Can't Hide From Me

by Cordelia Kingsbridge

  Charles leaned in and licked around his finger as he fucked Ángel with it. He grunted in surprise when one of Ángel’s hands landed on his head, pressing Charles’s face against his ass.

  “I’m so close,” Ángel said. “Don’t stop.”

  Though Charles couldn’t see for himself, he could imagine the lewd picture Ángel must be making—bent over on his knees, one hand on his cock and the other stretched back to hold Charles in place. He had to be resting his forehead on the back of the couch to keep his balance, more concerned about having his ass played with than his own comfort—

  His groan muffled by Ángel’s skin, Charles hooked his finger toward the front of Ángel’s body and found his prostate, massaging it in a brisk circle. Ángel cried out, his body quaking and muscles rippling as he came hard onto the couch. Charles helped him along, milking his prostate to prolong his orgasm, until Ángel gave a weak moan, his hand falling limply from Charles’s head.

  Charles withdrew his finger and sat back, wiping his mouth. His jaw was on fire and his lips were numb, but it was well worth it to see Ángel so fucked out.

  Ángel shifted sideways, sprawling on one side of the couch. Charles picked up the dish towel and cleaned his hand before scrubbing Ángel’s come off the upholstery.

  “Sorry about your couch,” Ángel said, watching him through half-lidded eyes.

  “It’s seen worse,” said Charles, though that wasn’t quite true. Now, the couch he’d had in Tucson—that thing had seen some shit.

  He finished cleaning and went to his bathroom to drop the cloth in the hamper. Pausing in front of the mirror, Charles forced himself to own up to the truth of the situation. Yes, being with Ángel felt good; it always had. That didn’t mean it was the right thing to do, or that he wouldn’t end up hurting. Ángel had never apologized for Tucson, and Charles wasn’t sure he could forgive him even if Ángel did. Plus, Ángel was all screwed up from the stalker, not to mention his time undercover. This wasn’t fair to either of them.

  When Charles returned to the living room, Ángel was half-dressed. “You don’t have to say anything,” Ángel said before Charles could speak. He pulled his T-shirt over his head. “We both knew this was going to happen, and if we try to talk about it, we’ll only end up fighting. Can we please just accept that we’ve never been good at not fucking each other and leave it at that?”

  “Yeah,” Charles said, shamefully relieved. If Ángel wasn’t going to make a big deal out of this, neither would he.

  Ángel flopped down onto the couch. Charles glanced at the television, where the movie credits were rolling.

  “I know it’s early, but I’m going to hit the sack,” he said. “I didn’t really sleep earlier, and I’m totally beat.”

  “Okay, good night.” Ángel picked up the remote control.

  Halfway to his room, Charles turned. “Are you going to . . .”

  “I’ll sleep on the futon,” Ángel said with a small smile.

  Charles nodded and stepped into his bedroom, shutting the door behind himself. He exhaled heavily and considered the interaction they’d just had. The aftermath of hooking up with Ángel yet again could have been much worse—shouting, insults, thrown objects. A calm exchange of words and immediate disengagement was the best he could have hoped for.

  So why did he feel so uneasy?

  Ángel bided his time, flipping through the channels with the volume low enough that he could keep an ear out for any sounds from Charles’s bedroom. Charles could have been telling the truth about going straight to bed—or he could have just wanted to get away from Ángel.

  After half an hour of silence, Ángel padded over to the bedroom door and cracked it open. Charles lay on his back, twisted up in the covers, one arm flung out to the side. Ángel watched the steady rise and fall of his chest for perhaps longer than was necessary to be sure he was really asleep.

  Closing the door with a quiet click, Ángel turned off the television, killed the lights, and shut the door to the second bedroom as well. Then he hurried toward the front door, where he shoved his feet into his shoes, helped himself to one of Charles’s sweatshirts, and grabbed Charles’s keys from their bowl before letting himself out of the apartment and into the cool night air.

  He had a hospitalized gangbanger to confront.

  “I’m sorry, sir, visiting hours are about to end,” said the woman at the reception desk when Ángel entered the hospital lobby. The main entrance was on the opposite side of the building from the emergency room, and at this time of night, the lobby was quiet and deserted. A metal grate had been pulled down to lock up its small coffee shop.

