by Gregory Ashe
And then there was still the matter of Adaline’s sudden inheritance and Columbia’s meeting with Thomas—the meeting she denied having, in spite of Thomas’s worried text to the contrary. Hazard massaged his forehead again as his thoughts came back to the beginning.
He wasn’t sure how long he spent thinking, but when the sound of raised voices startled Hazard from his thoughts, his watch said that it was almost ten o’clock. The voices came closer, and Hazard realized that it wasn’t voice but instead a voice. One voice. Somers’s voice. He sounded furious. And drunk.
And then the door opened, and Somers stepped into the room. Naked.
Hazard had seen Somers naked before, but only once, in the locker room, that one unforgettable moment in high school. But they had been boys then, and Somers as a roommate had been surprisingly modest. Even when things between the two men became most heated—even the night before—there had been barriers: the towels, the blankets, the darkness.
John-Henry Somerset was beautiful, the kind of beautiful that hit like a shotgun to the back of the head and didn’t leave any brains or blood behind, the kind of beautiful that left Hazard thoughtless and speechless and, damn it, motionless. Every muscle toned and defined. Skin bare except for dustings of blond hair on his arms and legs. Each movement marked by sinuous grace, as though Somers were a gymnast or a dancer instead of a cop.
For the second time in his life, Hazard had a full view of Somers’s tattoos. Geometric patterns coiled along his arms, climbing to his collarbone, just low enough on his neck that a collared shirt might cover them. More ink covered his torso: swirling calligraphy that coiled over pale, hard muscle and ended at the deep V of his abdomen. What had Somers said it meant? Something from the Bible, Hazard remembered. Something about justice. Right then, though, Hazard didn’t care about justice. He didn’t even care about the tattoos. He cared about what was under them.
Hazard’s face was hot. No, fuck hot. It was burning. Sweat beaded on his brow and dampened the cloth under his arms. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t take a goddamn breath, like the air had thickened to gelatin. He managed to yank the top button of his collar loose, and he tugged at the cloth, trying to convince himself to pull in air.
Somers was talking, Hazard realized. The blond man had the phone to his ear, and he was shouting, and he—thank God—didn’t seem to have noticed Hazard’s reaction.
“—yeah, well, I’m sorry, Cora. I’m so goddamn sorry I called and interrupted your goddamn dinner. No—no—no, don’t, I said I’m sorry. I’m sorry I called. I’m sorry your precious Thanksgiving was ruined because your husband called. You probably have to get back there before Ethan starts to get lonely.” Furious squawking interrupted Somers here, and after a long moment, Somers broke back in. “I know he’s in the house. My goddamn house, Cora. Mine. Who the hell paid for it? Don’t play—” More squawking. “Don’t play stupid. I know he’s there. That’s why you weren’t going to invite me over. It’s a small town, Cora. People talk. Did you forget that? Next time you sneak Ethan Dorsey into my goddamn house at midnight, you better damn well think about what—”
A shrill voice cut through Somers’s words, and then the call disconnected. Somers swore and tossed the phone on the bed. He stood there a moment, hands on hips in profile against the light, the slender musculature of his body picked out in shadow. Then he ran his forearm over his eyes and huffed a breath like wet Kleenex ripping.
“Who’s Ethan Dorsey?” Hazard asked, and he knew it was the wrong question as soon as he opened his mouth.
Somers turned towards him. That hurricane that had been moving in earlier, the hurricane storming through those ocean eyes, it was there now, furious, threatening to tear down everything it could reach in a hundred miles. Somers let out another of those wet-Kleenex breaths. Tears glistened like trails of mercury in the lamplight. Then his breathing changed. It deepened. His chest swelled with each breath. It sounded like the hurricane was about to make land.
He crawled onto the bed, on all fours, staring at Hazard. “You like what you see?”
“I said who’s Ethan Dorsey.”
Somers inched closer. “You do. You want me.”
