by L. A. Witt
“Make yourself comfortable.”
Five minutes later he’d been asleep.
I wasn’t disappointed. No, that wasn’t the strange, hot sensation curling in the back of my throat at the sight of Andreas splayed across my couch like he owned it, letting himself get some much-needed sleep in the presence of a person he barely knew. If I had to guess, I’d say I was feeling possessive, but fuck that. I wasn’t about to mess things up with Andreas by pushing too hard. I could be patient when it came to getting what I wanted. Driven, focused, but patient. A good detective had to be a good hunter too, and I’d learned from the best.
Besides, it wasn’t like I didn’t have things to do in the meantime. I was a list person―and yeah, I could just imagine what my new partner would say when he realized I had a bullet point fetish, but I’d cross that bridge when I came to it. In the meantime, I was just confused enough right now to be paranoid, and I hated that feeling. A list might bring me some clarity. So I sat down at my kitchen table, pulled an ever-present pad of paper and a pen over, and started writing down names.
Blake’s people:
Jake (custody)
Kenny (seen at court, possible contact)
Jeff (a fucking KID, heroin source)
Following them was the growing number of people who had been on our list of possible contacts when we’d started and had subsequently died, or who we hadn’t been able to locate. There were too many names there. I frowned and hauled over my personal laptop, logged in and accessed the copy of the file I’d stowed in a private email account. Against the rules, yeah, I knew that, but I didn’t feel all that bad about it. Too many people had seen that fucking file already, and one of those people—or more—was winnowing away our list of suspects faster than we could pick them up. I couldn’t prove it, but the odds of all those losses being coincidence were just too slim.
I knew what Vic would say. Talk to your captain. Hamilton was there to make our lives easier, wasn’t he? He was supposed to facilitate the progress of our investigations and keep the brass off our backs, and under slightly different circumstances I’d agree. In this case, though? With Andreas’s life possibly on the line, with too many hits and too many disappearances and threats that seemed to come out of nowhere? I couldn’t do it. Not without giving away too much, and the more I talked, the deeper IA would dig.
Detective Thibedeau. I started a new list, this one titled Internal Affairs Assholes, and put his name at the top of it. I threw Trent Newberry on next, because that was another “coincidence” that grated on me―that Trent had been hanging around a precinct he had no official business at. Why was he even there? Had he seen the file? Had Thibedeau? The memory of the red car that Andreas had been so wary of earlier in the week surfaced again, and I sighed. Were we still being followed, and was Internal Affairs really behind it?
I rubbed my fingers against my forehead. I’d be accusing Santa Claus of colluding with the enemy next. Thibedeau was the kind of ladder-climber who had filled the DA’s office, and Asher had taught me to spot them a mile away. He was opportunistic, but he lived for rules and regulations. If he didn’t, if he’d had a shred of creativity and a slightly shorter stick up his ass, he’d have already done what Andreas had: planted evidence to get the result he wanted, only he’d have planted it against Andreas. I just couldn’t see it.
Trying to list Andreas’s enemies would take way too long, and probably be incomplete regardless. I’d heard the murmurs in the bull pen, seen the glances in the locker room. No one confronted him because he was the living definition of unapproachable, but that didn’t mean they didn’t talk amongst themselves. After his injury, after the card on Lee’s body, and as evident as the shit storm that this case was turning into was, the talk would only get louder. All I could do was ignore it. I had his back on this.
You think you know everything? Oh, my shoulder angel was an insidious little fuck. You think he’s told you all the important stuff? Think a guy like this would open up to you? You’re not that special, Darren.
Well, what didn’t I know? Apart from anything about his family life, or most of his career on the force, or how he’d been infected and how long he’d been dealing with it. My fingers hovered over the keys, almost ready to do what I hadn’t bothered with yet, that low of all lows: Googling his name. It made me feel like a scummy PI just thinking about it.
