Where all paths meet, p.10
Where All Paths Meet, page 10
part #3 of The Adventures of Holloway Holmes Series
I started toward the entrance to the parking garage. Holmes caught up quickly, of course, and he watched me out of the corner of his eye, probably thinking I wouldn’t notice.
The garage was mostly empty, aside from a few minivans and crossover SUVs, and Holmes indicated a lone Prius that had its hatchback open. It was currently stuffed with boxes and suitcases, clothes crammed into every available crevice, some of the garments already falling out of the car. One t-shirt had spilled out of the back and lay on the concrete: black, with pink varsity letters that spelled BIG DICK ENERGY.
“Of course he drives a Prius,” I said.
“What does that mean?” Holmes asked, and of course, he didn’t ask it like a normal person would, but because he actually wanted me to explain it.
“You’ve lived with him for God knows how many years. You tell me.”
“I don’t understand your tone. You sound upset.” He touched the tab of the zipper on his—my—hoodie. In a testing voice, he asked, “Are you upset?”
The fun, appropriate, mature, and responsible thing to do would have been to be a passive-aggressive little bitch for the foreseeable future. But, since this was Holmes, he would only get earnestly worried and sincerely concerned and continue to make polite inquiries and look for social cues.
So, instead, I said, “You’re goddamn fucking right I’m upset!”
The words bounced back from the concrete around us, so maybe it was more of a shout, and maybe it wasn’t all that hard to stay mad at him.
“Jack—”
“You’ve been living here for five months, H? Less than an hour away? With him?”
“At the time, I believed—”
I held up a finger and made a warning noise, and to my surprise, H cut off. “Do. Not. Lie to me.”
The corner of his mouth trembled.
“He blackmailed Aston,” I said.
“I do not condone—”
“He got Dawson killed.”
Holmes set his jaw. “You know perfectly well—”
“I don’t know anything, H. I don’t know anything about you. Last night—” My voice broke, and it was thicker when I managed to speak again. “He kidnapped me, remember? Did you guys laugh about that while you were hanging out together? Was that something fun to talk about after you finished fucking?”
The hurt radiated through his face, and then chips of fire flared in his cheeks, and his voice became brittle and high. “Stop talking! I want you to stop talking.”
“Too bad.” His hands opened and closed at his sides. “What?” I asked. “You want to hit me? Are you going to beat me up so I’ll do what you want?”
“I would like to.”
“Then do it. You do whatever the fuck else you want, so just do it.” His fists tightened, knuckles white. “Do it!”
“Don’t shout at me!”
“I’ll shout if I want!”
When the echoes died away, the sound of traffic from the street filtered in. Holmes’s breathing was labored, and his eyes were glassy with tears. He wiped his face on his shoulder and, in a tightrope version of his normal voice, said, “Are we finished?”
“No.” But I had to jerk myself back from that, and almost as quickly, I said, “Yes. I don’t know.”
He nodded as though that had somehow made sense. He dried his eyes again, and tears filled them immediately, but his voice was steady as he spoke. “Paxton is clearly in the process of leaving. It would be in our best interest to prevent him.”
I managed to make a sound that passed for agreement.
“I will go to the condo. You wait here in case he slips past me.”
“Are you going to warn him?” I asked. “Are you going to tell him to run?”
Hurt fractured his expression again, but this time, it vanished into cold passivity. He held out his keys. “If you don’t trust me, then I will wait here.”
I considered the offer. Then I shook my head.
A moment later, he was gone, the door to the building closing quietly behind him.
My phone buzzed with a message from Dad: Where are you?
Another text came through almost immediately: Why does the parental app say you’re in Salt Lake?
I slid the phone back into my pocket.
I remembered the weight of Holmes’s head on my chest, the smell of his hair, the peacefulness of his breathing.
Instead of doing that to myself, I went back to the truck and got out an ancient pipe wrench Dad kept under the back seat. It had a handle two feet long, and it was solid steel, and in theory, it was only for self-defense. Maybe he’ll try to kidnap me again, I thought as I gave the wrench an experimental swing. As far as I was concerned, that made everything self-defense.
