by TA Moore
Kelly shrugged. “You’d have told me not to go.”
“I’d have been right,” Cole said. “You didn’t go.”
That wasn’t entirely the point. Kelly let it go anyway. Some things weren’t worth the argument.
“So Maxie’s with his dad tonight, right?” Cole asked. “How’s that going?”
“Great. Byron said he’d spend the night with him at Wil and Molly’s. I left Maxie there earlier.” Kelly pulled his phone out to check for any updates from his second-oldest brother and his second wife. “Yeah, he ghosted. Molly says she’ll drop him back at mine tomorrow.”
“It’s his job,” Cole said with a sigh. “It’s hard enough being a cop. Being undercover is twice as bad. Byron can’t always just take a night off, not if it would jeopardize his cover or lose him a lead. You know that.”
“It’s his son.” Kelly took a swig of Guinness to try and wash the words out of his throat. It didn’t work. “He could take one night off. The department could pull him out if he wanted.”
That was off script. They both knew it.
“Mom said you dropped Maxie off with them for the day last week,” Cole said to change the subject. “She said you had a job? I thought you’d taken time off.”
“I didn’t think Mom minded.”
“She didn’t,” Cole insisted. “But you know she can’t take Maxie for long. With Dad’s health, he can’t cope with a baby in the house.”
“Dad was at work.”
“I know, but you know that Dad can’t cope with Maxie right now. It just ends up in a row with Mom about Byron and… everything, and he doesn’t need the stress. We don’t want him back in the hospital, do we?”
“No.”
Cole reached over the table and scruffed the back of Kelly’s neck with casual affection. “I know it’s not fair. Okay? Byron will sort himself out, Mom will hook him up with someone who can be a new mom to Maxie, and then it will calm down. If you need a break, call me or Wilde and tell your work to go to hell. Not like the world is going to end if some cheating husband gets his end away, right?”
“You know that’s not all I do, right?” Kelly asked.
Cole laughed and let go. “I know, I know how hard you work, kid,” he said. “But it’s not like you’re stopping murderers, is it? You can take a vacation.”
“Yeah, well, Clayton’s a… friend.”
“A… friend?” Cole asked. He grimaced. “You’re fooling nobody, kid. Last Thanksgiving you talked about this Clayton guy—what a great lawyer he is, how he does all this pro bono work with battered women, the nice suits he wears—more than you did Liam. A crush is one thing, though, but you’re not dating one of that turncoat Baker’s boy toys. You can do better than that. Look. New guy at the precinct’s supposed to, you know, swing your way sometimes. He’s Catholic and all, so Mom will be happy. You want me to put a good word in? Talk you up a bit? Leave out the shit stuff?”
There were probably worse things, but Kelly couldn’t think of any. “No.”
“It’s no trouble,” Cole said cheerfully. “He’s probably coming to the next barbecue at Mom and Dad’s. You know how Dad is about making the new guys feel welcome. I’ll introduce you.”
Kelly shook his head and sucked down a gulp of Guinness. “I can find my own boyfriends.”
Before Cole could press his case, the first notes of “Mack the Knife” trilled from Kelly’s pocket as his phone jittered against his hip.
“I gotta take this,” Kelly said. “Then I’d better head out.”
He drained the rest of the pint and stood up. Cole followed suit and dragged him into a rough hug, complete with backslap.
“Let me know if you need any help.” Cole stepped back and mock-slapped his face again. “And don’t block with your face.”
“Asshole.”
“Jerk.”
Kelly left Cole to finish his pint as he wove through the customers between him and the door. The bar had been empty, or near enough, when they limped it, but the clock had ticked past seven, and ESPN’s pregame coverage of a hockey match was up on screens behind the bar.
He dodged around a tired woman in a suit. His shoulder hit a man in his blind spot by the bar, and he twisted around to bring him into view. “Sorry!” he said and held up his phone. The dial tone had gone dead, and the red Missed Call hung on the screen. “I have to make a call.”
The guy wiped liquor off his mustache with finger and thumb. “You made me spill my fucking drink.”
