Dangerous Ground, no. 1

by Josh Lanyon

  “I’m lighter, I’m faster —”

  “You’re sure as hell not faster these days.”

  Which was true, but not guaranteed to win points. But Will wasn’t interested in winning points; he was interested in keeping Taylor in one piece, whatever it took, and maybe Taylor read that resolve in Will’s eyes because after a pause, he shrugged. Said tersely, “Hey, suit yourself. You always do.”

  The injustice of that stung, and although Will had told himself he was not going to lose his temper again, that he could be patient, that Taylor and their partnership was worth working this through — whatever the hell this was and however much work it took — all the same he bit right back, “Christ, that’s rich coming from you.”

  And instantly Taylor was cool, his body deceptively relaxed — a fighter poised for action. Oh, yes, Will had seen that loose, easy stance a hundred times. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Forget it.”

  Taylor got in front of him. “I don’t want to forget it.”

  Un-fucking-believable. In fact, if he didn’t know better he’d have suspected Taylor had been shot in his goddamn head. Who was this stranger who had taken over Taylor’s body?

  Will planted both hands on Taylor’s chest and pushed him back a step. “What, are we supposed to have another wrestling match now?”

  The physical aggression caught Taylor off guard, and Will pressed his advantage. “You’re self-centered, MacAllister. You do whatever you want whenever you feel like it, and to hell with everybody else. This is a perfect example.”

  “This?” Another time and place Taylor’s indignation might have been funny. “I didn’t even want to come on this goddamned trip. I did it for you. And what the hell you wanted out of it beats me since you obviously —” He broke off, and to their mutual horror, for an instant appeared to be choked with emotion.

  Anger, Will could deal with. Arrogance, aggression, he knew what to do. This? No.

  Before he had time to rethink, he reached out — and just in time stopped himself from pulling Taylor into his arms. He settled for squeezing those rigid shoulders. “Look, Taylor, all I meant was…you don’t always think things through.” He offered a tentative smile. “Come on, I’ve known you three years. We both know your track record. When it comes to relationships you think with your dick and damn the torpedoes. And yes, for the record, I…find you attractive too. You know that. But there’s more at stake here. I don’t want to screw up our friendship or our partnership because we sleep together.”

  “Why would it screw anything up?” Taylor was looking at him so seriously. So…earnestly. It cut him up inside. The last thing he wanted to do was hurt Taylor. Ever. But Taylor just wouldn’t stay down. He kept getting up and coming back for more. And what the hell was Will supposed to do?

  He said, struggling for patience, “It’s already screwing everything up and we haven’t even done it!”

  “Why couldn’t we give it a real shot?”

  “What are you talking about? Give it a real shot? Give what a real shot?” Will let go of him, and gestured to the scene before them. “Here’s why. Because we’re in the middle of a crime scene and we’re arguing about our goddamned romance.”

  He couldn’t stand the look on Taylor’s face, so he turned away. What they needed was a climbing harness but…what the hell. He jumped for the lowest limb, wrapped his legs partway around the thick trunk, and hauled himself up a couple of feet. Blowing out, he reached up for the next branch. He swung himself up, stretched for another tree limb — and began to climb.

  At first it was like crawling through undergrowth, but then the branches spread out, and he was able to see what he was doing and move more freely. He had a good head for heights, and the tree had thick, dark, irregular bark, making it easier for his boots to find purchase. The limbs were plentiful. Yellow cones rained down as he swarmed up through the cinnamon-scented branches.

  The tree groaned, swaying in the wind. Will looked up, and the feet of the dead parachutist were hanging an arm’s length away.

  Pausing to pull the knife from his ankle sheath, he looked down, surprised to see how small and faraway Taylor looked.

  “Lightning to the north,” Taylor called, batting away another hurtling cone. And then… “Brandt — maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”

  “Now you tell me,” Will muttered. He called back, “Simmer down, buddy boy. It’s under control.”

  Knife in hand, he studied the tangle of parachute and parachutist. Wind and weather had reduced the chute to ribbons, and the body wasn’t in much better shape. A tree limb thrust from the hijacker’s waist like a spear; he must have been impaled as he crashed through the branches. Crime really didn’t pay.

