by TA Moore
The urge to exorcise the image of Donegan, half-melted into the cheap fabric recliner, hit Boyd. Sometimes it helped to talk, and the overripe horror of the smell and flies and fluids might be drawn out of the event as he tried to pin it down. But with the stink of it still on him, the idea made his gorge rise.
“Ask me over a beer later,” he said as he lowered the bar toward his chest and then back up. The muscles in his arms stretched and ached gently. The smell of death wafted from his pits, and he made a face. “Or a whiskey.”
Boyd had just managed to raise a sweat, the dull ache in his shoulders the usual, satisfying distraction from the static in his head, when Harry stuck his head out of his office and whistled.
“Maccabee,” he said with a jerk of his head. “In here.”
Shit. The distraction made Boyd hesitate, and the momentum of the lift was lost, his arms suddenly weak and stubborn. He gritted his teeth and forced them to straighten. Jessie grabbed the bar and pulled it back to reposition on the rest.
Boyd dropped his arms and left them to hang for a second as the blood hummed in his shoulders. Finally he rolled off the bench and onto his feet.
“Good luck,” Jessie said.
Boyd gave him an unenthusiastic thumbs-up as he padded over to the office. He wondered dourly if Dannie had passed on his bout of career doubt this morning.
“Yeah?” he said as he pushed open the door.
Harry was seated behind his desk, attention on the screen of his computer. He pointed at the chair opposite and then went back to his surprisingly speedy two-fingered hunt and peck over the keyboard. Boyd sighed, plucked his damp T-shirt away from his stomach, and sat down. Habit made him glance over Harry’s head to the Wall of Fame behind him, where dead and injured-out firefighters stared back down at him. His grandfather was there, the dense pattern of his beard and brows enough proof they were related, and his father—although his inclusion was mostly courtesy since he was two days from being let go when he died.
Cutter’s Gap was, Boyd supposed wryly, a town full of ghosts.
“Right.” Harry hit Send and turned his chair with a creak to face Boyd. He leaned his elbows on the table. “You’re not going to like it.”
“Never lead with that,” Boyd said.
A smile tried, and failed, to break through Harry’s scowl.
“I don’t like it either,” Harry said. “But we’re both going to have to suck it up. Apparently concerns have been raised about financial misconduct—”
“What?” Boyd spluttered. “I don’t—”
“And questions have also been raised about whether you’re fit for duty, or your ADHD has impacted your ability to serve,” Harry finished. “Until the investigation is over, Boyd, you’re suspended.”
Earlier doubts or not, that sentence was like a kick to Boyd’s chest. He exhaled raggedly as he leaned back in the chair and couldn’t catch his breath again for a moment.
“Fuck off,” he blurted when he did. “That’s bullshit, and you know it.”
“I do,” Harry said firmly. “No question, Boyd. That doesn’t change procedure. I wish it did. We don’t need to be short-handed this month. Go home.”
“Why?” Boyd asked.
Harry raised his eyebrows. “That’s what suspen—”
“Why am I being reviewed? Why now?” Boyd asked. “By whom?”
Harry glanced at the computer screen. “Apparently what triggered it was a bail bond you signed for recently. Questions were raised about how you could afford it.”
“I put my apartment up as collateral—”
Harry hushed him. “Tell the review panel, not me,” he said. “Call the union rep, go home, book a weekend away or something.”
“I—” Boyd trailed off and scrubbed his hands over his face. He could still smell Donegan. “What the hell, Captain?”
Harry’s face tightened unhappily, and he glanced at the door for a second.
“Look, I asked questions,” he said. “You’re a good firefighter—a damn good one. I told them that. No one argued with me, but we’ve still got to go through the motions. Do you understand?”
It felt as though someone had wrapped Boyd’s brain up in a giant ball of tinfoil and was rolling it around inside his skull. So…. “No. I haven’t done anything.”
Harry looked exasperated as he rubbed his thumb along the bridge of his nose. “Boyd, this isn’t personal. It’s political. You have to understand that sometimes you have to play the game.”
