by TA Moore
She hiccuped a breathless laugh as she looked around. “Doesn’t matter. Nobody.” It wasn’t just a lie, it was an afterthought. “I just don’t want to get divorced. He’s a good man, really, just under a lot of stress. I don’t want to make it any worse, and we need… we need money.”
Her eyes were wet with tears as they darted nervously toward the road again. A big blue SUV was parked at the curb. Clayton hadn’t paid it any attention earlier.
“Okay,” Clayton said slowly. He freed his wrist from her fingers and turned her toward the building. “I just need you to sign some papers. Then you can do whatever you want.”
Nadine resisted the pressure of his hand. “I can’t,” she whispered. A tear escaped, and she angrily swiped it away with her fingertips. “They hurt Jimmy. If they don’t get their money, they’ll hurt me. Or Harry.”
The mention of his name made her face crumple for a second, and she looked just as achingly vulnerable as her son.
“Harry’s safe. You don’t have to worry.”
Nadine’s sniffed and shook her head. “They know where he is,” she said. “They took pictures of him. Of my son.”
She wrenched her arm free of his grip and backed away.
“Look. Just come with me. You’ll be safe,” Clayton tried to reassure her. It was his turn to glance at the car as the door opened and expelled a lean, wiry man in a faded gray sweatshirt with sweat stains at his collar and under his arms. He looked like a rat, but a tough one. “The police know what’s going on. They’ll protect you. They’ll make sure nothing happens to Harry.”
She folded her bare, bruised mouth in a humorless pleat of a smile.
“You already promised me that once,” she said. There was no real venom in her voice, but the accusation still caught Clayton somewhere raw. “I shouldn’t have listened. They just want money, and I’ll give it to them. I don’t care what happens to Jimmy now. To hell with him… and you. I just have to take care of my son.”
She turned and walked briskly back toward the car. Shit. Clayton pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialed 9-1-1 as he went after her.
“You don’t know what’s happened,” he said as he caught up with her. He grabbed her elbow and pulled her back a step. At the car, the tough rat glanced back inside at someone for instructions. “Jimmy can’t hurt you anymore. Neither will they.”
She swallowed hard. “I can’t risk it,” she said. “This is all my fault anyhow. Better me than Harry.”
The rat pushed himself off the car and swaggered across the sidewalk. He held one hand behind his back, and the muscle in his arm flexed as he gripped something.
“She’s coming with me.”
The phone connected, and the tinny voice of the operator asked what his emergency was. Clayton ignored it as he tightened his grip on Nadine’s elbow.
“If we go inside, there’s a security system… guards,” he said. “They won’t be able to touch you. I can get Harry here too. We can protect you. If you leave with them, we can’t.”
She looked down at her arm and then up at him. “Are you going to make me stay?” she asked. “Going to drag me in there against my will?”
He hesitated but finally made himself let go of her. Even if he were willing to manhandle her, the men in the car would catch them before they got far. Clayton shifted his attention to Rat Boy.
“You have no idea what you’re getting into,” he said. “Let her go. Do what you like to Jimmy. That’s no skin off my nose. He’s the one you have a problem with. Obviously.”
Rat snorted. “Not for long,” he said. “And shut up. Get in the car, woman.”
Nadine took a step, hesitated, and looked back at Clayton. “I don’t need to be rescued,” she said. “I’m sorry I got into this. I’m sorry, but just do as I ask.”
“I told you to get in the car,” Rat snarled. He grabbed her shoulder and swung around to march her to it.
It wasn’t a gun shoved into the back of his jeans. Just a hammer.
Clayton cursed briskly and lifted his phone to his ear. “Hello?” he said to the worried-sounding operator. “There’s a woman being kidnapped outside the Symons Building. It’s a blue Nissan…”
He backed up to see the tags on the SUV. “Rogue. License is—”
“Fucker,” Rat muttered and shoved Nadine roughly toward the car. He yanked the hammer out of his waistband and loped toward Clayton. “You should have kept your nose out of this, asshole.”
Probably.