  His own position wasn’t quite right…

  Will transferred the knife to his mouth, and edged around the trunk, feeling cautiously for footholds. It was hard to see… He pulled himself up to another branch, balancing, and edged closer to the sack of rotting clothes, flesh, and bones.

  And all the fresh pine scent in the world wasn’t helping…

  “That is definitely lightning,” Taylor said from below. He had that irritable sound he got when he was nervous. “You mind not taking all day, Brandt?”

  “Yeah, I mind. It’s my vacation; I’ll spend it any damn way I please.”

  “Asshole.” But he could hear the unwilling laugh in Taylor’s voice.

  Will steeled himself and felt over the dead man’s rags, seeking a wallet or any kind of identification. He didn’t expect to find any, and he wasn’t disappointed. That done, he began to saw with his free hand at the straps of the knapsack. He tried to be careful, but he was in a hurry now, and the clothes and corpse began to come apart with his tugging. One of the black boots fell.

  Fuck. Fuck. He wiped his face on his shoulder. Called down, “Stand back, MacAllister. It’s raining men.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  His tone was priceless. Will bit back a ferocious grin, and went back to hacking at the knapsack straps. A few more slices and he had it. The backpack tumbled down a few feet, knocking needles and cones and twigs loose — along with the corpse’s other boot.

  Will lowered himself down swiftly, pursuing the knapsack. He found it lodged in the V of the trunk and a branch.

  Grabbing it by the severed straps, he swung it once, twice, out beyond the span of the branches — and let it fly. “MacAllister, heads up!”

  The pack went sailing and then dropped to earth like a stone.

  Will let himself down fast, ignoring the scrape of rough bark on his hands. A few feet from the ground he balanced on a thick limb.

  Taylor had retrieved the bag. He knelt in the mud and pine needles, knapsack wide open, staring up at Will. “You sure you don’t want to run away to Mexico with me?” He held up a neatly bound stack of greenbacks.

  “Nah.” Will jumped down, landing lightly on the soft wet earth. “Salsa gives you indigestion.”

  “True.” Taylor tossed the stack of dollars to Will.

  The money felt damp, sinister to his touch. He thumbed through it. Benjamin Franklin’s skeptical expression flashed by over and over.

  The rain began to fall.

  Chapter Three

  “You warm enough?”

  Taylor didn’t bother to respond, staring out the mesh window of the tent at the rain sheeting down the sides.

  Of course he was cold. He was freezing his ass off. Will had told him not to wear Levi’s. He’d told him to dress in layers. Wool socks, long underwear, lightweight wool sweater or acrylic sweatshirt, military surplus pants or jungle fatigues. But no, Mr. Know-It-All had chosen flannel shirts and Levi’s and a leather jacket. He’d changed his soaked clothes for dry, but he was still chilled, fine tremors rippling through his body every few minutes.

  It had taken them a few minutes to set up the tent after the skies opened up. Now the rain beat down on the plastic and sheeted off the sides, puddling on the ground outside. I
nside the tent it smelled of rubber, damp wool, and something dank and moldering.

  The money and backpack sat in the far corner. They had been through the backpack. No ID there either. No clue at all as to who the dead man was, but Taylor thought he fit the general description of Jon Jackson, one of the suspects in the Black Wolf Casino robbery. As a former employee of the casino, Jackson had come under investigation despite — or maybe partly because of — the fact that he’d left town two days before the robbery and hadn’t been heard from since.

  Will opened his mouth to tell — suggest — that Taylor change into his own spare fatigue pants, but Taylor said abruptly, “Only one hijacker got on that plane.”

  “Looks that way.”

  “One robber gets on the hijacked plane. The others split and go their separate ways.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe. Either way, they go prop up their alibis — maybe they are each other’s alibis.”

  Will scratched his bristling jaw, considering. Taylor was a natural at this kind of doublethink. In fact, he was a little too good. Some of his scenarios were straight out of Agatha Christie, in Will’s opinion. But this one sounded reasonable: Wile E. Coyote leading the hounds off the trail of the foxes. Still, there were problems with it.

