Take the Edge Off

by TA Moore

  Maggie raised her hand toward Cal. “I don’t want any trouble,” she said. “Not in my shop. Don’t—”

  Cal ignored her. “Maybe you shouldn’t push people into open graves,” he said.

  Whatever the kid had told Maggie, that hadn’t been part of it. She dropped her hand and gave him a disappointed look. “Logan.”

  He flinched. Cal would bet there weren’t a lot of people in the kid’s life who cared enough he could disappoint them. So he’d never gotten used to it.

  “You don’t get it,” he said. “I told you it was for a good reason. The guy had it fucking coming.”

  He pulled away from Maggie and left her with a handful of his shed hoodie clutched in one hand. Panic twitched over his face, and he lunged at one of the stations to grab a pair of scissors. He clutched them in his fist and jabbed the sharpened points at Cal.

  “Get out of my way,” he yelled, and his voice cracked.

  “What are going to do?” Cal asked him. “Give me a bad trim?”

  Maggie threw the hoodie at him. “Logan. Put those down, or I’ll call the police.”

  That was one pressure too many for the kid. Logan threw her a panicked look and lunged forward at Cal. The point of the scissors caught in his T-shirt and poked the skin underneath. It didn’t sting as much as the tattoo it scratched had when he’d gotten it.

  Cal punched him in the face. He felt the crunch of cartilage under his knuckles, the familiar wet spit of blood over his fingers. It wasn’t enough to break Logan’s nose—probably—but he did drop the scissors as he staggered back.

  “That hurt,” he whined, the back of his wrist pressed to his dripping nose.

  “So does stabbing people, Logan,” one of the other hairdressers, a tiny woman with a crest of pink hair snapped. She handed Logan a towel to stem the bleeding and gave Cal a nervous look. “You okay? Look, I know he’s being a dick, but he’s harmless. He’s under a lotta pressure and….”

  Cal pulled the neck of his T-shirt down. There was a red mark scraped through a line-work skull. A few drops of blood had oozed up from under the skin, but it had already dried up.

  “I think I’ll live.” He glanced at Logan. The kid was at bay against one of the chairs, the towel still bunched up under his nose and his eyes on the door at the back of the room. “You run, I’ll catch you.”

  Logan dropped the towel enough to sneer at Cal. “You didn’t in the graveyard,” he said. “Old man like you, all you’ll catch if you run after me is a heart attack.”

  That stung. Cal wasn’t old, but he had gotten to the point where he was too old for a lot of stuff he used to do—going to prison, playing gutter-trash arm candy, not caring that he was alone. He was not ready to be too old to intimidate scrawny little toughs.

  “I found you, didn’t I?” he growled. “If I have to find you again, I’ll break your fucking kneecaps when I do. Now sit the fuck down. I told you, I want a word.”

  Logan stared at him, wire tight as he tried to decide what to do. It was Maggie who decided it for him. She gave him a shove toward an empty chair.

  “Sit down and stop tracking tea and blood all over my floor,” she said sharply. “Better to talk to him in here than whatever alley he runs you down in. He’s not going to do anything to you in here.”

  Logan shot her a look over his bloody towel. “He punched me,” he pointed out.

  “You deserved that,” she fired back at him. “Sit. Talk.”

  After a second, Logan reluctantly did as he was told, hunched up and sullen as a kid at school as his ragged, knock-off sneakers dangled off the floor. Maggie turned and headed for the door. She paused briefly as she passed Cal.

  “Don’t be too hard,” she murmured. “It ain’t an excuse, but his girlfriend is real sick. He’s strung tight, is all.”

  She didn’t wait to see if Cal cared. She strutted over to the door and locked it.

  “I have an appointment in fifteen minutes,” she told Cal. “You can talk to Logan until then. After that I’ll call the cops and get him thrown out.”

  Cal turned one of the black chairs around, brushed clipped blonde hairs off the leather seat, and sat down. He leaned forward, elbows braced on his knees, and narrowed his eyes at Logan.

  “Why did you attack Joe at the graveyard?” he asked.

