by Clancy Nacht
The table Lance’s laptop sat on was small and circular, but it would hold two. Lance hurried over to slide his cords out of the way. He was nervous about leaving Jeff in the room with Guy so precariously hidden. “It’s fine. I don’t smell too bad, do I?”
“No, of course not.” Jeff set his bag on a chair and picked out his cord and laptop. “But it is a little weird to work with you in a bathrobe, if I’m being honest.”
“Of course. I’m sorry. I’ll throw something on.” Lance took a deep breath. All his suits were in the closet. He eyed it and then glanced back at Jeff. His back was turned.
Lance opened the door. Even knowing that Guy was in there, it took Lance a moment to place him. He was scary good.
Lance grabbed a suit and closed the door. Maybe a shower would be all right. The only reason Jeff would go into Lance’s closet was if he was looking for something, and if he was snooping, maybe he’d deserve what he got from Guy. “You really don’t mind if I have a quick shower?”
“Nah. It’s fine. Corey said he was going to email the candidate files. I didn’t have the email when I left my room earlier. I guess everyone’s getting a little bit of a late start. Were you guys up late last night?” Jeff moved slowly hooking up his cords, as if he wasn’t familiar with moving his laptop around so much. New on the trail.
“Not terribly late. Midnight?” Lance grabbed socks and underwear out of his drawers.
“Long hours. Not surprised you oversleep.” Jeff moved his bag from the chair and sat down, making himself at home. “I’ll order us some coffee.” He waved Lance off to shower.
After a quick glance around the room, Lance locked himself in the bathroom and took the quickest shower he could. Getting dressed in the humid air was annoying, but airing the room out and changing with Jeff right there would’ve been too awkward.
Once dressed and ready, Lance opened the door, pretty sure he hadn’t heard any disruptive wrestling from the other room. Jeff was hunched over his computer, screen filled with documents. He turned and gave Lance an approving once-over, then returned to his reading.
Lance stood next to the closet, tempted to look in to see if Guy was still there. Surely he was a master of ducking out of occupied places, but what would Lance do if Guy was still there? Wave?
He made his way to his computer. Sitting down in front of it, Lance recalled Guy trying to break his password and the thwarted attempt to reboot. He shifted his laptop so that Guy couldn’t peek through the closet slats, unlocked his computer from its shut out, and rebooted.
Jeff sat up and stared at the back of Lance’s computer. “Oh, it’s working. It looked really dead to me. Like dead dead. I tried to start it up for you.”
Lance tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. Interesting. Maybe Jeff was just trying to be helpful as he said, but it was strange he’d concern himself with Lance’s computer. Then again, if he were someone to be suspicious of, would he admit that he’d tried to get in?
“Huh, that’s strange. It’s fine.” Lance swiped his phone screen while his computer booted, punched in his passcode, and read the app-generated security token. Then he punched it in, appended to the end of his password—a misspelled, ASCII-ridden lyric from a song he hadn’t listened to in years.
Even with such precautions, Lance didn’t keep anything on his computer that linked him to his former life. It was a dead end, but Guy knew that or he wouldn’t have been so obvious in trying to obtain access.
Within minutes, Lance had his email open, and he was slogging through running mate candidates for Elliot’s run as president. “Bounce all the white men.”
Jeff looked like he’d expected Lance to say that. “He needs an ultra-conservative to balance the ticket.”
Lance grumbled, which made Jeff laugh.
“I know. But we’re looking at the optics. We have to keep his appeal broad. Centrists will make or break this.”
“Not if the base isn’t rallied.”
Talking about the base reminded Lance just who he was promoting. Ugh. When he played at politics as a game, Lance wanted to win. He wanted to make Elliot happy, and really, Elliot seemed open-minded on broader issues.
Then again, he could spout the rhetoric against his personal beliefs as well as any politician. Did it matter if the candidate was personally good if his actions and politics ran counter to his convictions?
Lance sat back and stared at his computer. Winnowing the white men from the list took it down to less than a third of what they were given, which was a sad statement on the party he was working for.
