Every Other Weekend

by TA Moore

  When he saw his mother the next day, she looked at him with her bruised eyes the way Nadine had.

  It was too much, too messy. Clayton wasn’t even sure why he wanted to tell it. He never did. It was the past. So he took a knife to the tangled string of the narrative and cut it down to the bone.

  “My mother fell in love with a lot of frogs,” he said with a deliberate flash of black humor. “They only ever turned into losers when she kissed them. It never changed for her. I thought it might for Nadine.”

  He thought he could change it for her. His mother hadn’t wanted him to save her—the next frog was supposed to do that—and he thought he’d come to terms with it. Maybe not.

  It was his turn to be surprised as Kelly reached out and scruffed the back of his neck. He slid his warm, callused fingers under the collar of Clayton’s shirt and brushed his collarbone. It was barely intimate, but it still plucked Clayton like a string. He was tall enough that the only people who touched his neck other than himself were people he was in bed with.

  “It doesn’t matter if Nadine trusts us. We’re still going to help her,” Kelly said. “Then maybe she can change things for herself.”

  Clayton mocked out a groan. “An optimist and a romantic,” he said. “What do I see in you again?”

  And just like that, the grin was back, wide and easy and warm. Kelly laughed as he braked to let an angry man in a Beetle cut in front of him. “Well, you seemed to like my ass.”

  “That’s true,” Clayton said. “It is a nice ass.”

  There was more. A ridiculous, sappy amount more, but Clayton wasn’t an optimist or a romantic. So he held his tongue.

  “I should call Aggie,” Kelly said. He glanced back into the back where Clayton had rather forgotten Maxie was. “Get her to babysit. Although Cole… if Mom puts pressure on, he’ll fold.”

  Clayton smiled. “Actually,” he said. “I have that covered.”

  “FIRST THINGS first. There are rules regarding babies in this office,” Baker said sternly as he got up from behind Clayton’s desk. He held out his expensively sleeved arms. “Give him to me.”

  Kelly obediently handed Maxie over. Awake and alert after the long car nap, Maxie squawked and waved sticky fists in either triumph or alarm. Baker looked delighted.

  “Aren’t you a cutie,” he crooned as he cuddled Maxie into the fold of his arm. One big hand almost covered Maxie entirely, from knee to shoulder, as he rocked him. “So much trouble going on around you, and you have no clue what it’s all about, hmm?”

  “It is a lot of trouble,” Clayton admitted. “I’m sorry I got you into—”

  Baker shook his head and freed his hand from Maxie’s fingers so he could point at Clayton. “Not this time. If this goes wrong, it’s all on you. You should have talked to me before you did this.”

  Deserved or not, Clayton still winced as he thought about what it would do to his career. It would have been nice to say that he didn’t care, that the only thing that mattered was Nadine, but he did care.

  Failure meant he’d hang his shingle in some miserable little town—not the same one he started in, not in Utah if he could help it, but still the same—and have to charge bruise-eyed women to chase their exes for child support. If he was lucky.

  “That’s fair,” he said. “Does that mean you aren’t going to help us?”

  Baker gave him a wry look. “That depends entirely on what you want,” Baker said. “And if I can do it without my peachy fresh ass getting hauled over the coals.”

  “We don’t want you to get in trouble,” Kelly said. “We can—”

  Baker shushed him. “Considering how many favors I burned so you could screw the pooch with the Internal Affairs investigation? You don’t get to turn me down. Either you accept my help gratefully or I tell you to stick what you need where the grass doesn’t grow, but either way it’s my choice. So?”

  “Take care of Maxie?”

  “Oh, that I’ll do,” Baker said. He looked down at Maxie, who was chewing on a custom-carved resin button, and said, “I’ll teach you about the importance of a watertight contract for marital happiness. What else?”

  “First, I need to talk to Harry. Maureen said that the police took him into protective custody?”

