by Rob Byrnes
“Yeah. Less itchy, too.”
Jared joined them, conservatively dressed in brown cargo shorts and a pink polo shirt. Between Grant’s firm parental skills and almost a week with the congregation at the Virginia Cathedral of Love, he was starting to fit in.
He spotted Malcolm Fielding across the street watering his lawn and waved. Malcolm returned the wave, then refocused his attention on the grass.
“Cllllloset case,” Jared drawled.
“Who?” Grant looked back across the street. “Fielding?”
Jared nodded. “I can spot one a mile away.”
Grant looked at Malcolm again and shook his head in disagreement. “Nah. Henpecked, maybe, but not a closet case. I figure him for one of those guys that puts up with his wife’s crap at home because he’s having an affair at work.”
Jared licked his lips but his eyes never left Malcolm. “Want me to prove it?”
“No. I want you to behave yourself. And I want you to remember that you’re about to go to ex-gay camp.”
Jared sighed. The nearer the date of the conference, the more he dreaded it. “Do I have to?”
“Yeah,” Grant said. “I thought you were looking forward to a lot of sex there.”
Jared licked his lips again. “Why, when I can get it right in the neighborhood?”
That was when Grant and Chase both decided three was a crowd on the tiny porch.
“Think we can convince ’em to start ex-gay camp this afternoon?” Grant asked when they were back in the kitchen.
“Technically,” Chase said, expanding on a point Grant had no interest in, “it’s not really a camp. More like a heavily supervised week in a hotel.”
“I’ll pay for the extra night. Two, if I have to. Couldn’t cost more than the damn toaster, could it?”
Chase laughed. “Maybe a little bit more. It’s a nice hotel. Expensive. It might even be the one where Eliot Spitzer met that hooker.”
Grant took a glance out the window. “Speaking of hookers…”
“What?”
“It’s our fault. We never should’ve left Jared alone. Now he’s across the street talking to Fielding.”
With that, Chase was at Grant’s side to see for himself. “I’d better break that up.”
Grant stared at him. “Are you jealous?”
“Of course not. It’s just not acceptable behavior.”
“I think you’re jealous.”
Chase pulled himself away. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Okay. Just asking.” Grant took another look out the window. “Now what…? Why are Jared’s shirt and shorts wet? Looks like he must’ve accidentally gotten sprayed by the hose.”
“What?”
“Annnnd…now the shirt comes off!”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Hmm. Maybe Jared was onto something. Fielding ain’t exactly looking away.”
Grant continued to watch the scene unfold. First Chase rushed across the street, then tried to pretend he wasn’t rushing, and then half dragged Jared back home.
“I’m not jealous,” said Chase, when he was back in the kitchen. “But I’ve been watching the clock, and it’s almost time for Jared to get to the cathedral.”
“Mmm-hmm,” said Grant, with a tiny smile on his lips.
$ $ $
A short time later, Jared—now in dry clothes—and Constance waited for Farraday, who was on his way back down the block from where he’d been repotting Ms. Jarvis’s pansies. Grant waited, too, along with Chase, who was still definitely, absolutely, unquestionably not jealous.
They’d decided that Chase would be going to church that day. Not to ensure Jared didn’t fall into the baptismal font and be forced to strip off his wet clothes, but to case the finance office with Constance and figure out if there was a way to get around the cameras.
Because they’d now been in Nash Bog for a few weeks, and that was a few weeks too long.
No sooner did Farraday walk through the front door than Grant handed him the car keys and made him turn right around. Constance and Chase followed, with Jared trailing and tossing a wave to Malcolm Fielding as they approached the car.
In Jared’s wake, the front door remained wide open.
Grant yelled across the lawn. “I’m not paying to air-condition the entire neighborhood, y’know!”
In the living room, Lisa looked up from her book. “We really have to find out what’s in those lawn chemicals.”
$ $ $
“Afternoon, Miss Brown,” said the elderly security guard sitting at his post in the lobby of Cathedral House.
