Divide & Conquer

by Madeleine Urban

  All the while, Zane’s fingers carded gently through his hair. “I know what it’s like to be totally in the dark,” he said, his voice calm. “But I wouldn’t go anywhere even if I could. I’d rather be here with you than somewhere else alone.”

  Ty reached up and gripped his hand, trying to grasp a thread to keep him from truly panicking. He would hurt them both if he lost control. Zane’s fingers curled around his in a firm grip.

  “Can I tell you a secret?” he asked Zane, voice low and threadbare.

  “Yeah.”

  “You ever get gut feelings? Like you see something and you just know?” Ty asked, feeling stupid but not caring. He felt Zane squeeze his hand. “First time I saw you, after I got over hating you, I knew… I knew we’d die together. I could just feel it deep down. Never felt that before.”

  Zane exhaled heavily. “Not today. And not tomorrow. And not for a long time to come, Ty Grady. You hear me? A hell of a long time.”

  Ty nodded jerkily. “Do me a favor?” He reached out and grabbed at Zane’s other hand in the pitch black. He shoved it upward, trying to get Zane to raise his arm. “Hold up the ceiling, okay?”

  Zane let Ty move his hand to touch the stone, which inexplicably made Ty feel a modicum better, but he kept his other linked with Ty’s. Several heartbeats of quiet passed before Zane spoke. “First time I saw you, after I got over hating you, I knew,” he said, echoing Ty’s words, “I knew I’d fall in love with you.”

  Ty shivered all over, torn between the comforting warmth of Zane’s words and the cold terror of impending crush injuries. He couldn’t get in any air to speak.

  “I laughed at myself,” Zane continued, a hint of pleading in his voice, “and then I denied it, and then I did everything I could to prove myself wrong, but it didn’t work.”

  “I know, Zane,” Ty whispered, though he had to admit the words brought a certain level of relief he hadn’t realized he’d needed.

  “Ty.” Zane’s even, soothing tones finally broke on the short gasp of his name. “I love you and I’m scared I’ll lose you. Please don’t leave me alone in the dark.”

  Ty closed his eyes, trying to push back the weight of the tons and tons of stone that sat precariously above them. He smiled weakly with Zane’s words. “Now was that really so hard to say?” he tried to tease, but it came out sounding desperate.

  “Yes?” Zane answered, forlorn. “Jesus, Ty, come here, please.”

  Just the thought of moving made Ty begin to tremble. He squeezed his eyes closed, gritted his teeth. He reached blindly for Zane, his hand glancing off Zane’s shoulder, and Zane did the rest, moving close enough to embrace him in the tight space.

  Zane lifted one hand to cup Ty’s face. “Do you have any idea how brave you are?” he asked, the sounds ragged and perhaps even a little choked.

  “Tell me when I’m not about to freak out, okay?” Ty requested hollowly. The trembles skittered through his body and into Zane’s.

  “Tell me about the ribbons,” Zane requested abruptly, his voice again calm and soothing.

  Ty knew what he was doing, trying to take Ty’s mind off their impending doom any way he could. He shook his head. “The two on top are the Bronze Star and a Purple Heart,” he started breathlessly.

  “Bronze Star?” Zane repeated, sounding surprised.

  “The country’s fourth highest medal,” Ty rattled off desperately, trying to find distraction from the realization that he couldn’t breathe. He was about to have a full-fledged panic attack. “Awarded to any person who, while serving in any capacity with the Armed Forces of the United States, distinguishes him or herself by heroic or meritorious achievement or service while engaged in an action against an enemy of the United States, in military operations involving conflict with an opposing foreign force, or while serving with friendly foreign forces engaged in an armed conflict against an opposing armed force in which the United States is not a belligerent party.”

  “Damn, Ty, are you reciting military guidelines?” Zane asked, sounding both impressed and horrified.

  “Yes, shut up. It’s helping. Accomplishment or performance of duty above that normally expected, and sufficient to distinguish the individual among those performing comparable duties is required.”

  Zane snorted softly. “What’d you do to earn it?”

  Ty breathed in deeply, the air shuddering out of him just as quickly. “I killed a whole lot of people.”