  Baker didn’t look up from Maxie as he nodded, but his voice stayed crisply businesslike. “Some people might not call it the nanny state, but when one of our lawyers gets attacked on the street outside, the police are informed. And since I didn’t know you decided to go off course on this, I informed my contact in IA. They were concerned enough to want Harry under their watchful eye for a bit. Why?”

  “I need to talk to him.”

  Baker looked up and considered Clayton for a second. “I always liked how hard you work, how far you’d go for a client. Your commitment,” he said. “Liked, past tense.”

  “I will owe you. Everything.”

  “Yes, you will,” Baker said. He thought about it as he jiggled Maxie competently in his arms. “I’ll see what I can do. It shouldn’t take long. The answer will either be yes or laughter. If that’s first, what’s second?”

  “Just another call,” Clayton said. “It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.”

  “HI.” HARRY’S voice was tight and small. In the background a dog barked, and an irritated man muttered something about never working with dogs or children.

  “Harry, have you spoken to your mom since the night at the safe house?” Clayton asked. In the guilty pause that followed, he listened to Heather and Kelly talk quietly outside.

  “She called the place,” Harry muttered.

  “I need you to trust me. It might be hard, but I promise I want to help,” Clayton said. “The men that came to your house the night your mother got hurt. You saw them, didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  It wasn’t just loyalty that stuffed Harry’s nose and made his voice crack like that. It was guilt, the guilt of a kid who would never forget that he hid while someone hurt his mother, although hopefully, one day he would understand that it wasn’t his fault.

  “You couldn’t have stopped them. They were grown men, bad men.”

  “Dad said… when he came back… he said he’d trade me in for a dog. Least a dog’d bark.”

  Clayton wished he’d let Kelly punch his brother.

  “Did Maureen let you take one of her puppies to keep you company?” He could feel the pressure of time on the back of his neck, but it wouldn’t help. When Harry mumbled a yes on the other end, he asked, “If the dog had been with you the other night, would you have sent it to stop the men?”

  “No!” Harry said with a sharp jolt of distress in his voice. “They’d hurt Giz. She’s just a puppy.”

  “They’d have hurt you too, and still hurt your mom,” Clayton said. “Instead you stayed out of their way and you were able to get help. You didn’t do what your dad said. That was brave.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was Gregor Kevoian there that night? Was he one of the men who hurt your mom?”

  “No.”

  Shit. Clayton scrubbed his hand over his face as though he could wipe away the cobwebby feeling of defeat as it settled. Had they been wrong about Kevoian, or had he just not gotten through to Harry?

  “But I saw him outside,” Harry admitted, sounding nervous as he quickly spat them out. “Outside in a big car. It wasn’t his car, but he has lots of cars he uses. Dad gets mad at him because they aren’t their cars. Uncle Gregor told him to lighten up. I thought it was nice.”

  Clayton thought about the big blue SUV, an oddly suburban choice of vehicle for violent gangsters. “Have you seen these cars?”

  “I wasn’t supposed to,” Harry said. “But sometimes Dad left me with Uncle Gregor, and he’d take me out for a drive in one. They were all locked up in a big garage…. Mr. Reynolds, when Mom called, she said that Uncle Gregor had hurt Dad. I… is he okay?”

  No matter how much they deserved it, sometimes it was hard t
o hate family.

  “He just hurt his ankle,” Clayton said. He tugged a drawer open and rifled through the files he had tucked in there for quick consultation—the Tates’ financial report, a stack of past and paid-out prenups, but not what he was looking for. He shoved the drawer shut and stood up. “Harry, you’ve been a real help. You know that?”

  “Really?”

  “Your mom will be very proud of you, and your dad should be too.”

  “He won’t,” Harry said sadly. “That’s okay.”

  Clayton hesitated. It felt like there should be something to say, but there wasn’t—nothing that he could cover in a phone call.

  “That’s his problem,” Clayton said. “I have to go, Harry. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Harry hung up. Kids—no time for adult sentimentality or drawn-out goodbyes. Clayton put the phone in his pocket and walked around the desk. He stuck his head out around the door.

