Storm Season

by Elle Keaton

  “I am so sorry, Micah. I was distracted by my dad and his friend who’s visiting, my bad.”

  Ira had also come out from behind the counter but had nothing to do since Sara Nightingale, Savior of Clumsy Coffee Drinkers, was already on it. He muttered something that Adam couldn’t quite hear, though he was reasonably certain it wasn’t nice.

  “It’s okay,” Micah whispered to his feet. His shoulders were tight and his face was flushed an unbecoming beet red. The guy was going to stroke out if he kept blushing like that. Adam tried to go back to chatting with Ed and quit watching Micah out of the corner of his eye, but he was having a hard time concentrating on what Ed was saying.

  Finally managing to get his head back into the discussion, they came to a firm agreement about cleaning up Gerald’s property. Ed and his daughter had wormed their way, if not into Adam’s heart, at least into some grey area of likeability. Adam blamed it on the caffeine Sara had plied him with over the past few days and Ed’s genial refusal to be pushed away. Ed promised to call some other old friends, saying they wanted to pitch in and could donate some equipment. Adam was reluctant at first, but he knew if he didn’t accept the help he’d never get the place cleaned up. Ed and Sara both rushed to reassure him that the guys weren’t carpetbaggers coming to pick over the estate. They were what Ed termed “Gerald’s true friends.”

  Ed finally left. Another coffee disappeared while Adam sat and watched the drizzle-mist come down. When he’d moved to L.A., he had spent every possible minute outside. Any time off from school or work was spent at the beach, finding hiking spots, or sitting on his porch. It had taken him about two years to realize the sun was there to stay. He could spend a weekend indoors and wouldn’t emerge to find a nuclear winter had set in. Still, he hadn’t realized he missed the rain.

  The café door swung open and a couple of uniformed officers tramped in. Adam had grudging respect for most of these guys; a few he had a lot of respect for. They had a tough job, were overworked and underpaid. The relationship between the feds and local law enforcement was difficult. Adam tried, but often he lost patience with posturing jerks who made his job even harder. It shouldn’t matter which branch of law enforcement they represented; they were all trying to do the same thing. These particular guys pinged his yahoo radar. And he thought—he hoped not, but he thought—he might recognize one of them.

  He kept his eye on them ordering their coffee and chatting with Sara, half listening to the vague chatter in the shop. Even though it was mid-afternoon traffic was still busy, the tables full. Micah hunched over his laptop, muttering to himself as his fingers flew over the keys, crossword puzzle set aside. Adam could see his lips moving. The guy was a wreck; anyone could see that. Sighing, Adam went back to trying to concentrate on paperwork.

  One minute he was staring out the window again, watching raindrops trace a path on the plate glass and contemplating life; the next he was grappling with 180 pounds of man, seeming to consist mainly of arms, legs, and embarrassment.

  “Oh, my god.” Micah struggled to regain his balance without crushing any of Adam’s parts. His handsome face was mere inches away from Adam’s own, and now Adam knew he did have gorgeous green eyes. “I am so sorry. I—” he pushed off Adam’s chest and shoulder, “—never mind.”

  He smelled good. Adam cursed himself for noticing.

  “I’m going home before I kill someone.” Micah’s voice was as shaky as the rest of him.

  “No. Don’t go.” Adam stood, grabbing Micah’s wrist before he could get too far away. “It was my fault. I stuck my legs out there; anyone could have tripped.” It was true, he’d stretched out, paying no attention to who might be walking down the path between tables.

  Micah tugged his wrist out of Adam’s grasp. Adam’s fingers tingled where he’d been holding on. Wasn’t that the stupidest thing he had come up with in a while? With Micah’s scent wafting around he had lost his ever-loving mind.

  “Let me buy you a coffee?” What the hell was he doing? “It’s the least I can do for setting up a booby trap for you to fall onto…into.”

  Micah stared at him for a heartbeat. He was tall (taller than Adam’s 5’10”, anyway) but much leaner. There had been a reason Adam played football in high school. It wasn’t because he was the best at blocking passes, but because he was built like a fire hydrant; he blocked people.