Constance offered him a friendly smile and said, “Good afternoon. Are Dr. Hurley or Mr. Merribaugh in today?”
“Not today. I think I heard they were going to Washington.” The guard took a look at the man accompanying her. “Who’s this?”
“Oh, this is Mr. Hudson. He’s offered to assist me in getting the books in shape.”
The security guard waved them on.
It was hot in the finance office, so Chase opened a window. “Nice view,” he said. “Private.”
“You’re probably gonna want to close that window,” said Constance.
“I just want to get some air circulating. It’s stuffy in here. Why not keep it open?”
“Be quiet and listen. You’ll figure it out soon enough.”
It took a while, but soon he heard music from the seemingly endless rehearsal taking place in the auditorium. Roughly three minutes after that, “The Lonely Goatherd” had wormed its way into his ear.
He closed the window and said, “Let’s get down to business. Where’s the camera?”
“It’s mounted on the wall opposite the closet door.” He picked up some papers from her desk and pretended to look at them while checking the camera out of the corner of his eye. From the way it was angled, he figured it captured most of the office.
“Is there anything we can use to block the camera for few minutes?” he asked. “Something that won’t be obvious?”
Their eyes glanced around the room, until Constance spotted a large foam core panel half-tucked behind a cabinet. She pulled it out and said, “How about this?”
The image on the panel was a rendering of the Great Cross, with a note on the bottom indicating it predated construction. It might have been a cathedral artifact except someone over the years had defaced it, drawing spirals through the vertical section that blossomed into the horizontal section. Chase hated people who defaced property; it was the only type of crime short of physical harm he’d never participate in.
But for now, the defaced drawing would do. He held it up and stood behind it. “Think this will provide enough cover?”
“Maybe,” said Constance. “Of course, people are gonna wonder why you’re standing in the middle of the office holding that dusty old thing.”
“Then you hold it.”
“Uh-uh.” She pulled over a metal chair and motioned for Chase to use it as a prop, but the board slid off. “There’s gotta be something around here…”
“Just hold it. This isn’t gonna take that long.”
But she saw what she needed so didn’t bother answering him. In a corner of the office, next to an unused coat rack, stood a folded easel. Constance retrieved it, opened the legs, and helped Chase guide the foam core board into place.
“I feel like MacGyver,” she said, when the obstruction was between them and the security camera.
Chase took another glance to make sure he wasn’t being watched, then inspected the closet door.
“I don’t think we’ll have a problem getting in the closet. The safe is another thing.” He looked at her. “You didn’t happen to notice what kind it was, did you?”
“Sorry. Safes aren’t my thing.”
Chase shook his head. “I’m gonna assume the safe is nothing special. Still, we’ll need a pro to get into it. And if we can’t do that, we’re going to have to steal it.” He licked his lips. “I’ll bet Grant could get in
with no problem.”
“Our Grant?” She thought about that. “I knew he had his talents, but I didn’t know they included safe-cracking.”
Chase shrugged. “Oh, yeah. He’s great on safes. All kinds of locks. That’s how we met.” She stared at him, not saying anything, and he took that as a sign to continue. “It had to be…well, we’ve been together for seventeen years, so seventeen years ago. I was pissed off at my dead-end job at Groc-O-Rama…”
“The one you still have?”
“Well…yeah. Anyway, I decided to rob the safe. Turns out, Grant was planning to rob the safe the very same night.”
“Hmm…”
“Right? But it worked out, and the rest is history.”
She shook her head. “Burglary…breaking and entering…safe-cracking…That might be one of the most romantic love-at-first-sight stories I’ve ever heard.”
He blushed and looked away. “Yeah.” Then he remembered their job at hand and returned his attention to the locked closet door. “We just have to get Grant into Cathedral House. After that, we’re golden.”
Constance was by nature an optimist, but she was also a realist. “Long as nothing goes wrong.”
