by Sarah Black
Colton was torn between the rush of feeling lifting his cock, his skin flushed hot and sweet, and the desire to...
Diego raised his head. “What? What did you do?"
Colton raised both hands. “I did nothing! But this one crazy broad, she must have caught me at a weak moment. I mean, she didn't say anything, she just went down on me and it was the best fucking head I ever got, ever, except you, baby. I thought my cock had blown off and was lodged in the fucking wall."
Diego shook his head, laughing. “Are you kidding me? A girl?"
"I think it actually could be considered sexual assault, but this is one of those gray areas. I'm just grateful she got called away to a car wreck before she got out the latex gloves and lube, man."
"Jesus, I can't leave you alone for a minute."
"So don't leave me alone."
Diego sighed, let his head settle on Colton's belly. “Not now, Colton, okay? We'll talk later about what we're gonna do."
And Colton could taste sorrow, could feel the sorrow coming through Diego's lips, through his tongue, the tenderness, and sweetness, it was nice, but it wasn't Diego, who liked rocking sweaty fun, but who, right now, tasted like he was kissing his lover good-bye.
"I won't let you do it,” Colton said, leaning up on his elbows and looking down at Diego's black hair spread across his ivory belly. A rough tongue, scrape of teeth down the shaft, and he arched up and thrust into Diego's mouth. “I'll never let you go. You belong to me."
An hour later and Colton was drifting, asleep in a cool dark room like the ones he'd grown up in on his granddad's ranch. It was only cool compared to the temperature outside in the sun, but eighty-five degrees on a fine, summer afternoon, in a room built of thick adobe walls and mud plaster, was as close to heaven as Colton planned to get.
He and Diego were stretched out on their backs, not touching, letting the drowsy ticking fan cool their skin, drifting into sleep. This minute, they were okay. They were together. He wanted some revenge, that was true. He was going to take some revenge, too, but not so he would feel better. That was a dead-end road. He would do it so Diego would feel safe again. So everyone who had been hurt, or threatened, would feel safe. Not from every bully in the world, but from this bully.
Revenge would never make it easier to look into Diego's beautiful eye, dark as the night sky over the Sonoran desert, bright as the stars, to look into one eye and not the other. That would never be okay. But Colton would make sure he felt safe in the world again.
"Can you still be a heart surgeon with one eye, Diego?"
Diego was quiet, then he reached over and linked his small finger with Colton's. “I don't know. But I don't think so, Colton. My depth perception isn't right. It should get better, though. They say most of the time it gets better. Or good enough, anyway. Hey, I got a job offer if I stay down here.” Colton could hear something in his voice, something fine and brittle he'd never heard from Diego before. “The women's clinic. They need a doctor to do abortions. Somebody's been hurting the girls."
They lay silently after that, stared at the Virgin on the wall, traced the fine network of cracks in ancient plaster on the ceiling above them. Late afternoon the clouds boiled up from the southwest, rumbled and spit a little rain into the dust of the compound. Colton drifted, resting for the first time in weeks, smelling the rain, rain water on a clay tile roof, then later, as the sky softened, he could smell beans cooking, a wood fire and meat on the grill, hear the soft voices of women speaking Spanish, and he felt like he was home again. “You wait down here for me, where it's safe, Diego. I'll take care of everything, and come get you when you can come home. Or I'll just stay with you now. That would be fine with me."
Diego curled against his side, sighed, and put a hand over Colton's chest, over his heart. But when the noises changed outside, and they could hear the clatter of an old pickup, men's voices raised, he was up and digging into the table next to the bed for a gun. Colton stared at him in astonishment. Just for a moment Diego looked like a stranger, his face thin and hard, the eye patch giving him a guarded, hostile look. And he had a gun?
Colton was off the bed and across the room in two steps. “Give me that. What do you think you're doing?"
"You might have forgotten that there's a warrant out for my arrest. For murder, Colton."
"I haven't forgotten. I'm lying right here, you're gonna pull out a gun and shoot the bad guys yourself? Don't you think I can take care of you? You don't trust me to keep you safe?"