  “…he just sounds so stern.” Heather was midsentence. “I like to imagine he’s a knight and I’m his lady wife, and he tells me to be chaste while he’s gone to the Crusades. Then I bang the maidservant.”

  “Before you do, where did you put Jimmy Graham’s background report?”

  Heather turned in her chair. It was a sign of the stress of the last few days that she had the same hairstyle as yesterday. She reached up and rubbed her hand over the fuzz.

  “I thought that, since the police were involved, we were done with that client,” she said. “I filed the supplementary material in the archives, but after what happened last night, I told them to pull it. It hasn’t come back yet, but it might be in the mailroom.”

  “Could you check?”

  Heather nodded and popped up out of her chair. “Give me five minutes. I might need to flirt to get Bets to dig into the unsorted mail.”

  She trotted off down the hall, and Clayton glanced at Kelly. “What exactly were you talking about?”

  “That I had no idea why Baker wanted Maxie,” Kelly said. He was perched on the end of the desk and twisted around to look at Clayton. “I still just handed him over. He could have thrown him out a window.”

  “The windows don’t open.”

  “Still,” Kelly said. He rubbed one finger between his eyebrows. “You make a big deal to your family about how your brother can’t be trusted, then just hand the baby over to the first big suited man who asks.”

  The frustration in Kelly’s voice made Clayton laugh—not much, but enough to cut through some of the old pain and fresh guilt that clotted in his chest.

  “The rule is that if you bring a baby to the office, Baker gets a hold,” he said. “He loves babies more than he loves cufflinks and expensive tea.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “Yeah.” Clayton reached out and gave Kelly’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “You made the right call not to leave him there. People in corners don’t make good choices, and even at his best, your brother shouldn’t be in charge of fleas.”

  “I guess,” Kelly said. He dipped his chin and brushed a soft-lipped kiss over Clayton’s bruised knuckles. “Thanks.”

  Clayton felt a flush try to crawl up from under his cheekbones. He pulled his hand back and glanced around to see if anyone had seen the gesture. No one had, and he was slightly disappointed.

  He rolled his eyes at himself. The sooner he got over this “little bit in love” thing the better, before it made him sentimental.

  “Do you want to sit this out?” he asked. “It’s going to involve interfering further in an IA investigation.”

  Kelly scratched his jaw. “Why aren’t we just handing this over to the cops?” he asked. “This is what they do.”

  It was a fair question. Clayton pulled the loose sling off over his head and tossed it onto Heather’s desk. His hand ached the same no matter what he did to it. If he wasn’t going to use it, there was no point in hanging the sling around his neck like a sad attempt at a hipster scarf.

  “I don’t trust them,” he admitted. “The police were happy enough to let Byron—or Jimmy—get away with mistreating Nadine when it suited them. Internal Affairs was happy to let her case wait while they tried to work out what to do about Jimmy, or Detective Byron Kelly, if that’s your pick. I want her free of this—all of it—and the best way to do that is to make this messy and public.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, what?”

  “You’re right,” Kelly said. “Whatever sanctions land on Byron’s lap, the LAPD will still want to keep this quiet if they can. It’s embarrassing. It could be expensive. The best outcome for Nadine and Harry will be that they get paid to disappear, not just swept under a rug. Besides, I’ve already interfered in an Internal Affairs investigation. I might as well make it count.”

  Clayton snorted.

  “What did you want with my report anyhow?” Kelly asked.

  “You had a list of properties owned by Jimmy Graham, either by himself or in Nadine’s name, in the report,” Clayton said. “I need to find a warehouse big enough to store a large number of probably stolen cars.”

  Kelly bit his lower lip and frowned. “There were a couple of nonresidential properties. I remember that,” he said. “Not sure if I drilled down deep enough to get their measurements, though.”

  “We can find it out,” Clayton said.

  At the other end of the hall, the elevator doors opened, and Heather waved a heavy file triumphantly at him as she stepped out.