He wasn’t drunk enough—yet—to hit aggressive without a run-up. Kelly clapped him on the shoulder.
“Sorry, man. I didn’t see you,” he said. A wave of his free hand caught the bartender’s attention. “Get the guy a refill would you, Mike? On my brother.”
Behind the bar, Mike shrugged and did as he was told. The shouldered man looked a bit put out that it had been settled so quickly, but his friends dragged him to the bar to mumble sourly over his fresh drink.
Kelly pushed through the line at the door and out onto the pavement. Hot night. The temperature hung in the air like moisture, sticky in his mouth as he breathed. Sweat broke on the back of his neck as he walked away from the clatter and chatter of the bar to dial Clayton back.
Cars growled by along the road. Locals went past at high speed in desert dust as they raced the lights home or to the pub while fresh tourists crawled nervously along from the rental place in SUVs with maps plastered up against windshields.
A couple of loitering kids, poser toughs in new Converse and custom-made skull-grin bandanas, gave him a sidelong look as he stopped. After a quick assessment of him—old phone, older jeans, the newest things about him the bruises on his knuckles and jaw—they decided he didn’t have anything worth the hassle of running away afterward.
Clayton picked up the phone after two rings.
“Hey,” Kelly said. “What you need?”
“I will owe you for this,” Clayton said grimly.
“For what?”
There was a pause. Kelly couldn’t see it, but he’d watched Clayton in enough meetings to imagine the way he pinched his nose.
“Apparently there’s been some developments in the Graham case. Can you meet me at the Saint Bernard’s Shelter?”
It begged for a joke—something about dogs and commitment that invited flirty banter. But there was something in Clayton’s voice that sounded almost brittle, somewhere between angry and frustrated. It felt like intimacy, and even though Kelly knew it wasn’t, he couldn’t quite convince himself to shatter the illusion.
“Where?” he asked.
“Why do we pay you again?”
“I can find out, but it will be quicker if you tell me,” Kelly said. He’d already turned and had his hand out to hail a passing taxi. The driver gave him the same assessment as the wannabe toughs and came to the same conclusion. Behind the dirty windshield, the red-faced man glanced away and kept going. “Fucker.”
“What?”
“Not you.”
The next taxi had nowhere better to be. He pulled in, and Kelly climbed in as Clayton clipped the address off in his ear.
THE LITTLE boy wasn’t crying.
Kelly would have been, at that age, maybe even now. He stalled in the doorway as Mrs. Park, the small, tight-mouthed woman who’d let him into the building, pushed past him with the first-aid kit.
The boy’s mother—Nadine, Kelly recalled from the background check, a dropout from a place more trailer park than town out in the desert—sat on the sagging old plaid couch and bled apologetically into a wadded-up tie as Clayton crouched next to her and held it to her face. She looked like she’d been tossed through a car window, with bloody scrapes on her face and arms. Someone had torn the earrings out of her ears and left the lobes split and raw, and from the amount of blood on the blue cotton jacket, she had a broken nose under the crumpled folds of patterned silk.
“I’m sorry,” she muttered through the cloth. It was a monotone litany of self-blame th
at shortcut its way around anyone else yelling at her. “I shouldn’t have come. I know I didn’t listen to you. I brought this on myself. I know I did. I know. I just didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“That doesn’t matter now,” Clayton told her. He gratefully surrendered his position at Nadine’s side to Mrs. Park and her first-aid kit. A glance and a nod acknowledged Kelly’s arrival and told him to wait a minute. Kelly couldn’t help the distracted flicker of interest at Clayton with his collar undone and his sleeves rolled back from his wrists. It was the closest to casual Kelly had seen on him. He pushed that aside for later and focused his attention back on the room. “Just let Maureen clean you up. Okay? Then we’ll decide what to do.”
Kelly winced as Mrs. Park carefully peeled the makeshift bandage off Nadine’s face. Fresh blood poured out of a nose that hadn’t so much been broken as crushed. It was swollen and canted toward her cheek, with shades of bruise pooled under the skin and around her eyes.
