by Gregory Ashe
Tuck nodded. He was wiping the lacquer of blood and snot on his cheeks.
“Words, Tuck.”
“Yes.”
“You’re probably thinking that you’re going to call the cops when I leave. Maybe you’re thinking about calling North. I want to tell you why that’s not going to happen. You’re not going to call the police because right now, do you know where I am? I’m in a hospital, Tuck. I’ve got doctors and nurses and a real live detective from the Metropolitan Police checking on me to make sure I’m ok. I bet you’re thinking something really stupid right now, Tuck. I bet you’re thinking that they’ll have security cameras, that there will be people who notice I’m missing, that they’ll be able to piece together a timeline. But I track people down for a living. I know all the mistakes they make. So if there’s anyone who can get away with it, it’s me. Am I right, Tuck?”
“Yes, God. Yes. I can’t move my arm, Shaw, I think it might be worse than just my collar bone; I need to get to—”
“In a minute. First, you’re going to tell me why you’ll never say a word about this to North.”
Through the mask of blood and snot and spit and tears, Tucker glared up at Shaw.
“Go on. I won’t ask again.”
“He’d never believe me.”
“Keep going. You can say whatever you want now; I promise, no retribution.”
For a moment, it seemed like Tuck might not have anything else to say. Then he gestured with his good hand, an all-encompassing sweep, and words spilled out. “He’d never, ever believe me. That Shaw-fucking-Aldrich, who walks on water and is basically Jesus Christ in every other way, that you could come into my house and beat the shit out of me, he’d just laugh. He’d think I was on drugs. He’d—” An inarticulate squawk choked Tucker for a moment. Then he swept his hand out again, as though trying to point to something just out of sight. “You’re fucking psycho, all right? You know that. I know that. The way you watch him. The way you’ve stalked him. Christ, he could tell you to kneel by the table and wait for scraps and you’d fucking do it, and even then, he wouldn’t see the real you. He’s never been able to see that, never been able to see how fucking insane you are. But I see it. I saw it all the way back in freshman year. I know—”
“That’s enough.”
Tuck shut his mouth so fast that Shaw heard teeth click together.
For another long moment, Shaw studied Tucker, the waspish handsomeness partially buried under gore and pain and what was perhaps the first time Tucker Laguerre had really had his ass handed to him. “You fell down the stairs. Say it.”
“I fell down the stairs.”
Shaw nodded. “Just remember: if I see North with so much as a papercut. Doesn’t matter if he got it from opening a piece of mail.” Shaw laughed with sudden surprise. “Christ, you better hope he doesn’t get in any accidents because then I really will come back.”
Tucker was trembling. As adrenaline continued to pump through his system, as the shock wore off, rage was replacing the fear and submission that had given Shaw the upper hand. But Tuck didn’t look at Shaw, not in the eyes. Not quite.
Giving the nine iron a jaunty little whirl, Shaw stepped back. “I’m going to keep this, is that all right?”
Tuck stared at the floor, fury mottling his cheeks.
With an easy swing, Shaw banged the club against the step next to Tuck’s head.
“Yes, fuck, you can have the whole fucking set, just get the fuck out.”
“Have a good night, Tuck.”
Chapter 37
North took the stairs up to Shaw’s bedroom two at a time, the Red Wings coming down like thunderclaps as he launched himself up. It was Wednesday evening, the first real chance North had found to escape the hospital and check on Shaw. North had insisted on keeping the office closed all week—against Shaw’s very vocal objections. Shaw had a way of digging in his heels about things, and when North had raised the issue of keeping the office closed, it had looked like it was going to be one of those times. North had been worried enough about Shaw that he’d done something he didn’t like to do: he’d cheated. He’d pretended to get emotional. He’d pretended not to be able to talk. And then he’d said a few broken words about Tuck still being in the hospital after that bad fall Sunday night, and Shaw had melted like a fucking popsicle.
A few days shouldn’t have seemed very long, but right now, shooting up the stairs, North felt like years had passed. Some of that had been the hours in the hospital with first Shaw and then Tucker—broken collar bone, hairline fracture on the thigh, and the worst was some internal bleeding where something, maybe the banister, had hit Tuck hard in the side—but most of that feeling of years passing had come from the simple fact that North was out of his fucking mind with worry.
