by Gregory Ashe
“Since when do cops carry knives?” Jem mumbled.
“Jem,” Tean said, “are you ok?” Jem was still trying to focus his eyes, but he knew he wasn’t seeing right because Tean was holding a gun. “Let him go and get the fuck out of our way.”
Jem tried to remind him about the swear jar, but whoever was clutching his hair—Jager—gave a vicious jerk, and Jem let out a moan.
“Let him go! I’ll do it. I swear to God I’ll do it.”
“Nice try, buddy,” Jager said, sounding almost amused. “You’ve got three things going against you, though. First, you’re a fag. Second, you’ve had plenty of time to do it already, and if you haven’t done it by now, you’re not gonna do it.” Jager yanked on Jem’s hair again. “Come on. We’re going for a ride, the three of us.”
“I’ll put a bullet right through your head.”
“Jesus, buddy, even for a cocksucker you’re stupid. The third thing, and this is a big one: gun’s not loaded. Now come on. We’ll do this nice and easy and fast.”
The gun bucked in Tean’s hand. The muzzle flash made Jem squint, and then the clap of the gunshot deafened him. The bullet missed—or maybe Tean had intended to shoot the wall. Jem felt the knife at his throat, a tugging heat where it cut, and then he was free. He turned to face Jager, hand diving into his pocket, and he pulled out the barrette with its sharpened clip. He stabbed Jager twice in the belly before the other man could react, and then he grabbed Jager’s wrist and beat his hand against the doorjamb, once, twice. Jager dropped the knife, and Jem kicked it under the desk.
“Tean, come on,” Jem shouted, shoving Jager down onto the linoleum.
Tean stumbled after him. He was still carrying the revolver. In his haste, he caught the desk drawer with his leg, and he stumbled and hopped around it. Jager was trying to get his gun free from its holster; blood made dark patches on his BLM polo.
“Come on, come on, come on,” Jem shouted.
As soon as Tean reached him, Jem grabbed his arm and dragged him toward the exit. Jem waited for the shot. He saw Jager’s hand on the gun, struggling with the holster snap.
Then they plunged out into the cold, the night, the desert, the smell of gasoline and motor oil, the sound of the poplars as a breeze kicked up. They ran.
21
Tean drove down Moab’s main street at ten under the speed limit, vaguely aware of cars and trucks whipping past in the opposite direction. The intensity of the artificial lighting was blinding, and he was shaking so hard that he had to white-knuckle the steering wheel with one hand to keep from falling apart. Jem touched his arm, and he flinched and made a noise.
“I’m going to take this,” Jem said quietly, his fingers warm where they wrapped around Tean’s hand, slowly loosening his grip on the revolver. The blood on the side of his face looked black. “That’s it, just let me take it. You did so good. You did amazing. But I need you to let go now. You can just let go and relax.” Tean’s fingers spasmed and released, and Jem slid the gun free. “That was so good. You’re doing really wonderfully. Pull into that gas station.”
“I’m fine,” Tean mumbled, but he eased into the Maverik’s lot, where they floated in a cloud of sodium light. He stopped the truck and put his hands over his eyes. When Jem pulled him into a hug, he didn’t fight it, and after a while, he stopped shaking.
Then, tapping Jem’s arm, he wiped his face and said, “I can’t believe I fell apart like that. I’m sorry. I’ve—I’ve been in situations like that. The canyon with Ruth. The trailer, when Phil attacked us. That abandoned building with Leroy. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m—”
Jem cupped his face. “How about you stop for just a second? Don’t say anything. Practice your usual Tean form of communication.” A smile softened the words.
Tean nodded. The heat of Jem’s hand on his face. The smell of his hand, of whatever soap he’d used last, of his skin. He closed his eyes and saw Jem slumped against the desk, saw blood running down his face, saw himself as though he were standing outside his body, saw himself like a statue, the gun pointed at Jager, doing nothing as Jager grabbed Jem and put a knife to his throat.
“I froze,” Tean whispered.
“It’s ok. I know how you feel about guns and killing. You were in a terrible situation.”
