by A. J. Thomas
“That you’re a closeted geek look. Being a geek hasn’t been something to be ashamed of for decades now.”
“There was no such look,” Elliot lied. “Will it work?”
Ray glared at him for a long moment, then went back to clipping things into place. “Eat so we can get going already.”
“So you can leave this mess for me to sort out?” Elliot gestured to the counter. Even he had to admit that the mess was rapidly disappearing back into the thin laptop case.
“I doubt you could sort it out. I’ve fixed your computer, bought you groceries, made you breakfast, and I’m helping you with this case. You’re welcome.”
“I didn’t ask you to do any of that. I also didn’t need you to drive me home last night, I’d have gone a bit slow, but I’d have gotten home in one piece. And you know damn well that you’re more of a liability on this case than an asset.”
“Too proud even for a thank you?” Ray sighed. “Hey, Belkamp, catch!”
Ray tossed a tiny metal cylinder at him. Elliot reached out and caught the cylinder, then dropped it again as it stung his hand hard enough to make his knuckles ache. “Hey! What the hell?”
Ray’s lips were pressed together tight and he was shaking. After staring at Elliot for a few more seconds, Ray burst out laughing, then held up another cylinder. “I can’t believe you fell for that! Didn’t you take shop in high school?”
“What the hell did you do?”
Ray took in a deep gulp of air and finally managed to get the laughter under control. “I charged an extra capacitor. It discharges when you touch both leads. I’m sorry, they came in a four pack, and I couldn’t resist.”
“Did you pull this kind of shit with Superman?” Elliot asked.
Ray straightened, the laughter dying quickly. Elliot regretted the question as Ray’s back and shoulders tensed.
Even though the arson case Elliot had been assigned to in northwestern Montana hadn’t actually gotten Ray’s partner killed, it had left him physically broken. Elliot had gathered afterward that Ray cared about his partner as more than a friend, and though his partner didn’t return his feelings, nearly losing him must have been hard.
“He has a name.”
“He must have the patience of a saint. I think Superman fits.”
He glanced sideways at the pot of oatmeal, grabbed a packet of Pop-Tarts from the box in the cabinet, and headed back to his room to eat and get cleaned up fast. The sooner he got Ray Delgado back to his own car, and out of his house, the better.
“Okay, I get it.” Ray followed him into the bedroom. “It really was just a joke. I used to do that to guys in my shop class all the time. Once to the teacher, even.”
Elliot stopped at the bathroom door and spun around. “Tell me something; did the guys in your shop class actually like you?”
Ray pursed his lips for a moment. “Do you actually like me?”
“No, I don’t. I doubt any of the guys in your shop class did, either.”
Ray’s cocky posture shrank and his shoulders slumped forward. “Okay. I’m sorry, man, I… I’ll cool it. No more practical jokes.”
“Yeah, right. Get the hell out, I want to take a shower.”
Ray didn’t move. “You shouldn’t eat that crap.” He gestured to Elliot’s foil-wrapped breakfast.
“You know what, Delgado? I’m actually a grown man. I’ve been feeding myself, tucking myself in, and working my own cases for a while now. If I want to eat Pop-Tarts for breakfast, I will. I don’t need nutrition advice from a psychopath who’s going to try babying me one minute and electrocuting me the next! It’s patronizing, it’s annoying, and if you don’t knock it the hell off I will throw your ass out!”
“I didn’t mean it like that, I’m just….”
“Get out.”
Ray shut his eyes and took a long, slow breath. “I can never do anything right with you, can I?”
“Do anything right?” Elliot wanted to scream. Being treated like a child in his own home was bad enough. He hated the way Ray just turned Elliot’s accusations back on him, shifting the focus away from Ray’s own behavior and making him feel as if he’d done something wrong. Elliot felt like he was sixteen and shouting at his ever-calm, open-minded parents all over again. Elliot grabbed the front of Ray’s T-shirt and tried to lift him up. The few inches of height he had over Ray didn’t give him much of an advantage, but he managed to lift him a little. Ray was a lot heavier than his slender frame made Elliot suspect.