She flinched as the wet cotton wool touched her lip and clenched her hands into fists on her knees. A whine worked its way out of her throat.
“We’ll need to get—” Clayton started.
“Can’t it wait? She’s—” Mrs. Park interrupted as Nadine ducked the wad of cotton wool again.
The “Sorry. I’m sorry” plaint of Nadine’s raw apologies cut under both of them.
It was the kid who shut them all up. “Are you a cop?” he asked abruptly as he stared at Kelly with his jaw set. “Dad says we shouldn’t talk to cops.”
Nadine tried to bolt up off the couch. “No. I told you.” She couldn’t quite make it to her feet and sank back into the cushions. Color flushed up her cheekbones and into her temples as she tried to bat away Mrs. Park’s hands. Her voice cracked and spiraled up toward panic. “I told you and told you. I can’t talk to the police, and I can’t go to the hospital. I can’t. For Harry’s sake.”
“I’m not a cop.” Kelly stepped forward and held his hands up. He cracked a grin that hurt the bruise on his jaw. “I’m way too short,” he joked.
Nadine nearly choked on a startled laugh. She pressed the back of her hand to her bruised lips. The white cast that ran from thumb to elbow was grubby and badly cracked. She studied him with bloodshot blue eyes full of watery suspicion.
“Really?”
“I’m a private investigator,” he said calmly. “I work for Mr. Reynolds. He asked me to come and help.”
She blinked hard and took a deep, shuddery breath and then nodded sharply. “Okay. Okay. I’m sorry. I just can’t go to the police. I need help, that’s all. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Kelly said. “We all need help sometimes.”
“Not like this.” Nadine wiped her nose on her fingers. “People don’t let their lives get out of hand like this. Not good people.”
“You’d be surprised. I see a lot of good people in bad places,” Clayton said. “Will you be okay with Maureen for a minute? I need to talk to Kelly.”
Nadine gave a very small nod but kept her trembling lips pressed together. Mrs. Park squeezed her knee gently. “She’ll be fine,” she said.
The kid crawled up on the couch and fiercely hugged Nadine’s good arm. “It’s all right, Mom,” he said. “It’s all right. We did the right thing.”
She leaned into him and rested her cheek on the top of his head. Blood dripped onto him, but neither of them seemed to notice. “I’m sorry, baby. I should have done better.”
Clayton scrubbed his forearm roughly over his face and then jerked his chin for Kelly to follow him into the hall. There was a dog barking somewhere in the building, a persistent yip that echoed off the high ceilings.
“Did her husband do that to her?” Kelly asked after he pulled the door shut behind him.
“She says no.” Clayton frowned at his bloody hands as though he weren’t sure what to do with them. He spread his fingers, grimaced, and then rubbed them roughly against each other. It smeared the blood into thinner patches, and dry scabs of it worked into the skin of his knuckles. When they were as clean as he could get them, he crossed his arms. Lean muscle corded tightly in his forearms. “That might be a lie. She’s definitely scared that he’ll find her.”
Kelly rubbed his thumb along his jaw, where a day’s worth of stubble was rough as his thumb raked through it. He assumed that last part was why he was there.
“Not here?” he asked as he glanced around. The industrial beige walls were shabby with age and dented old damage—most of it the sharp-edged chips and scrapes of general wear, but a few deep and fist shaped.
“Apparently he knows she was here.”
“Tracker on her phone,” Kelly said immediately. He pulled a rueful face as he added, “Or she just didn’t think to turn off location services. People don’t.”
“If I’m going to be her lawyer, I can’t afford to have the appearance of impropriety. I know this isn’t part of your usual—”
“It has been,” Kelly said. He grinned when Clayton gave him a dubious look. “We don’t always do family law. Baker’s clients tend to be a bit more… precarious.”
The spare room at Kelly’s was empty. Clients had crashed there before, when something had gone unexpectedly and sharply south with their litigations. But he couldn’t justify that with Maxie in the house. Even if Nadine and her son were harmless, the ex clearly wasn’t.