Tean shook his head.
“It’s ok,” Jem repeated. “You got us out of there. Focus on that; that’s what matters.”
Tean couldn’t find the words, but what he wanted to say, what he needed to say, was that Jem had it all backwards. Tean wasn’t shaking because he was scared. He wasn’t in shock. He didn’t need reassurances or comfort, although he couldn’t pull away from Jem’s touch. Looking down the barrel at Jager, he hadn’t felt the wavering sickness that he remembered from his one and only time turkey hunting with his grandfather. He hadn’t felt anything but the desire to kill this man who had hurt Jem. To murder him. And the feeling was still burning its way through him, scaring Tean with how much it made him want to hurt another living creature.
“Enough,” Jem said, patting Tean’s cheek. “Wherever you’ve gone, get back here with me.”
Exhaling again, Tean nodded. When he looked over, he said, “You’re bleeding.”
“I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not. Look in the mirror.”
“Oh. Damn. I liked this shirt.”
Tean got out of the truck, retrieved his gear bag, and came around to the passenger side. He opened Jem’s door. The sodium lights flooding the gas station’s pad made it easy for Tean to examine Jem, although Jem whined and squirmed and batted at Tean’s hands.
Clicking off the penlight, Tean said, “I don’t think you have a concussion, but you need a doctor—”
“You’re a doctor.”
“—a doctor for people to make sure.”
“Pass.”
“No, no passing, not with that cut on your neck and that laceration on your head. Jeez, that guy must have been wearing steel-toed boots. We’re lucky he didn’t kick you any harder.”
“It felt plenty hard.”
“I’ll look up a hospital—”
“I said pass.”
“No.
“You can’t tell me no.” A smirk pulled at one side of Jem’s mouth. “My body, my choice.”
“I’m deciding this. I’m the one who’s worried about you. I’m the one who—who had to watch something horrible happen to you. I’m the one who can’t sleep at night because I don’t know where you are or if you’ve got a roof or if you’re safe or if I’m going to see you again, and I am sick as fuck of feeling like this all the time. And shooting that gun made me feel very macho, so I’m yelling, but it’s starting to wear off and I’m a little embarrassed, but I’m not backing down.”
Jem’s face was blank. “I’m not going to a hospital or a doctor-in-a-box or whatever you—”
“Stop talking.”
“Don’t—”
“I said stop.”
Red spots bloomed in Jem’s cheeks, and he clenched his jaw. Tean ignored the death look. He made Jem move around to sit on the truck’s tailgate, where the light was better. Then he opened the gear bag again, taking out antiseptic wipes. He cleaned the cut on Jem’s neck first, and then he administered lidocaine, grabbing Jem’s head when Jem winced and tried to pull away.
“Don’t move,” Tean snapped. “I need both hands for this next part, and I don’t want you walking around with crooked stitching on your throat.”
“Like Frankenstein’s monster.”
“I said stop talking.” Tean did the sutures carefully, taking his time with the needle and forceps. Cars roared past the gas station lot, but Tean had parked far enough back that they didn’t have to worry about the dust. A Dodge Ram pulled up to the pumps, its lights sweeping across Jem and Tean, picking out the copper and red and even a few strands of silver in Jem’s beard. Jem was very pale and, Tean noticed now, shaking.
“D
oes it hurt? The lidocaine should have helped.”
“No.” The word was tiny and whispered.
“Are you scared of needles?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
Jem’s gaze was fixed over Tean’s shoulder, his lips white with pressure.
“There,” Tean said, snipping the excess thread on the last suture. He dressed the wound. “I’m going to do the laceration now.” He waited for the argument, watching the tremors in Jem’s hands.
But Jem just gave a jerky nod.
Tean repeated the process; Jager’s boot had torn open the skin on the side of Jem’s head, and the wound was ugly and wide but not deep. Tean did the best he could and dressed the wound. He disposed of the waste in a biohazard bag, cleaned the suturing kit as best he could—although everything needed to be sterilized—and packed the gear bag again. Jem was still sitting on the tailgate, so Tean helped him stand and walked him around to the passenger seat, where he offered a clean—albeit plain—t-shirt that he kept in the truck for field work.
