. Like the guest bedroom, the living room was on the street side of the house, and Jeffrey imagined the sheriff had been looking at much the same view as Jeffrey was now when he noticed the fire coming from the football field. It would've taken him less than five minutes to jog over to see what happened. At least that part of the sheriff's story checked out.

Despite the modest house, Valentine, or maybe his wife, seemed to be quite the gardener. Tiny landscaping lights lining the front yard illuminated their handiwork: fall plantings and grass that was mowed neat like a green blanket. There were so many things a man did to make a house a home, whether it was replacing a rotted soffit or painting the walls or hanging some ugly floral wallpaper in the bathroom that your wife had picked out. Not that Sara was partial to large floral patterns, but judging from the Laura-Ashley-gone-wild scheme throughout the house, Jeffrey was guessing Mrs. Valentine was.

He tried to think of all the changes he and Sara had made to their home over the years. The only ones that came to mind were more recent. Before the woman from the adoption agency came for a home visit, Sara had convinced Jeffrey to get on his hands and knees with her and look at the house the way a baby might. He'd played along, laughing until they'd found a nail sticking out from the kitchen cabinet under the sink. By the time he spotted a finger-sized gap between an electrical socket and the Sheetrock in the laundry room, he was ready to tear down the house and start again from scratch.

Jeffrey found himself wondering what Al Pfeiffer's house had looked like before the firebomb had been thrown through his window. What had Pfeiffer been thinking as he watched his home burn down? Or had the old sheriff been too consumed by his own injuries to take much notice of what he was losing? Jesus, had he heard them nailing his front door shut and known what was about to happen?

Jeffrey glanced back at Sara lying in bed. What had he gotten her into? Or, worse yet, what had Lena gotten them into? Just yesterday, he had been looking for ways to tie together all the threads. Tonight, the solution had come flying through his window with a big bow tied around it. The pearl-handled knife jutting out of Boyd Gibson's back belonged to Lena.

Jeffrey sighed, slouching back in the uncomfortable metal chair. He stared out the window again, watching the empty street. He must have dozed off, because the next thing he knew, a hint of light was slanting in through the window. A car pulled up outside. The driver got out and stumbled toward the house across the street, dropping his keys twice before he managed to open the front door. Less than a minute later, he came back out of the house and walked in a drunken diagonal back toward his car. Jeffrey was wondering if he should intervene when the man fell into the backseat. The front door of the house opened a crack, a woman poked out her head to check on the man, then shut the door again.

Sara stirred and Jeffrey turned around to see if she was awake. She was still on her stomach, arms and legs spread as she took advantage of his empty side of the bed. There was enough light now so that he could see her face. He hated arguing with her, couldn't function when they were mad at each other. Watching her in the morgue, the careful, respectful way she handled that poor woman's body, had reminded him of all the reasons he needed Sara in his life. She was the one person who could cut through all the bullshit and show him what was important. She was his conscience.

When Jeffrey had initially met Cathy and Eddie Linton, his first thought was that they just didn't make marriages like that anymore. Now, being with Sara, he understood that they did.

The floor creaked outside the bedroom door as someone walked past. The bathroom was at the end of the hall, separating the two bedrooms, and Jeffrey listened as the footsteps softened, shuffling across the tile. The door clicked closed.

Seeing the house last night, Jeffrey had found himself thinking there was no way Jake Valentine was on the take – not unless he had a secret mansion somewhere out in the woods. The place was definitely a fixer-upper. Fake pine paneling lined the living room and the kitchen cupboards were original to the house – not a good thing when you lived in a 1960s ranch. If Jake was taking money to look the other way, the sheriff sure wasn't spending it on himself.

The shower turned on. Jeffrey wondered if it was the sheriff or his wife. Myra Valentine wasn't exactly friendly with them last night, but not many wives would be glad to welcome two strangers into their home at one in the morning. She was a short woman, maybe five feet tall in her socks, the top of her head not quite reaching Jake's chest. What she lacked in height she made up for in girth. Jeffrey guessed she was at least a hundred pounds overweight. Standing side by side, the Valentines looked like the living embodiment of the number ten.

Like her husband, Myra hadn't asked a lot of questions. After the most basic introductions were made, she had hustled Jeffrey and Sara into the guest bedroom with the kind of efficiency you'd expect from a high school English teacher, fetching Sara a towel and washrag, briskly changing the bed so they would have fresh sheets to sleep on. When Jeffrey had volunteered to help, she'd given him a scowl that made him feel like he'd been caught passing a note in class.

The shower turned off. Noises came from the rest of the house. Pots and pans clattered together. A radio was switched on, the sound down low. In the bathroom, a hairdryer whirred. Sara didn't move. She had always been a heavy sleeper. She'd told him once that it came from her grueling internship, where catching sleep was a competitive sport.

Two years ago, she'd slept through a hurricane while he'd anxiously stared out the windows, waiting for the oak tree in the front yard to come crashing down on the house.

Jeffrey stood up, stretching his arms over his head, feeling his spine creak as it tried to align itself to something other than the shape of a folding chair. There was a dull throb in his head and he could still smell smoke from last night's fire on his skin and hair. He could smell Sara mixed in there somewhere, too, and his body stirred at the thought. If he'd been just about anywhere else in the world but Jake Valentine's house, he would've climbed back in bed with her and done something about it.