Not that Democrats were likely that much better.
He tapped his fingers on the table. His judgement on politics was unfair, particularly since he was coming from the tech world. There was so much lip service given to equality, but when it came to seats of power, women and minorities were hopelessly outnumbered. The fact two white men were sitting at the table making these decisions didn’t escape Lance’s notice. Even as a gay man, he was cisgender and white, not that far from ultimate privilege.
Oppo research could knock out any one or twelve of the candidates Lance might put forward as optically good. A wrong choice could destroy any and all goodwill that Elliot had built up with the public. Though Lance wasn’t particularly active in politics, even he hadn’t missed the disaster of John McCain’s candidacy after he added Sarah Palin to the ticket.
Optically, she was a great choice. A woman! She was highly conservative, pretty, and at first seemed well-spoken. At the moment, they were positioning Elliot very similarly to McCain’s original campaign reputation—the party-bucking maverick. Elliot made even fewer apologies for it. Then again, it was still early.
Palin alone didn’t bring McCain’s campaign to a halt, but her presence in the spotlight even today was a blight on McCain’s legacy. A wrong choice could have real and lasting effects on Elliot’s future.
Lance sorted through names and faces, reading biographies until he was dizzy. Each time he found someone who seemed good, he tried to reconcile his choice with the base. Was it even possible a woman or minority could appeal to a base of radicals? If the moderate candidate with a running mate from Crazytown didn’t work, why would it work with two moderates?
Coffee had arrived, been drunk to the dregs, and the dregs had cooled. Afternoon sun lit the room. Lance had done little other than read, like Jeff was doing across from him. His stomach growled, protesting the lack of breakfast as he hit the midday.
“Lunch in or lunch out?”
If they left, that would give Guy an easy out, but Lance only thought of that after he’d spoken. He should’ve been more aware.
“I’m in the zone. Let’s order in.” Jeff got up and grabbed the menu from next to the bed.
Lance sighed, but he imagined in Guy’s line of work, an air-conditioned closet wasn’t the worst place he’d had to hide. In some ways, it was nice having him there. Not that Jeff was likely to do anything inappropriate, but if he did, Lance had a Guy.
“I’m zoning out. You finding anything interesting over there?”
Jeff dropped back into his seat as he flipped through the menu. “Not really. There’s good and bad to everyone. Eliminating the white guys kind of alienates a good portion of the base from the get go.”
“Starting to think that myself.” Lance frowned and weighed the merits of putting names on a dartboard and picking that way.
“Lunch is on the campaign, right?” Jeff grinned in the way a college student on track for a free meal would.
“Yes, Jeff, have the steak.” Lance rolled his eyes and took the menu. He practically had hotel menus memorized by now. He decided on salmon and picked up the phone.
“To drink?” the operator asked after Lance had given his order.
“Uh… Water and… the cab, I guess.” Lance raised his brows at Jeff. “Wine?”
“Merlot.” Jeff beamed like he felt clever for knowing a varietal.
There were two merlots on the menu. Lance ordered
the cheaper of the two, figuring it didn’t really matter.
“Very good. It’ll be up in thirty minutes.”
Lance hung up and then squinted again at the laptop screen. It felt like only a few minutes had passed when there was a subtle knock at the door.
Jeff hopped up, hungry or eager, Lance wasn’t sure, but while Jeff was tending to the man delivering the food, Lance received a status report about Michael’s roommate Kate from his PI.
So far, Zed observed that Kate’s life appeared to revolve around her computer. She played games late into the night, rolled out of bed in the morning, and went into what appeared to be a fairly boring IT job at a local startup, Radonz, that Lance had heard about. They provided software to stand alone kiosks, frequently used by casinos.
She didn’t lunch with anyone, just took her sad little Lean Cuisines into work with her every day. No pets. She didn’t meet people for drinks. Just work and home.
Lance considered asking Talia to track what Kate did online, but given how little there was to go on and how she didn’t seem to be in any actual danger, Lance figured it was unnecessarily invasive. He’d give Zed another day to watch her, and if nothing was going on, he’d declare her safe. Maybe take Guy’s advice and leave the situation alone.