The sound of his voice, insistent, demanding, and steamy enough to shake the wrinkles out of a square mile of linen, made Hazard shiver. He tugged at his collar again. There just wasn’t enough air in the goddamn universe right then.
Crawling closer, Somers put his hands on Hazard’s legs. He forced them apart and crawled between them. He was aroused—that much was obvious—but that horrible look in his eyes, like something that wanted to strip the limbs from trees and strip the paint from houses and strip the sand from the beaches, like something that wanted to strip Hazard down to the—
—what would it feel like, to be naked against Somers, smooth and hard—
—to the bones, that horrible look hit Hazard like a bag of ice to the balls.
Somers had reached him by then, his hands curling around Hazard’s collar, turning Hazard’s face towards him. Booze stank on his breath—where he had found the alcohol, Hazard wasn’t sure, but Somers had obviously drunk enough for half the Wahredua PD. At that moment, Somers’s lips parted, and he leaned towards Hazard for a kiss.
A better man, Hazard knew, would have stopped Somers. But Emery Hazard wasn’t a better man. He was who he was: tired, and hurt, and touched by the man he had loved since they were both boys. The kiss, when it came, had the same frenetic viciousness that Somers’s kisses always carried. It ripped away Hazard’s breath, it bruised his lips, and it kicked out his mental legs and left him crawling in the dark.
Memory, more than rational thought, intervened when Somers tried to kiss Hazard again: the memory of the kisses stolen in Somers’s apartment, in the first days of their partnership. Those kisses, too, had been fueled by Somers’s drinking. Those kisses, too, had been buried the next morning, hidden under Somers’s normal camaraderie and good cheer.
Hazard pushed Somers away. Somers whined, the noise ragged with need, and leaned in.
“No,” Hazard said.
“You told me to make a choice,” Somers said, and that storm, that goddamn storm in his eyes had to be whipping at three hundred miles an hour. “Here it is: you.” He settled his weight against Hazard’s hand, pressing forward for the kiss.
“No.”
“What the fuck do you mean, no? You want this, right? Well, here it is. All those fucking teenage wet dreams come to life. How many times have you jerked off to me? Five hundred? A thousand? God, how many gallons of cum have you dumped for me?”
He didn’t mean it. That was Hazard’s clearest thought. Somers didn’t mean it. Somers—sober—never would have said something like that. Never would have thought something like that. The realization was like a bell struck at a winter midnight: the only sound breaking a crystalline stillness.
“I need some air,” Hazard said. He got to his feet, dumping Somers on the bed, and lurched towards the door.
“You know what your problem is?” Somers shouted, face red as he righted himself. “You’re a fucking pussy.”
Hazard shut the door behind him, and the crash of wood on wood echoed down the cramped stairwell. He stood there for—
—forever, just let me stand here forever and never have to move again—
—a minute, his fingers aching around the doorknob. Then, with the same shuffling steps, he limped down the stairs. He couldn’t pull in a deep breath. He couldn’t quite stand straight. Once, as a boy, Hazard had played football. Just a neighborhood game, before the other boys had caught onto the queer lurking amongst them. And one of them—one of the big, Irish Foley brood—had tackled Hazard. The Foley boy, David or Patrick or Sean, had put his shoulder right into Hazard’s solar plexus. This, right now, was a little bit like that, like a piece of himself had caved inwards, like he’d always be hunched forward and unable to right himself. And the air. There was just no goddamn air.
But the irony was that there was
air. All around him, now, Hazard heard the storm battering Windsor. The old building creaked in protest, and the winds swirled and howled. Like the night before, this night lay under a blanket of sound and snow. No one in the house, Hazard realized, would have heard his fight with Somers. No one would hear anything. Just as no one had heard anything the night Thomas Strong was murdered.
