Take the Edge Off

by TA Moore

  “I told you, Cal’s not your business,” Joe said.

  Edward extended the umbrella to cover him. “I don’t want to see you get hurt,” he said. Then he admittedly stiffly, “Either of you. Whatever you… whoever you love in the end, Joe, it’s not going to be him, is it? An ex-con, dragged up in Tottenham, can barely even read? You’re going to have him on your arm at the theater. Cut him loose now, before he thinks this means more than it does.”

  Joe walked away from the dry shelter of the umbrella. “He’s dyslexic, Edward,” he said flatly. Probably, he admitted to himself. He knew Cal wasn’t stupid, that he had a library of audiobooks on his phone, and he’d seen how Cal blocked out addresses when he needed to read them. “And at least he’s not a liar.”

  “He’s a thief. Thieves lie, even if only by saying nothing. It’s part of the job.”

  Joe turned around and stared at Edward through the veil of rain. “Is that how you did it?” he asked. “Held your tongue and never contradicted Harry? Lies by omission didn’t taste as bad?”

  The umbrella was tilted into the rain and cast a shadow over Edward’s face that made it hard to read. Guilty or still a liar, Joe wondered.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Joe,” Edward said. His voice was easier than his face, and the tight edge on it betrayed him.

  “Did she call you?” Joe asked. “Or get in touch with Harry?”

  There was a pause. “You have to talk to your dad. I think, maybe, Harry is ready to listen, but you need to hear it from him. I might have watched you grow up, but you’re not my son. This isn’t my business.”

  “Neither is Cal,” Joe said coldly. “So remember that in future. You speak to him like that again, you’re the one who’ll be looking for a job.”

  “You think your father will let that—”

  Joe took two long steps forward, back under the umbrella and into Edward’s face. He could smell fried chicken and beer on his breath, see the heavy bags under Edward’s eyes.

  “If he doesn’t, I’ll quit,” Joe snapped. “Either way, you’ll be out of my life.”

  “Is he that good in bed?” Edward asked, his lip curled in distaste.

  “Yeah,” Joe said, and punched him.

  It wasn’t the best punch. Joe didn’t have enough room or enough practice to get his shoulder behind it, but his knuckles caught Edward on the jaw and knocked him back a step. That might have been surprise as much as impact.

  Joe shook his hand, realized he didn’t have anything left to say, and walked away. His head was full of noise that meant nothing, and the tight, anxious aftertaste of lost control. He hunched his shoulder and water dripped under his collar and down his neck.

  “Joe,” Edward yelled. Joe tightened his jaw and didn’t look back. “Joseph!”

  The urgency in his voice caught in the nape of Joe’s neck like a hook and yanked him out of his temper. He started to turn, but before he could, something hit him. He lurched sideways and tripped off the pavement into the road, and his elbow and hip cracked hard against the tarmac as he went down. His face caught the curb and he saw stars. The car, however, barely missed him. It slowed for a second and then bounced back down into the road and screeched away down the street.

  Edward lay on the pavement where the car had tossed him, his body awkwardly angled and still. It was too dark and wet to see blood on the pavement, but it was dark and vivid against his skin.

  “Edward!” Joe scrambled to his feet, awkward as his bruised leg didn’t want to work yet. He limped over to the still body and stooped down to grab Edward’s shoulders, although some vestige of common sense drew the line at any attempt to shake him awake. “Edward, open your eyes. Come on, Edward, speak to me.”

  He wheezed instead, and one eye fluttered open, although it didn’t react as though he saw anything. Then it closed again. At least he was alive.

  The doorman had run halfway down to them and stalled. “I’ve called the ambulance,” he yelled. “The police. They’re on the way.”

  People had stopped to watch. “You shouldn’t move him,” a man said with authority. “He could have hurt his neck.”

  “What happened?” someone asked

  “Car lost control,” the authoritative man said. “He shoved his son out of the way but couldn’t dodge himself. Tragic.”

  Joe remembered the impact of hard hands in his back and flinched with guilt.

