The Two Gentlemen of Altona (Playing the Fool, #1)

by Lisa Henry

  Henry padded after him. “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “You should take me fishing.”

  “We’re staying inside, remember?”

  “I’ve never been fishing.”

  He dumped the clothes on the old couch. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  He could almost believe it. “Well, too bad. We’re not here to fish. We’re here to keep our heads down.”

  “We could multitask,” Henry suggested with a winning smile.

  “No.” Mac scrubbed his hand over his scalp. “You know what kind of range you can get on a sniper’s rifle?”

  “Um . . . no?”

  “Enough that we’d never even fucking see them. So we stay inside.”

  Henry sighed. “Mac, you’re killing me.”

  “Better me than them.”

  Henry was silent for so long that Mac wondered if he’d finally got through to him. Not that Henry didn’t understand how dangerous this was, just that he kept putting on this bullshit show of playing dumb. Of flirting and teasing and joking, which hell, was maybe Henry’s way of keeping himself grounded when he was afraid, but Mac was sick of it. He preferred to keep his head in the game. The actual game, not whatever fucking alternative Henry wanted to play.

  Henry sat down at the table and rested his chin in his hands. His dyed black bangs fell over his forehead.

  Mac began to dish up the pasta. “Is that dye job permanent?”

  “I didn’t ask. Guess we’ll see after a few washes.” There was something distant in Henry’s eyes now.

  “Someone helped you with it?”

  “My friend.” Henry’s brow furrowed.

  Mac carried their dishes over to the table and sat. “Brown suits you better.”

  “Ah, you just miss my glasses.”

  “I don’t miss your glasses.”

  “Of course you do. They make me look like a sexy librarian, which is absolutely more your type than a punk kid.” Henry raised his fork to his lips. “You like shy men.”

  Did he? Mac shoveled pasta into his mouth. So much for no carbs. “I don’t think that’s true.”

  “Okay, maybe not shy.” Henry licked at a dab of sauce in the corner of his mouth. “You like good boys. The sort with steady jobs and no parking tickets. The sort who have a job where they wear a tie, and pay their taxes on time. You don’t like guys with punk hair and makeup, not because you think they’re too out there, but because you think they don’t respect authority.”

  Maybe. Mac had never actually analyzed it. He thought briefly back to his college fantasy of a beer-drinking, football-watching man’s man. He didn’t know anymore if that was really what he wanted or not. It wasn’t like he was in a position to choose.

  “Except you don’t like guys in law enforcement either,” Henry continued. “Why’s that? Too much dick measuring when you get together? You want a civilian. A nice, quiet, trouble-free civilian.” His look dared Mac to contradict him.

  “Shit,” Mac said finally.

  “What?” Henry put his fork down.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have left my copy of Club Werewolf lying around, Mr. Holmes. Now you know everything. I’ve been foiled again.”

  Henry threw back his head and laughed, and the sound was so genuine that Mac couldn’t help laughing too.

  So maybe that was the secret to dealing with Henry’s bullshit. Henry didn’t win as long as Mac didn’t get pissed. And it was only for a few days.

  Mac could handle it.

  Who knew? It might even be fun.

  Henry slept better that night than he had in a long time, despite the ever-present threat of being shot and having his head come apart like Pete’s had. He did sleep nude, but Mac didn’t join him in bed, not even when Henry whimpered experimentally as though he might be having a nightmare. He decided not to push it.

  The next morning was fun. He fried eggs, and Mac relented a little and agreed they could walk around the backyard. He showed Henry an old rope he and his sister used to climb on, and Henry climbed it to show off. He got to the tree branch and started up the tree, thrilled to be moving again, to be outside.

  He heard Mac say his name below. He hesitated, then climbed a little higher.

  “Henry. Come down.”

  He perched for a moment in the crook of a branch, gazing out at the woods. The sunlight filtered through the shifting leaves. His skin was dappled with shadow in places, and in others, illuminated. The world looked different from up here. He could just make out the sloping roof of another cabin on the opposite shore of the lake, but it felt like he and Mac were the only people in the world. It was peaceful, quiet. The sort of world that only existed in fantasies. “It’s beautiful up here, Mac. You should come up.”

