"NICE CAMERA," JJ COMPLEMENTED SARCASTICALLY. "Where'd you dig up that relic? Why don't you just use your phone?"
After finding out that Gavin had the gun that Rafe used to kill Sheriff Peterkin, the four teenagers continued to follow his car because he was going to meet up with Ward for some reason. It was most likely going to be a payoff. Once they were unable to continue to follow him in the car because of the closed road, they had to go on foot and do a bit of trespassing.
That was how they ended up where they were — ducking behind a fence opposite the construction site that Gavin and Ward agreed to meet. Pope was holding some weird crazy camera that looked like it was from the stone ages, so, of course, his friends had to make fun of him for it. Bree nodded in agreement to what JJ said. "Yeah, are we sure that thing is functional?"
"You two, shut up. First of all, I like my antique electronics. Second of all, this is a telephoto. It allows me to get a close image from far away," the Heyward boy explained as he looked through something in the device that showed him the image of what the camera was recording.
Kie shook her head with a sigh. "Lord of the dorks."
"For definitive proof of witness payoff, we're gonna need quality glass," he countered, causing the rest of them to send looks to one another. What he said next snapped their attentions away from that, though. "There he is."
"Yo, get down," the Maybank boy ordered when they saw Ward's silhouette running toward the building, holding a duffel bag in his hand as he tried to cover it from the rain. Yes, it was pouring down rain, so all four of them were getting soaked.
"And there's Gavin. Where are you going, you son of a bitch?" Pope asked, his camera trained on the Cameron man as the two ran inside. Once they did that, he realized that they could not see them anymore. "No, no, no, no. I'm losing him. Shit. Where's he going?"
The blonde boy next to Pope looked around before walking away. Bree furrowed her eyebrows at him, and he just said, "Hold on." Then, a couple of seconds later, he whistled and called them over. "Yo! Hey. I found something. Come here." When they got to him, he told them, "Gotta go up top." Then, he ran around the back of the building and began climbing a ladder so that they could get to the top of the building.
"Hurry. Don't wanna miss anything," Kie pointed out, and they all began moving a little bit faster. Once they got to the top, they crouched down and looked out at the half-constructed building. They could see the outline of the two men through the wall.
JJ looked over at the Heyward boy, squinting through the rain so that he could see the camera in his hands and make sure that it was working. "You rolling, Pope?"
"Yeah. Yeah, I see them," he answered. After a couple of seconds of waiting and watching, he informed them, "Ward just handed Gavin something. I think it's a duffel bag."
"Guys, I think this is a payoff," the Maybank boy told them, and no one replied to him. They just kept waiting for Pope to give them an update on what was happening.
He kept watching through the camera, and then he spoke up again. "Gavin doesn't look happy about something. It looks like he's yelling at Ward."
"Why?" Kie questioned.
Pope shrugged and shook his head slightly, careful not to angle the camera away or miss anything. "I don't know, but he sure looks mad."
"Maybe if this fucking rain wasn't so loud, we could hear what they were saying," the brunette girl piped in because she was really curious as to what was making Gavin so mad. Maybe they could use that to convince him to testify against Rafe and Ward.
They went back to what they were doing, and the three without the camera could only see two silhouettes when they were in the light. The rest was up to Pope. He muttered, "Shit."
"Woah, woah, woah, woah," the blonde boy mumbled, and Bree looked a little closer to see that the two people seemed to be wrestling or fighting or something.
Kie furrowed her eyebrows, looking to each of her friends. "What's going on?"
"I don't know," Pope told her, and even though he had the clearer shot, he could not tell what was happening between the two men. "They're fighting over something."
"Eh, 'fighting' might not be the best way to describe it," the Callaway girl corrected him, making a face as she watched what was happening across the street with a confused expression.
Pope nodded in agreement, and he looked really focused on the fight. They needed that footage to show to someone to get people to believe them and clear John B's name so that he could come home. "Yeah, it's mostly just Ward kicking the shit out of Gavin."
