by A. J. Thomas
He was supposed to have gone back to the doctor to get the stitches taken out two days ago, but he had skipped the appointment. If he told the doctor the truth, he would never be medically cleared to go back on duty—not unless he could learn how to shoot left-handed. If he could work up the nerve to lie about it, he didn’t deserve to go back to work anyway. Only a real bastard would put his teammates and partner at risk by going back on duty when he would likely end up dropping his gun if he ever had to use it.
He shook his head as he tried to imagine life without his job.
He had more or less fallen into police work, but it had become his life. While he was finishing his undergraduate degree, intending to teach English and coach track and field, he had gone out with a guy who wanted to be a cop but couldn’t work up the nerve to go to the preemployment test session alone. Their relationship had ended the moment Christopher passed the tests and his boyfriend didn’t. The job turned out to be the best thing that had ever happened to him. He loved being a police officer. And the thought of starting a new career, when he was already well past thirty, was terrifying. The thought of taking early retirement on disability was even more frightening.
Christopher wiggled his fingers again, watching to make sure they were actually moving. There was no way to know for sure if he would be able to handle a gun again until he tried it, and he didn’t dare try until he’d had a few more weeks to heal. Just trying to hold his gun had been a disaster. He had dropped it on his bed four times before he decided to tuck it into his nightstand until he went back on duty.
He curled his fingers into loose fists, let his gaze settle on the ground in front of him, and just ran. He ran until he couldn’t feel the pain as the tendons in his shoulder caught with each swing of his arm, until he didn’t care about the tingling and numbness in his fingers, until he forgot what extensive nerve damage to his gun arm would mean for his career, until he let go of the petty jealousy he felt toward the girl his partner had picked up at the gym. He ran until he couldn’t feel anything at all.
Life was a lot like the grueling long-distance races he ran. He knew he had to keep moving forward, even if there didn’t seem to be any hope of his shoulder recovering. There were desk jobs with the department, and training and consulting positions. He would find a way to move forward if his arm didn’t heal, and until then, he would run until he didn’t have the energy to worry about it anymore.
It was nearly one thirty by the time he finally staggered the last half block back to his condo. He fumbled with his door key and felt his stomach seize as the knob turned in his hand. His right hand twitched toward his left side, to the spot where his gun would have been if he’d been wearing his harness. The door was yanked in as Christopher let go of the knob and stepped to the side. He didn’t make it very far.
“Where the hell have you been!” Ray, still dressed in his running clothes, grabbed Christopher by the shirt and hauled him inside, then slammed the door behind him. “How does five miles take you five fucking hours? Why didn’t you call?”
Christopher tried to swallow but found his mouth was too dry. He had worn himself down so far that he was dehydrated and his blood sugar was low. He had felt a headache creeping up on him during the last two miles back to his place. If he didn’t rehydrate, cool off, and get some electrolytes soon, he was going to end up stuck on the couch with chills and nausea for the rest of the day. He had refilled his small water bottle at least three times, but he should have had more.
Unfortunately, it was hard to come up with an explanation for all that while the world was still spinning. “Water…,” he rasped, trying to move past Ray and get to his kitchen. “Salt. Aspirin.”
“Sit your ass down!”
Christopher would have laughed about how easily Ray shoved him down onto his couch, but he was too tired. Ray didn’t even try to be gentle as he ripped Christopher’s shirt off over his head. Christopher stared at the yellow jersey, wondering how he hadn’t noticed the bloodstains on the front and back. After thinking about it for a moment, he chalked it up to endorphins. He’d been really embarrassed during his first marathon when he hadn’t noticed bloody outlines of his nipples on his white shirt until after the race was over. There was a lot of blood on his shirt now. That was strange.
“Fuck.” Ray’s hands ghosted over his shoulder and back, picking at sweat-soaked bandages. “Is there anything I can say that would get you to go back in to the doctor?”
Christopher shook his head slowly. “I need some water. And a Snickers bar. And a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Then I’ll take a shower. It doesn’t hurt, so I’m sure it looks worse than it is.”
“Don’t move,” Ray ordered in his most authoritative voice.
A few minutes later, Christopher found a cold bottle of Powerade and two aspirin in his hand while his partner mopped at the blood on his back with a dark washcloth. Then, while Ray put a clean, dry bandage on his back, Christopher fiddled with the shirt in his hands to distract himself from the heat of the other man’s fingers. When Ray pushed him back against the couch and walked around to stand in front of him, Christopher felt the euphoria give way to panic.
“I’ve got it.” He grabbed the washcloth and tried to hop up from the couch. He ended up bumping into Ray and stumbling backward to avoid the physical contact. He scooted to the side and escaped to the bathroom with the washcloth in hand. He cleaned up the blood on the front of his shoulder, shocked that he had actually managed to tear the small wound open again after it had nearly healed. He rinsed out the washcloth, dried himself off with a towel, and then turned to find his partner leaning against the door frame with a box of large bandages in hand.
“What the hell, man? Weight lifting wasn’t stupid enough? You had to try harder to really fuck yourself up?”