  “You should come down. Now.”

  This guy looked for parades to piss on, didn’t he?

  Henry climbed down.

  They played cards again. Henry was getting better at winning without cheating, but Mac still beat him mostly.

  “You sure you’re not cheating?” Henry grumbled.

  By midafternoon, they were both going stir-crazy. Henry had a solution to that, but he didn’t bring it up. He liked being on Mac’s good side, and it worried him that he was spending so much time enjoying himself with Mac, and so little time considering his other options. If he struck out on his own, he stood a chance of being able to disappear.

  Even if they made it through this stint in the woods, and he testified, and Maxfield went to jail, what did he think would happen? He and Mac would send postcards to each other? Mac was going to be glad to wash his hands of Henry. So what was the point of all this . . . bonding?

  He was staying because he believed Mac could protect him. But once Mac was done trying to protect him . . . fuck. He should have bolted their first night here. Would have, if he weren’t so chickenshit about storms.

  “I have to call Val.” Mac rubbed his hand over his scalp. “I have to know what they found from the BCA.”

  “What? Now? What about risk and reward?” Henry was still going over the start of a plan in his head. There was a road not too far from the cabin that paralleled a stream. He could walk alongside the water instead of the road until he hit the highway. Then he could hitchhike. If Henry took his phone, Mac wouldn’t be able to put the battery back in and call his office, so he wouldn’t be able to put out an APB on him. And if Henry caught a lift with a random stranger, Maxfield’s guys would have no way of tracing him.

  Poor Mac, though. What if the bad guys did show up? What if they killed Mac? And Henry would never even know about it.

  Wasn’t he responsible for enough awful things happening to people?

  Viola would have wanted him to stay with Mac. She’d want him to keep his promises.

  But he couldn’t keep living his life for her. That was what Stacy had said once. It was okay to need her, okay to miss her. But he also had to think about himself.

  “If I turned on my phone just long enough to give her a quick call, no one would have time to trace it,” Mac said.

  “You want to risk that?”

  Mac’s jaw was tight. “Or we go back.”

  “Back?”

  “To Indianapolis.”

  “I know you talk a lot about my stupidity getting us killed, but don’t you think—”

  “No one tried anything there. They only went after you when you went on the run. When you were isolated. Whoever the mole is, he can’t just go down to the holding cell and shoot you.”

  “I ask again: you wanna risk that?”

  “I could keep an eye on you. 24/7, until we figured out who in the department is working with Maxfield. When we left, we probably did exactly what the guy wanted us to: dragged ourselves out to the middle of nowhere, where we’d be easy targets.”

  “You assume it’s a guy,” Henry said, hoping to distract Mac from what really didn’t sound like a great plan.

  Mac nodded. “I’m a little old-fash
ioned, I know. But most criminals are male. That’s a fact.” He stood. “I’m gonna call Val.”

  “Please? Give it one more night?”

  Mac paused.

  “You can call her in the morning.”

  Because what if Val supported Mac’s crazy idea to go back to Indianapolis? Henry would miss his chance to run. Mac could call Val in the morning. He could call her once he discovered Henry was gone, even if he’d have to drive into Altona to do it. He could tell her to order roadblocks and posters. It wouldn’t matter, because Henry wouldn’t screw up this time.

  This time, he’d disappear.

  Mac stared at him a moment. “All right. What do we do until then?”

  Henry grinned.

  “Don’t say it.”

  “No! Mac, come on. You said pants stay on, and I respect that.” He got to his feet. “How about a play?”

  “Huh?”

  “I’ve got my Shakespeare book. We could do a scene here in the cabin.” He glanced around and spotted the clothes Mac had left on the couch. “I’m sure there’s stuff we could use as props and costumes.”

  “Um . . .”

  The look on Mac’s face right then was officially the best part of their cabin stay so far—aside from when Mac had almost fucked him. “Please? It’ll be fun.”

