Every Other Weekend

by TA Moore

  The flash of resentment caught Kelly by surprise. It stuck in his throat like a ball of nettles despite the fact that this—other than Byron’s sliced-open leg—had always been the plan.

  “I don’t mind,” he said.

  “A boy should be with his father,” Kathleen said firmly. “I remember when you two were little, always getting into fights so Jim would pay attention to you. You’d have thought they hated each other, Claire. All so their dad would come and break it up.”

  “Always saw right through me, Mom,” Byron drawled. He shifted cautiously in the bed and turned a grayer shade of pale as his foot shifted in the sling. “Speaking of Dad, where is he?”

  “He won’t be long. They were on their way.” Kathleen gave Maxie back to Byron, who grimaced as he looked down at the baby. She pulled her bag onto her lap to hunt through it, through receipts, a roll of coins, a crumpled handful of cardboard loyalty cards, and finally her phone. She tilted it toward the lamp on the bedside table to see the screen. “Oh. Worth wants one of us to meet him in the north tower to tell him where we are. He and your dad are driving around now.”

  It was a good excuse. “I’ll go,” Kelly said. Claire protested halfheartedly from her perch by Byron. She wasn’t family. Kelly should stay with his brother. He waved his phone at her. “I should check some stuff with work anyhow, and they don’t want you to use your phone in here.”

  He stepped into the hall. Behind him Kathleen tutted over the fussy Maxie, and then she noted to the room at large, “See, he can’t get a moment to himself. It’s not like the other boys. When you run your own business, you can’t just put in for time off and forget about it. They’ve run him ragged the last few weeks.”

  That was Kathleen for you. She was only ever nice about her boys to other people. Kelly stalked away down the hall, away from his brother’s bedside and the ugly knot of feelings he had no right to have.

  A woman with a crying little boy in tow and a confused toddler on her hip came out of one of the rooms. She wiped her face on her sleeve and gave the boy’s arm a tug as they headed down the hall. Devastation was no barrier to a child’s bladder.

  Kelly felt a pang of… guilt… that his brother was going to be okay while someone this woman loved obviously wasn’t going to be. It was stupid. Maybe it seemed like Byron sucked other people’s luck out of them, but he didn’t really.

  Not from a hospital bed anyway.

  The toddler started to cry hiccuped sobs of confused misery as they reached the elevators and stopped. His mother made a feeble attempt to comfort the child and then gave up. She just tilted her head back and watched the elevator count down the floors while the child wailed.

  Kelly took the stairs. It had been too rough a day to close himself in a tight metal box with strangers and their hospital-sour grief.

  His phone buzzed in his hip pocket as he reached the parking lot. Kelly pulled it out to see, half expecting his dad’s number.

  It was Clayton. The sight of his name made Kelly feel better than it should have, even though the call was probably just work related. It frustrated him. Even if Clayton hadn’t made it clear that he just wanted something casual, Kelly didn’t need a new boyfriend. There was work, there was Maxie, and love should be easy. He already knew nothing about Clayton would be easy.

  Besides, it was work, nothing personal.

  Nadine texted me. She said she’s changed her mind about the divorce. Didn’t ask about Harry.

  That made no sense. Kelly texted back quickly.

  Think she’s safe?

  No answer. Kelly stared at the unresponsive screen as he wondered what to do, torn between reluctance to let Clayton down and loyalty to his family. That it was even a question made him feel worse, but…. Dad and Worth would be there soon, so Kelly wasn’t needed. The bitter thought occurred to him that he never really had been. He’d only been the delivery method for Maxie.

  It wouldn’t usually bother him. Kathleen loved all her boys, but right then, he was tired and sore and not in the mood to kick his self-pity into gear. He was halfway through an offer to head over to help Clayton when he heard his name clipped out sharply.

  “Captain, we don’t know what happened,” a man’s voice said, distorted as it echoed off the bare concrete of the parking lot. “We haven’t had a chance to talk to Detective Kelly yet.”

