by Gregory Ashe
“Rory betrayed him the minute his own skin was on the line. That’s what love really is: a convenient name for hormones, something every single fucking person will jettison to save themselves.”
Hazard blinked, shook his head, and took a step forward.
“They died because you were too slow. They died because you couldn’t save them.”
Wiping his face again, Hazard took another step. He shook his head. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help them. You’re right about that; they’re in my head every day, and I don’t know if they’ll ever leave. But they died because you are a pathetic fucking monster. And today, I’m going to put a bullet in your head.”
“That’s right. Show everybody you’re the hero. Come find me. Come kill me. Justice, Emery Hazard style.”
When Hazard took his next step, angling left, needing to get to a staircase or a ladder, some way of accessing the catwalk, everything shifted. The spotlights strobed at the same time, the pulses irregularly timed and of varying lengths. It was like the light through the windows of the Haverford. Hazard took another step, moving between pools of darkness, every slash of light a moment of extreme danger. A gunshot rang out; the crack filled the enormous space of the warehouse. It was Mikey Grames again. Mikey Grames was shooting at him again.
Hazard tried to control his breathing. He tried to ground himself in the moment. He focused on the bursts of sensory input. But the problem was that everything was the same: the bricks, the concrete dust, the moldering plaster, the dry rot, the light strobing the darkness, the summer heat mixed with the dank cool of a closed-up building. All his tricks to separate the flashback from the present failed because there was no separation; this was the Haverford all over again. And a small part of his brain knew that Empire Fruit had never been about tripwires or pressure plates or timed explosions; the real trap had always been this, and the iron jaws snapping shut were impossible to break or escape because they were in his mind.
The next shot was so loud that the force of the clap made Hazard stagger, and it wasn’t until he tried to regain his balance that he realized he’d been shot in the leg. He staggered, went sideways, and landed hard. Pain blazed, burning through the fog of shock, and he heard himself scream. He was still holding the Blackhawk, but as he tried to right himself, someone ran up behind him. The kick connected with his hand while he was still trying to twist around. He felt at least one finger snap. Another kick connected, and the Blackhawk spun out of his hand and skittered across the uneven cement. Hazard launched himself after it, but the pain in his leg threw him off balance. A kick followed, connected with his kidney, and he bellowed. Then a kick to the back of the head. Then he was on the ground, shaking, his face pressed to the concrete, the rough grit of its dust on his lips and cheek and in his mouth, mixing with blood. The muzzle of a gun jabbed him in the back of the neck.
“Say it,” the electronic voice demanded, and the muzzle dug into Hazard’s neck, grinding his face against the concrete.
“You won,” Hazard said. “You won, Mitchell.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
JULY 6
SATURDAY
5:44 AM
HAZARD WAITED FOR the bullet. The spotlights cut off. The only illumination came from an ancient security light, which projected a yellow, papery cone near the massive double doors that led outside. Hazard blinked, trying to adjust his vision to the darkness. The pistol jabbed him again.
“That was a guess,” Mitchell said.
“Not entirely. It was mostly a process of elimination, but you also got sloppy with the mailboxes. I should have put it together as soon as John told me someone was blowing up mailboxes. That was one of the first things you told him, all the way back when he was looking into Cynthia’s death. You told him that when you were a teenager, you blew them up when you got bored.”
“It was a fucking guess. You guessed.” Then, after a breath, “Those goddamn mailboxes. I knew I shouldn’t have done that again.”
“Let me sit up.”
“No. What did you tell me? You wanted to put a bullet in my brain or something like that. You can stay right there.”
“It was really smart,” Hazard said. “Really, really smart to make yourself one of the victims.”
Mitchell snorted. The rustle of clothing and the pop of a knee told Hazard the younger man had settled into a squat.
“We couldn’t figure out how the Keeper had escaped. We couldn’t figure out how he hadn’t left any physical evidence. It seemed impossible. Everybody leaves something. Everybody makes some kind of mistake. But not the Keeper. All we could find was evidence belonging to the victims.”
