Prodigal

by TA Moore

  Mac glanced around at him and then pulled a second twenty out of his wallet. He handed it over. “On me.”

  She looked curiously at him, the note folded between her fingers, but then she shrugged her soft pink-clad shoulders.

  “Two burgers, two coffees,” she said. “It’ll be ten minutes.”

  She headed into the kitchen, her voice sharp as she conveyed the order to the cook, and Mac tucked his wallet back into his jacket as he came over to the booth.

  “Coincidence?” he asked. “Or are you stalking me, Morgan?”

  “Neither,” Morgan said. “The doughnuts might be a stereotype, but I’ve never met a cop who didn’t need a coffee. And this is the closest diner to the station.”

  “What if I got Starbucks?” Mac asked. He nudged Morgan’s feet out of the way and sat down. The leather cushions under him creaked as he sat back. “Were you just going to come back tomorrow?”

  Morgan picked at the cut of a graffiti heart someone had scored into the Formica of the table. The remnants of old ink were still worked into the scratches.

  “I would have come to you,” Morgan said, ignoring the fact that Cutter’s Gap didn’t have a Starbucks. “I just had enough of the cop shop recently. So? Where do we stand?”

  “We?” Mac pulled his arms out of his jacket, folded it, and hung it neatly over the back of the booth. “You and me? Or you and Boyd after that show you made of yourselves the other night.”

  Morgan poked absently at the inside of his cheek, the chunk he’d taken out of it just a tender spot now.

  Ah.

  “Bob made a complaint?”

  “You’re lucky he didn’t,” Mac said. “His father didn’t want the bad press. He never does, although usually he’s talking people into dropping charges. Did Boyd really hit Bob with a—”

  “Chair, yes,” Morgan said. He could feel the stupid grin on his face, and he reached for the milkshake. It might taste bad, but at least he could hide behind it. “I didn’t ask him to.”

  A reluctant smile tugged at the corner of Mac’s mouth. “You wouldn’t need to,” he said. “The amount of fights that kid got into….”

  He trailed off with a rueful shake of his head. Morgan took a drink of the too-sweet shake and tried to imagine Boyd as a troublemaker. It wasn’t that difficult, actually. Boyd was easily led. He wiped his mouth and shrugged off the soft feeling.

  “So I don’t need to worry about Bob,” he said. “Just this whole ‘you’re a dead—’”

  Mac held up a hand to shut him up as Bertie came over with two cups and a carafe of coffee. She pursed her lips as the table went quiet with her arrival.

  “No refills,” she said. The cups went down on the table, and she filled them up. “Not after the lunch rush.”

  Nobody cared. By this point Morgan figured a good cup of coffee was as hard to find in Cutter’s Gap as a missing eight-year-old.

  “You turned up anything about that DNA?” Morgan asked when she was gone. He swapped the milkshake for the cup, liquid hot against his palms. It was a double-edged question. He wanted to know why a fifteen-year-old mystery had screwed up his life, but if he was going to get Shay’s car, he needed to be sure of what Mac already knew. “Still think I’m Sammy Calloway?”

  It was a joke… and a test.

  Mac leaned back in the booth. The star on his chest glittered dimly in the overhead lights. He took a long drink of his coffee and then set the cup down.

  “It doesn’t matter what I think,” he said. “Just what I can prove. Right now we still don’t know. So far no one has come back with any record of you from the places you said you lived as a child. That could mean something, or it could mean that some small town hasn’t gotten around to digitizing their records. And the DNA results we did this time were inconclusive.”

  “What does that mean?”

  A muscle jumped in Mac’s cheek as he clenched his jaw. After a second he visibly forced his jaw to relax. “That means I need to tell Donna what’s happened and rip her heart open again.”

  Morgan shrugged uncomfortably. “Just tell her it’s a mistake,” he said. For an instant he forgot that he was going to—maybe—pretend that he was. “I’m obviously not this kid.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Mac said as he lifted the coffee off the table. He got it halfway to his face and paused, mug forgotten in his hand. “Donna believes that Sammy’s alive, the same way Catholics believe in Mass. Nobody is going to change her mind because she doesn’t want to believe he’s dead. And you, Mr. Graves? You look like her prayers come to life.”