Colton looked at Diego's eye patch, at the long, elegant hands that were never meant to hold a weapon.
"I'll tell you what I think. I think you're gonna do something stupid, take some goddamn revenge, and then you'll be on the run forever and I'll be alone. That's what I think. You're gonna leave me alone. I might as well get used to it now."
"Diego, what the hell are you talking about?"
The wooden door burst open, and he had Diego shoved behind him and the weapon out and leveled.
The light was behind him, so the man in the doorway appeared huge and dark. “Very tough, muy macho. It don't mean dick to me, boy."
Diego started to move, but Colton grabbed his sleeve, kept him still. The man stepped into the room, hands open to show he didn't have a weapon.
"Uncle.” Diego stepped away from Colton, came to the man and hugged him. “Uncle, this is Lieutenant Colton Wheeler, Pima County Sheriff's Department. Colton, this is my great-uncle Manuel Del Rio. Captain Del Rio, retired Mexican Highway Patrol. Don't shoot him, okay?"
Manuel was old, seventy maybe, and huge, even bigger than Colton, with a white mustache and hard dark eyes and a slight limp when he walked, like his knee was sore.
"I've heard of you, Lieutenant Wheeler.” He offered a hand, and Colton shook it. It was hard, the palm rough, and Colton thought the old man could have crushed his fingers to powder if he'd wanted to. “You play a reckless, dangerous game with your badge back and forth across the border. You break the rules so you can save all the boys and girls in trouble, huh?"
"It isn't a reckless game to me.” Colton held his eyes, so the man knew he meant what he said.
"My nephew has told me what happened to you both. What is it that makes Americans hate so much? When they have so much?"
"I don't really care,” Colton said. “Hating is a choice, but what he did to Diego, what he has probably done to other men, that's a choice that's going to cost him his life."
The old man nodded. “Yeah, boy, you're very tough, very strong. But you don't strike me as being very smart. And this situation is going to need somebody a little bit smarter than you; you don't want to end up in the desert living alone with a horse and a tent, with bounty hunters tracking your ass."
"That doesn't sound so bad.” And the old man laughed and told him to stop acting like a fool. His granddad had done that, too, shut him up and straightened him out with just a few words. He grinned. “I don't need to be that smart. Diego will handle the thinking for both of us."
That got another bark of laughter, and Manuel studied his nephew, shaking his head. “Then you better think hard, Diego. Think why you want to go back. Mexico needs a good surgeon more than America. We can keep you safe here, you and your big dumb American, too."
Colton nodded. “Fine with me. Whatever you want to do. We can go to the ranch if you want, Diego. Or I'll sell it if you want. We can buy some land down here. Anything."
"You'd sell your granddad's ranch?” Manuel was stroking his chin, staring at Colton with narrowed eyes.
Colton felt a wallop of regret, something sharp and deep down in his belly. “Yes, of course.” His voice sounded strangled, and the old man laughed at him.
"I knew your granddad, that tough old bastard. Sonora was in his blood. Is it in your blood, too?"
Colton nodded his head. “Yeah, it is. But Diego is more important. His career, I mean. His life."
Diego sighed. “Well, why don't you two big strong lawmen go sit outside, get som
e mescal and pass the bottle and spit in the dirt and figure everything out?"
Colton flipped the safety on the gun, stuck it down in his pocket. Manuel ran a hand over his chin. “Actually, that's a good idea. Come on, boy."
Colton followed the old man out the door, turned back to Diego. “You got any more guns hidden?"
Diego shook his head.
"Fine. You can take this one off me after I'm dead if you need a gun. But otherwise don't pick one up again."
Diego took a deep breath, hands on his hips as if trying to calm himself.
"That's right, Diego. Listen to him. You'll just shoot yourself and your mother will kill us all.” Manuel waved across the compound, where the women were cooking. “Hey, bring us a bottle of tequila! What kind you like?"
"Gold,” Colton said. “But anything tastes good when a man's thirsty."