  Then Cal was there, his jacket stripped off and tucked under Edward’s head. “It’ll be all right,” he told Joe as the ambulance arrived. “C’mon. I’ll get you to the hospital.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  EDWARD WAS the sort of man who looked hard as nails even unconscious in a hospital bed. An IV was down in the crook of his arm, and electrodes were glued neatly to his chest to make the assorted machinery whine and beep.

  He had a room to himself, and the doctor had actually come in to speak with Joe.

  Cal wasn’t sure if that was because Bailey Holding employees had good health care, or that Edward’s condition was serious. He scratched his side. All he usually got when he was busted up was a gurney, a tired nurse with dissolvable thread, and a glass of orange once the stitches were done.

  “I need to change,” Joe said from the chair by the bed. He’d spent the night there, conflicted and mostly silent. He rubbed his hands over his face. “Call my father, let him know what’s happened.”

  Cal pushed himself off the wall. “I’ll drive you back,” he said. “The hospital will call if anything changes.”

  “They wanted to know if he had any relatives,” Joe said. “I didn’t know. The things you don’t know about people. I’ve known him my whole life but… he knows who my real mother is, and I don’t know if he has a brother or a niece. I don’t know whether to be pissed off at him or guilty.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I know. And yet.”

  After a moment Joe sighed and stiffly pushed himself upright. He put a hand on Edward’s shoulder with awkward, obvious affection, and then walked past Cal and out into the hall.

  “Thanks, for staying,” he said as he paused in the doorway and put his hand on Cal’s arm. “I know he’s not your favorite person, but he’d appreciate it.”

  “I didn’t do it for him.”

  “Then I appreciate it,” Joe said. He briefly tightened his hand.

  “Didn’t say it was you either,” Cal said with a shrug. He winced inside as he said it, but his skin itched to get it over with and screw up the moment.

  Joe smiled and then winced as the expression creased the road rash on his jaw and cheekbone. It was raw and freshly cleaned, the yellow swab of iodine stained onto Joe’s skin, but the nurse had decided not to bandage it.

  “I have to speak to the police later,” he said. “A detective is going to call at the hotel. Not sure if I should call my father before or after.”

  “After,” Cal said. That reminded him of the missed call from Van that he still had to return. It would have to wait. He fell into step beside Joe as they left the room and walked down the hall. “Otherwise you’ll have to call him again. Trust me, your family always wants to know what the police said to you.”

  Joe dredged a cool smile from somewhere. “You’re the expert, I guess.”

  That comment would usually have made Cal smirk and crack wise, reassured in a weird way that he was right about how people saw him. It wasn’t as though he could complain about it either—he brought it up.

  “Not exactly something to be proud of,” he said instead. The words felt rough in his throat, and he felt the back of his neck scald with embarrassment at being soft. Or… vulnerable. Cal cleared his throat and crooked the corner of his mouth in a smirk. “Maybe I should have stuck with stamp collecting when I was a kid, had another string to my bow.”

  Joe bumped his arm against Cal’s. “I like you fine the way you are,” he said. “I don’t think stamps would have made a difference.”

  “Probably
not,” Cal admitted as he hooked his arm around Joe’s waist. He leaned in to rub a rough, stubbled kiss up Joe’s jaw so he could he confess into his ear. “Especially since when I say collected, I mean cut them off the letters old lags sent to my granddad from Spain… or Strangeways.”

  He still had them somewhere. Maybe. After Grandad died, most of his stuff went to El, boxed up and packed in the white van he rented. El offered Cal whatever he wanted from the house, but what would Cal have done with it back then? When he had money, it pissed through his fingers, and when there was no money, he didn’t have a pot to piss in.

  The vague idea of going to get them floated through Cal’s head. Although he didn’t have any idea what he’d do with them—frame them to cover the weird dent in his rented one-bedroom apartment? Before he could pick the idea to shreds, Joe snorted and pushed Cal away from him.

  “If I ever need to send an emergency letter, I’ll call you,” Joe said. “For now, I need to talk to the nurses and make sure they have my contact details. Meet me outside with the car in fifteen minutes and we can go back to the hotel?”

