Pretty Pretty Boys

by Gregory Ashe

  As the minutes ticked by, Somers find himself kicking his heels harder, shifting in his chair, scratching at his arms. The smell—that smell of disinfectant, a harsh chemical smell without anything like citrus to soften it—how could the people here stand it? It was supposed to be, Hazard knew, a clean smell. But it didn’t smell clean to him. It smelled like helplessness, like old age, like decay. It smelled like ugliness, and a small, insistent part inside Somers—a part that he hated but was powerless to overcome—revolted at the smell because Somers knew he was young and beautiful and that this place wasn’t for him.

  A doctor came through the door a few minutes later; by then Somers’s head was hurting so badly that he didn’t bother learning the man’s name. He just felt cold hands on the side of his face, and he followed instructions and answered questions, and at the end, he was pronounced fit for duty. “Although,” the doctor said in that kind of gruff, 1950s-fatherly cheer that doctors tend to assume, “I bet you’ve got a hell of a headache.” With that, the doctor gave Somers prescription-strength acetaminophen and left.

  Somers swallowed the pills dry—Christ, could your head split open from the inside if the pain got bad enough?—and stepped out of the room. The ER was quiet today, with only a middle-aged couple sitting on the molded plastic chairs. The man had one arm in an impromptu sling; broken, Somers guessed. One nurse was diligently clacking away at a keyboard, while two older nurses stood heads together, throwing glances at Somers and giggling like they weren’t any older than fifteen. Somers threw them a cocky grin—it helped to have a cocky grin on hand, it could do a hell of a lot of work for you—and glanced around. Still no Hazard.

  He peered into the adjacent room and found his partner seated, shirtless, on the examination table. As Somers stepped inside, Hazard’s head came up.

  “If you send that weak-kneed pansy back in here—oh.”

  “That weak-kneed pansy? I’m guessing that was the young man who raced out of here like you’d strapped a rocket to his back?”

  Hazard shrugged. Again Somers was struck by how different his partner was from the boy he had known in high school. He was a big man, yes, but big in a tightly sculpted way—broad shoulders coming down to a narrow waist, abs and pecs chiseled under a layer of sparse, stiff hair. His long hair had come out of its careful part and now hung shaggily over his eyes. The bandage across his chest was stained red, and it had peeled away from his shoulder to expose the beginning of the cut.

  “He kept touching me,” Hazard growled. “I told him if he didn’t keep his hands to himself, I’d break every one of his fingers and see how well he could wipe his ass like that.”

  “He kept touching you?”

  To Somers’s amusement, Hazard colored—a bright blush that ran through his face and down into his neck. “Where’s that damn doctor?”

  “My bet?” Somers said, dropping into one of the vinyl-covered chairs along the wall. “They’re letting you sit. Maybe indefinitely. It’s a nice way to punish bad behavior, and there’s not really anything you can do about it.”

  “Great.” Hazard’s hands swiped across the examination table. “Where the hell is that shirt?”

  “Maybe the pansy took it.”

  “Fuck this. We’re getting out of here.”

  “You need stitches.”

  “We have work to do.”

  “Will you sit down? We’re not leaving until you’re taken care of.” Somers rocked himself onto his feet and stuck his head out of the room. As one, the two older nurses swiveled towards him, and Somers tried his cocky smile again. “I think my partner is ready to be civil, whenever the doctor has a minute.”

  The women twittered, laughed, stuck their heads together, and then one said, “Just a few more minutes, Detective.”

  Somers’s smile widened, and he mimed tipping his hat to them before ducking back into the room. “All right,” he said to Hazard. “Few more minutes and we’ll be out of here.”

  They sat in silence for a moment before Hazard said, “What in the name of Christ happened earlier today?”

  “Which part? It’s been a pretty memorable day.”

  “I don’t get it,” Hazard said, and his face showed his genuine bafflement. “You’re a good cop. You’re smart, although you like to pretend like you’re nothing but smiles and eye candy. You did good work in Smithfield, from what I heard, and that’s the worst part of Wahredua. If anyone had asked me, I would have said you know how to handle yourself. But today, at the college—what the fuck were you thinking?”

