Every Other Weekend

by TA Moore

  “I had access to operational money to rent a warehouse, the buy-in to the dealer’s business, and to flash the cash when I needed. If they checked me out, I had to look the part on paper, didn’t I?” Byron rubbed his thigh again. “Money was there. I needed it. I figured I could slot it back in later—move some funds around—no harm done. Except you idiots froze Jimmy’s accounts, and I had to try and scramble to cover my ass. So unless you think the LAPD have employed leg breakers to collect on debts… nothing to do with me.”

  Clayton rubbed his eyes. His head ached with a sick pulse in time with his hand. It hurt more since they bandaged it, and the pressure of the dressing against tender bones made it throb harder. He could taste failure in the back of his throat, like Utah dust and cheap beer. It had been a mistake to come here today, to make a decision while he was angry and still twitchy with adrenaline. All he’d done was give Byron a heads-up that he was under investigation.

  “I told you that you wouldn’t like it,” Byron said smugly. “I don’t know who took Nadine or how they even knew she left Jimmy. It’s not exactly something I was boasting about—”

  “Shit.”

  Clayton twisted around to look at Kelly. Guilt hung on his face like a weight. Clayton knew the feeling. “What?”

  Kelly hesitated for a second and then grimaced.

  “What about Kevoian,” he asked. “There’s bad blood there, right?”

  Confusion creased Byron’s face. “Gregor?” He snorted. “Naw, he’s Jimmy’s business partner. They’re tight. We’ve been working him for years. He was Jimmy’s ‘in’ to Glendale. Low-level carjacker, but he’s got aspirations to power, and that makes him useful. No reason to burn him yet.”

  “You tell him that?” Kelly asked. “Because when I talked to him, he said Jimmy had double-crossed him. Then he implied you double-crossed your new partners as well, and they weren’t happy about it.”

  Byron swore viciously under his breath and threw the half-drunk glass of lemonade at Kelly’s head. Pink liquid and lumps of strawberry splattered over Kelly and the wall behind him an instant after Kelly got his arms up to block the tumbler’s impact with his face. It smashed against his forearms and scattered over the ground.

  “Five years,” Byron yelled. He grabbed for the plate on the bedside table next to him. “Five fucking years of pretending I liked that greasy dickhole, and you mess it up in five minutes. Fucked up my life when you were born. Fucked it up now.”

  Clayton bolted to his feet. He yanked his arm out of the sling and shoved Byron down onto the bed before he could chuck the plate.

  “It sounds like you already did that,” Clayton snapped. Despite his injuries, Byron had muscle, and it wasn’t easy to hold him down. It certainly didn’t shut up the rant of curse words and insults that spilled out of him. The injured tendons in Clayton’s hand stretched as he tightened his grip. It felt like they were about to snap. The backwash of pain and anger slipped his control, and he shook Byron with a short vicious terrier snap just to shut him up. “Why would this business partner turn on you?”

  Byron spat at him. It hit Clayton’s shoulder, wet and more disgusting than it should be as it soaked through his shirt.

  Down the hall an anxious voice called, “Is everything all right in there? What’s going on?”

  Glass crunched behind Clayton as Kelly walked to the door. He opened it and leaned out.

  “Everything’s fine, Mom. Byron just dropped his glass.” He closed the door and turned around to brace his back against it. His face was cold as he looked at Byron. “If anything happens to Nadine, to that boy, we’re done.”

  The temper went out of Byron like someone had turned off a tap. For a second, when the angry body went still under him, Clayton thought he’d killed him. He pushed himself off Byron’s shoulders and stepped back.

  “You don’t mean that. We’re family.” The man who’d just thrown a glass at his brother’s face had the temerity to sound affronted. “Don’t be all butthurt about the glass. If I meant to hit you, I’d have waited till I was in your blind spot.”

  Kelly snorted out a strangled laugh. “Yeah, I remember playing baseball with you,” he said. Blood dripped down his forearms where broken glass had nicked him. “And I mean it. If you don’t help us, you’re not my brother.”

  Calculation flashed through Byron’s pale eyes as he tried to work out how serious Kelly was. He glanced at Clayton finally and spat the words out.