Elliot was going to shout at him, to shove him out of his bedroom and toss him out the front door, but the way Ray’s cheeks darkened and his lips opened, the way his breath seemed to come in shallow huffs even though he wasn’t moving, sabotaged Elliot’s rage.
Ray’s gaze shifted from Elliot’s eyes to his lips and back again, and then the other man rose up on his toes and crushed his lips against Elliot’s. Elliot stumbled backward, his fingers still wrapped in Ray’s T-shirt, pulling the other man with him. He felt Ray’s hands on him, felt Ray caressing his shoulders hard enough that his skin stayed warm even after Ray shifted his hands down Elliot’s chest to his waist. All the while, Ray’s moist lips rubbed against his, not forcing his lips apart, but maintaining a pressure and insistence that left every nerve in Elliot’s body tingling. He tugged on Ray’s T-shirt, pulling until the other man’s body was flush with his own. Ray rocked his hips against Elliot’s body, shoving the bulge in his slacks against Elliot’s rapidly swelling cock.
Elliot gasped at Ray’s frank arousal and used his grip on Ray’s T-shirt to shove him away. He would have followed up the push with a punch or a throw, but his head was spinning, and he was already out of breath. He settled his weight on the wall behind him and forced himself to take a few deep, slow breaths to calm down. He glanced up at the obnoxious man in his bedroom, thankful he wasn’t the only one standing there with a stunned expression and an obvious hard-on.
When Ray took half a step toward him, Elliot held up both of his hands, stopping him. “No.”
The disappointment in Ray’s eyes made Elliot want to take it back. It made him want to drag Ray over to his bed and give them both a chance to get this stupidity out of their systems. But that was all this attraction was—a stupid mistake that shouldn’t have happened in the first place. It was a mistake Elliot was not going to repeat.
“It’s not that it wasn’t good. It was good.” Elliot stepped into the bathroom. It had been amazing, but Elliot had no intention of saying that out loud. The last thing Ray Delgado’s ego needed was reinforcement. “I’m not going to fuck around with someone close to an active case. It’d be professional suicide.”
“Nobody would have to know.” Ray’s voice was quiet, almost pleading.
“That’s not the only reason.” Elliot shifted from one foot to the other. He wasn’t sure why he was nervous. “I’m just not looking for a hookup. I’ve got a chance to stay in one spot for more than a year with this assignment. I’ve got a chance to actually get to know someone. That might not mean anything to someone like you, but it’s a chance I’ve never had before, and I don’t want to waste it.”
Ray looked like he was about to protest, then he stopped, his head tilting to the side. “Never?”
“I joined the ROTC so I could pay my own way through college.” Elliot shrugged, trying to explain. “Training to be an officer, serving in the Reserves on weekends.”
“Did you change schools a lot?”
“I started college in the fall semester of 2001. I was called up to active duty three weeks after 9/11, and six months later I was invading Iraq. Being stuck on an infantry convoy in the middle of a war zone isn’t exactly the place to start thinking about dating.”
“So we’re the same, you and me.”
“You served?”
“No, I just mean the relationship thing. I’ve never really been involved with anyone, either.”
“I know that’s a lie. I think I was number three on the list of people you hooked up with during t
hat week in Montana.”
“Number two.” Ray shrugged quickly, as if it didn’t matter. “But I mean a real relationship. You know, where you can come home and someone’s there waiting for you. Where you don’t have to keep up all the flirting and shit.”
Elliot scoffed, knowing that had to be bullshit. “You’ve got to be kidding me. What’s the longest you’ve ever dated someone?”
“You mean with actual dates? Like going out and doing something, or just sex?”
“Either.”
“Ten days.”
“Ten days?” Elliot didn’t mean to laugh. “I think I might actually have you beat.”
“What was yours?” Ray asked.
“Two months, during workups for that first tour in Iraq.”
“Workups? Like, training? What, did you sleep with your drill sergeant or something? ’Cause that would be really hot.”