  Zane was silent for a moment, then shifted against Ty to hold him more securely. “Tell me about the rest.”

  Ty shook his head and strained his eyes to find light. When he could make out nothing in the blackness, he reached up for the ceiling. If Zane wouldn’t hold it up, maybe he could.

  He touched the cold stone, and he felt Zane raise his arms to help. “I’ll hold up my end, if you’ll hold up yours,” Zane said.

  “Don’t humor me, Garrett. Just hold up the ceiling for me, okay?” Ty snapped, but he was laughing at his own words.

  “Yes, Staff Sergeant,” Zane said smartly.

  A deep rumble and a shiver in the stones interrupted Ty’s stinging retort, and Zane grabbed him and yanked him down, covering his head as the stones started to shift and fall again. The shrieking of the rock shearing filled Ty’s ears, and just as he thought his heart might stop, just as everything around them shook violently, several large stones behind Zane toppled in the opposite direction, giving them a little more room and letting in shockingly bright dull-gray light.

  Ty stared at the shaft of light as if he could actually use it to pull them out of hell. His arms tightened around Zane, fingers digging in reflexively as he fought down the stark terror. It wasn’t something he could really control; it was ingrained in him to fear the darkness and spaces that closed in when he couldn’t see. Even this hint of light and Zane’s arms around him couldn’t fight back the impending panic attack for much longer. He was surprised he’d staved it off for this long. He firmly believed it was Zane’s doing, him saying the right things at the right time.

  Another stone fell away, then another, and as the hole got bigger, Zane literally dragged Ty over his lap and shoved him toward the opening. Voices started to echo around them, their names bouncing off the stone as people called.

  Ty crouched at the narrow opening, trying to fight through the haze of panic to judge if he could make it through. He didn’t think he could, and forcing the wrong stone to shift could bring the whole thing down. He didn’t try it, instead calling out to the rescuers and sliding back into the darkness to sit with Zane. His hand trembled, but he reached for Zane’s and gripped it hard anyway as he met his lover’s eyes. “You asked me not to leave you alone in the dark.”

  Zane didn’t reply, but he pulled Ty’s hand close and pressed his lips gently to Ty’s knuckles.

  “YOU two look like shit.”

  Zane stopped on the threshold to Dan McCoy’s office and scowled as Ty pushed past him. “Worse than that,” Zane disagreed. His headache still raged, his eyes still felt swollen and full of the rock particle dust that had been kicked up into his face numerous times, and he could just feel the bruises coming up all over.

  Better than the alternative.

  “You okay?” McCoy asked, looking back and forth between the two partners.

  Zane still wore his ruined suit, now almost gray from the sand and stone ground into the fabric and boasting a few split seams, and several red scrapes scored one side of his face. Ty’s dress blues had suffered as well, but Ty had insisted on changing immediately, even when that meant into the spare running shorts and T-shirt stuffed in his locker downstairs. It was a scarlet-red T-shirt, with a dancing rock, a quivering piece of paper, and an awkward pair of scissors standing in a rough circle, all with guns in both hands and aiming at each other.

  Despite their ordeal, Ty had managed to come out looking like an action hero at the end of the movie, hair perfectly mussed, a delicate smudge on one cheek, the appropriate amount of dirt to make him loo
k rugged instead of a wreck. Zane sort of wanted to hate him.

  “You ever been buried under several metric tons of stone, Mac? Well, I have. Three times now!” Ty snapped as he eased himself into one of the chairs in front of McCoy’s desk.

  McCoy frowned but didn’t take the bait, for which Zane was grateful. If they could get through this, he and Ty could get out of here.

  “All right, Garrett, you sit too. You did your debriefs, so you know we found your truck intact. We’ll get it back to you in a few days. Go ahead and check out a car for the rest of the week. You can drive your partner around, since his truck is toast.”

  “About that—”

  “It’s being filed with Bureau insurance as a work-related personal property casualty,” McCoy said, talking right over Ty. “I’m sure there will be all kinds of paperwork for you.”

  Ty grimaced but didn’t say anything. Zane figured he was still grieving for the valiant Bronco.

  “I’ll be reviewing all the intel later this week as we deconstruct the case,” McCoy announced as he handed each of them a file folder. “But in the meantime, I thought you’d at least like a few answers.

