Over and Again

by Brooke Edwards

  He glances behind him and catches sight of a taxi with its Vacancy light on. It takes a precious few seconds to push his way closer to the street and wave an arm, but the taxi’s blinker comes on and it rolls to a stop a moment later. The driver is an older man, salt-and-pepper bearded and with a mop of wiry hair, but his eyes are sharp. Brock glances down at the pocket containing his cell and makes a quick decision he already knows is stupid. New York always seems to bring it out in him. “The Frederick, thanks,” he says, climbing into the back of the taxi and pulling his cell out as he goes.

  Scrolling to the E section of his contact list, he taps the envelope icon.

  At the Frederick. Will leave a key card for you at the desk. [14:01]

  Settling into the seat, he pulls the belt across his chest and glances back toward the front. The driver is patiently waiting for a break in traffic to pull back out onto the road. Brock tips his head back against the headrest with a sigh.

  2

  Brock stretches out under the thin sheet as streaks of light from the street filter through the crack in the curtains. His eyes flit lazily from the rumpled covers at the bottom of the bed to the curve of Evan’s back where he’s bent over, untangling the mess of their discarded clothes. There’s a warm ache in his muscles, the itch beneath his skin gone.

  “How long are you in town for?” Evan asks, and Brock props himself up on an arm. The elevation gives him a perfect line of sight and he hums appreciatively.

  “Not sure,” he says. “However long this takes.”

  Evan chuffs out a laugh and his thigh muscles ripple as he pushes up to his feet, shaking out the jeans he’d been wearing a couple of hours ago. “Heard that one before.” He steps into one of the legs, the denim sliding up to sit snugly against his skin. There’s a blooming red patch just over his collarbone, bright against his pale skin. “I’ll just wait for the next call.”

  Brock thinks about telling Evan that it’s likely to be a longer stint this time, longer than the handful of days it usually is, longer even than the month he spent in the city a couple of years ago. The words are teasing at the tip of his tongue before Evan turns, looking over his shoulder with a smile that steals away some of the warmth under Brock’s skin and leaves behind a prickle of unease. There’s a cold, calculating hint behind the smile that catches Brock off guard, and Evan’s next words don’t help. “See you tomorrow night, big guy.”

  The door closes behind Evan before Brock can form words, easing back into the frame with a soft click as the lock engages. He kicks his feet under the covers until they’re puddled somewhere around his knees, and then reaches down and pulls them up until they’re tucked under his chin. The mattress groans quietly under him as he rolls, landing flat on his back as the covers slide with him. Facing up, the flickers of light from the window slip away and he lets his eyes fall closed.

  Skin clammy with cooling sweat and that same prickle of unease, it takes a long time for Brock to fall back to sleep. It might as well have been all of five minutes for how rested he feels when his alarm starts going off. “You’re getting too old for anything happening after 1:00 a.m.,” he mutters into his pillow before turning it off and rolling back over.

  Daniel is surprised when he walks into the precinct, past the desk where Mary is sitting instead of Kay, and ends up with his face mashed against something hard and covered in fabric. Bands of iron close around him and he sees a flash of navy blue. He reaches up blindly, patting with the hand not clutching his file, and has to reach up too high for it to be Rhys. “Bailey,” he says, muffled by the chest in his face.

  “You have no idea how glad I am to see you.” Cohen’s voice is rough, and when Daniel manages to push away enough to see his face, he looks like he hasn’t slept in days.

  “I’d say I can probably tell from those bags under your eyes,” Daniel says, and his heart rate picks up. “I told you to call if you needed me. What happened? Is it—did Bartlett show up?”

  “No, no sign of him at all.” Cohen takes a step back, opening more space between them. “It was just hard, not knowing what was going on up there. You’re awful at texting.”

  “I see how it is,” Daniel mutters, rubbing at his chest. “And don’t even try and convince me that you weren’t talking to Peter behind my back.”