  “I made a mistake.”

  “The way I see it, you’re not the kind who makes a lot of mistakes.”

  Somers’s felt his face growing hot. “Well, I’m human. And I do make mistakes. Plenty of them. You should know better than anyone, but if you forgot somehow, go ahead and ask Cora. She’ll be happy to tell you.”

  “Don’t do that. Don’t try to shuffle things around. We’re talking about work. You’re my partner. We need to be able to depend on each other. So I want to know what happened.”

  “I didn’t expect them to turn on me. Not like that. Most people around here, well, they know me. They grew up with me. They grew up with you too, but—”

  “But it’s different.”

  “It is different, if we’re going to tell the truth. Not just because of what we were like in high school, although I know that’s part of it. And not just because of our families. I know that who I am, it’s part of the relationship I have with people in this town. But the other part of it, the other thing that makes you and me different, is that I’ve been here. Aside from Mizzou, I’ve been here my whole life. That means when people get drunk or violent, when they get out of hand, I know their mom or their grandma, I know their dad, I know who to call and I know who not to call. They might take a swing at me, but only when they’re so drunk or high they don’t know me from the President of the U.S. of A.”

  “And you thought that made it ok to approach a dangerous mob?”

  “No, dumbass. I wasn’t thinking of them as a mob. I was thinking of them as Bill Bay, Sydney Thomas, and Ralph Moree. I was thinking that most of those men had gone to my football games and cheered when I scored.”

  “Cravens didn’t seem to—”

  “Cravens has been an outsider for as long as she’s been an insider. She’s a woman and she’s a woman who wanted to be a cop. I mean, I shouldn’t have to spell this out for you, Hazard. You know what it’s like to be different in a small town. So I’ll say it again: I made a mistake, and it won’t happen again.” Somers tried to soften his breathing and his voice. “And thank you.”

  “I said that to Cravens because I don’t need a partner who’s sidelined during our investigation.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I mean thank you for saving my life. And, in the process, getting yourself sliced up. That’s on me. I know it’s on me. And I’m not going to forget it.”

  Hazard, for his part, looked decidedly uncomfortable at the shift in tone. He shook his head and looked down at the floor. Somers sank back into the vinyl seat, letting out a slow breath of relief. What he had said had been true. For the most part. But Somers had been a cop in Wahredua for a long time. He knew better than to get close to a mob of rabid Volunteers, especially without taking the appropriate precautions.

  No, the real reason for his mistake didn’t have anything to do with a small town and a long history with its inhabitants. No, the real reason was that John-Henry Somerset had been showing off for his new partner. He had wanted to look like a goddamn action hero, and he had wanted to impress Hazard. Well, look how well that had turned out.

  “What Fukuma said,” Hazard began.

  “I told you: fuck her.”

  Waving a hand at this, Hazard said, “No, I mean about Armistead. It’s interesting.”

  “Pretty much everything she said was interesting if interesting means bat-shit crazy.”

  “She claimed that Armistead was behind that string of hate crimes. Sh
e said she had eyewitnesses.”

  Somers stretched out his legs. “And she also said those eyewitnesses wouldn’t say anything to the police; they only told her because they were expecting the same kind of vigilante justice that the Volunteers want. That’s the most convenient kind of witness, you know: the kind that nobody can substantiate.”

  “That’s the thing, isn’t it? On the one side, we have Naomi telling us that Armistead is the victim. She might be telling the truth. Armistead is about the right size for our victim. His truck matches the truck Lady Mabbe saw.”

  “Let’s think about that: in that scenario, someone impersonating a Volunteer lures Armistead out to the trailer. He convinces Armistead to help him unload a barrel of paint thinner, and then—what? He kills Armistead and starts the fire?”

  “More or less. In that scenario, Fukuma could still be our killer, but our immediate suspect is the other man, the one impersonating the Volunteer.”

