John’s gut eased. He had allies, caring and intelligent ones. “Thank you.”
When he hung up, he finally looked Mari in the eyes for the first time. They were pale. Sober. Shaken. There was no judgment, just the chilled shock of gazing into the abyss.
“He’s afraid of you,” said Mari.
“You’re -- are you afraid of me?”
“No -- no, but ....” Mari stared at him. “This man sobbed in my arms. I slept in bed, holding him while he clung to you like you were the life raft he’d been looking for all his life. And I see this. Part of being a woman is being vulnerable. And part of that is seeing a man’s actions through the lens of what he’d do to you under the wrong conditions. Maybe I am scared.”
“Hon - he broke the law and betrayed us. Yeah, I’m gonna let him know I’m pissed.”
“He’s -- why is he afraid of you?”
“Do you think I’m being needlessly harsh?”
Mari shook her head. “It’s -- that you can do this. Automatically. As part of your job. You really -- do arrest people, and put them in jail. For real.”
“Yeah. Ask Nick,” said John.
“My God," said Mari. "The man serves five years in prison, comes out, and fights like hell to earn your respect and friendship? The man who sent him there? Now he was nearly murdered, and you’re willing to send him into another of those places without blinking. Watching this ....I never saw in person how serious it all is.”
John took both of her hands gently in his. “Nick is an exceptional man. It’s why he’s here, with us. You want to know who I’m usually arresting? Think the kidnappers of the world, not the Nicks.”
She looked him directly in the eyes. “I know. I’m not judging you. Or your job.”
He stroked her hands. “Don’t simplify Nick. He is every bit as vulnerable and loving and sweet as you’ve seen this week. He’s one of the toughest, bravest, smartest men I’ve ever met. He’s also the guy who just decided to abandon us without saying goodbye, and an unreformed con artist and thief.”
“If I were afraid staying with my friends meant a repeat of being beaten, stabbed, and tortured while I was still recovering from the first time, I’d run away too,” said Mari.
John tried to hug her, but she pulled away and glared. “You’re dripping wet, Clueless. So’s Nick, who’s sitting on the foot of the bed refusing to dry himself off or change because you ordered him to stay there.”
John sighed. “We got a change of clothes for him?”
“With the towels I handed him.”
John opened the door. Nick was sitting where John had left him on the bed, wet hair plastered to the sides of his bruised face.
“You can drop the ultra-obedient routine. It doesn’t work for master criminals who just pulled an escape attempt.”
He picked up the towels and clothing and put them in Nick’s lap. Nick didn’t speak. He was shivering, his teeth chattering, head down. John frowned. This wasn’t a routine to make Mari feel sorry for him.
John felt his own hair. Just as wet as Nick’s, and he wasn’t particularly cold. But he’d been moving around, and wasn’t scared or critically injured.
“Nick?”
John did shiver, himself, now. “Mari!”
She dashed into the room.
“Help me get Nick out of these clothes and dried off.”
NICK
Nick was shivering, and nauseated. He was scared, and sickened by John’s anger. He was trapped, and didn’t have any viable plan, and could feel the drugs he was on slowing his mind. Dazing him, rendering him some slower, sleepier, less intelligent version of himself.
He felt helpless, and that was an unfamiliar and horrifying thing. He’d been, technically, helpless many times. But rarely felt it, or was unable to see a way forward and out.
And he was in too much pain to use the towel John put in his lap. He was barely aware of Mari unbuttoning his shirt and trying to ease it off. He moaned but didn’t protest when John gently moved his arm so Mari could get it off.
“Oh, damn,” said John. Not in an angry way, in a quiet and horrified way. He took Nick’s hand and turned it over gently. “Your wrist’s bleeding through the bandage. Where I grabbed you.”
Nick laughed, a welcome feeling. He had pictures in his head, not haunting but amusing him. They were of concrete and steel and blood, his blood.
For all that John had seen that cell he was in, Nick was pretty sure he hadn’t actually seen it. He’d written it off as a nightmare from another dimension. So that now, he thought it was a big deal that Nick’s wrist was bleeding a little.
They took his shoes and socks off, and John pressed a set of dry boxers and pajama bottoms into his hands.
“Nick, we’re gonna step out for a minute.”
Huh? He looked after them and at the closed door. Oh. Privacy. Right. He almost snickered.
Try that concept on after spending years in a maximum security prison.
He fumbled through changing. John made him take a dose of pain meds, and Mari wrapped a soft robe around his shoulders and started rubbing his hair with a towel. It felt like his hair was being pulled out with sandpaper, and he let out a squeak of startled pain, and ducked.
John instantly blocked Mari’s arm, figuring it out before Nick. “They yanked him around and dragged him by the hair. He’s gotta still be pretty sore.”