  Ángel flashed his ATF badge as he approached, casually hooking his thumb over the name on the ID card. “I’m checking on a prisoner,” he said, his voice clipped. “Mark Cooper?” He hovered at the edge of her desk, bouncing on the balls of his feet as if he were in a rush and irritated by the delay.

  Though Ángel wasn’t one hundred percent sure this was the right hospital, it was the closest facility to the site of the raid that was equipped with a trauma unit. The receptionist’s reaction confirmed his hunch.

  Her face alight with curiosity, she said, “Oh, you mean the guy in 415? I heard he got shot up in some kind of gang fight!”

  “That’s the one,” said Ángel, blessing human nature. Privacy regulations always fell by the wayside when gossip this salacious was involved.

  The woman gestured to the log on the counter. “I just need you to fill out—”

  “Look, I don’t want to alarm you,” Ángel said with a significant glance, “but I really don’t have time for this.”

  Her eyes went wide, then darted furtively to the elevator bank like Buzz was going to come flying out any minute with guns blazing. “Should I call security?”

  “That would just escalate the situation. I don’t want to panic the other patients if there’s no need.”

  “Of course.” The woman handed him a visitor’s badge and said, “I guess it wouldn’t be a problem if you signed the log on your way out instead.”

  “Thanks,” Ángel said. He clipped the badge to his sweatshirt pocket and strode toward the elevators, hitting the call button. The elevator arrived within seconds; once inside, Ángel made an educated guess and pressed the button for the fourth floor.

  Sure enough, he emerged into the trauma unit—a standard layout of two long corridors of patient rooms with the nurses’ station in the center. From where Ángel was standing, he had a clear view of the SDPD officer seated outside a room on the far end of the left hallway. The whiteboard in the nurses’ station that displayed the nursing assignments didn’t contain patient names, of course, but it did have initials.

  415—M.C.

  Mark Cooper was Buzz’s real name; this was as much corroboration as Ángel was going to get without seeing the man face-to-face.

  He considered the police officer guarding the room. She was sitting with her arms and ankles crossed, slumped a bit in her plastic chair. As Ángel watched, her eyes drifted shut and her chin nodded toward her chest before she startled and gave her head a hard shake. Ángel turned in a slow circle, checking out the rest of the unit, and smiled when he saw a small, comfortably furnished room of the kind used to hold family meetings.

  A few minutes later, Ángel walked up to the officer with a cup of fresh coffee. “I think you could use this more than I could,” he said, showing her his badge at the same time that he held out the coffee, ensuring that her focus was too divided to pick up any details.

  “Thanks,” she said. She gave Ángel a pretty subtle once-over as she accepted the coffee, but it was enough to convey her appreciation for his looks.

  Letting a hint of flirtatiousness creep into his tone, Ángel said, “I promise my mouth hadn’t touched it yet.”

  The officer grinned. “I guess I’ll just have to take your word for it.”

  “Okay if I have a quick chat with the prisoner?” Ángel asked, jerking his thumb toward the closed door.


  “Sure, knock yourself out.” She sipped the coffee. “Don’t think you’re going to get anything out of him though.”

  “As long as I can tell the boss I tried.” Ángel gave her a conspiratorial wink and let himself into the room.

  He was relieved to see that the patient was indeed Buzz, asleep in his bed with the lights dimmed low. It was a private room, and Buzz wasn’t on any heart-rate monitoring equipment, both of which were good things for Ángel and not so great for Buzz.

  Ángel brightened the lights and dragged the visitor’s chair to Buzz’s bedside, taking a seat. Grimacing, Buzz stirred underneath his covers, lifting one hand to block the light from his eyes. He turned his head and frowned at Ángel.

  “Who’re you?” he asked, his voice slurred with sleep and narcotics.

  “My name is Gael Flores,” said Ángel, giving him the alias he’d used as Raúl’s boy toy. “Have you heard of me?”

  Buzz rubbed his eyes. “No.”

  “How about Raúl Esparza?”

  “No, dude,” Buzz said. He dropped his hand to the bed. “What do you—”

  “Manuel Juarez?”