“Didn’t even notice,” said Christopher. He grabbed the box and fished out a bandage before Ray could volunteer to help him. “It’s not bad,” he said, poking at the tiny pinpricks of red along the top and bottom of a raw, red stretch of new scar tissue. “I pulled the stitches, but the skin is fused. Was my back all right?”
“What do I have to do to get you to stop this? You think I enjoy going to work every night and watching other guys work our cases? I would like to get back to work sometime this year, so do you think you could find a bit of fucking self-control so your body can actually heal?”
“Self-control?” Christopher laughed. He wiped at his face with the rinsed-out washcloth. “The man who takes home a new twenty-year-old twice a week is lecturing me about self-control?”
“Me having a sex life makes this less stupid?” asked Ray with a calmness that never failed to infuriate Christopher.
“I tore the stitches, that’s all. They were supposed to come out two days ago. I really don’t get why you’re making such a big deal out of this.”
“You got shot! The bullet hit an artery! Do you have any idea how it feels to sit there and watch someone you care about bleed to death on the sidewalk? How it feels to watch you do this to yourself?”
“No,” Christopher admitted. “Thankfully. I’m sorry, all right? I should have… I should have done a lot of things differently this week.” Like told the doctor about the numbness in his hand before he left the hospital. Told his captain the truth, so he could assign someone else to work with Ray instead of forcing him into classes and desk work while he waited for a full recovery that wasn’t going to happen. He should still tell Ray the truth—tell him that the next time he needed Christopher to be there to back him up, Christopher would fail him. The next time he needed to come through for his partner, Christopher was likely to get him killed instead.
“Come on, Hayes, I didn’t mean to turn into some kind of drama queen on you.” Ray rubbed a soothing hand up and down the middle of his back for a moment, and then his partner awkwardly stepped back to the bathroom door. “Come on, get over it and I’ll spring for lunch and a beer.”
“Can’t. I have to go talk to Captain
Jenkins.” Christopher shut his eyes and tried to force his brain back into the calm quiet from his run. His skin still felt warm where Ray had rubbed his back, and no matter how much he tried to keep his thoughts under control, he couldn’t seem to stop focusing on that warmth. “And I need a shower before that. Pull that off my back so it doesn’t get all gooey?”
“But I just put it on there!”
Christopher opened his eyes and met his partner’s gaze in the bathroom mirror. “Gooey,” Christopher enunciated carefully.
“You’ve got to eat, idiot. The captain can wait.” Ray smirked at him and ripped the bandage off fast. “Hurry up, I’m hungry. Although, after listening to what’s-her-name talk about us, I got the impression you should be buying me lunch.”
Christopher felt a blush rising fiercely. In the mirror, he could see that his partner was blushing too, but he was smiling. No way was he going to let Ray get the last word. He pulled up the same smile he used to break the ice with guys in bars and let his gaze travel noticeably up and down his partner’s body. “It’s just because I’m taller than you,” he explained, dropping his voice a little. “Trust me, though, you’d be the one opening doors and pulling out my chair in the relationship.”
Ray’s blush turned crimson. “You mean….”
“If I spell it out for you, do you think you’d turn purple?”
“What?”
Christopher pointed to the mirror. “You’re blushing like a kid who just got caught with a dirty magazine. Who knew that infamous sex life of yours was so dull?”
“It’s not dull! I just… I never thought about the logistics of….”
“Ha! Purple!” Christopher didn’t even bother trying to hide his laughter as his partner ran for the safety of the living room.
He showered fast and got dressed, pulling on some khaki shorts and then wincing his way into a polo shirt. He found Ray, dressed in clothing he’d stolen from Christopher’s closet, reclining on his couch flipping through his newspaper. He stopped himself from wondering if he looked as good in his clothes as his partner did. Joking aside, he would not allow himself to follow where those thoughts led. “Ready?”
“Yeah. Hope you don’t mind.” Ray gestured to the button-down shirt and black slacks. “I figured we should go somewhere nice. I owe you for not sneaking a beer into the hospital last week.”
“Belated beer is still beer,” said Christopher with a happy smile. “I can’t say I’m all that eager to celebrate getting older, though. Another few years and I’ll be as slow as you.”
Christopher smirked at the way Ray rolled his eyes. Talking to his captain and admitting his career was all but over would keep.
Doug reached up to the radio clipped to his shoulder and pressed the button. “On rappel,” Doug said.
“You’re all good” came the crackling reply from the radio.
He set his feet wide and leaned backward, over the edge of the cliff, then settled into his harness and let himself down slowly. The moss-covered spots where his feet touched the cliff were slippery and littered with loose gravel. The tiny stones fell away as he pushed off and lowered himself down. Three search-and-rescue members had hiked down into the canyon that morning, following the creek. They were waiting for him down below. Half a dozen others had been willing to make the descent down to the body, but as the only member of the volunteer search-and-rescue team who also worked in law enforcement, it fell to Doug to try to preserve whatever evidence might have survived in the windswept canyon.