Rat swung the hammer in a low, nasty arc. It wasn’t aimed at Clayton’s head. It was meant to make him scramble away. Back off.
“SWR,” Clayton told the operator. “The rest is obscured.”
This time the hammer was aimed at his face. Clayton jerked his head back, the prickle of old habits chill on the back of his neck, and the blunt end of it caught his hand. He felt the crunch of something under the skin. It didn’t hurt—not yet—but he could feel the tight heat where it would, and he heard the crack as the phone hit the ground.
Rat grinned nastily, and Clayton punched him in the mouth. The crack of bony knuckles against teeth was the last thing Rat expected. Most people would have been cowed by the violence, by the shock of assault. But Clayton had been punched before. Even as an adult, a surprising number of people thought it was okay to punch their ex’s lawyer.
Surprise flared in Rat’s eyes, and he staggered back. He spat blood onto the pavement, wiped his mouth on his arm, and glared at Clayton.
“When I’m done w’ you,” he slurred through split lips. “Expensive suits ain’t even gonna make you pretty.”
He worked his fingers around the rubber handle of the hammer and took a step forward. Despite the rough words, he looked nervous, as though he hadn’t expected it to escalate. He flinched in surprise when the lights suddenly came on, and he lifted one hand to shade his eyes.
“Hey! You! Get the hell out of here.” It was the first time Clayton had heard the security guard say anything other than “Have a good night.” The stocky man had finally noticed the fight and come outside. He ran across the plaza with his gun gripped in one sweaty hand.
It was a Taser. Clayton knew that, but it looked real enough in the moment.
Nadine was already in the car. Whoever the driver was yelled flatly, “Get in the goddamn car. Leave it.”
Rat turned and ran. He threw himself into the back of the SUV as it pulled away.
That’s when Clayton’s hand decided to hurt.
Chapter Fifteen
“BEER?” JIM asked suspiciously as Kelly handed him the cold glass.
“Ginger,” Kelly told his dad. “Mom said the doctor—”
Jim interrupted with a disgusted noise.
“No booze. No smoking. No fried foods,” Jim grumbled as he ducked his head back under the hood of his hobby car, an old Willy’s Jeepster in vintage denim blue and halfway to drivable. Sweat beaded on the sun-scorched back of his neck. “Don’t know if they’re making me live longer, or just making it feel like longer. It’s going to be a bloody awful barbecue.”
Despite his grumbling, he sucked down half the jug of chilled ginger beer, wiped his mouth, and burped discreetly. He set the glass on the edge of the engine and shoved his hands into the half-built guts. The car wasn’t going to be on the road anytime soon. Kelly had spent hours on it with his dad when he was a kid, just the two of him usually. It was the sort of thing Byron always got bored with quickly.
While Kathleen prepped ribs and barbecue sauce, Jim had fixed the suspension and shown Kelly how to sandpaper down and fill the holes drilled in the bumper. At least until his buddies rolled up with chilled six-packs and gossip from the precinct. Then he’d tossed Kelly a twenty to polish the leather until it was like butter and clear up the drive.
It was only years later that Kelly realized those were bullet holes in the metal. Like so much in his family, the ugly truth went unsaid.
“So, I heard that, ahh, your friend went back to Ireland,” J
im said from under the hood. It was the first time they’d talked in weeks. Neither of them had mentioned that. Probably wouldn’t either. “For the best really, with you taking Byron’s lad in like that.”
Kelly sat down on the low wall that separated the drive from what his mom insisted would be her perfect lawn one day, when she had time. He took a drink of his beer—actual beer, no ginger involved—and wiped sweat off his forehead onto his arm. The forecast kept promising the heat would break, but every day the sun defied it. From inside the house, Maxie’s persistent, miserable wail registered his opinion of the heat. The steady monotonous note of it caught under Kelly’s skin, but if he went into the house, Kathleen would chase him back out again.
“You have to let him cry it out,” she tutted last time. “Byron isn’t going to spoil him like you did. He needs to get used to that.”
It didn’t seem like something someone should have to get used to, never mind a baby who couldn’t even sit up yet. But Kelly didn’t get a say in that. Maxie was Byron’s son, and he got to decide—even if that had already screwed up one kid.