That said, though he denied it even to himself, now that That Man’s toadies had shown up to whisk Lance away for a private meeting, he wondered if the two things were related.
But they couldn’t be. Michael Rios was murdered long before Lance’s picture hit the news. For That Man to have murdered Michael would presuppose that one, That Man knew who and where Lance was—which he’d given no indication of for eleven years—and two, that That Man suddenly gave two shits that Lance used Grindr. If that were the case, Austin’s gay community was about to be in crisis.
That said, Lance couldn’t deny the tiny possibility that if Rios were working dirty, there was a pretty big chance that he knew That Man.
But if that was true, if Rios worked for That Man and Rios fucked Lance, why would that get him killed? That Man was dangerous, but he wasn’t crazy. Lance narrowed it down to a couple of possibilities.
One, That Man knew where Lance was and Rios was sent as a honeypot. It wouldn’t have been difficult to get the right man for the job on Grindr and just wait until Lance got to him. But if Rios was That Man’s honeypot, it made no sense to get rid of him. Even if, and it was a very big if, Rios refused to go on with the scheme after they fucked, why wouldn’t That Man just send another honeypot? Sure, Lance wasn’t looking on Grindr as much, but he wasn’t that difficult to get to in many ways. So no, that couldn’t have been what happened.
The second possibility was that Rios and Lance hooked up completely coincidentally and That Man found out. If anything, That Man would’ve wanted to use Rios to lure Lance back in, or he would’ve just told Michael not to fuck Lance again. Nothing so special had taken place between them that Lance could imagine Michael dying over it.
Most plausible was that Rios was working for That Man, they had some sort of disagreement unrelated to Lance, and it was all just a big coincidence.
But if that was true, then why was That Man trying to get in touch with Lance now?
Maybe That Man had gotten into Rios’s phone, recognized Lance, and decided to get in contact? Or maybe everything really was coincidence and the reason why That Man didn’t try to contact Lance before now was because he was prompted by the grainy elevator camera.
The motives didn’t change that That Man wanted to get in touch with him, though Lance took some comfort in knowing he probably didn’t cause Rios’s death personally.
The waiter rolled in the trolley, he was very tall and well built. Something about him seemed familiar, but then, Lance had been getting room service a lot lately. “This is your steak.” He pulled off the silver covering to reveal the food underneath. “And your salmon.” He did the same presentation of Lance’s lunch.
Lance gave him a brief smile. The waiter peered pointedly at the laptop-laden table. No room for dishes. “I guess I can leave this here. Oh, and your wines…” He gestured to the two glasses, their tops wrapped in cellophane so they wouldn’t splash. He pulled off the wrapping. “This is your merlot, and this is the cabernet.”
The waiter looked between the wine and the pair of them. “Make sure they’re to your taste?”
Lance had had waiters ask for him to taste the wine before, but room service? Maybe it was something new the hotel was trying to enhance the experience or something.
The way food trolley was parked made it awkward for Lance to get to the wine, so he waved off waiter. “I’m sure it’s fine.”
The waiter glared at him.
Lance frowned.
“Oh, I’ll do it.” Jeff, who was on the other side of the trolley, gamely gave his wine a sniff and a swig. “Very good.”
Then he grabbed Lance’s, which Lance started to object to, but Jeff was too fast. He sniffed it, made a little noise, swirled the wine, and took a swig. “Yes, very good wine.”
The waiter’s glare never left Lance’s face. Then Lance remembered he hadn’t tipped. “Right, I need to sign something?”
“You should try your own wine, sir. It’s very good.”
Lance stood and raked his gaze over the trolley until he saw the check’s little black folder. “I’m sure it’s excellent. Thank you.” He flipped the bill open, signed his name, room, and gave another 10% gratuity over the 18% that was already added in. “Great job. Thank you. We’ll leave this in the hall when we’re done.”
“You really should make sure you’ve tried your wine, sir. Make sure we didn’t give you two merlots.”