  The back of Morgan’s throat felt raw with…. What? Guilt? None of this was his fault. He hadn’t asked to get dragged to this dying town so they could jam him into the hole left by a lost kid. The feeling scraped against his chest walls as he swallowed, but resentment made him force it down.

  “First time a mom would have said that about me,” he said. “You could just leave the DNA and wait and see if someone finds my own school photos or something. I played hooky often enough. There has to be some kind of record?”

  Mac considered that for a moment. Then he sighed, shook his head, and finally remembered to take a drink of coffee. It had cooled enough that he could taste it, and he grimaced.

  “You aren’t a low-profile man, Morgan,” he said. “And around here, the Calloway case isn’t a low-profile story. Donna already knows there was some new evidence in the case. I’ve put her off about what exactly, but I can only do that so long. I should have told her already. I just wanted to have something concrete first.”

  He looked into his coffee, made a face, and shoved it over to sit next to the sad blue shake.

  “Bertie,” he said, voice raised to carry to the counter. “Make my burger to go. I’ve got to get back.”

  He slid out from the booth and waited at the counter for Bertie to fetch his lunch in a Styrofoam clamshell. A couple of minutes later, Morgan’s burger came out, a puddle of juice already on the plate under it.

  “Here you go,” Bertie said as she slid it onto the table in front of him. Her eyes flicked over to the milkshake. “Funny thing, you know. Kids used to order that all the time. I see them sometimes—that firefighter, for one. Him and his friend….”

  She trailed off expectantly. Morgan didn’t know for what.

  “Yeah, well, it’s awful,” he said. Bertie just hovered there as she studied the blue liquid. Then he cleared his throat. “Burger looks great. Thanks.”

  At last she left. Morgan picked up the burger, bun dented under his fingers, and stared at it while he waited for his appetite to come back. It didn’t, so he took a bite and choked it down anyhow. It lay heavily in his stomach.

  He hadn’t decided exactly what he was going to do to put Deacon Hill in the picture, he reminded himself. And what if he did tell Donna Calloway he was her son, and then he left? At least she could stop looking for her son. It might even be a kindness.

  Would he tell Boyd that, he wondered darkly. He didn’t let himself answer, but he was done with the burger either way.

  THE SMART thing to do would be to go to Shay and pick his brain. He was Sammy’s brother, and he knew everything Morgan needed to run this con. It wasn’t as though Morgan would even have to lie. Shay wanted this to play out smoothly just as much as Morgan did.

  So why was he slouched against Boyd’s door? He hadn’t even known if Boyd was home when he climbed the stairs until the muffled “Hold on” from inside.

  If he were honest, Morgan already knew the answer. He had—what, a week?—left of Boyd’s pretty-as-fuck eyes and sweet mouth. Then he’d be out of here, and Shay would have Boyd and his justice all to himself.

  That thought made Morgan taste bile in the back of his throat. He shrugged it off because that sort of answer would make a smart man—whose freedom and twenty grand had been bet on his ability to fuck people over—get out of here. Sentiment and second thoughts were the sort of thing that got you sent to jail, and no matter what they p
romised, no one actually waited on the outside. Luckily Morgan wasn’t really all that honest.

  Shay might tell Morgan everything he thought Morgan needed to know, but he was a mechanic with an axe to grind, not a con artist. A lie lived or died on the details, and Morgan didn’t trust Shay to know what details mattered.

  See? It wasn’t a lie, but it was a truth he could live with.

  He thumped the door again with the flat of his hand. “Are you dead?”

  “Nope.” The door opened from under his shoulders, and Morgan caught his balance as he turned. Boyd, hair messy and skin greasy pale, smirked at him as he propped himself against the jamb. “Maybe I’m getting laid.”

  He smelled like sweat, sleep, and the sour bite of whiskey that had sweated out through his pores and soaked into his rumpled T-shirt. It made Morgan’s lip curl, the back of his throat raw as his temper scraped at it.

  “And they had to get you drunk first?” he asked.

  Boyd rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. “I did that myself,” he said. “Bad day.”

  “Bet mine was worse.”

  “I got fired.”