Chase shook his head. “I’ve been on capers where things have gone wrong, but this one? You got a job here and they love you. Jared will be the perfect gay bait. Everything on this job is going right.”
Which was the moment a knock on the door threatened to change that.
Without making a sound, Chase grabbed the foam core panel and tucked it back behind the cabinet, while Constance folded the easel and set it aside. Then she smoothed her skirt, put a pleasant smile on her face, and answered the knock.
“Sister Constance!” said Merribaugh, greeting her. “Working on a Saturday?” He turned and saw Chase, and a quizzical expression crossed his face. “And…Mr. Hudson?”
“Charlie offered to help me get organized,” she said. “The books are a mess.” Then she thought to add, “Praise the Lord.”
Merribaugh cringed at that, but accepted the rest of her words at face value. He knew what a mess the books had become since Leonard Platt was discharged. “Mr. Hudson, I didn’t realize you knew finance.”
“A little,” he said. “Just a little. But I wanted to help out the Cathedral, so…”
“Well, thank you! I’ll make sure Dr. Hurley knows what a wonderful volunteer you’ve been.”
Merribaugh fully entered the room, and for the first time they realized he was wheeling a small suitcase.
“The guard downstairs said you were in Washington, DC, today.”
“Not yet.” He parked the suitcase next to her desk. “Dr. Hurley and I are leaving in an hour. But first I wanted to get something out of the…” He didn’t want to say too much in front of Charlie Hudson, so, to Constance, he motioned his head toward the closet door. “Now if you’ll be kind enough to excuse me for a moment, I need a little privacy.”
Chase and Constance walked into the hallway, and Merribaugh closed the door behind them. They heard locks click on the other side of the door, and the sound of the suitcase being unzipped and zipped again. Minutes later, the door reopened and Merribaugh emerged, rolling the suitcase behind him.
“That’s everything,” he said. “Now I’m off to the Beyond Sin conference where, among other things, we’ll be curing Sister Constance’s hairdresser!”
“Praise the Lord,” she said, with no enthusiasm whatsoever, as she and Chase returned to the office.
Chase listened to the wheels of the suitcase roll down the hall and felt a slight flutter in his stomach. When he heard the elevator doors close, he looked out into the hall, then back to Constance.
“Remember how I said everything is going right?”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe everything was going right.”
“You mean that suitcase?”
“That suitcase is either full of clothes for his week at the hotel, or…Nah, never mind. It has to be clothes, right?”
She shook her head. “That suitcase isn’t big enough to hold seven million dollars. At the outside he could maybe get twenty-five, thirty thousand in it. So if it wasn’t clothes, it was just a little walking-around money for him and Hurley to spread around in DC. Not seven million dollars.”
The hesitation in Chase’s voice let on he was troubled. “I suppose…”
“Merribaugh’s a fool,” she said reassuringly, “But even he’s not a big enough fool to be wheeling seven million dollars in cash around the District of Columbia. Plus, that suitcase…no way it holds that much money.”
“Right,” Chase said, more to himself than Constance. “Right.”
$ $ $
“Good news,” Constance announced when they returned home several hours later.
Grant looked up from his newspaper. “Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.” Chase stared. He’d never seen Grant read a newspaper before. “Uh…anyway, it looks like a simple safe-cracking job.”
“And we figured out how to block the camera,” she added.
Grant set the newspaper on the floor. “Nice. But you think we can get a crew in and out without problems?”
“Piece of cake,” said Chase. “The security guards all know Constance. She can tell them she’s called some repairmen for something, the repairmen show up…”
Grant finished his sentence. “And the repairmen walk away with seven million dollars.”
“Exactly.”
“So when do you think we can pull it off?”
Chase and Constance exchanged glances.
“How does tomorrow sound?”
“Pretty close to perfect,” said Grant, and he smiled.
17
After breakfast the next morning, Chase found Jared in his bedroom. Even though he’d been there for nearly an hour, only half the suitcase was full.
