by Elle Keaton
“How old was your dad?” Micah asked out of the blue.
“Huh? Early eighties, maybe mid.”
Ed and Buck came in, and while they were all shuffling around so they fit at the table Micah asked Ed the same question. Ed chuckled and ran his hand over his scruffy beard, thinking.
“Gerald was funny about his age. He was older than he looked. I think he was closer to ninety than eighty. When I first met him he said he was in his thirties. That was in 1970. But things he said over the years made me recalculate. I think he was about ten years older. Didn’t really matter, because we all behaved like jackasses anyway.”
Adam did not seem surprised by that. “He was born at a time when it was a lot easier to fake stuff like that, for sure.”
“But why?” Micah asked. He’d been curious and now there was another mystery.
“Vanity? He always had a girl hanging on. Even when I was in high school there would be women. Not at the house like when I was young,” Ed looked embarrassed and Adam continued, “but they would call or, God forbid, stop me at the grocery store—or, one time, at the gym—and ‘check in’ on him. It was horrifying.”
“I think it’s weird,” Micah said.
The house and property would be finished in the next few days. On closer examination one of the cars wasn’t fully salvageable, at least with original parts. Buck was ecstatic to try and rebuild it anyway. He kept repeating, “I won’t let you down.” Micah knew nothing about cars, but he’d looked the Pontiac up on the internet and it would be a beauty when, and if, it was finished; they all would. Adam didn’t seem to care about them at all.
“The money would be great, but what I want to know is, why were they there in the first place?”
Weir hadn’t added anything to their conversation. He was still hunched over, sulking into his coffee. Although, at the mention of Adam’s dad, he seemed to perk up and listen.
Ed was watching Adam, his head cocked to the side as if he was thinking. “Did Gerald ever tell you anything about his life?”
“Not that I remember. I mean, obviously, I know things from being around him, from what was public knowledge. But no, he never told me much. I know—I thought,” he corrected himself, “that he grew up in California and came up here in the 1950s. He must have been young I guess. He was always going on about being blue-collar. Like it mattered. I never met my grandparents, on either side. And until recently I supposedly had no siblings.” He stopped for a minute, thinking. “Looking back, yeah, it was strange, but at the time I didn’t know any better.”
The door jingled as someone pushed it open. Micah had his back to it so he couldn’t see who came in. Ed and Adam both looked as if they had seen a ghost. Micah turned in his seat so he could see what, who, they were looking at.
A tallish younger guy stood just inside the door, squinting a bit as if his eyes were adjusting to the lights inside the café. He had long dark hair and dark eyes; he was rumpled, his jeans well-worn, his sweatshirt frayed at the wrists and neckline. His resemblance to Adam was undeniable, and shocking although his skin was lighter and his body leaner.
“Well, shit,” Ed whispered.
The sound carried to the front of the shop, and the man’s shoulders stiffened as he pivoted to look straight at their table. He had a wary expression and, even though he had been the one to enter the coffee shop, looked like he’d been cornered. Wild, Micah thought; the stranger looked like a wild creature.
They all stared at each other for long moments before Ed slowly stood, motioning the man over. The piercing sound of steaming milk broke the uncomfortable silence, and slowly the murmur of conversation began to rise again. Ed was shaking the man’s hand. He still looked like he was about to bolt out the door but allowed Ed to drag him over to their table.
“Adam, this is Seth Culver.”
“Yeah, another one of the things my late father neglected to tell me,” Adam said bitterly.
“What Adam means is, he’s really glad to meet you, Seth. He’s had a stressful few weeks, but he’ll come around,” Micah interjected.
Adam pinned Micah with a death glare. “But, yeah.” He stood and stuck a hand out toward Seth. “I’m Adam; I guess we’re related.”
Micah didn’t know what to do with himself. He started to get up and leave, but Adam’s warm hand was at the small of his back. “This is Micah, my …” Such a dork moment but Adam looked up as Micah looked down, emotion flickering through Adam’s eyes as he smiled. “My boyfriend.”
“Yeah?” Micah smiled back at him.