  He said, “You think they trusted him to get on that plane and fly away with all that money? What happened to the ‘no honor among thieves’ rule?”

  “I think it’s more of a guideline. Anyway, it was a risk, sure. But it’s not like they weren’t the gambling kind.”

  Will acknowledged that.

  Taylor said, “Getting that money out of town was one way of protecting it — and maybe protecting them — assuming they were local.”

  Will turned it over, nodded. “Maybe. Yeah, they couldn’t take the risk of being stopped with the money, and they sure wouldn’t want it turning up in any subsequent searches. They couldn’t know how much time they’d have to stash it.” He wished he could read Taylor’s face, but Taylor was mostly staring out at the rain — and it was the first time Will had ever felt lonely in his company.

  “They’ve probably spent every weekend up here since the snow started melting searching for that plane.” He gave another of those little shivers.

  Will said, “Maybe. Maybe they figure he double-crossed them.”

  Taylor finally glanced Will’s way, his eyes oddly colorless — almost gray — in the dim light. “Maybe. But say they did some checking around. It probably wouldn’t take long to figure out that no one ever saw Jackson after that night in December.”

  “If it was Jackson.”

  “They’d know the plane went down. I think they’d figure Jackson — yeah, if it was Jackson — and the money went down with it.”

  “It fits,” Will agreed slowly.

  He studied Taylor’s sharply etched profile. It was hard to see in the fading light, but little details struck him: the black stubble on Taylor’s jaw, the length of his eyelashes, the soft dark hair growing over his collar, the set line of his mouth. It was kind of a sexy mouth. Sensual, even a little pouty, though Taylor was not the pouty kind, and his mouth spent a lot more time laughing and shooting itself off at the wrong moment than it did pouting.

  Taylor had his faults, God knew, but he was smart, savvy, and tough. He was good company most of the time; the best partner — the best friend — Will had ever had. He’d missed him badly these last six weeks. Hospital visits, even stopping by Taylor’s place once he’d been released, hadn’t been enough; in fact, it felt like he’d barely seen Taylor since the shooting.

  The shooting.

  It had been a routine op. Scratch that. It hadn’t even officially been an op. They’d received a tip-off that a passport counterfeit ring was operating out of the back of a nail salon in Orange County’s Little Saigon. A nail salon fronting a ring of counterfeiters? How dangerous could they be?

  Will had been up front chatting pleasantly with the teenaged pink-haired receptionist, and sizing things up. Taylor was supposed to be out back scoping the alley and neighboring businesses — just getting the lay of the land. They had nothing to move on at that point; it was just intelligence gathering. But Taylor had wandered around to the back of the salon and slipped in through the delivery door, apparently deciding all on his own to take a look around. And whatever he’d spotted amidst the boxes of acrylic powders and foam rubber toe separators had encouraged him to poke around a little more in the stock room — which is where two juvenile members of the local Phu Fighters gang had found him.

  The first clue Will had was the sound of shots from a back room in the salon. Two shots — and neither of them the familiar and distinct bang of Taylor’s .357 SIG — and he’d known. Known instantly that Taylor had been shot.

  He’d mown through the screaming, hysterical women, racing for the stockroom, and finding it — for one bewildered moment — empty. Then his gaze moved past the wall of boxes and metal shelving units and he’d spotted Taylor slumped on his side, blood spilling out of his chest, pooling on the cement floor. Taylor’s face had been bone white with shock, his eyes huge and black and stunned. Will had knelt down beside him, kneeling in the puddle of Taylor’s blood, and for one instant of sheer blind terror, he couldn’t think beyond the fact that Taylor was dying. That any one of those shuddering, faint breaths might be his last.

  It had never crossed his mind to go after the shooters. Not until later.

