by Gregory Ashe
“Yeah, but you never came here. I mean, I never saw you here.” Somers slackened, his head drooping against the glass as he stared at Big Biscuit’s stained walls and drooping canopy. “I was here all the time in high school. It was cool, you know? Eating at a diner was cool. God, we were so stupid.”
Stupid. And the thought of Jeff’s knuckles popping.
“Did you come here?” Somers asked as they got out of the VW. Snow crunched underfoot. Yellow snow.
“Why the hell do you care?”
“It’s just a question.”
It’s just a question, Hazard thought. The sound of Jeff’s knuckles popping, that sound, that goddamn sound, and he says it’s just a question.
“Well?”
“Yes.”
“I never saw you here.”
“Oh well,” Hazard said, but inside he was thinking, three o’clock, we came here at three o’clock in the afternoon because we were scared, because I was scared and because I was too stubborn to listen to Jeff. Three o’clock. And at three o’clock in the afternoon, when Big Biscuit had the fewest customers, Mikey Grames had been there. Like he’d been waiting. Like the whole thing was a setup. And Mikey Grames had cut his initials into Hazard’s chest. Three o’clock in the afternoon, and all for a damn biscuit.
No. More than a biscuit. It had meant a lot more than that, and Jeff understood that. But who the hell cared anymore?
Inside, the air still smelled like sausage—the fat, greasy patties, their edges blackened on the griddle. The decor had remained the same: red vinyl, chrome fogged by fingerprints, and vinyl squares that looked like they had disintegrated rather than simply wearing away. Once they were inside, Somers took charge, navigating towards a booth at the back. Their waitress, who looked young enough that she might need a booster seat when she sat behind the wheel of a car, dropped two glasses of water on the table and whipped out a pad of paper.
“Big Biscuit Breakfast,” Somers rattled the words off without looking at the girl. He sipped his water and added, “Coffee, too. Cream and sugar.”
The girl—the child—stared at Hazard.
“Could I see a menu?”
Somers choked on his water; he fumbled the glass trying to set it down. The girl, in contrast, grew icily still. She put the point of her pencil between her teeth.
“What the hell do you need a menu for?” Somers said in a low voice. “Just order what you usually order.”
“I’m not hungry for that.” Hazard stretched up out of the booth, glancing around the diner for a glimpse of the food that might be available. The other patrons congregated in a tight bracket: white men over sixty in denim overalls and work boots, all of them.
“Hazard, just order something,” Somers hissed.
“Cantaloupe.”
Eyes widening, the girl bit down on her pencil. The tip of a pink tongue poked out between her teeth, and the pencil lead clattered onto the tabletop.
“For the love of God,” Somers muttered, wiping at his eyes. To the girl, more loudly, he added, “He’ll have the same thing. Eggs over easy.”
“No, I’ll have them—”
“Eggs over easy,” Somers repeated.
The girl stared at each of them in turn before dropping the pencil to the page. She seemed to have forgotten that the lead had broken, and she scribbled at the page with the useless pencil and walked away.
Somers dropped back in his seat, eyeing Hazard with disgust. “You said you’d been here before.”
“I have.”
“It’s not the Moulin Vert.”
Hazard didn’t respond.
“What’d you think they were going to have on the menu?”
“Drop it, Somers.”
“Who’d you come here with?”
It sounded like an honest question. A few months ago, though, it would have triggered Hazard’s defenses because it was a question that touched, however tangentially, on Jeff. Now, Hazard knew, that wasn’t Somers’s way. Somers never beat around the bush; he’d come straight out and say whatever he was thinking. Unfortunately.
But even though the question was honest, Hazard found himself drawing out packets of Sweet ‘n Low and Splenda and shuffling them like he was doing a card trick.
“Oh,” Somers said. “Really? With him?”
“Why shouldn’t we?” Hazard said, cramming the sweeteners back into their cardboard tray. “Because we were faggots?”
“Ree.”
