Blue hoped it was something big. She wanted to go back to her room early to clean up. Then she was going to buy Ivan a pizza.
She wanted to see him spread his tailfeathers.
All.
Over.
Her.
* * * B l a c k h a w k - W h i t e f o x * * *
Harvard Quad
Monday Noon
It took a while to find him. First, they checked at the fraternity. Then they headed to the off-campus housing in his file. Hell! Ethan pulled every string he could tug, and the man was nowhere to be found.
Then, as they were walking across the quad, there he was. Well, this was going to work out fine.
“There’s your hooker hirer,” Callen stated.
“Let me handle this. You two scream Fed.”
“And you don’t?” Ethan asked. “You were on three magazine covers last month. Better Historic Homes, and two tabloids. The second he sees you…”
“We all know tabloids don’t count. No one reads those rags. Well, certainly no one who goes to Harvard.”
The men let her have at it.
On the last case, she punched Ethan in the balls, and nearly broke Callen’s nose trying to prove she could manage her own work life.
So, they were going to let her do just that. If she wanted to approach, they’d let her drive the bus.
As Elizabeth walked through the quad, she was wearing her sunglasses and tracking him. He was sitting on a wall, laughing with a bunch of other students.
It was boys being boys.
What surprised her was they didn’t look like Harvard material. The one had tattooed Free Willy on his neck.
God!
She could only imagine what the hell he had named Willy. So, she smiled and approached, hoping not to get his attention until she was closer.
Elizabeth knew the second he saw her.
His eyes focused, his smile disappeared, and she saw the telltale sign.
“We have a runner!” she shouted, just as he leapt off the edge of the wall and took off down the hill.
Behind him, Elizabeth followed. As he dodged around students, she saw a way to take him out before he disappeared into the busy crowd.
“FBI! STOP!”
He went left.
She went high.
Elizabeth leapt off the ledge, taking the man into a fountain in the middle of the square.
Everyone stopped and stared.
When she pulled her cuffs, she rolled him to his back. She almost wanted to keep his head underwater, but that would be wrong of her.
So, she cuffed and lifted him.
“When the FBI says STOP, you should do it! You made me get my favorite boots wet. That makes me want to book you on so many freaking charges.”
Callen and Ethan ran up to them.
They found their wife kneeling in a fountain.
Neither man laughed, but God! They really wanted to do just that. She was soaked, and she was sitting on some college kid. He was cuffed, and the two of them weren’t going anywhere.
“Joseph Gates?” she asked, smacking him in the middle of the head with her wet badge.
“Yes! I’m sorry, officer. It’s only one blunt!”
She stared at him.
“You ran, made me chase, and for a freaking joint?” she asked. “I sacrificed my favorite boots, comfortable jeans, and waterlogged gun for a rolled up blunt?”
Ethan laughed and then covered it with a cough.
“Yes, I guess?” he asked.
She stood and pulled her gun. He began crying and cowering as if she was going to put a whole clip in his stuffy, Harvard, preppy ass.
“I’m not going to shoot you, idiot. I’m going to remove my soggy magazine so my husband can dry my damn gun off!”
Callen took the gun and the pocket square out of his brother’s suit jacket.
Ethan was amused as hell.
“We need to have a talk, son.”
He still looked afraid.
“Relax. I’m not busting you for weed. I don’t care if you smoke forty pounds of it every night. I’m not DEA. I’m FBI. I’m with the Violent Crimes Unit!”
He stared at her.
“So not the pot?”
She smacked him in the head with her badge again. “I ask the questions here. Got it?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Callen found it funny that his wife had tackled the giant of a man, and all because of the smoke he had tucked behind his ear.
Mental note.
His kids were NOT coming to Harvard.
Elizabeth started the interview, but she didn’t let him leave the fountain.
“Why were you hiring a call girl?”
“Street cred. She was hot, and every guy likes one sure fire lay a week.”
She looked at her husbands.
“Is that true?”
“We get it daily. Marriage has its perks,” Ethan stated. “Why pay when you can buy a girl a ring and get lucky all the time?”
She rolled her eyes.
“You need to focus on school. Not getting laid. That got you chased through a quad and tackled—by a middle-aged woman. You should be ashamed of yourself, doughboy. More gym, less munchies post joint smoking.”
“The team will never let me live this down.”
He jerked his head toward them.
There stood football players.
They were watching him curiously, but mostly watching Elizabeth in her wet blazer and t-shirt.
Callen growled and they scrambled.
“Good. Back to the questions. Where did you pick up Lucy O’Donnell?” she asked.
“She picked me up in a bar. We went out back, she asked for cash, gave me head, and it became a weekly thing.”
Then it hit him.
“Wait! She was the one who was killed?”
“I said the Violent Crimes Unit. Why do you think she was killed?” Elizabeth asked.
“I saw you on that magazine in the checkout line. You were having wild orgies in the office. You do that homicide thing.”
She pointed at Ethan the second he opened his mouth. She already knew what was coming.
