Prodigal

by TA Moore

  “You and Shay?”

  Guilt flickered across Boyd’s face, and he folded his lower lip between his teeth as he nodded. “Me and Sammy,” he corrected Morgan. “Shay was older. We used to follow him around, beg him to let us work on that muscle car of his, but he never paid us much attention. Back then, though, Mrs. Calloway was just Sammy’s mom. I mean, she was nice, we weren’t scared of her, but I never really thought of her as being a person. She worked a lot—two jobs, and it was shift work—so she was never home much. One year Sammy went to Yellowstone with me and my dad, and she made us a cake to take with us. It was awful, but you ate it anyhow.”

  Morgan caught that, but he didn’t bother with a correction this time. “And after?”

  “After Sammy disappeared, I was scared of her,” Boyd admitted and immediately looked sorry. “I mean, I was just a kid too, and… Mrs. Calloway had problems. She wasn’t well, and she said things she didn’t mean. She’s a lot better now, most of the time. Anniversaries throw her for a loop, the calls from cops who say they’ve found something, when—”

  “When Mac tells her that her son might be alive, but he’s a thief and a hustler?”

  Boyd didn’t agree out loud, but the rueful face he made was close enough. He took a drink of his water and frowned, straight brows knit together as he tried to explain.

  “She might be happy. Or mad that we didn’t tell her right away,” he said. “I don’t know if she’ll be… together enough… to cope with it. I just, I don’t know how she’ll react. Not to you.”

  “Will she think I’m him?” Morgan asked. His freedom was based on one answer to that question, but….

  “Probably. She’s always believed he’d come home,” Boyd said. “At least until the DNA comes back, or you find something to prove who you are… and aren’t.”

  Con artists didn’t have bad tempers, so Morgan never ran anything more complicated than a hustle over a pool or card game. He’d met enough—lived with enough—to know the best lie was a redirected truth.

  “I lied to Mac,” he said abruptly. Boyd, at least, had enough good sense not to look surprised. “My mom’s not dead. My dad either. Not as far as I know, anyhow.”

  It was hard to read Boyd’s expression, but he started to tap his fingers on the table. He always did that when he wasn’t sure what else to do, as though his body couldn’t cope when his brain was in neutral.

  “Why—”

  Morgan clenched his jaw. He’d brought it up, and now he didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t have to, not all of it. If he gave too many details, he’d have no wriggle room afterward.

  “I don’t remember them, really,” he said. Not well, anyhow. There were blurry snapshots of frustration and teary prayers as they held him down, of locked doors and his desperate, confused rage as he battered against them. Someone’s arm in a cast, and maybe he’d done it, maybe that was why they sent him away in the end. “I suppose I should, ’cause I was eight or nine, but I don’t. Just that one day this man came and got me in his car, and he told me they didn’t want me anymore, and him and his wife would be my new family.”

  His next memories were of the cheap plastic seats in the pickup, hot against his bare thighs, cheap cheese sandwiches, more locked doors, and the sort of active, aggressive prayer that came with slaps and shoves.

  “Jesus.”

  “It wasn’t that bad.” It was, and wasn’t, a lie. Morgan remembered his own anger as the most disruptive thing in the neat, disapproving house, the vague assumption that if he was bad enough, they’d send him home. “They sent me on to another family that wanted a kid, and when they realized they didn’t want this kid, they sent me on again. By the time I hit the foster-care system, I was already five homes down.”

  “Why didn’t you tell Mac?”

  Morgan’s harsh crack of a laugh that caught him off guard. It had been years ago, and he should be over it by now. He’d gotten a few beatings, been sweated over by some wet-lipped bastards who never quite worked up the courage to go further than a hard cock pressed against his back, but he’d never been broken.

  “It’s bad enough that one family didn’t want you,” he said. “At least foster families aren’t meant to be forever. Those people were all desperate for kids, just not me. Besides, I figured the DNA would be enough, and I wouldn’t have to….”

