Declination

by Gregory Ashe

  But the words came to Shaw from somewhere at the end of a long hallway, and a door closed, and Shaw slept.

  Chapter 6

  OVERNIGHT SHAW’S HEAD turned into glass. He was sure there was a word for that process. Glassified? No, that didn’t sound quite right. Something else. Something with a vee. But every time he went looking for the word, a giant Red Wing boot came smack down on his head, shattering it into a thousand pieces. Over and over again. Until Shaw finally crawled out of sleep and stumbled to the toilet and threw up again.

  As he washed his face and mouth at the sink, a few details came through clearly. One: his head wasn’t made of glass, although it sure felt like it was about to crack. Two: North was stomping around the kitchen like he wanted to put a hole in the floor. Three: Glass tinkled, tinkled, and tinkled as North cleaned up from last night.

  Last night. Shaw groaned as he swished more cold water in his mouth, desperately wishing he knew where North had put his toothbrush or his hairbrush or, for that matter, the keys to the GTO so Shaw could just get in the car and escape without having to face his boyfriend.

  Spitting out the water, Shaw studied himself in the glass. He looked a little like a Jack Russell Terrier that had styled its hair like a hedgehog. Without many options, Shaw settled for washing his face once more, gathering his hair into a bun, and promising himself no more puking.

  But at the bathroom door, he stopped with his hand on the knob. Last night had been such a mess. Last night had been totally Shaw’s fault. Not just the drinking—not just that weird, masochistic desire to put down a few beers because he knew it would get him skunked and because he wanted that, wanted the whole screwed up experience of being sick and being halfway outside himself and being numb, for a little while anyway, to everything else.

  No, it wasn’t just the beer and puke and the broken glass that had been Shaw’s fault. This thing with Jadon, the torture, the gunshot wound, that was Shaw’s fault too. And the way things had gone bad with North back at the Borealis office, when Shaw had gone somewhere else and he just remembered hands on his knees, vulnerable, the sudden need to sink under the black water rolling in. That had all been Shaw’s fault. Because he hadn’t stopped the Slasher, and so the Slasher had gotten Jadon. Because he wasn’t strong, and so when he was scared of being so open to North, in every sense, he ran away inside his head.

  No more. Whatever else happened, going forward, no more.

  Opening the door, Shaw stepped out into the hall. He made his way to the kitchen, where North stood at the trash can. When North saw Shaw, he tipped a dustpan into the bin, and glass tinkled and chimed as it spilled into the liner. North rattled the dustpan against the side of the bin, shaking free a final few pieces of glass, and then placed the broom and dustpan in the pantry. He slammed the pantry door, and Shaw put a hand to his head, making sure the skull hadn’t split at the loud noise.

  “Sorry,” North said.

  Nails clicked on the floor, and a moment later, the puppy skittered into view, moving so fast that the turn sent him into a slide and he scrambled to catch himself. The Löwchen straightened his hind legs, planted himself next to North—he was barely the size of one of the big boots—and fixed his tiny eyes on Shaw. Then he began to growl. And yip. And yip. And yip.

  “Oh,” North said. “That’s too bad. He’s all riled up now.”

  Pressing fingers to his temples, Shaw said, “It’s ok.”

  “I can’t hear you over the dog,” North said, and then he turned and pushed a pile of pans into the sink. Metal crashed and thundered; Shaw squeezed his eyes shut, purple blobs floating against the inside of his eyelids, and wondered if he could pass out.

  “Oops,” North said.

  “Can I get some water?”

  “Sure, let me just move these pans.”

  “Never mind. No, God. Never mind. I’ll just . . . I’ll just sit here until my head explodes. Or the dog stops barking. Either one.”

  Eyes still closed, Shaw groped at the air until he found a chair, and then he dropped onto the seat and put his head on the table. The Löwchen was still barking, and North seemed to be cleaning every pan he owned. With steel wool. And a lot of casual, incidental banging. Shaw thought about crying again.