  A frisson of tension ran through Buzz, and he was suddenly looking everywhere but Ángel’s face. Ángel smiled.

  “Why’d you put those papers in that car, Buzz?” he said.

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  Buzz reached for his call button, but Ángel knocked it out of his hand. It fell off the far side of the bed and clattered to the floor.

  “I think you do,” Ángel said. “You stashed a set of false papers for a Manuel Juarez among the guns you brought for Felix Torres to inspect. I want to know why, and I want to know where you got them from.”

  “I’m not telling you shit,” Buzz said, all fired up now. “You a cop? I’m not saying anything without a lawyer—”

  “Do I look like a cop to you?” Ángel snapped.

  Buzz hesitated, his eyes raking over Ángel’s body—his casual hoodie and jeans, the obvious lack of a gun, his slouched posture, the long hair falling into his eyes. “Well, what the hell do you care, then?”

  “You don’t need to worry about that. Just tell me who contacted you and what they said.”

  “Fuck this.” Buzz braced his hands on the mattress and tried to heave himself upright, getting about halfway before he swayed and slumped sideways with a pained expression. “Get the hell out of—”

  Ángel grabbed Buzz’s throat, forcing him flat on his back and holding him there. Letting out a choked gasp, Buzz slapped at Ángel’s hand and pushed at his shoulder, but he was too out of it to have any effect. Ángel didn’t even need to use both hands to keep him down.

  “Do you have any idea how easy it would be for me to kill you right now?” Ángel said, retreating into the cold detachment that had allowed Gael to watch Raúl beat the shit out of some hapless victim with no reaction other than boredom. “You’re weak, in pain, drugged up on narcotics. You couldn’t be more vulnerable.”

  Buzz’s frightened eyes shot toward the door.

  “Think you could call out loud enough to get her attention before I managed to crush your windpipe?” Ángel tightened his grip just a bit. Though the hold he had on Buzz’s throat was certainly enough to be painful, and it would prevent him from speaking, this wasn’t near enough pressure to strangle him. “More to the point, is whatever you’re hiding worth that risk?”

  Buzz wet his lips anxiously, his eyes darting back and forth, then lifted his trembling hands in surrender. Ángel loosened his fingers but kept his hand placed over Buzz’s throat in a clear threat. He wouldn’t kill Buzz, obviously, but he was prepared to choke the man into unconsciousness if he had to.

  After clearing his throat a few times, Buzz said, “Night before the meet, I had a voice mail on my cell when I came home from the bar. It was some guy who works with Felix Torres, said he’d pay me to call him from a pay phone at a gas station near my house.” He snorted. “Didn’t even know those still existed. When I got there, there was a hundred-dollar bill taped up underneath the phone box, so I figured what the hell, I might as well call the guy.”

  “And?”

  “And it was the same guy who answered,” said Buzz. “He had to get some papers to Torres, but the feds were all over him and he couldn’t risk direct contact. Offered me five hundred bucks to put the papers in one of the cars we brought to the meet.”

  “He specified that exactly?” Ángel said. “That you needed to bring the papers to the meet with you?”

  “Yeah, man.”

  Meaning, as Ángel had suggested to Ed, that the stalker had gotten his nose into the ATF’s investigation through his surveillance of Ángel. That he’d figured out the meet was with Torres before the ATF had was troubling, but not all that surprising if the stalker were cartel himself—he’d have had a different set of contacts and his own extralegal avenues of investigation.

  “Anyway,” Buzz said, “I got home and the papers were in my mailbox with the cash. Easiest money I’ve ever made.”

  Ángel shook his head with reluctant amusement. “So you didn’t tell any of your buddies, because you didn’t want to split the payout.”

  Buzz scowled, his fear fading now that Ángel had made no further violent moves against him. “Why should I? They didn’t do shit.”

  “You’re sure it was a man on the phone?” Ángel asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did he have an accent?”

  “Uh, yeah—he sounded kind of Western. Like a cowboy, you know?”

  “Western . . .” Ángel sat back, startled, his slack hand sliding from Buzz’s throat to his collarbone. “You mean he sounded American?”