  Logan snorted, winced, and wiped bloody snot away on the back of his sleeve. “Joe,” he mimicked in a sing-song sneer. “Like you’re mates? I saw you at the graveyard—Mr. Bailey this and Mr. Bailey that. Him in the back like Little Lord Fauntletits and you going where you’re told. You ain’t mates, bro.”

  “I ain’t asking for your opinion,” Cal shot back. “Why were you there?”

  “People go to graveyards,” Logan muttered. He tossed the ruined towel over the arm of the chair and slouched back. “Maybe I wanted to get in early, get a good spot.”

  Cal leaned over and hit the height adjustment lever on the chair. It dropped and Logan yelped in surprise as he went with it. His hands flew up in surprise, and he winced as the impact jarred from his tailbone up to his battered nose.

  “Dickhead,” he snapped at Cal as he dropped his hands self-consciously.

  “Answer the question,” Cal said bluntly. “I don’t want to dob you in to the cops, kid, but I will.”

  Logan shifted in the chair and tugged absently at his earlobe. It had been pierced once but healed over, and he rolled the scarred channel between his fingers.

  “You’re not going to be any good to Asha in a cell,” Maggie chipped in from where she’d stood to sort her scissors and pretend she hadn’t listened in. “Tell him what he wants to know.”

  The pressure made Logan screw up his face and fiddle more at his ear.

  “You think you owe this person? Whoever put you up to it?” Cal said. “They pulled your fat out of the fire once, maybe, or they were nice to you sometime. Now you want to pay them back, show that you deserved their attention, right?”

  In his case, with a shrug and a “whenever,” Van had fronted him some cash when he needed it. Of course he had. The money didn’t mean anything to Van. He didn’t need it for his rent or his kid. He hadn’t even sweated for it unless you considered the ten minutes it took him to empty his dad’s wallet. But Cal remembered how desperately grateful he’d been and how relieved he’d been with Van later when he asked his opinion about something. A way to pay off the favor while he paid off the loan. Then Van had needed something from Cal, and even if Cal had wanted to say no—and he hadn’t, he’d bought in 100 percent—he couldn’t have done it.

  Logan shrugged his opinion with a dismissive tilt of his shoulders.

  “She’s not like that.”

  “She.” Cal hadn’t missed that. Maybe Edward was right, then. That would wake the harsh old man.

  “What’s she like, then?”

  Logan rubbed his hand over the side of his face. “Good,” he said. “Kind, like. Not to me, either, to Asha.”

  “His girlfriend,” Maggie interrupted again. She looked around at Logan and pursed her lips sympathetically. “She has leukemia.”

  “It’s the best sort to get,” Logan explained brusquely. The words spluttered out of him on autopilot, something he’d learned by hopeful rote. “If you’re gonna get cancer, you want this one, right? She’s really sick, but she’s gonna get better.”

  He said it like he needed to believe it.

  “That’s where you met this woman with a grudge against Joe?”

  “She’s his ex,” Logan said. He scratched at his elbows as he shifted in the chair. He glanced up to give Cal a hard look. “He used to beat her up, this mate of yours. I’ve seen the scars. Then he came back, started threatening her all the time and sending people to watch her. He was a real perv. And she didn’t ask me to do anything. I said I’d do it. I wanted to help her like she helped Asha.

  “Scars?”

  Logan held his arms up to show his forearms. “All up her arms, like he burned her or something.”
<
br />   Cal hesitated as he tried to pull the threads of the story into something that made sense. The ex part implicated Kristen, but how would she meet a kid with leukemia in London? She didn’t have any scars that Cal had noticed either, and the description hardly fit someone desperate to turn up at her ex’s hotel and tell him they weren’t broken up.

  But there was one person in the story who was involved with a cancer charity.

  “Do you mean Abigail?” Cal asked reluctantly. He had liked her, with her massive glasses and careful sympathy, even if she wasn’t Joe’s mother. She’d seemed kind, but Cal had assumed that because she was at a cancer fund-raiser. “Abigail Beranger?”

