Brady handed those over too.
“You good to go, Cowboy?”
Brady liked that. Cowboy. Maybe if his Eric was Charlie, Brady could be Charlie’s Cowboy.
He was thinking in circles, and he had to get his shit straight.
“Yeah,” he said. “You coming with?”
Burton shook his head grimly before turning his blank, tinted-visor-covered face toward the many surveillance cameras that Brady had no doubt were currently taking their pulse and X-raying their bones. With a vicious little laugh, Lee Burton extended his middle finger to all watching as a final no to Brady’s question and then goosed the accelerator and pulled out.
Brady had no doubts that in two hours, he’d be in Victoriana General, pacing the waiting room with his friends, sending fractured killer’s prayers for his brothers.
Brady would have given anything in the world to join him there, but God. So much blood. He couldn’t let that be in vain. With a determined squaring of his shoulders, he turned to theentrance of the building and stepped inside, holding the phone up over his head along with his other hand.
As he’d suspected when he’d seen Burton flip off the surveillance cameras, he was greeted by a phalanx of Special Agents, weapons drawn, expressions locked down and ready for Armageddon.
“Hey,” he said, loud enough to carry. “Did you guys see all that fun information released to the news outlets today? Blackmail, kiddie porn, higher-ups?”
There was a change in that mass of bodies. A listening quality. Sure, sure, he could imagine that information making the rounds, freaking people out, starting a panic.
“Anybody want to know where that came from?”
An older man stepped forward, hair cut close to his scalp, a combination of black and gray. “Yes,” the man said, “yes, indeed. Wewouldlike to know where that came from.”
“I’ll tell you,” Brady said. “But first I need to see Jessica Chambers so I can speak to her in private.”
The man’s eyes went wide. “We can do that for you, sir. Do you care to surrender that phone?”
Brady shook his head. “Let me speak to Jessica first, and then I’ll tell you all a story. But you need to promise me you’ll listen, or I’ll rip the SIM card right out of this thing and crumble it to dust.”
He put his other hand to the back of the phone, where he knew he could access the card, and he rather enjoyed watching everybody hold their breath.
“That’s what I thought,” he said softly. “Jessica Chambers. Now.” He paused and heard his stomach grumble. “And you know, I wouldn’t mind coffee, a bagel, and a trip to the bathroom, either. You would not believe my day!”
Serenity
VICTORIANA GENERALwas a small hospital, and Eric, Jai, and Ace shared a room for recovery. For the first two days, they were ideal roommates, because none of them, Ace especially, were in the mood to speak much.
Between the bullet and the head injury, Ace had been a close call, and Eric wouldn’t forget the sound of Sonny’s quiet sobs next to his bed for a very long time.
George had been their go-between, making himself the spokesperson for the patients in room 301 and the rest of the hospital, with Amal as his second. Eric kept expecting some sort of police interview, but apparently the whole damned force was still reeling from the clusterfuck on the interstate, andsomething(Eric had no idea what) had happened to all the vehicles involved.
Eric’s ass hurt a lot, which was what happened when you got shot in the back of the thigh, and his heart hurt too, which was what happened when the man you loved showed up on every news outlet on the planet lying about the phone that implicated city councilmen, DAs, police chiefs, and one US Congressman from Orange County in a kiddie porn ring that had involved dozens of victims and a revival tent preacher.
Every lie—whether by omission or outright, bald-faced falsehood—was designed to protect not only Eric, but the entire little desert enclave that had welcomed Eric into its midst and called him brother.I have no idea who killed the Kuntz brothers, but at this point I think it’s what happens when lawenforcement does not respond to a community crying out in pain.I was nowhere near what happened on the interstate that day—given the time I arrived at the FBI, I would have needed to be going 200 miles per hour to have seen it go down.
No, I am not aware of the statistical anomaly of decreased crime, but I do doubt it’s attributable to Arlen Cuthbert’s prowess as a leader.
And it was funny, but Cuthbert had ordered dash cams off all the vehicles approaching the flatbed pickup that morning—why would he do that? Did anybody know who he was talking to? And Ace and Sonny’s spectacular jump had been the only thing people could remember.I don’t know who Cuthbert got out of his vehicle to talk to—there was a group of men standing in front of the flatbed, I think? But damn, you should have seen that SUV come out of nowhere! A 360-degree corkscrew, right over our heads!
But that hadn’t been caught on any dashcams either, because they’d all been shut off so Cuthbert would have no witnesses in an acre full of cop cars.
The whole thing was murky and strange and full of conflicting stories, and the only thing anybody could be sure of was there was a whole lot of damage to clean up.
And the guy driving the green Forester was a crazy sonuvabitch.
Eric had to smile at that last part, but the smile was bitter. That crazy sonuvabitch was having a hell of a time soothing his fractious, damaged boyfriend. He’d watched George give the little man sedatives and call it “headache pills” just to get Sonny to sleep.