“What? That’s what you thought.”
“You don’t know what I thought. You’ve never asked me.”
“What does it matter, Somers?”
“It matters because of this.” Somers gestured at the space between them, as though the thumbprints swarming the tabletop held some sort of secret. “That’s why it matters.”
“The day I came here,” Hazard said, “Mikey Grames was sitting right over there. Third stool from the left. He had on those Ralph Lauren jeans he was so proud of, and they were halfway to his knees. He looked like a damn idiot. I sat in the booth near the window. With Jeff. I had—Christ, I don’t even know. Coffee. An egg. Honest to God, I don’t remember because all I could think about was Mikey Grames. He noticed us. He was staring. And all I could think was that this was my fault because it had been my stupid idea. Jeff never would have come here.”
“Ree, you were right. You had every right to come here. Mikey—”
“He left. We were halfway through eating, and he left, and that was worse because of the way he looked at us. On the way out, he stared at us like he wanted to kill us. And I remember having something in my throat, some food that I didn’t remember chewing, and I didn’t choke, but it was there, suffocating me because I couldn’t swallow. He was going to kill us. We were on opposite sides of the booth, Jeff and I. We weren’t touching or kissing. We weren’t dressed like faggots, but we might as well have had on silk shirts and leather chaps as far as Mikey was concerned. And you know what? I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t eat any more. We paid—Jeff paid—and we left. Jeff went home. I was sick. I wanted to throw up, but I couldn’t. I started walking home.”
Hazard paused. He wanted to say the rest of it. He wanted to tell Somers the end of the story: Mikey and John-Henry and Hugo catching him a few blocks off Market Street, fencing him into the alley, while Mikey pulled out a pocket knife and carved the first three lines of a G into Hazard’s chest.
But what was the point in telling it? What was the point in bringing that up? To make Somers feel guilty? There might be some satisfaction in that, but it would be a petty, vicious kind of satisfaction, and Hazard had had enough of that for one life.
“What?” Somers said.
“That’s it. I walked home.”
“That can’t be it. You said you started walking home. Something else happened. Did Mikey come back?”
At that moment, the waitress returned. She set down four plates, two for each man: pancakes, eggs, bacon, sausage, and the eponymous big biscuit. A sticky-looking syrup container followed, along with pads of real butter. Then, planting her hands on her hips, the waitress studied the table, nodded, and left them. Customer service, Big Biscuit-style.
“What’d you like about this place?” Hazard said, spearing a sausage patty. “You heard me bitch, now tell me your side of it.”
“Ree, what happened?”
“It’s history. Tell me what the cool kids did.” Hazard surprised himself with a smile. Part of that was the sausage; it was damn good.
For a moment, Somers said nothing. His face was far off, as though he were trying to find the ending to Hazard’s story. He stirred his eggs with his fork, piercing one and spilling yolk across the sausage and bacon. “It was a lot of things, I guess. Good food.” He ate a sausage for emphasis. “That goes a long way, especially for teenage guys. You know: carbs and protein, and you can eat all you want because you’re seventeen and you’ll burn it off without getting out of bed.”
“Not the only place,” Somers said, spreading butter on his pancakes and drowning them in syrup. He carved a slice out of the fluffy mound and shoveled it into his mouth. “The best place.”
“Come on.”
“I don’t know. It’s not like something special happened. It just . . . happened.”
“You can do better than that.” Hazard followed his partner’s example; the first bites of pancake melted in his mouth.
“Well, some of it was football. The guys liked to come here. It was a varsity thing, no freshmen or JV allowed, and that made it really attractive. It was a big deal when you got to go to Big Biscuit. We’d go before games, after games. Sometimes both. We’d go on the weekends. Bing—” He paused. “Damn, I hadn’t thought about that. Bing used to come here. He was so young, you know. Just a few years older than the rest of us, even if he did teach metals and coach varsity. It seemed so cool, hanging out with him. He was in college, and he was our coach, but he was also just cool.”