My phone rang and saved my sanity. I grabbed it and took it out onto the balcony—yeah, I had one, and while it only fit a single chair, it was a nice little addition to an otherwise crappy place. I answered as soon as I slid the glass door shut behind me. “Hey, Mom.”
“Darren?” She sounded . . . scared? That wasn’t good. “Are you close to home?”
I frowned. “No, I’m still working.” Technically that was true, since Captain Hamilton’s last words to me had been to look out for my partner. Bam, done. I was all over that. “Why?”
“Asher’s gone.”
My heart stopped beating like it had suddenly forgotten how. I squeezed my eyes shut for a frozen, brutal second before I finally found my voice again. This wasn’t the first time Asher had left the house without telling anyone. We had a system in place for this kind of emergency. “Did he take a car?”
“No, they’re both still in the garage.”
“Okay, so he’s on foot. Is Vic out looking for him?”
“Ye—yes, he is, but we don’t know how long Asher’s been gone! I checked on him twenty minutes ago, and he was there, but . . . I mean, what if he makes it to a bus station, or if he gets mugged? He has his wallet with him, and he’s got a little money in there.”
“If he’s catching a bus, he’ll be on camera buying a ticket, and if he’s mugged, he’ll have something to give up, but—” I had to raise my voice to be heard over my mom’s little wail, and seriously, she was breaking my heart here. “But the odds of that are so small, Mom. Seriously. He’s probably just walking around the neighborhood, or maybe heading for the DA’s office. He’s fine. Did Vic rustle up some patrol cars?”
“Yes, a few.”
“They’ll find him. Just give it a little longer and you’ll see, they’ll bring Asher home.”
“He went out his window!” She sounded so affronted. “I don’t even know if he’s wearing shoes, and he’s been so angry lately, and what if he hates us? What if he hates staying here with us?”
“Asher loves you, Mom, you know that.”
“He used to,” she said. “I know he did, but the disease―”
“Just because he can’t remember everything doesn’t mean he doesn’t know who you are. You’re his mother, and he loves you. He’s just too smart for his own fucking good, the little shit.”
That got a watery laugh out of her. “You both are. God, you were such hellion children. I don’t know how I survived your teens.”
“You spoke softly and carried a really big stick.”
“Do you think this might be it?” she said, and it was such a non sequitur that I couldn’t follow her. She continued before I had to ask what she meant. “The reason your daddy never came back, I mean. Do you think he didn’t really mean to leave us, that maybe he just . . . forgot, one day? He was about Asher’s age. Maybe he went for a walk and didn’t remember how to get home.”
My mother was going to talk herself into a heart attack at this rate. “Alzheimer’s comes on pretty gradually,” I said as neutrally as I could manage while still wanting to kill the fucker who was my sperm donor. Went for a walk, my ass. You didn’t just wander away after clearing out your bank accounts and packing a fucking bag. “I really doubt he lost track of things in the space of one afternoon.”
“But maybe— Oh!” I heard the doorbell ring. “Oh honey, it’s . . . oh, Officer, you found him! Asher, baby!”
I couldn’t hear what he said in reply, but if my mother wasn’t freaking out about getting my brother to a hospital, then he was at least functional. “I’m going to go, Mom,” I said into the phone. “Bye.” I’
d call back later to talk to my brother, when I was less likely to yell at him for worrying our mother.
I turned around and almost shouted as I saw Andreas right on the other side of the glass door that I apparently hadn’t closed completely.
“Fuck,” I breathed, opening the door the rest of the way. “If I fall off this balcony, it’ll be your fault for sneaking up on me.”
“I wasn’t sneaking, you were just being loud. Really loud.”
I winced. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”
Andreas shook his head. “I don’t mind. I was just gonna ask if we needed to go out.”
“Go out?”
“To help look for your brother.”
I couldn’t help it, I gaped. “You don’t even know him,” I managed after a moment.
Andreas narrowed his eyes. “He’s your family. I’m your partner. If you needed to go look for him, then I’d go with you.” Of course, moron, his tone implied. Rather than feeling talked down to, I got that warm, tight sensation again. I lowered the phone and came back inside, more relaxed than I’d felt in hours.