  Boyd reached over the table and took his hand. He rubbed his thumb lazily over the underside of Morgan’s wrist, and Morgan wondered if he could feel the kick of blood under his skin. It was uncomfortable. Morgan had always been aggressively upfront about the fact that he liked to fuck guys, but it was different to be soft about it. The urge to pull back was checked by… he didn’t want to.

  “It’s okay,” Boyd said. “But Morgan… if you don’t remember anything before that man…?”

  Morgan cringed. He knew what he was, a car thief and a crook, a problem people usually wanted to get rid of. Sometimes it meant he couldn’t care about who he hurt. But that didn’t mean he didn’t have a soul, that the thought of lying to some poor, grieving old woman didn’t turn his stomach.

  “Don’t,” Morgan said. He might have to tell this lie—he couldn’t go back to jail, he’d barely survived last time—but he was only going to do it once. What he needed from Boyd was reassurance that, somehow, it was the right thing to do. “I’m not… and it’s for the best. What the hell do you think would happen if I were? She’d get her son back and then lose him again? What would that do to her? It’s not like I remember her or that I’m going to stick around this hole once Mac’s done with me.”

  Boyd studied him. “At least she’d know, even if you left,” he said. “I mean, of course you would. It’s not like there’s anything you’d want to stay here for.”

  “Nothing,” Morgan agreed. He might have to hurt these people, but maybe he could make it hurt less if they knew what an asshole he was. “Anything here I can find more and better somewhere else.”

  He waited for Boyd to call him out on what a liar he was. Instead he just took his hand back.

  “I guess you can,” he said as he looked away. “Lucky you’re not him, then, right?”

  Yeah. Morgan watched Boyd dig into his hot dog. That was what he was—lucky. Thank God he wasn’t actually wanted.

  Chapter Thirteen

  IT HAD been a three-hour drive to Morgantown—should have been two, but a Chevy fishtailed into a truck, and the crash caused a traffic jam—and the only slot the union rep could get for Boyd this month. So he should probably pay attention to what Tara Martinez said.

  Boyd bounced his knee under the table and watched Tara’s mouth as it moved up and down. What came out was mostly white noise.

  “Obviously serious accusations….” The cafe’s playlist had flipped back to the Bossa Nova cover of “Fever” for the third time. “… stellar record to date despite….” The student outside, in his camo jacket and Converse, was eating packets of sugar like candy, and that sounded good. “… any need for accommodations is always….” Should he have called Mac this morning and told him what Morgan said? Was that up to Boyd? Would he even have asked that a month ago, or would his loyalties have been… easier? “… based on the information you have, even if they won’t repeat it, you might need to consider your options.”

  She finally stopped, took a quick sip of her coffee, and raised her eyebrows expectantly at Boyd as she waited for him to respond.

  Shit.

  Boyd looked down at his notebook. Before she’d taken his pen away from him because he was tapping it on the table, he’d written down her name and doodled a stick figure version of her in a firetruck. Useful. He flicked the book closed before she noticed and grabbed on to the last thing she’d said.

  “What options?” he asked.

  She sat back in the narrow chair and pursed her lips. “Off the record?”

  Boyd shrugged. “Sure.”

  “Transfer.”

  Boyd closed his mouth, the click of his teeth loud
inside his head, and stared at Tara for a moment. She tucked her hair, gray threaded through the black bob, behind her ear and let him absorb that.

  “That’s not the advice I expected.”

  “It’s not the advice I’d give everyone,” Tara said. She cupped her coffee cup in both hands, halfway to her mouth, as she talked. “And it’s not the advice I’ll give you on the record, but based on what you told me? Get out of there. Take it from a lesbian with the last name Martinez, you can fight, but you won’t win, not long-term. Even if you get them to back down on this, they’ll come after you again and again.”

  “If I don’t stand up to them,” he protested weakly, “they’ll just do it again, to someone else.”

  Tara nodded slowly. “If you want to fight them, I will back you up and respect the hell out of you,” she said. “But you have to go in with your eyes open about what you’re going to get. Justice, maybe. A career as a firefighter, probably not.”