Elliot laughed and leaned his head back against the wall. “He wasn’t my sergeant, but he was a drill instructor. Hand-to-hand combat instructor, actually. I met him when I went through basic training during the summer, and when I came back and he wasn’t my instructor anymore, we hit it off. And he was hot. I was eighteen, skinnier than I am now, and I’d only ever seen men built like him on calendars. That was in the middle of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. I had to deploy with my unit, and…. It never would have worked anyway.” He smiled as he remembered the fierce man who, despite yelling loud enough that he made some of his trainees wet their pants, turned out to be a surprisingly accommodating and attentive lover. Elliot had felt so alone, so isolated by the secret he carried into the Army, he had clung to the older man during those two months. When he got back from his first tour, he’d tried to look him up only to find that he’d been deployed, too. He tried once more when he finished school only to learn his lover had been killed providing cover fire for three of his subordinates to escape from a sniper in the streets of Kabul.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring up bad memories.”
Elliot shrugged, wondering how he’d let his guard down so far that Ray could tell he was upset. “What about you? Who was amazing enough to last ten whole days with Ray Delgado?”
“Her name was Patricia.” Ray smiled whimsically. “We were sixteen. She was gorgeous. I thought I’d fallen in love at first sight, and she left me for my cousin Martin. One of Sophie’s brothers, actually. He rubbed it in my face for months. About a year later, she got pregnant and he dumped her as soon as she told him. He told everybody in the family it was my kid so they wouldn’t give him shit about it.”
“Was it?” Elliot had to ask.
“No. I would have taken care of them both anyway, because I really thought I was in love with her. But she was totally in love with Martin, no matter how he treated her.” Elliot was surprised by how disappointed Ray sounded. “Sometimes I wonder how my life would have turned out if that had gone different.”
“You haven’t been with anyone for more than ten days since you were sixteen?”
Ray shook his head. “Absolutely not. You don’t understand, though. Martin didn’t go after her because she was beautiful or because he actually wanted to date her. He went after her because his brother Alejandro told him to, just so they could put me in my place.”
Elliot laughed, assuming he was joking. His laughter died as the serious look in Ray’s eyes solidified. “That’s a bit paranoid.”
“No,” said Ray seriously. “I’m afraid not. We were always competitive, me and Alejandro. He was always older, faster, bigger, and smarter than me. He always won, until I got smarter. As I got older, he expected I’d work for him, running drugs to his dealers and being his errand boy. Even then I didn’t want any part of it, and after Patricia was humiliated and abandoned by her family and Martin’s, Martin and Alejandro flat-out told me that they set it up to get to me. He wanted me to understand that if I didn’t play by his rules, he would take away anything and everything I cared about.”
Elliot stepped toward him, stunned. “You haven’t let yourself get close to anybody since then? Just because you’re afraid your cousin might try to steal a lover away from you?”
“Well, it was partly that.” Ray grinned. “Being good-looking, horny, and young had a lot to do with it too.”
“I think that’s a bit more believable.” Too late, he realized that if Ray really was related to Sophie Munoz, some of Ray’s cousins had FBI profiles containing the most gruesome violent crimes Elliot had ever heard of. They could very well be the type of people who would do far worse than steal a lover away to punish someone who betrayed them. “Is that why you went into law enforcement?”
“Yeah. I was angry. I figured if I was going to spend my life being afraid anyway, it might as well be for something worthwhile. At least this way, I occasionally get the chance to scare Alejandro, too.”
“Does he know Sophie is missing?”
Ray nodded slowly. “He was the one who told me she was missing. And before you say anything, yes, I know the person who reports the crime in kidnappings, disappearances, and murders, is usually the one responsible for it.”
“It’s a statistical fact.” Most often, people were killed by someone they knew, and once the perpetrator realized that there was no way to hide what they’d done, they would report the crime themselves in hopes of avoiding suspicion once the crime came to light. “He could very well have killed her.”