“He’s fine. Someone found him and brought him home.”
“Huh. So. Alzheimer’s?”
I sat down on the couch with a sigh. It was still warm from Andreas’s body heat. “You heard that, huh?”
Andreas nodded at the sliding door. “You left a gap. Loud, remember.” He didn’t say anything else, but I figured he deserved to know. I knew his deep, dark secret—it wouldn’t kill me to share one of mine.
“Asher was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s three years ago. It’s extremely rare this young, and tests showed he carries a gene linked to it that he probably inherited from our dad. Not Vic,” I clarified, but Andreas just nodded like I wasn’t being utterly redundant. “Our actual father vanished off the face of the earth when I was two.”
“Do you have the gene?”
“I don’t know.” I smiled a little and tried to pretend that my hands weren’t shaking. We were getting into uncomfortable territory, but I couldn’t even remember the last person I’d talked to about this that I wasn’t related to. Maybe it would do me some good. “I could get the test, find out if I have it. My mom thinks I should.”
Andreas sat down next to me. “What do you think?”
“I think I’d rather not know. If I don’t have the gene, great.” Except I’d feel ludicrously guilty about escaping that fate when Asher hadn’t. He’d never wish it on me, but my feelings didn’t have to make sense, damn it. “And if I do have it, then I’m living on a clock. I think it would drive me crazy, always wondering when I was going to start showing signs, whether or not this would be the day I’d finally start forgetting.” I forced a shrug. “Right now, I . . . just don’t want to know.”
Andreas nodded. “I get that.”
“Yeah, I can tell.” We sat in companionable silence for a while, close enough to touch. I wanted to touch, fuck I wanted it so bad, but he still looked like shit and I wasn’t feeling so great myself, after my mom’s call. “So.” I glanced at him. “Delivery and bad TV?” My unfinished lists taunted me from the table, but I just couldn’t go back to them right now.
Andreas smiled. It was ridiculously enticing. I had to hold myself back from reaching for his lips and tracing the edges of his smile with my tongue. “Sounds good.”
Darren ordered a pizza and pulled a couple of beers out of the fridge. I decided one beer wouldn’t kill me, and after the day I’d had, I didn’t really care if it did.
We sat on the couch where I’d slept off some of today’s bullshit, and though Darren picked up the remote, he didn’t turn on the TV. Fine by me—there was an election coming up, so all the news channels would be spewing bullshit, and there weren’t any decent shows on right now. Though I supposed he might’ve had some good things on Netflix; if he was anything like me, he’d have things queued up for weeks before he finally got a chance to sit down and binge-watch them on a rare day off. That was about the only way people in our line of work ever got to watch anything. There were even rumors that Captain Hamilton had called in sick once so he could catch up on a season and a half of Game of Thrones because there were so many spoilers floating around at the precinct.
I took a swallow of beer. It was some hipster brand I’d never heard of, and it wasn’t half-bad. Somehow I was surprised Darren had good taste in beer. Maybe because his taste in men was questionable.
While I mused over his tastes, Darren stared at the TV screen as if it were on. He took a sip from his beer bottle, but his gaze was distant. His thoughts were probably a million miles away too.
I cleared my throat, and he jumped.
Shifting a little, he glanced at me, as if he’d suddenly realized he’d been staring off into space and was wondering how long ago he’d checked out. “Sorry. Did . . . uh . . . did you say something?”
“Not yet, no. You looked a little preoccupied.”
His cheeks colored. “Yeah. Sorry.” He shook his head and looked toward the blank TV again. Bringing his beer up to his lips, he muttered, “Just thinking.”
“Anything in particular?”
He set the bottle on a coaster on the coffee table. “Would you buy it if I said I was crunching baseball stats?”
“I wasn’t born yesterday, Darren.”
“Of course not.” He smirked. “That would mean I was born this afternoon.”
I laughed, nearly choking on my drink. “Fuck you, asshole. I’m not that old.”