  “His name was Walter Pierson Sutton, son of Clarence and Mitzi Sutton,” McCoy began. “Father’s a doctor; mother’s in interior design.”

  “Upper crust, huh?” Ty muttered distractedly as he licked his thumb and scrubbed at a spot on his arm, checking to see if it was a bruise or dirt.

  “The Suttons live in Roland Park, lots of money flowing. Pierce attended the Gilman School.” He paused to check for comprehension. Zane was still new to Baltimore and shrugged.

  “More-money-than-sense type of place, patches on the uniform, schoolgirl socks,” Ty said tiredly.

  “It’s a boys-only school,” McCoy specified.

  Ty shrugged as if that didn’t matter.

  “That’s where Sutton met Ross Tanger and, through Gilman’s elective program, Hannah Myles at Bryn Mawr School and Graham Lewis at Mount Saint Joseph,” McCoy explained.

  “So they basically all went to school together. White-bread kids with access to money and nothing to do,” Zane concluded.

  “On the nose,” McCoy said with a nod. “The Suttons gave that kid anything and everything he wanted. The other kids had reasons for wanting money that didn’t come from Mommy and Daddy. Not good ones, but reasons nonetheless: oppressive stepmother, forced responsibilities, boredom.”

  “So what went wrong?” Zane asked, turning the pages in the file as he skimmed.

  “There’s no way to really know what set him off,” McCoy said, sounding frustrated as he leaned back in his chair and dragged both hands through his thinning hair. “What we’ve been able to discover so far is he had a recent fascination with anti-authoritarianism, anarchy, and misplaced social rebellion. The principal at Gilman said he had a terrible attitude with authority figures. And although he didn’t have to work, Pierce drifted through several jobs at places in the Inner Harbor—including the aquarium—over the course of the past two years.”

  “Doing recon,” Ty said, almost under his breath. The false alarm at the aquarium suddenly made sense.

  McCoy nodded soberly. “Now we can see it as groundwork laid. We’ve got a warrant to get at his personal effects, computer, and phone, but now that he’s out of the picture….” He shrugged. The case was closed. More research would be academic.

  “He was an angry kid who just… decided to kill people,” Zane said, having a hard time believing it could happen even though it had come within mere seconds of killing him.

  “The banks weren’t the goal. They were the diversion,” Ty murmured sadly.

  “This was one pissed-off young man,” McCoy said. His exhaustion was clear in the deep lines and shadows on his face. “Initial profile says that by Sutton’s reckoning, the world needed to crash and burn and be rebuilt. And the other kids have told interrogators that he zeroed in on Grady after the aquarium. Called you his white whale.”

  “That… makes no sense,” Ty muttered.

  “He’s talking about Moby Dick,” Zane said.

  “I know what it means, Garrett!” Ty snapped.

  Zane shrugged and looked at his partner askance, but he didn’t pick up the looming argument. He closed the file and let it fall to his lap, then reached up to rub the back of his neck as it twinged painfully.

  “What about the others?” Ty asked abruptly. Zane suspected he wanted to know about Hannah Myles.

  “It’s clear from interviews with the other three kids that Sutton became increasingly unstable over the past year. Erratic, angry, hateful, but at the same time extravagant and wild. They didn’t want him to take his temper out on them, so they went along with his plans,” McCoy concluded.

  “What’s the US District Attorney going to do?” Zane asked quietly, thinking about the sheer terror on Graham’s face.

  “They’ll likely go with our recommendations,” McCoy said. “Probably extended time in a minimum-security jail for Ross Tanger, assignment to a low-security women’s facility for Hannah Myles, and possibly just probation for Graham Lewis, considering his choice to turn Sutton in and the fact he wasn’t personally involved in any robberies.”

  “So it’s over,” Zane said slowly.

  McCoy raised one shoulder. “For now. This time.”

  “I’m going to go get drunk,” Ty stated, pushing himself up out of his chair.

  Zane stood as well, tapping the file folder on his other palm. “You coming to the wake, Mac?”