  Despite the distortion, the voice plucked at Kelly’s memory. It sounded familiar somehow. He took the last few steps carefully and nudged the heavy stairwell door open with his foot. The first thing he saw through the crack was the blandly handsome profile of the man who’d given him a very professional beating the day before.

  “Look, I agree with you on the basics. The Glendale situation is unstable,” Blandsome said. “However, we can turn this accident to our benefit. Blame it on Kevoian, get him out of the equation, and there’s no one else but Jimmy to fill the gap. They’ll have to use him.”

  Adrenaline itched under Kelly’s skin and tried to twitch his muscles, but fight-or-flight wouldn’t be particularly helpful right then. He absently pressed his thumb into the edges of his black eye, and the dull pressure was a throb in the empty socket. Fight hadn’t exactly worked out that well for him before either. He glanced at the man with Blandsome. He had short gray hair and a darkly tanned face. He wasn’t one of the Beefcake brothers. Doubt pinched for a second—maybe he was wrong, the man’s defining feature was how bland he was—but then he glanced down. Those were the same boots, the worn-to-creases jump boots with a T-shaped notch in the toe that had given him a kicking earlier.

  Shit.

  It made no sense that they were there… unless Byron’s accident hadn’t been an accident. If whoever Jimmy’s new partners were assumed that the Kelly who’d asked questions about them was a cop. Kelly grimaced around the sour-lemon tang of guilt. He’d never live that down.

  Except he wouldn’t need to, would he? The pieces were all there—the undercover protection detail, the lonely wife, the sudden absence three months ago—and despite Kelly’s best efforts, they started to fall into place.

  There was a third man with them, but he was behind the white pillar. All Kelly could see was a black-clad shoulder and a bristle of a beard.

  “I know how many years you’ve put into Jimmy,” the man said. His voice was low, a rasp of controlled irritation, and the hair on the back of Kelly’s neck itched with recognition. “I don’t want to burn that identity any more than you do, but at the same time, I won’t put one of my officers at risk. Even if I agreed, how you going to explain that Jimmy suddenly has a cast?”

  Blandsome glanced at Salty, who shrugged and answered for him. “People have accidents,” he said. “We just say he did.”

  The third man snorted and stepped out from behind the pillar. Kelly already knew who it was. Like Mom had said, how many times had he been lectured in that low, irritated voice over his grades or fighting.

  Jim Kelly, his white hair shorn short and his beard grown out since Kelly had last seen him, stalked over to the elevator and jabbed his finger against the call button.

  “I don’t like this, Lepson,” he said flatly. “You’re pushing this cover to the edge.”

  Blandsome shrugged. “That’s not really your call, is it, sir?”

  Jim grunted. “You wouldn’t be here, Lepson, if I couldn’t pull the rug out from under you. If this accident wasn’t an accident, then your team has fucked up and put one of your undercover cops at risk.”

  “He signed up for it,” Salty pointed out.

  Kelly tasted bile in the back of his throat, a hot wash of angry acid. He forced it back down and closed the door carefully. One thing being Byron’s brother had taught him was to always think before you jumped in—not that he could see any way this wasn’t what it looked like.

  He sat down on the hard edge of a concrete step and looked at his phone. The half-written message to Clayton hung in the minimized window. He took a deep breath, deleted it, and started again.


  She’s not with Jimmy, he typed instead.

  Because Jimmy was upstairs on starched white sheets as he waited for his dad to tell him if his cover was blown or not.

  Son of a bitch.

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE COFFEE stall outside the courthouse sold Advil. They were overpriced and came in single-serve packets. Clayton didn’t care. Lack of sleep and the offensive brightness of the morning had combined to drill a spike of pain from the crown of his head down to his spine. He swiped his card.

  “…it’s going to be another hot day in old LA,” the radio balanced on top of the cooler warned chirpily. “Temperatures are predicted to hit one hundred degrees this afternoon, increasing the risk of….”

  The vendor flicked the radio off and tched his tongue. “Some idiot will start a fire,” he told Clayton as he passed him the Advil, or maybe it was to the woman who’d just stepped up to grab her coffee. “Some idiot always starts a fire.”

