by Peter Styles
“Me too, Quinn,” I said, trying to dispel my own worry that Quinn might be right. “Me, too.”
14
Things at the department hadn’t changed at all when I came back, though, I felt like everything in my world had tilted on its axis. I felt like everyone could see what Nico and I had done, what I’d decided to give life to that I’d never been willing to admit before. But, it hadn’t. The receptionist greeted me the same as always, there were the same doughnuts and coffee in the breakroom, the same boys cutting up and making the same jokes.
I’d settled into my routine, answering emails, following up with victims by phone, getting through my inbox, when I heard Sheriff’s Wolfton’s booming voice through the office. I tensed.
“Case! Good to see you, son. Glad you managed to get some time off.” Wolfton seemed happy to see me. We’d always gotten along fine. He’d liked my military background from the beginning for the training and, later I realized, so he could tell voters his department was veteran friendly.
“Glad to be back, sir,” I said. Seizing my opportunity, I went both feet in. “Actually, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about. Do you have some time?”
“Sure. Come on back when you’re ready. I’m clear all afternoon.”
I gathered my thoughts and then went back to Wolfton’s office. There was only going to be one shot at trying this.
He was quiet as I explained what Nico and I had discovered, Nina Thurston and Zane Starr and the letter. I showed him a copy and he read it, his eyebrows shooting up.
“Well, what do you think?” I asked, once I was finished. I thought of Nico, how hopeful his face had been when Starr had been talking, how eager he was even as he was shrugging it off as just a ‘hope.’
Wolfton sighed heavily, rubbing the space between his eyebrows with his fingers.
“You know there are problems with this, Case.”
“I do,” I answered. “But, there’s enough here to at least raise a doubt. It’s at least enough to make someone stop and wonder.” A reasonable doubt. I’d watched the public defenders and private defense attorneys make their closing arguments a hundred times by now. That reasonable doubt is all they needed, not anything more.
He sighed again, sitting back in his chair and meeting my eyes.
“Case, I’m gonna be honest with you, I think you need to let this go.” He crossed his hands over his stomach.
“Sir?” It wasn’t that it was all that surprising, but I wanted to hear his explanation. He owed me that much at least.
“You need to let this lie, Landon. There’s already a conviction on the books. A jury found Oliver Suarez guilty. Case closed. Move on to something else, focus on something else. You need to, what with the promotion up for grabs. Going back over old grounds isn’t really what we’re gonna be looking for in a detective.”
I nodded, trying as best I could to rein in my temper before I punched the condescending smile off of his face. I could hear the silent warning in his tone. If I didn’t let this go, if I didn’t lay back and let this happen, I could kiss the detective position goodbye. And fucking Wolfton was connected. He’d been the sheriff in Worthington forever. He could blackball me all over the state if he wanted to, if I pissed him off enough. I fumed the rest of the day and left at five on the dot regardless of where I was in my work. Fuck it. I hated being pinned in. I hated feeling like my back was in the corner.
As I drove home, I thought. I could go around Wolfton. The DA was a no-nonsense woman. She’d hear me out. She was cautious, and she cared about justice. She’d rather open and reinvestigate herself than have some emboldened public defender file something and go after her department. Or, I could go straight to the judge? Fuck, either of those was going to guarantee that Wolfton would ensure I died on patrol. I’d never get the opportunity again that he was offering me now. Not if I went behind his back. I pushed it all to the side to let it rest in my mind before making any sort of decision. Better to sleep on it and reevaluate it again tomorrow with fresh eyes.
When I got home, Nico was there, just like last time waiting on the steps of my front porch. I was surprised to see him, and half-hard. Christ, I was like a trained dog responding to him as he stretched out against the steps, shirt riding up to reveal just a sliver of brown skin. He stood up as I walked up the path, and I reached out and took his wrist to tug him into the house behind me. Nico Suarez looked like he belonged in my house. My brain already screamed that Nico was mine while we were in Gaton, but it didn’t really compare to seeing him here surrounded by my home. Fuck. Where had all of that come from?
