Final orders, p.6
Final Orders, page 6
part #5 of Hazard and Somerset: Arrows in the Hand Series
“I fucked up.”
As Palomo strode toward the swinging gate, she said, “Don’t spend too long up there.”
“Where?” Hazard asked.
“On the cross. There’s only the one, and you have to share it with Dulac.”
Then she was gone, heading down the hall toward the locker rooms. Hazard turned a glance on Dulac, who was scowling after her.
“So,” Hazard said. “That’s still going on.”
After a moment, Dulac shrugged, and his face relaxed. “She’s ok, man. She’s gotten a lot better after, you know…”
“After she fucked up a murder investigation?”
“She’s been through some tough shit. She is some seriously tough shit. But she’s not who I thought she was.” Then he offered one of those enormous, frat-boy grins. “Sometimes I have to remind myself of that like fifteen times a day, though.”
Hazard opened his mouth to respond to that—something about the idiocy of having to remind oneself fifteen times about anything—but then details that had registered in his subconscious finally reached the front of his brain.
Dulac looked like shit. His eyes were red rimmed and smudged with dark hollows. His shirt was rumpled; a stain marked the placket, probably where he hoped his tie would cover it, only his tie looked like it had spent most of its earthly existence wadded up at the bottom of a hamper, and now it was hopelessly wrinkled. But the real trouble was the smell of his breath—not boozy, but too much mouthwash—and the tightness in his hands, his shoulders, in everything, like the only way he knew how to smile was by gritting his teeth. Hazard had worked with alcoholics, and he’d seen dry drunks before.
“What’s wrong?” Hazard asked.
“Nothing, dude. Just, you know, doing the job.”
“What did she mean about the cross?”
“Nothing.” When Hazard didn’t bite, Dulac tried a laugh. “Nothing, bro, seriously. I just, you know, keep fucking things up at home. With Darnell, I mean. We’ll work it out. We always do.”
“What did you fuck up, and how, and how serious is it on a scale of one to ten?”
“Jesus Christ.” Dulac did another of those wind-up laughs and rubbed his mouth. “It’s fine. I was, you know, under a lot of stress for a while. Now it’s the opposite.” He looked like he tried to stop there, but more broke free. “I mean, it’s tough to go from hot shit, saving all those people in that van, and now I’m back to tiddlywinks.” He hefted a stack of papers. “This is about mailboxes, bro. Fucking mailboxes. Somebody’s blowing them up, and I’m, like, the mail inspector’s local bitch. Do this, pull that.”
The case Dulac was referring to had been some sort of small-scale human trafficking operation—a van with expired tags that he’d spotted at a gas station, which had turned out to be holding fourteen women and children in various states of dehydration and malnourishment. Hazard hadn’t heard anything about the mailboxes, but it did sound like a step down—in terms of public interest, at least.
“It’s a small town,” he said with a shrug. “That’s the nature of the job.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“So, let me get this straight: you’re fucking up your home life when you’re stressed, and now you’re fucking it up because you’re not stressed enough?”
Dulac stared at him.
Palomo’s sensible shoes clicked against the linoleum as she returned to her desk. Her face was expressionless as her gaze returned to the monitor, and she murmured, “Both of you still trying to stay up there?”
“I’m making sure I understand his situation.”
“Ree,” Somers called, “leave Gray alone, please.”
“Oh, Jesus, thank you,” Dulac said in an underbreath.
Hazard turned; he hadn’t heard Somers leave his office, but he must have at some point because now he was standing in the hallway that led back to the cells. Somers was watching him, his face unreadable. Then he tipped his head to one side. Hazard joined him near the hallway, away from the bullpen. Just the two of them, the thrum and bone-shaking rattle of the copier, the smell of toner and burnt coffee.
“Maybe a Keurig—” Hazard began.