Even though he had been climbing for years, Doug took his time inching down the limestone wall, trying not to disturb the other rope or too much of the loose stone. After about ten feet, he dropped past the six-foot overhang that had, so far, obscured the body from view. If it hadn’t been for the clear view of the body from the trailhead parking lot, the poor soul dangling below him would probably have been hanging there until some random hiker found the rope tied off near the trail high above. There weren’t likely to be too many more hikers until spring officially arrived in another month or two.
He braced his feet against the wall and glanced down to his left. Long blond hair streamed out from the body in the wind. He could tell from the bulk of the shoulders that it was a male, despite the long hair. The rope cut through the hair and seemed to run down the body’s back. That’s not right, Doug thought grimly. He suspected the person below him had been climbing alone and hit his head, but if that were true, then the body would be hanging sideways, with the rope still attached to the climber’s harness. Doug clipped the rope tight and pulled on a pair of latex gloves before dropping the last few feet.
He tied himself off, took off his sunglasses, and tried to make out the features of the body beside him. The blond hair framed a pale gray and purple face with bloated eyes and a gaping mouth. The man wasn’t dressed like a climber, but in black jeans and a leather biker vest. There was nothing beneath the vest but tattoos and sliced skin. And the rope, Doug noticed. An efficient noose had tightened so much it cut into the bloated skin around the man’s neck.
“Fuck.”
Suicides always sucked. He tried to change the man’s image in his head, to mentally erase the bloating and decay, but he couldn’t place the man’s face even then.
“Send down the backboard,” Doug called into the radio. Above him, the rest of the search-and-rescue team lowered a hard fiberglass stretcher. Doug swung himself to the side and caught it before it could smack the body in the head. He guided it down another few feet, and then he hit his radio again. “Stop.” He swung the stretcher around the body and held his breath as he leaned around the body to wrap the black nylon strap around the man’s chest and secure it against the Velcro on the other side. As soon as he finished the first strap, he launched himself off the wall and swung as far away from the body as he dared, then took several deep breaths. Holding his breath again, he swung back to the body to secure another strap around the legs.
As he bent sideways to secure the second strap, he ended up flinching as the back of the dead man’s fingers rubbed against his temple. When he pulled his head away slightly, he saw a long series of black marks along the inside of the man’s forearms. At first, he thought the man must have been absolutely determined to kill himself, and slit his wrists several times just in case his neck snapping, the rope strangling him, and smacking into the limestone wall on the way down all failed to kill him. As he moved his head a bit closer to wrap the second strap around, he made out the shape of a letter among the bloody cuts. He swung to the side a little and, reluctantly, reached out to turn the man’s arms so he could read the letters.
“Fuck,” he whispered again.
He grabbed the webbing attached to the foot of the backboard and hoisted it up, then clipped it into a carabiner on his harness. Then he found a few good footholds and climbed up several feet. He pulled the slack rope tight and carefully unclipped the carabiner. He hoisted the bottom of the backboard the last few inches and secured it, so the stretcher was hanging horizontally. He avoided looking at the man’s face again. At what was left of his face, anyway. He pulled out a small knife. Before he opened it, he reached for his radio again. “Backboard secure—I’m cutting him down.”
“Make sure you cut the right rope now,” a half-amused voice said over the radio.
Doug opened the pocketknife, reached for the stretched rope attached to the man’s neck, and began to saw through the rope a few inches above the knot. He stopped after he cut through most of the rope and reached for his radio again. “Oh, damn,” Doug drawled. “I always get this one wrong…. Remind me, is it the rope tied with a clove hitch I’m supposed to cut, or the one tied with a noose?”
“That’s a puzzler,” the same voice echoed. “But, hey, you’ve got a one in three chance of guessing right.”
“Tension,” Doug warned before he let go of the wall and let his weight settle in the harness. He sliced through the last of the braided rope. The rope holding the stretcher shifted as the
man’s full weight settled onto it. The webbing stretched tight and held the body secure. He folded up his knife and slipped it into his front pocket. He settled back into his harness and pushed himself off the wall, then reached for his radio again. “All right, let’s bring him down, slow.”
“You got it, chief.”
Doug kept one hand on the stretcher and let the men lowering the body set the pace. He guided the stretcher over two more overhangs, and even though he knew the man on the stretcher was so far beyond feeling a bump or two that he was beginning to decompose, he tried to keep the stretcher from swinging back into the cliff wall. A hundred and twenty feet below the overhang where he’d cut the man down, three more members of the search-and-rescue team caught the stretcher and set it down on the rocky shore of the creek. Even though two of them were professional paramedics and one was a forest ranger, they all froze when they saw the state of the body. The paramedics recovered so fast that Doug wondered, not for the first time, if they were human at all. They moved in, unhooked the stretcher from the rope, and began to run through a standard emergency-response checklist.
Doug pulled the forest ranger aside. “Is that guy from the Missoula newspaper still down at the trailhead?”
“I doubt it. I’ve got an intern down there making sure no one else comes up this way. I can call and ask her.”
“Please do.”
The ranger nodded and pulled out his cell phone. After a moment, he covered the mouthpiece. “Yeah, he’s still there.”
Doug turned back to the paramedics, who were already hoisting the stretcher for the hike back down to the trailhead parking lot. “No. There’s a reporter camped out down there. I want him bagged before we take him anywhere.”