"Why are they fighting?" JJ questioned, even though they had already established that none of them had any clue why.
"I don't know." They fell silent for another moment, the only sound was the rain pounding against the pavement around them. Sometimes, when there was a little bit of a lull in the storm, they could hear the grunts of the two men. Pope's eyes widened. "Holy shit. Ward's got a gun."
Kie said, "I bet that's the murder weapon." They kept watching as Ward held the gun in his hand, and the Cameron man was about the walk away when Gavin said something that made him mad.
So, he turned around and fired two shots at him.
"Holy shit!" Bree exclaimed as Pope and Kie gasped. Ward just tried to kill Gavin because he knew about what happened on the tarmac. If he did that to some random guy that he could just pay off, then what would he do to four teenagers that had proof of him murdering someone.
"No, no, no, no," the Carrera girl denied, her voice shaky with tears because they may have just witnessed a murder. "That did not just happen. What is going on?"
The blonde boy looked over to Pope who was getting back up to his knees and continuing to film. "Tell me you just got that."
"Enough to put this asshole away for life," the Heyward boy answered angrily. He noticed that Ward was walking over to the edge, and if they stayed there, he would be able to see them. "Oh, no. Get down. Get down."
"I think we should go right now. Pope, you have enough, right?" JJ questioned as they ducked down but kept the camera up so that it could still film if Ward did anything else illegal.
Pope nodded slowly as the Cameron man backed away, and they kneeled again, Pope looking through the camera at him. He informed them about what was happening as it happened. "Yeah. Hold on. He's coming out. There he goes. I think he's looking for the gun. I think the gun just went down the drain. He's looking for it. Hey, he's looking for the gun."
"Kie, what are you doing?" JJ asked, and they looked over to see that the Carrera girl was climbing onto the ledge. Bree furrowed her eyebrows, but it was too late to do anything because she was already yelling.
"What is wrong with you?" the raven-haired girl shouted down at the man, causing all of her friends' eyes to widen when they realized what she was doing. "Murderer!"
The Cameron man looked up just as Bree yanked her friend down from the ledge and back onto the ground. "Get down. What are you doing? He's gonna hear you."
"I don't care if he hears me. He's a murderer," she told them.
As Pope went back to see what ward was doing, JJ and Bree tried to calm their female friend down. "Yeah, and he's gonna murder us, Kie."
"Guys, he sees us," the Heyward boy informed them, bringing the camera down and ushering them toward the ladder. "Come on. We gotta go. He's coming." Pope was the first down the ladder, then JJ. When Kie stepped on, she accidentally stepped on the blonde boy's hand.
"Ah, my hand!" he exclaimed, and he lifted his hand, causing him to fall off the ladder and kick Pope in the face as he did so. They both hit the ground, and the camera went flying across the ground.
As the Carrera apologized profusely and the Callaway jumped to the ground next to them. Pope ran over to inspect the camera, and his expression told them that it was broken. JJ groaned, "You're kidding me. You fumbled it?"
"You kicked me in the face," the Heyward boy defended himself. It was a very good reason because Bree knew she probably would've done the same thing if JJ kicked her in the face.
The Maybank boy pointed at Kie and blamed her. "She stepped on my hand."
"I was trying to hurry," the raven-haired girl argued, but the fighting was not going to help them at all. They had lost their only evidence, and no one would believe them then.
"Ward's coming. Can we just go please?" the brunette quizzed, gesturing for them to move a little faster than they were. "Let's just get out of here and call the police."
《✵》
"LOOK, IT WAS RIGHT HERE," KIE EXPLAINED TO SHOUPE. They were in the building where Gavin was shot, and the police had just arrived to hear their story. The Carrera girl was pointing to all the spots that things happened as she spoke. "And this is where that maniac claimed his next victim."
"His next victim? Right. How long ago did you say it happened?" the officer asked them as JJ checked the wood for any signs of blood or something that they could use to convince him since he sounded really skeptical.