  “Some of the money I moved might not have been Jimmy’s,” he said. “Technically. I might just have been… warehousing it for Gregor and our business partners. If Gregor checked and found it gone? He’d pull this sort of stupid Godfather shit instead of just finding out what was going on. Moron.”

  The door behind Kelly rattled as Kathleen tried to open it. He pushed his shoulders back against it. “Not yet, Mom.”

  “What about the new gang you were working with?” Clayton asked. He pulled the phone out of his pocket and dialed half a number. Then he deleted it and sent a text to Nadine instead. Sometimes you just had to commit to your mistakes. Need you to sign Motion to Dismiss for restraining order and bank accounts released, he typed out as he asked, “Could they be behind this?”

  Byron grimaced. “They’d have called me and threatened to hurt Nadine if I didn’t get it back to them,” he said. “Gregor knows that wouldn’t work.”

  “Why’d you even marry her?” Kelly asked as he stepped away from the door and let Kathleen and Jim in. “Did you love her? At all?”

  Byron snarled and shrugged off Kathleen’s attempt to fuss over him.

  “About as much as I loved that French girl,” he said. “A whole lot, until I got bored and left her in Mexico. Now if you’ll all fuck off, and that means you too, Mom, I need to let Lepson know the shit hit the fan when he wasn’t looking.”

  CLAYTON HELD the baby while Jim Kelly patched his son’s bloody arms up with Monster High Band-Aids and impatience. Somewhere in the house, Kathleen cried messily while she begged Byron to explain himself.

  “That temper will be the death of him,” Jim muttered as he swiped iodine with one hand and slapped the plaster on with the other. “He’s like a kid when it goes off, just can’t control himself.”

  “He calmed down quickly enough when throwing things didn’t get him what he wanted,” Clayton said coolly. “Maybe you should try that.”

  Jim didn’t acknowledge the suggestion—unless the clenched jaw under his cropped beard counted—but he shut up. That was good enough. In the crook of Clayton’s good arm, Maxie squirmed, croaked, and reached demandingly for someone he knew better. It probably wasn’t good childrearing practice, but Clayton dipped a finger into a glass of lemonade and popped it into Maxie’s mouth.

  He’d never cared much about kids—one way or the other—but he was good enough with them. Some of the foster families he’d lived with had farmed kids like they were rabbits, three beds to a room and the money straight into their pocket. Others meant well, but an overtaxed system still squeezed more kids into their houses than they could care about individually. Babies didn’t expect much, and Clayton had been old enough and sane enough to be trusted with them.

  The taste of sugar and lemon made Maxie screw up his face in confusion, but it distracted him from squirming.

  “There,” Jim said. He slapped the last plaster on and stood up. Then he gathered all the bits of paper and cotton wool and tossed it in the garbage. “Go grab a clean T-shirt from my room. You’ve got blood on that.”

  Kelly plucked his T-shirt out from his body to check. The splatter of blood over the worn gray Pogues logo made him grimace.

  “Thanks.” He stood up and then hesitated. “Can you tell Mom I’m sorry? I didn’t do this to spite Byron.”

  “You still did it,” Jim said tiredly. “No matter how he fucked up, he’s still your brother. You should have come to us first. Not—”

  He gave Clayton a sour look. Even an association with Baker could only ge
t you so far, apparently. Still, it was better that he blamed Clayton than Kelly.

  “He’s married a woman under false pretenses,” Kelly said with an edge of exasperation to his voice. “I’m pretty sure he’s a bigamist. He has a son. What were you going to do?”

  He pulled his T-shirt off and used the stained fabric to scrub his lemonade-sticky hair. Apparently, Clayton noted to himself, the habit of walking around half-dressed wasn’t just for Clayton’s benefit after all.

  Not that that stopped him appreciating the view. The bruises were still livid against Kelly’s tanned skin, fading out to a swamp-murky green around the edges, but it didn’t disguise the hard lines of his body or the honed muscles.

  The memory of that heavy, solid body under Clayton—and its easy surrender to him—made Clayton’s throat go dry. He dragged his attention away and caught Jim’s scowl as it darkened. It was bleakly satisfying to make the man’s day worse, even if it was only a bit.

