by Gregory Ashe
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing.”
“Yes, it does. It means something.”
“Baby, I’m just saying you get off when I let you run the show. That’s not a bad thing.”
“Maybe I don’t want to run the show. Maybe I want you to tease the hell out of me, grab me, drag me around, have your way with me. Maybe I want that.”
North’s face was flat and expressionless for a moment. “Why is this turning into a fight?”
“It’s not a fight.”
“You’re yelling.”
“I’m not yelling. And I’m not . . . I don’t have to be in charge every time. I don’t have to, I don’t know, drive. Whatever the fuck that means.”
“Shaw, I don’t care if you—”
“Well, I don’t have to. Ok?”
Downstairs, the Löwchen began to bark again, and all of a sudden Shaw started to cry. He rolled against North, burying his face in North’s shoulder. North ran fingers through Shaw’s hair, working the bun loose and finger-combing the long strands until they drifted across Shaw’s shoulder blades.
“Why am I so screwed up?” Shaw whispered into North’s shoulder.
North just ran his fingers through Shaw’s hair.
“I’m sorry,” Shaw said, his face still buried in North’s skin, still tasting sweat and Irish Spring soap.
“I don’t want you to be sorry, sweetheart.”
“I’m screwed up. I’m really, really screwed up.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I’m . . . I’m fucked up, North. I just wish it could be easy again. The way it was with—” Shaw cut off before he could name Matty, but he couldn’t keep the ghost from sliding between them.
They were silent; outside, a garbage truck rolled past, clattering across the broken asphalt.
North rolled on top of Shaw, and one of his strong hands caught Shaw’s jaw and turned him so they were face to face, foreheads touching.
“I can’t breathe,” Shaw said.
“Do you feel better now that you said that?”
“Get off. I’m going to suffocate.”
“Yelling about it. Swearing about it. Saying ‘fucked up’ instead of ‘screwed up.’ Do you feel better now?”
Shaw drove the heel of his hand into North’s chest. “Come on, you weigh too much.”
“Tell me why you’re fucked up.”
“I think you broke a rib. I think a broken rib went right through my lung.”
“You’re doing a remarkable amount of talking for a man with a punctured lung. Tell me why you’re so fucked up.”
“You know why.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“Get off, North. I’m not joking around anymore.”
North just squirmed a little closer, his forehead still pressing against Shaw’s, his breath hot on Shaw’s face. “You know what I think?”
“I think you need to brush your teeth.”
“You know what I think?”
“I think you’re—you’re being a bully.”
“You know what I think?”
Shaw’s eyes were hot and stinging again, and he tried to turn away, but North still held his chin, still pressed his forehead to Shaw’s.
“I think you’ve been through some bad shit, baby. And you just need some time to feel safe with me.”
“That’s stupid, North.” Shaw wanted to wipe his eyes. “Please get off me, ok? Please? Of course I trust you, just please get off me.”
“You trust me up here,” North said, butting gently against Shaw with his forehead. “But you don’t feel safe with me. Not all the way. And you know what? That’s ok. I’m here for the long haul. I’m here for as long as you’ll have me. Whatever you’ll give me, whatever you can give me, I’ll take it until you know you’re safe with me.”
Shaw thought again about what it meant to be vulnerable: the Slasher throttling him in the dark, Carl dead in an alley, Matty digging the knife into Shaw’s chest.
“I love you,” Shaw whispered, blinking tears from his eyes.
“I love you too,” North said.
“Why isn’t that enough?”
For a long moment, North was still, his hot breath licking Shaw’s cheeks. Then he whispered, “It will be, baby.”
Then Pari started to yell. This time, she was shouting something about the Danish blue cheese, and the puppy was barking again. North grinned. In spite of his best efforts, Shaw started to laugh.
“You need to take him to a shelter,” North said, his fingers still delicately working along the length of Shaw’s hair as he rolled to lay next to him. “Before he gets too big and nobody wants to adopt him.”
