You Know What I Am
BRADY FOUNDthe vacuum, all charged and ready and, adjusting for the camper’s rocking, managed to clean up the glass on the floor and the couch and the back of it too—especially the fleece afghan on the back. He emptied the cannister into one of the many garbage bags Eric had under the sink and bundled it up in the trash.
So compact, so efficient, so like a real home—only now their real home was trundling over a dried-out riverbed, and Brady was trying not to panic because somebody hadtried to shoot himthrough the front-room window.
But that person was dead now, so it was okay.
Was it?Wasit okay?
Brady knew he’d already faced one sort of reckoning. Ace had killed the Kuntz brothers. Heknewthat. It wasn’t the way he would have done things, but then, he wasn’t living out on the edge of nowhere.Hisdetermination to bring law to this land did not mean anybody else with his uniform, his badge, and his gun, wanted the same thing. How many years would it have taken to get somebody’s attention Brady’s way? How many children’s lives would have been ruined in that time?
But it wasn’t just Ace, was it? It was Jai. It was Burton and Jason, who were apparently military, although their “extracurricular activities” weren’t exactly on books.
And it was Eric, who, although a professed newcomer to this little circle, obviously knew his way around.
Yes. Brady knew what Eric was—sort of. He knew that Eric had some very efficient ways of thinking, and a certain comfort with tight situations of the law. But he didn’t know specifics, and suddenly hewantedto. George and Ernie and Cotton hadn’t been blind to what their men had done. They simply… knew their talents lay in different areas. Putting things together, Brady figured George had probably been the one to find out about the children with chlamydia, and from there he’d informed the others as to what Preacher Kuntz was doing. Ace and Jai had made the plan, but everybody had obviously had a part. (Except Cotton, who’d seemed quite put out.)
Brady could do no less.
By the time the mess was cleaned up and Brady had fished Eric’s first aid kit out of the bathroom (and it was far more extensive than Brady would have imagined), Eric had found a place deep in the desert. With a grunt, he killed the engine and the headlights, and for a moment Brady closed his eyes and tried to hear the sounds of the night through the shattered window.
An owl, he thought. A coyote in the distance. The breeze off the desert floor. The faint scent of some sort of flower. He’d been in Death Valley in time for the super bloom the year before. Would that be even bigger this year because of the hurricane? Would he live to see it?
Abruptly he sat on the bench seat of the couch and let out a breath.
“What?” Eric asked into the quiet. “What prompted that?”
“I want to see the super bloom with you,” Brady said softly. “I was just wondering if we could.”
“Mm.” Wearily, Eric stood and wandered toward the couch, his feet finding their way across the simple path in the dark.
“Take off your shirt,” Brady told him. “Put your phone light on the back of the couch. You cut yourself pretty badly, and I’d like to dress it.”
Eric complied, and held out his arm, grimacing as he tried to look at the outside meat of the bicep. “Fuck,” he muttered.
“I’ll get it,” Brady reassured him, touching him briefly on the hip to make him sit down. “Don’t worry.”
“It’s just a difficult place to have a wound,” Eric said, and Brady wondered about some of the other marks on Eric’s body, and who had tendedthosewounds.
For a brief moment, Brady worked at applying lidocaine-laced antiseptic to the wounds before using the flashlight to search for glass. He grunted, spotting a couple of glimmers before he reached into the kit for the tweezers to pull them out.
“What are you thinking?” Eric asked softly.
“I’m thinking,” Brady said, “that you onlyassumeI know what you are. But really, as far as I know, you have some skills that are… well, comfortable with violence. And that I’ve needed to come to a reckoning about what I’m going to do with that knowledge.”
“Oh,” Eric mumbled, and he sounded very much defeated, his head drooping on his neck as he trusted Brady to wield the phone light with one hand while using the tweezers to tug the glass out of his flesh with the other.
“I told you I wouldn’t betray you,” Brady said softly, working with as much gentleness as he could. “And I think I’ve made it clear that my once ironclad ethical boundaries have a lot more elastic in them than I would have suspected. But… but I don’treallyknow what you are. I know you’re good in bed.” He flashed Eric a grin and was heartened to see a weak version of it reflected in Eric’s return smile. “I know that you’ve been incredibly kind tome, and that you’re pretty good with a handgun. I know that you’ve got some computer skills—and not garden variety ‘find that list of people’ sort of hacking and cross-referencing. And I know you can think quick in a clutch.” He smirked. “Oronthe clutch, if we’re hauling ass into the desert.”
“Ha, ha,” Eric said dryly. “Ouch.”
“Sorry about that.” Oh wow—these glass crystals wereembeddedin his flesh, and Brady squirted on some more lidocaine, because he wanted this part to hurt as little as possible.
“So what?” Eric asked, taking a deep breath, probably to deal with more of Brady’s ham-handed doctoring. “What is it you think you don’t know?”
“What you really do,” Brady replied. “Where does your money come from? You’re about to ditch an RV that costs more than I make in ayear—hell,threeyears—in the desert, and all I can hear in your voice is a little bit of regret.”
“And some relief,” Eric admitted. “That the kittens were at Ernie’s when this happened. I’m really glad they’re okay.”