  Joe turned away without waiting for an answer. It wasn’t a problem. The car was parked in the high-rise as the parking fees stacked up in twenty-minute increments. It was a bit high-handed—a please wouldn’t have taken long—but under the circumstances, Cal could let it go. It was the we that made him hesitate, even if not for the reasons it would have two weeks before.

  “Once I drop you off,” Cal said, “I’ll need to take a couple of hours personal time.”

  That made Joe turn to look at him. As easy as it was to read him sometimes, at others, Joe was still opaque behind that handsome, reserved face when he felt he needed to be. Joe was disappointed, maybe, or curious. Whichever it was, he didn’t dwell on it.

  “I suppose I’m lucky that my secret admirer hasn’t scared you off entirely,” he said. “Fine. I doubt I’ll be going out anywhere this morning. If anything changes with Edward before that, I can get an Uber. That is, assuming you will be back?”

  “Nowhere else to be.” Or that he’d rather be, but even that made Cal squirm with discomfort.

  Joe let a slow sweet grin slip through his reserve as though he’d heard it anyway. “Good to know,” he said. “Until we get back to the hotel, though, you’re still on the clock. I’ll see you outside.”

  He headed over to the nurse’s station, and Cal left him to sort out the details while he went to fetch the car. He supposed he could have told Joe what he had to do, but he preferred to keep it to himself until he knew whether or not Van had found out anything useful about the kid who’d attacked Joe in the graveyard… and if Cal trusted the information.

  Van wasn’t the most reliable man at the best of times, and Cal had blackmailed him.

  Cal dropped Joe at the hotel and then called Van on the Bluetooth as he turned the Bentley toward his flat. He needed to change. There was a point where the smell of last night’s sex became “the smell.” It rang an unfeasibly long time before it finally cut to the answering machine.

  “I’m busy,” Van’s recorded voice drawled. “Or you’re not important. Try again later.”

  Cal didn’t bother to leave a message. Ten minutes later the phone rang. It used to be that the sight of Van’s name splashed over his phone would have given Cal butterflies. Even after Van fucked him over, Cal always half wanted the next call to be the one that made it better. Not that there had been many.

  As he changed lanes and squeezed the Bentley past a double-decker bus—the tourists on top took pictures as he passed, in case there was someone worth a photo inside—he felt flat. No infatuation, no adrenaline kick in expectation of their next job, not even any anger.

  It felt strange, but Cal supposed he knew why.

  He answered the phone.

  “You fall down a hole?” Van asked over a backdrop of cafe noise and the snotty gasps of someone in tears. “I called last night.”

  “I was busy.”

  “I saw that on the news,” Van said. The line went muffled, Van’s voice dim as he snapped at someone, “Would you give over? If I didn’t want to keep fucking you before, I certainly don’t now. You look like my mother after she’s been at the gin.”

  A young voice spat a tear-snotty “Bastard,” as a chair scraped back from the table.

  “Thank fuck for that,” Van muttered as he lifted the phone back to his ear. He didn’t bother to explain himself. He didn’t need to. It wasn’t the first scene like that Cal had seen, or been part of, although he’d stuck to the insults and skipped the tears. “That guy who got knocked down at the Renaissance, I saw you with his boss in the photos. Cozy. Looked like you got yourself in there nicely.”

  That made Cal feel something, but he clenched his teeth on his temper. He didn’t like the wet insinuation in Van’s voice, but he still needed his information.

  “It looked like it was none of your business,” he said. “What did you get for me?”

  Van’s laugh was dirty. “Gotta tell you, after your little display the other night, a hard-on. It reminded me of what I’d missed. We used to have a lot of fun together. Remember?”

  Cal botched an attempt to cut in front of a white van and had to tuck the Bentley back into its lane. It wasn’t the come-on, it was how fucking transparent it was that Van thought he could use Cal to get something out of Joe. It was pathetic, and Cal used to fall for it.

  “I remember,” he said. “It used to be a right laugh in the cells at night when I told people how you’d set me up. We all thought you were a right joker.”