“I get that,” Boyd said. “I just don’t understand how I’ve ended up in the penalty box when I didn’t even know I was in play.”
The chair creaked again as Harry sat back. He looked tired and a little resigned. “You spent your whole life in Cutter’s Gap, Boyd,” he said. “Is this the town you remember from when you were a kid? Do you think we got as many opioid overdoses ten years ago? Twenty? Were there as many shops standing empty? How many kids at your school were hungry or dirty or both?”
Boyd shifted uncomfortably. His memories of the town were tainted by what had happened to Sammy, the shadow of paranoia and suspicion that had kept a close eye on his childhood after that day. But he knew what Harry meant. Cutter’s Gap had been a mining town, then a mill town, then a factory town… all of it gone now. There were a few farms outside of town, short-run contract jobs in the warehouse outside town, or people could drive three hours to the Wal-Mart, but not much else.
He just didn’t see what that had to do with his career.
“People want to change that. They want to bring in new business, convince people to invest in us, maybe even get some tourist money coming in,” Harry said. If he was trying not to sound cynical about that prospect, he failed. “And they don’t want the first thing people think about Cutter’s Gap to be that it’s the place kids disappear.”
“One kid,” Boyd said, as though that mattered. Of course, there were other children who’d been kidnapped or killed over the years, but never so… totally. “And so what? They want to get rid of me because I was Sammy’s friend? What are they going to do next, fire Mac because he was involved in the investigation?”
It was a ridiculous suggestion, but then Harry pursed his lips, and Boyd realized he was right. Almost, at least.
“Mac’s been under pressure for a while,” Harry said. “He just didn’t think it was anything you—or Shay and Donna—needed to worry about. They aren’t trying to rewrite the past, Boyd. They just want it to stay buried. No more investigations, no more bloggers, no more news crews, and no more chasing down leads and drawing attention.”
Boyd exhaled as he sank back in the chair. Then he fidgeted to his feet, a jolt of adrenaline with nowhere to actually go itchy in his joints. He paced back and forth and then stopped abruptly behind the chair and gripped the back of it.
“I won’t forget about Sammy,” he said. “Mrs. Calloway won’t. For fucks sake, Harry, everyone in town grew up with early curfews and escorts home. No one is going to forget about it.”
“That’s not who they care about,” Harry said. He rubbed his hand over his cropped silver hair and sighed. “Me? I’m always going to remember that year. I’m never going to forget his face or how scared I was for my kids. But the reporters, the true crime writers, the vultures don’t care about me or anyone else in town. They want to see the grieving best friend, the broken older brother, the mother who still believes in miracles.”
Boyd leaned his weight on the chair until it creaked and tried to control the tension that burned in his muscles. “Imagine it as blue smoke,” he’d been told as a kid. “Breathe it out and shake it off.” It didn’t work. He dragged himself upright with a jerky movement that shoved the chair into the desk with a crack.
“Fuck it,” he said. “And fuck you. I don’t deserve this.”
Harry narrowed his eyes momentarily but let the swear word slide. He sat back and rubbed his hand over his face.
“If we all got what we deserved,” he said wearily, “Sammy C
alloway would have made it home that day, and none of this would matter. Go home, Maccabee, and… maybe think about what you want. This isn’t going to stick this time, but if enough complaints are made, it won’t matter if there’s truth to them. I know Sammy was your friend, but do you really think he’d want you to flush your life away?”
It wasn’t funny, but it made Boyd laugh anyhow.
“Yeah, well, maybe I’ll ask him,” he said as he stalked toward the door. “Next time I see him.”
That thought lasted until Boyd had grabbed his bag and stalked out onto the street. Then last night—this morning’s—hard words caught up with him. It wasn’t that he’d hung on to the fight, but he didn’t know who he wanted to be there when he knocked on the door. That didn’t seem fair to either of them.
Maybe he’d find the answer in the bottom of a bottle. Or two. Why not? It wasn’t as though he had work in the morning.
