The Rational Faculty (Hazard and Somerset: A Union of Swords Book 1)

by Gregory Ashe

  He got his hands under Rory and rocked the young man onto his side. Rory screamed, and Hazard let the young man slide back onto the limestone after a heartbeat. He had seen enough: deep, savage wounds. It was a miracle Rory was talking. It was a miracle Rory was still alive.

  And Hazard’s words came back to him then, spoken on a cold night to a boy who had wanted to know what it felt to love someone the way Hazard loved Somers. Like I’m not just me anymore, Hazard had said. Like I’m all tied up with him, and sometimes, being tied up with him is the only thing holding me together, holding me in place.

  A choked noise escaped Hazard.

  Rory’s head snapped toward the sound. “Phil?”

  Hazard shook his head, but he knew Rory couldn’t see him. He reached out one hand, curled his fingers, combed sweat-stuck hair back from Rory’s forehead.

  “I feel really bad, Phil. I know you said I had to hold on, but I feel really bad.”

  Hazard was shaking, huge shakes, all over. But his hand was steady as he brushed Rory’s hair.

  “I just want to rest, Phil. I don’t want to hold on anymore.” Rory’s voice shifted, gained cohesion. “You’re not Phil. You’re not . . . oh God. God, I just want to let go. Tell me I can let go.”

  Hazard let his hand slide down to cup the boy’s face. He had seen the wounds that the boy had received. He knew what waited, and he knew how it would end: here, now, or in a few hours.

  “You can let go,” Hazard said, not recognizing his own voice.

  Rory smiled, his mutilated mouth trying to curve, and tension eased from his body.

  Hazard counted out three minutes and twenty-seven seconds before Rory stopped breathing. Then, shuffling back to Mitchell, Hazard applied pressure and waited for help to come, his ears full of the droning of bees.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  NOVEMBER 9

  FRIDAY

  1:57 AM

  THE POLICE CAME. AND the sheriff’s deputies. Cravens and Dulac. Somers. The ambulance came, and then another. Frannie Langkop, the first paramedic on the scene, who was leather and bone and spiky gray hair, patted herself down like she was looking for a crucifix or a pack of smokes and stared at the living beehive inside the dead man’s blown-out head. Phil’s head; they hadn’t confirmed it was him beneath the swarm, but Hazard knew. She said, “That’s messed up, that’s messed up, that’s just so messed up,” until Cravens touched her arm. Then Frannie jolted out of her trance, passed what remained of Phil, and started tending to Mitchell.

  Nobody came near Rory; Hazard wouldn’t let them, not even Somers. He waited for Engels. When the sheriff arrived, he paused at the abomination that someone had made out of Phil’s body. Engels stood there, his hair argent in the glare of an LED flood, one side of his face enameled by the light, the other side lost in shadow. He made a low cry, and Hazard knew that he had recognized his son.

  After that, the scene became chaos. Engels was shouting and weeping, clutching Rory to his chest. Cravens alternated between trying to lead Engels away and demanding to know who had let Engels onto the scene. Hazard stood with his back against limestone, condensation soaking through his shirt and leaching the heat from him. He wrapped his arms around himself. He watched. He was still shaking.

  “Ree,” Somers said, gripping Hazard’s arm. “Come on.”

  Then the station, the flickering fluorescents in the interview room, the smell of burnt coffee. Moraes and Carmichael had dropped the attitude; they treated Hazard politely, with something approaching the old respect they had shown him. Carmichael had obviously been crying; Moraes’s dark skin looked ashy, and his eyes drooped. They had questions. They took statements. They passed papers for Hazard to read and sign. He read and signed and pushed the page and the pen as far across the table as he could reach.

  “Thank God,” Carmichael kept saying. “Thank God you found them.”

  Hazard started to laugh. He laughed until Moraes sent Carmichael to get Somers. And then he kept laughing until Moraes started looking around, checking the door, shuffling papers, anything so he didn’t have to look at Hazard. Then Hazard realized he was the only one who got the joke, and he stood up and threw his chair through the one-way mirror.