  “We could have managed it,” Jim said. “Got ahead of it. Protected him.”

  “And her?” Clayton asked.

  Kelly gave him a hard look. The cat might be out of the bag where Byron’s bigamy was concerned, but Kelly had kept his word and not told anything else.

  “We’d have done what we could,” Jim said. “As much as she wanted.”

  “Well, it’s done now,” Kelly said. “I’ll go get your T-shirt. Then we’ll get out of your hair.”

  He tossed his T-shirt into the bin on the way out of the kitchen. Clayton shifted Max on his arm. His elbow ached from the awkward weight, and he moved his hand so he could flex his fingers. They felt stiff, and the bones pinched when he moved.

  Jim walked to the garbage can and jabbed the tail end of the T-shirt in through the lid. “I have no bone to pick with you. You were just doing your job,” he said. “But Kathleen, she has no patience with anyone who’s hurt her boys. So I think you’re done with my family.”

  Probably. Clayton didn’t fool himself about that. Maybe the Kellys weren’t quite the perfect family he always imagined, but they were tight-knit. He could ask Kelly to choose between him and his family, but he wouldn’t.

  He looked down at Maxie. In one foster family, there’d been five different babies in and out before he got sent somewhere new. All of them were sent back to one home or another, to parents who swore they’d sorted themselves out.

  “Do you know why I’m Nadine’s lawyer?” he asked.

  “Money?”

  “Because she came to the women’s shelter I work with sometimes and begged me,” Clayton said. The words made Jim flinch. “He’d worn her self-confidence down so far that she thought she deserved the way he treated her. But she wanted to protect their son.”

  Clayton hadn’t promised Byron anything.

  “He’d not raise a hand to a woman,” Jim said. He tried to bluster, but he didn’t sound confident. “He knows better. There’s no coming back for a man who hurts a woman or a child.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” Clayton said. He heard a door close with a creak of hinges that could use some oil. “But you know as well as I do, abuse doesn’t just come with a black eye.”

  Jim might have been able to come up with something to counter that, but Kelly returned into the kitchen before he could. Old cotton stretched over his shoulders and bagged around his lean waist. The fit was off just enough and in all the wrong places that Clayton slanted a look sideways at Jim just in time to see him suck in his stomach.

  It was a petty thing to take satisfaction in, but Clayton did anyway.

  “Dad—”

  “Enough,” Jim snapped. “You’ve upset your mother, and whatever Byron’s done, or not done, he’s just out of hospital. Just let it lie.”

  Clayton’s phone finally chimed the arrival of an incoming. It was Nadine’s name on the screen, but he doubted she’d written the terse message that scrolled along next to it.

  Safe house. Tonight at seven.

  His stomach twisted grimly, but he ignored it as he tapped out a quick confirmation. Hopefully it wouldn’t be necessary to keep that appointment. He just wanted them to need Nadine in good health a while longer and to think they were going to get what they wanted.

  “We need to go,” he said.

  Kelly gave him a quick apologetic look, and Clayton hated himself for the second of surprise that hit him. People disappointed you. He already knew that. So he braced himself for Kelly to beg off. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t already more than fulfilled the original favor.

  “I’m still taking Maxie,” he said.

  Jim scowled. “The hell you will,” he said. “Your mother can take care of him.”

  He took a step toward Clayton, arms out as he reached for the baby. Kelly blocked him. “Dad, I’m not leaving the kid with Byron. Not right now. I don’t trust him.”

  “Why not?” Jim blustered. “What do you think he’s going to do? That’s his own flesh and blood, boy.”

  “Do you really want me to tell you?” Kelly asked after a moment. There was a hard note in his voice. “Because I will, Dad.”

  The lawyer in Clayton appreciated the neat trap the question laid out. Either Jim heard something he didn’t want to about Byron, or he admitted that he knew there was something about his son that he’d turned a blind eye to. Whatever door you opened was going to hurt.

  “What will I tell your mom,” Jim asked as he looked away. “She’ll be round at your house before you get back.”

  Clayton cleared his throat. “I wouldn’t recommend that,” he said. “If this gets forced into the legal arena, it isn’t going to end well for Byron.”