THREE WHISKEYS, and Boyd had hit that dangerous point of “drunk enough to come up with bad ideas and sober enough to carry them out.” Usually that meant a hookup with someone whose name he didn’t know and wasn’t going to find out.
But Boyd knew exactly where to find the only bad idea he wanted to fuck, and it wasn’t in a bar close enough to his apartment that he could stagger home later. No one in the Black Bear bar was tall enough, blond enough, or going to screw Boyd’s life up enough to play unsatisfactory stand-in for Morgan.
“Another?” the bartender asked as he cocked a pierced eyebrow at Boyd’s nearly empty glass.
Boyd tossed back the dregs, the burn of it sharp as it went down, and shook his head. “Beer,” he said, as though that would somehow sober him up. While the man stuck a glass under the tap to pull a pint, Boyd leaned his elbows on the bar. “You ever just… been involved with someone, and you just don’t know who they are? Or who that makes you?”
The bartender looked up at him for a second. “Ain’t we all?”
“What did you do?”
“Lost my job, lost my wife, ended up here.”
Close enough. “What do you wish you’d done?”
There was a pause that could have ended with the beer tipped over Boyd. Instead the bartender just gave a humorless chuckle and slid the glass over the bar.
“Got out of bed sometimes, talked to her friends, listened to her ex instead of punching him in the face.” He thought about that for a second, and his mouth twisted in a reluctant smirk. “Before I punched him, at least. He was still an asshole.”
Someone at the other end of the bar waved a twenty in the air. The bartender rolled his eyes and sauntered down that way, no hustle in his step. Boyd took a sip of beer and wished he could solve his problem that easily.
If he knew who Morgan’s old friends were, then he wouldn’t need to talk to them. He’d know who Morgan was—wasn’t—and that would… solve maybe 60 percent of his problems. Maybe. Boyd would still be suspended and halfway to in love with an ex-con who didn’t want to hang around.
Boyd caught the tail end of that thought and nearly choked on his beer. He coughed, spluttered, and wiped his mouth on the back of his arm. It felt like fizz and horror in his stomach, like falling in love involved an actual drop to a messy end.
For some reason, though, what it didn’t feel like was a surprise.
Boyd took a long, cold draft of beer and then set the pint down. He slid off the stool and felt the whiskey hit wherever it was in his brain that his equilibrium lived—not enough to make him stagger, but the floor pitched under him.
Yeah, that was where he needed to cut himself off.
He tossed a ten on the bar to cover his beer and, once the floor settled, headed for the door. It was late enough that the air had cooled, and there was a bite to it that gnawed at his liquor buzz. Give it enough time, and he’d sober up, enough, at least, to think better of what he was about to do.
Better get on with it, then.
Boyd pulled his phone out of his pocket as he cut across the narrow, angled lot and headed in the general direction of his apartment. He didn’t have the number in his contacts, but he didn’t need to. Over the years he’d dialed it enough that it was muscle memory for his thumb to tap it out.
“I need to speak to Ben Sullivan,” he said. “It’s important.”
“… Literary Agency,” the man on the other end finished his rote greeting out of habit, then regrouped. “Can I ask who’s calling? I’ll see if he’s available.”
“Boyd Maccabee.”
He didn’t need to say anything else. There was an intake of breath and then a quick request to stay on hold before the line switched to Muzak. Ben Sullivan’s whole career as a journalist was built on the Calloway case, and two of his true crime books were based on what he believed was the truth. It was never a lie—Boyd would give him that—but that never made it any easier to read his version of your life on paper.
Shay hated him, but Boyd didn’t know anyone better at picking the scraps of someone’s life out of the gutter.
The Muzak cut off midnote, and the receptionist asked him to hang up, with a promise that Ben would call him back soon.
“Soon” was under a minute.
“Boyd?” Sullivan said. He’d lost most of his accent, buffed it down to something Southern enough to be interesting when he got on the news but not enough to brand him. “I heard that there was new evidence in Sammy’s case. Is it true?”
