by Gregory Ashe
“You’re a miserable drunk. No. Not miserable. You’re a gaping asshole.”
“We had a chance. We had a goddamn chance at getting him, and you had to blow everything. Why?”
Hazard shook his head.
“What? Now you aren’t going to talk? You had plenty to say back at city hall. Hell, you had plenty to say when we came in here. Now you’re just going to shake your head at me. That’s perfect. That’s typical Hazard, right there.”
The waiter sauntered up to them. “Uh oh,” he said in a lilting voice, setting glasses of water in front of them. “You two sound like you’re having a bit of a spat. Should I come back?” He tilted his head, eyes locked on Hazard until Hazard shifted uncomfortably.
“We’re fine,” Hazard said.
“I want another shot. A few more shots.”
“We’re fine. Just bring us the burgers.”
Toying with one end of the waxed mustache, the waiter paused, head still cocked, as though waiting for something. Hazard was starting to think he’d seen the young man before. Where? At the local gay club, The Pretty Pretty? Once or twice Hazard had allowed Nico to drag him there, but every time they went, boys—and men—swarmed Hazard. Their interest was fueled mostly by the fact that Hazard was a gay cop who had solved the murder of a young gay man. It had made him, in local gay culture, something of a celebrity—a trait that Nico enjoyed.
“My name’s Marcus,” the waiter said, cocking his hips. “If you need anything.” He sashayed back towards the kitchen.
“You want him to take off his pants?” Somers asked. “You could fuck him too, I bet. Before we even get our burgers, if you’re fast enough.”
“You’re being a—” Hazard fumbled for words. “A jerk. I know I screwed up back in Newton’s office. I’m not stupid. I’m sorry. You love apologies. You think an apology fixes everything. So there it is: my apology. I’m sorry.”
To Hazard’s surprise, Somers turned away. Sunlight through the window gleamed on his cheeks, outlining the tracks of tears. With one arm, Somers dashed at his eyes, and then he shook his head and cleared his throat. It wasn’t enough; he dashed at his eyes again, and then again.
“Somers,” Hazard said, rising halfway.
“Just sit down, all right? Sit the hell down.” Somers wiped at his face again. “If you move, I swear to God I’ll shoot you. You hear me? Just sit your ass down.”
Hazard sank back into the seat. Somers was always happy. Somers was always cheerful. Even at the worst of their fighting, Somers never got more than angry—nothing like this. The trickle of tears, though, and the silent shudders that ran through Somers, were worse than any amount of yelling, any amount of swearing, any threats of physical violence.
“Somers. John-Henry. I’m sorry.”
“I know you’re sorry, you big dumb piece of muscle. I didn’t sleep last night. My head’s screwed on backward, and I’m pissed that the whole case just turned to shit, and now I’m drunk, thanks a lot for that.” Somers wiped his face again, and this time, his cheeks stayed dry. He looked so much younger in the winter light. Not—
—that boy in the locker room—
—a child, but a young man. The gold in his hair turned to fire as the light skimmed it. “All right.”
“What?”
“All right. I know you didn’t mean to do that, shout at Newton like that. So all right.”
Hazard knew this was the moment to tell him about Jonas Cassidy. He knew it was time to clear the air between them, to tell his partner what had led to his return to Wahredua. He owed Somers that much. Somers had been open, more than open, about his own failings. It was one of the qualities that had made it possible for Hazard to put behind him their terrible history. But when Hazard opened his mouth, the words wouldn’t come. Because when he did tell Somers, when Somers finally knew the truth, he wouldn’t look at Hazard the same way. And some days, that look from Somers was the only thing Hazard had.
The moment passed, and Somers picked up his glass of water. His fingers cut prints into the condensation as he drank half the glass, and when he set it down, he seemed a little steadier. Some of the pressure that had been building up in him over the last day had been released; a little emotional steam had vented. Only a little, though—not enough, Hazard suspected. And it would keep building until Somers found who had tried to kill his father, making Somers more and more unpredictable as time went on.