  Then it all stopped. The clash of metal, the puppy’s barking, everything. North’s footsteps moved toward Shaw, and a chair squeaked across the tile, and little paws padded along the tabletop. Something wet ran a stripe along Shaw’s ear. Then it came again. And again. And then it really started going at his ear, trying to get deeper.

  “You’ve got a new technique,” Shaw said, his voice muffled because he was still collapsed at the table.

  “I had some inspiration,” North said.

  “Your tongue feels smaller.”

  “That’s just your imagination.”

  “And . . . pinker.”

  “I know that’s your imagination.”

  “And you’ve got a lot more stamina.”

  “Oh?” North shifted, the chair creaking under him. “My stamina has been a problem in the past?”

  The Löwchen’s tongue found a sensitive spot inside Shaw’s ear, and he giggled and jerked away, groaning as the headache rebounded inside his skull. He sat up straight, opened his eyes, and met the puppy’s gaze. He looked like he wanted to bark, but North’s hand stroked his back, and he settled for a single, warning yip.

  “We should sell his pelt online,” Shaw said.

  “I’m thinking about keeping him. He’s got more sense than some people I could name.”

  “I don’t think I like Schlafly’s.”

  North raised an eyebrow.

  “But maybe I should try a Blue Moon. Or a Flat Tire. Or—”

  “Is that stunt you pulled with Taylor going to happen again? Assaulting a police officer, Shaw. Of all the stupid shit.”

  “No.”

  “Are you still in love with Jadon?”

  “What?” Shaw blinked, trying to look past his headache and the lingering nausea to focus on North. The blond man didn’t look different, but something had changed. A wall had gone up between them—maybe just temporary, maybe something that could be pulled down easily, but a wall. And that was new. That was the first time Shaw had seen anything like it.

  “North, I love you. Only you. You know that. I’ve loved you for . . . forever, I guess.”

  “You weren’t honest with me yesterday. When we were messing around, you wanted me to think everything was ok, and everything wasn’t ok.”

  “It wasn’t you, North. It’s me. I’m screwed up, and—”

  “And then we got that call and we went to the hospital. Fine. I get it. Jadon’s important to you. Plus he’s a cop, and he’s been helping you with the Slasher thing. He showed up with those horrible cuts. It made sense for us to go; we needed to go. But then we got there, and you went after Taylor like he was some asshole off the street, and then we came back here and—” He made a sound of disgust and gestured at the kitchen.

  “He didn’t try to kill himself, North. Nobody tries to commit suicide by shooting himself in the chest.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do. I do know that. This is another warning. This is Taylor and Waggener, warning me—”

  “Why? What have you dug up on the Slasher in the last two months?” North’s big hands flattened on the table; the Löwchen seemed to sense the sudden drop in the room’s temperature, because he scurried over to North, flopped down, and pressed himself up against North’s arm. “That lead on the widow went nowhere. Nothing on her husband either, by the way. The man they had in prison for the Slasher’s crimes, he’s dead too. Dead before you could even talk to him, let alone convince him to confess that he was taking the fall for somebody else. The last time we had anything close to a lead on the Slasher, Jadon showed up on your doorstep cut to ribbons. So tell me the truth right fucking now: have you been working on this alone? Did you find something
and you haven’t told me? Why did they need to hurt Jadon to send another message?”

  Fixing his gaze on the table, Shaw said, “I don’t know. I haven’t found anything. I haven’t been doing anything behind your back.” That last part was true only in a certain sense; Shaw never stopped looking, never stopped digging, but he hadn’t done anything new without telling North. It was close enough to the truth that he only felt slightly guilty.

  “You want to know what I think?”

  “What?”

  “I think Jadon looked like a wreck when we saw him. I think he’s been through a really bad couple of months: you broke up with him—”

  “This isn’t about that. I don’t like you bringing up my relationship with him.”

  “It’s relevant, though. You break up with him. Then he gets the shit beaten out of him by psychos in black masks. They use a razor blade to turn his chest into a steno pad. He’s got a picture of me pinned to his jacket. He’s not even a full steno pad, that’s what he realizes. He’s just this one message. And he couldn’t hold on to the guy he liked, he couldn’t keep himself safe. So he goes into a spiral.”

