The car behind her rolled slow along the gravel path. Stones shot out from underneath the tires and struck the brushes on the side of the road, themselves and herself little moving shadows against the high beams.

“Get down on the floor,” The voice behind the speaker said. Masculine, a little deadly.

She stopped.

She froze and put her hands on her head and slowly got on her knees. For a moment she thought she was going to die. When she was on her knees, she continued and laid on her belly and wheezed. She fiddled with the loose strands of her hoodie. The car stopped. I’m an idiot, why the fuck did I do this? For who? For what?

“Don’t shoot me please,” She said.

He wasn’t even out of the car yet. She was talking to the running engine. It idled for a while, the man’s breathing behind the wheel. She could hear that well, the whole world keen and clear. The car stopped. The man sighed. She did not turn her head once. The man stepped out of his vehicle and approached, she watched the dizzying image of the pastoral landscape before her and her stretched out shadow upon it. Hills and hills and hills and little lights from houses below her like the sky was inverted or perhaps her rising higher above, past heavens gates. The footsteps closer and closer. Her mind blanking. The creosote and Joshua trees at her flanks waving at her and nodding to gusts of winds.

He was behind her and she felt sick to her stomach.

“Name?” He asked.

“K-Kat,”

“Full name,”

“Caitlyn Masalis,” She said. “M-A-S-A,”

She couldn’t remember her last name, her heart was beating so hard it made her head throb.

“ID,” He said. “Reach into your pocket, slow-like,”

Her hand fumbled.

“I’m just here to take a walk, that’s all,”

“You were just here to take a walk. Alright. Sure,” He scoffed and though quiet, she could hear it in under his breath. “Hands behind your back,”

The cuffs were tight on her wrist. He pulled on the chain to test them and her whole torso expanded up.

“Can I please sit right,” She said. “My stomach hurts,”

“Your fault, no one told you to lay down,”

He walked over to her and faced her. A man in his early forty’s quite possibly, a little scruff about his face. Two greyed out eyes, the luster taken from them or perhaps the soul removed. Blond hair so darkened he was close to being brunette. It could have been the night and the beams could have just hit him wrong and her eyes so full of rushing blood that they’d lost clarity from the pops of her capillaries. Suddenly her senses did not seem so keen. She stood on her knees.

She needed to go to the restroom.

He turned his wrist to his watch.

“It’s almost one in the morning and you’re taking a stroll up the mountain is what you’re telling me?”

“That’s right,”

He reached into her pocket and pulled out what was in there.

“Phone and flashlight,” He said.

“Things you need when you go up the mountain,”

“Certainly, certainly. Why this trail?” He asked. “There’s a whole other side to the mountains and plenty of places to walk elsewhere, why this one?”

“I like the scenery,”

“You like the scenery,” He laughed and walked over to his car. “I’ll be back. Stay still,”

He left her. She turned around and saw him talking into a receiver on the dash board, his eyes heavy set on her. Face devoid of humanity.

When he received whatever news it was he went for, he walked back nodding and put her things back in her person.

“What are you doing here?” He asked. “You know this is a dangerous place, don’t you?”

“I told you, I was just walking,”

“No, you weren’t. You don’t even live here,”

“What? You need to live here to walk the trail?”

“In a lot of ways, yes, you do,”

“The other trail was closed,”

“I know, I helped close it,” He said. “Specifically to avoid people like you,”

“People like what? Who are you? What’s your badge number?”

“6721,” He said. “Detective Mandival,”

He stood Kat up by the binds on her wrist and took her to the back of his car. There he set her down and closed the door. A black sedan with small police lights a top like a small top-hat. She sat cold in the car and looked back and forth between him and the scenery. The dry desert floor expanding out into oblivion. He started the car. She jumped. The car rolled on through an already indented path.

“Where are we going?” She asked. “Am I being detained?”

Of course Kat knew the answer to both. He was Havenbrook PD. HBPD. She had done something illegal. It could have been considered an attempt to ruin the crime scene. Not that she was thinking that gravely. But circumstances made it hard about anything in general, she only felt them. Felt the ideas like pulses of hot and cold and all manners of aches and turnings in her body. Nausea made her head spin. And between her sporadic looking back and forth, between the fading hope running out my face, she could not think. She nudged in the seats and found a nice corner to lay down like

“I’m just going to ask you a couple questions is all,” He said. “You’re more than welcome to shut up or talk up,”

She wanted to vomit.

“By the way, I need to read you your rights,” He said. “Pay attention,”

Her head spun.

The worst she’d ever gotten was detention. This was long ago enough. What was it for? Putting gum in someones hair, being a bully. Fourth grade, fifth grade? So long ago realized so soon. And now her whole life was screening past her in the tinted cop windows, a whole history and a whole life running by between the interstices of the blackened trees.

“Did you get all that?” He asked.

She nodded.

She arrived and was cuffed and sat at a bench besides a water machine that hummed, the officer in question throwing her to some office worker on the bottom police floor. She watched several people go in and out; face-tattooed men frothing at the mouth, a black man talking to himself, a woman trying to bite through her cuffs and then her hands. Kat hugged the water machine and watched them, turning away when they almost made eye contact.

After what felt like hours, the detective met her outside.

“Caitlin, huh,” He said. “You work at Channel24 and you tried to barge into premises barred by the police, that’ll get you in real trouble, you know that?”

“I know that now officer, thanks,”

“Now what in the hell were you doing that for? What’s a picture worth? You know I could have shot you,”

“Do you think that’s a good first instinct to have?” She looked at him.

He sighed.

“What you did was stupid, you’re going to spend the night in jail, do you understand?” He said. “You can call someone in the morning to pick you up,”

“Alright,” Her legs shook. “I get it,”

He shook his head.

“Sure you do,” Mandival sipped on a cup of coffee. “You’re that type of journalist, aren’t you? The sick-in-the-head type,”

“Why? Because I wanted a picture of a fucking house?”

“Because you’d do something stupid for a picture of a house, yes,” He said. “Do you know how hard you make our lives? All that sensationalist shit?”

“That’s the job,”

“And this is my job,” He said. Someone screamed down the hallway, presumably from the cells. She shuddered at the thought of occupying one of them. To be honest, looking down the dead eyes of the detective did have her reconsider for a moment, every stupid decision leading up to this moment. The quick avalanche of her existence across several days. The shame that perhaps her mother was right, which was truly the most Lovecraftian truth of all. Mandival stared at her and blew at the top of his coffee and shook his head before walking out towards the front exit.. Kat stood, cuff biting at her wrist stopping her. She stood crooked.

“I guess I should try,” She said. “Got any new development on the concrete killer?”

He waved his hand away, in a nice-try-hot-shot type of way. In the, you-should-know-your-defeat, type of tone. The lights looked dimmed and far, his form getting smaller and smaller as he went down the hall. The detective turned and his fading image disappeared in the frosted glass and walls of the halls. She felt they would meet again. Fate? Or probably perhaps? Kat sighed. She sat and pulled at her chains. A man with bulging yellow eyes looked at her from across the hall, breathing smoke from his mouth. Froth at his chin, coming out from his crooked teeth.

He smiled. She smiled back.