  “Wasn’t behind your back.” Cohen’s lips twitch upward. “I needed an informant, I think I told you that in more than one text.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Yuk it up, rookie.” Daniel waves a hand, turning toward the rest of the bullpen to hide from Cohen the grin curving his own lips. “Conference room in five, you lot. I want a full debrief.”

  The rustle of a dozen people getting up and gathering things comforting background noise, Daniel turns back toward Cohen, and they fall into step together on their way to the conference room. “Where’s Kay?”

  “She told Murphy she needed a personal day today,” Cohen says. “She should be back Monday.”

  “Personal day,” Daniel says, shaking his head as he pushes open the door. “She hasn’t taken a personal day ever, she takes too much joy in traumatizing the entire department.”

  Cohen moves past him toward the board at the front of the room. “It’s been a rough few days,” he says, not looking back. His shoulders are tight enough that Daniel can see them inching up toward his ears with every passing second. Daniel sighs and boosts himself up to sit on the edge of the table.

  “I’m sorry I sucked at reporting back,” he says. The file bends beneath the pressure of his sudden grip. “It wasn’t—I mean, I didn’t really know what to say. I still don’t. I wrote up a report on what I saw at the scene, and I took the photos they gave me, but I still don’t know what words to use.”

  The thin cardboard feels cool underneath his fingers as he tries to smooth out the crease. Cohen turns around from the board, his gaze zeroing in on the file in Daniel’s hands.

  “That bad?”

  Daniel holds the file out. He’s memorized every word in the sparse report and sees the pictures in technicolor whenever he closes his eyes. “The worst part is how much is missing,” he says and swallows against the lump growing in his throat. “We don’t know how Fairhall found them. We don’t know whether the explosives going off was an accident, or some twisted attempt to take them both down with him. We don’t know where Bartlett is, or whether he knew anything about what was happening up there.”

  It slides from his grip slowly, Cohen’s hesitance written in the tight line of his mouth. “Do you think he would have set them off on purpose?” His eyes flit between Daniel and the file as he lays it open on the table between them. “He had enough self-preservation instinct to stay off our radar all this time. Why try and blow himself up when he was so close to getting what he wanted?”

  “Same reason Bartlett set an entire building on fire while he was in it,” Daniel says, as the others start to trickle into the office. He pushes off the table and moves toward the board, resting his hand on Cohen’s shoulder as he passes. “You back a mad dog into a corner, Bailey, and it doesn’t care how it gets out.”

  James has been injured in the line of duty before. As a beat cop, he’d caught a glancing blow in the side from a machete that had curved up and around his rib cage. A thin, but deep cut, the scarring wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The starburst of angry, dark raised skin high in his left shoulder where a stray bullet struck home during a shoot-out at a drug raid was much more noticeable. He’s broken ribs and other bones, most of which still ache when the cold starts to roll in. A sign of age, as much as the dangerous life he’s lead, his best friend Melanie has assured him more than once.

  Nothing has ever scared him more than the immobilizing cast on his left leg and the distant ache spiraling out from his left hip. The IV in his arm beeps every couple of hours, a cold trickle spreading from the crook of his elbow and numbing everything it touches. It usually helps dull the pain and the panic when he startles himself awake out of the doze that he keeps falling
into. Drugged sleep isn’t a real substitute for natural sleep, but James doesn’t think he’ll sleep properly again until he’s home, in his own bed, with Derek in his arms and the coroner’s report on the bedside table assuring him Coy Fairhall would not be coming back. Sam has been sleeping on the recliner a nurse dragged into the corner for him while James was still out, and seeing him usually calms James the rest of the way down.