Shaw sat upright. “I can’t do that. There’s no way I can do that.”
“Shaw.”
“Do you know what they do to those poor animals?”
“They put them up for adoption.”
“Yeah, North. And then they kill them if nobody adopts them.”
“Shaw, he’s a puppy.”
“Exactly. I am not going to murder a puppy.”
“I never said you had to murder him. I’m saying people want puppies; he’s an expensive breed. That means somebody’s going to grab him as soon as he goes up for adoption.”
“You don’t know that. They might put him down after a day. After two days. What if they put him down after two days?”
From downstairs came an enormous crash, and then Pari cried, “Not the Emmenthaler!”
North’s eyes narrowed. “I guess I wouldn’t blame them.”
“Shaw,” Pari screamed up the stairs. “Shaw, I don’t care if North is making you count out your spanking—”
“There’s an idea,” North said.
Shaw felt his face heat.
“Really?” North said, watching Shaw’s reaction. “Interesting.”
“—you better get your cherry-red ass down here and kill this dog, or else I’m going to do it for you.”
“I guess I should put on pants,” Shaw said.
North raised his hand and offered, “Unless you’d like me to get that ass cherry-red.” He made an innocent face, one eyebrow raised. “We’d hate to disappoint her.”
“Not—if you—” Shaw scrambled toward the dresser, keeping his ass safely turned away from North. “I have to sit down.”
North made a noncommittal sound.
Damn Pari, Shaw thought. He was grabbing a pair of ornately-stitched jeans when his phone buzzed. North dug it out of the pile of discarded clothing, looked at the screen, and said, “Unknown number.”
Shaw shrugged and held out a hand; North tossed it to him. Shaw answered the call, and for a moment, the only sound on the other end was rough breathing.
“Hello?” Shaw said. “Hello?”
“Jadon.” The voice was familiar, although Shaw couldn’t place it. The words were thick with emotion. “It’s . . . something happened to Jadon.”
“What? Who is this?”
“Bryce Barr.” Jadon’s partner at the Metropolitan PD.
“Barr?” For a moment, Shaw felt like he was in a dream; it seemed unreal that Jadon could invade his bedroom this way, first in conversation, and now in a phone call. Then it felt less like a dream and more like a joke. “What are you—”
“He’s been attacked. Jadon’s in the hospital.”
Chapter 4
NORTH DROVE THEM in the 1968 Pontiac GTO convertible he’d bought in August. Original color, Springmist Green. He’d flown out to Venice Beach, checked out the car, and bought it that day. On a loan, of course. But the good news was that he could afford the payments, and he could afford his apartment, and he could afford, every once in a while, to take Shaw out to dinner. It had taken two days to drive back to St. Louis: two days of sun and wind. The alkali deserts studded with cacti, and then the Rockies, and then the rolling green and gold of the Midwest at the end of summer. Everything was checke
red into fields of wheat and alfalfa—farther east, corn—and the occasional wild prairie of tall grasses ruffled by an invisible hand.
Now, driving in the dying sunlight of the September evening, the humid air whipping around them, North wished he could fly out to Venice Beach again. This time he’d go with Shaw, and the two of them could drive back slowly, take more than two days. They could see the Grand Canyon; North had never seen the Grand Canyon. They could stop at some stupid shit like the world’s tallest rocking chair or the gopher that predicted an earthquake or the second-best collection of sewing needles in the continental United States. They could stop whenever they wanted, sleep whenever they wanted, touch whenever they wanted. Be away from here, from this place, from the nightmare poisoning Shaw, a slow, toxic seepage that North couldn’t block or stop or treat. He could just watch—now that Jadon had pointed it out, the little shit—as Shaw got thinner, his features more drawn, the color in his hazel eyes static and glassy. Like tonight.