  “I can’t just transfer,” Boyd said. “Cutter’s Gap is my home. It’s—”

  What? He’d bristled last night when Morgan said there was no reason for him to stay in Cutter’s Gap. But why should Boyd?

  It wasn’t where his family lived. His mom was in Florida selling condos to snowbirds, and his only living grandparent was in Charleston, and no one had talked to her in twenty years. He had friends in Cutter’s Gap, but not really. It was always too hard to get that close to anyone, not with everyone in town ready to tut their tongues at his disloyalty to the tragedy. Boyd wasn’t supposed to have other friends or be happy. He was meant to be the tragic little boy forever.

  He’d stayed for the same reason he did most things in his life. Maybe that needed to change.

  “What?” Tara asked.

  “I don’t know,” Boyd said. “It’s…. What I want? That’s not something I think about a lot.”

  She gave him a confused look, and then after a glance at her phone, drained her coffee and passed him her card over the table.

  “Well, think about it now,” she said as she gathered up her files and stuffed them into her briefcase. “I have all the paperwork. I’ll chase up this disciplinary hearing for a couple of days because, whatever you decide, we want you cleared on that, and once you make up your mind, I’ll be behind you a hundred percent.”

  Boyd stood up and offered his hand across the table.

  “Thank you.”

  She gripped his hand firmly, her short nails pearl white and fingers callused, and gave him a crooked, tired smile.

  “You’d think nobody would want to stop you from saving people from fires,” she said. Her handshake was brisk and done as she stepped back. “But once politics gets involved… common sense goes out the window. Take care.”

  The bell over the door jingled as she left. Boyd sat back down and stared into his coffee. He hadn’t drunk much, and it had gotten cold, the cream melted to a scum on top. Boyd took a drink anyhow. He had another twenty minutes before he had to move his car, and Cutter’s Gap had been pretty clear he wasn’t needed there.

  What did he want?

  Morgan.

  Apparently the answer was easy and came with the heavy, sweet ache of want that settled somewhere between his gut and his chest. Boyd made a face at himself and tried again. What he wanted to do with his life, without anything owed to anyone else. Just this once, something that was just for him.

  A job. A city. Hell, just a vacation that wasn’t a tag-team drive with Shay back from the Midwest in a muscle car whose shocks were gone. Did being angry about his suspension mean he did want to be a firefighter, or was he just pissed because it was unfair?

  He took another drink of cold coffee and tried to let the answer come to him. It coalesced out of the darkness of his brain—sticky-sweet hunger with scruffy blond hair, a long, lean body, and the odd mixture of caution and cockiness as he touched Boyd. His hand cautiously still under Boyd’s, pulse fast and nervous, as Boyd touched him.

  Fine, Boyd sighed, point taken. He wanted Morgan. That wasn’t a surprise, and it didn’t have to mean anything. Drunk revelations about being halfway in love didn’t count either. And just because Boyd decided to want something for himself didn’t mean he could just ignore what everyone else thought. Whatever the DNA turned up, nobody was going to be thrilled that Boyd had muddied the waters.

  He absently flicked his tongue over his lower lip. The split was just the suggestion of a rough seam now, but Boyd didn’t need the pain to remember the raw-meat taste of his own blood. That had been over an indiscretion. Once Shay found out how far it had gone, he definitely wouldn’t be happy.

  Boyd drained the last of the coffee and left a tip under the cup as he got up. He still didn’t think Morgan was a mistake, but maybe bad ideas came with a shelf life.

  The bell over the door jangled as he went outside, and the hot air made sweat break out on him. He fished his phone out of his pocket as he headed down the street toward the parking lot where he’d left his pickup. It had been set to Do Not Disturb during his meeting with Tara, but he hadn’t expected anyone to call. The other firefighters had texted him their support already, his mom had threatened to come home to read someone the riot act, and that was pretty much it.

  But the cracked screen was full of notifications. Boyd flicked through them as he walked. Most of them were from Shay.

  Have you seen the paper? Why didn’t anyone tell me….

  Where ARE you? I tried to call.

  You’re SUSPENDED! What the hell did you do?

