by A. J. Thomas
“And I think he worked part time at a local church.”
“Oh, he would,” Christopher sneered.
Doug eyed Christopher carefully. “His PO said he got disability too.”
“I didn’t know alcoholism was something you could get disability for,” Christopher grumbled.
Doug leaned back slightly. “Thought it had been twenty years?”
“Page seven,” Christopher nodded to the file folder. “In the coroner’s report, under ‘other notes’. Late-stage alcohol-induced cirrhosis.”
“Well, who knows? Maybe he got on disability for something else and then pissed away his monthly check on beer,” Doug suggested. “I can give you a ride over to the house if you’d like,” he offered.
“That’d be great,” Christopher said automatically. Christopher followed Doug to his truck. Christopher couldn’t help stretching out a little in the large cab. He had sprung for the cheapest rental car they had, but that had meant a compact car instead of an SUV. Christopher was too tall to fit comfortably into most sedans, so not having to climb back into the tiny rental car was a relief by itself.
Doug started the truck and pulled out of the parking lot, then glanced sideways at Christopher.
“Something on your mind?” Christopher asked, before he could stop himself.
“Ah….” Doug tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “No.”
For a long time, neither man said anything. Christopher almost laughed at how long they both let the silence drag on. Most people gave in to the urge to fill the pauses left in conversations. The silence was awkward, but knowing that Doug seemed to be more than able to control himself made it amusing at the same time. It was also a nice change of pace after putting up with his partner for so long.
Christopher stopped that thought cold. He wasn’t going to start comparing Doug to Ray. That would mean putting Ray into the same category as Doug in his head, and that wasn’t fair.
“So.” Christopher grinned brightly. “You from here originally?”
“Yeah. Well, technically, I grew up a bit to the south. I went to high school here, though.”
“Didn’t like the school in your hometown?”
“I think it would have been fine, but my mom was the only English teacher at the reservation high school.”
“The only English teacher? Like one teacher for the whole subject, for every single student?”
“Yes, one English teacher for the entire school. There was only one science teacher, one history teacher, one math teacher, and the shop teacher doubled up and taught PE. All of the teachers’ kids were bussed up here. It’s a nice town, though. I imagine it’s a bit of a change from San Diego, huh?”
“Have you ever been to So Cal?” Christopher asked.
“No. Just the East Coast.”
“Well, it’s not as bad as everyone thinks. Downtown is straight city, but northern San Diego is built on mesas. The highways run through the canyons in between, so driving around, it’s easy to forget that you’re driving through a city of six million people. The High Sierras are an hour away from the coast, so you have everything from surfing to the Pacific Crest Trail all right there. It’s a great town, an awesome town.”
Doug glanced at him curiously. “You don’t like it.”
“What makes you say that?”
Doug gave him a wry smile. “The lady doth protest too much, me thinks.”
“Shakespeare?” Christopher laughed. “Really? Man, you are an English teacher’s kid.”
“Am I wrong?”
Christopher glanced out the window, watching the tiny mountain town pass by. “No.” He shifted in his seat and clenched his right hand into a fist, relaxed it, and clenched it tight again. His fingers were still numb, and even clenching his fingers made the tendon in his shoulder twinge. “Yes. I’ve just had a hard couple of weeks. I like San Diego. I’ve never lived anywhere else, but it’s big enough that if you really need to get away, you can just move to another neighborhood.”
“I’ve got to admit, I’m envious.”
“Working here is that dull?”
“I’m envious over the way you gripe about things. This has to be weird. Getting lost, dealing with all this, and running into me—it’s a lot to deal with. And you talk about how beautiful the drive was.”
“What’s wrong with having a positive outlook?” asked Christopher, his bright smile firmly fixed in place.
“I didn’t say there was anything wrong with it. It makes you hard to read, but there’s nothing wrong with it.” Doug pulled up in front of a two-story Victorian that looked like it had seen better days.