  “That’s not what this is. This isn’t about . . .” Shaw had to take a breath, brace himself on the table; the room was a tilt-a-whirl now. “He must have found something. Or maybe they think I found something, and they wanted to send another message.”

  “What?”

  “Barr said—”

  “Barr thinks someone was looking for something, but Barr’s his partner. Barr is biased. What if he—”

  “He didn’t try to kill himself.” The words came out as a shout, and Shaw was shocked—and slightly gratified—at the way North drew back, at the sudden flicker of apprehension in those ice-rim eyes.

  “You keep saying that, but you don’t have any proof.”

  “Then I’ll get some proof.”

  “Washington Strategic called this morning. They tried your phone, but you were crashed, so then they called me.” North touched his pocket as though somehow proving a point. “They’re in. They want us. They said yes to the whole thing, exactly the way we bid it.”

  “No way.”

  “Yes way. This is it, Shaw. This is the big break. No more one-off divorce cases. No more dog abductions. They want us to start with their twenty top executives and work our way down. We’re going to have to branch out, hire people, build. This is Borealis becoming a real agency—national, maybe international.” North was petting the dog again, his fingers crooked as he raked them down the puppy’s back, and the puppy was panting and seeming to love it. “This is what we’ve been working for, Shaw. Four years. For this.”

  “That’s awesome. That’s incredible, I mean—” Then Shaw saw it: the set of North’s jaw, like he was ready to keep fighting. “What?”

  “They want us in Seattle tomorrow to run a full check on their CIO.”

  “We can’t. I mean, that’s way too short notice. We’ve got other cases, we’ve got—”

  North shook his head.

  Shaw knew North was right; none of the rest of it was time sensitive. None of the rest of it, in the big picture, mattered. This deal with Washington Strategic was the big leagues. This was the only thing that mattered. Except.

  “He didn’t try to kill himself, North. He didn’t. This was torture, trying to get something out of him, and attempted murder. I bet Taylor and Waggener are already sweeping away the evidence.”

  “Or he did try to kill himself, Shaw. Or he’s been depressed for months, spiraling, and he tried a way out. I know you don’t like it, but you’ve got to admit it’s a possibility.”

  “One day. Give me one day. If he tried to kill himself, if that’s what it was, then I’ll drop it.”

  “And if it’s not? What then, Shaw? Am I supposed to call Washington Strategic and tell them we’d like to take their million-dollar account, and maybe I can squeeze them in before December?”

  Wiping under his eyes, Shaw waited.

  With an explosion of breath, North said, “One day, Shaw. One fucking day.”

  The Löwchen barked an exclamation point at the end of the sentence.

  “Thank you,” Shaw said.

  “Yeah, well, see how you feel after we figure out what really happened. Then you can thank me.”

  “He didn’t try to kill himself.”

  “Prove it.”

  Shaw nodded. “Let’s start with his house.”

  Chapter 7

  THE PROBLEM, North thought as he drove the GTO, the wind whipping through his thick thatch of blond hair, was that Shaw was too close to everything. Not just Jadon, although North had his own opinion about that. Everything. Shaw was close to everything, felt everything, and he never got scarred, never got callused, never got used to being hurt over and over again. On somebody else, North might have called the quality thin-skinned, but Shaw wasn’t pathetic, and he wasn’t a complainer. He wasn’t delicate, either—not about things that mattered. He was sensitive, like nobody had ever designed a filter that could keep the worst, most painful parts of life from striking right at his heart. And that’s why North was afraid this case might kill Shaw.

  Late morning, the skyline glittered copper and silver in the sunlight, a city of loose change dumped at a bend in the river. North thought he could smell the river in the day’s wet heat, although that smell was tempered by the spiky musk of Shaw’s hair product. Risking a glance, North checked his boyfriend again. Quick looks. Not too often. As though whatever were hiding under Shaw’s skin might only emerge when North weren’t looking, and he might catch it if he turned quickly enough.

