It occurred to Boyd, as they pulled away from the curb, that the only person whose reaction he hadn’t thought about was his own.
IT WASa dead body, or what was left of a dead body after three weeks in the West Virginia heat. Garrett Donegan had been eighty years old and a mean man his whole life. He probably would have appreciated the mess he’d made for his landlord to clean up.
A shower wasn’t enough to scrape the smell off Boyd’s skin—greasy and fetid and with a weird aftertang of coconut—so he dragged himself down to the gym. Sweat was the only way to get rid of some smells, rinse it out of your pores, and weights worked better for Boyd than the sauna. Sit still and sweat was too much like school.
“Good night?” Jessie asked archly from the lat machine as he let the weights pull his arms up. Muscles pulled tight under the inked designs that ran from his shoulder to his elbow as he rested his wrists on the handle and let his hands dangle. When Boyd gave him a curious look, Jessie pointed with his chin. “You got receipts.”
Oh. Boyd reached up and rubbed his throat as though the hickeys might smudge off like ash. There were other marks on him, a few bite marks and bruises from the fight, but none that were so easy to see.
“It was….” He hesitated as he grabbed a barbell and racked it up. “Complicated.”
Jessie, who was tied with Boyd for bad decisions made on impulse, flashed a grin that was the mirror image of his sister’s.
“Now that’s the best of night,” he said. “Want a spot?”
Boyd nodded as he loaded weights onto the bar. He stretched out on the bench and tested the weight. It felt a little light, unsatisfying, but his inclination to load up the bar until it was only adrenaline that let him make the rep wasn’t actually good for him.
“Do you smell something?” Jessie asked suddenly as he leaned over and sniffed pointedly. He couldn’t hold the serious expression and cracked up laughing. “I saw Danni on her way through to the sauna. She said it was a bad one.”
The urge to exorcise the image of Donegan, half-melted into the cheap fabric recliner, hit Boyd. Sometimes it helped to talk, and the overripe horror of the smell and flies and fluids might be drawn out of the event as he tried to pin it down. But with the stink of it still on him, the idea made his gorge rise.
“Ask me over a beer later,” he said as he lowered the bar toward his chest and then back up. The muscles in his arms stretched and ached gently. The smell of death wafted from his pits, and he made a face. “Or a whiskey.”
Boyd had just managed to raise a sweat, the dull ache in his shoulders the usual, satisfying distraction from the static in his head, when Harry stuck his head out of his office and whistled.
“Maccabee,” he said with a jerk of his head. “In here.”
Shit.The distraction made Boyd hesitate, and the momentum of the lift was lost, his arms suddenly weak and stubborn. He gritted his teeth and forced them to straighten. Jessie grabbed the bar and pulled it back to reposition on the rest.
Boyd dropped his arms and left them to hang for a second as the blood hummed in his shoulders. Finally he rolled off the bench and onto his feet.
“Good luck,” Jessie said.
Boyd gave him an unenthusiastic thumbs-up as he padded over to the office. He wondered dourly if Dannie had passed on his bout of career doubt this morning.
“Yeah?” he said as he pushed open the door.
Harry was seated behind his desk, attention on the screen of his computer. He pointed at the chair opposite and then went back to his surprisingly speedy two-fingered hunt and peck over the keyboard. Boyd sighed, plucked his damp T-shirt away from his stomach, and sat down. Habit made him glance over Harry’s head to the Wall of Fame behind him, where dead and injured-out firefighters stared back down at him. His grandfather was there, the dense pattern of his beard and brows enough proof they were related, and his father—although his inclusion was mostly courtesy since he was two days from being let go when he died.
Cutter’s Gap was, Boyd supposed wryly, a town full of ghosts.
“Right.” Harry hit Send and turned his chair with a creak to face Boyd. He leaned his elbows on the table. “You’re not going to like it.”
“Never lead with that,” Boyd said.
A smile tried, and failed, to break through Harry’s scowl.
“I don’t like it either,” Harry said. “But we’re both going to have to suck it up. Apparently concerns have been raised about financial misconduct—”
“What?” Boyd spluttered. “I don’t—”
“And questions have also been raised about whether you’re fit for duty, or your ADHD has impacted your ability to serve,” Harry finished. “Until the investigation is over, Boyd, you’re suspended.”
Earlier doubts or not, that sentence was like a kick to Boyd’s chest. He exhaled raggedly as he leaned back in the chair and couldn’t catch his breath again for a moment.
“Fuck off,” he blurted when he did. “That’s bullshit, and you know it.”
“I do,” Harry said firmly. “No question, Boyd. That doesn’t change procedure. I wish it did. We don’t need to be short-handed this month. Go home.”