  There was some color in Mac’s cheeks. “I don’t really know much Shakespeare.”

  “That’s okay. You can carry the book. No memorization required.”

  “I mean I don’t even understand what they’re saying half the time,” Mac muttered. “I had to read Romeo and Juliet in high school. There was a balcony and a dagger. That’s all I remember.”

  “I’ll help you.”

  “All right.” Mac’s hand twitched, but he took a deep breath and nodded. “Fine.”

  “You look great,” Henry told Mac. “Really. Now stand over here while I get ready.”

  Mac shuffled over to the corner of the room. He didn’t feel great. He felt foolish. He was wearing a loose belt around which Henry had wound a couple of colorful shirts to drape Mac’s hips. He was also wearing Cory’s T-shirt stretched across his head.

  Apparently it was this or Club Werewolf. He wasn’t exactly sure how his choices had been reduced to those, but Shakespeare seemed the lesser of two evils.

  “I just feel like Petruchio needs a funny hat,” Henry said. “He had a funny hat in the production I saw. He needs to be a bit ridiculous—but he also needs to be secretly smart and even tempered and in control. Otherwise the play just comes off as a load of antifeminist bullshit. I mean, there’ll always be some antifeminist bullshit involved. But it’s better if Petruchio has layers.”

  Mac had listened to Henry deliberate at some length over what scene they should do. He’d rejected A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet as overdone, flirted with something from Measure for Measure, then lit briefly on the dinner scene from Titus Andronicus before deciding it would be too hard for them to play all the characters.

  Finally he’d announced they’d do Katherine and Petruchio’s first scene together from The Taming of the Shrew. That meant nothing to Mac, so he’d said whatever Henry wanted.

  “It’s fun,” Henry told him now, buttoning Mac’s mother’s blouse. He turned to Mac and smiled a little shyly. “My mom never liked this play much, but she was Bianca in a regional production when I was nine, and I went to go see her. I was too young to think about it in terms of political correctness. I just thought it was funny. And that she was beautiful.”

  “Is that how you got into Shakespeare? Your mom?”

  “Yeah.” Henry tried to tuck the blouse into his too-tight pants. Mac tried not to watch. “She was an actress.”

  Mac snorted. “Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, huh?”

  “I’m not an actor.” Henry got the last bit tucked in. “I wanted to be. I wasn’t good enough.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  Henry didn’t answer.

  “Well, you’ll be better than me tonight, at any rate.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short.”

  Mac looked at the book in his hand. “I don’t even know what these words mean.”

  “My mom always said doing Shakespeare was an actor’s dream, because Shakespeare’s characters say what they mean. There’s not a lot of subtext like in modern drama. If a Shakespeare character says she’s angry, she’s angry. If he’s a villain, he turns to the audience and says he’s going to ruin Othello’s fucking life. Even if he lies to another character, he tells us he’s going to do it.”

  Mac resisted commenting on Henry’s interest in characters who said what they meant and meant what they said.

  Henry stepped over to him. “In this case, you need a wife. You don’t care what she’s like, as long as she’s rich. And you’ve decided you’ll marry me, even though I’m supposedly coarse and wild—and you won’t take no for an answer. But I’m going to give you hell. And you’ve got to find a way to make me obey.”

  “Haven’t we been acting this out on a loop for the last three days?” Mac asked. “Except for the marriage part, I mean.”

  Henry laughed. “See? You’ve been rehearsing, and you didn’t even know it. All right.” He’d found one of Cory’s barrettes in the bathroom and used it now to pin back his bangs. He pointed to a spot in the book. “Start here, where I enter.”

  Mac tried not to be weirded out by the sight of Henry in his mother’s blouse. Paging Dr. Freud, indeed.

  “I’ll come in from over here.” Henry crossed the room. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  Mac squinted at the page. “‘Good morrow, Kate; for that’s your name, I hear.’”

  “Wait until I get onstage,” Henry instructed.

