Take the Edge Off

by TA Moore

He said it as though he were being reasonable, all his cool self-possession back in place after it had slipped earlier. Cal scowled at him in frustration, because it wasn’t fucking reasonable.

  “Why not talk to your dad?” he asked. “Now you know he’s lying, maybe he’ll come clean.”

  Joe snorted. “You clearly haven’t met my father,” he said. “Confession, like publicity, is something for idiots. And to be clear, I don’t need your permission. A few hours in my bed doesn’t give you a say in my life.”

  Cal rolled his eyes.

  “I don’t want a say in your life,” he said. “I don’t want a front-view seat to your death.”

  Joe snorted. “It was a thug with a penknife,” he said. Apparently he’d forgotten how badly shaken he’d been earlier or maybe he didn’t want to admit it anymore. “I wasn’t in any real danger. Cal, I don’t expect you to get involved. In fact, I’m telling you not to. You said it yourself—you’re a driver, not a bodyguard.”

  YEAH, CAL was sick of his own words being used against him. Frustration pushed at the inside of his skull with a rattled pressure that needed a release. Use your words—that’s what the therapists always told him—not your fists. Cal had never been good at that.

  He took two long steps across the room and into Joe’s space—close enough to floor him, close enough to kiss him. The wary flicker in Joe’s eyes suggested he wasn’t sure what way Cal was going to go either. His throat bobbed awkwardly as he swallowed and looked down at Cal. There wasn’t much space between them. Cal licked his lips slowly and leaned in until their bodies touched from shoulder to thigh.

  “You got it,” Cal said. His lips grazed Joe’s throat as he spoke. The skin was freshly shaved and sharp with soap. “Next time I’ll leave you to get the shit kicked out of you.”

  He reached past Joe and grabbed the cup from the table to take with him as he left. The coffee wasn’t as bad as Joe had made out.

  THE DOBBINS’S front door was locked, and a heavy length of chain was doubled through the handles to underline the point. It didn’t mean it was closed.

  Cal cut around the side of the building, past drifts of old food wrappers and drained, crushed beer cans discarded against the wall, to the door at the back. He heaved it open with a grunt, and the corner of the heavy, metal-cored door scraped the existing groove in the old, concrete a millimeter deeper.

  It was dark inside. The windows were papered over, and only a couple of the gas-yellow neon strips were lit. Cal stood for a second to let his eyes adjust and wondered how much of a fuckup he was about to make. In the boxing ring, a kid, all sharp bones and ragged jeans hanging off his bony hips, bounced off the ropes and cursed in a sharp, clear voice.

  “Mind your fucking tongue,” Malcolm said as he tossed a towel in the kid’s face. He veered over toward the side of the ring and lifted his chin in Cal’s direction. “You want something, mate? Cos… fuck me!” Surprise and delight spread in a wide, gleeful smile over Malcolm’s face as he saw Cal. “Holy hell. Cal? Is that you?”

  Well, Cal thought wryly, too late to slink out now. He shoved his hands into his pockets and headed toward the ring as Malcolm ducked between the ropes. The rest of the bar had turned around to check out what was going on. Most of them shrugged and went back to their beer and conversations. A couple of Cal’s old mates downed theirs and slunk off to the bogs. Behind the bar, Gwenie, who’d managed the place with her tits jacked up to her chin in defiance of time and gravity for as long as Cal had been coming there, grabbed the phone.

  Malcolm jumped down off the ring and threw his arms around Cal in an enthusiastic hug. He roughly thumped Cal’s shoulders as he rocked them from side to side. His exuberance squeezed a laugh out of Cal, despite his reservations about whether this was a good idea or not. Malcolm had always been a hard guy to resist, whether he wanted to cheer you up or talk you into jacking a car from outside a dickhead lawyer’s house.

  When Cal told El he didn’t miss any of his old friends, he’d lied, the same way he lied to Joe when he said he’d stay out of his business. Still, what they didn’t know wouldn’t come back to bite Cal in the ass.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Malcolm asked as he grabbed Cal’s shoulders and took a step back.

  “Jail.”

  Malcolm had the grace to look ashamed, but it didn’t last long.