“Liam was here on a student visa,” Kelly said as he tried to ignore Maxie’s piercing, fire-siren frustration. “He was always going to go home one day. We both knew that.”
He had. Just like he’d known that Joey planned on a military career before he came out of the closet, that Harve was really obsessed with his ex and that was never going away, and that every other guy he’d ever fallen in love with came with a preestablished expiration date. It was easy to fall in love with them, because it was never going to really matter. He’d never have to choose between them and his family, never have to face what it meant when Kathleen asked him to be “discreet” in front of Jim’s friends.
“Thing is, Dad, I’ve met someone else,” he said. His throat was dry, and somewhere he imagined Clayton felt a chill run down his back. “He’s… I really like him.”
That got him a grunt from under the hood and a brisk request for a different wrench. Kelly picked it up and didn’t hand it over. The end of it was scraped and dented from a long-ago impact with a garage wall.
“I thought I might bring him over sometime,” he said. Or he had thought that—daydreamed that—before he realized what Byron had done. There’d be someone though, one day, even if he couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for it right now. “Maybe for dinner.”
“Your mom runnin’ a café now?”
“She’s hosting a barbecue for half your precinct tomorrow,” Kelly pointed out in exasperation. “Like she does once a month. Chili’s goes through less ribs.”
Jim snorted. “That’s different. And your brothers, Father Peters, my old partner and his wife? They aren’t strangers. They’re family.”
“Maybe I could bring him next time.”
“Well, I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” Jim said. He stuck his hand out and wriggled his fingers until Kelly handed over the damaged wrench. “What if someone says something?”
“Like what?”
Jim shrugged. “You know what the boys can be like. Some of them ain’t… politically correct.”
For a while the only sound was the rattle of wrench on metal and the occasional grunted curse from under the hood. Kelly scratched the scabs on his knuckles and tried to remember how to be an adult. It was harder than it should have been while he sat on his dad’s drive with the sun hot on the cropped nape of his neck.
“Dad, why didn’t you want me to take care of Maxie?” he asked. It was a question he was pretty sure he knew the answer to, but he’d never wanted to face it before.
“He your kid?” Jim asked. “You go against the grain and fuck your sister-in-law?”
It wasn’t funny. There was nothing funny about any of it. Even Byron, laid up with his ankle in plaster. It might be deserved, but it wasn’t funny. Kelly still nearly choked on his startled snigger.
That was Dad, crude wit and a sly wink as he passed them five bucks and told them not to tell Mom.
This whole situation—from the shame of what Byron had done to the guilt of not telling that Clayton was onto him—would have been easier if Kelly hadn’t loved them, or at least been so used to them that it was the same thing.
“Jesus, Dad,” he said. “No, I didn’t. She hated me.”
“Yeah, well.” Jim finally came out from under the car. He pulled an oily cloth out of his pocket and wiped his hands. Then he stole Kelly’s beer and gestured with the half-empty bottle. “You clean up your own mess, you shoulder your own responsibilities. God didn’t put anyone on this earth to pick up after you. That wee fella is Byron’s son, and Kathleen shouldn’t have gone to you lot to cover for him. Told her that.”
He punctuated the statement with a deep draught of forbidden beer and glanced guiltily toward the house as he swallowed.
It sounded good. Kelly wanted to believe it.
“I thought it might be because I was gay,” he said quietly. “Maybe you thought someone would say something.”
Jim scratched his jaw. His fingers left oily smudges in the gray scruff he’d cultivate until Monday morning. It was hard sometimes to remember that it had been twenty years since he’d shown Kelly how to change the oil in the car or throw his first punch. Back then—when everyone assumed Kelly just didn’t want to kiss girls because of cooties—he thought Jim knew everything. The Word of God that Father Peter preached on Sundays had nothing on the Word of Jim, as far as Kelly was concerned.