  Curly brown hair, green eyes, a few freckles, a little bit of scruff on his cheeks. Very nicely put together. Micah reddened under Adam’s gaze. Sweet.

  “Um, no offense, but I think I should quit while I’m ahead.”

  “I’m Adam Klay, by the way.”

  “Um…I’m, I mean my name is Micah. Micah Ryan. Who knows what the next cup may do? I’ll never get home and the cat will think I’ve abandoned him so he’ll shred the couch and”, “uh.” Micah shut his mouth with a snap, his cheeks a less-dangerous shade of red this time.

  Adam smiled. “Next time, maybe?” He sat back down, vowing to spend the rest of the afternoon working on his own shit and not interfering in the lives of complete strangers.

  Given the Booking Room happened to be across from Skagit police headquarters, Adam saw cops there every day, along with a fair representation of the rest of Skagit. He’d shuffled all the regular patrons around in his head until he had them fairly well categorized. Lots of cops; a few young mothers who met to gossip. They wore yoga pants and pushed strollers with a better suspension system than his aging Subaru. A group of senior men who shared a large table and complained about anything and everything and for some reason were obsessed with the American Civil War. Pretty standard for the neighborhood.

  Adam watched as a disheveled young woman he’d never noticed before, clutching a grubby backpack, sat down at Micah’s table. Micah startled and then stared back at her with his classic confused look. Adam wondered what was going on.

  Finally, Micah said something, so quietly Adam couldn’t hear.

  The girl nodded, not replying, staring down at the backpack, twisting her hands together. She was young, much younger than Micah. She was pale and looked cold. Not dressed for November weather at all, only worn jeans and a thin T-shirt covered with a paltry windbreaker. Her hair was probably a pretty blonde, but at the moment it was stringy, half falling out of a blue knit beanie. Her eyes darted around the room, and when she caught Adam’s gaze she stood abruptly and hurried down the hallway to the restrooms. Huh.

  Ten minutes later she hadn’t returned. Micah was still sitting there waiting, with his own belongings packed up. Adam had to quit stalking.

  His mother had called a couple more times so he stepped outside to talk to her, finally admitting that he was in Skagit taking care of Gerald’s business. She expected him at Thanksgiving, she said. Since when?

  “What are you doing? You could have paid someone to do this for you.”

  Adam sighed. She heard him.

  He half listened to her rant at him. When he’d gone to stay with her in California, immediately after graduation, before he started college, he’d been old enough to understand she had never intended to have children. Adam had been an experiment or an accident; either way an event that she immediately regretted. This need to berate him about his life choices was relatively new. Adam didn’t know what to do with it. He suspected she was bored and didn’t currently have a man-friend to keep her occupied.

  Micah fumbled out the door while Adam was standing under the eaves with his cell phone to his ear. He watched Micah walk away and debated telling his mother an emergency had come up, but his stuff was still inside. Nix. Instead, Adam had a front-row seat while Micah hurried up Main and then turned left, heading into the nearby residential neighborhood. After clicking off his mother’s rant, Adam grabbed his own coat and laptop and headed back to his dismal motel room. He was planning on heading back to his dismal motel room, but he found himself taking the turn for the freeway instead.

  He didn’t know why he was driving out to Gerald’s again when Ed and his
buddies still needed another day or two to get their stuff together. He didn’t want to go back there alone. Ironic that someone who examined crime scenes on a regular basis couldn’t stomach an empty house. Still, muscle memory had him exiting I-5, continuing down the narrow state road, and counting driveways until he found the right one.

  His car bumped down the gravel access road, and a cedar tree loomed from the left, its branches sweeping the roof of his car as he inched closer. The sensation of returning to his past was so strong Adam wasn’t able to open his car door for long moments. He sat listening to the tick of the engine as silence seeped inside, a blanket covering him.

  The late-afternoon light was gloomy. There weren’t any porch lights on, only his own headlights shining into the darkness. He turned them off, cursing, wondering if the utilities had been disconnected since the funeral. His father may have been a curmudgeon who flipped off the county government every chance he got, but he was also a valuable commodity to the community; too much cold or damp would destroy whatever artwork was left.