“It makes me hard to read?” Christopher got it. “You’re worried I was just stoking your ego this weekend?”
“I didn’t say that,” said Doug.
“I wasn’t.” Christopher kept himself from smiling, kept his face serious. “Despite everything, and there was a fuck of a lot of everything, my weekend was incredible.” Christopher wanted to touch him, especially when he saw the blush that darkened Doug’s cheeks.
Doug gestured toward the house. “This is it.”
“Really?” Christopher narrowed his eyes. “It’s old, but it’d still be expensive. If he was on disability, he couldn't afford this.”
“It’s not so nice on the inside. Reach into the glove box.”
Christopher cocked his head to the side but opened the glove box. Inside, on top of a stack of manuals and maintenance records, was a large jar of Vick’s VapoRub. “That bad?”
“Yes.”
The menthol in VapoRub was one of the few things that could block out some of the nastier smells police officers and paramedics tended to encounter. Christopher opened the jar and smeared a bit of the gel under his nose. He held out the jar to Doug. When the other man reached for the jar he closed his fingers over Christopher’s hand, and Christopher felt his stomach flutter.
He looked away quickly. This was not the time for this. Doug was as far in the closet as a man could get, and he had literally gotten sick at the sight of Christopher. Doug wanted casual weekend sex. That didn’t mean he wanted Christopher.
“You know,” Christopher said as he pulled the jar back and twisted the lid back on, “I’m sure you’ve got other stuff to do. Why don’t I sign what needs signing and let you get out of here? I’ll get in touch with an attorney and a funeral home tomorrow to deal with everything else.”
Doug stared at him for a long moment. “If that’s what you’d like to do. I only have the case file and the coroner’s report here, though. You can sign to ID the body, but his will and the paperwork for temporary custody of personal property is back at the station.” He plucked the VapoRub out of Christopher hands. “I’ll take you inside, then you can ride with me back to the station, we’ll get the paperwork out of the way, then I can drop you off back at your car. If you want.” The less than subtle invitation hung in the air between them for a moment. Doug applied the VapoRub to his upper lip and hopped out of the truck. “Come on.”
Doug unlocked the front door and held it open. Christopher strolled inside, barely hesitating as the smell of cat, sweat, rotting food, and filth assaulted him. He looked around the old living room and groaned. His brother had furniture—a house full of furniture, and knickknacks, and stacks of papers, and too much other crap to take in just by looking at it. Flies were everywhere. They buzzed around all of the furniture in twos and threes, the quiet hum of their wings making the still silence of the house that much more apparent. “Thank you for the VapoRub,” Chris whispered.
“A couple of cats ran out the first time I opened the door. I brought his property box the next morning and tried to find your phone number, but I didn’t see any sign of them at the time. They might have had another way back in.”
“Cats?” Christopher waded through the closely packed furniture, stepped around stacks of boxes, and opened a window. He opened the rest of the windows in the room, then moved into the kitchen, opening all the wind
ows he could find. In the kitchen, he found an overflowing litter box in one corner, a garbage can filled with empty beer and liquor bottles, and a fridge completely devoid of food. He opened a few more windows, leaning as close as he dared to the spider-infested screen to get some fresh air, and then he gave up.
“You okay?” Doug asked.
Christopher shook his head. “I need to get out of here. Give it time to air out.”
Doug nodded and helped Christopher back through the mess. Christopher tumbled out onto the porch and took several deep, gasping breaths. Doug hesitated at the door, looking back into the living room.
“What is it?” Christopher asked, pushing himself to his feet again.
“Someone’s been here,” Doug said quietly.
“Who would want to go in there?”
“I left the property box on the couch last Monday. It’s gone.”
“But you locked the door,” said Christopher, appearing by his side.
“I did. You might want to change the locks. It looks like he gave somebody else a key.”
“Did you go through the house after you found him? See if there was anybody else living with him?”
Doug shook his head. “No. I just searched his desk. The smell was worse then. His PO said he lived alone, and I took his word for it. Now that you mention it, though, somebody had to have been feeding those cats. Do you want to go back in?”