“I just checked on them,” Somers said. “Colt’s fine. He’s upset because he knows you’re upset, of course, and he’s embarrassed, and he’s a tiny bit afraid. Nothing that’s going to kill him; I made sure of that. Like I said, he’s fine.” He blew out a breath. “They’re all fine, for that matter. Foley put them in separate cells, which means the whole thing is still a little scary instead of a joke. I’m going to give them a couple of hours, and then I’ll kick them loose. Diana doesn’t want to charge them; hell, I didn’t want to charge them. If we charged every dumbass, in high school or otherwise, who threw a few punches, we’d never have time to do anything else. But you saw them—what was I supposed to do?”
“You did what you were supposed to do,” Hazard said. “I’m sorry that Colt and I have made your life harder than it needs to be.”
Somers looked through him; the words didn’t seem to register, and he said, “This is exactly what they want, you know that? This is the kind of debacle they love, Joyce Sturgis and her whole protective parents’ gang. Did you see them watching the school? They knew Theo was about to be arrested.”
“Someone tipped them off.”
“Yeah, I wonder who?” Somers asked sourly.
“What are you going to do about Carmichael?”
“I don’t know. I told her to take a couple of personal days while things cool off. It’s right on the brink of insubordination, but it’s not quite there. Did you see her with Keller at the school board meeting?”
Hazard nodded.
“It’s the kind of shit he pulled,” Somers said. “I’m not making the same mistake this time. I’m going to cool down. And then I’m going to have a real conversation with her. She does solid work, although I think she was better on a beat, but I’m not going to have an officer on the force who uses the badge to fight the Culture Wars 2.0.”
“Did Diana know anything about that call from her office?”
“She’ll look into it. If it was one of her people, she’s going to hang them by the ball sac. You can say a lot about Diana Daley, but she does not fuck around as the county attorney.”
“And, of course, Carmichael might have made the whole thing up.”
“Yup,” Somers said. “She could have made the whole thing up.”
“Where’s Theo?”
“I sent him out the back door as soon as we got here. The whole thing is bullshit; Miranda knew it was bullshit. That distribution charge? Jesus, there are a dozen ways what Theo’s doing doesn’t come close to meeting the standard. No prosecutor in their right mind would have taken it to court, and honestly, if he wanted to slap us with false arrest, he’d probably get a settlement out of it.”
“That doesn’t really seem like his style.” Hazard hesitated. “I assume that the parents’ concerns are unfounded?”
“You’re worried Theo is making Colt read gay porn?”
A flush heated Hazard’s face. “No. If he wants to access pornography, of any variety, I think that’s normal, and it’s probably a conversation I should have with him about the realities of sex versus their aestheticization and idealization—”
“Fluffers,” Somers said, his grin cracking as he fought against a laugh. “Don’t forget fluffers.”
“—the psychosexual dimensions of kink and fetish, as well as the question of consent and the complicated ethical ambiguity of much commercially produced pornography.”
“Let me know when you’re going to have this talk,” Somers said. “I’ll dig a grave in the backyard so Colt can just crawl right in and die when you’re done.”
“I’m glad that teaching our son to talk about sex openly and honestly and comfortably and, most importantly, safely, is so funny to you.”
“Maybe I’ll dig two graves,” Somers said with a roll of his eyes.
“But I haven’t read the book myself, John. That’s the point of my question. I suppose I should, just to make sure there’s nothing genuinely objectionable in it. It is a novel, after all.”
“I’ve read it,” Somers said.
“You have?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, I was way too scared to look up gay porn on my parents’ computer, so mostly I settled for, you know, exercise magazines, and, uh, a vivid imagination. But they had a copy of Katabasis in the school library. I didn’t check it out. In fact, I put it behind some of the football books so that if anyone saw me grabbing something, they’d think it was, you know, a Joe Namath biography or something.”
“You compromised the Dewey Decimal System? John, that system exists for a reason—”
“I think I’d enjoy this rant, I really do, but I’ve got to cut you off here; I have to get back to work. Short answer: the book is really, really good. And really important. Still, today, I think. It’s about who we really are. The masks we wear. Why we wear them. What’s really underneath. And, of course, it’s about walking into hell for the person you love. And yeah, it’s got some sexually explicit content, and I remember some of those scenes being hot as fuck when I was fifteen and just about literally boiling over with hormones. I had a lot of dirty thoughts in that library. But it’s not porn—the book, I mean. It’s thoughtful. It’s smart. And the sexual content is, well, about situations that a lot of kids get into at that age. In a book, they can experience it vicariously and, hopefully, make smarter choices because of it.”