I found a spot between a Honda minivan and a tiny Toyota crossover, and I waited and watched. It didn’t take long. Paxton came out of the building at a frantic walk, boxes loaded in his arms, throwing glances over his shoulder. You couldn’t miss him: tall, athletic, dark hair in a faux hawk, almond-colored skin. When he reached the Prius, he started shoving things around in the hatchback, trying to make room for the next load. He was still working on it when I whapped him in the back of the leg with the wrench.
He screamed and fell, and he grabbed his leg and rolled on the oil-stained concrete. I felt a moment of pity, maybe even worry that I’d overdone it. Then I stepped on his neck.
Paxton choked, slapping and clawing at my leg. His eyes looked a little bulgy. He was trying to work something out of his pocket with one hand.
“Hi, Pax,” I said. “Let me run something by you really quick, before you do something stupid. I’m guessing you’ve got a knife, and you’re thinking you’re going to stab me in the leg. Which would piss me off. A lot. And I’m already pretty pissed off, so that’s saying something. So, before you do it, you need to consider one thing: a knife in the leg is going to hurt like a motherfucker, but it’s not going to slow me down when I break your head open with this wrench.”
He sputtered, and he clawed at my leg some more, but he gave up on his knife. Spittle flecked his cheeks, and his eyes were wide and definitely protruding now as his face turned a surprising shade. Puce, maybe. I feel like that’s what Ms. Prinze would have called it in seventh-grade art.
I took my foot off his neck before he passed out. In case you needed proof that I’m a living saint.
He coughed and hacked and spat, and he did a lot of massaging his throat and trying to look pitiful. I stood there with my wrench and enjoyed visions of braining him.
“Oi,” he finally managed. “What the bloody hell?”
“What are you doing, Paxton?”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. You could have killed me.”
“Could have. Might. Will. What are you doing, Paxton?”
“What am I doing? What are you doing? This is how you spend your days now? Hiding in car parks, waiting for innocent passersby to hit with your club?”
“Remember how I told you I’m pissed off?” I gestured chest-high with the wrench. “I started here.” I moved the invisible line up a few inches. “Now I’m here.”
Paxton stared at me. Then he mouthed what I took to be, “Bloody fucking hell.”
We were both quiet for a minute. Tires squealed somewhere else in the garage. Paxton’s breathing did sound raspy, even when he wasn’t making a production out of it, and that made me feel a little bad.
I felt less bad when he asked, “Where’s Hol?”
“Interesting question. You tell me.”
“Come off it, bruv. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t with him, so where is he?”
“How long have you and Holloway been together?”
Paxton blinked. “What?”
“Have you ever heard of something called statutory rape?”
“Jeez—hold on, hold on. He’s my little mate is all. We get on. That’s it.”
“I’ve got this crazy belief,” I said, hoisting the wrench, “that the modern-day criminal justice system is missing out on the potential of corporal punishment. So, why don’t we start with me breaking your leg, and we’ll go from there?”
“Bruv, bruv, bruv, hold on!” Paxton scooted back against the Prius and held up a hand. “He’s a mate. That’s all, innit?”
“No, I don’t think so. In fact, I don’t think you’re his mate at all. I think, as usual, you want something. And you’ll do whatever you have to do to get it. You’ll be the big brother. You’ll be the sexy but untouchable best friend. You’ll be the fuck buddy, right? You did it once, and you broke his heart. H might not see you for what you are, but I do.”
His expression changed. The wariness remained, but the emotional undercurrent changed, became something that ran swift and deep.
“I’m going to ask you again,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“You see what they’re like.” His voice was darkly, richly bitter, all the playfulness skimmed away. “The Holmeses. The Moriartys. They’re not even proper people, are they? They look at the rest of us, they see playthings, toys, tools. You’ve been around them a year. You’ve been a Watson even less than that.” He sneered. “How does it feel, yapping at their heels, hoping they decide to pet you instead of a swift kick to the ribs?”
“H isn’t like that.”
Paxton rubbed his chin. “Hol—Hol is a good bloke. Too sweet for his own good. They’ll eat him alive when they get bored playing with him.”
