by Sidney Bell
“Huh.”
“The real question,” Tobias mused, “is what would Mama want Ghost to do to or for Spratt and his team?”
“Probably nothing good.”
Tobias hung his towel up, then froze, arms still extended. “Oh. Oh, jeez. That’s gotta be it.”
Sullivan lifted his eyebrows. “Well?”
Tobias spun around. “Blackmail.”
“You have a predilection you should look into,” Sullivan said, only half joking, but at the same time, Tobias’s answer struck him as sound. “Makes sense, though. Why else does someone involved in organized crime send a prostitute to the top cop in your city? To get him under your thumb. Even if he’s clean until that point, a few pictures of the guy with a hooker’s not going to look good. Mama would know that her kind of business can be investigated on the federal level, too, so it wouldn’t be enough that Spratt has guys in Internal Affairs. RICO statutes, you know? She’d be aware that Spratt would want to keep any connections to Ghost quiet, because the Feds wouldn’t hesitate to take a hard look at him if there was even a whiff of questionable activity. And if Mama had reason to believe that Spratt would fall for the noble, suffering hustler routine as long as Ghost was the hustler in question, it makes sense that he alone could get the job done. Damn, that’s playing the long game, though.”
“Ghost wouldn’t mind screwing over a cop that way.” Tobias’s mouth turned soft and worried. “But your fake client asked Spratt if they’d made progress with Ghost. If Ghost could trust someone who was doing whatever Spratt’s been doing to him. What if they figured out why he’s really there? God, what if they’ve hurt him?”
“Hey, now.” Sullivan kissed his temple. “He’s still alive, at least. They can’t be treating him too badly or he’d never trust them. And you said Spratt talked about him needing to feel safe, right? We’ve got a little time, at least. Yeah?”
Tobias nodded. His lips landed, sweet and warm, against Sullivan’s collarbone.
Sullivan rested his forehead against Tobias’s for a second before forcing himself to pull away. “Spratt’s the link to Mama, though. She’s not going to be concerned with a couple of mid-rank cops when she can go after the big fish. Let’s start with him. Let’s figure out what he’s up to.”
After two hours with the county courthouse property records, Sullivan grabbed his keys.
Benjamin Spratt owned a townhouse roughly ten minutes away in Capitol Hill.
* * *
Sitting in the car was delicious torture.
Tobias’s buttocks were sore. Like, absurdly sore. And if he rocked his weight without thinking, the sudden remembrance of why the pain was there sent heat flooding through his whole body. At this rate, he’d be hard half the day.
Or maybe not. As they drove downtown, his phone rang. His manman.
“You gonna get that?” Sullivan asked, turning the radio down. More of that gritty seventies stuff he liked.
Tobias stared at the screen. He was still enjoying the centered stillness he’d gotten from the scene last night, and he wasn’t sure he was up for more argument. “No. I think—no. Should I?”
“That’s up to you, sweetheart.”
That—he glanced at Sullivan, startled. He’d called Tobias sweetheart before, of course. A bunch of times, by this point. But never outside of the bedroom. Never like this, casually, like the pet name was more than a tool in their BDSM toolbox.
Sullivan was startled, too, his brown eyes going wide where they were watching the road. The silence grew awkward until they hit a red light, when Sullivan looked over, his eyes tracing Tobias’s expression. “I didn’t—that just came out. Sorry.”
“No,” Tobias said quickly. “I don’t mind.”
“No?”
“I like it when you call me that.” Tobias’s heart was thundering, warmth crawling up into his face. He liked it a lot, and never more so than here, in completely ordinary circumstances, as far from the bedroom as they could be. “Don’t be embarrassed, please.”
Sullivan cleared his throat. “Cool.”
Tobias grinned, then glanced at his phone. She’d left a voicemail, and maybe he couldn’t handle arguing, but he could at least listen, couldn’t he?
He put in his code and held his breath. Her voice was tinny over the line and she sounded tired. Resigned, maybe.
“Tobias, it’s me. I wanted to speak with you about what happened on the phone with your papa yesterday. I—” She broke off and sighed. “We’re at such cross-purposes these days. It seems like we can’t stop hurting each other, doesn’t it? But I want you to know that we aren’t going to stop trying. We love you, and if you have things you want to tell us, we’ll listen. We can’t promise we’ll understand or agree, but we’ll listen. I hope... I hope you’ll call, cheri.”
She hung up, and Tobias lowered the phone to his lap.
If he looked back on the call with his papa logically, he could admit that a big part of the meltdown that followed had been about the fear of rejection. He’d learned about it in therapy, not that it took a genius to figure it out. Lots of adopted kids struggled with that, and he was no different. One of his earliest memories was—embarrassingly—of having a tantrum when he was four or five because his parents had closed their bedroom door in his face without realizing he’d been following them inside. It’d been such a tiny thing, entirely accidental, but he’d broken down completely, too young to know why he was so upset.
He also remembered Manman singing “Dodo Titit” to him, drying the tears from his cheeks with kisses and brushing his hair away from his hot face. He was loved, he knew it. His papa hanging up on him had hurt him in a place he was vulnerable, yes, but he’d never have done it if he’d realized how deep it would cut. Besides, Tobias couldn’t expect the world to rotate around his issues; that was his responsibility and no one else’s—his responsibility to make clear, and his responsibility to cope with.