  “I went to see your friend, and he called me a con artist,” Morgan said. “I guess it’s lucky you didn’t feel like you had to boast that we’d hooked up, or he’d have probably called me worse.”

  Boyd squinted at him for a moment and then pushed himself off the door jamb with a groan. He left the door open as he padded back into the dimly lit apartment. Sweatpants hung low around his hips, the cuffs folded under his heels. “You know what? It’s too early for you.”

  “It’s midafternoon.”

  “Shit,” Boyd said as he folded himself over the breakfast bar and laced his hands together at the back of his neck. His voice was muffled between his elbows as he groaned, “This may be another bad day.”

  If he wanted sympathy, Morgan was out. He’d done his time in foster care with drunks and their hangovers and trod carefully around their bitter, brittle tempers to avoid the beating they’d blame him for later. It wasn’t something he was interested in now that he could walk away when he wanted.

  But he hadn’t, had he?

  Despite the slow-brewed temper that clenched his jaw and made the back of his head ache, Morgan grazed his attention over the abandoned sprawl of Boyd’s lean frame. Damp cotton didn’t hide much of the muscle underneath, and Morgan swallowed hard as he reached the hip-cocked curve of Boyd’s ass. The worn sweatpants hung on his hipbones by the last bit of stretch in the band, and Morgan didn’t know if he wanted to fuck Boyd or just slap the self-indulgent misery out of him.

  The thought tangled his hand for a second—the crack of his palm against Boyd’s ass and the heavy weight of arousal in his groin as Boyd squirmed—and his stomach turned in visceral disgust. He dragged his attention away from Boyd’s ass and fed the lust to his anger. His sour mood might make him an asshole, but at least it didn’t make him sick.

  “How much did you have to drink?” he asked, his voice deliberately harsh.

  Boyd propped himself up on his elbows and rubbed his hands over his face. “Not enough.”

  “Yeah, nothing as thirsty as a drunk,” Morgan said.

  “Three whiskeys,” Boyd said. “Half a lite beer. I’ve been told I’m a cheap date.”

  The stink of whiskey and shame, mostly his own, had Morgan’s temper primed like a tripwire to go off at the flimsiest pretext. Despite that, he couldn’t resist a flash of exasperated humor at Boyd’s wry confession. It was pathetic—Morgan could hold his drink better than that, and whiskey always got him thrown out of the bar before he finished the bottle.

  “You smell like one,” Morgan said. “You really get fired?”

  “Suspended,” Boyd said as he twisted around, elbows still braced behind him. Dark stubble shadowed his jaw and exaggerated the sharp angles. The hangover, if you could actually justify anything that came from three whiskeys as a hangover, had bruised green tones under his eyes. He scowled bleakly. “Maybe I don’t want to go back anyhow.”

  Not a good idea, Morgan thought with a nip of guilt, when his ten grand was going to drive out of town in the next month.

  “Just enjoy your time off and then apologize for whatever you did,” he said with a shrug. “Who cares? It’s just a paycheck, at the end of the day.”

  “Do you know what I do?” Boyd asked as he tilted his head to the side.

  “No, but I don’t care,” Morgan said. He wrinkled his nose. “Go shower. I want to take you to dinner.”

  Boyd stared at him and raked his hand through his sleep-flattened hair until it stood up in dark, unruly spikes. His eyes brightened to their usual honey-and-liquor shade as a cautious shadow of his usual ridiculous smile broke through his funk. “Like… a date?”

  The hint of amusement in Boyd’s voice caught Morgan on the raw. His already cocked temper caught hot and dry on his ribs at the thought that he was being mocked. He curled his lip at Boyd in contempt.

  “Why bother. We already fucked,” he said. “I just need to talk. About Shay.”

  Boyd’s smile twisted at the corner with a wry tilt that made Morgan scowl. In the mood he was in, the last thing he wanted was for someone to be patient at him.

  “We can talk here,” Boyd said.

  Morgan snorted at him. “Or would we just fuck?”

  “You think a lot of yourself.”

  The amused dismissal in Boyd’s voice was a joke. Morgan’s temper wasn’t so hair trigger that he didn’t get that. It was stupid to take it as a challenge, especially when he needed information more than he needed Boyd under him.