He tossed off his jacket and wandered to my kitchen like he owned the place.
“Got anything to eat? I’m fucking starving.”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re always fucking starving. There’s some bread, and there’s some sandwich stuff in the fridge.”
“Mmmm, someone’s forgotten what it’s like to be young,” he snarked. He hardly had the sandwich slapped together before he was tearing into it. “I imagine you forget lots of things in old age.”
“Not how to pull you over my knee if need be,” I reminded him. It was a pretty thought. Him hard and grinding against my clothed knee as a I aimed sharp smacks to the back of his thighs, to his hole.
“May have to take a raincheck on that, jefe. You, uh, well…”
“Wore your ass out, and now it aches to sit let alone anything...else?” I asked cheerfully, grabbing a beer out of the fridge for myself and one for him.
He blushed to the roots of his hair. Bingo.
“That’s a shame,” I added, trying to keep my tone light. “I was kind of hoping to break you in on my bed.”
Nico’s hunger didn’t look like it had anything to do with the sandwich anymore. Good. My imagination kept running on, imagining scenarios where Nico was always here when I got home, always waiting for me with that look in his eyes, lips half-parted.
“That so?” He asked. His voice was heavy now, husky.
“Mmmm,” I affirmed.
He shook his head like he was trying to shake himself out of a daze.
“Stop distracting me,” he said, waving a hand at me.
“Me? You’re the one that came in here, I guess to raid the fridge? You still haven’t said.”
He tsked again. “You know why I’m here. How did it go today? With the Sheriff?”
The smile slid off my face, and I looked down, not quite making eye contact. Fuck, I wish I had more time to make up my mind. But that wasn’t going to change anything. I wasn’t that type of person. When I made up my mind, there wasn’t a lot of dithering. The problems I’d contemplated in the car on the way home were insurmountable. It wasn’t fair to delay this and leave Nico to wonder, to hope, when there wasn’t any possibility of a different outcome.
“That bad?” He asked, his tone somber.
“I took it to Wolfton, but it’s not enough.”
“You told him the whole thing, Zane Starr and everything?”
“Yep,” I answered. “It wouldn’t have mattered if it had been the Pope himself. He’d rather have a jury conviction for murder one than a re-investigation in an election year.”
“Okay. That’s bullshit, but okay. So, what next?”
“What do you mean what’s next?” I asked.
“Well, who do we go to next? There’s someone else you can take it to, right? The DA, governor? Someone…. Right?”
I sighed heavily.
“Nico...” I started.
“No, no. There’s got to be something you can do,” Nico tried, his eyes going wide and his voice taking on a slightly more frantic tone.
“We knew this was a long sho--”
“Don’t tell me it’s a long shot. We busted our asses for days chasing down needles in fucking haystacks for this cabron to say, ‘meh, sorry. Not enough. Try again next time.’ Fuck that! There has to be some way to make this right. To make the right people see and investigate.”
“I’
m sorry, Nico. There’s not a lot more I can do.”
“My parents sent me here, so I could have a better life where stuff like justice and freedom were actually supposed to matter,” Nico said, suddenly before he pushed the plate he was eating off of away from himself in frustration.
“Well,” I started to say, a little carefully since it was clear that I’d touched a nerve, “They do.”
“Do they?” Nico asked, shooting me a look of surprised disbelief in my statement. “I haven’t seen my máma since I was three years old. Three. I can barely, barely remember them. I can’t ever see them. Not unless they find a way to come here. For what? Why? What was the fucking point of that?” Nico paused as though I actually might have had an answer to that, like he genuinely wanted reassurance that there had been some reason for being asked to leave his family.
I tried to take a step forward to close some of the distance between where I stood in the middle of my kitchen and where Nico stood, his back to the counter, all of his hunger of any kind and any of the good mood that he’d been in earlier completely forgotten.