  Van clicked his tongue and dropped the act. “Still holding a grudge. All right. The guy you want is Logan Calle. He’s seventeen, lives in a flat over a hairdresser’s on Turnpike Lane. Him and his girlfriend had a sideline in rolling Johns for their wallets. That how you met him? We both know your new friend must like a bit of rough if he’s into you.”

  “What hairdresser?”

  “Loads of Locks,” Van said. There was a crunch as he bit down into some toast. The thought of breakfast, despite everything that was going on, made Cal’s stomach grumble. “Woman who runs the place is called Maggie Dee. She owes me one, but I’m not wasting that on you. So, if you want a favor, sort it out yourself.”

  The line went dead.

  MAGGIE DEE was six foot two in heels and wore a headscarf pleated into intricate folds until it looked like a shell. She’d also a soft spot for scabby little oiks like the one she rented her flat to, and she wasn’t about to tell some stranger with scarred knuckles anything about him.

  “I’ll tell him you called,” she said as she plucked his card from his fingers with sharp, white-tipped nails. She looked down her nose at him. “If I see him, that is.”

  1970s pop played in the background, and the staff, at a loose end this early in the morning, eavesdropped as they made busywork at nearby stations. The only client, an old lady in to have her thin, white hair washed and set, didn’t even bother to pretend she wasn’t listening. She turned around in her chair and drank her tea while she watched them with interest.

  “I’d appreciate that,” Cal said. “Tell him that he ain’t in trouble. I want to have a word about… someone he knows.”

  Maggie tucked the card into the waistband of her skin-tight trousers and gave him a thin, dry smile. “I’ll tell him you called. Now, unless you want your hair cut—” Her eyes flicked to his close-cropped scalp and she pursed her lips in disapproval. “—you can leave.”

  His hair did need a trim. Cal suspected that Maggie would make a point to take it down to the wood. He shook his head and left her with one last assurance that it was important he talk to Logan. She didn’t look like she cared.

  Cal went across the road and two doors down, to a narrow little kebab shop. It was tiled like a bathroom and smelled like old grease, but they were open for breakfast. Cal handed over a fiver for a pita stuffed with meat, mushrooms, and onions with a fried egg slapped on top to leak through. He doused it
with ketchup—the Aussie behind the counter made a face at that—and went out to wait for Logan to either roll in or out.

  He was halfway through his breakfast and all the way to regret when the bus pulled up and a lanky teenager shuffled off. Cal hadn’t gotten a good look the day at the graveyard, but the Slipknot hoodie was the same, and after the kid spat in the gutter and scratched himself, he headed in through the door to Loads of Locks.

  Cal tossed the remnants of the breakfast kebab in the bin and wiped his hands on a napkin as he jogged over the road. He dodged the oncoming cars—one dented Nissan Mura with too many kids packed in the back nearly ran over his booted feet—and hopped up the curb onto the pavement. The chimes hung over Maggie’s door rattled as he let himself in.

  “… is she?” Maggie asked Logan as she pushed a mug of tea into his hands. Without the skull mask pulled up to his nose, Logan was a bony teenager with surprisingly good skin and heavy, blood-shot eyes. He dropped the tea when he saw Cal. It hit the black-and-white-tiled floor and splashed milky tea everywhere.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” he spluttered at Cal. Then he cut a suspicious look toward Maggie. “Did you tell him I was going to be here, Maggie? I told you it was a fucking accident.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Maggie snapped. She grabbed his arm and twisted her fingers into his hoodie. “I told him to go, but of course he was going to come back. You knew that. He found out your name. He wasn’t going to shrug it off because you weren’t in when he got here.”

  Cal closed the door behind him before Logan could make a break for it. He pushed his hands into the pocket of his jeans and tried to look unthreatening.

  “I just want a word,” he said.

  “It was an accident,” Logan spat at him. “I was only going to give the tall guy a scare, warn him off. Then you came out of nowhere and grabbed me. I had to defend myself, right? It wasn’t my fault you got hurt. Maybe you should stay out of things that don’t concern you, mate.”