Can't Hide From Me

by Cordelia Kingsbridge

  Charles shrugged, his shoulders drawing together. “Look how much happier you are after spending the day with Jesenia. I don’t do that for you. All I ever do is upset you.”

  “Charles . . .” Ángel took a slow step toward him. “I don’t need you to cheer me up. I need you to help me keep my head above water when I can’t do it by myself anymore.”

  Charles shook his head, not understanding.

  “What do you think would have happened to me if you hadn’t been there when I found Paul?” said Ángel. “What if I’d been alone? Or with someone who didn’t know exactly what to say to make sure I didn’t touch his body, and sat with me for hours afterward, and helped me stop dissociating?” Ángel’s voice cracked, and he cleared his throat, looking away. “That was one of the worst moments of my life, and even after everything, there’s nobody else I would have rather had with me than you.”

  Struck speechless, Charles scrambled for a response, but Ángel wasn’t done.

  “I feel safer staying here with you than I’ve felt in a long time,” he said, meeting Charles’s eyes again. “I didn’t realize you didn’t know that, or I would have said something. There are tons of people in the world who can make me laugh and have a good time, Charles. There’s a very short list of people who make me feel safe. That’s what you do for me; that’s . . . that’s how you make me better.”

  Charles held out a hand. Ángel took it, and Charles drew him close, slipping his arms around Ángel’s waist.

  “One day, we’ll have that conversation about what happened,” Ángel said as he rested his forehead on Charles’s shoulder. “But not now, not while I’m being stalked by someone who might want to kill me. I can’t handle both at once. Please.”

  “Okay.” Charles kissed Ángel’s cheek, overwhelmed, his throat sore and aching. “Okay.”

  They stood in that embrace for a long minute, until Ángel pulled back far enough to brush his lips over Charles’s. “Come take a shower with me,” he said, and that was that.

  Showering together segued into a marathon sex session that traveled from the bathroom counter to the bedroom floor, broke for a quick snack in the kitchen, resumed over the kitchen counter, and traveled back to the bedroom wall before ending with Ángel on his hands and knees in Charles’s bed, clinging to the rattling headboard as Charles pounded him vigorously from behind.

  Most of Charles’s life force left him along with that last orgasm. He toppled off of Ángel and landed on his back beside him; it took several tries to remove the condom with his shaking hands, and even then it was all he could do to tie the thing in a sloppy knot and drop it off the side of the bed.

  Groaning, Ángel collapsed onto his stomach without apparent concern for the come-soaked sheets. They lay in sated silence for a while, Charles wavering in and out of sleep.

  “God, I feel like I just took an entire college football team,” Ángel said some unknown time later.

  “Why a college team?” Charles said, affronted.

  Though Ángel still lay on his stomach, his head was turned toward Charles on the pillow. He cracked open one eye and said, “What, you think you’re good enough to go pro?”

  Stifling a smile, Charles smacked his ass, and Ángel laughed. Rather than withdraw his hand, Charles rolled onto his side, trailing his fingers up and down the sweat-damp skin of Ángel’s back.

  Ángel made a soft purring noise, watching Charles’s face. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “What is it about me that’s always scared you so much?”

  At any other point in time, Charles would have brushed him off, pretended incredulity. But here, in the intimacy of his dark bedroom, his body warm and humming with bliss, he was able to say, “You make me want to break the rules.”

  Ángel’s brow furrowed. “What rules?”

  “Don’t sleep with a coworker, for one.” Charles gently kneaded the muscles at the base of Ángel’s spine. “Don’t get drunk on a weeknight. Don’t eat ice cream for breakfast. Don’t accept rides on motorcycles. Don’t take off for a weekend in Mexico on the spur of the moment and end up staying with total strangers you meet in a bar.”

  “Those are stupid rules,” Ángel said, and then paused. “Except for the last one. That was an error in judgment on our parts.”

  Charles snorted agreement; they were lucky the Gonzalezes had turned out to be good people.