Christopher shook his head frantically. Doug pulled the door shut and turned the key, locking the deadbolt.
“Come on, then.” Doug took hold of his elbow and led him away from the house. “We can finish up paperwork, and then I’ll come back with you to make sure the house is empty.”
Christopher shook his head more. “Run. I need to run.”
Christopher was practically shaking with nerves.
Doug slipped his arm around Christopher’s back and guided him back to the truck. “I can help with that. Paperwork first, then you can get changed in the station locker room, and the high school track is a quarter mile down the road.”
Doug was glad he was wearing a heavy suit. He didn’t think he would ever be able to see Christopher in those running shorts without getting tuned on. Even after stepping into that festering house, with its cat-piss stench, he still got hard seeing Christopher step out of the sheriff’s department locker room in a tight black Under Armor tank top and the same damn shorts. Even with his expression hard and guarded, Christopher was still breathtaking. A heavy suit jacket, that made his erection a bit less obvious, was a very good thing.
Doug had the forms ready when Christopher came out, and the man was so eager to run that he scribbled his name on each line without even glancing at them. Four blocks down from the department, a new running track encircled the high school football field. A baseball diamond and the Lions Park playground were right next door. He and Christopher were the only ones in the park. At nearly six thirty, most of the streets of Elkin were empty.
Christopher didn’t say anything. He took off at a slow jog around the track twice, and then he sped up. He increased his pace until he seemed to be flying around the track. Somewhere between four and five laps, Doug sat down on the bleachers, half aroused and half in awe as he just watched Christopher move. Somewhere between five and six miles, Doug stopped counting laps and just enjoyed himself.
“Is he going to be much longer?” The voice came from behind him. Doug looked up at the high school football and wrestling coach. The man had taught PE when Doug was a student, but Doug couldn’t seem to remember his name. He had also been Doug’s own wrestling coach, so he felt shitty for forgetting him. “Sorry,” he said with a shrug. “I think he’s going to be a long time. He just lost his brother, said he needed to run, but he’s from out of town… I didn’t know where else to take him. Is it all right?”
The coach watched Christopher circle around the track in the fading twilight. The old man adjusted his ball cap, strolled around the side of the bleachers, and fiddled with a metal power box. The lights around the track snapped to life.
“Turn the lights out before you leave, you hear?”
“Thanks, Coach,” said Doug. He leaned forward, watching Christopher increase his stride and his speed yet again.
“Sure, Doug.”
Doug looked up again. “You still remember me?” he asked, genuinely surprised.
“I try to keep track of my kids. With an average of fifty students per year, it ain’t that hard. You wrestled two years and played basketball one year. Mostly, though, I remember I could never get you to try out for football.”
“Yeah.” Doug laughed. It had been wrestling his freshman year that had alerted him to the very real problem that he got way too turned on when he managed to get another boy pinned down. The entire season had been mortifying, even when he was wearing a cup. Football had been unthinkable after that. Sure, the other guys said it happened to everyone, but not everyone had wet dreams about wrestling afterward. He could only imagine what football would have been like. “My dad got hurt playing in college,” he lied. “My mom didn’t want the same thing to happen to me.”
The coach nodded slowly. “It happens. Who is he? He can run.”
“He's some big-city hotshot homicide detective. Says he runs ultra marathons, whatever that means….” Doug scoffed.
“Ah. You’ve got to watch out for those guys,” said the coach. “Those ultra runners are a whole different kind of nuts.”
“So people really do it?” Doug stared out at Christopher again. “Run fifty-mile races?”
“Fifty is the gateway drug,” the coach warned him seriously. “You’ve never heard of them? There’s this one in Death Valley, in the middle of summer, that’s a hundred and thirty miles.”
“A hundred and thirty miles, through the hottest desert in the world, in the middle of summer?”