  Having Derek in sight would probably do more good, James knows, but cuts the line of thought down before it gets out of control. Clint and Genevieve had brought him in sometime the day before, long after Daniel had left. As if the wheelchair wasn’t enough, the gauze taped to the side of his head and surrounded by pale, close-shaved skin set cold fear squeezing James’s insides. His last memories of the boathouse are hazy, colored dark with terror and the sharp crunch of bones and wooden beams and fiberglass. The most frightening moment was when he lost sight of Derek, closely followed by the moment he jerked back to consciousness and realized he couldn’t get up. Screaming out and only hearing silence, then sirens, had left his throat raw and his heart thudding erratically. The anxiety had never quite faded, the hospital swinging between a cacophony of sounds and silence broken only by the relentless beeping.

  Clint had pushed Derek’s chair toward the bed, and Derek had struggled out of it, limping to the side of the bed and grasping James’s forearm with clumsy hands that trembled even when he had a grip. His eyes drifted up to where James’s casted leg was held up by a sling and then over the drips in his arm, and James is never going to forget the horror that crept into them. He’ll remember that longer than he will the crunch of bones and the whoosh of the shelving along the back wall of the boathouse going up in flames.

  James doesn’t know how long it was before Clint and Genevieve left, taking Derek with them, only that it wasn’t long enough. His finger hovered over the Call button for a long time, wondering whether they’d even listen if he asked for them to be moved into a room together. James is toying with the idea again when Sam stirs on the recliner, jerking awake with a wet gasp. He wipes at his mouth with a sleeve, shaking his head. His hair is flattened to the side of his head, his cheek blotchy-red with the imprint of the chair. A rush of love overcomes the anxiety for a moment and James cracks a grin. It pulls at the tight, healing skin along his jaw but doesn’t hurt enough to outweigh how good the smile feels.

  “Aren’t you just a sight for sore eyes,” he says.

  Sam makes a sound somewhere between a snort and a cat hacking up a furball, and the chuckle that bursts out of James’s mouth surprises them both.

  “Take a look in the mirror sometime, Pops,” Sam says, wiping at the sides of his mouth aggressively. “I’ve seen ghosts with better complexions.”

  “Go ahead,” James fires back, laughter still rumbling in his chest. “Pick on the cripple, right? I taught you better than that.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Lydia says as she comes through the door, a handkerchief already in her hand. “You taught him to aim below the belt.”

  Sam shoots a smug look at James over Lydia’s shoulder as she stops in front of him, but it drops away as soon as she starts scrubbing at his face. “Talk about below the belt,” he mutters, but tips his head when she taps at his cheek with her fingers.

  “Whipped,” James mouths, leaning back against the mound of pillows behind him and biting back the wince when the movement sends pain radiating from his hip. He tries to shift down, using his arm against the mattress to push just a few inches and get the pillows back in the middle of his back. His leg wobbles where it’s held up by the sling, and the pain ratchets up a handful of notches until he can’t hold back a breathless cry.

  Sam and Lydia are both at his sides when his vision clears. Lydia’s hand is cool and soft against his cheek, and Sam’s grip around his forearm is solid and grounding. “Breathe through it, Dad,” Sam says.

  “I called the nurse, someone’ll be here any minute,” Lydia says and rests her hand against his forehead. “That’s better. Next time, you’ll just ask us to help, right?”

  James just nods, leaning into the touch and panting with the waves of pain twisting his insides. He grapples for Sam’s hand, squeezing, until the cool trickle starts at the crook of his elbow and spreads the numbness through his body again.

  Brock wakes up later that morning, overheating in the blanket cocoon he’d finally fallen asleep in. His hair is plastered to his forehead, sweat-slick and flat, and there is something ringing somewhere. The sound is piercing, bouncing between his ears, until he finally reaches out and slaps a hand over his vibrating cell on the nightstand. His palm muffles the noise enough for him to drag his head up off the pillow and fight his way free of the covers. When he finally swipes across the screen, he hisses out a breath from behind clenched teeth as a tinny voice erupts from the speaker.

  “—back at the precinct,” he hears as he brings it to his ear.

  “Didn’t catch that,” Brock mutters, arching his back until something cracks and the tight muscles relax. He pulls the cell away from his ear, glancing at the screen and seeing an unfamiliar number. “Who is this?”

