Hard Line

by Sidney Bell

  More to that point, why was Tobias the only one of the kids who still had his original last name?

  It was an anomaly.

  Sullivan dug deeper.

  Tobias had graduated from a Catholic high school in a district equitable with two doctors’ salaries, albeit a year and a half later than normal students would’ve. That time in the residential treatment facility, Sullivan supposed. Tobias didn’t have a criminal record, and for the past four and a half years he’d been a student at Metro State University of Denver, studying Cell & Molecular Biology. He was likely to graduate this upcoming winter.

  There was nothing concrete about Tobias’s adoption. He found a few mentions in local papers of a teenage girl with the same last name abandoning a baby back in the day, but he couldn’t tell for sure that she was the birth mother in question. If she was Tobias’s mother, though, it was pretty fucked up.

  After staring at the results for a long while, Sullivan decided he wasn’t going to be sympathetic. Tobias’s adoptive parents might be decent human beings who liked to help others, but whether or not they’d gotten around to giving their kids the whole don’t-blackmail-people lecture didn’t matter. This rested on Tobias’s shoulders and didn’t buy him any slack.

  He got out the Nathalie Trudeau case file and tapped a finger against the photograph of the girl. She couldn’t have been a more storybook representation of innocence, with her slightly bucktoothed grin where her adult teeth had come in too big for her face.

  “What happened to you?” he muttered.

  When he was tired of feeling maudlin, he put the photo aside and got to work.

  He ran searches for every variation of Yalena/Yellena, Seryozha, and Yasha Krayev that he could think of, then realized he’d skipped ahead and did some research into Russian names. When he went back to Google, he changed Krayev to Krayeva for Mama’s searches because Russians used gendered last names. He wished he had their patronymics—Russian children had a middle name denoting their father’s family—because that would really help narrow things down, but he couldn’t find anything.

  He was able to nail down a mug shot photo that made it clear that Yasha’s real name was Yakov, and there was a woman named Yelena Krayeva who’d done a charity thing for abused women at a local restaurant a few years back, but there was nothing conclusive, and there were no pictures attached. He couldn’t be sure that Yelena was the same person as Mama.

  Unfortunately, whoever Mama was, she’d covered her tracks well.

  Next, he went through the list of Ghost’s contacts. The text messages and code names marked almost all of them as clients, but Sullivan checked them anyway. He used online reverse directories mostly, and ran the unpublished numbers through a PI database that private citizens couldn’t access, and probably wouldn’t want to, since they charged about fifty bucks a number. For now, the only nonpublished number that he was willing to pay for was the cell phone of the mysterious K.

  But he got nothing. The number was unassigned, belonging to a burner phone. A dead end.

  After he’d gotten everything he could from Ghost’s phone, he started some searches for his actual job, quickly getting what he needed to serve one of his dirtbags with a bright, shiny subpoena.

  The answer was just sitting there. Waiting. Like the universe had cleared every potential obstacle out of his way.

  It kind of pissed him off.

  “How’d it go?”

  Sullivan jerked his head up, finding Raina in the doorway. He blinked at her, wondering where the hell she’d come from—she was damn sneaky for someone who wore heels all the time—and she clarified, “With the concerned citizen?”

  Right. Sullivan shrugged and let some of his annoyance show. A half-lie was always more believable than one made up wholesale. “He’s kind of an asshole.”

  She pulled a yogurt out of the fridge. “A useful one?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I hope this isn’t the report so comprehensive I’ll die that you mentioned earlier, because it leaves something to be desired.”

  He explained everything up to the point where Tobias had requested to play assistant, instead saying that he was sure that Tobias knew more, and that with some finessing, Sullivan might be able to get the break he needed. He also pointed out that he wasn’t behind on his regular work.

  Raina made doubtful, noncommittal noises, but she did that a lot when Sullivan said things, so he didn’t read too much into it.

  Not long after, he was following Jasper Giff, a disability-hosing loser in his forties, into a grocery store. Sullivan made his move in the freezer aisle, and barely had time to say, “Jasper Giff?” before the guy dropped his toilet paper and margarita mix and ran for it. Giff managed to make it through the parking lot and behind the wheel of his car before Sullivan caught up, and proceeded to laugh at him through the windshield as he fumbled to start the engine. “Too late!” he called.

  Sullivan slapped the packet of paper down on the hood and called back, “This counts as being served, and it’ll hold up in court. Have a nice day, dickhead.” He left the packet on the hood and, with Giff’s furious curses ringing in his ears, crossed the lot to where he’d left the Buick.

  His irritation didn’t fade with the success of the chase. As he filled out the form he would send to the district attorney’s office to show that he’d delivered the papers, he was tempted to do something juvenile, like punch the dash.

  All too easy. The usual channels, the usual answers, the usual outcome. Giff had been right where any other disability-hosing jerkwad would be hiding—at his girlfriend’s house. All it had taken was waiting for the idiot to come out where Sullivan could get to him, and bingo. Four hours from start to finish, and not an original thought required or a single challenge found at any point in the process. Even the stupid chase had been predictable—guys like Giff always ran.