Hazard noticed that, at some point, their waitress had returned with their coffee. Big Biscuit service again—usually the coffee came first. He sipped at the drink, barely noticing its heat because he was thinking about what Somers had said. Thinking about Bing.
Back then, nobody had been cooler than Bing. He’d had it all: good looks, athletics, brains, money. In a town like Warhedua, that had made Bing magnetic. No, not magnetic. It had been more like gravity. Things had revolved around Bing; they always had. Even Emery Hazard, on the edge of Wahredua’s solar system, had felt that pull. Until that day at the lake, when Hazard had been walking along the beach, and Bing had stood there, framed by the sun and the water, stripping away shirt and shorts and kicking them into the sand, Hazard drooling enough to raise the water level a few inches.
“Anyway,” Somers said, breaking Hazard’s train of thought, “that was it. Some of the girls knew we came here, so they would come too. I never really thought about the fact that you didn’t come here.” His face screwed up. “I should have invited you. I mean, it’s a diner, right? Everybody should have come here. It’s just a place.”
Hazard shrugged, but he knew Somers was wrong—and he knew that Somers’s knew too. Somers might not phrase it in the same words, but both men knew that the question wasn’t about place but about power. And one way of showing power was to be different, to do things that other people couldn’t do. A little tick ran through Hazard and he felt a thought come into alignment. Yes, power was about doing things that other people couldn’t do—and, often, doing them in conspicuous ways.
“Your dad,” Hazard said.
“What?”
“He’s a lawyer, right?”
“I guess so. He’s a partner in his firm, but I don’t think he does much besides play golf. What? Are we done talking about Big Biscuit?” Somers’s flashed an easy smile, but those blue-green eyes, like the oceans in a beer commercial, were troubled. “I still want to hear about what happened to you.”
“Who would your father want to impress?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Law firms need clients, right? That’s a big part of their business. So who did he want to impress?”
“I have no idea. I don’t talk—” Somers paused. He ripped a piece of bacon in half, chewed, swallowed, and then said, “My father and I don’t talk about that kind of stuff. He’s still angry I didn’t go to law school, and the whole thing’s boring as hell anyway.”
“What about the mayor? What about the sheriff?”
“Who did they want to impress?”
“No. Did your father do business with them?”
“Christ, Hazard, I don’t know. What’s your point?”
“Your dad was showing off.”
“What?”
“Last night, at the party. He was showing off when he called you.”
Somers’s blond eyebrows drew together. “He’s called me plenty of times—”
“But he called you last night when Stillwell had a gun. And think about it: there were lots of younger men at that party, so why were your father, Mayor Newton, and Sheriff Bingham the ones keeping an eye on Stillwell? Because that’s who your father was trying to impress. One of them. Maybe both. He wanted them to see that he had a cop in his pocket. Think about it: why didn’t the sheriff handle things?”
“Mayor Newton appoints the police chief. He’s got the whole department in his pocket.”
“But this is different. This is private, on-demand, and there’s loyalty: a family bond.”
“You don’t know much about my family, I guess.”
“You went, didn’t you? Your dad called and you went to help him—”
“Look, Hazard, I see what you’re getting at, but it doesn’t make any sense. I’ve been doing this kind of stuff for my dad for years. Last night wasn’t any different. Let’s drop it and focus on what we know.”
Hazard sheared through a sausage link and ate it in two bites, his teeth clicking together as he chewed. It wasn’t the same. Last night was different.
“Here’s what we know,” Somers said. “Someone contacted Stillwell, hiring him to show up at the party under false pretenses. A lot of false pretenses. Stillwell showed up at the party with a gun. Stillwell shot my father. And Stillwell was killed while in police custody.” Through another mouthful of pancakes, Somers said, “It’s Newton.”
Hazard grunted.
“Don’t make that noise,” Somers said, spearing a fork towards Hazard. “You know it was him. You know it.”