  “Daniel Callahan. Catch you at a bad time?” Brock decides to ignore the amused lilt to the other man’s voice.

  “Takes a while to get used to the street noise again.” He grunts and pushes his hair off his forehead. “What did you need?”

  “I’m back at the precinct today. Bailey told me you came by yesterday and he brought you up to speed, but if you’re going to be working with us on this, I’d like to make sure you and I are on the same page.”

  Brock glances down at the screen again, taking note of the time. It’s after 9:00 a.m. “I can be there in an hour or so,” he says after a moment of fuzzy thought. “See you shortly.”

  “See you then.” Callahan hangs up before Brock gets the chance.

  He pushes himself up to a sitting position and then up further, wincing as the sweat turns clammy when fresh air hits his skin. “Shower,” he says, tipping his head back and sighing bracingly. “Come on, the day’s waiting.”

  “Do I get any custody in this arrangement?” Tia asks from her perch on the back of the sofa, her swinging feet making dull thuds whenever they hit. “Because I resent the implication I was a deadbeat.”

  Peter doesn’t even bother looking back over his shoulder at her, digging through the overflowing laundry basket for clean underwear. He finds a pair of his briefs tangled in the strap of one of Tia’s bras and sets about unwinding them as he hears her flop onto the sofa cushions with a dramatic sigh.

  “I thought you’d be glad to have your sofa back sometimes,” he says, trying to figure out how the garments ended up hooked together and failing miserably. The tiny hooks leave behind equally tiny holes.

  “I would be if it meant I got to have sex on it again, instead of you abandoning it to have sex somewhere else.” One of the throw pillows from the sofa makes impact with his back and Peter sighs, tossing the bra back onto the towering, stacked basket.

  “Did I imagine the fact that you poured coffee in his lap because we weren’t sleeping together?” Peter turns the briefs the right way out and drops them next to the duffel bag he’s filling. “Because I’m getting mixed signals.”

  “Mixed signals?” Tia parrots and throws another pillow. “You disappear for the better part of a week to have some sex honeymoon, and then I get a voicemail saying that you’ve gone to Albany because that psycho blew himself and two other people up.”

  “I stayed in touch!” Peter protests, turning around as guilt starts to prick at him. “I sent you that picture of the tree that looked like a dick, remember?”

  Tia throws a third pillow and it hits Peter right in the face. “A phone call with some details would have been nice!” she shouts. “I stopped by the police station to ask the receptionist if she knew more than you were telling me!” She stops, lips curling up at the corners smugly. “She said that you’re gonna get a talking to, by th
e way. I kinda got the impression it isn’t gonna be a good one for you.”

  “Fuck.” Peter sighs and drops onto the sofa, right in the middle of the pile of laundry. He presses his face against the side of Tia’s thigh. “I’m sorry, you’re right. It was easy to get swept up in, you know?”

  “Of course I know, you idiot.” Her fingers settle in his hair, much gentler than her words. “You’re practically living some straight-to-DVD action-slash-romance movie shit. Some really brilliant, underrated actress plays me and totally steals the show. She’s gonna get nominated for an Oscar, just you wait.”

  Peter snorts. “I’ve got time to scroll through some D-list actresses with you before I go back to Daniel’s,” he concedes.

  Tia pulls at his hair and he pinches her thigh. “Damn right you do,” she mutters. “Now go get my laptop and leave your phone here. I want to text Detective Hot Pants a picture of my Taser.”

  “Not even dating a cop is going to stop me getting arrested because of you.” Peter shoves his cell at her and struggles out of the grip of the sofa and nest of clothes. “I don’t know why I love you.”

  Tia’s cackling fills the apartment as he trudges toward her room in search of her laptop.

  Daniel leans back in the chair, gaze flitting between the mugshots pinned to the whiteboard. “Has anyone talked to Sal?” he asks. “Is there any word out on where they’ve gone to ground?”