  Mom is in the hospital. Call me—

  Then one from Mac. Did you talk to ANYONE? Call me when you get—

  Boyd pressed his thumb down against the broken screen until he could feel the cracked edge press against his skin. Guilt chewed at the base of his skull as though someone had pushed their knuckles into the nape of his neck.

  “Fuck,” he muttered as he stopped abruptly in the middle of the pavement. Someone banged into his shoulder, bounced off, and cursed him.

  “Asshole,” the girl snapped as she caught her balance and dodged past him. “Watch what you’re doing.”

  Boyd ignored her as he opened his phone and scanned through the messages. Nobody had sent him an actual link, just panic and accusations.

  Is it TRUE?!? Danni spluttered in Messenger.

  Two journalists had slid into his Twitter DMs to ask if he’d talk to them.

  Someone with a number he didn’t recognize had texted him to fuck off and die.

  It was Sullivan who finally came through with a link in an email, along with a brief explanation that he hadn’t broken the story, but he had to cover it. Familiar contempt at the old excuse clenched in the hinges of Boyd’s jaw, but he still clicked on the link. Someone else tutted as they manhandled a double stroller past him, and he finally shifted out of the way, toward the yellow painted curb.

  A blog article slowly opened on his phone, the text half-obscured with google ads and pop-ups. But the headline was legible almost immediately—Calloway or Conman? It didn’t get any better as the rest of the page loaded with a grim mug shot of a younger, bonier Morgan and a grainy shot of him with Boyd as they limped out of the bar after the fight. To Boyd there was something obviously intimate in the shot, the way his hand was on Morgan’s hip and the hint of a grin on Morgan’s profile as he angled his face toward Boyd. That might just be him, because whomever had written the article definitely saw it as more conspiratorial.

  He tried to read it, but after a few lines, his eyes gave up and just skipped from quote to quote on the screen. That was bad enough. His suspension—“for financial misconduct”—was in there, along with Morgan’s record and a pious line about how Donna was “too upset” to be interviewed.

  “Shit,” Boyd muttered.

  He stared at the cracked screen for a moment as he tried to decide what to do next. More lines jumped out at him, a “When did you stop beating your wife” question about Deacon Hill, reference to Shay’s financial problems at the
body shop, and an arch reference to the old reward that James Fernfield had offered for any news about Sammy’s disappearance. The urge to shortcut anything actually useful and just throw his phone through a shop window got him by the throat.

  Before he gave in to it, another message popped up on the screen. Call me, Shay demanded in all caps.

  That might not be a good idea, but at least it wasn’t a phone through a window. Boyd tapped in Shay’s number, and the call barely got to ring once before Shay picked up.

  “Did you talk to Sullivan?” Shay skipped the usual pleasantries to ask harshly.

  Boyd stumbled over a lie long enough that in the end, he just settled on the truth. “Yeah.”

  “Yeah? That’s it?” In the background Shay heard something metal smash against metal. “You screw everything up, and that’s it? Yeah? Why the hell did you go to Ben Sullivan, of all goddamn people. I mean, I don’t like Macintosh, but at least he only fucked us over because he was incompetent. Sullivan did it for money, more than once. He built his fucking Malibu beach house on my little brother’s grave!”

  The accusation made Boyd grimace unhappily. Part of him didn’t think it was entirely fair, that Sullivan had done his job and reported on the case, but he also remembered the sick shock when he walked into Target and saw Sammy’s face on Sullivan’s latest book in Bestsellers. Yet even then, Mrs. Calloway loved Sullivan’s books for keeping Sammy’s case alive.

  It wasn’t simple. Shay thought it was, Boyd wished it were, but it never had been.

  “I needed to know who Morgan was,” Boyd said. “And Sullivan doesn’t have to go through the proper channels like Mac does.”

  Shay made a disgusted, frustrated sound down the phone. “For God’s sake, you know who he is. Or you would if you stopped thinking with your cock. My brother was a good kid. He was smart, and he was honest. He was loyal. If he’d had a chance to grow up, you really think he’d be… that? A crook? A liar? Someone who just fucks strangers to get a bed for the night?”