  “You know I don’t make you break these ‘rules’ you made up for yourself, right?” Ángel arched his back into Charles’s caress. “I might present the opportunities, but you decide to take them. You want to break your own ridiculous rules.”

  “No, I don’t,” Charles said mildly.

  “Mm-hmm. You can’t be happy living inside the rigid lines you’ve drawn all around yourself. Some people could be, but not you. You need a little excitement, a little danger. It’s why you chose the career you did.”

  Charles’s hand stilled on Ángel’s back. “You know why I chose this.”

  Ángel was one of the few people he’d ever told the full story about how his parents had died, gunned down in a convenience-store robbery gone wrong when he was eight years old. Charles hadn’t been the first or last child in his community to lose loved ones to guns, either, but things had never changed for the better.

  “Yeah,” said Ángel. He reached out and brushed the backs of his fingers over Charles’s jaw. “There are lots of ways you could have worked against gun violence, though. You could have gone into law, or politics—you chose federal law enforcement. That’s not a choice people make lightly.”

  Considering this, Charles moved his hand again, stroking along Ángel’s spine.

  Ángel’s dark eyes gleamed in what little light filtered through the closed blinds. “You don’t have to make up for the fact that your grandmother lost her son, you know. She’ll still love you even if you don’t force yourself into some arbitrary ideal of perfection.”

  His stomach twisting as the shot hit home, Charles said, “You’re one to talk. Like the way you live your life isn’t a deliberate fuck you to your parents.”

  “My parents were abusive garbage,” Ángel said. “I don’t live my life for them; I live it the way that feels right for me.” His hand slid from Charles’s jaw to the hollow of his throat. “I don’t think you feel right, Charles. I don’t think you’ve felt right for a long time.”

  Charles’s first instinct was to deny it, but then he thought about all the days he’d come home from work or the gym and just sat numbly in front of the television for hours on end before dragging himself to bed, waking up the next morning feeling just as empty. The activities he’d once enjoyed, whether meeting the guys for a pickup basketball game or hitting happy hour with colleagues after work, had fallen by the wayside. He wouldn’t say he’d been sad, exactly, but he hadn’t looked forward to anything for a while.

  Since Ángel returned, he’d woken up every morning knowing the day promised to be interesting, even if it annoyed the ever-loving shit out of him.

  “I feel okay right now,” Charles said.

  Ángel’s smile was breathtaking.

  Charles smoothed his fingers down over the curve of Ángel’s pert ass, seeking out his slick, relaxed hole. “You’re really swollen,” he said, tracing the rim with his fingertips.

  “That’s what happens when you get your ass reamed out for . . .” Ángel turned his head, picking Charles’s phone up off the nightstand. “Christ, three hours.”

  “It wasn’t three continuous hours,” Charles said, though his chest swelled with pride nonetheless.

  “Still.” Ángel dropped the phone and turned his face back toward Charles.

  His eyelids fluttered when Charles carefully slid one finger inside, savoring the easy give of his body. Charles added a second finger and watched, mesmerized, as they sank in and out.

  “Charles . . .” Ángel parted his thighs, canting his hips. “I can’t come again.”

  “I think you
could,” Charles said, hoarse. “I think if I milked your prostate, you’d come for me again—even if you couldn’t ejaculate, even if you couldn’t get hard. You’d still feel it inside.”

  Ángel moaned brokenly.

  Charles curled his fingers, shifting closer to Ángel—and they both froze at a soft thump on the patio outside.

  They met each other’s eyes for a breathless moment, then disengaged without speaking, rolled off opposite sides of the bed, and gathered their scattered clothes, dressing in silence. The thumps and rustling continued, accompanied by a familiar hissing noise that Charles couldn’t quite put his finger on.

  Ángel retrieved their guns from the drawer where they’d stashed them before their shower, handing Charles his. There were two sliding glass doors to the patio—one in the living room and one here in the master bedroom—so Charles eased himself against the wall, Ángel at his shoulder, and twitched back the blinds.