Manuel nodded at him, eyes narrow. “That's right. And what you thirsty for, Lieutenant Wheeler? Revenge? Blood?"
Colton looked behind him at Diego leaning against the door frame of his room. “I'm thirsty for the life we were going to have. The good he's going to do in this world. I have to shoot that sick fucker in the head to get our life back, then that's just an extra little treat for me, isn't it?” He sighed, and Diego's dark face looked like a rock. “Shit. I'll probably just end up doing what he wants me to do. He's mad and scared and he doesn't trust me to fix this. Thinks my way isn't the right way."
"He knows you pretty good, then."
Diego's family compound was a sprawling, dusty cluster of ochre and terra-cotta colored buildings, space for four generations to eat and talk and drink tequila in the central courtyard. The whole was enclosed by a thick, mud brick wall as high as a man's head.
The walls of the small casitas were eighteen inches of mud brick, with deep window seats and cool, dark interiors, and they had lovely plumbed bathrooms because the women of the Del Rio clan were particular in the extreme.
Diego and the old man stayed close to Colton as the courtyard filled with relatives, perhaps with more strong and willing young men than normally spent a hot summer night under the Sonoran stars. Colton was starting to feel a low rumble of panic in his gut, because Diego was still not talking to him about what they needed to talk about. But there was no time. They were surrounded by his family, and it was clear Diego was their darling, their shining star. And it was also clear to Colton that everyone, though they were trying not to show it, blamed him for Diego's terrible injury. How could they not, when he was standing here with his big blond American face?
The old man didn't. He had been around criminals, and crime, for all his long years. He knew evil flared up out of the desert, throwing grit in the eye, filling the mouth with sand.
Diego didn't blame him either, but what he felt was worse, and Colton didn't know what to do about it except get him off alone somewhere, and love him, and after a long, quiet, peaceful time, his guilt over leaving, and his fear that it could happen again, his fear that Colton would leave him alone, would melt away in the wind. That's what he hoped, anyway. Because he could feel Diego's fear, feel how angry he was at being made to run.
"We ought to go down to the coast when everything settles down, do some fishing."
Diego looked at him, smiling. They were standing as close to each other as two men could in public, in Mexico.
"Yeah, that sounds good. Hit the beach for a couple of days. Where do you want to go, Colton?"
He shrugged. He didn't know much about Mexico's famous beach resorts. “Acapulco?"
Diego shook his head. “No, too many gringo tourists. Cabo, man. Someplace quiet and Mexican. Tortillas, tequila, sunshine, and sand. That's all we need."
Diego's mother walked over and shook Colton's hand. He had met her before he had ever known Diego. She was the Mexican counsel for his stretch of the border, a woman of fierce pride and beauty, a fighter who appreciated that gray areas existed, but didn't embrace them the way Colton did.
She was an attorney, believed in the law as a tool of social order and social justice. Colton wasn't really sure what this meant, but she had told him this as if it was her credo the first time they had met, and he turned it over in his mind sometimes, thinking about her.
She had a strong, elegant face, and her black hair was drawn back from a center part into a bun at the nape of her neck. She wore combs in it. Colton didn't know much about women's hair doodads, but he recognized ancient ivory.
They had met over the case of a young woman found in the desert with a newborn, some hours after the baby's birth. She claimed the baby had been born in America, and Colton had been inclined to believe her, even give her credit for a few miles, given the state of her bloody wet skirts, but Esmeralda Del Rio had seen something he had not. At the hospital the young woman proved to have not just given birth. The Border Patrol never found the real mother's body.
But after that first meeting, they had seen each other occasionally in the course of their work, and she had assumed the dignified, carefully instructive attitude of a stern and patient godmother when she was around him.
He had started to notice the combs. She didn't wear much other jewelry, but she always had these beautiful combs securing her bun. The carved ivory ones were very old, Spanish, Diego told him, and she had some with pearls and some with different stones and jewels—heavy silver, mostly. Diego told him she had always collected vintage hair combs, and that he thought his mother was unique because she actually used the beautiful old combs in her hair, didn't collect them and then lock them away in a vault.