Batting the fork away, Hazard said, “You’re leaving stuff out. Important stuff. Nobody mentioned a gun in those emails. Nobody hired Stillwell to do a hit. And I agree Stillwell’s death is suspicious, but if Lender’s dirty, then he might be dirty for a lot of people.”
“But we know he’s dirty for Newton. We know that much.”
“Christ, keep your voice down, will you? Look, I’m not saying it wasn’t Newton, but I’m saying we don’t have anything to base it on. If we go to the chief and tell her that we believe Stillwell was hired to kill your father, she’s going to ask us why. What do we have to offer her? Nothing.”
“Somebody hired Stillwell to go to my parents’ house. It’s not nothing.”
“No, it’s not. But it’s also not enough to convince the chief that this is murder for hire. She wants it buried; you heard her. All four of her detectives smell like shit around this case, and the faster it’s closed, the better. You know her better than I do. What’s she going to do if she even suspects we’re nosing around Newton for this?”
Conflict twisted Somers’s face. “She’ll—”
“Be honest.”
The conflict in his face folded into despair. “Jesus, man. Somebody tried to kill my father. You want me to just shut up about it? Go back to work? Pretend it didn’t happen?”
Hazard lanced his eggs; yolk poured out, mixing with the sausage crumbs. He mopped at the mess with his biscuit.
“That’s it? We’re just going to sit on this because you’re scared?”
“Don’t do that bullshit,” Hazard said, not bothering to look up from sopping up the yolk on his plate. “You know that’s not what I said.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying get your head out of your ass and work this case like a real detective. You’re the best one I know when you’re not dicking around feeling sorry for yourself.”
The silence that followed was so deep, Hazard felt a moment of vertigo as if he could have fallen into that silence and kept on falling. It made him dizzy, and he finally looked up, not able to bear it any longer. Pink brightened Somers’s cheeks; he was biting his lower lip. His tousled blond hair looked like he’d just gotten out of bed—and he hadn’t been sleeping.
“What?” Hazard said.
For a moment, it looked like Somers would say something.
Then he shoved back his plate and glanced at Hazard’s half-eaten pancakes. “You going to finish those?”
Hazard curled an arm around the plate protectively.
“Work the case like a real detective, huh?”
“It’d be a nice change.”
“I’m the best one you know.”
“Oh God.”
“No, you said it. You can’t take it back.”
“Fuck me.”
“I’m the best.”
Hazard shook his head and turned his attention to the pancakes.
“Ree?”
“Just drop it, all right? I’m never going to say it again.”
Somers laughed, and it was the closest he’d sounded to normal in the last twelve hours. “Let’s work the shit out of this case.”
With a grunt, Hazard worked his fork against the pancakes. “In about fifteen minutes.”
HAZARD FINISHED HIS PANCAKES. The last bite had been as good as the first: tender, fluffy, bathed in butter and syrup. Eying the empty plate, Hazard wondered if he had overestimated his own abilities; his stomach was dangerously full.
The time spent eating had diluted the atmosphere, and for that, Hazard was grateful. Somers’s anger he could understand. Somers’s frustration, Somers’s rage, Somers’s frenzy to act—all of these things, he could process, parcel out, and deal with. But this other side, this dangerous proximity to—
—intimacy—
—Somers’s soft side made Hazard uncomfortable. Uncomfortable? That was mild. Hazard would have jumped head-first through Big Biscuit’s plate glass window to avoid that kind of conversation because it was during that kind of conversation that Somers’s blue-green eyes got soft, that he leaned a little closer, that the smell of his aftershave rolled over Hazard, the smell of sea-salt drying on skin and crushed amber, that Somers’s turned his elbows in, looking awkward and coltish. It was during those kinds of conversations, Hazard had discovered over the last few months, that he was most in danger of—
—falling in love—
—making a mistake. Better to eat in silence, better to chew slowly and sip lots of coffee, better to let time defuse the bomb that was ticking down between them than to take that kind of risk.