White Space Season 1

arm of his bed to get more drugs.
    “Billy’s a friend of mine back home. Though I’m not sure how he’d fit behind you since he’s seven foot nine.”
    “Seven foot nine?! No, he’s not!”
    “OK, maybe he’s a bit shorter than that. But he’s still a lot taller than you. So, if it’s not Billy, and it’s not Jon, I’m all out of friends.”
    “You only have two friends?” Emma asked, surprised again.
    Houser smiled, “Two friends I can count on, anyway. Well, there’s one other.”
    “Yeah? Who is it?” she asked, her smile growing bigger.
    “Well, he’s short. Like super short. Even shorter than you.”
    Emma stuck out her bottom lip at the short crack.
    “And, let’s see … He’s brown, and furry, and he eats my cookies all the time.”
    “Ta-da!” she said, thrusting her hand forward to display Ted D. Bear.
    Houser took his bear, still wearing both his furry legs, despite being in a car accident with him. “How did you find him?”
    Jon answered, “The cops on the scene collected your stuff. I asked them if I could get the bear to bring you in the hospital. I’d hate for the big man to be without his teddy.”
    “Hey,” Houser warned, “you watch it. Or you’re gonna fall to number two, behind Ted on my best friend list.”
    Jon laughed and they all made small talk while Houser couldn’t help but notice the shift between Cassidy and Jon. Like animals, they circled one another differently, almost like they’d changed their scent. They seemed much closer then they had the other day. As if they’d …
    Oh Jon, you slept with her? What the hell are you doing?
    Houser set the topic on his mind’s front burner so he could discuss it with Jon the next time they were alone. And when his head wasn’t throbbing. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep his eyes open.
    “Thank you for my bear,” he said to Emma. “I appreciate it.”
    Houser tucked the bear next to the bed rail and then said, “I hope you all don’t mind, but I’m tired.”
    “No problem, buddy,” Jon said. “We’ve gotta get something to eat, anyway. These pretzels only made me hungrier.”
    He thanked everyone for coming, then waited for their collective goodbyes and promises to return soon.
    Before they left, Jon reached into his pocket and said, “One more thing. I grabbed your phone from the hotel room. I couldn’t find your laptop, though. Maybe it’s in the car, which is at the tow yard.”
    Jon handed the phone to Houser. Houser glanced at the screen: 25 messages and a nearly dead battery. “Can you get my charger when you think about it? It’s back at the hotel.”
    “One step ahead of you, and I already thought about it,” Houser said, pulling the charger from his pocket. “Though if I were two steps ahead, I would have charged it. Hold up a second.”
    Jon found an outlet behind Houser’s bed, then plugged in the cell and set it on his bedside table. “There you go. Need anything else before I leave?”
    He was trying to think of something clever to say, but nodded off mid-thought.
    As Houser slept, he dreamed of Liz Heller.
    She had given him something before he left her house. Something important. Something she seemed almost afraid to give him. Something small. Something which he could not lose. Something that …
    And though she’d not said it, a voice in his mind filled in the blank … something worth killing for.

    * * * *

CHAPTER 3 — Liz Heller

    12:57 a.m.
    Wednesday…

    Liz couldn’t sleep.
    Tomorrow, she was burying her husband’s ashes. Ashes because someone at the funeral home screwed up and cremated her husband, despite her specifically ticking the box marked “burial” on the forms she was forced to fill out, and double checking her work like everything else she did.
    Liz was livid at the screw up, and had cried for an hour straight after slamming the phone in its cradle.
    While Roger had consistently said, in more conversations than she could count, that he didn’t care what happened to him after he died, Liz wanted him buried beside her — bodies, not ashes. She couldn’t help but feel that even though Roger was dead, some part of him suffered during the cremation process.
    The cremation also meant that she never got the closure she was seeking in seeing his body.
    She never had the chance to make an identification, since the medical examiner’s office determined that her husband’s head was too destroyed to make a positive visual ID. She wasn’t sure