  “Jesus Christ,” Moraes shouted. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  Then Somers was there, grabbing Hazard’s arm. Hazard shook him off. Somers grabbed again. Hazard shook him off again. Somers gathered a handful of Hazard’s shirt and hauled him toward the door.

  “Get the fuck off me,” Hazard shouted, grabbing the copier, overturning it with a crash and the sudden smell of toner. “Get the fuck off.” This time, a bulletin board which came free from the wall, spilling tacks and notecards and a hand-drawn flyer for farm-fresh eggs. “John, I’m going to fucking kill you, get the fuck off me.” A handful of papers he knocked from a desk. A lamp, its bulb shattering on the vinyl. The coffee cart, mugs and carafe smashing against the floor.

  Then, somehow, Somers spun him around, and they were face to face.

  “You want to break something?” Somers grabbed a computer monitor from the front desk. He yanked on it, trying to rip it free from its cables, but it wouldn’t give. He tried again; still nothing. Then, shouting, he smashed it against the desk, once, twice, until the LED screen was cracked and black. “Fuck, Ree, let’s break something.”

  Hazard stood there, chest heaving. An audience had gathered: the few uniformed cops not on campus, and Moraes and Carmichael watching from a distance.

  “Go on,” Somers shouted. “Take out a few windows while you’re at it.”

  Hazard couldn’t catch his breath. His shoulders rose and fell. Black spots whirled in his vision.

  Somers came closer; his voice dropped, intended just for the two of them. “I know it hurts. I know it’s bad right now. Let’s go home, ok? That’s the only thing we can do now.”

  He reached for Hazard’s hand, but Hazard pulled away, stepping around him.

  “Don’t touch me,” Hazard said, throwing open the doors and launching out into the nothing that waited for him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  NOVEMBER 11

  SUNDAY

  3:28 PM

  SOMERS SHIFTED ANOTHER STACK of reports onto his desk and tried to disappear inside them. Disappearing wasn’t his main goal; it wasn’t even a conscious goal. But he was driving for it, at the edge of consciousness, with everything he had. The reports, which covered everything from Jim Fabbri’s murder through the discovery of Rory, Phil, and Mitchell in the sub-basement of the law building, were the first step toward figuring out who had murdered two innocent men and almost killed a third. The reports were essential. They contained statements, evidence, documentation. They were the key to solving this case. And Somers needed to solve the case. He needed it more than he’d needed anything in his whole life.

  But when he opened a report to read, he didn’t see words on the page. He saw white sand beaches, tropical drinks, escape. Or sometimes he saw a weekend hiking, just him and the trees, no brooding silences, no scarecrow eyes, no mixture of guilt and fear weighing in his belly. Or more and more often, he saw nothing. He simply stared at the page, his mind blank, the closest to relief that he had come in the last two days.

  If he went home now—

  He snipped off the thought, licked his thumb, and turned a page in the report. White sand. The heat on his back. Muscles loose and relaxed, and the smell of coconut. Just the crashing waves. No talking. Even better, no silence, which was even worse than talking.

  If he went home now, he would find silence. Total, stark silence. And the house dark, the lights turned off in every room, the air so dry that every footstep threatened to set off a cascade of sparks. And Somers would walk into that darkness, into that silence, deeper and deeper until he reached the living room, and the sofa, and Hazard—

  “Got something for you.”

  Blinking, Somers brought the figure into focus. Dulac ha
d lost his pie-stealing smile, and now he looked younger than ever. But he held a stack of folders.

  “Oh. Just put them—hold on. What are they? Are those from the demonstration at Wroxall?”

  “No, these are new. From the ME. Everything she’s got on Phil Camerata and Rory Engels.”

  “Oh.”

  “I went through them. If you want me to—”

  “No, I’ll take a look.”

  “Maybe that’s not a great idea. Maybe you take a few days and come back to this.”

  “And it gets colder and colder.” Somers shrugged. “I’ll take a look.”

  As Somers read through the reports, Dulac took a seat at his desk. Dulac didn’t even pretend to do something. He sat, watched Somers, and waited.

  “Well,” Somers said, tossing the reports on the desk. “I’m never going to sleep again.”