  “Naw,’ Logan said with a flash of annoyance at Cal for not getting it. “Not Missus B. It was her daughter. Daisy. The redhead.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  JOE SAT on the low, leather chair in his bedroom and stared blankly at his computer. The police had come, taken some notes, promised to call if they found anything, and gone again. It had taken all of ten minutes. Now all Joe had left to do was call Harry and fill him in. Skype was open on the screen, Harry’s profile pulled up, and all Joe had to do was hit the phone icon. That was all he’d had to do for the last half hour.

  He took a drink of coffee—the harsh, strong brew from the hotel room’s machine somewhere between what he needed and what he deserved—and wondered what to say when his dad answered.

  “Edward was hit by a car,” Joe said aloud to the empty room. “I’m gay, and I found out my dead mother isn’t dead or my mother. Busy week.”

  Maybe Harry would have another stroke, Joe thought bitterly, and die. Then none of them would have to deal with it.

  Despite everything, the thought of Harry being dead caught at Joe’s heart with a mixture of guilt and fear. Harry might be a liar, but he was still Joe’s dad, the only family he had. Joe didn’t want to call Harry, because he would actually have to ask him about all the lies, and he was scared about what the answers might be.

  Before he had to bite the bullet and get on with it, someone hammered on the door. Joe knew it wasn’t Cal, since Cal had a key, but his heart still jumped with anticipation. Maybe he’d forgotten his keys or had his hands full?

  Joe knew he hadn’t, but it was an excuse to slap the lid of the laptop down and go find out. He glanced at himself in the mirror and grimaced at the raw scrape, the edges bruised blue, along his jaw. He looked like a twelve-year-old who’d tried to shave for the first time, but there wasn’t much to do about it.

  He pulled the suite door open and stared in surprise at Kristen—not who he’d hoped to see, and he was used to the faint guilt of that, although he supposed it wasn’t warranted now that they were officially exes. And she was not who he expected to see either.

  “Kris—”

  “You can go to Hell!” she blurted as she threw something small and glitter bright at his face. “And you can stick that up your ass.”

  Joe fumbled the ring out of the air. The edges of it cut into his palm as he clenched his fingers around it. His temper spluttered in confusion, ready to ignite but not quite sure where to go.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he asked.

  “You told the police I’d followed you to England? That I stalked you?” Kristen took a step back from the door and raked her fingers through her hair. It tangled around her fingers as she shook her head in disbelief. “I loved you. I came to England because I didn’t understand why you didn’t love me anymore. Maybe I’d have liked to get back together, if we could, but what I wanted was to understand why. That’s not stalking. It’s normal. It’s fucking normal! How dare you try and make me out to be crazy when you’re the one who lied and ran off and cheated!”

  Joe glared at her. “You think the fact you got on a plane would make me call you a stalker?”

  “What then? That I wanted you back? That I wanted you to talk to me?” Kristen shoved him with both hands in frustration. “You told me that you loved me, then you told me you never did. I needed an answer. That’s not stalking, you asshole.”

  Doubt picked at the edges of Edward’s theory. It had already been frayed when the police asked if he knew anyone who wanted to hurt him, but it had still seemed convincing. Now it had unraveled enough that it was on the verge of coming apart. What did Kristen have to gain from this little show of angry innocence? The breakup was done and dusted. He’d already told the police what he knew.

  The hurt in her eyes seemed real. It made Joe feel as bad as it always had.

  “You’re saying you didn’t send the letters?” he asked her. “Courier me the bear?”

  Kristen blinked back tears. “What letters? What bear?” Her expression was curious as her eyes drifted over the lines of his face. Whatever she saw made her lips tremble before she pressed them together in a tight line. She took a step back from the door. “You think I’d do something like that? Harass you? Fuck you, Joe, but thank you for my answer. You never loved me at all.”

  She turned on her heel and stalked away. The last threads of Edward’s theory fell apart in Joe’s head, and he was left with a handful of accusations and guilt.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Kristen jabbed the Call button on the elevator and then looked back at him. “For what?”

  He put his hands in his pockets. “I shouldn’t have listened to Edward. I should have known you weren’t behind any of this,” he said. “It was … at least if you’d done it, I knew something. I knew why.”

  “Is that all?”