“I’m going to kill you, Emery. I’m impressed that you figured it out, but I’m going to kill you.”
“Because you won,” Hazard said. “I know. Let me sit up.”
A soft rasp came back, and Hazard visualized the sound as Mitchell’s finger worrying the composite grip of the pistol.
Without waiting for Mitchell to decide, Hazard held out his hands and very carefully rolled onto his side. Mitchell’s reaction was immediate: he brought the barrel of the pistol down hard, cracking it across Hazard’s face. The sight ripped open a line from Hazard’s temple to cheek, and blood ran down his face, touched the corner of his lip, the iron smell of it masking everything else.
But Mitchell didn’t shoot. He just stood and shuffled back, the gun still pointed at Hazard, and said, “You do what I tell you to do. Understand?”
Hazard nodded. Mitchell looked . . . alive. That was the only way Hazard could describe the flush in his cheeks, the glow in his eyes, the intensity of his expression. Nothing had really changed about Mitchell. He had the same watery blue gaze, the same fiery hair. But now he looked fully awake and alert, as though every other time Hazard had seen him, he had been half asleep. The gun, pointed at Hazard’s chest now, was a massive semi-automatic. This close, Mitchell wouldn’t have to worry about aiming; if he hit Hazard anywhere, a bullet that big would take care of the rest.
“Are you gay?” Hazard said.
“It’s the twenty-first century, Emery. Get with the times. I’m me. That’s all I have to be.”
“So this wasn’t a hate crime. You’re not on a mission to get rid of queers and homos?”
Mitchell laughed and shook his head.
“Why Rory and Phil?”
“Because I hit on you once at the Pretty Pretty, and you wouldn’t have anything to do with me. You treated me like a kid. You wouldn’t look at me. You wouldn’t talk to me. I was nice to you, I flirted with you. And you stared straight through me. Then I saw you with John-Henry. I was curious. I started to watch more. And after I had hired you to investigate that murder, I followed you. Just sometimes. One night, I followed you to the sheriff’s house. I heard you talking to Rory outside, telling him . . . telling him what it felt like to be in love.” Mitchell shrugged. “What did you say? It’s like being tied to someone. Something like that. Do you still feel that way?”
Hazard touched the cut on his cheek; it stung, and he dropped his fingers. “I came here for John, didn’t I?”
“You did.”
“The Orpheus thing, it was just a gag? You just wanted to jerk our strings, and the bees were creepy as fuck. Is that it?”
Something small and furry scurried at the edge of Hazard’s vision; Mitchell followed the rat, or whatever it was, with his eyes. A moment later, the rat vanished through a hole in the wall, and something clanged.
“Old pipes,” Hazard said when Mitchell looked at him. “It’s going to cost you a fucking fortune to fix up your little nightmare den.”
“No,” Mitchell said slowly. “The Orpheus thing wasn’t a gag. It was to prove a point. And I think I’ve proved it; as you said, you came here for John-Henry. But you only get to do it once, Emery. You only get to walk into death once for someone you love and come out alive.”
Behind Mitchell, something moved again in the darkness.
Hazard struggled to keep his gaze on Mitchell, struggled not to look.
“I should have known,” Hazard said, “when you disappeared. I should have known it was you. No home security system is perfect, but we’d managed to rig up something pretty fucking good. At first, I was convinced it was one of our friends, someone you trusted enough to let inside. Then I was sure the Keeper was . . . was brilliant. Smarter than anyone I could imagine, with resources beyond anything I had encountered. Those were the only two options that seemed possible. That was the whole point of making me set up the security at your apartment, right? To get in my head, screw with my thinking? The Keeper had been ahead of me this whole time: hiding his trail with the bees, planting the recording equipment in my office, luring you to that fake meeting a few months ago, leaving that bee on my desk. And then, not only did he manage to abduct you from behind several layers of security, but he even managed to erase the security camera footage from an encrypted server. He could be everywhere at once: he got Nico and Dulac on the same morning. I’d never encountered anyone like this. Finding Dulac at Rasmussen’s house only postponed the questions.” Hazard smiled grimly, feeling the blood still running hot past the corner of his mouth. “How, how, how. I should have known none of it was real. Just tricks. Sleight of hand. Misdirection.”