  “Yeah, I meant to visit,” he said as he stepped back and rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. He tweaked the corner of his mouth in a shrug. In the ring behind him, the two kids scuffled and battered each other with padded fists. “But, well, you know how it is. After you fucked up that last job the way you did… writing was on the wall. Boss wanted you to learn your lesson.”

  A sour mix of anger and resigned amusement sat in the back of Cal’s throat. He did know how it was. That was why he hadn’t come back around since he got out….

  “What else could you do?” he asked.

  “’xactly,” Malcolm said. He bobbed up onto his toes and threw a mock one-two punch flurry at Cal’s stomach. “My hands were tied.”

  Cal palmed Malcolm’s forehead and shoved him back a step with a snort and a grin. There was no point in being pissed off at him. It wasn’t the movies. Thieves robbed from the rich because that was who had the good shit, and they gave to the poor to get their car washed. No one hung out with crooks because you figured they’d be loyal and upstanding. Fun, sure. Cal could still remember the giddy rush the night he and Malcolm boosted the lawyer’s flashy BMW. They hadn’t even sold it on, just driven it into the Serpentine and left it to the swans. Best night of Cal’s life up to that point, and the lawyer who’d fucked over Malcolm’s dad had deserved it.

  But once the adrenaline faded, that memory wouldn’t even get a round in. When the shit hit the fan, it was Boy Scouts like El who’d stick around. They might not be fun, but neither were prison visits.

  “Is Van in?” he asked. “I need a word.”

  Malcolm waved a hand at the bar. “Gwennie can buzz you up,” he said. For a second, the happy-go-lucky front slipped and Malcolm tugged on his earlobe. “There’s other car thieves on the books, Cal, and time served don’t mean shit anymore. Don’t be picky. Take what you’re offered.”

  He didn’t need to put the rest into words. They both knew what he meant. Break a few knees, shake down a couple of shop owners, shed a little blood to buy yourself back into favor. It was the sort of work Cal had always sidestepped. He’d never had the stomach for it.

  If that was the price of entry, maybe there was more than one reason for Cal to go straight.

  “See you around,” Cal said with a last slap to Malcolm’s shoulder as he turned away and picked his way through the tables to the bar. Behind it Gwennie polished a salt-glazed glass with a grubby cloth as though she’d ever get it clean and waited for Cal to ask, “I need a word.”

  Gwennie fished the key to the back out of her cleavage and handed it over. It was about as warm and damp as Cal expected.

  “You know the way,” she said as she grabbed a beer from under the bar. Only the one. She held it out. “Take this up with you, would ya? My knees aren’t what they were.”

  Cal shrugged and took the beer. He was—technically—still on call. If Joe decided he wanted a midnight run to the coast, Cal needed to be sober for it.

  “Sure,” he said. “I get the tip.”

  Gwennie smirked at him with apricot-painted lips. “Yeah, I’ve heard that about you.”

  She flicked her cloth over her shoulder and strutted down the bar to pour a round of shots for some nervous, sweaty kids about to do something stupid. Cal remembered being them, but he’d thought he’d grown out of it. Apparently, he mused as he bounced the beer in his hand, not so much.

  He let himself through the battered old door behind the bar and creaked his way up the back stairs to Van’s office. His weight on the steps squeezed the stink of stale booze and old blood out of the carpet and soured the air. He stopped on the landing. There was n
o door, so he rapped his knuckles on the old wallpaper instead.

  It wasn’t much of an office. A leather sofa and a wide-screen TV took up most of the space, with a scarred old Formica table stuck in the corner of the room to do double duty as a desk. The desk was covered with paperwork, and Van was slouched out on the sofa as he watched EastEnders. He looked up at the knock and mugged surprise, as though he hadn’t expected anyone.

  “Caught me slacking,” he joked as he swung his bare feet off the cushions and stood up. Honey-brown hair, gray smudged back from his temples, stuck up messily behind his ears, and his shirt was wrinkled. He spread his arms out wide and grinned. “Cal. Damn, I’ve missed you, man.”

  There’d been a time….

  Cal ignored the “bring it in” spread arms and instead leaned against the raw plaster where the doorframe used to be. He studied Van and waited for the old twinge, the “hell, maybe” that you couldn’t quite beat to death with a rock.