“We’d have been better off in Cuba!” he said, his voice rising, as he tried to take a step back away from me, obviously a rejection of any attempt to get closer. “At least there, Oliver wouldn’t have been the poster child for a scary, brown vato some fucking bullshit backward-ass town needed to lock up like the motherfucking boogeyman. He wouldn’t have had some trumped up, kangaroo court to find him guilty. It’s bullshit. It’s all fucked. None of it means anything.”
Nico almost absent-mindedly closed a cabinet door that he’d left open in his hurry to find something eat, shutting it a little harder than was absolute necessary. He shook his head, then, and turned around like he was trying to clean up after himself, like he was trying to get ready to leave.
“I’m sor--”
“And, do you want to know what the worst part is?” he continued, whipping back around to me.
His voice kept getting louder and louder, his eyes more and more sharp. I doubted he even heard me start to speak. “I believed it. All of it. Oliver used to hold me when I was little and scared and crying for my Pa and tell me that it would all be for the better. He’d fucking dry my tears and tell me to be strong and make them proud because I could be whatever in the fuck I wanted in America. Motherfucking land of opportunity. Before this crazy bullshit happened, I was studying. I wanted to be a lawyer. I wanted to make them proud, and I wanted to be a part of that system. And now? Now, I just want to throw up. Or punch your fucking Sheriff in the face. Or both. Yo no sé. Puta madre. Cabrón!”
I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to comfort him. Something I wasn't naturally given to and something, in this case, I didn’t want to investigate too closely. I knew full well, I was probably part of the problem. I got it, though. Or tried to, anyway. The army had been, for me, a way out, an avenue to something else. I wasn’t on the path, before the army, to be anything. My father had been in and out, not really a presence in my life, and my mother, well, she did the very best she could. I’d wanted to do something that would matter, something where I’d have a chance of taking care of her and Noah. She’d remarried when I entered the service. I could understand a child’s want to make his parents proud, and that was what Oliver was to Nico, his father. He’d taken care of him, comforted him, protected him.
“Nico, there’s just not a whole lot else I can do,” I repeated. “I’m sorry. I really am.”
15
I don’t remember exactly what I was doing with my hands, I think I was trying to distract myself or myself look busy while I fought down my temper and the white-hot anger I felt in the bottom of my stomach. I think I must have slammed a cabinet door shut, and then maybe stuffed something back into Landon’s fridge and thrown away whatever I was eating before. Whatever I was doing, I was trying to seem calm and measured, even if I didn’t exactly feel calm and measured. I had almost begun to feel like it was working, too, when Landon answered me and told me he was sorry in that sad, defeated tone as though justifying his not wanting to do anything more. That, I couldn’t stand.
“No, and you know the other thing, pendejo?” I continued on, fucking furious that the only thing that Landon had to say for himself is that same phrase over and over again, ‘there’s nothing that I can do.’ “You wanna know the other thing?”
Landon looked he was struggling to say something. No, Case looked like he was struggling to say something. But, I didn’t care. I didn’t give him time to answer. When we’re this angry, Cuban questions are rhetorical, anyway.
“The other thing is, is that I’m good at school. I’m actually great at school. I know you fake-worried about it earlier with your ‘shouldn’t you be in school’ bullshit, but you’ve never asked. Don’t worry, I’ll get to that later.”
“Nico, stop. There doesn’t have to be a later. Listen—” Case tried to come closer to me again, but I wasn’t sure that I could trust myself if he did, so I folded my arms against myself and leaned further back into the kitchen counter I was against, moving back away from him as much as I could in the tiny kitchen. I knew that if I didn’t burn off some of the anger I was feeling, though, I was going to do something that I regretted, so I sidestepped him and started pacing around the kitchen as I talked.
“The other thing,” I continued, as I paced around with my head low and my arms crossed, “is that I work and put myself through school and it’s not even hard. I’m good at school because I was fucking inspired by what happened—by what y’all did—to my uncle.” At that, I looked him up and down head to toe, trying to force myself to see him as part of the problem and not the solution I thought he was. Once again, Case looked like he was going to interrupt me, but I cut him off first.