Mitchell nodded. “But good, right?”
“Very good.”
“Why did Rasmussen help you?”
“She worked for a while at one of the reform schools I spent some time at. I had a few incriminating pictures. Serves her right; she kept telling me she was trying to make me feel better. She kept saying it while she put her hand down my pants.”
“Smart,” Hazard said. “You were so smart about everything. Except how could you know John would go after Nico? How could you be sure he’d find him?”
“Oh, I wasn’t sure. But I thought one of you, maybe both, would turn up, and so I decided to wait around and see. It wasn’t hard; campus was practically empty. If you had come instead of John, or if you had both come together, I would have had to play things differently.” Low in Hazard’s field of vision, Mitchell’s hand, the one with the gun, had begun to move restlessly. “Now it’s my turn: why did you come, Emery? If you figured it all out, why show up like this?”
“I figured a cowardly little fuck like you might scamper off. I didn’t want that to happen.” Hazard took a deep breath, running his hand slowly over the pitted concrete until his fingers closed over something hard and rectangular. A brick, he guessed. “Why did you kill Susan?”
“Because I could.” Mitchell shrugged. “And, like Rory and Phil, she had a connection to you that was loose but real. I knew the chief would be focused on Wesley, and it was an easy way to make you suspect the people around you.” He smiled, a brilliant flash of teeth. “Tell me you had your doubts about John-Henry. Just for a moment. Tell me you wondered, when they found the drugs and Rory’s and Phil’s underwear, and Somers’s prints were all over everything. Tell me you at least had an instant when you worried your boyfriend might be the one behind everything.”
“He’s my fiancé,” Hazard said quietly. The wound in his leg was throbbing more fiercely, and he was vaguely aware that he’d lost quite a bit of blood. His vision was narrowing. Static hissed in his ears. “Do you know when I decided to kill you? Instead of wasting the taxpayer’s dollar on a trial, I mean.”
“Emery, only one person is going to die today, and that’s you because you were so desperate to play the lone hero—”
Hazard threw the brick. It caught Mitchell on the side of the head, tearing open his cheek and knocking his head back. He stumbled, screaming. Then, wiping blood from his face, he aimed the gun at Hazard.
Somers came out of the darkness, grabbing Mitchell’s arm and forcing the gun up and away. Mitchell squeezed off a shot as they struggled. The redhead was making a keening noise as Somers forced one arm behind his back. Hazard watched Somers’s face slowly darken with the effort, and then he scooted forward and drove the heel of his foot into Mitchell’s balls. Mitchell squealed, dropped the gun, and collapsed. He was puking while Somers snapped the cuffs on him.
“It was when I realized I’d trusted you with my daughter, you fucking monster,” Hazard said. “I left her in the van with you. Do you remember? You’d come to me with a story about a phone call, how I’d missed our appointment, and I believed you. I thought the Keeper of Bees had tried to lure you into a trap, and we rushed over to my office. I left Evie with you in the van. When I realized, later, who you really were, that’s when I decided.” He took a shaky breath. “And just for the fucking record, you fucking imbecile, I’m not alone; I have a fiancé.”
“Very romantic,” Somers muttered as he patted down Mitchell.
“Thank you,” Hazard said. The world had gotten squiggly and dark. “John, make sure—oh.” Hazard blinked, trying to clear his vision. “Shit.”
The last thing he heard was Somers’s panicked: “Ree?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
JULY 7
SUNDAY
2:38 PM
SOMERS HAD DECIDED THAT, if he got reincarnated as an engineer, he was going to spend his next lifetime designing a hospital chair that didn’t pinch the spinal column or dig right into the tender spot between his shoulder blades. He shifted on the chair again, adjusting his book on his chest, and wondered about having Cora bring up some pillows. Like, a million of them.