  “Hang on, Taylor,” he’d said, and he’d yelled at the terrified faces grouped in the doorway of the stockroom to call 911. His voice shook when he said, “Stay with me, Taylor. Stay.” The words had seemed laden, charged with fears and feelings he’d never considered — never allowed himself to consider. And he’d shrugged out of his sports coat, putting it around Taylor, shouting at the women to bring him towels, clean towels to try to stanch the bleeding. And the frightened women had scattered, a couple of them returning with freshly laundered towels that he jammed up against the bullet wound in Taylor’s chest.

  Taylor’s lashes had flickered. His colorless lips parted but no words came out, and Will didn’t even know if Taylor could hear him or not. Taylor’s eyes were open, pupils huge and black, but there was no other sign of consciousness in his chalky face, no response to Will. Will had taken Taylor’s icy hand in his and chafed it, feeling the long, lax fingers twitch feebly; maybe it was response, maybe it was just…a dying nervous system shutting down for good. And it was the worst day, the worst hour, the worst moments of Will’s life waiting for the paramedics — waiting for Taylor to stop breathing, for his eyes to fix and glaze before help could reach them.

  But then, afterward, when it was clear that Taylor was going to live — and recover fully — Will had been…angry. Why not admit it? He had been angry. About as angry as he’d been terrified — which was about as terrified as he’d been in his life.

  Because the truth was Taylor had brought it on himself. His ego hurt, he’d gone looking for trouble, and when he found it, he’d charged right into it without following procedure or using common sense. He hadn’t waited for backup, and he sure as hell hadn’t waited for Will. Taylor was a little headstrong and he was a little arrogant, but he wasn’t stupid and he wasn’t reckless — why had he done such a reckless, stupid, stupid, potentially fatally stupid thing?

  And Will knew why. Because of David Bradley. Because Taylor found out Will was seeing David Bradley, and he’d been…jealous. Which didn’t make a lick of sense. Taylor knew Will dated. Taylor dated. It was one of the first bonds between them: the fact that they were both gay. Not a lot of gay special agents in DSS. They’d have been a good team in any case, and they’d probably have been good friends — they shared a similar jaded worldview and sarcastic sense of humor — but the fact that they also shared the same sexual orientation… Yeah, it forged that bond between them into reinforced steel. They were practically brothers. Brothers-in-arms.

  Less than two months ago Will would have said no one knew him b
etter — no one was closer to him — than Taylor. That was assuming he’d have been willing to talk about his feelings — which he wouldn’t have, of course. They didn’t talk about that kind of thing.

  Will glanced over at Taylor. Profile hard, he was staring out the tent window at the rain thundering down.

  The last thing he’d ever meant to do was hurt Taylor.

  He still wasn’t clear exactly where he’d gone wrong.

  He’d mentioned David in passing a few times, mentioned that he was seeing him. Taylor had seemed — well, he hadn’t seemed anything in particular. Why would he? But that last afternoon, Will had mentioned he had seen David the night before, and Taylor had got kind of quiet and weird.

  “You’re seeing a lot of him,” he’d said, bringing it up a couple of hours later when they stopped for lunch.

  “Yeah? So?” Will had known immediately who Taylor meant; he knew Taylor too well to have missed that odd moment in the car earlier.

  “You…getting serious?” And Taylor’s face had been — well, frankly, Will still couldn’t quite describe what Taylor’s face had been. Troubled? Uncomfortable? Hurt? All of the above? It had been a weird expression, and it had been weirder yet because he could tell Taylor was trying not to show anything.

  “Nah.” But then he had made the fatal mistake of being honest. “I don’t know.”

  And Taylor had gone white.

  White.

  Like Will had stabbed him. He looked stricken.

  “What’s the matter?” Will had said. “What’s wrong?” Because something sure as hell was wrong.

  But Taylor had laughed, closing up instantly — which wasn’t how they were together. “Nothing’s wrong. Bradley’s a great guy.” And he’d shrugged — like a guilty little kid caught in a lie. And then he’d changed the subject.

  What. The. Hell.

  But Will had let it drop — not like he had a choice. Taylor was talking himself away from the moment, whatever that moment had been. And, truth to tell, Will couldn’t get away from that moment fast enough himself.