“Okay, yeah. That crossed my mind,” he said. “You know what it’s like. People think things, don’t they? Come up with things. You hear it all in my line of work. We get calls all the time from people who’ve seen a man outside a school or heard a toddler throw a tantrum when a man picked them up. Most of the time, it’s their dad or uncle, but we still have to go ask questions. All it takes is one of your ma’s church friends to say it’s odd that you don’t mind changing Maxie’s diapers, and then, well, people always like to think the worst.”
“Yeah,” Kelly said resignedly. “I guess they do.”
He left the beer with Jim and headed inside. Maybe he had to come to terms with adults being fallible. Maxie could wait a few years before he had to realize that.
WHEN THEY were kids, Byron caught chicken pox from a kid at school. Actually Kelly caught it first, but no one mentioned that in retellings, and even he tended to forget that detail. Kathleen had given Byron a bell to ring if he needed anything.
Every ten minutes he rang that bell. In the end Cole took it from him and buried it in the back garden somewhere. Actually it might still be there. No one had found it again.
For years that insistent tinkle-tinkle had held pride of place in Kelly’s brain for the most annoying sound ever. Apparently now there was an app for that, with a variety of different bells.
The gong was the one that set Kelly’s teeth on edge.
Everyone looked up as the bong echoed down the hall at maximum volume.
“Aggie,” Kathleen asked as she grabbed a packet of ham out of the fridge. “Go see if he needs anything, dear?”
The muscles in Aggie’s jaw clenched. She stuck her hands in the soapy water in the sink and then shook them off.
“I’m a pathologist, Kathleen,” she said. “Unless he’s going to die, I’m not much use to him.”
Kathleen tched at her. “He’s sick, dear. Be nice.”
Aggie’s lip curled her opinion, but she dried her hands on a tea towel and stalked off.
“You could just ignore him,” Kelly said as he held Maxie on his knee with one hand cupped behind his head and mock bounced him. “He’ll get used to it.”
Jim probably wouldn’t have noticed it, but Kathleen caught the echo of her own words. She threw a handful of pickles onto the sandwich and slapped the top slice of bread on top.
“He has a broken leg,” she said. “What’s he going to do, hop down to dinner? I’m just glad he feels like he could keep something down today.”
Kelly rolled h
is eyes and turned his attention back to Maxie. Taking off his socks and his weird little baby jeans had stopped the tears, but Maxie’s cheeks were still raw and pink from frustration. Kelly used the hem of his T-shirt to wipe them and pulled a face for him.
It was apparently the funniest thing that Maxie had ever seen, and he gurgled out a delighted baby crow and waved his arms and legs about in uncoordinated glee. Kelly had to laugh along as he caught one of Maxie’s hands and kissed it.
It was sticky but the tickle of it made Maxie laugh again.
“He likes you,” Kathleen said. She ruffled Kelly’s hair with an affectionate hand. “You’re going to be his favorite uncle one day.”
Kelly lifted Maxie up so he mock stood on Kelly’s denim-clad knees. “Hear that?” he said as Maxie kicked him. “I’m the best uncle, even if you don’t know it yet.”
Maxie burped a skeptical spit bubble and stretched up onto his tiptoes. At some point over the last few days, he’d done some weird baby thing and looked more like a baby than a grumpy alien infant. He was still skinny, and still had a dubious air for the whole life thing, but he seemed sturdier.
“This is why I wanted a big family,” Kathleen said wistfully as she turned back to make the coffee. “So you’d have this—family to step in and help out when needed. When I had you boys—my family all the way back in Donegal and your dad’s in Derry—it was lonely. I’m so proud my boys are all still close, that you can all come together and support each other.”
Guilt pinched Kelly hard somewhere soft and vulnerable. He didn’t appreciate it. It wasn’t as though he owed Byron anything, and he hadn’t for a long time. Even if he did—even if it had been Cole or Wilde—what had been done to Nadine and Harry was still beyond the pale.
He knew that, but it was just hard to believe it. Or maybe he knew that, once it all came out, his mom wouldn’t believe it.
“Mom, maybe I should take Maxie again tonight,” he said.
She tutted at him. “Sweetheart, I know you’re lonely since Liam left, but Maxie isn’t a dog. He should be with his dad.”