“DON’T or you’re joining me in the water.”
“Magazines,” he said, laughing. “No one reads them, especially blunt smoking college kids at Harvard.”
Okay, so she’d been wrong on that one.
“Again, yes, Lucy is dead.”
“WOAH! I saw her Thursday at six. We hooked up in my apartment, she left by seven, and two hundred bucks richer. I got the full works. It was my birthday.”
“Oh, well, happy birthday,” she said.
He grinned.
Elizabeth dunked him backward into the water like she was christening him.
“One, two, three, four…”
“Paperwork,” Ethan warned.
She pulled him up, and he sputtered.
“Don’t be an idiot. I was being sarcastic. I don’t give a shit that it was your birthday or that she gave you ‘the works’. Besides, real men don’t buy women.”
“I have a penis so…”
She dunked him again.
When she pulled him up, she pointed at her husbands. “REAL men don’t buy women.”
“Real men don’t share,” he said, referring to their relationship.
“Real men do share when their woman likes to have sex twice a day, and they are halfway to fifty. We don’t pay for it. You do. Zip it, so,” Ethan stated.
That shut him up.
“Was anyone bothering her, but you?” Elizabeth asked as Callen handed back her gun. She holstered it, and focused on the idiot.
“Not that I knew. All I know is Lucy got me. We’d smoke a joint, get it on, and she’d head out. I don’t want to be tied down. I have so much to offer the world.”
Elizabeth rolled her eyes. “Yeah, syphilis is cool and the gift that keeps on giving. You’re sleeping with a hooker! And for this your parents pay sixty grand a year?”
&
nbsp; “Don’t be a hater.”
She dunked his head under water.
“One, two, three, four…”
“Baby…”
She pulled him up.
“Lose the attitude. If I tell the dean that you are smoking a joint, what do you think they’ll do? I know. Piss test you, there goes college, and football.”
“Okay! I’ll answer!”
“Spill all you know. It shouldn’t take long.”
“She mentioned to me that there was a guy hitting on her at the bar. I thought it was to make me jealous, but she was just pussy. I blew it off. There are girls you bang, and there are girls you marry. Lucy was not the latter, but she was certainly the first part of that.”
She didn’t want to even touch this asshole. He was slimy and a douchebag—and he was banging a hooker weekly.
Ick.
Elizabeth thought about the text that Blue had sent her. She also thought about the bar that Tajel went to when she met up with her dean.
This was getting interesting.
“Was it ‘McCory’s’?” she asked.
“Yeah! We always go there. They have kicking bands, and you can smoke in the back. They don’t push the whole ‘no lighting up’ thing.”
“Cigarettes. You can’t light up pot anywhere since it’s illegal in this state.”
“Whatever.”
She let it go and instead focused on the details. They had to interview a dean and head to a bar. That looked like it was going to be one hell of a day.
She reluctantly removed the handcuffs.
“Hand over the joint.”
He gave it to her but reluctantly. “That was my after-school snack.”
She held him under the water. When he came up, she stared at him.
“Crack is whack. Learn it.”
He stared at her in confusion as she uncuffed him.
“It’s pot. What are you talking about?”
Elizabeth tucked her cuffs into her back pocket and shook her head.
“Unfreakingbelievable. This is the generation that’s going to replace us when we retire. I have zero hope for our world or the FBI. We had better train our kids right so someone can take the helm.”
They didn’t argue with that at all.
As they walked away, she looked at her husbands.
“What?” they both said at once.
“I do feel old.”
They laughed.
That happened.
“But don’t you feel smarter in the knowledge that you have job security since that generation is clueless?” Ethan asked.
Yes, yes, she did.
But it didn’t make her sleep better at night.
How could it?
They were handing the asylum over to the nuts.
They were going to run the world.
* * * B l a c k h a w k - W h i t e f o x * * *
Morgue
He was there alone with Chrissy and a few of the techs. Still, Chris’s world was still reeling from what had happened to him.
While Christina kept asking if he was okay and he knew Elizabeth was willing to hurt the woman, he needed calmer heads to prevail.
He couldn’t believe he was going to do this.
Chris was going to call Tony.
Pulling out his phone, he made a call. On the second ring, Tony answered.
“Hey! I was just thinking about you,” Tony said.
“Yeah, how’s Jax?” he asked, trying to find some normalcy in the tumultuous storm that was brewing in him.
“Well, they thought the cord was around the baby’s neck.”
“Is it?” he asked, focusing on his other best friend and his personal issues.
“No, she moved and untangled herself. This fatherhood shit is a nightmare. I may not make it. I feel stress related heart issues coming.”
Chris laughed. “You’ll be okay.”
“How do men do this? This is why anthropologically the Neanderthal populated many women and never settled down.”
“It’s hard, but you’ll be okay. I feel the pressure too. Bethe had a fever. It turns out it was teething at her age. Who knew? I’m a doctor, but I didn’t realize it could happen. I must have missed that part in med school or my pediatrics rotation.”