  “The thing with the bees.”

  Somers shook his head. “Fucked up.”

  The bees. Boyer, in her report, had indicated that following the trauma to bone, brain, and tissue caused by an expanding bullet, a queen bee and her attendants, enclosed in a queen-excluder sack, had been forcibly inserted into the cavity. The swarm had been drawn to the location by the imprisoned queen. Several uniformed officers were trying to track recent shipments of bees, but so far, they had turned up nothing. That had been, by far, the worst of it. Somers thought that the image of Phil’s body, hung on strings in that awkward, looking-back pose, swarming with honey bees, would haunt him for the rest of his life.

  But it hadn’t just been the bees. Rory’s wounds had been gruesome. And Mitchell’s would have been worse, although it looked like the killer had just gotten started with him. Boyer’s summary of the wounds Rory had taken made it clear that the young man had been tortured; Somers was surprised, when he read the list, that Rory had survived as long as he had. By any account, he ought to have died long before Hazard and Somers found him.

  A dark part of Somers, a part he hated, wished Rory had died before they found him. A selfish part that remembered a dark, silent house, the sight of Hazard’s face in profile, his eyes fixed, unseeing, on something Somers could never reach. That dark part wished they had never found Rory and Mitchell and Phil. That dark part wished it had all ended with Cynthia, when things had been good.

  And vocalizing that wish, even partially, even only in that dark little corner of himself, made Somers shiver. Because he wanted it so damn much.

  “No prints,” Dulac said. “No DNA. Nothing from the killer.”

  “Mitchell?”

  “He’s in and out on pain meds, but he’s still stable. Half the time when he talks, he blames himself, but nobody can get a straight answer out of him as to why.”

  “He’s not going to be able to ID him,” Somers said, tossing the ME’s reports onto the papers already flooding his desk. “He’s not going to be able to tell us anything.”

  “We don’t know that. We could get a decent description; Mitchell seems smart. Or maybe we just get some impressions, but hell, anything’s better than nothing.”

  “No,” Somers said, shaking his head, not knowing how he knew. “He won’t be able to tell us anything.”

  The rest of the day passed slowly, with Somers sinking into the pages of reports. He thought about Maui and piña coladas. Or Alaska, leaving footprints through miles of virgin snow. Maybe London. Hell, what would he do in London?

  At half-past six, he found himself in the Mustang. Night had settled over Wahredua, and the headlights picked out the road in front of him in painful brightness: a flurry of trash cutting across his path, the reflector strips on Noah and Rebeca’s mailbox, the glow in the eyes of some small animal on the lawn. The house, Somers and Hazard’s house, was dark. The way Somers had known it would be.

  And suddenly, he wasn’t sure he could do this anymore. Not again.

  He stopped in the driveway, the Mustang rumbling around him, the headlights splashing against the garage door like a marquee for a bad movie. Bullshit and Bullshit. Something like that. Or, The Somerset Shit Show. His hand was on the key, but he just sat there.

  Somers thought about the day they had moved into this house, when Hazard had held him, kissed him, looked happy in that secret way that he had. He thought about the week before, when he had met Hazard and Evie at the park and seen his boyfriend pushing his daughter—their daughter—in a swing. That day, Somers had been half afraid his heart might explode. And a part of Somers thought about what he always thought about when it came to Emery Hazard: the look, the touch, the brush of dry lips in a locker room twenty years ago that had sent them both tumbling out of orbit until they found each other, here, again.

  So he turned off the car and went inside. No lights. Not one. No dinner waiting in the oven. No smell of household cleaners to prove that Hazard had been keeping up with his chores or earning his keep or whatever the hell Hazard thought he needed to be doing. It was like a mental checklist, and every unchecked box made Somers walk a little faster, sweat stinging him under the arms, across the chest.

  In the living room, Somers stopped and listened. It took him a moment to hear over the rush of blood in his ears; then, there it was, Hazard’s slow breathing.

  “Can I turn on the light?” Somers asked.

  Leather squeaked in response to some shifting in Hazard’s position. When his voice came back, it was ragged. “I guess.”