The waiter returned with the burgers, each plate loaded with french fries and toppings—lettuce, white onion that stung Hazard’s eyes, tomato, pickle slices. Again, the waiter—Marcus—lingered, his gaze so sharp that Hazard felt himself shift under it.
“We’re fine, thanks,” Hazard finally said.
With an audible sniff, Marcus left.
“The thing with Newton and the sheriff—” Somers began, his face turned towards his plate as he layered tomatoes and onion and lettuce on the patty.
“Look, I’ll make it right, somehow. If he tries to get Cravens to fire us, I’ll—I’ll take the heat, do something, I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.”
“We’ll figure it out, dumbass. And that’s not what I was going to say. I was going to say that it changes the case.”
“We’re not stopping because of Newton. I don’t care if he thinks he can put the screws to me. End of story.”
“Maybe we’ve been looking at the wrong guy.”
A sliced tomato dripped onto Hazard’s fingers, dangling over the burger. “Excuse me?”
Letting out a sigh, Somers said, “I’m not giving up on that theory. But let’s think about it: if Newton really had tried to kill my dad, why would he push the sheriff’s investigation? The last thing that he’d want would be an investigation.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time a murderer tried to help the police with his killing. Remember, somebody had keys to those cuffs. Odds are good it was somebody in law enforcement, and the only one there was the sheriff. The mayor and the sheriff might be in this together. Anyway, people who kill get crazy. They do all kinds of stupid things. Some of them get off on it, being so close to the investigation. They all trip up, though.”
“That doesn’t sound like Newton.”
“Even if Newton’s too cagey to make a mistake like that, he might have felt pressured by the sheriff. You can tell Bingham’s furious; I don’t blame him. His granddaughter was killed in front of him. He leaned on Newton, got him to pull some strings.”
“Maybe,” Somers said. “I’m just saying, this changes things. I know I found that recording in the safe, but that’s the thing: it was in the safe. Newton might not even know about it. If he doesn’t, then what reason would he have to go after my father?”
“Like we said at the beginning, Newton always has a reason. Just because we don’t know what it is doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have one.”
A grin sparkled on Somers’s face, and it looked surprisingly genuine after his recent storm of emotions. “So we’ve traded sides? Now you think he did it, and I’m saying he didn’t.”
“I’m not saying he did it. I’m saying that we shouldn’t stop considering him a suspect.”
“You still think it was my mother. Or—”
“Or Jeremiah. Yes. I do.”
Somers nodded. Burger juices stained his hands and had trickled down to his wrists. He took another bite, chewed thoughtfully, and nodded again. “All right.”
“All right what?”
“We need to start talking to our witnesses. This case, the thing I thought we had, it’s not as open-and-shut as I’d hoped. I was blind. I was pushing too hard because I wanted it to be Newton. I wanted a quick close. But we need to go back and do it right. We’ve looked at Stillwell’s stuff, and we know someone hired him to be there. Someone planned this. Let’s start talking to the people who were in the room when the shooting happened. Let’s see what they noticed.”
Hazard opened his mouth to respond, but at tha
t moment, his phone buzzed. It was a single word from Nico: hey. Dismissing the text message, Hazard started to return the phone to his pocket. Then he stopped. Marcus, the waiter, was watching from the doorway. Not watching Hazard, not specifically, but watching. A nervous trickle ran down Hazard’s spine.
Pulling the phone back into his lap, he sent back: Hey.
You busy?
Still trying to figure out what happened last night.
The next message came twenty seconds later. Too long. Right now, are you busy?
It felt like a trap, and that made Hazard angry because he didn’t know why it should feel like a trap. He was having lunch with Somers. They had lunch every day. They worked together. They lived together. They practically breathed together. It was nothing, the sensible part of Hazard’s brain said. He was reading too much into the text. Nico was just bored or lonely and looking for a chance to chat. That was all.
But the dark, buried part of Hazard’s brain remembered the month before, when Hazard had been in the hospital. Nico had been insistent that Hazard move out of the apartment. Nico had been furious with Somers for not calling, for not telling him what had happened to Hazard. That was all it had been: anger at Somers’s forgetfulness. And even that was a lie, a lie that registered only in the deepest part of himself, where Hazard was still unwilling to admit what Somers had pointed out gleefully: that Nico was jealous of Somers.