  ASI and other investigatory agencies like them only got the tricky subpoena cases; the district attorney’s office and the bigger law firms had their own people to serve papers to those witnesses and defendants who weren’t trying to hide. Sullivan was only sent after the dumb asses who couldn’t be quickly located by an intern.

  Giff and the other guys like him were supposed to be the hard cases, and it had still been by the numbers. Textbook. Easy cash.

  Unsatisfying.

  That familiar discontent settled over him like a blanket, and he could feel himself getting moody. As angry as he was about Tobias’s manipulative blackmail attempt, at least that was interesting. The contrast between the work he’d done just now and the work he’d been doing on Nathalie’s case had never been so clear, and for a second he couldn’t help acknowledging that he was worried that he wouldn’t be able to solve it. He’d go crazy doing nothing but serving subpoenas for the next year.

  * * *

  After dinner, as he was nodding off on the couch to a nature documentary about wasps, his cell rang. He checked the screen, saw Caty’s name, and set it aside. The ringing continued until voicemail kicked in, then stopped. For a moment, anyway, before resuming. Went to voicemail. Ringing resumed again. Over and over.

  There was a long pause. Nearly three minutes passed.

  He was beginning to think he’d weathered the storm when his cell rang again. Lisbeth’s number this time, and he sighed.

  He answered with, “I’m not talking about it. I’m not. I’ll hang up first.”

  Even before she said a word, Lisbeth’s habitual calm wafted across the line like a subtle perfume. Pleasant. Soothing. Sweet. Especially compared to Caty’s yelling in the background. He only caught about every third word or so, but he got the gist from coward, and delusional and bastard.

  Lisbeth said, “I don’t want you to talk about your feelings, Sullivan.”

  “Good. How’s work? Write any confusing contract lingo today?”

  “Nope, we�
�re not doing that, either. You’re going to listen while I explain something, and then, once you’ve thought about what I’ve said, you’re going to call Caty and deal with this like an adult.”

  “No promises.”

  She waited silently.

  Eventually, when it became too awkward to stand, he said, “All right. Fine. God.”

  “Thank you.” She was serene in her victory. “Please hear me out before you respond. I won’t take long.”

  He turned off the television and resigned himself to misery.

  “We’re not friends because we like each other, I think you’ll agree. We’re friends because you love Caty and she loves you and she belongs to me, which means, by extension, you do as well. And since I have no motivation to sugarcoat uncomfortable truths to protect your feelings, I think you might find my read on things more objective than hers. So here it is: you’ve been unkind.”

  Sullivan sucked in a breath. In the background he could hear Caty’s yelling elevate to a more fevered pitch.

  “One moment, please, Sullivan.” There was a rustle on the other end of the phone, then a thud that might’ve been a door closing. Caty’s shouts became distant.

  “Sorry about that,” Lisbeth said, placid as ever. “Now, I think you’ll agree with me that the situation with Nick was badly handled on your part, although I suspect we would give different reasons for why we think so. That you’ve reacted by adopting celibacy leads me to believe that you’re suffering a persistent insecurity.”

  “Jesus,” he muttered. “Is there anything Caty doesn’t tell you?”

  “There are no secrets in a healthy Dom/sub relationship,” she replied, only a little smugly. “Where was I? Yes, I think you’ve been unkind—to yourself. You’ve allowed him to warp your opinion of yourself, and since his opinion is very limited in experience and open-mindedness, you’re judging yourself by an inferior standard.”

  “Lisbeth—”

  “There’s nothing wrong with you,” she explained, so brutally plain about it that it made an actual lump rise in his throat. “I know it’s difficult not to internalize the judgments of people we care about, but it’s something we all have to learn not to do, because the alternative is to be miserable and subject to other people’s whims. You gave yourself impossible expectations to live up to, and you’ve been cruel to yourself ever since you decided—erroneously, I might add—that you failed.”

  “Lisbeth—”

  “Be quiet, please.”

  He closed his eyes.

  “The relationship failed because you attempted to change yourself to make him happy, not because you’re monstrous. You’re not an animal; you’re a dominant. That he couldn’t see the difference is a flaw in his thinking, not yours. Punishing yourself like this is both wasteful and blind to the reality of the situation.”

  “You can’t know that.” He sounded like he was choking.

  “Have I ever lied to you?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever thought me kind?”

  “No,” he murmured. “No, you’re not kind.”

  “Then hear me, Sullivan. What Nick said was untrue, ignorant and cruel. And, to my way of thinking, unforgivable when said by a lover or a friend.”

  His chest hurt. Fuck, it hurt like a boulder lay on it.

  “Do you understand?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Call Caty when you’re ready.” Lisbeth hung up on him.

  Sullivan rolled over on his couch and pressed his face into the cushion. His skin felt hot and too tight, his stomach sick, and that damn boulder was still there, crushing his chest into fragments. He smothered his wet, ragged breaths into the couch cushions and pretended that he couldn’t still hear Nick’s words in his head.

  This is disgusting. You’re like an animal. These things you want...they’re monstrous.

  Why can’t you just be normal?

  He had to force himself to tune those out, to hear Lisbeth’s words instead: there is nothing wrong with you.