  Unlike the rest of the old gang, Van hadn’t grown up around there. He was a rich kid with the sort of bad habits you can’t indulge on a part-time basis. For a while, when they’d been stupid kids, one of those habits had been Cal. He hadn’t been Cal’s first time or his first love, but it had been the first time he’d played the bit of rough to scandalize the parents.

  It hadn’t lasted, and that had been mostly down to Van. They’d stayed friends, but that had been mostly down to Cal. Not that he picked that up until it was too late. It turned out a year in jail was a good tool to kill the maybes.

  “I need a favor,” Cal said.

  Van dropped his arms and hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans. He hung on to the smile.

  “From me?” he said. “Now see, I heard you turned over a new leaf. At least that’s what your brother said. Apparently you didn’t need the likes of me dragging you down. I should put that on my Christmas cards this year, give my parents a giggle.”

  “They taking your calls again, after you stole your sister’s wedding fund?”

  The quick flash of anger painted red over Van’s cheekbones. He liked to play the gangster, not the strung-out junkie who’d steal from his own family. The truth was somewhere in the middle, but it was still an easy hook to catch him on.

  “Like your parents want to hear from you,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Cal admitted as he held the beer out. “But that doesn’t bother me.”

  The chilled bottle dangled from his fingers. After a second, Van faked a laugh and took it from him. He used one of his rings as a makeshift bottle opener to pop the cap off the beer, and froth spilled over his fingers.

  “What do you want?” he asked as he licked his fingers clean.

  Cal glanced away and scratched his jaw. Over it didn’t mean entirely past it, apparently. Old memories poked at him until his cock twitched. It had been fun with Van. Everything had back then… until it had all gone wrong.

  “I need to find a kid,” he said.

  “Yours?” Van asked. He sat back down on the sofa and slung his arms over the back of the couch. The base of the bottle tapped against the cushion and left a wet stain on the leather. “Prison changed you, man.”

  Cal reached into his pocket and pulled out the flick knife the kid had dropped before he ran. The flash of metal between his fingers made Van stiffen with sudden wariness. He shifted his weight and licked his lips.

  “Now, Cal,” he said. “Let’s not—”

  “Grow up,” Cal said as he tossed the knife to Van, who snatched it out of the air with one hand. “Some little thug tried to jump one of El’s clients at the city graveyard yesterday. Tried to stab me when I jumped in. He’s about five eight, wears a Slipknot hoodie and a skull bandana, and there’s a good chance I broke his wrist. That’s the knife.”

  Van took a swig of beer and then put the bottle down by his feet so he could turn the knife over in his hand. He hooked his finger into the hole and tugged the blade out. It was hardly an antique, handed down from father to son, but it was a nice bit of kit. The blade was short and curved, with the logo etched into the blade, and the handle had been roughly etched with symbols and latticework—better than the knock-off ninja shit that most kids started out with. Someone would have envied it.

  “What makes you think I’ll find him?” he said.

  A slow, humorless smile curled Cal’s lips. His mouth was so dry he could feel his lips stick to his teeth. “Everyone has a mate that’ll sell them out,” he said. “Once word gets out you’re looking, someone will dob him in.”

  Van stood up and prowled over to Cal. He stretched up as he did so, to prove the half inch in height he’d always claimed to have on Cal. His smile was pointed and challenging as he poked the point of the knife against Cal’s collarbone. The scrape of it was cold as it scratched at the skin as though it were looking for an itch.

  “Naw,” he said. “I meant why would I fucking bother? What’s in it for me, now you’re Mr. Right Side of the Law?”

  Cal grabbed Van’s wrist and pulled it to the side. “You owe me.”

  “Your brother broke my nose when he came round,” Van spat. He relaxed his fingers under Cal’s grip and let the knife drop to the ground. “I let it go. When you got out, I stayed away. I could have talked you round. I always could, but I didn’t. So anything I owe you, I figure I paid off.”

  He wasn’t wrong. If he’d come round with a good idea for a heist and a bottle of Jack to plot it over…. Well, it wasn’t as though Cal was good at being an upstanding citizen. His first instinct was always to take what he wanted and make himself scarce before anyone could complain.