As he reached the top of the steps, he forced himself to slow, to take the last few at a normal pace, to let his breathing settle. What had happened with Matty and Shaw, the little that Shaw had been willing to discuss, had been like some grotesque magnification of what had happened when Shaw and Carl had been attacked near the end of freshman year. Shaw had inflicted most of the physical damage himself, trying to get free of the ropes, but it wasn’t a few lacerations—not even the deep ones—that made it hard for North to breathe when he really got thinking about things.
No, thought North as he reached the closed door to Shaw’s bedroom and paused, his hand on the knob. No, it wasn’t the physical damage that worried him, not really. It was the rest of it. It was the simple facts of the diagnosis: Matty had been Shaw’s first; Shaw really only had one setting inside his head, and he loved harder and hurt deeper and felt more intensely than anyone North had ever known. Matty had taken the best part of Shaw, the most vulnerable part of Shaw, and broken it. The times when North couldn’t breathe, the times when he had to stand up and pace in Tuck’s cramped hospital room, were when he thought that maybe, just maybe, Matty had broken it past repairing. And then North would think about the later years of college, watching Shaw slowly fall apart until he couldn’t even leave the apartment they shared, until North was hurting inside so much, just watching Shaw, that he thought he might go crazy too, until one day North had finally lost his mind and kicked down the bedroom door and dragged Shaw outside.
His fingers felt cold around the doorknob. Or maybe the doorknob was cold. Or maybe the world was just a fucking cold place. It was hard to tell sometimes. North turned the knob, and it stuck. Locked.
Terror buzzed, rising like a swarm inside North’s chest, and he had a picture of Shaw doing something stupid, of a knife, of a rope, of pills, and he hammered on the door. “Shaw! Hey, Shaw. You in there? Shaw!”
The door flew open, and Shaw stood there in nothing but a pair of mustard-colored briefs that were practically falling off his bony ass and two mismatched socks. One came up to his knee and featured a sparkling unicorn. The other looked like it was one of North’s black cotton running socks.
“What? Are you ok? What’s going on?” Shaw poked out his head, looking down the stairwell. “Is it Pari, is she—”
“No, sorry. I just didn’t know if you could hear me. I just—” North felt his cheeks heating, and he shrugged.
“What time is it?”
North eyed his friend, taking in Shaw’s flush, the briefs that were barely clinging to his ass, the mismatched socks. “Were you watching porn?” The unicorn sock. “Some sort of weird anime porn?”
“What?” Shaw blinked and looked at himself, seeming to realize only then what he was wearing. “No. Wait, what? Have you actually seen some of that stuff because—hang on. What time is it?”
“I don’t know. Five. Five-thirty.”
“Dang it.” Shaw sprinted back into the room.
North followed, watching with a grin while Shaw dragged open dresser drawers, pulled a turquoise guayabera off the corner of the mirror, and shrugged into it. He did up the buttons while he sprinted down the hall toward the living room. �
�Have you seen my pants?”
“Which ones?” North took in the apartment with careful slowness. A litter of socks and shirts and underwear. A pile of torn-out pages, and the ruined binding of the book they had come from—Christ, what kind of experiment or self-help practice or life hack was Shaw trying?—and four kettles lined up on the windowsills, which made North vaguely uneasy that Shaw had been trying to make sun tea again, and an enormous ficus that had not been here two days before. Aside from the darker patch of wood in the hall, it still looked like a Shaw Aldrich apartment. More importantly, it still felt like a Shaw Aldrich apartment. “Those panties you were running around in at the Lucky?”
“They weren’t—” Shaw poked his head into the room long enough to say, “—panties.”
Then he was gone.
“What about those cute little pink jorts? The ones you got in Boystown?”
Shaw’s head appeared again; his hair was slipping out of its bun, a long auburn curl falling over his shoulder. Against the turquoise shirt, the red in his hair, normally muted, seemed to come alive. The effect made North forget what he’d been about to say.