“How’s the pain?”
Jem shook his head once as he stripped out of his bloody tee.
“Are you angry at me?”
Another shake of his head.
“I shouldn’t have yelled at you, and I shouldn’t have forced you to let me treat those wounds. I’m sorry. I was feeling really overwhelmed. I took it out on you because I didn’t want to feel powerless anymore.”
“I liked it,” Jem said, tugging on the clean shirt. He rested his head on the seat, a smile flitting across his face. “You should do that whole yell-at-me, take-charge thing more often. Very butch. I’m just mad you wouldn’t give me a Frankenstein scar.”
“Jem—”
“I need a minute.”
The smell of diesel exhaust floated past Tean. He counted to sixty, but Jem had his eyes closed.
When Jem spoke, his voice was flat, as though he had ratcheted it down as tightly as he could. “It’s hard for me. Scary.”
After a moment, Tean asked, “What?”
“All of it.” His eyes squeezed even more tightly shut. “Not being able to do it myself.”
Tean thought, for a moment, what Jem’s childhood must have been like: an ever-shrinking circle of the things he could control; the fear and helplessness as he was uprooted and passed from home to home again and again. The gesture came out of nowhere: a lock of hair had fallen out of Jem’s part, and Tean brushed it into place. He yanked his hand back when he realized what he’d done. Jem’s eyes opened to slits.
“You don’t have to do everything yourself,” Tean said. “You can let other people help sometimes.”
Jem’s smile was hard and lopsided. Behind Tean, the bell on the Maverik convenience store jangled. Teenage voices carried, bouncing off the cement pad, just laughter and strings of swear words.
“Time to go,” Jem said quietly.
So they left.
As Tean merged into traffic, he said, “I’ll get you your own room at the lodge so Scipio won’t bother you.”
“I honestly don’t know if it’s safe to go back to the lodge. We should probably get Scipio and go.”
“You don’t think—Jager wouldn’t—” But both times, the sentences caught in Tean’s throat.
“He’s dirty,” Jem said. “The knife is a dead giveaway; a cop ever pulls a knife on you, you know something is fucked up. He was going to kill both of us tonight, Tean. He was going to drag us out to the middle of nowhere and cut our throats, and honestly, he could probably do it so nobody would ever find us.”
Tean nodded. “That’s . . . that’s a very good point. But why would he help Tanner fake his own death?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think maybe it’s a mix-up?”
“The way he acted made it seem more serious than a misunderstanding.”
“No, that’s not what I meant. Jager obviously has something he’s willing to hide, and he’s willing to kill to hide it. But maybe it’s unrelated to whatever happened with Blake and Tanner and Antonio.”
“No way.”
“I know that logically it makes more sense for everything to be connected, but the world isn’t necessarily logical. It’s entirely possible we stumbled onto two separate things.”
“Nope. First, because Jager acted so fucking weird that night at the canyon.”
“That could have been—”
“And second, because he had Blake’s necklace wrapped around that drop gun.” Jem motioned, and Tean pulled the chain out of his pocket and passed it over. Jem let it dangle from his fingers, silver glittering in the ebb and flow of headlights. “This is Blake’s. Why the hell does he have Blake’s necklace? And why keep it at his office?”
“It’s a silver cross. A lot of people—”
“Blake wore this in Decker. It’s his; I know it’s his. And it has his initials on the back. BB.”
They turned on US-128. On the left, the Colorado was a black snake, glittering under cliffs of red sandstone, their tops lost in darkness. On their right, the headlights picked out ephedra and bitterbrush, a tumbleweed rocking where it was caught on sharp yucca leaves, the dart and flutter of small black shapes. Bats, Tean guessed, dining on the insects along the river.
“We need to call Ammon.”
Jem sighed.
“I know you don’t like him—”
“Fuck that. You know I hate him, but that’s not the point. He’s a cop.”
“And?”
“And cops protect cops.”