“I need you to do me a favor,” Boyd said. He needed to get this over with before he thought about what a shit thing it was. “Someone called Morgan Graves. I need to know everything you can find out about him.”
He could practically hear the gears grind and roll in Ben’s head as he scrawled that down. “Is he a suspect? Another victim?”
“I don’t know,” Boyd drawled, or maybe slurred. “I think I love him.”
It wasn’t as though Sullivan didn’t know everything else about him. The last book had been written just after he broke up with his ex, and that had made it in.
“That’s not a reason to invade his privacy, Boyd.”
“Suddenly you care about privacy? Didn’t you get your hands on Mac’s disciplinary file?”
“That was relevant.”
“So’s this. He could be Sammy.”
Sullivan exhaled a hard “huh” of breath that sounded as though something had hit him in the stomach. After a moment he roughly cleared his throat.
“I’d already booked my flight back,” he said. “I’ll move it forward. Send me everything you know about Morgan Graves, anything I can use as a starting point to find out who he really is. Boyd… do you think he—?”
Boyd hung up him. He’d already sobered up enough for regrets.
Chapter Twelve
THE BLUE, frothy concoction in the tall ribbed glass was a bubblegum milkshake, and Morgan had no idea why the fuck he ordered it. It looked like a teenage girl’s idea of what was cool and—he took a drink and grimaced—tasted like diabetes. The woman behind the counter, all boobs and blond hair, had given him a startled look when he asked for it. She probably didn’t get many people over thirteen who wanted one.
Morgan slouched down in the booth, his booted foot propped against the seat opposite, and idly stirred the drink with a straw.
It had been a whim, the same as asking for Shay’s car yesterday instead of fifty grand in cash for… whatever crime it was to pretend to be a dead kid to frame someone for your murder. Morgan had a feeling he got a better deal on the milkshake.
He was still a custom muscle car better off than he was that morning, he reminded himself. That would get him a new start, even if it wouldn’t quite cover a new life.
The saccharine idea of a new life with Boyd fluttered through his head—tangled sheets and the taste of Boyd’s skin on his tongue, clasped hands in public, and kisses on street corners that looked more like something out of a Lifetime-movie vacation village than the faded ex-mining town that was Cutter’s Gap.
Morgan snorted and pushe
d the milkshake away as though that sugary fantasy was its fault. What did he think was going to happen? Boyd would wait for him to get out of jail, Morgan wouldn’t fuck it up somehow like he always did, and they’d live happily ever after?
No. People like Morgan didn’t get dreams. They faced the truth. He’d fucked Boyd, and now he was going to fuck him over. Twice. Even Boyd, laid-back as he was, wouldn’t get past that. If he could, Morgan would just know he was one of those marks you could bleed dry over the years.
He let himself imagine that for a second—Boyd at thirty-five in a suit and expensive watch. He’d have a touch of gray at his temples, and he’d still open his wallet and go down on his knees for Morgan—
The rattle of the bell over the door interrupted Morgan’s fantasy before it went too far. He cleared his throat and sat up to check who’d come in. He didn’t need to bother.
“Captain Macintosh,” the server—Bettie, Bertie?—singsonged happily. “Your usual?”
“Yeah, coffee,” Mac said. “Get me a burger too? Make it—”
“Rare,” Bertie or Bettie said. “I remember.”
Morgan glanced over with a flicker of amusement and watched as Bertie leaned over the counter, boobs squeezed together and up against the V of her uniform. She smiled flirtatiously at Mac as he chuckled and passed a twenty over the counter.
“You know, you don’t need to pay,” she said as she plucked the cash from his fingers. “You could just take me out one night instead. Get me a couple of beers at the Bull Ring, and we could call it even.”
“Thanks for the offer, Bertie,” Mac said. “But, ah, that wouldn’t exactly look aboveboard, would it?”
She waggled her eyebrows at him. “So you’d plan to go below deck?” she said archly and then laughed at herself. “One day, Joe, you’ll see what you’re missing. Coffee and a burger, on the captain’s wallet.”