He chuckled halfheartedly, but it faded as he stared off into space again.
“Hey.” I turned toward him, slinging my good arm across the back of the couch. “I’m supposed to be the quiet, brooding one here.”
That prompted a slightly more genuine laugh. “Fair enough.” He faced me. “I guess I’m just curious about a few things.”
“Such as?”
“Well, after what you told me in the ER this morning . . .”
Oh God. That.
The beer I’d drunk threatened to come back up, but I forced it to stay down. I reminded myself he hadn’t been disgusted by my status. He’d barely batted an eye, actually. Hell, he’d kissed me not thirty seconds after I’d told him. I just fucking hated talking about it.
“What do you want to know?”
“I guess, well . . . I mean, how long have you known?”
“About four and a half years.”
“Four and a—” He cocked his head. “Didn’t you say you have a four-year-old kid?”
I flinched and nodded.
“Oh.”
I drained my beer and set the bottle on the table. “She’s negative, thank God. We still have her tested every year just to be absolutely sure, but the doctors are pretty confident she’s in the clear.”
“So, her mother has it?”
I nodded again. “She tested positive during a routine screening while she was pregnant. So I was tested too.” I sighed, rubbing the back of my neck. “We’re not even sure who got it from who. We both had some wild years before we met—I slept around after my divorce, and she did some heroin in her twenties—so neither of us can pinpoint where we might’ve gotten it.” That old familiar guilt pressed itself against my ribs. “But, statistically, it’s way more likely she got it from me.”
Darren grimaced. “Jesus.”
“Yeah. Great thing for a man to have on his conscience. And let me tell you, I’m probably the only father on the planet who got less sleep before my kid was born than after. I couldn’t sleep for shit until I knew she’d tested negative.”
“I believe that,” he said quietly.
“My ex tried to forgive me—especially since there was a small chance she’d been the one to give it to me—but we were already in a rough spot even before she got pregnant. Throw in the stress of a kid we weren’t expecting and then finding out we’re both HIV positive . . .” I shook my head. “We made it until our daughter was a few months old, and then we called it quits.”
> Darren watched me for a moment. “Do you still see your daughter?” He winced like the words hadn’t come out right. “I mean, shared custody and all that? Or—”
“I see her a couple of weekends a month. I’d like to spend more time with her, but right now, it’s all I can do.”
He fell silent again. Then, “What about your health? You seem like you’re doing pretty well.”
I held up my bandaged arm. “You mean aside from blacking out and splitting my arm open?”
“Isn’t that from the drugs?”
“It is, but I wouldn’t be taking them if I didn’t need them.”
“Fair enough. But beyond the side effects of the medication, have you had any problems?”
“Not really, no. Ever since I started treatment, my virus load has stayed pretty low. Like I said, it’s been undetectable for a long time. Physically, I’d never even know I had it aside from the damn drug side effects.” I sighed, running a hand through my hair. “Mentally . . . that’s another story.”
Darren turned toward me, pulling his knee up onto the cushion between us. “How so?”
I exhaled. “I heard ‘HIV’ and thought it was a death sentence. I came from the era when AIDS meant two or three good years if you were lucky, and then slowly dying alone.”
“That was a long time ago, though.”
“Well, as you helpfully pointed out a minute ago,” I said with a slight laugh, “I grew up a long time ago.”
He chuckled. “Fair point.”
“So anyway, I knew nothing about the current prognosis for HIV patients, and I kind of . . . I panicked, I guess. No way in hell was I going through that. In fact, shortly after I found out, before I’d really sat down and let a doctor pull me back to reality, I seriously considered getting myself killed on the job.”
Darren’s jaw fell open. “Really?”
I nodded. He didn’t need to know quite yet that I’d gone a lot further than “seriously considering.” Or how much that had altered the course of our current investigation. I was beginning to trust him more than I’d expected to, but I wasn’t ready to tip my hand that far—I needed to be absolutely sure before I showed these particular cards.