  Buzz nodded.

  This was unexpected. None of the men Ángel knew from the cartel would have been able to speak English with an American Western accent, at least none who also had motivation to pursue him this way. Oscar and Roberto definitely wouldn’t have been capable of it.

  Getting himself back on track, Ángel said, “You never met this man, then.”

  “No.”

  “Did you delete the voice mail?”

  “No, I’ve still got it,” Buzz said. “Don’t have my cell, though. Cops took it.”

  Access to Buzz’s cell phone wouldn’t be a problem; Ángel would just have to make sure he subtly nudged the team into checking his voice mails. They might even do that of their own initiative and save him the trouble.

  “This conversation stays between you and me, do you understand?” said Ángel. He placed his palm gently over Buzz’s throat once more.

  Buzz’s Adam’s apple bobbed against Ángel’s palm as he swallowed hard. “Sure, dude. I don’t want any trouble with the cartels, okay?”

  Ángel considered Buzz for a long moment, decided he was sincere, and let go, rising to his feet. Buzz watched Ángel warily as he returned the chair to its rightful place and left the room, but didn’t call out for help.

  After bidding the cop a flirty goodnight, Ángel left the hospital through the packed emergency room, tossing his visitor’s badge into the trash on his way out.

  Had the information he’d gained from Buzz been worth leaving Charles’s apartment alone and unarmed, jeopardizing his life as well as his career? Probably not in the long run. But Ángel wouldn’t have been able to sleep tonight if he hadn’t known that for sure. At least now he had an actual, concrete lead.

  The next morning, Ángel emerged from Charles’s guest bedroom marginally better rested than he’d been for the past few days. He rubbed sleep from his eyes as he shambled into the kitchen, where Charles was on the phone, his forehead creased in a deep frown. Ángel poured himself some coffee and listened to Charles’s conversation with half an ear.

  “So what are we going to do now, then?” Charles said. “Uh-huh. Yeah, okay. No, I’ll tell him myself. That’s fine. All right, see you later.”

  Charles hung up and put down his phone, his brow still furrowed. />
  Warming his hands on his mug, Ángel leaned one hip against the counter. “Was that Eva?”

  “Yeah.” Charles turned toward him, and the nape of Ángel’s neck prickled at the grim expression on his face. “Ángel, I . . . I don’t know how to tell you this, but . . . Buzz is dead.”

  The mug slipped out of Ángel’s hands and crashed on the floor.

  Hot coffee splashed over his feet, ceramic shards scraping his skin, but Ángel felt none of it. He stood motionless while Charles cursed and grabbed a dish towel, crouching to wipe the coffee off Ángel’s feet.

  “Get up on the counter before you slice your feet open,” Charles said.

  Moving as though he were submerged in molasses, Ángel reached back and lifted himself to sit on the counter. He gazed blankly at his reddened skin, his mind reeling.

  Charles mopped up the rest of the coffee and then swept the shattered mug into a dustpan. “I know this is bad,” he said. “We’ll figure something out, okay? We’ll . . .”

  As Charles straightened up and met Ángel’s eyes, his voice trailed off. Ángel stared back at him, too horrified to bother hiding his reaction.

  Charles set the dustpan down and said, very quietly, “What the hell did you do?”

  “I didn’t kill him,” Ángel said.

  “Oh my God.” Charles took two quick steps backward. “But you saw him?”

  Ángel compressed his lips and nodded.

  “When?” Charles said, and then shook his head. “Shit, you went out last night after I fell asleep, didn’t you? Is that . . .” His eyes widened and he stepped even farther away from Ángel. “Is that why we had sex?”

  “No!” Ángel jumped off the counter, wincing at the sting of his feet. “Charles, no, I would never do that to you. But . . . if I’m being honest, that’s why I didn’t want to talk about it afterward.”

  Closing his eyes, Charles pressed one hand to his forehead and breathed deeply through his nose.

  Ángel wrapped his arms around himself. “How did he die?” he asked.

  “There was an error with his insulin,” Charles said, dropping his hand to his side. “He got ten times the dosage he was supposed to and went into diabetic shock. They couldn’t resuscitate him.”