Mari sat down at his side and held him in a soft hug while John unwrapped the bandage on his wrist. Nick braved a glance. The bruises were starting to fade slightly, and where John had grabbed him the healing cut was bleeding again. But it didn’t look all that bad.
John applied antibiotic ointment so gently Nick barely felt it, and put nonstick gauze pads over the wound and wrapped it. A shiver of horror went through Nick’s stomach.
“You’re not using gloves.”
All of Nick’s fear of John, his anger, his humiliation vanished in that second and was replaced with worry.
“My blood test results aren’t back yet, I could have been infected with HIV. John --”
John heard his desperate worry, and held up his own hand. “I didn’t get your blood on me, and I don’t have any broken skin. And you are not going to get HIV, and neither am I.”
Nick found himself frantically hugging John. He couldn’t lose him. He couldn’t.
“Don’t risk it. Please, don’t risk it.”
John hugged him back, softly. “I am so, so sorry, Nick. I injured you. I hurt you in anger, I betrayed your trust, and I’m sorry.”
John was warm. And Nick was cold, and the way he and Mari were holding him was going to save his soul. “I’m sorry,” said Nick.
John let go and picked up the towel, pressing it against his hair, rubbing with gentle pressure. He’d seen the video, cared, and knew how not to remind him of what had happened. It was blissfully comforting, and Nick closed his eyes.
It was going to be okay. Because of these bafflingly wonderful people, it was going to be okay.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Restraint, Part 2
JOHN
Gary and Nick greeted each other with smiles that were the uncertain beginnings of a friendship. He replaced a very silent Nick Aster’s cut-off anklet on his left ankle, then pulled out the second one from an electronics case.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Nick, turning a bit pale. His blue eyes were in full-on innocent mode, baffled and pleading.
“It’s this or prison,” said John. “I have zero trust in you not to run right now.”
Nick seemed to shrink, flattening his body against the bed as he extended his right ankle towards the Marshal. He looked truly miserable.
Wills buckled the second anklet on. It was less sophisticated technology, and bulky and ugly, more like Nick’s original tracker.
“This is basically a house arrest setup,” said Wills. “Lower tech, but it’ll let Langley keep a closer eye on you. If you exit the bedroom, it’ll sound an alert. If you cut
this, or exit the house, it’ll sound enough audible alarms to wake the neighborhood.”
“Peachy,” muttered Nick.
Wills charged ahead with the tight look of someone who didn’t care for the job he had to do. “There’s a team of armed Marshals outside with a canine unit, so don’t think you can disable John here and get a head start.”
Nick stared at John. You really think I’d do that?
John looked back, cold and hard. Your mind was already going there. Drug us and bolt. I’m not a moron.
“You were planning to run,” said John. “You don’t like this, too bad. Consider it a disciplinary action.”
Nick glared back at John. “Your lead investigator’s an emotionally crippled functioning alcoholic. He couldn’t scream, ‘my negligence got people killed and now I’m scarred for life’ any louder if he had a megaphone. He’s not working this case, he’s working the one he screwed up years ago.”
John and Wills exchanged uneasy glances. Thing was, John had to think Nick was probably right. Fisher was intelligent, competent, well respected, and possibly just a little completely unbalanced.
“Now you’re asking me, on the basis of his skills, to stick around waiting to be arrested on a warrant issued out of spite and be returned to the place I was mistreated so badly I almost died? Tell me how that’s an act of rationality, let alone caring,” challenged Nick.
Wills winced. "First, no warrant has been issued. Second, our team is out there to intervene if necessary to prevent you from being taken back there. Third, everyone involved in this cares a great deal. Daniel Curry authorized the FBI to pay for all this, and we're talking thousands of dollars a day, just so you don't have to go back to the prison you're actually supposed to be in right now. And this is after you cut your anklet and tried to escape custody, which nobody seems inclined to charge you with, by the way."
Nick reached out, took Gary Wills's hand in his, and squeezed it. "Thank you. You've been wonderful, from the first minute we met. And I don't take it for granted."
Wills squeezed back with a kindhearted smile. "Never thought you did. We'll get you through this."
Nick refocused on John, getting back to the protest at hand. “Believe me, if I knew you were in danger of, say, the CIA showing up and dragging you off to Gitmo, I wouldn’t force you to stick around and see. I’d do everything in my power including kidnapping you myself to be sure that you never, ever had to risk going through that.”
“That’s not the situation,” said John. “This is: If you run, you will be caught, and you will go to a high security prison, probably in solitary confinement, for decades. You will suffer prolonged mental and emotional torture. Given the stakes, I’d send you back to prison right now to prevent that from being a possibility. So you decide. Back to prison now until this is all over, which does have the advantage that you wouldn’t be able to be sent to Rikers. Or, take the risk of remaining on the outside, but you do it with me.”