For a moment he felt such a visceral longing for her and Papa and home that his chest tightened. He saved the message and thought, later. They might not be good at listening, but they would try, and that was all you could ask of someone, really.
And if worse came to worst and they pressured him to resume his studies for medical school, he’d say no. It wouldn’t be easy, and it might change things irrevocably, but Sullivan had been right last night. Maintaining that boundary didn’t make him wrong, and it didn’t make him cruel. It made him himself, and if they truly loved him, they would love him even like this.
Sullivan was also right that it was unfair to expect them to change their behavior unthinkingly when he’d never set boundaries before. Unfair to get angry when they did as they had always done, what he had never protested.
Yes, they had made decisions for him as if he were still a child.
But he had let them. For far, far too long. He wished he knew why. Why had it been so impossible for him to stand up for his own hopes and interests? He’d known he was loved. When they’d realized they couldn’t have the children they wanted, the children they could make together, his parents had done an amazingly decent thing to adopt him. They loved him. They wouldn’t kick him out of the family for being too much trouble now that their legal responsibility to him was done.
He knew that.
He’d never trusted it though. Despite all the evidence, he’d never stepped out onto the uncertain ice and trusted them all to remain intact.
None of them were guiltless.
In fact, there wasn’t a single relationship in his life where he’d done that, he thought now. No one in the whole world where he’d just been his entirely messy self and trusted that the other person wouldn’t walk. Church probably came closest, but even with him, Tobias still watched that line. He wasn’t himself with anyone except for...
Sullivan.
Tobias had done and said exactly what he wante
d over the past two weeks with Sullivan, and Sullivan had never flinched. Despite Tobias’s attempt to blackmail him, despite his massive amounts of drama, despite shoving him and arguing with him and impulsively breaking the rules they’d agreed on in the beginning of this thing, Sullivan was still here.
Sullivan liked him, mess and all.
Just like Tobias liked him.
Not that Sullivan had much mess to him. Except for his insecurities about what he liked in bed—which Tobias would punch his ex in the nose for if he ever saw the jerk—Sullivan pretty well had his shit together. He certainly wasn’t making his decisions because of extenuating circumstances. This was who he was, and Tobias really, really liked him.
What came over him then wasn’t the itch he’d been struggling with for weeks and weeks. It wasn’t desperation. It wasn’t some temporary, maddening thing. It was a quiet awareness of what could be.
After this case wrapped up, Tobias could rebuild his life into something closer to his own ideas of happiness. He could be the guy who studied...well, he wasn’t sure yet, but something other than medicine. He could study whatever and get a job he liked and hang out with his friends. He could volunteer in the community, because he wanted to help people, but he could do it in a way that didn’t make him anxious or resentful. He could keep dating Sullivan, too. He could listen to him talk about weird, rambling subjects and make sure the fridge was stocked with healthy snacks so Sullivan wasn’t eating bare pieces of bread because he wasn’t paying attention, and he could sass back enough to make Sullivan’s face go dark and aggressive before he reached for the paddle.
Wow.
It stole his breath. The possibility of it all. The potential happiness waiting to be grabbed. And Sullivan could definitely be part of it.
He should be part of it.
He opened his mouth to tell him exactly that, only for Sullivan to say, “Few more blocks, I think.”
“What?”
Sullivan jerked his chin toward the building beyond the windshield. “The place where Spratt lives. Next block. Keep your eyes open for places where we can sit and watch the street without getting busted.”
Right. Work. Ghost. Tobias bit his tongue. It wasn’t really the time for that conversation, anyway. He’d need time to explain it right, especially if Sullivan had any doubts. And if everything did work out, Sullivan might want to have sex after.
He couldn’t even imagine what Sullivan might choose to do, but it would be good. He shifted his weight, and pain sparked through his buttocks and up his spine and he shivered a little. It would be so good.
Fortunately, Sullivan was being professional and was therefore oblivious to the sheer number of small epiphanies Tobias was experiencing. On their second trip down the street past Spratt’s townhouse, he pulled into a tiny alley that led to a small parking lot behind a diner bustling with early lunch-goers. The large front window would offer a good view of the red door across the street marked 2600 C, the address in Spratt’s name in the courthouse property records.
They couldn’t spend the whole day in the diner, of course. It was likely Spratt wouldn’t be back for hours yet, and while it bugged Tobias to be reduced once again to sitting and waiting, he knew this would be far less effort than trying to track Spratt’s or the balding man’s locations down through the department. Even Tobias’s limited experience was enough to be sure that poking around a police station and then surveilling it would be logistical nightmare, assuming they didn’t get busted.
After eating, they left on foot, window shopping nearby, never out of sight of the townhouse, before going back to sit in the car for a few hours. The small parking lot was tucked away between two small stores and there wasn’t much traffic. Sullivan took some pictures, then got out his binoculars to peer through the first-floor windows. “He’s definitely not home. Nice place, though,” Sullivan said, handing the binoculars to Tobias so he could take peek. “Bet that television cost him a few thousand.”