  But Somers didn’t turn on the light. He picked his way across the room, one shoe slipping on something that felt like a paperback, cracking his knee against the coffee table. He groped for the outline of the sofa and sat on the edge of a cushion. Here, he could sense Hazard’s position even if he couldn’t see him. They were back to back; Hazard had rolled away from Somers. And in some way, that made sense. Maybe they’d never really seen eye to eye. Maybe it had always been like this, and now it was just easier to recognize.

  “Sorry,” Hazard said in that horrible, raw voice. “I lost track of time. I’ll order something. Or I can go pick up—”

  “I can’t do this again. I love you. I love you so much that I think it might kill me. Jesus Christ, I didn’t even know I could feel this way. But I can’t do this again. Not the silence. Not the darkness. Not you going away to someplace I can’t reach you. Not knowing—” Somers cut off, choking on the words, but the images in his head were enough: knives, rope, the rat poison in the cabinet in the garage. “I can’t.”

  The heat of Hazard’s body where they touched was the only answer.

  “I know you said you didn’t know if you would ever be better. But I need you to try. I need you to be you again, even if it’s a different you. If that means going to a shrink, let’s go. If that means taking some time apart from each other—”

  Hazard’s whole body contracted; Somers felt the movement. He could see it in his mind, a flinch, like Hazard had been struck.

  “It doesn’t matter.” The words exploded out of Somers. “Can’t you see that? It doesn’t matter, the job with the police, being a detective for a department in a pissant town. You are you; the job was just a job. You—”

  “You solved the murder. You realized how Cynthia did it.”

  “And you found Mitchell and Rory and Phil.” Back to back, Somers could feel Hazard shaking. “You saved Mitchell.”

  “I let Rory and Phil be tortured to death. They’re dead because of me.”

  Shifting on the sofa, Somers turned so that he was looking at Hazard, although the dark made it hard to see anything but his outline. “Turn over.”

  Nothing from Hazard except heavy breathing.

  Guided by touch, Somers found Hazard’s cheek, hot and wet. He turned Hazard’s head, not hard, not by force, until he thought they were looking at each other, more or less, through that darkness.

  “Stop,” Hazard said, the word catching in his throat.

  Somers curled his fingers, stroking Hazard’s cheek, the tears making the skin slick.
>
  “Stop it. Right fucking now.”

  “Ree, I am sorry. I’m sorry for how much this hurts you. I really am.”

  “Get your fucking hand off me.”

  And then Somers’s patience snapped. He struggled to keep his voice even; he lost. “You can grieve, sweetheart. You need to grieve. And I’ll love you and be here for you and do everything I can. But this, what you’re doing now, this is selfish. Do you understand?”

  Rage radiated off Hazard, an invisible heat.

  Somers stood, made his way through the darkness, and climbed the stairs. He didn’t turn on a light until he was in their room. Lying on the bed, he blinked rapidly, trying to study the ceiling, trying to convince himself there was something absolutely fucking mesmerizing in the plaster.

  Then, from below, the front door crashed shut, and Somers knew he was alone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  NOVEMBER 11

  SUNDAY

  8:56 PM

  HAZARD RAN FOR A long time. He carried more muscle than the average American male, and over the last few months, most of his exercise had consisted of running. So he ran. In jeans and a long-sleeve tee, he ran until he was soaked through with sweat and exhausted. The sweat was a mercy because then he couldn’t tell, if he wanted to bullshit himself, how hard he was crying.

  But when he couldn’t run anymore, when he walked and the November night stole the heat from his body, Hazard wasn’t sure he wanted to bullshit himself anymore. He’d been bullshitting himself for a long time. And sometimes bullshitting himself had been good. Sometimes it was important, held him together like twine, until a crisis had passed.

  Tonight, he wasn’t sure.

  The problem was that the wounds were still raw. Losing his job had been bad, but he’d been there before. But this time, he couldn’t seem to work through it the way he had after St. Louis. Since he had joined the police, the job had given his life stability and meaning when the men he dated did everything they could to tear him down. Until Somers. And now, everything had flipped. Somers gave his life meaning. And the job—the job was gone like dandelion spores in the breeze.