“Don’t you think they’d be a little—you know—for a—” Then Shaw shook his head. “I think I gave them to Rufus anyway.”
Gone again.
North tried to work some saliva back into his mouth. It was one thing having to control himself when Shaw spent most of his life in various states of undress. That was unfair on a cosmic level, but North figured he was enough of an asshole that he probably deserved it. This, though, with that goddamn turquoise guayabera, this was a whole fucking other level.
“Hey, I’ve got kind of an idea,” North said, suddenly restless and pacing to the window and the line of tea kettles. Empty, thank God. “Shaw?”
“An idea?”
“Maybe we get out of here for a few days. Like, a mini vacation. We can go to Chicago or KC or Nashville.”
From the bathroom, echoing against the tile, came Shaw’s voice. “We’ve got to work.”
“I think it’d be good for us. Just get away. Relax.”
Hocking noises— Shaw was brushing his teeth, North guessed—and then, over the running water: “Tuck’s not exactly in a good condition for you to leave him alone.”
“Tucker will be fine. And anyway, I asked him, and he was really supportive.” Oddly supportive, actually. None of the sniping about Shaw. None of the hysterically jealous rages. “He even said he wanted to pay for the whole thing; he’s been sitting on his Christmas bonus from last year.” And that was the most bizarre part of the whole thing, although North wasn’t going to give Shaw the satisfaction of saying that.
“Can’t,” came Shaw’s tile-echo voice from the bathroom.
“What? Why?”
“I just can’t.”
“You have no fucking life besides this place, and we can take a few more days.”
“Sorry. Can’t.”
North was about to wade into it and pick a real fight about this—he didn’t like Shaw in this place, he didn’t like Shaw being alone after everything that had happened. He didn’t like worrying at odd moments that Shaw might fall back into that horrible space where North knew he had only fifty-fifty odds of reaching him. Then North saw the laptop on Shaw’s unmade bed, the sheets kicked into a ball at the foot, and decided to try a diversion. “So you were watching porn? Hopefully nothing you’re ashamed of. Some guys really need to have a gag in their mouth, that’s nothing you should have to hide.”
“What?” This time, Shaw’s hair had completely slipped free, spilling across his shoulders and down his back, and he stared at North like he hadn’t understood a single word. “Oh. No. Watch that video and tell me what you think.”
His bare feet slapped the wood as he raced into the other room.
North settled onto the bed and pressed play. Black-and-white footage rolled across the screen. In one corner, white numerals marked the date as 5/7/2011, and North’s heart beat a little faster. Seven years ago. The end of their freshman year at Chouteau.
The angle of the camera was poor: most of the field of vision was occupied by the glass-and-concrete vestibule of what looked like an herbal supplement shop—at least, that’s what North thought he could make out in the grainy picture. The camera had been mounted high and deep in the vestibule, probably by an amateur; this last part, North judged by the fact that the camera actually covered so little usable space.
But someone might not have noticed a camera like that, a voice said at the back of North’s head, and his heart beat even faster. Someone planning something. Someone who thought he had covered all his bases. Someone might have missed this camera, someone might have made a mistake because it’s such a shit-poor place for a camera.
The outermost quarter of the camera’s field of vision took in a stretch of sidewalk, a parking meter with a dinged-up pole, and a few feet of asphalt. North watched as the seconds ticked by on the digital clock. His heart had moved up in his chest. It felt like it was beating just below his throat now, and he had sweat under his arms, and something made him want to scratch himself everywhere—hard, nervous scratches to keep himself from going crazy. It was just some black-and-white security footage. Just old security footage from seven years ago. It was nothing.
And then, feet at the edge of the screen, then legs, then a hand at the side. A knife. North wasn’t sure that was what he was seeing, he wasn’t positive, but the long, pale strip, held against the man’s leg low, as though he were trying to hide it as he ran—it could be a knife.
Then nothing.
North’s heartbeat had doubled. Tripled. Had he just seen what he thought he’d seen? His body was sure, even if his brain wasn’t. Still trying to process the low-quality footage, he reached for the laptop’s screen to close it. The West End Slasher. Somehow Shaw had gotten a copy of a video that nobody else had ever seen—that, as far as North knew, nobody else even knew existed. Dread dropped in North’s stomach: what if Shaw were right? What if the Slasher were still out there?