In the passenger seat, Shaw tapped a staccato rhythm on the dash. He wasn’t shaking. He wasn’t falling to pieces. He wasn’t crying, even. And at the surface level, North wasn’t really surprised by any of that; Jadon and Shaw had dated for a few months, that was all. And while it was obvious that Jadon still had feelings for Shaw, North was secure enough to know that Shaw didn’t feel the same way about Jadon. Shaw cared about the detective, sure—but fuck, Shaw cared about everyone. Shaw cared about the frogs in River Des Peres. Shaw cared about mosquito populations. Shaw cared about that yippy little Löwchen, and so Shaw could care about Jadon, worry about him, without being in love with him.
North signaled, guiding the GTO toward the Kingshighway exit on Highway 40, and tried to ignore the unsettled part of his brain that didn’t buy any of the shit he’d been telling himself. That other part of his brain, the part he normally trusted to accumulate facts and observations and details that might make or break a case, that other part of his brain just kept saying, Watch out, watch out, the mental equivalent of one of those big yellow signs like Falling Rocks or Sharp Turn Ahead. Watch out. Watch out. Watch out. Watch out, because Shaw wouldn’t look at you when you tried to make love. Watch out because he was crying when you wanted to fuck him.
Wordlessly, Shaw reached over and took North’s hand—the one that had struck the steering wheel.
“He’s alive,” North said as the convertible slowed on the exit ramp, and the rush of air turned into the soupy, wet stillness of the lingering Midwestern summer.
“I know.”
“They’re going to do everything they can for him.”
“I know.”
“He’s going to be fine, Shaw.”
Shaw didn’t say anything, but his thoughts screamed across his face like a lightning storm.
Barnes-Jewish sprawled across several blocks of the Central West End, a collection of glass and concrete towers connected by bridges floating against the purple haze of night. The buildings were studded with yellow where windows broke the darkness. Inside, banks of steady fluorescents made the hallways as bright as day, casting pools of light that gave the linoleum depth, as though North and Shaw were skimming the surface of a lake and something terrible and bright burned under the surface. Everything smelled too clean; North rubbed his nose and searched his pockets for a stick of gum, but he came up empty.
Detective Bryce Barr of the Metropolitan Police met them on the eighteenth floor, pacing near the elevators, his hands clasped around his mouth like he was trying to light a cigarette in a high wind. Barr was Jadon’s partner; older, probably not far from retirement. His bushy, dark hair and brows and his bushy little sliver of a goatee all were showing signs of gray. Tonight, the lines in his face were canyons, and he could have passed for sixty. Maybe seventy, North corrected.
“All right,” Barr said, dropping his hands long enough to speak and then cupping them again, as though that invisible cigarette might snuff out. He seemed to be speaking to himself, the rest of his words muffled by his hands as he said, “All right, all right.”
“What happened?” North said.
Shaw didn’t wait for an answer; he tried to shoot past both men, heading blindly down the hallway, but North hooked his arm and drew him back.
“I want to see him,” Shaw said.
“I know,” North said. “Hold on.”
Barr dropped his hands and shook his head. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“What the hell does that mean?” North said. “You called.”
Staring at them for a long moment, Barr shook his head. “Aww, fuck.”
“What?”
North saw realization dawn in Shaw’s eyes. “You thought you were calling Ricky.”
“Who’s Ricky?” North said.
“Ricky is Jadon’s boyfriend.” Shaw’s whole face was twisted into something that might have been a smile, but it was awful, not really a smile at all. “He had it programmed in his phone. Boyfriend, or something like that.”
Barr nodded. “Boo. He had an entry for ‘Boo.’ That’s what I dialed.”
“You thought you were calling Ricky but—” A giggle broke through, and North thought Shaw might be on the verge of cracking and going straight into an epic cry. “But he didn’t change the number. You called me.”
“What a fucking shit show,” Barr said, rubbing his eyes. “You might as well get out of here. There’s no way you’re getting in to see him. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to get Ricky in to see him.”
“What happened?” Shaw said.
“He got beaten up. And then shot. He’s still unconscious.” Barr looked like he was trying to stop talking, but more words tumbled out. “It’s bad, it’s really fucking bad.”