  “You could have gotten that yourself,” Kelly pointed out as he slid off the desk.

  “I’m not actually confident what floor the mailroom is on,” Clayton admitted. “I’m absolutely confident that Bets in the mailroom isn’t my type, or vice versa.”

  Kelly chuckled. “Don’t worry,” he said as they walked toward Heather. “You’ve still got me.”

  Yeah, but not for long.

  Chapter Nineteen

  THE WAREHOUSE turned out to be a stripped-out factory a few miles outside of Glendale. Records said it had been closed down a few years before for using trafficked immigrants as their workforce. After that it was sold at auction by the police… except apparently not.

  Kelly parked on the street opposite. Thick sandy dust layered the windshield of his pickup, but he didn’t bother to turn on the wipers. In some parts of town, dirty cars drew less attention than clean ones.

  “Last chance,” he said to Clayton. “You sure you want to do this?”

  Clayton gave him a withering sidelong look and otherwise ignored the question. He nodded toward the large blue SUV parked in the shadow of the building. A man in dirty blue overalls crouched at the back of it and worked at the bumper.

  “That’s the car they brought Nadine to the office in,” he said.

  As they watched, the man popped off the license plate and started to screw another into place. His sleeves were rolled back to his elbows, a few inches farther than usual from the flash of pale skin as he worked.

  Kelly turned the engine off. The air-conditioning cut off with it, and the heavy heat of the day started to soak through the metal of the car.

  “Looks like they want to use it again,” he said. “Are you ready?”

  Clayton grimaced. “This is ridiculous, dangerous, and probably going to end my career,” he said. “So I’m as ready as I’m likely to get.”

  He got out of the car. The sun picked out gilt and sand in his short curls and painted harsh shadows down his lean cheeks. Kelly knew he should focus, but his stomach detoured his brain with a rough clench of awareness. He knew how a smile could soften the thin line of Clayton’s mouth, and how an unexpected kiss could surprise the sternness away from his face.

  Or it had once. Kelly wanted to know if it would again, if he could coax that low laugh out of Clayton with a joke and a rude pass of his hands. He wanted… more than Clayton wanted to give probably. Definitely more than Kelly could afford right then.

  His life was too complicated to invite someone else and expect
them to stay, and it was only going to get worse. He wasn’t sure he even liked his family much, but they were still his family. Even if the IA investigation never took root, there’d been an awful lot of truth thrown about for people who weren’t used to it.

  People were like fish. Introduce something new into their environment, and, if they could get away with it, they’d rather die of shock.

  He still wanted it, though. Usually his heart was pretty good about logic—breakups still hurt, but once you accepted it was necessary, if you’d always known it was necessary—but this time it just wouldn’t let go.

  Kelly leaned down and groped under the driver’s seat for the old wrecking bar stashed under there. He scrambled out of the car and reached around to tuck the heavy metal bar down the back of his jeans.

  “Do you really think that’s going to help if this goes wrong?” Clayton asked.

  “Probably not,” Kelly admitted. He tugged his T-shirt down over the tool. The rough edge of it scraped against his back as he breathed in. “It just makes me feel better—like I didn’t walk in unprepared.”

  “I think a gun would be better.”

  “My aim’s not what you’d call great.”

  That startled a laugh out of Clayton. It wasn’t exactly how Kelly had imagined it—there should be more skin, less hot industrial air—but it still felt good. Stupid, but good.

  “If this doesn’t work,” Clayton said as they walked across the road, “you really do have a wonderful ass.”

  Kelly snorted.

  The factory gates were open. A chain and padlock dangled from one side of the frame. Clayton squeezed Kelly’s shoulder quickly, wished him luck and veered off. Kelly waited until he was out of sight and then walked through gates. As he crossed the forecourt, the grubby man who’d been at work on the SUV jogged to intercept him. Kelly thought he recognized him as one of the mechanics who’d lurked behind Kevoian at the garage. But he couldn’t be sure.