  A slight hooded figure stood in profile to them, spray-painting the other door. Charles flipped the lock and wrenched open the door, his gun held in a two-handed grip as he pushed through the blinds.

  “Freeze!” he said.

  The tagger yelped, dropped the paint can with a clatter, and sprang over the patio railing, rabbiting away into the apartment complex. Ángel took after him like a shot, not even taking the time to consult with Charles before he vaulted the railing as well and disappeared into the night.

  “Ángel!” Charles cried in exasperation. He glanced at the message that had been sprayed onto the glass with blood-red paint.

  I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE

  Groaning, Charles slid the bedroom door shut and went after Ángel, finding himself in his second goddamn foot chase of the day.

  Fortunately for his sore legs, this one was shorter. The tagger was fast, but Ángel was much faster, or maybe just more determined. He gained steadily as they raced across courtyards and crashed through banks of flowering bushes; when they emerged from a cluster of buildings into the grassy area beside the complex’s pool, Ángel leaped and grabbed the tagger around the waist, bringing them both to the ground.

  By the time Charles caught up, Ángel had the thrashing tagger on his back, pinned by his hips and wrists. Charles leaned down to yank off the tagger’s hood, then stepped back in surprise.

  It was a skinny Latino kid, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, nobody Charles had ever seen before. He glared up at them both with the fuming defiance common to adolescents everywhere.

  “Who is this?” Charles asked, though from the expression on Ángel’s face, he already knew the answer.

  “I have no idea,” Ángel said.

  They had to take the kid back to Charles’s place so Charles could duck inside and grab his cell phone to call the cops—and clear the apartment, in case anyone had snuck inside when they’d been gone. While they waited, Ángel sat the kid on the parking-lot curb and settled beside him, keeping a sharp eye for any sign that he’d make another run for it.

  “What’s your name?” Ángel asked.

  The kid wrapped his arms around his knees and didn’t answer.

  Ángel watched him for a moment, then said, “¿Cómo te llamas?” Even if the kid spoke English, speaking Spanish might create a sense of solidarity and get him to let down his guard a little.

  “Marco,” the kid muttered, his tone bleeding resentment.

  “Why’d you tag my friend’s door, Marco?” Ángel asked, continuing the conversation in Spanish.

  Marco shrugged without looking up. “Just something to do.”

  “That was a pretty personal message,” said Ángel. “Was it meant for anyone in particular?”

  “Not really,” Marco said. He toyed with his shoelaces, eyes glued to them like they were the most fascinating things he’d ever seen.

  Charles emerged from the apartment and came around to stand in front of them. “It’s clear. Cops are on their way.”

  Marco lifted his head just enough to glare at Charles with purest loathing.

  “Can I tell you what I think, Marco?” Ángel said, drawing his attention away from Charles. “I think someone else put you up to this—paid you, or maybe threatened you—and you’re afraid to tell us who it was.”

  “I’m not afraid.” Marco’s scornful eyes traveled back to Charles. “I just don’t like cops,” he said, clearly operating on two mistaken assumptions—first, that Charles couldn’t speak Spanish, and second, that Ángel wasn’t a cop himself.

  Charles recognized the advantage at the same time Ángel did. He kept his face blank, betraying no indication that he’d understood. The poor guy had that distinct cop vibe seeping out of his pores, though, and there wasn’t anything he could do about that.

  Ángel, on the other hand, had always been able to pass for a civilian; he wouldn’t have lasted long undercover otherwise. “He’s not just a cop,” he said, capitalizing on the opportunity Marco had handed him. “He’s a special agent with the ATF. Do you know what that is?”

  Marco’s eyes widened, and he nodded.

  “He’s a good guy, though. He doesn’t want to see you get in trouble for this any more than I do.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Marco. “They’re all the same.”

  Ángel looked up at Charles and switched to English. “He’s worried about what’ll happen when the cops show up.”

  “Tell him I won’t press charges if he comes clean about who sent him here,” Charles said.