  It took a second, but finally Jim backed down. He crossed his arms over his chest and glared at Kelly. “I’m disappointed in you,” he said. “We raised you better than this.”

  “Yeah, well,” Kelly said roughly as he grabbed a bag from under the table. “I’m disappointed in you too, Dad.”

  Kelly stalked out of the kitchen without looking back. So he didn’t see the stricken look on Jim Kelly’s face.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “SORRY,” KELLY rasped out.

  The word sounded like it had been stuck in his throat for a while. It had taken twenty minutes on the I-10 from the Kelly house to the roadworks at the Sacramento off-ramp for him to spit them out. After Maxie dozed off in the back, drugged into sleep by the groan of the engine, it had been a quiet drive.

  Clayton rubbed the back of his neck. Despite the air-conditioning, his fingers came away sweaty. He hadn’t minded the silence, but he was relieved that it was broken. The stillness hadn’t felt like Kelly.

  “They’re your family, not your fault,” Clayton said. He checked his phone again. The quick swipe and scan for new messages was driven by nerves—mindless and not that reassuring. Still nothing. He closed the screen down with a determined press of his thumb. In a minute he’d swipe and check again, but he tried to pull his attention back to the slow crawl of Kelly’s truck. “I should have believed you when you said you didn’t know Byron was Jimmy. I had no reason to think you were a liar.”

  Kelly shrugged. He drove with one hand on the wheel, the sun bright on his tanned arm. It burnished the fine hairs on his skin down to gilt.

  “I can’t blame you for that. If it hadn’t been Byron,” he said. “If it had been Cole or Wilde? I might have covered for them. Or at least let them in on things sooner. I knew what Byron was like. I just didn’t think he was like this. And I’m sorry you got hurt.”

  It was still a bad idea. Clayton was still going to do it. He couldn’t seem to resist.

  “Me too.” Clayton reached out and brushed his thumb over Kelly’s bruised cheekbone. He felt the warmth of the bruise and the startled twitch that ran through Kelly. “How old were you?”

  “Three,” Kelly said. “Byron was… either just turned six or nearly six… and I think he wanted to see what happened if he hurt someone. It was, like he said, he needed to calibrate his behavior.”

&nbs
p; “See how far he could go.”

  “Nothing personal,” Kelly said. The dry smile that curved his mouth brushed against Clayton’s palm. “To be honest I think the fact that I got so much attention was more of a deterrent than the trouble he got into. There you go. That’s my story. So what happened last night?”

  The cars ahead of Kelly’s pickup crawled forward a car length, and Kelly rolled forward to close the distance again. It didn’t look as though the traffic was going to clear up and miraculously give Clayton an out.

  He didn’t know why he wanted one. It hadn’t been the highlight of his week, but he’d been mugged and come out worse.

  “They brought Nadine to the office last night. They must have been outside for hours. I worked late.” Clayton provided the Cliffs Notes for the evening, from the scuffle on the road to the antiseptic visit to the hospital to get his hand X-rayed. It was actually, although he didn’t mention that, the first sick day he’d had in five years. It was appendicitis last time. He finished the story and felt the hard fist of regret in his gut again. “Nadine could have gotten away from them if the security guard had gone out sooner, but she didn’t trust me to keep her and Harry safe.”

  “Us. We both promised her,” Kelly corrected him. “And if it weren’t for me, Kevoian wouldn’t have known they split.”

  The car ahead moved again, a bit farther this time. Clayton missed his bike. He flexed his fingers, and the pain reminded him why it was still parked at work.

  “I was the one who was there. It was… when I was a kid, I was in foster care,” he said abruptly. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kelly twist around to look at him, his blue eyes intent on him for a second until he turned back to the road. Whatever he’d seen on Clayton’s face… he didn’t say anything. He just waited.

  The whole confession scrolled out in Clayton’s head—that his mother might have loved him but not as much as she loved the asshole she’d either met or was about to meet in a bar, about the beatings, the blood, the assholes who got worse every year she got older, or that one time he tried to fight off the guy who laid into her, but a slap and a flat, dead-eyed threat had sent him off to cower in his locked room.