Lance waved him off. “If you did, I’ll find a way to survive it. Really, thank you.” He practically forced the man to take the book, and Jeff ushered him out the door.
Once the man was gone, they traded looks.
“What was that all about?” Jeff snickered as he sat down.
“No idea. Maybe he spat in mine or something.” Lance pulled his plate of salmon within reach and settled on the water. Something about that whole interaction made the wine seem less appealing.
It became apparent swiftly that Jeff couldn’t hold his midday wine. He giggled loudly at seemingly nothing and slurred his speech. Lance had never seen anyone come quite so unglued from day drinking.
“I tell you shomthin else, Mr. Gachbee...I’m not a gay, but you… You’re a real good looking man.” Jeff giggled and shoved a glob of potatoes in his mouth. “You make a man think… like, you know… Corey says you’re the woman.”
Lance took a deep breath as he sliced his salmon. The idea that Jeff and Corey had spoken about him turned his stomach, but being referred to as a woman because he preferred to bottom really stung. Not that he hated women, he simply wasn’t one. He could only imagine what sordid conversation had led Corey to tell Jeff that. Or why Corey even knew.
Did Elliot brag?
Or maybe Corey gleaned it from Grindr.
Either way, Lance was quickly losing patience. “I don’t see how it’s any of your business how I have sex.”
“Sorry.” Jeff’s eyes filled with tears. He grabbed his wine, or maybe it was Lance’s wine.
Lance didn’t know anymore. He didn’t care. He wanted to finish his meal and send Jeff off to go sober up.
Jeff continued blubbering. “Didn’t mean… wasn’t sure how far…”
“You’re not a whore, and neither am I. It will not go that far. Ever.” Lance slammed his utensils down. “This is inappropriate. You’re drunk. I think you should leave.”
Jeff looked terrified and dopey. He tried to stand but appeared to lack coordination to do so.
Lance eyed the glasses of wine. Both were still half full, but Jeff was acting as if he’d had several bottles.
“Jeff, wait! Don’t…” It was too late. Jeff had gotten up, stepped from the table, and then dropped to the floor, pulling the dishes down with him.
; Guy burst out from the closet and pulled the deadbolt to keep out anyone who might try to get in.
Lance jumped onto the bed to get around the trolley and took Jeff’s pulse. He was out cold, but he seemed fine otherwise. “Knockout drug.”
“Damn it, Lance, what is going on? Who wants you so bad?” Guy helped Lance move Jeff onto the bed.
The door’s lock beeped open but the chain latch prevented the intruder from getting back in.
Lance charged the door. “You tell him to go fuck himself, you hear me? I am not talking to him.”
The man pulled a gun and cocked it. “You sure about that?”
Behind him, Guy had followed and held his own gun pointed steadily at the waiter’s head. “He’s pretty sure.”
The waiter glared up at Guy. “Oh, I see. Well, this will be interesting to report.”
Guy leaned in, crushing Lance between him and the door. “This man is under my protection. You tell whoever you need whatever you want.”
Taking a couple of steps back, the waiter chuckled. “Oh, I will. We’ll all have a big laugh about it, believe me.”
Before either of them could ask why, the man pocketed his firearm and ran down the hall. Guy threw Lance out of the way and unlatched the door, but by the time he got through, the waiter was nowhere to be seen.
Lance crumpled to the floor next to the bathroom door. Guy would have questions once he got back, but the way the waiter laughed left Lance afraid of how Guy would react to the answers.
Chapter Nine
Gideon ran down the hotel hallway, but he was already too late. Having that extra bolt likely saved he and Lance from a real fight with Voelker, but undoing it wasted valuable time in Gideon’s pursuit. Even so, maybe Voelker had tripped or someone got in the way, so Gideon dashed onward.
Damn it. This wouldn’t have happened if Gideon hadn’t gotten sucked into Lance’s orbit. He cursed himself as he checked the elevators. Both had gone up, which seemed an unlikely choice if Voelker was trying to leave the building. Besides, the chances of the elevator doors being open on this floor when Voelker was trying to get away were slim. So, to the stairs.