  “And the thing that doesn’t make sense is why Armistead would go along with the impersonation—even Naomi couldn’t work up a convincing story for that.”

  “On the other hand,” Hazard said, “Fukuma tells us that Armistead is the one we should be looking at as a criminal.”

  “You’re telling me he killed himself? That’s a stretch.”

  “No. I’m saying we’ve taken Naomi’s story for granted. But what if Fukuma is right? What if Armistead and another man—presumably, in this scenario, another Volunteer, a real one—killed someone else? And they put the body in the trailer and set the fire and skipped town?”

  “So in this version, Naomi is either lying to cover for them or, more likely, honestly believes Armistead is dead and wants Fukuma to go down for it.”

  “Yeah, that’s how I see it too. It’s hard to believe Naomi would draw attention to Armistead if she knew he had killed someone and was on the run. She’d be more likely to keep quiet and say nothing.”

  “So Armistead is either our killer or our victim,” Somers said. “Jesus, as if my head weren’t hurting enough already. And in either scenario, we need to find the other man. How in the world do we do that?”

  “We keep following up on Armistead. And, for that matter, on Fukuma. Whatever she says, she’s still dangerous enough—”

  “And crazy enough.”

  “—to have done something like this, and we can’t discount Naomi yet because she’s been right about some important things so far.”

  “So we follow up on Fukuma’s alibi. It’s going to be air-tight, Hazard. She’s not an idiot.”

  “We follow up on the alibi,” Hazard said, nodding. “But we also follow up on her story of the witnesses. Let’s see if anyone else can put Armistead at some of these crimes. If there was someone he was regularly targeting, for example, we might have a better lead on that version of events.”

  “That means going through all of those reports,” Somers said, his head throbbing at the thought. “Jesus, that’ll take days to find all those people, show them a picture of Armistead, ask them the right questions.”

  “If it takes days, it takes days. But we might be able to narrow things down.”

  Somers nodded. “Ok, I didn’t think of that. We look for patterns first. Or names we recognize. Cast a small net first.”

  “Exactly. And we do one other thing.”

  “What?”

  “Fukuma mentioned a specific assault. One at the Pretty Pretty. We go there and start asking questions.”

  Somers smiled in spite of his best efforts at self-control.

  “What?” Hazard asked.

  “You realize you’re asking me out to a gay club.”

  “Oh my God,” Hazard groaned into his hands.

  At that moment, the same doctor who had treated Somers stepped into the room. With familiar fatherly good cheer, he bellowed, “Well, now. Here’s our troublesome new detective. What have you been up to, young man?” He stepped over to the table. “That cut doesn’t look too good. Let’s get the bandage off. We’ll be careful with the tape—”

  “No need,” Somers said, jumping to his feet. He grabbed the loose end of the bandage and ripped it free. “One pull, comes right off.”

  Hazard grunted as the adhesive tore at the hairs on his chest and abdomen. Then his head came up, and he fixed Somers with a glare that was pure murder.

  “You said we were in a hurry,” Somers told him with a grin and then sauntered out to the waiting room. He didn’t plan on being anywhere close to Hazard when the doctor started stitching him up. Hazard might be able to get a scalpel or something—no, better to let the nurses have a few more minutes of ogling. Somers whistled to himself; his head was already starting to feel better.

  BACK AT THE STATION, SOMERS and Hazard found their desks in disarray. Papers had been shoved here and there, pencils and pens had been spilled everywhere, and on Somers’s desk, fallen paperclips sparkled amidst the debris.

  “What the hell is this?” Hazard asked. “Where are my notes?” He shoved through the chaos. “Where the hell is anything?”

  Somers grabbed his phone and started dialing.

  “Who are you calling?”

  “Upchurch.”

  The phone burred twice before Upchurch’s voice came on the other line. “Hey, buddy.”

  “What the hell?”

  “Whoa. What’s up? You sound mad.”