“There’s a secure house we use sometimes,” Kelly said. “My brother’s ex is a Realtor. She sorted it out for us. It’s mostly just for people to sit in before we drive them to court, and there’s not much in there, but it would do for a couple of days until you sort something out. I can get Larry to change the alarm remotely so we can get in.”
Some of the wire-strung tension went out of Clayton once he had a solution in hand. Not all of it, but enough to drop his shoulders slightly. “That works,” he said. “I would have put her in a hotel but….”
“You don’t have the firm for a buffer,” Kelly said. “It would look more suspicious than her taking your couch.”
Clayton smiled grimly. “Even though the last time I was a danger to a woman’s virtue was when I tried to convince my foster sister to steal a soy sauce pot as a souvenir from our favorite Chinese restaurant.”
“Clayton Reynolds breaking the rules?” Kelly asked with dry skepticism. “I find that hard to believe.”
The smile on Clayton’s face flared into a grin, just for a second, and then faded into something thoughtful. He skimmed his pale gray eyes over Kelly in a once-over so quick it could have been Kelly’s imagination. Or, Kelly supposed, his height might mean it didn’t take that long to get from his head to his crotch.
“Sometimes you stick to the rules because you know how good it feels when you break them,” Clayton said roughly, “and how bad it turns out.”
It sounded more like a warning than a come-on. If it was, it didn’t work. Kelly didn’t think he’d ever been anyone’s bad decision, but he wouldn’t mind finding out what it would be like. Before he could put that tug of want into words, Clayton shrugged the moment off.
“We should go,” he said. “I want to get Nadine and Harry settled. Then, if you have time, we can discuss what else I can wring out of that favor.”
The thought of Nadine’s battered face—the broken nose and tear-raw cheeks—was better than a bucket of cold water. His dad always said domestic violence calls were the hardest. Not the worst—he’d seen worse things in his career—but hard because you knew that the black eye and the broken arm or the bloody legs and bruised face were only about halfway to how bad things would get. They were also dangerous—for the cop and the victim.
When Kelly did the background check, he found that the broken arm was Nadine’s first “walked into a door” hospital visit. It obviously wouldn’t be her last if she went back again.
“Don’t worry about it,” Kelly said. “Whatever you need to get her safe.”
Chapter Five
CHILDREN LEARNED by example. Loo
k at Kelly, who’d probably learned to be a Boy Scout, to make friends, to do the right thing, to help people, all at his dad’s knee. He probably had heartwarming stories about it.
Other kids only had bad examples. Baker had learned from his mom that brandy was dandy but liquor was quicker. Harry knew that, despite everything that the TV, his teachers, and his books wanted to tell him, not every kid got “The World’s Best Dad.”
Clayton had learned early on that when something in your life wasn’t going how you wanted, the only appropriate reaction was to fuck someone else over. It didn’t help, but at least someone was worse off than you, and that was something.
That impulse—kicked off by frustration and familiarity—wasn’t why he wanted to shove Kelly against a wall and kiss the earnest off that full, ridiculously unkissed mouth. It was just more ammunition for his cock.
He did best to ignore the temptation as they got Nadine cleaned up and ready to go.
“But I need my phone,” Nadine protested when Kelly asked for it. She squeezed her fingers around the narrow square of plastic and glass. Her voice was clogged and nasally as it wriggled through the puffy mess of her nose. “What if there’s an emergency? If Harry gets sick?”
Clayton picked up his ruined tie from the arm of the couch. Blood, snot, and tears had crusted into the thin ribbon of fabric and dried stiff.
“I can wash that for you,” Maureen offered.
The skin on Clayton’s shoulders crawled with the memory of rough old T-shirts, scrubbed until they were patchy and threadbare but still never quite clean. There’d always been a bit of a whiff around him as a kid—not dirt, just that musty smell of neglect that unloved cars and unloved children got.
“Don’t worry about it. Just a tie.” He tossed the tie into a trash can, and the end of it flopped limply over the side. He looked back at Nadine. “You said you didn’t want James to find you.”
“I don’t,” she said in a small voice as she hooked her arm around Harry’s narrow shoulders.