“Great. They teethe for that long? I’m screwed.”
Chris actually laughed. “You’re a bone doc. You should know all of that.”
“When it comes to babies, I lose my ability to think. I’m afraid I’ll screw up this baby.”
“You won’t.”
“Thanks. I needed to hear that. That’s why I wanted to call you. I know you’d set me straight.”
“Well, that’s why I wanted to call you,” he said, sitting in the doctor’s lounge off the morgue. “Something happened, and I don’t know how to deal with it.”
“You had that sex dream about Elizabeth again, didn’t you?” he asked.
“WHAT? I don’t have a sex dream about her! I had sex with her.”
“Jesus, when?”
“Tony! In our past! You’re insane.”
The man began laughing. He could hear the tension in his buddy’s voice, and he was trying to alleviate whatever was happening.
“Then what’s going on?”
“I had sex, but there’s a catch.”
Tony got quiet.
“Come on! Was it with the boss lady? I’ll keep your secret. I didn’t tell anyone for years you’d hit that.”
“If she hears you say, ‘hit that’ she’s going to hit you—and hard.”
“Yeah, I know. I like when she points at me. It makes me laugh.”
“I’m serious. I had sex, and there’s an issue.”
“What?”
He told him about the drugs and how he was violated by some crazed woman.
“Jesus Christ! Are you okay?” he asked, the humor gone from his voice. “Do you need me to come there?”
“Physically, I’m okay, but emotionally…I’ve had better days.”
“I’m sorry, Chris.”
“Yeah, me too. It was horrible. She drugged me and I couldn’t get off.”
“WHAT? Wait! Back that up. You couldn’t get off? Is that even possible? The whole idea is that Viagra makes sure that happens…”
“There was some pot too. She put it in the food. It was a whole shitty event.”
“Man, I’m sorry. Did she kill her?”
He laughed.
“If by ‘SHE’ you mean Elizabeth, she tried. Ethan stopped her.”
“Are you going to file charges? That’s assault, Chris. Men can be raped too.”
“No. I don’t want to talk about it with a jury, some lawyers, or the police.”
He got that.
Men also came forward even less than women who were sexually assaulted because of the humiliation.
“I’m just worried about one part.”
“Only one?” Tony asked.
“Yeah, why couldn’t I get off? I tried. God! I really tried. It wasn’t working.”
“Was she hot?” he asked.
“Not Elizabeth sexy, but she wasn’t hideous. I was up, but I couldn’t take the fall.”
“Well, getting up was likely the Viagra in your drink. The first time I did pot in college, and I’ll kill you if you repeat this—but I was a sex machine. I needed a lot of sex the entire time I was high.”
“You lead such an interesting life. Here, I had a wild time in college if I had yogurt for breakfast instead of cereal.”
He laughed.
“What do I do, Tony? What if I’m broken?”
There.
He said it.
“Did you really want to even have sex again? Other than this conversation, you never mention it.”
He wasn’t sure.
“From what you described, maybe you couldn’t get off because you really didn’t want to. You said she wasn’t your type.”
“Yeah, rapists who drug aren’t my big turn on.”
He lau
ghed.
“I think you’re over thinking this. It sounds like you want to prove to yourself that you’re still a man. Sex does not make the man. I should know. I made a baby and the wife has cut me off since she pukes every time I take my dick out.”
Chris laughed. “The motion?”
“Yeah, she said it’s like riding on the ocean. Apparently, that’s bad. The motion of the ocean is a myth.”
He snickered.
“Well, here’s the thing, Chris. If you’re not ready, skip the sex. You don’t have to do it just to do it. What happened to you sucked, but you can go back to the dating world when YOU are ready. Not when you think you should be.”
“What if I never want to go back?”
“That’s your choice.”
“What if I found the only people I…”
He stopped.
“What?” Tony asked. “You can tell me.”
“What if my soulmate is gone?”
Tony got it.
For the longest time, he thought he was destined to be alone.
“Cyra?”
He hesitated.
“Elizabeth?”
“Yes.”
“That boat sailed. Are you saying you want to get back on it?” Tony asked.
“No, I don’t want back on it. I’m saying that I know that she was the one. My insecurities drove her away, and it worked out for her.”
“But not for you.”
No, and that was his proof.
“Cyra and I were in trouble from the start. I just refused to see it. It’s taken a lot of therapy to realize I was searching for something I already had and destroyed.”
Tony knew he and Cyra were not in sync. He could hear the fights when he’d show up. Cyra wanted all of Chris’s time, and she was willing to hurt him to get it.
“If you think that Elizabeth was your only soulmate, or that it’s never happening again, you have one thing to do.”
“What?”
“Seriously, put your dick away.”
Yeah, he should.
He just wasn’t into it.
“Stop having sex until it’s right. You’ll figure it out. Ask the universe for a sign, and go from there. If it’s never again, then it’s never again. That’s your choice, Chris. If you really aren’t into it, why punish yourself?”
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