“You can go home,” Hazard said muzzily.
“I’m all right.”
“You should go home. Get a shower. Sleep in our bed.”
“Are you kidding? We’ve spent enough on hospital bills that I should own a private wing of this place. I’m going to get my money’s worth.”
“You’ve barely slept in the last week.”
“I caught a couple of hours when you were in surgery.”
“Liar.”
“And I did take a shower, for your information.”
Hazard, even very doped up, could still deliver a killer stare.
Somers pulled up the collar of his tee shirt and took a deep breath and winced. “Ok, I mean, I soaped up some paper towels and washed under my arms.”
Hazard’s head was lolling on the pillow. His eyes kept drifting toward the TV, where reruns of General Hospital were showing. Once he had started crying. That was during the episode when Lucas had woken up from a coma, and Hazard had tried to explain through his tears why it was so wonderful. And every once in a while, he got this goofy, very un-Emery Hazard grin, and described something obscene he wanted to do to Somers—often right then, and very reluctant to take no for an answer.
“I want you to go home,” Hazard said. “I want you to be happy. Oh my God, John, I want you to be so happy. I want you to be so happy that . . . that . . . that you’re like just beautiful and smiling and like the sun. And your hair. Your new hair is pretty. I liked your old hair, but I want to touch your new hair.”
Somers pressed him back into the bed before he could climb out of it. “For my next birthday, I only want one thing: I would like them to pump you full of whatever the hell you’re on, and then we’re going to watch reality TV all day. The really crazy shows. The ones with toddlers in beauty pageants. That kind of stuff.”
“And eat brownies,” Hazard said, drawing out the word and grinning so sloppily that Somers had to hide his face in his arm, reconsider the whole shower question, and try not to giggle.
After that, Hazard slept for a while. When he woke up, he wanted a ribeye.
“I don’t see why that’s too much fucking trouble,” he snapped when the nurse had left—escaped, was a better way to describe it. “It’s twenty ounces of USDA prime. You can get it at the fucking Publix for the love of fuck, and if they don’t have a fucking skillet to cook it on, what kind of shit-can operation are they running? Research on consuming red meat after injuries—”
“And he’s back,” Somers told his book.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
“What the fuck did you do to your hair? It looks fucking terrible.”
“The girls at the beauty parlor said you’d love it. I did it special for you.”
“Come over here,” Hazard said. His long hair was messily shoved back behind his ears; those scarecrow eyes were on fire.
“I think I’m close enough already,” Somers said, licking his finger to turn another page.
“I want a better look at you.”
“Oh,” Somers said, adding a little catch to his voice. “That’s so sweet. But I’m pretty comfortable.”
“John, come over here.”
Drawing out a note of indecision, Somers shook his head.
“John,” Hazard said.
“This book is really good.”
“Please?”
“Huh.” Somers laid the book on the chair, stood, stretched. He scratched his stomach. He arched his back. He ran fingers through his hair and twisted at the waist until his spine popped.
Hazard was growling.
As Somers settled onto the edge of the bed, he was very careful to hide a grin. His butt had no sooner touched the mattress, though, than Hazard hooked an arm around him and dragged him up next to him.
“Oof,” Somers said, squirming around, pretending to try to sit up and letting Hazard drag him back down. “Watch out, you’re an injured man.”
“I injured my leg,” Hazard said in a low voice, tugging Somers closer. “Not my arm. Well, not this arm, anyway.”
“Not another part either, I notice.”
Wrapping Somers in an embrace, Hazard kissed him once and then, with a suddenness that surprised Somers, buried his face in Somers’s neck. Somers relaxed into the hold until he felt Hazard shake once and then relax too, but the bigger man didn’t release him. After a few more minutes, Somers worked an arm free and ran his fingers through Hazard’s hair.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Somers asked.