  Eventually he slept.

  * * *

  He woke up to an eleven-mile dawn.

  The morning was full grown and his legs were jelly by the time he was done. In the shower, he sat on the floor of the tub and let cold water beat down on him. He toweled off and drank half a Gatorade. He managed to get dressed before the last of his energy became apathy and he stretched out on the couch again. He needed to close his eyes for a minute. Just to catch his breath and regain his equilibrium. Just for a minute.

  * * *

  “This is pathetic.”

  Sullivan cracked open an eye and saw a tall brunette with fawn-colored skin wearing a red pantsuit staring down at him in disdain. She was perched on the battered steamer trunk that he used as a makeshift coffee table as if she were afraid she might catch anthrax from the surface. She was peering around at the streaks of paint on the ancient hardwood floor and the grimy windows with the expression of someone witnessing an autopsy. He blinked, the blankness in his brain slowly taking shape.

  Raina.

  “You live in a crack den,” she informed him.

  “Why are you here?” Since he was almost flat on his face, the couch ate most of his words. Perplexed, he began to lift his head, and then froze. “What time is it?”

  “Nearly noon.”

  “Shit. I overslept.”

  “Apparently.” She flicked him on the nose hard enough that tears sprang to his eyes, then sniffed him while he lay there wincing. “You don’t smell hungover.”

  “I’m not.” He sat up, patting his aching nose gingerly.

  “I thought perhaps you’d stumbled onto your concerned citizen’s dirty laundry and been murdered.”

  “Your luck’s not that good. Bad night, that’s all. I’m sorry I didn’t call. Won’t happen again.”

  Those sharp brown eyes picked at him like he was a tangled knot of string that she was determined to unravel. It was disconcerting and familiar at the same time. He’d gotten that look a lot last year. He hadn’t told Raina much about the Nick situation—he and Raina were a strange mixture of friendship and professionalism and cutthroat competition that didn’t exactly invite confidences—but she was a keen observer and it wasn’t like the signs of a bad breakup were hard to read. Getting dumped happened to everyone; the symptoms were universal.

  Well, except to Raina. If the man who would dump Raina existed, he probably wouldn’t be alive for long after it happened. Sullivan certainly wouldn’t dare, not that he would make a move in the first place. No matter how much he appreciated her legs when she wasn’t looking, they worked together, and besides, Sullivan’s sexual tastes ran in a direction he was pretty sure would result in Raina extracting his intestines.

  “I’m fine,” Sullivan insisted, and grabbed a packet of nicotine gum from the floor where he’d dropped it last night. “See? Not smoking. Awake. I’m good to go.”

  She continued to stare at him. “If the case is too much for you...”

  “It’s not. I’m fine. I just overslept.” He frowned at her. “Wait. How did you get in here?”

  She stood, the ring of keys in her hand—which apparently held a copy of his house key that he definitely had not given her—jingling, and gave him a cold smirk. “The front door was unlocked.” She walked out of the living room, stepping carefully over the rotting boards piled in the entryway.

  “It fucking was not,” he yelled after her. Her only response was to laugh as she left.

  He supposed he shouldn’t be shocked that a professional snoop had broken in with an illegally obtained key.

  He raked a hand over his face. He felt marginally better than he had earlier. More capable of handling the activities of the day, which meant finding his blackmailer, doing some investigating, and snitching his house key off of Raina’s key ring.

 
He needed to call Caty, too. Not today. Soon, though. She would probably yell. She liked to yell, and she was good at it.

  He took a second to feel very put-upon by the demands of the women in his life. It occurred to him—not for the first time—that he needed to keep Caty and Lisbeth and Raina from meeting at all costs, because if they did, they would take over the world, creating some kind of amazon utopia, which wouldn’t bother him if not for the part where he—as a male—would be too dead to enjoy it.

  * * *

  He stopped for breakfast on the way to Tobias’s motel, getting a cup of coffee large enough to decimate his stomach lining by the end of the day, and pounded on the door with the flat side of his fist. It opened so swiftly that he felt a rush of air against his face.

  “Where have you been?” Tobias asked, the words stiff and bitten-off.

  “Hello, Tobias. I’m fine, thank you for asking. Yes, it is a lovely day, isn’t it?”

  Tobias’s eyebrows crushed together, and Sullivan watched with growing, vindictive amusement as Tobias fought the urge to be polite. Finally, resignedly, he said, “Sorry. Hello, Sullivan. How are you?”

  “Fine.”

  “Great. Where have you been?”

  Sullivan rolled his eyes and went inside. “Chill. I overslept.”

  Tobias closed the door behind him with an air of such perfect control that Sullivan knew that he’d been tempted to slam it. “Half the day is gone.”

  Sullivan put his bag of food on the table. “I have a life outside of following your every impulse, you know.”

  Tobias’s shoulders tensed. “What are the plans for today?”

  “Today we’re going to commit a crime.”

  That crease between Tobias’s eyebrows deepened. “I—I don’t—”

  “Don’t try to pretend that’s crossing some sort of line for you.” Sullivan eyed him darkly and crammed half of a greasy hash brown patty into his mouth.