And now this text, with Marcus watching from the doorway, with the too-long pause, with the repeated question: are you busy?
Somers was disconnecting from a call, and Hazard realized he had missed the conversation. “The electrician,” Somers said. “Somebody messed with the breakers just like we thought. Once the external breaker overloads, it trips the circuit for the whole house. Presto, absolute darkness. Hey, did you fall asleep? If so, I’m going to have a bite of your burger. I don’t know what it is. Big Biscuit this morning, but I’m still starved.” He reached for Hazard’s plate.
Without looking up, Hazard seized a steak knife and pricked the back of Somers’s hand with it.
“God damn it. You could have said no.”
Hazard ignored him. He had waited too long. The text sat there, unanswered. Grimly, Hazard typed in his response: Yeah, busy. What’s up?
No answer. Ten seconds ticked into twenty. Twenty ticked into forty-five. Then a full minute had passed, and the screen flashed and went dark. Auto-lock. Jesus Christ. Hazard glanced up. Marcus was still in the kitchen doorway, head down, hands cupped, as though looking at a phone.
“Come on,” Somers said, displaying the red mark left by the knife. “You going to eat that, or are you just being mean?”
Hazard took another bite, but it was like chewing airplane paste. Shaking his head, he shoved the plate towards Somers, who demolished the remaining burger in a few bites.
“Kind of like kissing.”
“What?”
Somers gestured at the empty plate. “You took a bite. I took a bite.”
“You’re idiotic, you know that? And you’re having the world’s biggest mood swings. It’s getting annoying.”
“Annoying? Oh man. I better watch out. Annoying.”
Hazard paid for the drinks and the burgers—although most of the bill was the drinks. When Hazard took back his card and his receipt, Marcus waggled his eyebrows and smirked. “Nico says hi.”
Hazard grabbed his jacket, thrust his arms into it, and tried to ignore the boy with the waxed mustache who was, at that moment, so fucking pleased with himself he was about ready to pop.
“You know him?” Somers asked.
“No.”
“We’re acquainted,” Marcus said.
“No, we’re not.”
“Distantly.”
Hazard growled, at a loss for words, and charged for the door. Marcus moved in his way in some sort of half-assed attempt to block him, and Hazard shoved past him and out of The Real Beef. Somers came after him, laughing. And Somers kept laughing for half a block as they walked towards the VW.
“It’s not funny,” Hazard snapped.
“You didn’t see the way that kid was looking at you. You’re lucky he didn’t cut the pants off you right in the booth.”
“Are you kidding me? He’s some jerk-off who’s trying to rat me out to Nico.”
“Are you simple? You know, like, touched in the head? Or just blind? You’ve got to be one or the other.”
“You really are an asshole sometimes.”
Scooping up snow, Somers tossed it at Hazard, who swatted it out of the air.
“Nope,” Somers said, his grin threatening to shatter his cheekbones. “Not blind. I bet you could have gotten his number too. Just think about it. Two numbers in one day.” Somers made a face. “Shame one of them was a girl’s.”
As Hazard unlocked the VW’s door, he touched his jacket pocket. The small, hard shape was still there: Hadley’s mobile phone, stolen from the morgue. Again, Hazard saw in his mind the two boys who had been making out in the darkest corner of the Somerset family room. He remembered the furious look on one’s face and the way he had walked towards Glenn and Hadley, the way his hand had dipped inside his jacket.
“What are you thinking about?” Somers said.
“Huh?”
“I’ve been freezing my ass for about two minutes while you stared off into space. What’s up?”
“Hadley. And those boys, the ones who were watching her.”
“Those boys are jailbait. Anyway, don’t you have enough guys trying to catch you as it is?”
“I’m saying what about them. The one boy, he was furious. About to start something with your dad.”
“You think a teenage boy hired a Craigslist hitman on my dad?”