  That’s what he should have done if he wanted to wipe the slate clean, but he hadn’t.

  Cal tightened his fingers on Van’s wrist and twisted roughly. Muscles tightened in Van’s arm as he fought to take his arm back, but it didn’t work. Cal braced his thumb against the back of Van’s hand and shoved him back over to the sofa. The backs of Van’s knees hit the cushions, and he toppled over backward.

  “How about this, then,” Cal said. “I owe you.”

  “Get off me,” Van said through pinched lips. His wrist was pushed back at an awkward angle until his fingers nearly touched the inside of his forearm, and his elbow was twisted painfully. “You think I can’t touch you because you’re sticking to legit work? All it takes is a couple of calls—”

  His voice choked into a groan of pain as Cal bent his wrist back another millimeter. The color, what Van had of it, drained from his face as he writhed against the leather. Cal used his weight against the lever of Van’s arm to pin him in place.

  “A couple of calls. That’s right,” Cal said. “That’s all it would take for me to give it legs. Van Davies sold me out to the cops. Pass it on.”

  “You wouldn’t dare.”

  Cal waited. After a second, Van grimaced because he knew better. He pulled his leg up and kicked Cal in the thigh with a bare foot. It wasn’t enough to hurt, but Cal backed off.

  “Get off me,” Van said as he got his wrist back. He pointedly massaged the joint. “I’ll do it, all right? Jesus, all you had to do was say fuckin’ please and thank you. Beg a little. Not you. You gotta take it too far. No wonder your mum’s embarrassed to introduce you to her new family.”

  Cal shrugged. “She says the same about El,” he said. “And El’s got manners.”

  Something nasty flashed through Van’s eyes, and Cal knew to brace himself. Like a rat backed into a corner, Van liked to make sure that even if someone won they walked away bloody from a fight with him.

  “Yeah, but you’re a package deal, aren’t ya?” he said. “She can’t have El without you. He’d never go for that. One more thing he can’t have because he’s got a fucked-up, dumb-as-dirt little brother.”

  That cut deeper than the knife had. Cal swallowed it and shrugged. “Find me the kid that jumped me. Once you do that, I have no reason to come round here and tell anyone the truth about who told the good Detective Kincaid what.”

/>   Van reached down with his good hand and grabbed the beer by the neck. He slouched back on the couch and took a swig. His throat worked as he swallowed.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “Now fuck off, Cal. You bring the tone down.”

  Chapter Six

  FIRST THING in the morning and there was another message from Kristen on Joe’s phone. He didn’t have the heart to delete it, but he couldn’t bring himself to listen to it either. To be honest, he didn’t need to. It probably didn’t differ much from the twenty other messages she’d sent him since they broke up—either promises that they could fix this if they tried or pointed, precise anger as she cursed him up one side and down the other.

  He didn’t blame her.

  Edward’s disapproval was palpable as Joe banished the voicemail to languish with the others in the saved file.

  “Kristen’s beautiful. She’s clever. She’s accomplished,” Edward said as he sat down on the other side of the small round breakfast table. He laced his hands together around his chalkboard black mug of tea, old scars a lacework of threads over his knuckles and the backs of his hands. “You could do worse.”

  “Maybe,” Joe said as he set his phone facedown on the table, in case an email came in that he didn’t want Edward to see. “She couldn’t have, though.”

  “Maybe you should have let her decide that,” Edward said as he took a drink of his brew and made a disappointed face. His preferred cuppa was black Yorkshire tea, bitter as something cooked up in a boot. He always said he’d developed a taste for it while he was in the Army, along with curry too hot to taste anything but regret. Apparently the hotel’s tea bags weren’t old and papery enough for him. He set the cup back down on the table and looked at Joe. “She loved you.”

  She did. Joe knew that.

  “And I liked her,” Joe said. “That’s not enough.”

  At the far end of the suite, the main door parroted its usual “welcome back” message as Cal let himself back in. Joe glanced around and listened to Cal slam the door and then go into his bedroom. He’d been out last night, and he’d come back late and kept to himself. Joe had thought about another text, another late-night tumble, but he… hadn’t.