  “I’ll drop by,” McCoy said. “At least make an appearance and then bow out so the real drinking can begin. You two go on. And you, Garrett, have a drink yourself. That was a dumbshit thing to do, but you’re the hero of the hour.”

  “Yeah, he’s a real fucking hero,” Ty grumbled as he walked out of the office, but Zane could hear the undertone of pride in his voice.

  Then Zane grimaced. “I’m going to be on TV again, aren’t I,” he said, dread building.

  “Running for the end zone,” McCoy confirmed. “We’re going to have a talk about your newfound popularity next week. But for now, go on. Get out of here. I’ll see you two later.”

  “I’VE got Garrett’s first drink,” Perrimore announced as Zane walked into the pub the Bureau had taken over for the night. “He’s damn well earned it.” Applause broke out, and Zane felt his cheeks heat—he was glad he’d decided not to shave off the beard. He hadn’t planned to be a hero.

  “He’s also our DD, so make it a Coke,” Clancy answered as she pulled Zane by the elbow around some tables to join the rest of the crew.

  “Hell, I’ll buy whatever drinks Garrett wants all night if it means I don’t have to drive home,” Alston said, toasting Zane with his bottle of beer.

  Zane shrugged out of his jacket and sat down next to Lassiter, who bumped their shoulders together companionably.

  “Good one, Zane,” Lassiter said seriously, holding out his hand.

  “Thanks, Harry,” Zane replied as he shook it.

  “Where’s your partner, Garrett?” Alston asked.

  “Went home to change,” Zane said, frowning a little. “I figured he’d beat me here. He was more than ready for a drink after this afternoon.”

  “Amen to that,” Perrimore added as he set a tall glass bottle of Coke in front of Zane.

  Zane smiled his thanks. “They practically had to cuff him to a chair to keep him still long enough to debrief.”

  Everyone who had ever tried to keep Ty focused on something in the office for more than an hour laughed, and the table dissolved into meaningless chatter. They talked about work, mostly, because to a group of FBI agents, there wasn’t much else, and because they’d all worked with Lydia Reeves in some way. But they also talked about softball, their kids, their spouses, their exes, the Ravens winning and the Orioles losing, about the weird smell that had been emanating from the third-floor supply room for a week now, and anything else that would fill the companionable silence.

>   They were on their second round when Alston sat up straighter and waved at someone who’d just come into the crowded bar. When Zane turned, he saw Ty making his way through the standing-room-only floor toward them. Ty smiled and nodded as he pardoned his way past people, sliding his hand down one woman’s arm as he squeezed by her, patting someone on the shoulder and smiling like he knew the guy as he slipped past.

  He waved two fingers at the bartender he probably did know very well, since they were just a block or two from his house, and he stepped up to the table to put his arms around Alston and Clancy.

  “What’d I miss?”

  “You’re two rounds behind, Grady,” Alston announced.

  “What took you so long?” Clancy asked practically on top of Alston’s words. “And why didn’t you keep the uniform on?”

  Zane just watched his partner, again feeling the rush of thankfulness for being able to see. Ty was, as the cliché went, a sight for sore eyes, and Zane wished they were anywhere but a bar crowded with their friends and co-workers. He swallowed hard, feeling his pulse pick up as the same thoughts that had been racing in circles in his head the past few hours started right back up again.

  He’d told Ty that he loved him, no ifs, ands, or buts. There was no going back now, and Zane wouldn’t if he had the chance. But damn, they had to call some kind of moratorium on important declarations during life-threatening situations.

  Ty gave them all his trademark crooked grin, either oblivious to Zane’s gaze on him or ignoring it like he often did when they were together in a crowd. “I had to change and take everything to the cleaners before the burnt smell settled in,” Ty told them just as the bartender called out his name.

  Ty turned and stretched across the bar to take the two beers he’d ordered. He stood right there at the bar and gulped down one bottle as the others heckled him. He slammed the empty on the bar, nodded to the girl cheekily, and then brought his other bottle to the table with him. He sat on the edge of Clancy’s stool, the two of them using each other as backrests. Ty’s knee brushed Zane’s as he settled in, and when Zane caught himself watching his partner, he was glad it was fairly dark in the pub’s interior but for the colored light of the beer signs and the several LCD TVs mounted on the walls.