“Yeah.”
Seth was ill at ease, and Micah didn’t think it was the gay thing. In fact, he got a vibe from Seth that made Micah almost 100% sure it wasn’t the gay that made him tense. But the guy had come 1,500 miles to meet a brother who didn’t know he existed.
Ed looked guilty. Micah wondered if this meeting had been staged. The last he knew, Adam hadn’t called Seth as they had been distracted by everything. He wondered how Ed had gotten a hold of him.
Weir watched the exchange in silence, but when Seth moved to sit down he vacated his own chair, offering it up. “I’m going to grab another coffee.”
“Jesus, Weir, you’re going to need an intervention soon,” Adam said.
They all laughed a little too loudly for the lame joke and watched while Weir made his way to the counter.
“Where?” Seth asked, his voice so quiet Micah had to strain to hear him.
“No, W-E-I-R,” Adam responded. “His first name is Carroll, but don’t let him know I told you,” Adam said at full volume.
“You are the biggest as—” Weir got out before Sara intervened with, “Children!”
Weir glowered at them and grabbed his huge mug of coffee, clutching it comically to his chest.
They left Weir at the café with his laptop and coffee, to do whatever it was he was up to. Ed insisted they all, including Seth, come to his place for dinner. Micah was secretly relieved; he didn’t think Adam was up to socializing with Seth on his own.
Even if Micah hadn’t learned about Seth first from Adam, it was unmistakable that the two were related. Ed was trying to draw the younger man out, asking questions about where he was from and what he did without getting too personal. Even with Ed’s conversation skills, they hadn’t learned much from the monosyllabic answers.
Yes, he was from Phoenix.
He had gone to U of A, never graduated. Seemed to have moved around quite a bit.
Most recently employed at a small garden center where he contracted out landscaping labor and some design.
Finally, Adam asked the question he clearly wanted the answer to most. “Why now?”
Seth didn’t balk. “I only recently found out about my father. Our father.” He stopped and looked up at the ceiling for a moment. “My mother was…difficult. We did not have a relationship to speak of.” Apparently Gerald had had a type. He began tracing a pattern on the tabletop. They were having beers while Ed warmed up his grill, the four of them sitting around the pine table set up inside an enclosure on Ed’s huge deck. It was pitch-dark outside; Micah couldn’t see any further than the light thrown by several lanterns placed along the railing. The back forty, as Ed called it, was invisible.
“I was raised by my aunt. When Marnie died a few years ago, I was cleaning out her house and found a box of her things. My mother’s. It took me a while to put the pieces together. My birth mother was a liar and an addict. It was hard for me to accept that she might have left something valuable behind with her sister. Probably she forgot she’d had it. That would be the only reason she didn’t sell it for drug money, or thrown away.”
“Sell what?”
Seth glanced up at Micah’s interruption. Ed was nodding like he had heard it before, and Adam was watching Seth intently.
“A small, original Gerald Klay. Early. From the 1960s, as far as I could tell from looking into it.” He was quiet for a moment before continuing. “It wasn’t until I ran across a picture of
Klay that I began to have suspicions. I was on some website about the history of the Skagit Valley school, Northwest mystics. There’s a shot of him when he was maybe in his twenties. It was like looking into a mirror.”
“Yeah,” Adam agreed. “He had some seriously strong genes. You look even more like him than I do.”
Ed interjected from where he was turning burger patties on the grill. “So I get an interesting phone call a bit after Gerald passed, asking for Edward Schultz. Now, the only person ever asking for Edward Schultz is my long-gone, downtrodden mother.” He pulled the lid of the grill down and came over to stand next to Seth. “Truth, though, I forgot I suggested that he come and meet. I would have told you, Adam,” he finished sheepishly. “I guess in all the excitement it slipped my mind.”
The burgers were mouthwatering. Ed worked hard to keep things light, mostly by regaling Seth and Micah with embarrassing stories of Adam’s childhood. Adam tried to stop him, but the man was a freight train. Adam had told him that Ed had couch surfed a lot, so Micah shouldn’t have been surprised Ed had been witness to much of Adam’s growing pains. And that he’d share it in a way his recluse of a father never would have.