  On the next look, though, Shaw plastered his hand to North’s cheek and turned his head forward. “Stop it.”

  “I like looking at you.”

  “I don’t need you checking to see if I turned into the wolfman.”

  “You’d be cute with a tail.”

  For some reason, that turned Shaw’s face to fire.

  Jadon owned a small, one-story brick house on the southmost edge of the Tower Grove neighborhood. It wasn’t a great spot in the city; it wasn’t even necessarily a good spot. Here, everything went block by block. North wondered if a cop might feel comfortable living with bars on his windows, like some sort of cosmic reflection.

  “Is it irony if cops have bars on their windows?” North asked.

  “If you’d studied for that poetic devices test freshman year,” Shaw said, popping open his door, “you’d know the answer.”

  North caught his arm. “Stop.”

  “It’s not my fault you didn’t study, North. And you can’t blame me if I like to remind you—”

  “No, stop opening your door. Shit. Get down.”

  North dragged him down as the patrol car came around the corner.

  Huddled in the footwell, North counted silently inside his head. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Was the patrol car still moving? Had it slowed down when the cops saw the GTO with its top down? Six. Seven. Had they stopped? Eight. Nine. Ten. Was a uniformed cop getting out of the car now, hand on his service weapon, ready to ask them to step out of the car, slowly? Shaw was wearing a gingham button-up that North had found at the back of a drawer, and the cotton bunched under North’s sweaty grip. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Where the hell—

  And then the patrol car rolled past, its engine grumbling, the squawk of the radio interrupting a quiet conversation, and one of the cops said, “God damn nuisance,” and the other said, “I’m telling you they don’t make cars like that anymore.”

  North caught Shaw’s dramatic roll of the eyes, and all of a sudden, North had to fight laughter. It bubbled up, threatening to overwhelm. His body shook with it; tears leaked down his cheeks. The patrol car kept rolling, and the sound of the engine dwindled. North popped up just long enough to check the block. All clear.

  Then he started laughing. He laughed so hard he fell back into the footwell, and then he was stuck and couldn’t get
up. That only made him laugh harder. Shaw laughed too, his slender frame shaking with giggles as he wiped his eyes. It probably only lasted a few minutes, but it felt longer to North—and it felt good, as though last night had only been a nightmare, and everything was normal again.

  Shaw helped North wriggle out of the footwell, and they both laughed a little more until Shaw finally managed to say, “What was that? Why’d you grab me? Hiding in a convertible with the top down while a couple of cops talk about how much they like a classic muscle car.” He laughed again. “If we’re going to break the law, maybe we should get a less noticeable way of getting around.”

  “Maybe,” North said, and suddenly the gag didn’t seem as funny anymore. “I guess that was instinct more than anything else; I didn’t want them to see us.”

  “Because of Taylor and Waggener.” Shaw nodded slowly. “God, I’m so thick. I should have thought of that. We’ve got to keep this quiet; if they think we’re on the same track as Jadon, or if they think we’re ignoring their warning, they might try again. Or they might come after us.”

  “That’s one reason,” North said.

  “If it’s suicide, like you think, why would they care if we poke around?”

  “Because that’s exactly what Taylor warned us not to do.”

  “Taylor’s connected to the Slasher, North; we can’t trust—”

  “Just listen, ok? Taylor told us we’d fuck over Jadon if we poked around.”

  “He just doesn’t want us on the same track as Jadon, especially if Jadon—”

  “Shaw, let me finish a damn sentence. Please. No matter what happened, this is a cover up. Do you understand? Whatever we find, we’re giving Taylor and his buddies the finger.”

  It took a moment, but then Shaw nodded. “Because of the insurance. Either way, they’ve got cops on patrol here watching the house. But unofficially. The kind of cops who might get carried away if they caught somebody breaking in.”

  “Because of the insurance and the pension and disability—Christ, who knows what else? If Jadon survives, he’s got two routes: either this is an attempted suicide, and he goes down a dark, shitty road; or this was the shooting of a respected officer of the law, and he might still be able to pull his life together.”