Nick took a long time to answer, and when he did, it was with an almost embarrassed demeanor. “I’m not usually afraid of prison. And I’ll get over it. I think once I heal physically ....but right now, I -- kind of am. A lot.”
Wills reached out and gently touched Nick’s hand with his. “And you’ve got some very dedicated people going to a great deal of trouble and expense to spare you that. Trust this agent, and if we have to take you back to prison, try to face it with faith. It might end up being a reassuring experience, to be reminded firsthand that most humans aren’t evil. Even in a prison.”
Nick glanced between the two of them, the desperate tension behind his eyes eased by intense affection and gratitude. “Thank you. I know what you’re doing for me, and I know I don’t deserve it after what I did today. This is a reassuring experience.”
JOHN
John went out to the car and retrieved the framed photo and the cat burglar after Wills left. He paused for a moment at the foot of the stairs, and smoothed the slightly dampened fur on its head. Nick cherished this thing. And all that the photograph represented.
There had been a time when Nick would have left them behind without hesitation. A time when Nick didn’t allow himself to cherish anything, because he was certain he would have to leave it behind or have it ripped from him. As much as today had been Nick as usual, Nick unreformed, it was actually enormous progress.
He opened the guest room door softly. Nick’s eyes went to what John was holding, but his expression revealed nothing. John set the cat burglar down by Nick’s side, and handed him the photograph. "You keep this. We'll print another copy."
Nick sat the photo on the night stand and hesitantly tucked the cat against his side, like he was afraid John would rip it from him if he showed he cared about it. He glanced at John out of the corner of his eyes, gauging the reaction. Wondering if he could really trust.
“It’s because you cared enough to take these that you’re not in prison tonight,” said John. "I was gonna do it, 'til I saw these in the cab."
“John - thanks for everything.” Nick’s voice was thick, and his eyes flooded with tears when their eyes met. He turned away, and John felt like he’d been punched in the gut as his adrenaline spiked.
Nick was still planning to run. Maybe not this second, but from the FBI, from prison, from a courthouse....
John grabbed him. “No. No. You are not bailing.”
Don’t leave me, Nick.
John gulped and moved on from that heartbroken internal plea, fast.
Nick was pale. “John, it’s never going to end. Justice for me was over the second I was convicted. I never used to be afraid of going back to Sing Sing, now - look what happened when you tried to cuff me. And that was with me trying - really trying - to cooperate.”
“No,” said John firmly. “Normal life was over for you when you broke the law, repeatedly and on a massive scale. I’m sorry, Nick, but justice for all the people you directly and indirectly victimized was your imprisonment.”
“I know that, jackass. Think back and count the times I’ve whined about going to prison,” snapped Nick. "But I was under the mistaken impression it would somehow be over when I got out. Silly me."
John realized Nick’s hands were shaking. He’d trapped Nick, and Nick was both hurt and frightened by being unable to run. John knelt by the bed.
“Hey.”
Nick wouldn’t look at him.
“Listen,” urged John. “You’re in too much fear to trust or think clearly, so I’m preventing you from doing something you’d regret for the rest of your life.”
Nick’s face was tight. “What exactly are you gonna do when a NYPD SWAT team breaks down your door, John? Shoot them?”
“I’m an FBI agent, and one involved in the case, at that. Even they wouldn’t take it that far.”
Nick was silent for a long time, quietly breaking down. He could hardly talk when he finally braved John again.
“This hurts. It meant a lot to me -- sending me into the hospital off anklet, and -- taking the watch off that night. Two anklets and an armed canine team?”
“I know,” said John softly. Seeing Nick flatten himself and almost cringe when Wills had put the second anklet on had been wrenching. “I’m sorry. But tell me honestly it’s overkill.”
Nick was silent, then looked away and let out a soft sound of assent that was almost a whimper.
“When I told Wills the other night that I cared about you too much to let you escape, I meant it,” said John. “I won’t let you screw up your life out of fear.”
“It still hurts,” said Nick quietly.
John rubbed his back, his fingers knowing exactly where to find the sore muscles now, and how to soothe them.
“Remember the doctor saying that basically, I was your behavioral therapist?”
“Yes.”
“This is one of those cases where you’re going to do something impulsive that you’ll regret for the rest of your life. This is one of those dumb Nick things. Let me stop you
.”
Nick started sobbing softly.
“Nick?” asked John, his gut twisting. He’d never seen Nick sob, now this was twice in a week. Wasn’t he getting better?
“Nick, please look at me? Please?”
John felt desperate. He couldn’t see someone in pain without needing to relieve it, and this was his best friend in so much distress he was sobbing. Maybe if Nick looked at him, he could figure out some sort of key.
Broken Blue Lines: Love. Hate. Criminal Justice.: An FBI Crime Drama / LGBT+ Love Story Page 15