Hazard studied his husband.
“I put it back, by the way,” Somers said with a tiny, broken smile. “In the right spot, I mean. When I was finished. If that makes you feel any better.”
Hazard wanted to say something, that every time he thought he knew, he learned he didn’t know anything, that he’d never known the maneuvers and misdirections, the facades and fronts, all the tools the man he’d loved had used to keep himself safe. He opened his mouth to say something.
Somers shook his head. The crow’s feet around his eyes looked deeper than usual. Silver bristled at his temples. One of those moments came for Hazard, looking at Somers like this, the way they did sometimes. This is real. He’s real. He’s mine.
“You’re going to get me in trouble, looking at me like that,” Somers murmured with his tiny, splintered grin. “What’s going on in that big brain?”
“Does Dulac still keep lube in the supply closet?”
Somers burst out laughing.
“Bro, was that about me?” Dulac called from the bullpen. “I swear I heard my name.”
“Shut up,” Hazard said without looking back.
“Go do something productive,” Somers said to Hazard. “I’ve got to finish some paperwork, terrorize some children, and then figure out a healthy, budget-conscious dinner. And hearing myself, I realize that I’ve just described our last date night.”
“I didn’t terrorize those children.”
“Your exact words were, ‘I’m going to put the fear of the living fuck into those hooligans and then let’s see them horse around on a trestle bridge again.’”
“They were being unsafe. That bridge is going to collapse one of these days.”
“They were in college, and—you know what? You need to go.”
Hazard kissed his husband’s cheek. Then he went south and east, and the kiss was a little more serious.
Laughing, Somers pushed him away. Then his face grew serious, and he hesitated before speaking. “Ree, the parents showing up like that today at the school—”
“Yes, I know.”
Relief smoothed out some of Somers’s features—and, unless Hazard was imagining it, appreciation too. With things like this, what they were best at, sometimes they didn’t even need words. Hazard got in one more kiss before Somers stiff-armed him away, and then he crossed the room toward the lobby.
“That was a grade-A kiss, bro,” Dulac shouted after him. “Nice tongue work. Solid dismount.”
“Please fire him,” Hazard called back.
Somers laughed harder.
When Hazard was in the Odyssey, when it was safe, he permitted himself a small, fierce smile. Then he started the van. He was going to make sure Loretta Ames made it out of town alive. And then, when things calmed down, he had some big plans for his husband and those dirty thoughts in the library. But first he had to figure out who was trying to manipulate events in Wahredua.
Someone had tried to get Theo arrested, and for some reason, in spite of his middling grasp of the six acceptable abbreviations for ante meridiem and post meridiem, Theo was Colt’s favorite teacher, Somers’s friend, and as far as Hazard could tell, a decent person. In doing so, whoever was behind this mess had gotten Colt involved. So, Hazard was going to find whoever was behind all the fuckery. And if he were lucky, they’d make their next move at Loretta’s talk that night.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MAY 15
FRIDAY
6:59 PM
HAZARD REGRETTED WEARING THE jacket; it was lightweight, and it had a tactical design, with a lot of good-sized, accessible pockets, but the air in the school gymnasium was already stuffy and warm, smelling of floor wax and rubber and the impossible-to-eradicate PE funk that lurked under some sort of astringent cleaner. He was sweating, and Loretta’s talk hadn’t even started yet.