  “No. I’m sorry for a lot of things, for hurting you,” Joe admitted. He glanced away from her and chewed the inside of his cheek. It might have been a lie, what they had, but it had been one Joe had convinced himself was true. “I did love you, Kris… like a friend, like a sister. I thought that would be enough. Now I know it wasn’t even close. I’m sorry.”

  She wiped her hand over her face, tracks of tear-pink skin visible through her make-up. The elevator chimed softly as the doors opened.

  “You can shove that up your ass too, Joseph Bailey,” Kristen spat at him as she got on the elevator. She jabbed an impatient finger against the button to send it down. “I never hurt you. I never would. I hope you’re happy, Joe, and I hope you know that you don’t deserve it.”

  The doors slid shut before Joe could say anything. He leaned against the doorframe and listened to the soft growl of the elevator as it went down. Something itched at him, down under the guilt and embarrassment.

  What did his stalker think they deserved? It had been easy to blame Kristen, because it at least made some sort of sense. He wronged her and she lashed out to let him know that his mother wouldn’t have been proud of him—to get her own back, to have her satisfaction.

  If it wasn’t her, then all of this had, after all, been about Joe’s mother’s death and his father’s lies. But Joe was the one who wanted to know the truth about that. His abusive pen pal already did, or believed they did. So they had to want something else out of it.

  Joe avoided his room and the quietly expectant computer and went into the small, well-appointed kitchenette to pick through the room-service breakfast he’d had no appetite for until now. The chilled orange juice and hot coffee had met in the middle and settled on tepid. The scrambled eggs had congealed. The granola was still granola, but once he’d ladled in the yogurt and fruit, he realized he still had no appetite for it. He pushed it away.

  Most of the time, he had a knack for this sort of task. It was a useful talent for a troubleshooter. People were rarely glad to see you turn up at their business, but once you knew what to offer them, that changed.

  He usually had something to work with. He had done his due diligence on the business and employees and, more importantly, he knew what he could and couldn’t do to get them what they wanted. All he knew about whoever sent him burned bears in the mail was that they were angry.

  What was Joe supposed to do about that? Back then he’d been a baby. He couldn’t influen
ce what happened. And while hindsight was twenty-twenty, even if he had the full story, he didn’t know what he could do to fix anything now.

  Take a leaf from Harry’s book and throw money at it. He poured himself a coffee.

  He paused midpour, the french press dangling from his fingers as something finally clicked—the file that Bea had given him the other day. Joe left the coffee to cool and stalked back into his bedroom.

  Yesterday it seemed like a distraction. If it was important, he’d assumed, then once he found Abigail, she’d be able to explain why. But it turned out she didn’t know much more than him. That left this.

  Joe unearthed the file from the drawer he’d tucked it into and emptied the contents onto the bed. He impatiently spread them out over the heavy quilt until he found the stapled-together report from the latest survey on the property.

  The address was printed on the top sheet in rounded, careful block capitals, underneath a low-res photograph of the house itself.

  Maybe Joe didn’t know what his abusive pen pal wanted or imagined they were due, but for over twenty years, his father had thought someone deserved this white-plastered suburban house with the small, aggressively neat lawn. In the same way that Harry had put a roof over his own son’s head, he’d made sure this family in Reading had room and board.

  Maybe….

  When Bea suggested it was guilt that motivated the regular-as-clockwork monthly deposits, Jack had dismissed it. He might have been wrong, although he thought Harry’s guilt wasn’t for what Bea thought it was. Maybe Harry and Abigail weren’t the only family the affair had split up.

  He texted Cal—twice. Nervous energy propelled him around the suite four times between the first text and the last. When he didn’t hear back in ten minutes—his brain at odds between the bittersweet acknowledgment that Cal owed him nothing and the bitter grudge that Cal did owe him transport—Joe called an Uber instead.

  The app gave him twenty minutes. He left his phone on the coffee table, the app open to watch the cartoon car jerkily etch-a-sketch itself along the rendered streets, while he pulled a jacket on over his dark gray T-shirt and laced up his running shoes. When he checked his phone, the estimated time of arrival had jumped. He had five minutes to get down in the elevator and through the hotel’s long, bare corridors. And still no text from Cal.