“Sorry,” said John, his voice low and subdued. “Nick, you amaze me. How does a felon make an FBI agent a better person?”
Nick’s eyes twinkled. “I’d reply, but then you’d call me smug.” He was starting to look like Nick again, eyes losing their black bruises and gaining life and joy.
My God, this man is tough.
The previous evening’s horror show hadn’t re-traumatized or embittered him, it’d helped him start rebuilding his innate affection for humanity.
“Your attackers get indicted tomorrow,” said John.
“Can we throw an indictment party?” asked Nick, giving John an odd, off-kilter glance.
“Balloons and cake?” John pretended to think about it. “Wonder if Mari’s ever hosted an episode in a maximum security state prison.”
Again with the look. “Quaint. I was thinking caviar and champagne.”
John followed Nick’s surreptitious glance to its target this time. Then he shivered. What Nick couldn’t stop looking at was his heavy leather belt. On it were pepper spray, a steel baton, and handcuffs.
Nick saw John’s shiver and bit his lower lip, embarrassed to be caught out.
John looked away. “Great. I’m dressed as the embodiment of your nightmares.”
Nick shifted uneasily and glanced around the small space. “Imagine how I feel about the other guys. I’m just trying not to look.”
“Not doing a very good job of that.”
“No.”
John was frozen in awkward silence for a few moments, wondering how to react. Took his seat in the wheelchair the intake officer had vacated. Remembered his resolve to become someone Nick genuinely didn’t fear.
He’d already spent years trying, little by little, to address Nick’s unspoken fears. Of being returned to prison on a whim, of working in the cage-like surveillance van, and so many little big things. But he felt like he finally had the key to something deeper, if he could figure out how to do it.
Finally he drew the baton and snapped it with his wrist to extend the telescoping bar, with its vicious little ball on the end. Nick’s whole body flinched, but his gaze showed no fear of John.
John handed Nick the baton. If he needed to look at the stuff, let him look at it openly. Nick gulped, and ran his fingers along it, exploring like a blind man encountering an unfamiliar object. He shoved it closed, tossed it in his hand, then extended it with a snap of his wrist. Flinched again, retracted it, and tried the move until he could do it smoothly and without reacting.
Then Nick drew a deep breath, braced himself, and struck the pillow. Grimaced at the impact, and shivered. Then swung it for real, fast enough for it to whistle through the air and hard enough to land with a violent thwack, compressing the cheap pillow instantly where the blow landed.
The sound made the blood drain from Nick’s face. He glanced at John, eyes wide. “Jesus.”
John felt a little shaky himself. He’d never counted the number of times Nick had been hit during that beating. But it was enough that it would take counting, and once was too many times to be struck like that.
He was glad to be carrying it, walking the halls with killers and no gun at his side. He’d use it without hesitation to defend himself or Nick. But using it just to hurt someone was unthinkable.
“They ever use this on you in here?” asked John, his voice coming out almost squeaky.
Nick nodded. “But not like ....”
“That?”
“Yeah.” Nick’s lip twitched, remembering. “A CO hit me across the back of my shoulders once. It hurt, but man ....” Nick directed another wide-eyed look at the baton in his hand and the pillow, which still hadn’t recovered. “Was he ever pulling his punch.”
“Justified?” asked John quietly.
“In context ....yes,” said Nick. He rubbed his forehead, the lines of his face tight with stress.
Had Nick’s aversion to violence originated long before he was old enough to start making decisions about what kind of man he wanted to be?
John thought about Nick’s empathy for the young, the week, the frightened. His true, not moralistic but deeply ingrained dislike of violence, paired with his own lack of fear. About the warping heartbreak a toddler would experience being beaten by his father.
Of course Nick accepted and coped with being hurt.
My father, my father, why hast thou forsaken me.
To fill the void of an absent and abusive father, whom he’d none the less loved, Nick turned to law enforcement. He let himself be imprisoned. He threw himself into John’s hands. He stayed in the anklet.
And once again, he'd been shattered by the ultimate abuse; abuse of power. Abuse by superior forces he was supposed to be able to trust.
It was the deep, well-scarred-over emotional wounds that needed healing, not the superficial trained traumatic reaction to a stick. But John had no idea how. He wasn’t a parent, or a shrink.
Nick retracted the baton and set it aside, eyeing the pepper spray. John drew it and passed it to him.
Nick held the can and studied it, read the text, held his finger on the trigger.
“They never used this on me,” said Nick. “Some inmates practice building up a resistance to it, so getting sprayed doesn’t bother them much. Saw a guy get hit with it once, he kind of yelled and covered his face with his arm, but he kept trying to tackle the guy he was fighting.”
He gave John an almost shy look. “I never got the impression it was a huge deal.”
John grimaced. “I was sprayed in training. It’s a good thing the stuff naturally makes you cry, because it hid the fact that it hurt so bad I was crying. I think -- by the way the instructor patted each student on the back while we fought through the worst of it, that was pretty typical.”