  She grunted sourly and grabbed her cardboard cup. “Some idiot should be made to pay for the damage.”

  “Some idiot does,” the vendor snorted as he jabbed his thumb at his chest. “Me.”

  Clayton ripped the pack open with his teeth and dry swallowed the pills instead of opening the bottle of water he’d bought. He could feel the tension in his jaw as he swallowed. The dull ache of clenched muscle and ground teeth amplified his headache.

  The pills wouldn’t get rid of this sort of headache. It would hang around until it burst like an abscess and left him blind with pain for an hour. Until then, though, he had to function, and the Advil dulled enough of the ache to let him do that.

  He headed into the courthouse. Briefcase, phone, and wallet went through the X-ray without incident, and then the security guard beckoned Clayton forward.

  The metal detector went off as it picked up the pins that held Clayton’s left forearm together. It always did, just like he always got pulled aside for a brisk pat-down by security guards who already knew him and his forearm.

  It usually didn’t bother him. It was a minute out of his day and one he could effectively bill. But he had to bite his tongue on a sarcastic comment as the jug-eared guard with crescent-shaped sweat stains dark under his arms as they dried in the air-conditioned chill, slid the wand up the inside of Clayton’s leg.

  How many minutes had he wasted on this over the years, he wondered bleakly. If he totted them all up, how many billable hours could he invoice his mother’s… third, fourth? The one with the rusted-out Camaro and the creepy eyes?

  Too many.

  He’d hoped he could save Harry from doing the same math, because eventually Jimmy would get tired of terrorizing his wife and turn to his son. In Clayton’s experience abusive assholes could always find a new low to sink to.

  The wand beeped as it ran over his forearm, and the guard gave him an apologetic shrug and sent Clayton on his way.

  On the other side of the security checkpoint, Baker waited for him on one of the benches. His arm was slung along the back as he watched people go by. A few of the defendants who saw him looked nervous. Some of the lawyers too, for that matter.

  “I shouldn’t have taken this case,” Clayton said without preamble as he joined him. “It’s too close to home.”

  Baker moved his arm and sat up. “Aren’t they all?” He shrugged when Clayton gave him a sharp look. “Background checks are standard, and you bounced around a lot of homes.”

  “Houses,” Clayton corrected him. It took more than a roof and a Wi-Fi password to make a home. He waited for the old wash of shame at the fact that someone knew about his life, knew his mom had fucked her life up. It didn’t hit. Maybe the headache hadn’t left any room for it, or he’d finally knocked that chip off his shoulder.

  “Besides,” Baker added, “unless you’re a rich old woman, if you dedicate all your do-good impulses to one cause? There’s something personal there.”

  The back of Clayton’s throat still tasted of powder and chemicals. He finally twisted the cap off his water and took a swig. The label said the additives were cranberries and green tea, but it just tasted flat and vaguely green.

  “I didn’t do much good this time,” he said.

  Baker slapped his shoulder. “Harry isn’t back with his father yet,” he said. Although an emergency placement with Maureen and her dogs would only hold for so long, and if Nadine didn’t come back, that only left Jimmy or foster care. “Nadine can still change her mind.”

  It wasn’t fair to be angry at Nadine.

  Clayton knew the statistics and the talking points. He’d heard—he’d said—the sound bites about how many times a battered spouse tried to leave before it took. He even knew how true they were. Yet, when he walked into that empty house last night, the sound of a children’s movie on at past three and a stool dragged over to the kitchen counter where Harry had tried to heat up something to eat, he felt the slow pressure of anger start to build.

  Like he’d told Baker, it was too close to home. He could still remember how cold and strange it was to be alone in your house overnight—or longer. His mom had spent two weeks in Vegas once—and the responsibility of it being a secret to keep from your neighbors and the school.

  So he was angry. That was his problem, though. Nadine was still, until he confirmed her text, a client.

  “I hope she does,” Clayton said. “If she does, what did you find out about Jimmy Graham?”