“Yes. And if it ain’t deserts, it’s mountains, with snow and ice. Like I said, they’re a completely different kind of nuts. Which is good, because you don’t want to be stuck out here tonight babysitting some kind of wimp. It’s supposed to get down below freezing again.”
“Hypothermia can happen, even when you’re sweating,” Doug chided.
“It most certainly can. But listening to somebody whine about it is never any fun. Take care of yourself, Doug.”
Doug waved and watched the coach head back toward the dark high school before turning his gaze back to Christopher. In the yellow glow of the overhead lights, Christopher’s arms and hair sparkled. The sweat dripping off him caught the light and made every inch of him glimmer. It also made Doug realize that, in nearly an hour, Christopher hadn’t stopped for a drink. Doug hopped down off the bleachers and walked the four blocks back to the office. There was a vending machine next to the locker rooms, where Doug bought two bottles of orange Gatorade. On his way out, he went through the dispatch and booking office.
The sheriff was sitting on the corner of the jail sergeant’s desk. Both men were leaning over a small monitor watching the youngest Elkin County sheriff’s deputy run an early drunk through a series of sobriety tests.
“Heavy Runner!” The sheriff, Greg Brubaker, called out. He was a large man who had probably once been intimidating. Like so many older men, gravity and beer had turned what was once a solid wall of muscle into a gut as round as his chest. Doug doubted Greg Brubaker had ever had to fight a man in his life—he was just too likable. His office was always open, though he was seldom actually in it. He wandered around the department, and the rest of the city offices, with an open smile on his face. He made a point to remember things that were going on in his officers’ lives, and he made a point to ask about them on a regular basis. Doug knew for a fact that, hidden beneath a Playboy magazine in his desk drawer, was a calendar with the birthdays of every city and county employee jotted down, so he always remembered them. Everybody liked him, and Doug couldn’t help but like him too.
Harold Daniels, his counterpart in the jail, was a hard man to like.
He was heavy-set, short, and so gruff he bordered on rude. He was also sincere, honest to a fault, and he took his job seriously. Doug also took his job seriously, and the two respected each other and got along fine.
“Come watch this with us! We’re taking bets on how long it’s going to take Jackson to notice how badly he fucked up the pat-search with this guy.”
“I think that boy of yours is slow, Greg. He’s not going to notice.”
Brubaker shook his head, a huge smile on his face. “My money is on two to four minutes. It’s been two, so he’s got two more.”
Doug stepped into the small glass office. On the desk was a security monitor with a split-screen display. The display in the upper right-hand corner showed the DUI room. Inside the DUI room was Eric Jackson, a twenty-year-old traffic officer with the build, face, and buzzed-cut blond hair of a ten-year-old boy. He was reading the instructions for the sobriety test from a small note card while a hulking man in blue jeans and a plaid shirt swayed back and forth as if the room was spinning. Doug had seen the same man in the DUI room a dozen times. He was obviously close to falling over, but he was filling in the blanks every time Jackson stuttered.
“I’m with Daniels,” Doug said. “Or I would be if I weren’t broke. Jackson is going to get him into a holding cell without bothering to look up from the prompt card.”
“There!” Brubaker called out. The man in the plaid shirt flipped a coin, fumbled with it, and watched as it clattered to the ground. “Less than four minutes!”
“Ah ah, watch.”
On the monitor, the very young deputy stopped reading, watched the coin roll across the floor, then bent down and picked it up. He handed the coin back to the suspect, and then went back to reading the instructions for the sobriety test. Brubaker groaned while the old sergeant laughed and collected a handful of dollar bills on the desk.
“Hey, Daniels, mind if I check something really quick?” Doug asked, pointing to the second work station crammed into the office. The sergeant nodded. Doug squeezed into the tiny space and logged into the FBI’s National Criminal Information Center database. He ran a quick records check on Christopher Hayes. The only thing that the check brought up was his police record, listing promotions, commendations, and an extensive list of training certifications. It also listed his date of birth, which was what Doug had been curious about—May 21.