  His eyes adjusted as he sat, gloomy dusk turning everything into shades of dark as evening settled in. The hulking log house and overhanging cedar were blacker outlines against the rolling November clouds. Nothing and everything had changed. The Doug firs stood on the other side of the drive, silently watching and waiting. It began to rain harder. He left without getting out of the car.

  Six

  Micah wondered what it felt like for heart-attack victims when the defibrillator sent that first crucial 500 volts of electricity flowing through their heart muscle, if it felt anything like what he was feeling now. His skin was on fire; his own living heart beating quickly enough he thought it might smash out of his chest.

  Before he could do something extraordinarily foolish, like take the mysterious Adam Klay up on his offer of (more) coffee, Micah gathered his belongings, the pack Jessica left behind, and what was left of his wits, and stumbled out the door. Adam was talking on his cell phone again, but Micah could feel his hot stare against his back as he headed toward the safety of home.

  He had fallen into a handsome stranger’s lap. In public, at his favorite coffee shop. Literally, tripped and fallen straight into it. The earth could not open up quickly enough to swallow him.

  Who falls into people’s laps? One minute he had been headed back to his table after a trip to the men’s room, kind of thinking about a late lunch; the next he was ass over teakettle, ending up in the lap of a very attractive man. The first one he had taken notice of in many years. In his defense, his mother used to say he needed to pick up his feet, usually with a big sigh, after he’d ended up face down on the living-room floor or tripped over a crack in the sidewalk.

  That night as he lay in bed, his cat curled up at his feet, Micah thought about the mysterious Adam Klay. In his bedroom with the curtains drawn against the dark month of November, he could admit he didn’t merely notice Adam, he was attracted to him. Falling into Adam’s lap had been Micah’s version of a defibrillator. His bewildered heart, numb for years, began to beat with hunger and hope. And fear as well, because he’d thought this part of his life was gone.

  Sometimes, your heart wants what it wants. Micah dreamt fantastically that night about warm brown eyes, strong shoulders and solid arms he knew could catch him if he fell, because they already had.

  Seven

  They were sitting in the café the next morning while Ed confirmed the time they’d meet to check out the property. He proudly held up his cell phone so Adam could see it, declaring that Sara had dragged him kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century; he could even text. Adam smiled and was disturbed to realize he wasn’t used to smiling. Not something he did a lot in his profession, true. But he’d been happy once. Maybe not overjoyed, but happy. He didn’t think he had always been an asshole.

  The same uniformed guys as before blew in, quickly confirming Adam’s opinion that they were indeed yahoos.

  “Hey, little lady, can we get a couple coffees to go?”

  Sara looked up, annoyed. “Sure, Jack, as soon as I get these folks’ drinks.”

  Jack ignored the two people in line ahead of him. Adam bristled internally, cops like these gave the other 99% a bad name. The second one, stocky and blond, had the grace to look faintly embarrassed. “We’re in a hurry, babe. Got a meeting.” The snake-oil voice was enough to make a person vomit.

  The ambient temperature in the café quickly dropped to something that could only be measured in Kelvin.

  Sara paused for a moment behind the counter. “Look, Jack.” (The “ass” unspoken, but heavily implied.) “I do not care that you are wearing that fancy uniform. I am not your babe, never will be. If you call me that again I will complain to the department. If you want to keep coming into my shop for coffee, you will treat me and my customers with the respect we deserve.” Jack didn’t hear that last part because he had slammed back out the door, leaving his partner to trail behind in shame.

  “Sorry about that, Sara,” he offered before following Jack.

  The entire shop was silent. Sara sighed and rolled her eyes. “As you were, folks.” With that, she efficiently finished up the coffees she had been making. Ira looked on, typical scowl on his face and bar towel in hand.

  Adam was restless in the motel that evening. The TV was on in the background, a habit from years of trying to keep up with local authorities while assisting with a case. Even so, he had far too much time to think about stuff he’d ignored by working eighty-hour weeks for years. He and Ed were going to the property the next day, finally.