“And, you know what, when I was inspired to start school, you know what they taught me? They taught me about all the kinds of things that happen to people like my Uncle when they get caught up in the legal system sometimes. They taught me about all the things that can happen to people like me. And I’d seen enough of it around me ever since I was a kid. I’d seen the teachers treat us differently, I’d seen people worry about getting pulled over by people like you. But what pisses me the fuck off is that for one second, for one second—” This time, I was the one that stepped closer to Case, jabbing my finger in the air at him as punctuation. “For one fucking second, I let myself think that you were different.”
“Nico!” Case tried to yell me down. “Will you calm the hell down?”
Case reached out an arm towards me. I don’t know if he meant to push me back or pull me closer to himself, but I didn’t let him finish the gesture. I jerked my shoulder back, not allowing him to touch me, uninterested in whatever he had to say for himself.
“What? What are you going to say back, motherfucker? You yourself told me that you didn’t think the Sheriff or the DA would like it. You said you were scared about your little promotion or whatever, and I thought you weren’t going to help at all but then you said that you would. You said that you would, and you went all over with me, so I thought that meant something. I thought, surely, that meant that when the time came, if it was true that the sheriff didn’t give a fuck about anything, that you would be prepared to go to the next level. To go the next step up. To the DA, to the DA’s boss, to whoever the fuck you had to go, because, if not?” I stopped myself for air for a moment, panting at Case while I tried and failed to answer my own question. “If not, then what the fuck was the point? Why did you call in sick and why did you come with me if you knew that you didn’t have the balls to see it all the way through? Why did you—” I was so angry, I thought I could swing at him again just as I did in the parking lot when we’d first sat down together. “Why the fuck did you promise that you were going to see it through if you knew that you weren’t?”
“I. Didn’t.” Case said, through gritted teeth. “I did make a promise. I promised to do everything I could, and I did exactly what I said I would do. Look,” he
stopped and held up his hands, still trying to calm me down. “Look, Nico. I know I haven’t exactly been eager to open up about it but—” Landon…no, Case…sighed. “The whole reason I got into police work, into being one of ‘those people,’ as you call it, was because I came back from overseas because my brother Noah got the shit beat out of him by some thugs nobody ever caught. Okay? I couldn’t protect my brother and now he’s afraid to even step out of the fucking house because nobody could protect him, and nobody could make the people who did that to him pay. So, I understand what you’re feeling. I understand that you’re upset about not being able to do this for your family.”
“Do you?” I yelled back. I felt my lips curling back sort of like they do when you smile, but this wasn’t a smile. It felt more like baring my teeth at him. “Do you really? Or, were the cops on your side that time? Were they helpful? Was it the kind of thing where you all did the best you could, but they just got away anyway? Or, was it the kind of situation, like ours, where the cops are actively working against you, against an innocent man?” That was harsh, I thought to myself. That was harsh. We’re talking about his brother. I should stop. But I couldn’t, I couldn’t stop myself from saying all the things that I’d been bottling up inside for years.
“Landon…Case…fuck, fine. Landon,” I said, deciding that it was stupid to pretend that there was distance between us when obviously, for better or worse, there wasn’t. At least, not yet. “Landon, I’m sorry that happened to your brother. I’m sorry you couldn’t protect him or bring his attackers in. But, it’s different with us. You have the ability to make that difference now. You have the ability to find the people responsible, not just for me and my uncle’s sake but for Nora’s parents, too. And, if you don’t—”
“Shut the fuck up!” Landon yelled, squaring up into a wide-legged stance. “Shut the fuck up about my brother and shut the fuck up in general.” Suddenly, I could tell that the dom-switch had flipped. He snapped his fingers at me and held up a finger almost in my face. “You’re going to apologize for this fucking tantrum, and you’re going to start tamping down that fucking attitude. You’re going to start remembering to put ‘sir’ at the end of everything else that comes out of your mouth and you’re going to—”