Moments slipped past us. The cotton of my shirt was bunched under my arms, and the smell of my sweat mingled with the oiled steel of the wrench. I didn’t know what to say to any of that, so I said, “You haven’t answered my question.”
“I wasn’t going to hurt him.”
“You’ve hurt him plenty already. He told me what you did. How you pretended to be his friend. How he needed you. And as soon as you got what you wanted, you abandoned him. You knew what his life was like, and you left him in that hellhole.”
Paxton stared at me. Then he burst out laughing. “Is that what he thinks? Christ, for a smart lad, he’s a proper dumbshit sometimes. I was allowed to stay until Blackfriar decided he wanted this proprietary whatsit, some little piece of code he had to have. So, he enrolled me at the college where a certain professor worked, and I got to bend over and take one for the glory of the Holmes family. Photos. Shock. Chagrin. And then a quiet resolution, everybody satisfied. And then it was the next job. And the next. And the next. I’m the best Blackfriar has, you know.”
“That’s supposed to be better?”
He rubbed his jaw again. “Do you know anything about the Adlers? About the family, I mean. Not me.”
“Here we go. Woe is me. Mommy spanked me and Daddy didn’t believe in my dreams.”
“Maggie’s father shot mine when I was six.” He flashed a grin. “Spoze you feel like a bit of an arsehole, don’t you?”
It took me a minute. “Uh, yeah, actually.”
Paxton’s grin faded. “Shot him in front of me. In the face. My mom never came back from that. And I still have to see Maggie’s dad at parties, still have to see Maggie, still have to smile and play nice. I’m alive because the Holmeses kept me alive. Kept me in that big, empty house as a pet. Because Blackfriar wanted me, but he was done with my dad, done with my mom. Those toys weren’t any fun. He wanted something new.”
“Jesus.”
“Hol doesn’t know, of course. He’d go bonkers. He’s as stupid as they come about things like that. But I learned the lesson fast enough: you’re alive as long as they want you alive. That’s a family lesson, by the way. Always have a reason for them to want you alive. The Adlers are, if nothing else, survivors. And every once in a while, we do manage to put one over on the Holmeses. We might not make it look pretty, but we’re still here.”
“Why don’t you run? Why don’t you go live somewhere else? Anything would be better than this. Being used? Having Maggie call you up when she wants you to blackmail a closeted kid like Aston? Doing the Holmeses’ and the Moriartys’ dirty work until they get tired of you?”
Paxton gave me a strange, unreadable smirk. “Got it all figured out, have you?”
“I can figure out that much.”
“Well, that’s the Adlers sorted then. ’Nuff said.” But the smirk got bigger. “And what do you figure happened to all the Watsons?”
The door to the condo building slammed open, and Holmes emerged at a run. He skidded to a stop, crepe soles squeaking on the concrete, and stared at us. His eyes fastened on the wrench, and I offered him my most innocent look and moved it behind my leg.
“Jack—” And then, with a trace of bewilderment, “Paxton?”
“Watcher, Hol,” Paxton said miserably.
His face was pale, his eyes hollowed, and he was favoring his arm again. I realized I’d forgotten, in my masterclass of petty bitchiness, that he was still hurt, and that one night’s sleep didn’t make up for the months that he’d been running on nothing but adrenaline.
He was also holding a shoe.
Following my gaze, Holmes held it up so I could see it better. It was one of his chukkas—the shoes he invariably wore unless he was in one of his disastrous disguises. And the bottom was black with what looked like oil. Memory flashed: the oily footprint in Baca’s front room.
“A car that looked like my car,” Holmes said, his voice hard as his eyes slid to Paxton and then to me again. “We saw it on the security footage. And now this. In my closet.”
“Shit,” I said. “Someone’s trying to frame you.”
Chapter 12
I Tied My Laces
“It wasn’t me,” Paxton said, and the words came so quickly and easily that they had to be automatic. “I didn’t do it.”
The silence that followed had the same cold, cavernous quality as the garage itself. I shivered and chafed my arms; it might have been May outside, but May in Utah felt pretty damn chilly when you were underground.