  His pride disagreed. Morgan lifted his chin and ran his tongue slowly over his lower lip as he rubbed his hand over his collarbones. He felt a flicker of smug satisfaction when Boyd’s cheeks flushed with interest as he watched the show.

  “Yeah?” Morgan stroked his hand down over his chest and the tight line of his stomach, where old bruises were fresh and tender under his fingers, until he reached his jeans. He hooked his thumb into the waistband and stretched his fingers down to frame the soft bulge of his cock. “Tell me, Boyd. You wanna fuck?”

  The “okay” was right there. Morgan could practically see it on the tip of Boyd’s tongue as he opened his mouth. Point made, even if Boyd did catch the admission behind his teeth before he actually said it.

  “Fine,” Boyd grumbled as he straightened up. “Dinner. But if it’s not a date, we’re going to Mallon’s.”

  He stripped off his T-shirt as he headed for the bedroom. Long straps of muscle and sharp bones flexed and moved under pale, sweat-damp skin, and Morgan had to lick his lips again as his mouth went dry. It was the careless strip of someone used to living alone, with the T-shirt tossed over a chair, but that just made it hotter somehow.

  “Since you brought it up,” Morgan asked as he gave in to his curiosity. The nerd glasses said accountant, but number crunching didn’t give someone an ass like that. “What do you do?”

  “I’m a firefighter,” Boyd said over his shoulder. “And an EMT. Or I was.”

  Morgan exhaled raggedly. Of course. The only thing that would make Boyd hotter, and there it was. Morgan gave his jeans a tug to loosen them over his groin. He’d played himself there, he could admit that. It wasn’t like Boyd would know he’d always had a thing for firefighters, the men in uniform who weren’t going to toss him into jail.

  Guilt, curdled by the smell of whiskey, lingered in the room, stirred as Morgan figured he could guess why Boyd was suspended. He tried to ignore it as he perched restlessly on the arm of the couch.

  “What happened to the other couch?” he asked as he heard the shower start.

  “Oh,” Boyd said over the sound of water. “Shay came over and helped me get rid of it.”

  Morgan made a sour face and slid down onto the couch, one leg still hooked over the arm.

  “Yeah, of course he fucking did,” Morgan muttered under his breath. It felt good to have someone he could let his
anger chew on without feeling awkward or guilty about it. “Asshole couldn’t even wait until I was gone to make his move.”

  AT SOME point the restaurant had been a Dairy Queen. The signs had been taken down and the red paint had faded to terracotta, but you could still tell. It still served hot dogs too, wet and shiny under stripes of mustard and ketchup. Morgan had eaten worse places, but….

  “So if it was a date,” Morgan asked. “What would be different?”

  Boyd wiped his mouth on a napkin and shrugged. “I wouldn’t have gotten a chili dog.” He sat back, the half a dog left on the plate in front of him, and raised his eyebrows over his glasses at Morgan. “What did you want to talk about?”

  What Boyd would have said if Morgan had asked him on a date. Morgan licked salt and ketchup off his lips and ignored the urge to ask. It wasn’t important. Even if the answer would have been yes, it wouldn’t change anything. He might want to believe it would, but eventually the no would have crawled in. If not because Boyd had gotten sick of Morgan—the way everyone did—then because he found out about the deal with Shay.

  “What’s she like?” he asked instead. He’d already picked out more than Boyd realized on the drive through town—who he liked, who he didn’t, what businesses were still here fifteen years later, and the ones that people still missed. It was easy because Boyd trusted him. Or, Morgan thought with the tang of something bitter, he trusted Sammy. Maybe Sammy had deserved that trust. “His mother. Donna Callaway. I’m going to have to meet her, and I don’t know…. It’s weird. What am I supposed to say?”

  Boyd sat back in the booth and looked uncomfortable.

  “I don’t know,” he said after a second. “Didn’t Shay—”

  “He told me she was broke, so I wouldn’t get any money out of her,” Morgan said. He plucked a french fry off his plate and dragged it through the ketchup. “If you need his permission to talk about her, don’t worry about—”

  “It’s not that. I really don’t know,” Boyd said. He pushed his plate away from him as though the topic had taken his appetite. “When we were kids—”