“I work homicide, and if I had evidence to indicate she’s dead, Alejandro is the first person I’d suspect, siblings or not. But until I see a body, I don’t have a homicide. No body, clothes and toiletries packed, no signs of a struggle. I also know that Alejandro is ultimately responsible for tracking down that stolen money, and if you’re right about her taking it and trying to disappear, he could be playing me just so he can find her and kill her.”
Elliot pursed his lips, surprised yet again. “Money?”
Ray rolled his eyes. “Do you remember our conversation last night?”
“I wouldn’t have discussed my case with you.”
“I am part of your case, you twit. Do you remember me telling you that I’m the informant Special Agent Hathaway was pissed at?”
Elliot tried to sort through his admittedly groggy memories. He knew that Ray had made him a bowl of soup, and he knew that Ray had groped him, but their actual conversation was a bit of a blur. “You’re the one who threw him into a big bucket of ketchup?”
Ray shrugged. “Ketchup… mustard… taco sauce… it doesn’t matter. The point is that I’m pretty sure Alejandro thinks she stole his money. He wouldn’t have asked me to find her unless he had some stake in her being found. He’s got no qualms about killing a woman, a member of his family, or anyone else. But if he’d already killed her, he’d keep quiet about it. If he’s still trying to find her, and I think he really is trying to find her, then he hasn’t killed her yet. But if he’s trying to find her, she’s in trouble.”
“You’re Hathaway’s informant,” said Elliot, trying to make sense of Ray’s role in this case.
“I’m a police officer. I was filing a report with the East County Gang Task Force. I’m not some fucking informant. I will not be intimidated and tossed around like some kind of criminal who’s providing information to save my own ass from jail.”
Elliot tried to remember if anyone had mentioned that the informant Hathaway had been so determined to put into protective custody had been a police officer. Hathaway himself must have known, but he’d ranted about the man being some kind of gangster. Jurisdictional rivalries aside, there was a minimal amount of respect owed on both sides, but Hathaway was definitely the type of agent who tended to forget that.
Finally, Elliot cocked his head to the side. “You realize you’re in danger, too?”
“No more than usual.”
Elliot folded his arms across his chest and glared at Ray, who was more than capable of the kind of theft his team suspected Sophie Munoz was responsible for. Even if Sophie Munoz w
as actually the one who siphoned millions out of those dummy accounts, Elliot wouldn’t be surprised if the Tijuana drug cartel blamed it on Ray, just as an excuse to get rid of a difficult informant. Hathaway had been correct about Ray being in danger, even if he’d been an ass about trying to protect him.
Elliot suddenly didn’t want to let Ray out of his sight. Given how Ray had responded to Hathaway, Elliot had a pretty good idea of just how far acting overprotective would get him, but the urge was undeniable. Letting him tag along during the course of this investigation was unacceptable, too, but it would give Elliot an excuse to keep him close and make sure he was safe. He’d be in deep shit at work if his supervisor found out, but he was pretty sure he could talk his way out of it.
There were other ways Elliot could convince Ray to hang around, of course. Elliot’s gaze lingered over the line of Ray’s shoulders, the tiny dip of his collarbone, and the bulk of muscles beneath his T-shirt. No matter how tempting Ray’s body was, Elliot didn’t want to get involved with him again. When they had slept together, Ray had still been exploring the idea of being bisexual for the first time. And even though he seemed to enjoy fucking men as much as women, the idea of switching roles had freaked him out so badly that he’d spent half an hour detailing just how degrading he thought the act of letting another man fuck him would be. If Elliot gave in now, it would be the same shit as before—he’d become nothing but a hole to fuck in Ray’s mind, just like all the women Ray had slept with.
Elliot would rather face his supervisor and chalk Ray’s presence up to a professional stupidity than fall into a relationship where he was treated with that kind of disrespect.
“All right, I’ve got to take a shower. You’re welcome to use the guest bathroom yourself.”
“There’s nothing in your guest bathroom. You don’t even have hand soap.”
“Oh, come on, I just moved in. If you really need a shower, you can wait until I’m done, then we can go find this Luca Garcia. But you have to swear to me that you won’t say or do anything when we talk to him.”
Ray nodded. “Not a word.”