Adam tried to draw the line at Ed finishing the story of when Adam ran away from home at age seven, but the cat was out of the bag so to speak. Micah and Seth both were laughing so hard hearing about the note he had left that Micah nearly choked on what was left of his burger.
“Mike Petersen was out in his cruiser and found him about four miles away. We were all surprised he had gotten that far. The kid would not get in the car, so Petersen drove real slow with Adam walking alongside until the kid got too hot and agreed to come home. Any other kid woulda been over the moon about riding in a cop car, but not Adam. Never figured he’d turn out to be a cop.”
“He bribed me with a Popsicle and showed me all the bells and whistles in the cruiser. I think that’s when I decided to go into law enforcement.”
Micah had been staring into the black of the yard while Adam spoke. At first he thought he was imagining things, but when he blinked a couple times what he saw was still there: a vague lighter shadow that was human-shaped.
He tried not to stiffen and give himself away, but they were sitting ducks up on that deck. The lanterns weren’t bright, but it didn’t matter.
Adam followed Micah’s gaze and roared, “Get down!” as all hell broke loose.
Fifty-One
Much later, when Micah was trying to tell the responders what had happened, he couldn’t get the words out. The scene kept playing in his head. The gunshots had been so incredibly loud, and there had been so many. A barrage. Intent to kill. Ed had leaned over to finish his story for Seth. He’d taken a terrible hit to his shoulder.
Adam had half ducked and then crushed Micah to the decking, covering him with his body. Mohammad did still have men watching Micah and Adam, though the attackers’ approached from the back of the property. They came around the corner of the house with their guns blazing, literally. It was about then that Micah realized Adam wasn’t moving, that the warmth he felt was Adam’s blood slowly pumping out of his body.
Aside from being a landscaper, Seth had apparently trained at the school of “Never fucking panic.” The guy was quiet as fuck, but he was efficient. When silence fell and Micah started to shatter, futilely pushing against Adam’s weight so he could try and stop the bleeding, Seth calmly rolled Adam off him and began applying pressure and issuing instructions. He’d stripped off his denim jacket and his T-shirt, then torn the soft cotton into strips and pressed them into the cavity in Adam’s chest.
Adam was so pale. Micah could hear the scream of sirens in the distance. He was sick of hearing sirens.
The two guys who’d dropped the ball were scanning the backyard. One had a hand on the neck of a dark, very still form. The other one was talking rapidly into his cell phone. Micah could see his lips moving but couldn’t hear his words. All he could do was watch while Seth pressed the remains of his T-shirt against the red blossom growing on Adam’s chest. He realized Seth was yelling at him, trying to get his attention.
“Check Ed!”
Ed had taken a hit to the shoulder, but he was conscious and trying to get up. Micah gently pushed him back down, holding his hand. Ed lifted his other hand and brushed it over Micah’s cheek. That’s when Micah realized he was crying, his cheeks were wet with tears. His grief heavier than anything he’d ever known.
“I can’t lose him, Ed; I only just found him.” Micah’s knees hurt from kneeling on the wooden deck, but he didn’t care. He was splattered with the blood of the one person who had been able to wake him. He was crying, and another wounded man was trying to comfort him.
It seemed like hours before the EMTs arrived. They gently moved Seth and Micah out of the way and began to do their job. He and Seth sat side by side, huddled under a blanket someone had thrown over them like so much furniture.
Sara and Weir arrived with a spray of gravel, Weir screeching to a halt next to the EMTs as they were loading Adam into the ambulance. A second one had its doors open, waiting for Ed. Sara rushed to him her face pale and anxious, and climbed in after the gurney had been loaded on. The ambulance carrying Adam roared off toward St. Joe’s, lights flashing but quiet. What did that mean? Micah’s head was both calm and swirling. Hot and cold. He was shaking, and so was Seth. They needed each other to keep upright.
“Weir—Carroll,” Micah rasped semi-hysterically. The man turned and saw the two of them huddled in the shadows. His surfer-dude demeanor was gone. He was all business.