  “I am mad. It was one thing for you to hit my desk like a hurricane when we were partners, but you can’t come in here and go through Hazard’s stuff like that. Or mine. Not anymore.”

  Hazard, doing his best glower, said, “Tell him if he fucks with my stuff again, I’ll fuck him up.”

  Somers waved a hand to silence his partner.

  “Buddy,” Upchurch said, “I’m over in Warsaw. Been here all day doing some fishing. That’s why I missed that first call. I had one on the line—big old catfish, about as big as Eldora. I wasn’t going to take a call from anybody but Ronald Reagan until I landed that catfish.”

  Somers barely heard the words. Upchurch had the unfortunate habit of going through Somers’s desk when they were in the midst of an investigation and leaving everything looking like it’d been plowed by a hurricane. But Upchurch wasn’t even on the force anymore, and anyway, he was out of town. So who had gone through their stuff? And why?

  “What’s that bastard say?” Hazard growled. “Tell him to get back here so I can kick his ass.”

  Covering the phone’s receiver, Somers said, “Will you cool off? It wasn’t him. Go do something useful.”

  “Something useful?” Hazard said in a dangerously low voice.

  Somers gave him the finger and turned his attention back to the phone. Upchurch was speaking again.

  “Listen, buddy, sorry about Naomi.”

  “You damn well should be sorry. What were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking that Naomi’s my only solid contact in the Volunteers, and if you didn’t talk to her, you were going to miss out on something big. At least, that’s what she told me.” A note of worry crept into Upchurch’s voice. “She wasn’t lying, was she? She gave you something good?”

  “She gave me something. I don’t know if it’s good or not. Hey, Upchurch, she’s only been here for three months. You’ve pulled stuff from the Volunteers before, though. Who else do you have in there?”

  “I’m not stupid enough to start naming CI’s, Somers. Not until I need to.”

  “You couldn’t have given me one of them instead of Naomi?”

  “I already told you: she’s my only solid contact. You know what those other guys are like. They’re all cranked up on speed and trying to bang their sister or their cow or their sister’s cow. Naomi’s smart. She’s crazy, going in for that Volunteers’ creed, and she’s ambitious as hell, but she’s smart. That’s the best I could give you.”

  “It would have been nice to have a warning so Hazard didn’t see me with my ass hanging in the breeze.”

  “What I hear about you two
,” Upchurch said with a laugh, “neither of you must have minded too much.”

  A frictive heat started somewhere inside Somers, heat caused by the collision of too many emotions moving too quickly. “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “Nothing, buddy. Nothing. Just a joke.”

  “You better believe it’s a fucking joke.”

  “I just meant everybody says you two get along. I’m glad. The new guy, he seems like he’d have me walking on eggshells. Most people, in fact. Kind of cold, you know what I mean? But people say you two are doing fine.”

  “Who says that?”

  “Come on, buddy. You don’t spend almost twenty years in a department without making a few friends.”

  “I’ve got to go, Upchurch. Lots to do.”

  “Me too, buddy. Got to get all these catfish in my boat.”

  “Luck.”

  “You too.”

  As Somers disconnected the phone, he was surprised to see Hazard coming back from the archives with a stack of folders in his arms. Clearing a space on the desk, Hazard set down the files and dropped into his chair.

  “You know, we do a lot of stuff on these magic boxes now,” Somers said, tapping his monitor.

  “People get lazy. Or stupid. Or they make mistakes.”

  “People do.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Somers said with a sigh. He grabbed a handful of folders. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  What they had, though, was a surprising amount of paperwork to wade through. Somers and Hazard agreed to start by listing all the names of everyone involved in the reported cases that had been tagged—unofficially and provisionally—as hate crimes. The list was surprisingly long, over thirty people in the last three months, and two names stood out.

  “Fukuma,” Hazard said, his big finger underlining the name. “She’s in your stack.”

  “All right, I’ll read up on the case. And look here: our buddy Cervantes.”

  “Back in September, so what?”

  “He’s the only one who shows up twice. Back in September, and then last week when his garage got spray-painted.”