When Hazard reached the landing in the entry hall, he paused. The house was dark, and in the darkness, it seemed much larger than it had during the day. He could go to the kitchen and try to find something edible—more edible, at least, than Leza’s lasagne—but his stomach felt like it was filled with lead shot. He could go to one of the sitting rooms. He had seen books in one of them. He could read. Just for an hour or two, until—
—Somers blacked out—
—Hazard had cleared his head. Grateful that he hadn’t undressed for bed, Hazard made his way downstairs. The house was chillier than he had remembered. It felt almost as cold now as it had the night before, but that didn’t make any sense. The night before, the study window had been open, and the old house’s heating had been unable to keep up with the winter. Now, though, Hazard’s breath steamed in the moonlight that filtered into the entry hall.
His nerves prickled. It was too much like the previous night. Something was wrong. The realization made things easier for Hazard: the sudden awareness of danger, even if it was only a possibility, cleared his head. Everything in Hazard’s world simplified: statistics, calculation, strategy. His slipped out of his lace-ups and padded down the hall in his socks.
The cold gnawed at him, sucking the heat from his hands and feet. As he headed towards the sitting room, the cold grew worse, and Hazard fought a shiver. He reached for his .38. The metal clung to his fingers, already ice cold, and his skin stung when he adjusted his hand on the grip.
With one foot, Hazard prodded the sitting room door open. He kept the .38 low, but ready to bring it up in an instant. A pale, dusty light entered the room from the massive windows—not moonlight, but the refracted glow of Windsor’s external security lights. Mixed with the glow came a rush of snow and ice, chittering against the polished wood floors, and snowmelt stained the rugs. The large picture windows had been shattered, and the storm had found its way into Windsor.
But it wasn’t the fury of snow and wind that made Hazard pause. It was the body that lay halfway across one of the sofas, its blood darkening the leather and puddling on the floor.
Someone had put two bullets through Benny Prock’s head.
HAZARD STUDIED THE ROOM FROM THE DOORWAY. Thick shadows lay in the corners, resisting the diffused glow from the outdoor lights, and the killer could still be hiding in one of them. Hazard nudged the switch near the door, and the hanging lamps burst to life. The incandescent bulbs painted everything with artificial yellow: the corners of the room were empty, and Benny looked pale, maybe even a little green, with his blood almost as dark as the sofa leather.
With slow steps, Hazard made a circuit of the room. His socks sloshed through the melting snow and ice, but his feet were already so cold that he barely felt it. He studied Benny from behind. Both shots had taken him from behind, and they had destroyed the upper half of Benny’s face when they had exited. Enough of the features remained for Hazard to be certain: his prime suspect for the other murders was now dead.
He glanced at the window. No glass lay inside the room, and that sent a deeper chill through Hazard. Someone inside the house had broken the window, spilling the glass outside. Why? The most obvious answer was to let the storm into the house, but that made no sense. Or, perhaps, the killer had done it for misdirection, to make it look like an outsider had broken into the building and killed Benny. Something as simple as where the glass fell might not have occurred to the real killer. Or, could an outsider have broken into Windsor, and perhaps the window had shattered during a struggle with Benny? Hazard thought of the other person at Windsor, the man living at the stables, the one whose footprints Hazard had found that morning—it might have been him. But why come now? And why kill Benny? And, most importantly, was the killer still in the house?
Another glance at the window told Hazard that the storm would have obliterated any tracks. Whether or not the killer was still here, the snow and wind left no clue. Hazard flicked one last look around the room and started for the hallway. Like it or not, he needed Somers.
When he reached the hallway, though, he stopped. A hint of something stopped him. A whiff of—
Gas.
The thought sparked a brief, intense panic. Gas. A gas leak. An intentional gas leak that would blow Windsor into God’s next kingdom. It might destroy most of the evidence. It might not. But it would sure as hell kill Hazard and anybody else still in the house.
For a moment, Hazard hesitated. Did he wake Somers and the others and flee? It would take time, and even if he had time, Hazard wasn’t sure that the others would believe him. Even Somers, in his drunken state, might not listen to reason.
Before Hazard realized he had made the decision, he was jogging down the hallway. His wet socks slapped the floorboards, and more than once they threatened to spill him onto his ass. He kept running. Life and death—everyone’s lives—now hung in a balance of minutes.