When they had met in a different capacity, when he stood up and shook her hand as her precious only son's lover, Esmeralda couldn't hide the wince and the disappointment. Colton was pretty sure it wasn't him, personally. He thought she liked and respected him, as far as that went, but when Esmeralda was raising Diego and thought about sitting across the dining table from her daughter-in-law, she never pictured a six-foot tall blond gringo cop. Even when she understood that Diego was gay, Colton suspected that Esmeralda dreamed of someone else for Diego, someone cultured, an artist or musician of good family, someone handsome and elegant and well-connected and rich.
She had a character with a core of steel. Colton recognized it, because he had one himself. He never said as much to Diego, but he secretly suspected she would have preferred all the boys around her to be gentle and kind and loving, like Diego, so she could take care of them, and keep the harsh world at bay.
Colton could see that it took a great effort of will for her to meet his eyes, to shake his hand civilly. He felt his heart drop to his toes. “Esmeralda. I'm sorry."
She sighed, took her hand away. What a stupid thing to say. But what could he say? I'll make it right? It could never be right. “I will do whatever I can do, Esmeralda, I promise..."
"Colton, I'll be in touch with you, okay? Later, next week. Just let me handle this. Don't do anything, don't let your men start to investigate, and just let me take care of this. You are recovered from your injury?” Her question was polite, nothing more.
"No, he isn't,” Diego said. “The concussion on top of the spinal fracture, that's very bad, very dangerous. He still needs..."
"It doesn't matter,” Colton said, and he could see Esmeralda agreed with him, since he was standing there on two legs, looking at her with two good eyes.
She rubbed across her forehead, and Diego leaned forward and kissed her cheek. One of Diego's young girl cousins brought them a couple of plates of food, and Diego pulled Colton away from the group. They sat down on a heavy carved wooden bench against the compound wall, balanced plates on their laps—strips of cabrito from the grill, tortillas cooked over a wood fire, pintos, and pico de gallo. Diego asked his cousin to grab them a couple of sodas, and she did, casting her big dark eyes over Colton and Diego, both looking so much like the romantic heroes of fairy tales, she wasn't sure who to fall in love with first.
"No more tequila,” Diego said, rolling the cabrito insid
e his tortilla. “Didn't the doctors tell you?"
"They might have. I thought I better come check with you. You want to kiss my scar, make it better?” Diego ignored this. Colton scooped up a spoonful of beans. “I brought you some cash, some money. I was worried you were stuck somewhere, you know, without..."
Colton looked around the courtyard. He was thinking like an American, like money meant safety. But Diego knew something he didn't know. Safety was family, people around who you could depend on, people you could trust.
Diego studied his face. “Thanks, Colton. Yeah, I could use some cash."
"You have your other papers? You need me to get anything?"
Diego shook his head. “I brought them, but I can hardly use them, can I? I'd be arrested at the border. I think I'm safe down here."
"I'll come back, then. Once I take care of ... business."
"Colton, why are you being so stubborn? You can't take care of this business. You shoot him, you end up on death row? That's not a good outcome. And he has plenty of clout, plenty of friends. Plenty of people who might not like that he's gonna get caught, but understand what he's doing."
"Understand what he's doing? He's a freak. American's aren't like that. And I'm not gonna end up on death row. There are ways. This is my business, Diego, and I'm good at it. Why don't you trust me to take care of us? I know what I'm doing."
"Your gray areas. I don't think so, Colton. I think it's too risky. I don't want you to take the chance. I'm asking you to leave it alone, play by the rules and let Mom do her thing."
Leave it alone? When the stars fall out of the night sky, lover. This was the one thing Diego could ask of him that he couldn't do. If he was in a coma, maybe, he'd let it go. Or dead.
An aunt came this time, gave Colton another tortilla and a pile of grilled cabrito. After she left, Colton rolled the meat up with some pico de gallo and took a big bite. “They all gonna come over here and get a look at me?"