  This time, Mac waited for Henry to start crossing toward him before he said the line. “‘Good morrow, Kate; for that’s your name, I hear.’”

  Henry swept by him, pausing to shoot him a brief, disdainful look that actually made him flinch. “‘Well have you heard, but something hard of hearing: They call me Katherine that do talk of me.’”

  Henry was . . . different. Mac didn’t know how to explain it. He wasn’t playing the role as if pretending to be a woman—no falsetto or overblown feminine hand gestures. But there was something womanly about him. The way he cocked his hip slightly and tilted his head. His stride. His expression.

  Mac struggled through Petruchio’s first speech, which had something to do with the name Kate, and how it was dainty. He was relieved when he got to the last line: “‘Myself am moved to woo thee for my wife.’”

  Henry crossed to him and spun around, then spat out his next line. It took Mac a moment to find his place again. Did Henry seriously have this scene memorized? He was afraid to leave his corner, but at some point, while he was stumbling over words, Henry found a way, in character, to drag him center stage. Mac was surprised to find himself getting into it. Henry’s energy begged to be matched, and while Mac didn’t have a prayer of delivering the lines like Henry did, he could at least try.

  There was something about how Katherine was a wasp, and Petruchio intended to pluck out her stinger—except she claimed he was too much of a fool to know where to find it. Mac thought about his coworkers. About Henry. Maxfield. Was Mac a fool who couldn’t see where the danger was, or how to remove it?

  “‘Who knows not where a wasp does wear his sting?’” Mac said. “‘In his tail.’”

  His efforts not to think about Henry’s tail fell by the wayside as Henry stepped forward and deliberately shook his ass. Then he turned and gave Mac a deadpan stare. “‘In his tongue.’”

  “‘Whose tongue?’” No need to think about Henry’s tongue, clashing with his. The heat of Henry’s mouth, the soft way he’d whimpered as Mac kissed him. No need at all.

  “‘Yours, if you talk of tails: and so farewell.’”

  “‘What, with my tongue in your tail? Nay, come again, Good Kate; I am a gentleman.’” Mac squinted at the li
ne, unable to believe he’d read it right. He burst out laughing.

  Henry was fighting a smile as well. Their eyes met. “‘That I’ll try,’” Henry said quietly.

  And slapped him across the face.

  “What the hell?” Mac raised a hand to his cheek.

  “It’s in the script,” Henry said brightly.

  He looked down.

  She strikes him.

  “Go on then,” Henry urged.

  He tried to ignore the sting spreading through his cheek. “‘I swear I’ll cuff you, if you strike again.’”

  Jesus, how often had he wanted to cuff Henry over the last few days?

  Yet right now, all he wanted to do was put his tongue in Henry’s tail.

  Henry had taken the book from him and was pacing back and forth across the room, doing different voices for the side characters who had entered the scene. He raced over to Mac suddenly and pointed at Mac’s line. With their bodies this close, he could feel Henry’s excitement, the joy he took in the words. It made him want to do better, to please Henry. He could still feel the place where Henry had struck him. The burn had turned to a soft prickling.

  “‘. . .We will have rings and things and fine array; And kiss me, Kate, we will be married o’ Sunday,’” Mac finished.

  “And, um, right here . . .” Henry looked at him. “You know the musical Kiss Me, Kate?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, well, it’s about an estranged husband and wife who are cast in these roles in a production of The Taming of the Shrew. And, uh, they do some of this scene onstage. Except they’re kind of using it to play out their real-life feud. So here, the wife slaps her husband, who’s playing Petruchio—even though that slap’s not in the Shrew script. And the, uh, the husband takes the wife over his knee and spanks her. As though it’s part of the Shakespeare scene. Though, of course, it’s not.”

  “I’m confused.”

  “Never mind. In Kiss Me, Kate, Petruchio would spank Katherine right here.” If Henry was trying for a flirtatious grin, he didn’t quite succeed. “I was gonna say, we could try a version like that, if you wanted.”

  He looked serious.

  Mac didn’t say anything.