Brady laughed a little. “Well, the quicker the better. I sort of like the heat in the desert.”
Ace grunted and nodded and continued to follow the dog out into the abyss of the horizon.
“Aren’t you worried?” Brady asked after a couple moments. “Rattlesnakes, scorpions, that sort of thing?”
Ace grunted and paused, holding up his hand.
“Hear that?” he asked.
“No,” Brady said.
“No rattlesnakes, then. Scorpions are hiding under rocks, coyotes won’t fuck with a human, and generally, it’s us and the creosote bushes, the tumbleweeds, and the cactuses.”
Brady thought for a moment about doing the old “cactuses/cacti” schtick and decided that no. Not with this man.
They continued on for a few more brisk moments, and then Ace stopped in the middle of a clearing and watched indulgently as the tiny dog pissed on a boulder the size of a small car.
“Every fuckin’ time,” Ace muttered. “And then he smells along the edge of it. Every critter in the fuckin’ county must’ve pissed here. It’s like they’re reading code.” He shook his head and turned to Brady. “You seem like a nice kid,” he said after a moment. “Ernie trusts you, and you didn’t drag Eric into theshit even when you could have. That means something to us, so I don’t want you to take this the wrong way.”
“Are we breaking up?” Brady asked, partly in jest but also partly in sadness. Dammit, he’dlikedhaving dinner in a house and not his crappy little apartment.
“Not necessarily,” Ace said, scowling up at the sky. “Look, I gotta ask you something… delicate. Please don’t get shitty with me. I know you people tend to stick together.”
Oh. You people. “Is this a cop thing?” Brady asked cautiously.
“Yes, it is,” Ace said, without batting an eyelash. “And I’ve known some that’re good and some that should be shot out of a cannon into hell. The problem is, before those people end up in hell, they end up fucking things up really bad for the folks on this end of the cannon. So I’m going to ask you some unsubtle questions here, and if you hate me, well, problem solved.”
Brady swallowed, suddenly aware that this was some sort of test. “You want to know if I’m dirty,” he said, trying to keep the anger out of his voice.
Ace lifted a shoulder. “I don’t care about your hygiene, son. I care if you’d cover if your brother in blue was a fucking pedophile or a drug dealer or somebody who rapes immigrant women because they’re too afraid of ICE to complain.”
“Ibegyour pardon?” Brady asked, his neck hackles up and blotches of anger rising to his cheeks.
“Don’t get het up,” Ace ordered, before Bradyreallysaw red. “Every one of those things I just named,we’ve caught a cop or an authority figure doing itout here. Notice I don’t suspectyou. That’s ’cause Ernie cleared you, but Ernie’s gift only goes so far. What I want to know is how far you’d go to cover for a boy in blue.”
Brady found he was breathing hard, his shoulders heaving, and slowly, slowly, he backed away from the edge of temper.
“Is it really that bad out here?” he asked, but he was feeling the sting of Arlen Cuthbert’s disgust as he did so, and hearing the absolute silence in the sheriff’s office over the last week whenever he’d walked in. His one friend on the force, a sweet guy with a wife and three kids, had been told he needed to use his vacation days or lose them and had been sent away for a month the day after Roy Kuntz’s smoking body had been found in the desert, and Brady was beginning to get a very, very bad feeling about the precariousness of life and that wind Ernie had been talking about.
Ace was giving him a simple, direct look that was absolutely fathomless. “It’s so much worse than I told you,” he said, and Brady swallowed down his nausea. “I’d love to have you over for dinner again. You seem like a nice guy, and you gave us a car, which definitely scores you some points. And you seem to speak Sonny’s language, and I gotta say, I’m partial to anyone who can do that. And you’re also gay as an Easter parade, and I’m not gonna lie, that fits in pretty well in my little garage, so that’s a plus.”
And now Brady was more mortified than mad. “How in the world did you know…?”
Ace cocked his head and rolled his eyes. At his feet, Duke the Chihuahua finished sniffing all the way around the pee-pee rock, cocked his tail, and made a deposit.
“Nobody in my department suspects,” he whispered, hoping it was true.
Ace nodded. “Is it the kind of place where you don’t want them to suspect?” he asked.
“My life would get a lot more dangerous if they did,” Brady said honestly. Arlen Cuthbert was always pretty liberal with theotherF-word, but Brady had been starting to wonder if he meant it in a more personal way over this last week. “I-I always wanted to be a cop. Like my dad and uncle. But after my folks died, I hadto move really far away so nobody knew I was the gay son, or I probably wouldn’t have lived this long.”
“Where you from?” Ace asked.
“Idaho,” Brady told him.
“Mm… that’s a shame. Shame you had to move from family, a shame nobody got your back here. I’ll tell you what.”
“What?” Brady asked, suddenly suspicious. Had he read these people all wrong?