“Do you know who attacked him?” North said. “Is the guy still out there?”
Barr shook his head.
“Who found him?” North asked.
Barr pointed to his chest. “He called me. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. He was babbling. But I managed to pick out the cross streets.”
“You found him,” North said.
“I drove out there; I guess I should have called for backup first.” Barr cupped his hands over his mouth, and again North thought of a man trying to get a smoke to catch in a strong wind. “It was bad. He was . . . Jesus. Just bad, ok?”
North glanced at Shaw, trying to make a decision. North wanted information, but Shaw was pale, his cheeks hectic, and North wasn’t sure he needed to hear more right now. It might be better to send him away first.
“We just saw him,” North said. “A few hours ago. What—”
Shaw broke in: “You don’t think I can see him?”
“Not right now.”
“Then tell us. All of it. Everything they did to him. Everything you saw.”
“Shaw,” North said.
Shaking his head, Shaw said, “I want to know. We need to know.”
“This isn’t a good idea,” North said. “Everybody needs to cool down.”
“Go ahead,” Shaw said, his gaze fixed on Barr as though North hadn’t spoken. “All of it.”
Barr opened his mouth, but steps down the hallway interrupted him. A female uniformed officer came towards them. Stocky, wide-hipped, she was strikingly beautiful: her dark hair in a twist-up bun, her dark skin glowing under the fluorescents, her dark eyes fringed with gold. Her name tag said Kelso. She gave them a long look and then glanced at Barr.
“It’s fine,” he said, waving a hand in a weary gesture. “They know most of it already, and they’ll bully the rest of it out of me soon enough.”
“The techs are still working his house,” Kelso said, throwing another glance at Shaw and North, “but it’s not promising.”
“Nothing? You’re telling me they’ve got nothing on who did this.”
Kelso’s mouth was a hard line; she shook her head.
“Jesus Christ,” North said. “How is that possible?”
“What’s going on?”
“Somebody was looking for something at Jadon’s house.” Barr’s bushy eyebrows contracted. “There’s been a string of break-ins, actually. All at the homes of police officers. And I have no fucking idea who’s doing it or what they’re looking for.”
North glanced at Shaw.
“What?” Barr asked.
“We just dragged somebody in to talk to Dzeko about those break-ins. Jadon was there. He was fine. I mean, he looked a little rough. But he was fine.”
Barr’s eyes grew distant; he rubbed his goatee.
Shaw said, “They were beating information out of him? Is that what you mean? They tortured him until he told them what they wanted to know?”
“If he told them,” Barr said. “I don’t think he did.”
“Why?” Shaw said.
“Because he’s still alive,” North said. “That’s what you mean, right?”
Barr nodded. “We think he got away, and they shot him, trying to stop him.”
“Barr,” a voice roared from down the hallway. “What kind of fucking game do you think you’re playing?”
Detective Philip Taylor was old and big; he had a craggy nose and shoulders like a linebacker. He stormed down the hall toward them, shooting a finger at Shaw and North. “Get the fuck out of this hospital and stay the fuck away from this investigation.”
North grabbed Shaw’s arm, but Shaw shook him off. “I want to know what happened to Jadon,” Shaw said, his voice hard, almost unfamiliar to North’s ears.
Taylor sneered. “Why? Because he was your boyfriend? Get out of here before I charge you with obstruction and trespassing and whatever else I think will stick.”
“Phil,” Barr said. “Hold on.”
“Go home,” Taylor told him. “You too. You know you shouldn’t be here. If this goes under a microscope, you’re not going to be doing your partner any favors.”
“What does that mean?” Shaw said. He glanced at Barr. “What didn’t you tell us?”
“Now,” Taylor roared. “Get off this floor. Get out of this hospital.” Then, without waiting to see if he’d been obeyed, Taylor wheeled around, grabbed Barr, and marched him down the hall toward where Kelso was waiting.