“He’s very neat,” Tobias noted. “There’s nothing left out anywhere. He doesn’t seem to own much, but what’s there looks like it costs a fortune.”
“I read that minimalism as an aesthetic can be linked to social class.” Sullivan peered across the street at pedestrians. “It’s easy to get rid of things you aren’t using if you have enough money to buy what you might need at any given moment. Whereas if you’ve been poor, it causes cognitive dissonance to get rid of things, because you’re afraid that if it turns out later that you need it after all, you might not be able to afford to replace it. Weirdly, having less stuff requires having more money. And in this other thing, I read...hold up. Is that—shit, that’s Tidwell.”
He snatched the binoculars out of Tobias’s hand, leaving Tobias to squint uselessly at a balding figure walking down the sidewalk. “That looks like the back of somebody’s head. I have no idea if that’s Tidwell.”
“It is. He was wearing the same coat at the picnic.”
Tobias glanced at him and admitted—if only to himself—that he was a little turned on by Sullivan’s observational skills. “Good catch.”
“Uh-huh. Hey, look who has a key.”
“I can’t look. You took the binoculars.”
“I bet you can make an educated guess. It rhymes with bidwell.”
Tobias gnawed on his lip. “Would you give an underling a key to your very expensive townhouse?”
“I tend to live in places that have holes in the walls and I’ve never had an underling, so I’m not one to judge.”
Once inside, Tidwell stood right by the front door for a good ten seconds. “What the heck is he doing?” Tobias asked, unable to see. “Is he staring at the door? Fiddling with the wall?”
“Alarm system, I bet.”
Made sense—only a few seconds later Tidwell turned away and went deeper into the living room. Tobias said, “That means he has the code. Spratt’s got to know he’s here.”
They traced Tidwell’s progress through the windows; he was in the kitchen for a while, putting a plate together with a sandwich on it, then disappeared downstairs. He came back up about fifteen minutes later, made a second sandwich that he ate at the counter before cleaning up, resetting the alarm, locking the door behind him and vanishing down the cement steps that led to the parking garage.
Tobias closed his eyes and tried to breathe. “He’s in there. Ghost’s in that townhouse somewhere.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Come on. Give me one other guess who it could be, if not Ghost?”
“The whole point is that you’re guessing. We need proof before we do anything.”
“And in the meantime he’s just stuck in there? Sullivan, if he had free rein of the place, he could make his own sandwich. He’s...he’s tied up or something. We have to help him.”
Sullivan sank back into his seat. He watched Spratt’s townhouse for a long, quiet minute. “You know this is shitty, right?”
“Of course it’s bad. He’s in trouble.”
Sullivan still didn’t look at him. “I didn’t mean...whatever. If. If he’s in there. And even then, we don’t know that we’d actually be helping him.”
Tobias frowned, wondering what he did mean, but then the rest of the sentence caught up with him. “You think he wants to be there?”
“You think he’ll thank you if he’s been working the situation for a month to get to wherever he is and we blunder in and ruin it because we think we know best?”
“Sullivan—”
“And you’re the one who keeps saying Nathalie’s alive and with Mama—”
“She is, it’s the only thing that makes sense—”
“So what happens if breaking in to Spratt’s house falls back on her in some way. Ghost isn’t my only responsibility here.”
“Or helping Ghost could give us a lead to finding her.”
“I’m not saying it won’t. I’m saying not yet. We don’t know enough to be sure that we won’t make things worse. I don’t think we’ll do him or ourselves any favors if we yank him out of there and it screws something up for Mama.”
“I don’t understand why you’re fighting this. It’s like you don’t want him to be in there.”
“Of course I don’t want him to be in there,” Sullivan snapped. “Do you...haven’t you put together what’s going to happen if he is tied up in the basement? Don’t you get what you’re signing us up for? So don’t blame me for wanting to double-check everything first. We don’t know enough yet.”
No, Tobias hadn’t considered what would happen next, what it would mean if Ghost was being held there against his will. He’d only thought of finally finding him, and suddenly the size of the whole thing hit hard. Look at how much time and effort the redheaded cop had put into finding Nathalie; look at the lengths Spratt would go to in order to get what he wanted. They wouldn’t give Ghost up easily. If they weren’t careful, Tobias and Sullivan would have these two dodging their every step, and with every advantage of the system that a cop could finagle.
He tipped his head against the passenger window. The glass was hot against his face, and through it he focused on the red door of Spratt’s townhouse. “We’re so close,” he murmured.
“So let’s not fall on our faces at the finish line. We confirm he’s there first.”
They sat in the car for another hour, then parked someplace else and sat there for another hour. They didn’t talk much; Tobias was vaguely annoyed—more with the reality of the situation than Sullivan specifically—and he suspected Sullivan was aware of it and was giving him the space to deal with it. It was thoughtful, and later, when he wasn’t as frustrated, he would appreciate it.
Eventually, near dinner time, when the staff at the diner had changed shifts, they went back to eat again. They were wrapping up a late, interminable meal and guiltily ignoring their exasperated waitress when Spratt emerged from the stairwell leading to underground parking across the street.