As he moved deeper into the house, the smell grew stronger. It stung his nose and eyes, and already Hazard’s breaths felt thinner, taking in less oxygen as the gas crowded into his lungs. He stopped at the kitchen, sprinted through the tiled room, and skidded to a stop in the laundry room. The door that led to the basement was open.
Hazard stopped at the stairs. The ambient light from the hallway reached its limit, and past that point, the blackness obscured everything. Hazard found the door jamb with one hand and inched one foot into the emptiness. It seemed an awfully long way down to the first step, but he kept moving. At this point, the slightest spark could ignite the gas. The whole house would go up. And that meant no lights.
It also meant no guns. With a grimace for the shadows, Hazard took another step down and holstered the revolver. Then another step. And then another. The darkness pressed against him; worse than the gas, it was the darkness that smothered him, stealing the breath from his lungs. A tiny voice told him to run—get clear of the house, get as far from this place as possible, and to hell with—
—Somers, not Somers, he couldn’t—
—to hell with the rest of them.
But the only way anyone was going to survive that night was if Hazard found the gas leak and stopped it. Somewhere in the basement there would be a shutoff for the gas supply to the house. If Hazard could find that, they might live through the night. It would still be a matter of luck, but by opening all the windows in the house, they could invite the storm to disperse the accumulated gas. And, Hazard thought grimly, they might very well freeze to death.
When his stockinged-feet touched cement, Hazard realized he had reached the basement proper. He took another deep breath, and pricks of light spun in his vision. It took him another moment to realize that the lights weren’t just from lightheadedness. Some of the lights were real.
As his vision adjusted to the darkness, he saw the sparkle of artificial light on broken glass. Someone had broken the basement windows, and now the glass lay all over the floor. Through the windows, the storm spilled snow that glittered in the house’s exterior lights. The same light caught the glass on the floor, as though someone had thrown down electric tinsel to cheer up the place.
Against the pinpricks of light, a man was staggering towards the staircase. Hazard noticed him perhaps an instant before the other man noticed Hazard. The man froze. He was tall and wide, bigger than Hazard, although not quite as fit. He wore a ski mask that hid his features, and strapped to his thigh was a pistol that looked like it fired some pretty big caliber bullets—big enough, say, to shoot through an elephant or two. The man’s hand drifted towards the gun, but he must have realized the same thing as Hazard: if either man fired his weapon, they would both die in th
e resulting explosion. The man’s hesitation lasted only a moment. Then he lunged.
An enormous fist, the size of a wrecking ball, swung at Hazard’s face. Hazard sidestepped the blow, but not fast enough. The fist clipped his ear, stinging and hot.
The big man had over-committed himself, though, and Hazard brought up his knee. He caught the big man in the stomach, hard enough that he heard a pained grunt. At the same time, Hazard jabbed. He caught the man in the face, and although the ski mask absorbed some of the blow, the force of the punch still rocked the man’s head back. Hazard pressed his advantage, jabbing again, and again the man’s head snapped backward. This time, blood glistened in the weak light.
Faster than Hazard could have expected, though, the man regained his balance. One of those wrecking-ball fists caught Hazard in the side, and pain detonated deep inside Hazard’s torso. The force of the blow knocked him off balance. As the next punch came, Hazard tried to dodge, but he was already staggering. The blow caught him hard in the stomach, knocking the wind from him and sending him crashing to the floor.
Glass squeaked and skittered under Hazard as he fell. He felt a hot slice across the back of his neck, and then his head cracked against the concrete. The world lit up like a lightning strike, and then it went a dangerous, drifting dark. Hazard clawed at the shadows, fighting against the dizziness and the urge to give up and let the darkness take him. In his blurred vision, the man came closer, and one big foot came back.
Hazard rolled, but again, not fast enough. The kick caught him a glancing blow instead of hitting dead on; that was the only thing that saved Hazard from broken ribs. The force of the blow still sent him rolling, and glass shards stung his face and hands as he tried to escape the kicks that followed him.