When we get back to street, Lib doesn't have to use her bobby pin. The door is unlocked and I know it's the right house because it's got the same door number and colors as the picture I got from the dude on the dark web. Or the regular web. I'm not exactly sure how he got the data or why he reached out to me on reddit for the fair price of a hundred dollars. I'm not even sure if I got played or not and this could all have been done fairly easily on a regular AI website that I'm just too old to know anything about.

But it doesn't matter.

I've got a good feeling about this. The house is practically empty. There's a single sofa in the living room, facing the window. I picture Stewart sitting on it, watching us break into his house next door. I wonder what he thought about as we wasted our time. Our precious time.

"What's that smell?" Liberty's fingers clench the bridge of her nose.

"Smells like sewage," I look at her from the window.

"That's sewage?" she retorts while grimacing.

"We should check upstairs," I say, walking past her and out of the room.

We silently make our way to the floor above. I expect to see Stewart as I turn the corner. What would I ask him first?. Maybe how all of this is even possible. Or why he chose to hide. Paranoid excitement bubbles in my throat like acid.

We take each of the rooms, searching them thoroughly. There's a mattress on the floor but no bedframe here. The window is draped with a makeshift curtain, pegged by forcing the fabric through nails on the wall. It hangs lowly, the blue light of night entering through the gap. Beside the mattress is a tall glass bottle with a cork. The edge of the bedsheet is damp from where water spilled from the bottle. He must still be close if it's wet.

"Omar," Liberty's voice echoing through the shadowy parts of the house reminds me to hold my sleeve over my nose. I'd forgotten about the smell.

"What?" I ask, coming out of Stewart's bedroom.

Liberty points at a door opposite us. When we open it, there are stairs leading into the attic when foul odor breezes past us. I pause as the nauseating feeling dissipates. Being the first to walk upstairs, I feel overwhelmed with the rotten stench coming from the attic. It gets stronger. Strong enough that both my sleeves are around my nose and mouth.

Liberty turns her phone's flashlight on. When the light stops moving, it's easy to make out the shape of a man in the corner. His legs are spread out, partially sitting up against the wall. I scan his body, capturing miniscule details for the small amount of time I have with him. The blue checked shirt, partially unbuttoned. The vest that's thin enough you can see clumps of his body hair through it. His bare feet, nails long and hardened. His arms on either side of him, laid like he was watching television on a couch. For a second, I imagine he is alive. That is until I meet his unmoving eyes.

This was the part where I ask Charles Stewart Jr. how he survived his Stag date. This was the part that we beat this. Liberty and me. Where we survive and go on to live our shitty average lives. But the gunshot wound on his forehead tells me a very different version of the same story. The one variable of this god damn plan that I didn't account for.

It takes a minute for me to fully grasp what has happened. I think it clicks much earlier for Liberty because she turns around, leaving me in darkness as thick as the dirt over a grave. The smell hits much worse in the dark. Something about your other senses kicking in harder when one goes. It smells so much worse now that I know what it is.

The rest of it happens like skipping parts of a movie. Liberty yanks me from where I'm rooted to the floor and I make it down the stairs without tripping over in the dark. Behind us, the attic door swings before ultimately coming to a close on its own. I assume she helps me make it to the ground floor because time is moving fast. The sound of our heavy footsteps echo in my ears a long time after we leave the property.

Liberty hunches over for a moment, clenching her stomach like she's about to puke. I rest my body against the yard railing, the black painted iron digging into me. I relax my muscles, letting them poke into me until it hurts.

Grabbing my arms with both hands, Liberty prepares herself for her inevitable, what the fuck.

"We need to call the police," she surprises me by adding.

"To tell them what?"

"We'll keep it anonymous but he doesn't deserve to stay there like that."

"They killed him," I say in almost a trance like state.

She's confused at first but then she gets serious, her eyes narrowing at me. "Don't do that, you saw what he did."

I touch my tongue to my cheek. "He didn't beat the system this long just to out himself like that. The shot was in the middle of his forehead, this was murder Liberty."

"You think the people behind the stag letters are killers? If that's true, they'd be killing everyone."

"Maybe they are," I reply. "Maybe they've just never messed up this bad before."

"If that's true, then why leave him like that for others to find him?"

She gets me there.

"I don't know, maybe they knew we were coming. Liberty, he hasn't been dead long. The blood looked fresh and there was spilled water on his mattress, still wet and everything."

Liberty looks around after my remarks, paranoid that we're being watched. I only realize what I've implied, after I say it.

"Fucking hell," Liberty swears.

"You're right," she straightens up, shaking her hands wearily. "I think you're right. We interrupted a hit."

If I'm right about this and someone was out for Charles then that could very well mean we are in fact, being watched right now. I look at Liberty who looks as finnicky as I am.

"Stand guard, I need to get proof."

"What?" she starts to follow me back towards the house.

I turn around, balancing my foot on one the stones. "Make sure nobody comes in after me. If this is what we're thinking it is, we need proof this happened."

She nods reluctantly, letting go of my sleeve.

This time, I take out my phone and turn on the light. I head back upstairs where the attic door is partially ajar from when we ran out before. It reeks just as bad but knowing that this was done to Charles, that he had been hiding away from the public under their noses in fear of his life, it gets me feeling a certain way.

My muscles are stiff with paranoia. Climbing the stairs, I grip the hand railing, just in case. This time is different. This time I know I'm stepping into a crime scene. I may be collecting evidence under my shoes right now. Or leaving some behind. Who the fuck knows how these things go in real life.

This man's body in front of me is as real as life can get. The flashlight turns off. It won't work at the same time as the camera. In the dark, I keep clicking on the white button, taking as many pictures as I can. Every angle without getting too close to him.

I've never seen a body this close. Not even when my mom's dad died and we had the open casket funeral. I told her to ignore Aunt Clara about that. Nobody ever took her ideas seriously. So I'm not sure why they listened to her then. None of them could get close to the body anyway. We all ended up just avoiding it, walking around like he wasn't there in the room with us. Cold. Pale. And gone.

At last, I switch from pictures to video. I'm not sure how much this phone picks up details in the dark but I gotta do this. If I don't make it out of this alive, I hope this video will help out some other sucker out there with a black envelope. He or she might have more time than I do to see this through. God, I hope I still have enough time to expose this to the world.

I distract myself with my thoughts long enough when a sound from downstairs catches my attention. My first instinct is that it's Liberty. But the sound echoes again and I realize it's coming from inside the house. Liberty wouldn't leave her spot. Repeating this in my head, it begins to sound more like a question than a thought.

Thud. Scrape.

I close my camera app and click the flashlight. With one final look at Charles Stewart Jr., I race towards the exit. Midway down the flight of stairs, the attic door swings shut and I hear a faint click.

That can't be right. There wasn't a lock on the door. Right? Or maybe there was and I didn't notice it. I push the door with my free hand but it doesn't budge.