“Yeah?”
“Officer Langley, a word please?” A guard was outside the door, his face blank, his words coiled in self-restraint.
John followed the guy, out of the cell, down the hall, and into a break room with a heavy door and a sign reading STAFF ONLY. As soon as the door closed behind them, the officer, a stocky man with a round face and square shoulders bearing Sergeant’s stripes, came unwound.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Langley. You’re sitting in the damn cell fraternizing with an inmate and handing him your weapons? What do you think this is, show and tell? You’re in a maximum security prison. What’s next, gonna have him cuff you?”
John could feel his face go red. “Sorry. We’re -- really good friends. We work together. He eats dinner with my family. We trust each other with our lives.”
The officer stared. “Who are you?”
“Uh --” John realized nobody down here had been briefed. To them, he really was a CO. “I’m an FBI agent. Undercover to protect Aster, my criminal consultant and partner who was assaulted in Riker’s.”
“Protect him from who?” asked the Sergeant a bit coldly. “Us? Inmates? Rogue NYPD infiltrators?”
“All of the above,” said John, sitting on the edge of a creaky faux-wood laminate folding office table covered with half-eaten sandwiches, open soft drinks, and donuts in boxes. “And, himself. And boredom, and fear.”
“Peachy.”
John pointed to a half-full donut box. “Can I take him one of those?”
No was on the tip of the guy’s tongue. But he corrected. “I can’t.”
John smiled. “Um ....sir, may I please have a donut for strictly personal consumption, possibly down the hall and in a cell?”
“You can have a donut.” The Sergeant shook his head, amusement fighting disapproval. “I’m Mike Kelley. You the FBI agent that screamed at the intake crew?”
John nodded. “John Langley. Aster likes and respects you guys, so I do I. You’d yell too if it’d been your best friend in misery.”
“Reckon I might,” the guard allowed.
JOHN
“You got chewed out,” said Nick, eyes dancing as he watched John enter the cell.
John crossed the t
hree paces of the “spacious” maximum security hospital room and dangled the donut above Nick’s head like one would wiggle a treat in front of a dog. “Brought you a donut.”
“Got chewed out and brought me a donut to hide it.”
“Got praised for my diligent guarding of a high-security prisoner,” countered John.
“Especially the part where you handed the high-security prisoner pepper spray and a baton.”
“About to pepper-spray the high-security prisoner’s donut.”
“Fine. Gimme.”
John handed the donut to Nick with a broad smile.
CHAPTER THIRTY
How to Make Nick Aster Talk
JOHN
John should’ve locked himself in a cell with Nick Aster years ago. He’d always wanted Nick to talk to him, and there was nothing to do here but talk. Or watch people on the tiny TV argue about storage units.
“So ....maybe I shouldn’t have called you a complete monster last night,” said Nick, licking his fingers after the last of the donut. It was such a normal act, it normalized the concrete walls and the orange getup and the steel toilet. “Maybe just ....a komodo dragon or something. Bitey, but kind of cute.”
Normalized them, but John kept seeing mental images of dapper Nick Aster twirling his hat, dressed in one of his absurdly slick, tight suits. The orange scrubs and cheesy bar-coded wristband almost made him snicker, and he tried to kick himself.
It’s not funny. He could almost hear Mari’s pained voice in his ear. It’s horrifying.
Not horrifying, he protested back. Sad, maybe. But it’s a little funny.
John wondered if it was as strange for Nick, seeing him in a cheap polyester uniform with a nickle-plated badge on his chest. He remembered Nick’s uncontrollable snickering, and the uneasy glances at his belt. Things could be funny and sad at the same time, he decided. Better that way than just plain sad.
John tapped his fingers on the window to the hallway. Nothing funny about Nick’s fury and the accusations it had fueled. Just sad.
“They were valid points. I got called an abusive predator by your favorite wine mooch. Fact that we’re friends kinda awes me.”
Nick smiled, something else both funny and sad. The swelling was gone from his face, but the bruises were still there, so an easy smile looked hilariously out of place. “Me too.”
John tried pacing. Coming up short against the cell door and walls proved even more frustrating than standing still. He sank down in the wheelchair feeling almost defeated, and a tiny shiver tried to surface. A sense of what it would do to him, to be confined for years. Of the suffering it must have inflicted on Nick.
“I love being your consultant, even your prisoner,” said Nick. There was an unusually sober note in his voice. “I’ve never been this happy, or felt as much joy as I do when we work together.”
“I don’t see you as a pet,” said John, flashing back to Nick’s accusation and feeling guilty about the fact that he sort of did. Not in a demeaning way; it was just a similar quality of immense affection and responsibility, was all.
Nick didn’t buy it either. Oh, yes, you do. But there was clear affection in Nick’s skeptical look.