“Jager isn’t—”
“You know what I mean. First, Ammon’s going to ask if we’re sure, absolutely sure, about what happened. Then he’s going to try to convince us that it was a misunderstanding. Then he’s going to suggest there’s another explanation. And then, if we somehow muck our way through all his bullshit, he’s going to tell us that he can’t help us because we’ve got illegally obtained evidence and it’s worthless. That’s how the system works, Tean. The guys like Ammon, they’ve got the whole thing rigged.”
“That’s not fair to Ammon. It’s not his fault that the court systems have evolved laws on evidence. And this isn’t even about Ammon; this is about Jager.”
“Same fucking difference,” Jem muttered.
“You don’t have to like him, although it would sure make my life a hell of a lot easier, but I’m not going to just sit here and listen while you claim he’s part of some batshit brotherhood-of-cops conspiracy.”
The air whipping through the windows filled the space between them.
“Keep it up,” Jem finally said.
“I will keep it up!” Tean swallowed and slid his hands along the steering wheel. “Keep what up?”
“Keep filling up our swear jar, please. I’d like to go to Disney World this year. And I’m not saying there’s a conspiracy. I’m just telling you, that’s the system.”
Tean opened his mouth.
“Call him,” Jem said. “See for yourself.”
Placing the call, Tean said, “You stay out of this. Don’t bait him.”
Jem crossed his heart.
On the eighth ring, Ammon answered. “Sweetheart, I’m sorry—”
“Sweetheart,” Jem said.
Tean flashed him a look.
“—but I’m still trying to work out this nightmare. We’ve been going all day, and honestly, I don’t think we’ve resolved anything. Can I call you when I’m going to the lodge? I’d like to see you tonight before I go to bed.”
“Excuse me?” Jem said.
Tean shushed him. Viciously. Into the phone, he said, “Something happened, and you need to know about it.” Then he told him about Kalista, Nick, and Jager.
As Tean talked, Ammon’s breathing changed: short, clipped, rapid. When Tean finished, Ammon said, “Are you the stupidest fucking man alive? Are you? Answer that question, please, because I need to know so I can decide exactly how t
he fuck I’m supposed to handle you.”
“Well?” Jem whispered. “Are you?”
Tean let go of the wheel long enough to pinch Jem’s leg, and Jem howled. Over Jem’s cry, Tean said, “I know you’re upset—”
“You don’t know the first goddamn thing, Tean. That’s the whole problem. When I get done here, you and I are going to have a talk. A very long talk. And I’m going to explain things to you so that you understand perfectly fucking clearly why this is never going to happen again.”
“Don’t talk to me like that,” Tean said.
“How am I supposed to talk to you when you won’t listen to me when I talk any other way?”
“I’m calling to tell you about a dirty cop, and you want to lecture me on—”
After a deep breath, Ammon sounded slightly more in control. Or slightly less insane with rage. “Give me a break. This is more of the Hardy Boys bullshit that Jem is always dragging you into. Jager’s not dirty; he’s been in that field office for fifteen years, and nobody’s ever had a problem with him. You were going through his stuff; he probably thought he was being robbed. This sounds like a really awful misunderstanding, but that’s not the same thing as a dirty cop.”
Jem had the decency to stare out the window so Tean didn’t have to watch him gloat, and Tean was surprised to find his face hot, his eyes stinging, as the conversation unrolled exactly the way Jem had predicted.
“It doesn’t matter,” Ammon finally said. “You broke in there. You let Jem talk you into this dumbshit move—”
“It was my idea.”
“That’s even worse! And because you did, now what might be a key piece of evidence is absolutely worthless in court.”
“You wouldn’t have found it anyway. You weren’t even looking at Jager.”
“This isn’t about me. This is about you taking stupid risks, putting yourself in danger, all to impress Jem because he’s a bad boy and you’ve still got a crush on him.”
“I’m not having this conversation with you again.”
“It’s juvenile, Tean. Grow up. He’s irresponsible, he’s dangerous, and he’s going to get you hurt. Whatever fetish you’ve got—”