  Baker frowned. “Cobwebs,” he said. “Old dead flies. No spider yet. I talked to Judge Ebel, and she confirmed—off the record—that she’d been… requested… to delay any movement on your petition for a restraining order. It’s in your office now, by the way.”

  “Thanks.”

  Baker shrugged that off. “I checked around, and there are a couple of cases in Glendale that got, ah, short-sheeted, so to speak. Plea bargained out, dismissed on grounds that any lawyer would only introduce as a Hail Mary pass. Just generally a lot of bad luck making anything stick right now.”

  “So Kelly was right. He’s an informant?”

  “I would be very surprised if he weren’t,” Baker said. He adjusted his tie fussily as he looked around to make sure no one was close enough to hear him. “I checked with an… associate who’s spending time in the Los Angeles County prison. He used to have some influence, and, based partially on what he didn’t say, there’s been enough mutterings about how lucky Jimmy is to earn him the moniker Greasy Graham. Nothing that would stick enough to get him a shiv in the shower, though.”

  If you’d asked Clayton a month ago, he’d have put money on never hearing Baker say the word shiv without him putting air quotes around it. His matter-of-fact pronunciation was only made more surreal by the smile and nod he offered some acquaintance on the way by.

  “Not ideal,” he understated. “It’s possible I could still use it as leverage, though. Might tighten Jimmy’s means, but being outed as an informant would tighten a noose around his neck.”

  Baker winced. “That’s… risky,” he said. “If they call your bluff….”

  “They’ll find out it’s not a bluff,” Clayton said calmly. “I’m not an ADA, Daniel. My first responsibility is to my client, not the man who manipulated her or the police department that had my”—the words caught in his throat for a second as he experienced the fleeting urge to call Kelly something else. He squashed it and finished the sentence—“investigator beaten up.”

  Baker still didn’t look happy. To be fair, it was bad business to end up on the wrong end of the LAPD. It would give the other partners grounds to curtail some of the more extravagant concessions they had made to recruit Baker to the firm, not to mention the punitive traffic tickets and possible criminal charges that would result if Clayton weren’t careful.

  “I know how much I owe you, Daniel,” he said. “I’m not going to drop you in it with this. If it comes down to me using this information, I’ll take full responsibility.”

  Baker snorted.

  “You’re m
y employee and my friend,” he said as he clapped a hand on Clayton’s shoulder. “You owe me billable hours and no scandals for the first, and nothing for the second. Unless you want to tell me what you were doing at Kelly’s house in the small hours of the morning?”

  It had been a long time since Clayton was innocent enough to blush. The last time, he thought, was during his first visit to The Zone when he moved to LA. But it certainly felt like he had blushed hot stripes across his nose and cheekbones. He glared at Baker.

  “He might have had a concussion,” he said self-righteously.

  Baker snorted out a laugh that started in his nose and turned into a belly laugh that crinkled the corners of his eyes. He flapped his hand apologetically at Clayton, who rolled his eyes and checked his phone.

  He had fifteen minutes until court and two messages that must have arrived when his phone was in the security tray.

  “Fine,” he said. “I might have something of a crush on our neighborhood pirate. Happy?”

  Baker wiped his thumbs under his eyes. “Are you?”

  It was the sort of question that Clayton was never sure how to answer. He was good at his job, and he had everything he wanted when he left Utah—a place to live that he didn’t have to share, enough money in the bank to feel secure, and he wasn’t dependent on anyone’s goodwill.

  Happy enough for him. For most people, though, happy meant a warm house and a warmer lover—someone who made them smile, who they made smile.

  It was eating pizza on the floor while he watched Kelly’s mouth curve into that wide, thoughtlessly warm smile and missing what he’d just said because his brain was elsewhere. It was half lust and half a slow, bittersweet warmth—because it wouldn’t last.

  But in that moment when Clayton had almost forgotten that it would never work, it had felt like happiness.

  He tapped the first message firmly with his thumb. “The sex is good,” he said blithely. Because that was the first rule you learned in a house like the one Clayton grew up in—never admit that you care about anything, and people wouldn’t know it would hurt to lose it.