“I think there was something weird about them.”
Somers sighed. “Well, they’re on our list of people to visit. Where do we start?”
“Jeremiah Walker.”
Somers scrunched up his nose and nodded. “Oh, Hazard?”
“What?”
“That guy, Marcus. The one I said likes you.”
Hazard started to growl.
“You know, the one that wanted to flip you out of your pants and have you make hot, angry, beefsteak sex to him on the closest table.”
“Leave off.”
“I’m just asking if you remember him. Remember how you made a big deal of how he doesn’t like you. How you told me I was wrong.”
“Will you fucking drop it, Somers?”
“Yeah, sure. Just one thing.” Somers plucked a scrap of paper from the front pocket on Hazard’s jacket. “Here’s his number.”
JEREMIAH WALKER LIVED IN A SWANKY apartment in downtown Wahredua, just a couple blocks off the riverfront. Somers normally didn’t use the word swanky, but he was feeling—
—loaded—
—good, especially after that thing with the phone number. Jesus, Hazard’s face had gone red. He was so pale; the red looked about ten times redder than it did on anyone else. And the way he shifted his shoulders when he was embarrassed. And the way his eyes moved like he was trapped. And the sudden, overwhelming rush to comfort him—and that, Somers thought, pulling his mind back to a safer zone, was the kind of thinking that was going to land him in a lot of hot water. It would have been one thing if Hazard had liked Somers in return. Liked liked, not just this casual thing that passed for friendship. But Somers had tried. Somers had thrown himself at Hazard—drunken, yes, and saying things he shouldn’t have said. But still, he’d done it. And Emery Hazard had shoved him aside and left the room.
The message didn’t get much clearer than that: Hazard might have forgiven Somers for the past, but he wasn’t interested in anything more. And, truth be told, Somers wasn’t sure that he was either. But the tequila made it easier to think. It seemed to lift everything up, put it within an easy reach. Some of it, too, was the grief and the shock: Somers’s nerves were raw, his emotions strung s
o tight that he could have plucked any one of them and it would have sounded like castrati on a bad day. Grief, panic, amusement, hilarity. Most of all, though, what Somers felt was a building pressure, like something inside him would explode if he didn’t—what? Cry? Scream? Neither of those appealed to him.
Instead, he’d done what he always did: he got drunk. And inside the boozy, amber light of the tequila, dangerous thoughts were swimming. Some of those dangerous thoughts were about Cora. About what he was supposed to do with a wife who wouldn’t divorce him, wouldn’t let him touch her, wouldn’t even look him in the eye some days. And even more dangerous thoughts about Emery Hazard, and the feel of his skin all those years ago in the locker room, and the drunken kisses in their apartment, and the feel of Hazard’s nails grazing Somers’s nipple at Windsor, and—
“Are you getting out of the car?” Hazard asked as he jammed down the emergency brake.
“Yeah.” Somers choked on the word. “Yep. Right now.”
That ass, though, Somers thought as Hazard walked towards the apartment building. God had done some damn fine work on that ass. Chiseled like a goddamn Mount Rushmore, that ass.
“Now,” Hazard shouted back.
Somers scrambled out of the car and towards the apartment building. The booze was making him sloppy. The booze was making him think dangerous things. The booze was making him horny, but the honest-to-God truth, the truth Somers wouldn’t bother denying, was that it felt better to be drunk and horny than the chaos, the confusion, the shock and the pain of the last day. And distantly, Somers wondered why he wasn’t fantasizing about Cora, or about that girl Kaylee, or about any of the other girls he’d slept with. The answer swam towards him, and he shoved it away.
“He won’t be home,” Somers said. “He’s a busy man.”
Hazard ignored him and pressed the button.
To Somers’s surprise, Jeremiah buzzed them up. They rode the elevator to the top, and instead of opening onto a hallway, it opened onto the apartment itself: a loft with exposed brick, an industrial ceiling of painted metal ductwork, and furniture that looked like it had been shipped straight from Finland or Sweden—somewhere cold, somewhere Norse, somewhere that cost a hell of a lot.