John tried to move forward. “But I do love -- whatever this is. Going to work is more fun -- life is more fun with you in it. I do think you’re adorable, and I feel protective of random people on the street, so of course I feel protective of you. I don’t feel like I own you, I’m just in charge.”
Nick smiled again. “What Theo forgets -- and I forgot last night -- is that I signed up for this. With a joy you can’t even .... you picked me up, and I was scared, and excited, and thinking -- uh-oh, my arresting agent is completely in charge of my life now. And it turned out you were just -- awesome. I still walk into the FBI with you, and think, how did I get this lucky? People like you and chances like this just don’t exist.”
There was real joy in his eyes, when he said that. It was similar to the joy John himself felt working with Nick. “After our first case, I was looking at the future of us, and I was excited, and I felt kinda sick and guilty. A man shouldn’t be handed this much control over a human being, let alone be thrilled about it. Mari said if I was a better jailer than Sing Sing, I shouldn’t feel bad. But ....”
Nick looked down at his ankle, currently bare. “It’s annoying and humiliating and it makes me feel distrusted and branded. When you take it off for undercover work, I feel like an actual, trusted person for once.”
He gave John a timid glance. Nick’s forehead wrinkled, and he wiggled his foot as though it might make a magic anklet appear. It was one of those adorable, vulnerable, honest flashes that always made whatever was hard in John’s heart melt.
“I miss it,” admitted Nick. “It kills me when you put it back on, but it’s .... us.”
John braved some honesty of his own. “I’m afraid when it’s off for good, that’s it for John and Nick. Closest friendship of my life, held together by that piece of plastic.”
Nick looked shaken, and there was something of the same insecurity in his expression that had accompanied his heartbreaking You weren’t getting rid of me?
“Would you -- you’d want me around?”
“Yes.” The word left John’s mouth before he even had time to think about it. He’d have thought he’d want to think about it, hard, but the answer was incontrovertible. Yes.
“You know you wanna strangle me half the time,” said Nick.
“Two thirds,” John retorted.
There was movement outside the steel door. An inmate was looking directly at them with a fixed gaze. His expression was tough to read because his braced nose was broken and thick stubble covered his lower cheeks and jaw, but the faintly off-kilter curl of his split lip placed it as a leer.
“You got yourself a right purty one there, officer.”
The inmate made smooching sounds at them, running his fingers tenderly through his own long, greasy hair. “Daddy and his boy, ain’t that a touching sight.”
John rolled his eyes. “Are your cliches responsible for your broken nose, or did you walk into a door?”
The inmate snickered. “Hey, can’t blame me for tryin’ to freak out the new guys.”
There was something more intelligent, more calculating in the eyes of the man in orange now. He spoke to Nick. “Kinda odd, now, ain’t it? Gettin’ all cozy with one of the screws? Might be a few folks interested in knowing the company you keep. Might be you two want me to keep my mouth shut.”
Nick’s eyes narrowed. Let me handle this, said a split-second sideways glance at John. “Might be you want to bandy around the name Nick Aster, and then decide if you want to be my friend or my enemy.”
“You ain’t so tough, pretty boy,” said the inmate. His sadistic grin revealed a patchwork of missing and blackened front teeth. “Looks to me you’re real good at losing fights, you could use some scars on that little designer face of yours.”
“No,” said Nick, his voice soft and gentle in a frightening sort of way. His eyes were slightly hooded and narrowed, his gaze flat. He held his jaw low and square, and his upper lip curled. John had just witnessed one of his chameleon-like shifts, into a ruthless inmate with a cruel streak. “I’m not tough at all. Neither was Ed Grossman. I heard he cried, at the end.”
John stopped breathing at the mention of the name of the man who’d been murdered for putting a hit out on Nick. The inmate physically backed away, and John felt a chill on his skin. Nick played prison inmate as flawlessly as any other role.
The man in orange gave John a significant glance, then back to Nick. “Even the mob drowns their rats.”
Nick smiled. “And your daddy probably drowned kittens. Both facts are irrelevant to this conversation.”
The inmate vanished just as John was developing a desire to re-break his nose for him, and his footfalls marked his progress down the hall. Nick pushed his hair back from his face, belying stress that had been completely invisible during the exc
hange.
“That wasn’t a casual taunting session. That guy was sent to find out what the deal was with us.”
“He failed,” noted John. “Sure that’s safe?”
“Means I don’t feel guilty. Puts him on the defensive for poking into my business.”
John got it instantly. “You explain, you’re trying to cover up.”
Nick nodded. “For all the talk, violence is a precious commodity in here. It costs. Ninety-five percent of the game is psychological.”
There was that chill again. “Other five percent?” asked John, realizing as it came out that he didn’t want to hear the answer to that question.
Broken Blue Lines: Love. Hate. Criminal Justice.: An FBI Crime Drama / LGBT+ Love Story Page 29