The gym was packed to capacity, every seat in the telescopic bleachers filled. There were kids, primarily teenagers. Colt and Ashley and the girl, Gwen, were there, high on the bleachers. Gwen had taken the spot between Colt and Ashley, and she had turned at an angle, her back making a wall between the boys. She and Ashley were holding hands, and when Colt said something and Ashley leaned over to try to hear him, Gwen leaned too, so that she and Ashley bumped heads. Presumably Ashley thought it was an accident because he laughed and kissed her. A long kiss. Long enough that Colt looked away, shoulders hunched, like he was trying to shrink inside his old Budweiser frogs t-shirt. Hazard figured a lengthy and loudly punctuated lesson to Ashley on public displays of affection was overdue.
The Sturgis family had gotten seats on the front row of the bleachers, not far from the portable stage where Loretta and Ayelet were sitting with Theo and Principal Wieberdink. Kirsta and Joyce had both obviously done their makeup again—Joyce with much better results—but Kirsta looked like she was glowing, and every few minutes, Joyce would turn around to say something to someone behind her, or stop someone walking in front of her, and she’d put her hand on Kirsta’s arm and Kirsta would glow a little brighter. Mommy’s good little soldier, Hazard thought. Joyce would milk the story of the arrest as long as she could; it looked like this might have been the happiest day of Kirsta’s life. Farther down the bleachers, Evan sat with his parents, his expression dour, arms folded across his chest. That was all of them, the whole teenybop cluster fuck except Cortez.
But Hazard was unsurprised to see that the majority of the people in the audience were adults. Like so many things that ought to be about children, this event had been appropriated by adults with their own political axes to grind. A heavyset, red-faced man who was sweating far too much to be healthy was sitting behind Derrick Sturgis, patting him on the shoulder every so often and leaning forward to say something he obviously hoped would be funny. The jokes didn’t seem to be landing. A pair of mommy bots with identical I-want-to-speak-to-the-manager haircuts stood in front of Joyce, crowding closer and closer. Pretty soon they were going to be sitting in her lap. Evan’s parents seemed to be getting their own fair share of approval and interest; Evan’s dad—or at least, that’s who Hazard judged the man to be—was shaking hands and occasionally patting Evan’s back. The family was new to the area, and Hazard was curious about the power dynamics being played out—why weren’t they sitting closer to Joyce and Derrick Sturgis? Was there an internal struggle for who got to be the biggest fuckwads of the crazy parents?
The only consolation was that the school had hired additional security: Somers was here somewhere, and Hazard had seen six different uniformed officers stationed in the gym. Signs and noisemaking devices—megaphones, air horns, some sort of preprogrammed sound effect device that made farting and vomiting noises—had been confiscated at the doors. It was possible that someone would be stupid enough to try something tonight, but if they did, there were plenty of people on hand to deal with it. Which left Hazard free to focus on one particular problem: who was behind the shitstorm starting to rain down on Wahredua.
Hazard studied the crowd, recording interactions, body language, what he could decipher of position and prestige. The most obvious suspect, of course, was Joyce Sturgis or someone in her family. Hazard wouldn’t have put it past her husband, who looked like his only role in life was to be a human-sized purse holder, or her daughter, who was some sort of mini-me clone. But then again, Evan Pawloski had attacked Theo at the board meeting, and his parents seemed pleased with the attention and approval that the rest of these numbnuts were showering on them. It was possible that one of them, or all of them, had orchestrated Theo’s arrest and arranged for parents to be waiting outside the school. Another option that was only slightly less likely was that Carmichael had done it all herself; her claim about the phone call from the county attorney’s office could have been just so much bullshit. Or Carmichael and Keller; Hazard wouldn’t put anything past the former police officer, who carried a grudge against Somers. The two of them seemed to be lying low; he didn’t see them in the audience.
Hazard’s phone buzzed, and he reached to dismiss the call. When he saw Ramona Andrews’s name, though, he accepted the call. He thought he knew what Colt’s social worker was about to say, and he wanted to get it over with.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Hazard, but I’ve been with a family all day—” Ramona stopped herself; she sounded exhausted. “Anyway, this can’t wait. I understand that Colt was arrested.”
“It was a misunderstanding.” Hazard had heard plenty of shitcan parents use the line before, both when he’d been on patrol and as a detective. He thought maybe it was a kind of currency. “Everything’s fine.”
