A smile, a genuine smile escaped my lips; surfacing from my already curled lips.
"Am I missing something?" I exhaled through my nose, shook my head like some answer from oblivion would wind up in my head.
Neither of them spoke, they continued to stare at me as if I was speaking some mysterious language unfit for their higher-order ears.
"Genuinely," I prodded again. "Is this really all you guys care about—all you guys are gonna keep asking over and over again?"
It was always Arlo this, and Arlo that.
Ink-man had finally settled down in his chair, he suddenly appeared in it, I hadn't even noticed when he stopped pacing around.
"You keep asking about him, like he did something so horrible."
The chair looked way too small for a man of his stature; the white-dusty plastic complained with every breath he took, every little shift. His hands were folded together like a net he never planned to let go of until he caught his lead, no matter how long it took him.
He tilted his head, not in confusion, but as a small step to my unclear eyes. "Did he not?"
My lips fell back, my mouth pursed together like everything inside would just spill out if I loosened it even the tiniest bit.
Coffee-breath spoke, his words came out soft, but his face was still this indiscernible mess I could only hope to decipher, I didn't though, the cold stare fluctuated in a twisting mass I felt trapped in. Yet the words that came out of the gaping hole fluttered out with caution, deliberate caution; simply adding a cushion to the blow.
He concluded the finale for Ink-man. "From what we can see, the only things we can see, that boy was present in a catastrophic fire that killed multiple people. He was seen with and had multiple associations with different criminal groups, criminal groups that were all present on the day everything went down, and now, he disappears all of a sudden—."
"He stayed." My voice peaked. "He pulled people out of that fire, he saved the lives of so many people, you have witnesses for that, no?"
"Let's backtrack just a little bit, okay?" His voice was calm, but my throat felt like it would collapse any second. "Before the warehouse, there was a man."
My mouth hadn't opened a crack, yet they looked at my face like my face read a hundred words.
"A body." Ink continued, they really were synchronized, thoughts and words alike. "An important one, important enough for people to stop picking up the phone; so important that three families went into radio silence."
Coffee pointed his finger like it was the first time something clicked in his head. "So important that for the first time in years, things started moving without orders, things that hadn't moved in years."
Ink looked at me with a light stare, his once clutched hands ripped apart like it had no seam.
"I wonder who was with him last."