The Maybank boy stood up after he found nothing, all of the evidence washed away in the storm. "Forty-five minutes ago, Shoupe."
"Okay," the man replied, writing it down in his pocketbook with a pen even though he probably had no interest in what they were saying. "And so, Ward Cameron just popped one off and shot him. Execution style? And then cleaned it all up in minutes?"
"Obviously," the Heyward boy said.
The Callaway girl sighed as she hopped off the railing that she was leaning on to inform the police, "Look, we filmed the entire thing."
"You filmed it?" Shoupe asked with raised eyebrows, hit head shooting up to look at her at her words because if they had that kind of evidence, that would completely change everything.
"Yes, but we can't show it to you because I stepped on JJ's hand," Kie said, recalling everything that happened on the ladder less than an hour ago. "And then he kicked Pope, and then Pope dropped the camera because it's a piece of shit, and it broke."
Pope continued to defend his camera despite everything that just happened. No one said it, but they all knew that if he had just used his phone, this would not be happening right now. "This is a telephoto, and we needed to get a long-distance image, and... and... and I fell, and it broke, so the video is basically unusable. But we were there, and we wit—"
"Look, I don't know what you kids expect me to do with this. You drag me out here in the middle of the night for a whole lot of nothing except for some crazy stories about how Ward Cameron's out on a random killing spree," Shoupe groaned out, interrupting the boy with an eye roll.
JJ yelled, "We're not making this up!"
"It's not a random killing spree!" Pope added as well as he tried to explain to the officer the reason for everything that went down that night. "Gavin was his pilot! Okay, he was paying him hush money because he was on the tarmac that day."
"Yeah, Ward was trying to keep Gavin quiet and get the evidence against Rafe," the brunette girl continued for him. She figured the more details they could add, the more likely it was for Shoupe to believe them. The chances were still pretty slim though.
Kie kept going, "Gavin was blackmailing Ward because he had the gun that Rafe used to kill Peterkin."
"He called him here and tried to pay him off, but it wasn't enough, and then so he shot him, all right?" the blonde boy shouted, emphasizing the major words in the sentence. "With the murder weapon!"
"How do you know that?" the mustache man questioned with a confused expression.
Bree quickly tried to signal to the girl next to her to shut up and not tell him what they did, but she did anyway. "Pope did this thing with his phone, and he put it in his car."
"I heard their whole conversation," the Heyward boy informed him.
"You wiretapped him?" Shoupe exclaimed, and that made the teenagers realize that they should probably shut up. "Stop. Just stop. I've had enough. You ever heard about the boy who cried wolf?" He walked down the stairs despite their protests and gestured to all of the other police deputies down there. "All right, there's nothing up there. False alarm. Let's all go home."
The Callaway girl held her hands up to stop them as Kiara did the same. "Shoupe, stop! Why the hell would we make this up? I know it sounds crazy, but you have to believe us."
"Can you just do your job for, like, 20 minutes?" the raven-haired girl asked him, as they folloewd him toward his car.
"I know you're upset, and I know you think your friend was innocent," the man told them with a pitying expression as he climbed into his car. "But you weren't there. The only actual witnesses who are above ground say the exact opposite. All right? And both of them have a hell of a lot more credibility than any of you right now. I saw your little art project on Ward's wall. Do not do that again. All right? Gonna make things a lot harder for the both of us. Go home."
Kie was in tears when the car started and they began to drive away. "At least—at least look for him! Someone died tonight!"
"I told you this would happen. Like, you're the one that had to drop the camera," the Maybank boy blamed his other male friend that was walking in front of them.
The Carrera girl spun around to counter, "It was your fault!" The two continued to argue, but Bree was busy watching Pope. His eyes were trained on the ground, and she could practically see the gears turning in his head.
"Hey! Hey!" he yelled, whipping around and interrupting his shouting friends, causing them all to look at him curiously. "We're not out of this yet. We can still go get the gun."