  Ángel relayed the message to Marco, though he’d seen enough comprehension on Marco’s face to be certain that he did indeed speak English. Marco mulled it over for a minute, still eyeing Charles with distrust.

  “You promise?” he said to Ángel. “I been in trouble for tagging before.”

  “I promise.”

  Marco huffed out a breath and said, “Me and my friends were hanging out in the park, just chilling, and some guy came up and asked if anyone would be willing to tag for him for a hundred bucks.”

  Ángel raised his eyebrows. “Does that happen a lot?”

  “Sure. Everyone around here knows we’re the best, and we’re not ganged up, so we can get around without starting wars or shit. Anyway, I said I’d do it, and he told me the address and what he wanted. Figured his girl was sneaking around with some other guy.” Marco gave Ángel a sudden startled look. “You his girl?”

  “Something like that,” said Ángel. “What did he look like?”

  “Kind of skinny, not really tall or short. Other than that, I dunno.” Marco raised his hands at Ángel’s answering expression. “Seriously. He was wearing a hoodie and sunglasses and a scarf, the whole deal. I couldn’t see anything but his nose.”

  “How about his hands?”

  “Gloves.”

  “Then how do you know it was a man?” Ángel asked.

  “No tits,” Marco said, with all the confidence of a teenage boy keen on the subject. “Plus, his voice was pretty deep.”

  “Could you tell what race he was?”

  “Latino—Mexican, for sure. Spoke to us in Spanish, didn’t seem like he understood English.”

  Ángel sat back, frustrated. Was this the stalker, or just an intermediary? It couldn’t be the same person who had approached Ian in the club—the physical descriptions were too different. And neither of those descriptions matched the voice Buzz had heard on the phone. Were any of them the actual stalker, or was he playing some kind of shell game?

  A police car pulled into the parking lot then, thankfully without lights or sirens. After a brief discussion with Charles, the officers agreed to give Marco a warning and escort him home—though not before Ángel got his address and phone number in case they needed to contact him again.

  As he and Charles stood on the sidewalk, watching the car drive off, Ángel said, “What if the stalker goes after Marco the same way he went after Buzz?”

  “He might,” Charles said. “I had a word with the cops about it and asked them to keep an eye on Marco’s house tonight. Ed ca
n discuss the situation with their captain tomorrow.”

  Ángel sighed unhappily, but there wasn’t much more they could do.

  “Did Marco’s description sound like any of your suspects?” Charles asked.

  “No. Roberto is even bigger than you are, and Mercedes could never be described as skinny either. It could just be a middleman.”

  “Then why cover up so much? Why not send another guy who kind of looks like Esparza, like with Ian?”

  “For all we know, the person who approached Ian was the stalker,” Ángel said. “Oscar could have fit that description just as well.”

  “And none of the people we’re talking about could have spoken English with an American accent.”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  Charles palmed his face, rubbing the bridge of his nose. Ángel took a step closer, and Charles reached out at once, pulling Ángel in against his side. Exhaling a slow breath, Ángel leaned into him and allowed himself a moment to appreciate Charles’s calm strength. He gave Charles a lot of shit, but sometimes Ángel craved a little order and stability too.

  “We’ve got to get at least some sleep tonight,” Ángel said a few moments later. “Come on.”

  “There’s just one more thing I’m worried about,” Charles said as he closed and locked the front door behind them.

  “What?”

  “How the fuck do you get red spray paint off a glass door?”

  “That’s not a super-helpful description,” Jade said the next morning.

  “Tell me about it,” said Ángel.

  Due to the sensitive nature of their discussions, they’d taken a conference room for their team meeting rather than hold it out in the bullpen. Charles sat beside Ángel, who looked tired but not on the edge of collapse. They’d both managed a few hours of sleep last night—in separate beds.

  “Well, I’ll see what I can do, but don’t expect any miracles,” Jade said. “Maybe there were surveillance cameras near the park . . .” She trailed off, tapping away at the tablet that was never far from her hand.

  “Where are we on the guns?” Charles asked.