“Honest, luv,” Paxton said, twisting to look up at Holmes. “You know it wasn’t me.”
“H, go back inside.” I tapped the wrench against my side. “Let me talk to him.”
Paxton burst out laughing and held out a hand. “Hol, be a sweetheart?”
Holmes glanced at me, his expression searching, and helped Paxton to his feet. When Holmes wasn’t looking, Paxton shot me a smirk.
“Ok,” I said. “You can stay if you want, but stand back. I don’t want to get brains on my hoodie.”
“A bit much, innit?” Paxton murmured to Holmes, and for some reason, that made Holmes huff his little amused breath. “At least he’s cute.”
Holmes suddenly found something very interesting to stare at on the ground.
“Did he hurt you, luv?” Paxton asked, his fingers brushing Holmes’s arm.
Holmes snorted.
“Course he didn’t.” Paxton’s hand came to rest at the small of Holmes’s back. “Come on, then. Let’s get you out of that thing and into some proper clothes.”
Which meant I had to trail after them, holding the wrench like a jackass.
When we got into their condo, I had that same moment of disorientation that I’d felt when I’d seen the building. The walls were a neutral color somewhere between untreated plaster and oatmeal. The furniture—a chaise, a coffee table, a dinette set—were chrome and leather and glass, and everything looked hard and uncomfortable. Paintings hung on the walls, beige texture pieces, gloopy dabs of paint, one that looked like a kid had gotten into wet concrete with a stick. A hint of something that might have been cologne or a candle, something peppery and tobacco-y, with a trace of citrus, hung in the air. No way Holmes had chosen that.
Paxton was talking a stream of nonsense as he shepherded Holmes into a bedroom. I left the wrench by the door and followed. The room was a spare, utilitarian space, the way Holmes’s residence had been at Walker: bare walls, simple bedding, no knickknacks on the dresser. I stayed in the doorway, watching as Paxton and Holmes slipped back into their routine from the last few months.
It was…not what I expected. Frankly, it was kind of shocking. Paxton was still an ass, of course, and every other thing he said was flirty, provocative, risqué. But the way he moved around Holmes was completely unsexual. The way he touched him. The way he hovered in Holmes’s no-fly zone. It was gentle. Playful. Almost childlike. He was walking a line the two of them had negotiated years ago, and I realized I was seeing Paxton the big brother, whom maybe nobody else had seen. Some of the things he said glanced right off Holmes’s armor. Others made him roll his eyes. A few made him blush, which only encouraged Paxton—one comment, whispered into Holmes’s ear, made Holmes shoot a look at me, his whole face catching fire as Paxton burst out laughing.
“Off with it—easy, luv, easy,” Paxton said as he slipped my hoodie off Holmes’s shoulders. He sucked his teeth when he saw Noneley’s bandage. “Need me to have a look at that?”
“It’s been tended to.”
“It’s been tended to,” Paxton said. “Sod you, you little bugger. Say thank you.”
“Thank—” Holmes cut off with a totally un-Holmes-like squeak as Paxton pinched his nipple.
Holmes’s eyes cut toward me again, and then he directed a savage kick at Paxton, who laughed and dodged easily. Coming after him, Holmes drove a sidekick at Paxton that probably would have broken a bone, but Paxton slipped away again, laughing even harder, his face wild and animated. Under Holmes’s mask of embarrassment, I could see the rueful amusement there too. He was still trying to cover the pinched nipple. In spite of myself, I started laughing as well.
Paxton ended up behind me, arms around me, laughing and threatening and demanding at the same time. “Oi, stay back, you! I mean it! Jack’ll defend me.”
“You’ve chosen poorly, then,” Holmes said as he advanced on us.
“H!” I objected. I was trying to get free of Paxton, but not too hard—the amusement was infectious, and a part of me was starting to understand what Paxton was doing: breaking the tension of those awful moments in the garage, giving each of us time to steady ourselves. That realization was a surprise at the back of my mind, an unexpected dimension to someone who had been, in my mind, a cardboard cut-out of a fuck boy up until now.