They ended up in Ed’s living room, away from the lights and the local news truck that had set up outside. Weir kept apologizing for not being there. For fucking up again. All Micah wanted was to be at the hospital with Adam. “Nice work, Seth; the EMT said you kept Adam alive until they got here,” Weir muttered.
Seth pulled clothes out of a carry-on bag he’d brought in earlier when Ed insisted he stay the night rather than check into a motel. “At least change your clothes,” he told Micah, holding out a shirt. They were about the same size. “It’s going to be a long night; you might as well not be covered in blood.”
***
The hospital was horrible. Seth had stayed at Ed’s. The police had been interviewing him when Weir dragged Micah off to his car. Mohammad was on his way back to Skagit. No one could reach Adam’s mother; Mohammad was listed as his emergency contact, anyway.
They were stuck in the grim surgery waiting room for hours. Weir stayed with Micah the entire time. They’d both had multiple cups of hospital coffee that tasted like battery acid.
Sara came and found them eventually. Ed would be fine; the bullet had gone through the fleshy part of his shoulder and exited cleanly without hitting anything, and he was in a room recovering. It looked worse than it was; most likely he would be going home in the morning or the next day. If he hadn’t bent down when he did …Sara shuddered dramatically.
Nothing, not even the death of his parents and sister, had prepared Micah for the wait. His family had been dead by the time he knew about the accident. There had been no choice, no waiting. Sara sat down next to him and took his hand in hers. He squeezed it so hard it had to hurt, but she didn’t take it back. They sat like that until the surgeon came out to tell them the news.
Micah had read that you could tell when the doctor came out to the waiting room. This woman was tiny and grim. “Mr. Azaya?”
Mohammad stood.
Micah struggled to stand, too, but his legs couldn’t be trusted not to wobble. Sara propped him up while they all waited to hear what the diminutive doctor had to say.
“This is Adam’s partner, Micah Ryan, and personal friend Sara Schultz.” Azaya informed her.
“I’m his partner also.” Weir flashed his badge.
“Okay.” She, Dr. Gupta, had a pretty lilting accent, The surgeon motioned to Mohammad to step away with her, while the rest of them waited. Micah, hated it. Hated the hospital. Hated
Matveev for trying to take another person he loved away from him. There was no doubt in his mind who had been responsible for the shooting.
Finally, Mohammad returned to their little group.
“Adam is lucky to be alive. The bullet entered his right side, puncturing his lung, before exiting. Nicked a vein, unfortunately, which was why there was so much blood. It could have been much worse without whoever did the initial wound pack. He would have bled out.”
Micah shut his eyes, feeling the weight of Sara’s slender arm around his waist, anchoring him.
“They were able to repair the damage. He should make a full recovery, although there will be pain and physical therapy involved. He is in ICU for the rest of tonight. When he wakes up they are going to run a few more tests.”
“Can I see him?” Micah whispered.
“He hasn’t woken up yet, but you may have a moment. I arranged it with Dr. Gupta.”
Micah didn’t want a moment. He wanted years. He wanted forever.
Seeing Adam pale and motionless against the white hospital bedding slayed him. The nurse came in a few times to check Adam’s vitals while Micah was there, all the machines and tubes beeping, humming, keeping Adam alive. Adam was a force of nature; it hurt Micah to see him reduced.
“They’re not going to let you stay here,” Mohammad spoke quietly. “Tomorrow, or rather later today, when he has a room, I’ll make sure you get back here. In the meantime, there are people who want to ask you questions about what happened.”
Reluctantly, Micah left. If he stayed, Adam would stay alive; if he left…he could not think that way.
Weir drove the short distance from St. Joe’s to Micah’s house. Mohammad had quietly faded into the background, leaving Micah in Weir’s clutches. The streets of Skagit were quiet in the way that means it is very late or very early. Weir parked on the street and let Micah lead the way to his front door. Frankenstein was sleeping curled up on the couch but roused enough to complain that he hadn’t been fed the night before.