“Keep watching,” Shaw said. Somehow his voice was still even; wasn’t he feeling the same terror marching through his gut that North was? Shaw was dragging on a pair of black jeans that looked surprisingly normal. Then hopping on one foot as he dragged the denim into place, Shaw made a half-circle, and North could see what was stitched in white thread on Shaw’s ass: Che Lives!
He groaned. Then, before he could say anything, movement on the screen attracted his attention again. This time, it was an automobile that whipped into the frame, obviously coming out of a tight turn—so tight that it hugged the curb, its wheels throwing up a particulate cloud of cigarette wrappers and broken pavement and pellets of blackened gum. North hammered the spacebar so hard that he thought he might have broken it, but that thought registered only at a distance.
Frozen on the screen, the car’s license plate showed in the narrow frame that the camera had caught.
When North looked up, Shaw was stunning: auburn hair up and back in a tight—and newly re-secured—bun; the long lines of his face and neck clean; his wiry frame showed off to good effect by the jeans.
Shaw’s face pulled North back to reality, though. Color burned in the sharp triangle of his features, flamed on the high cheekbones, and for a moment, North thought Shaw might be ready to cry. And then he recognized the emotion for what it was. Excitement.
“I found the fucker.”
“Shaw, where did you get this?”
“It was one of the blackmail recordings. One of the earliest ones. And before you make that face, yes, I’m going to turn over the flash drive. But I made copies, North. And thank God because I found him. I found him, North. I found that miserable fucker, and now I’m going to—” At the other end of Shaw’s apartment, the front door swung open, and North launched forward on the bed, his Red Wings slapping the boards. He had never heard anyone use Shaw’s front door, and his immediate, irrational reaction was that
somehow, Matty or Regina or Lee Brueckmann had come for Shaw.
“Shaw?” The voice was familiar, but transformed by echoes along the hardwood and the open spaces. “You said to just walk in. Hello? Shaw?”
“Back here,” Shaw called. In a hissing whisper, he said, “Don’t say a word. Not a word.”
In the same low voice, North said, “We’ve got to talk about this. We’ve got to think really—”
Suddenly, he forgot what he had been about to say.
The turquoise guayabera.
Those insane, painted-on jeans.
The way Shaw looked perfectly, unspeakably fuckable—even more so than usual.
“You’re going on a date. You—you—Shaw!”
The color on those high cheekbones deepened, but Shaw just smiled and shrugged. “I’ve got to get my information somehow.”
Those words skipped across the surface of North’s mind like stones on smooth water. He was still focused on this totally impossible fact in front of him. “You can’t. Shaw, you can’t—you can’t because—”
You can’t because you’re mine. That’s what North had been about to say. It had seemed so clear to him. Everything that had gone wrong with Matty, every way it had gone so horrifyingly wrong, seemed like a print-out from the universe: Shaw belonged to North. But it seemed like Shaw hadn’t gotten the same memo.
Shaw, whether fortunately or unfortunately, misunderstood again. “Because of the stuff with Matty?” He shrugged. “I’ll be in therapy for another thirty years because of that piece of shit. This is an opportunity.”
An opportunity.
I’ve got to get my information somehow.
“No,” North whispered, the sound ragged with horror.
Shaw’s grin was like the fucking daystar.
“Are you back—oh, hey.” Jadon Reck stepped into the room, and North had a peculiar sensation, a totally unique sensation in his twenty-six years of life: like his heart had withered, dried out, and blown away on a sirocco wind. It didn’t even hurt; there wasn’t anything left to hurt. “You look really nice,” Reck said, and his eyes must have caught North because his posture changed slightly, and then he leaned down and kissed Shaw’s cheek. There was something unexpected as Reck bent, a hesitation and uncertainty so at odds with the pretty-boy-jock-cop aura that, even in that wind-blasted hollow place of his chest, North actually found it endearing. “Um, hi, North.”