  His attention was caught when the anchor announced the discovery of a body off the Mt. Baker Highway. From everything she wasn’t saying, Adam suspected it was a homicide. They had not yet identified the body and all they could say was that it was a white female, possibly between eighteen and twenty-five years old. The anchor wrapped it up with a trite statement about making sure your loved ones were safe.

  Jesus Christ. As if the public wasn’t paranoid enough. Still, it piqued his curiosity. A few minutes of research revealed this was not the first body discovered in Skagit County this year. There had been another back in May, close in age, Hispanic. To Adam’s way of thinking, body dumps were like fleas or cockroaches: if there was one, there were many more never found.

  He called Mohammad.

  “You’re bored.” It wasn’t a question. “You are bored and task avoiding, so you want me to help you interfere with a local investigation.” If Adam hadn’t known Mohammad was as straight as a metal ruler, he would have fallen in lust with the man’s voice alone. He’d harbored a weird crush for the first six months he worked in Mohammad’s unit, but had managed to let it go when he met Mohammed’s incredibly smart and lovely wife, Ida. He and Ida had become good friends over the years, so Adam forgave her for stealing Mohammad. She was constantly trying to set him up, something he had managed to avoid so far.

  “I’m not bored. I’m concerned,” he lied.

  “Adam, I’ve known you for over ten years,” Mohammad replied. “Have you been to your father’s place yet?”

  Curse Mohammad’s sensitivity and his elephantine memory. Why couldn’t he have been a goldfish? Also, curse his own rare moments of honesty about his personal history.

  “Yes, I’ve been out there.” Adam sighed. “It’s even worse than I remember. I can’t help but believe that this legacy is a final punishment. The only one he could affect me with. I’m working on it, though.” A bigger lie this time.

  “You realize, Adam, that I make the big bucks because I am even better at your job than you are? I say you have done little more than stop by and see what you could without going inside. That’s what I would do, so I think that’s what you would do, too.” Mohammad’s family issues were different than Adam’s, but no less difficult: Regardless of the fact that Mohammad had been born and bred in the good ol’ US of A, his parents had disowned him for falling in love with a westerner. Go figure. Families sucked every
where. Mohammad and Ida had been together almost twenty years, and Mohammad thought maybe his mother would forgive him if there were grandkids, but neither he or Ida wanted them. Adam needed to stop feeling sorry for himself.

  “Okay, yeah. I’ve been to the property and looked at it like you said. But truth, an old friend of Gerald’s is helping out. We’re going through the backyard tomorrow, and hopefully the house next week. I don’t know how long it’s going to take.”

  “Adam, you have an obscene amount of sick and vacation leave banked. I think you have hours from your first year. I don’t know how you’ve flown under the HR radar for so long. You have the time; use it. And don’t call me again about interfering with a local. I’ve been down that road.” He hung up before Adam could reply. Fucker. Adam watched the late-night repeat of the news, which had nothing new to add, but still something pinged Adam’s radar.

  Eight

  Sara ambushed Micah while he was distracted by the heavenly aroma of his Americano. If the café was slow, she would often come and sit with him. He didn’t know what she found interesting about him. He’d designed her personal website as well as the one for the café—one of his favorites—but he didn’t think that was enough of a reason to hang out with Skagit’s most boring man. For a little while he’d worried she was attracted to him; he’d gotten the random “I’m gay” comment out to ward off anything happening. She’d looked at him like he’d lost his mind, responding with an outraged “Duh!”

  The woman had skills. The ambush was well hidden in polite chat about pretty much nothing; a funny story about her cat, a funny story about his cat, some Facebook video she had to show him. One minute he was drifting along, letting his thoughts ebb and swell along with the soothing drift of vapor from his coffee cup. Then, bam, suddenly he was saying yes to an invitation to Thanksgiving at her house. Mad skills. He must have been seriously distracted not to see her leading up to that. Then she finished with the killing blow of asking Micah to invite Adam Klay “if you run into him in the next few days.”