“Can’t make up your mind?” asked Chase. “Or are you putting this off as long as possible?”
The younger man held up a skintight see-through shirt—one of his favorites—and inspected it. “Maybe a little of both.” He looked at Chase with pain in his eyes. “Do I really have to go through with this?”
Chase nodded. “That’s pretty much the only reason you’re here. You want the ten grand, right?”
“Oh, yeah.” He started to pack the shirt, but Chase pulled it back out of the suitcase and draped it over a chair.
“I don’t think this will cut it for an ex-gay conference.”
Jared took the shirt from the chair and started to pack it again. “But it’s my favorite. I rock this shirt.”
Chase started to take it back out, Jared grabbed at it, and for a brief moment they were locked in a tug-of-war until, finally, Jared gave in and tossed the shirt angrily to the floor.
“Fine! I’ll dress like a straight guy.”
Chase looked into the suitcase. “Is that your cell phone?”
“Yeah, why?”
“The rules say no phones.”
Lines appeared on Jared’s forehead. If he’d known that, he would have been troubled, because to Jared, only old guys had lines on their foreheads. “But…but…No phones?”
“No phones.” Chase reached down and retrieved it from the bag. “If they find this, they might kick you out.”
“But my music is on it. And what if I want to text someone!”
“No phones.”
Jared’s forehead wrinkled a bit more and he jutted out his lower lip. “This is gonna suck so much! Straight guy clothes and no phone.”
“I like your spirit.” Chase glanced at his watch. “But not so much that I’m going to let you miss the conference. Finish packing and Farraday will give you a ride to the city.”
“You’re not my mother.”
“Do you want me to send Grant up here?”
“Okay, okay, I’ll pack!” Jared began filling the suitcase. It was only when Chase turned to leave the room he added, “I wish you were going with me.”
Chase allowed
himself a slight smile. After all, Grant wasn’t too far off-base about the lightly flirtatious relationship he had with Jared. That nothing would ever come of it was understood; that Chase encouraged it and enjoyed it was his private indulgence.
“I’m sure you’ll be fine on your own,” he said, meeting Jared’s gaze. “And it’ll only be for a few days. You’ll be back here with me—I mean, us—before you know it. And ten thousand dollars richer for the effort.”
“I guess so…” Jared turned to finish packing, and Chase used to opportunity to adjust himself and make an exit.
A short while later, Jared—suitcase in hand, frown on face—appeared in the foyer.
“Ready to go, kid?” asked Farraday.
“Ready.” His voice said it, not his expression.
When they were finally on the road, Farraday turned the radio down. “Don’t seem like you’re looking forward to this.”
Jared stared out the window. “It’ll be all right, I guess. I just wish I wasn’t going alone.”
“You’ll be fine.” Farraday thought about turning the radio back up before deciding against it. “It’ll be a new experience.”
Jared took his time before answering. “I’m sort of nervous about being around all those ex-gays. What if I catch it?”
“Catch what?”
“Some ex-gay thing! I mean, I don’t know how to do anything else!”
Farraday laughed. “You ain’t gonna catch an ex-gay thing. For that matter, probably no one else will, either.” He glanced to his right and saw Jared still staring absently at the countryside. “Listen, if it makes you feel any better about the next few days, I’ve been non-gay my entire life. It ain’t so bad. You can get through this conference.”
Jared didn’t respond—he just kept staring—so Farraday continued. “There’s nothing all that horrible about not being gay, y’know. Well, not usually. ’Course, I don’t really date anymore, but I got around when I was younger. Yeah…” He smiled for a moment, but only a moment, as he remembered a dating chronology that ran straight from “getting around” to “getting married” to…
“Nah, it ain’t so bad. Well, ’cept for when your fuckin’ wife screws you over and leaves you without a dime, and you have to make a living boosting cars and pulling jobs on the side just so’s she can’t get her hands on your wallet…”