Left on St. Truth-Be-Well (6 page)

“Yeah. Yeah, I got you. Do the things that make you happy. Maybe plan for retirement. Don’t stress about it too much. You’re a freaking Zen master, you know that? Where do you get health and dental?”

“Well, Toby may volunteer at the youth center, but I’ve got an actual job title. I took part of the afternoon off just for you.”

Carson grunted. “Appreciated. If you got health and dental, why’s your brother such a dick to you? And is this where I turn off?”

“Yeah, go right, and Glen’s a dick because in high school he had to take the remedial classes. Gave him an inferiority complex. That’s okay, though. His job has helped take up some of the slack.”

Carson pulled into the strip mall, then turned into a parking spot in front of the Big Blue Seafood Café, which he assumed was their destination. Then he looked at Dale full-on to see if the obnoxious little shit was yanking his chain.

He saw the telltale quirk of the lips and swore. “Jesus, you’re an asshole, you know that? You’re lucky he didn’t kill you for being a dick!”

That warm sea-rolling laughter broke again, and Carson had to take a deep breath before slamming the car door shut. Damn. Just…. He swallowed and rubbed over the warm place in his gut that started to vibrate with that laugh. Just
damn
.

They entered the café, and Carson was forcibly reminded of the fact he’d left his breakfast on the lawn of the Bates Parrot Hotel.

“What’s good?” he asked as the girl took them into the cool (and coolly dark) interior of the little restaurant.

“The fish tacos are on special,” the girl said brightly, and Carson suppressed a shudder.

“Now those are two words that should never go together. I’ll look at the menu.”

“What?” Dale asked as they sat on padded wooden chairs. “On special?”

“‘Fish’ and ‘taco’, smartass. They’re sort of an abomination against nature.”

“So’s ‘Honda Element’ and ‘mob boss’. You work with what you have.”

Carson kept expecting it to fade, to pale—those sudden shafts of attraction coupled with his absolute enjoyment of the conversation—but it seemed to get better every time Dale opened his laconic, country-boy mouth. They bantered until the waiter walked up to their table and Carson remembered they had real stuff to do.

“Hey, Cliff, how you doing?” Dale asked, his voice casual.

The guy either wasn’t fooled or was pretty on edge anyway. He looked at Carson sitting next to Dale and scowled. “You guys got your orders?”

“Anything is better than fish tacos,” Carson said sourly. “I’ll take the lunch fajitas, steak, and an iced tea.”

Dale looked at Carson and smiled.

“Don’t do it,” Carson begged, but Dale shook his head.

“I’ll take the fish tacos,” he said, “and an iced tea as well. Have you seen your brother around? They miss him at the center.”

Carson sat seriously on his gag reflex and looked at Cliff’s face for some sort of reaction. Cliff had sun-streaked straight brown hair, brown eyes, and two full sleeves of tattoos featuring everything from sea squid to naked women to skulls with snakes coming out the eyes. He didn’t look like the sort of guy who’d be afraid of a five-foot-seven-inch pennyweight like Carson, but something about the levelness of Dale’s gaze seemed to make him uncomfortable.

“You know him, Dale. He’s Toby. Always sort of lives his own life, right?”

“Yeah,” Dale said evenly. “And lately, his own life has involved that blond kid from Chicago, who’s currently scared to freakin’ death. You maybe want to tell Toby that?”

Cliff did that shifty-eyed thing that always amused the hell out of Carson because nothing shouted “Hey! I’m telling a fucking secret!” any louder than those eyes darting over your shoulder.

“Look,” he said quietly, “tell the kid that Toby’s okay. He keeps asking about Stassy, but Dad and me, we think it’s better if he lays low, right? You know what the cops in here think of him, right?”

Dale nodded. “Yeah, but I work with him, remember? I think he’s a good guy. So does Stassy. Does he have any idea what happened?”

Cliff shook his head. “He knows small stuff, but nothing that’ll help Glen. Here, let me put this in. I’ll be back to talk.”

He came back in a few minutes with their iced teas. After he set down the drinks, he pulled a chair next to Carson out and sat on it backward, resting his chin on the back.

“Okay, I’ve got about three minutes, ’cause the place is starting to fill up. Here’s the thing. Stassy and Toby got back to the room, right? And the body was just there. They took off, leaving their shit, but there’s two things Toby remembers. One is he saw the guy checking in, and he was sneezing his head off. Apparently he was allergic to the birds—”

“Or the mold or the termites or the spooge on the fuckin’ sheets,” Carson grumbled, and Cliff recoiled.

“Man, that’s gross. Really?”

“Swear to fuckin’ God.”

“Wow, Beatrice must have really lost her cracker to let the whole works slide down that far.”

“Beatrice?” Carson had a vivid flash of those lost blue eyes in the mousy, doughy face.

“Yeah, she inherited the place from her mom, who died falling down the stairs. It was hella tragic.”

“Hella?”

“Don’t mock me, dude. We all have our slang. Anyway, the place is a dump, and that guy was complaining about the fucking parrots.”

“So that’s one thing we know,” Dale said, getting the conversation back on track. “What’s the other?”

Cliff grimaced. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this—a cop’s brother. But you’ve been real good to Toby. He thinks the world of you, so I’m gonna trust you. Anyway, the guy was on the phone—”

“To my brother?” Dale sounded stunned.

“No, but close. Because he was freaking out about the birds and seemed to think something should be done about them, he kept switching from, like, 911, who seemed to think he was full of shit, to the voice box of the department of health.”

Dale nodded. “Okay, so Glen’s got a way to prove he was at least alive before Carson got here. But that doesn’t answer the question of what he was doing dead in Stassy’s bedroom.”

“Well, it’s not like the doors close real regular,” Carson said in disgust.

“Shit, did we tell my worthless brother that?” Dale asked, and Carson shrugged.

“You know, my brains were a puddle of shit by the time he was done with me. I could have told him the sky was purple and alligators eat marshmallow clouds, and not only would I have believed it at the time, but I would have forgotten I ever said it!”

Cliff laughed. “That’s funny. You’re a funny guy!”

Carson gave an ironic nod. “Thank you, thank you, the Carson show playing at St. Aubrey’s day in, day out. I’ll be here until the real culprit is found.”

Cliff was cracking up again when one of the waiters passed him, moving quickly. “Hey, Cliff, like, are you working your shift or chitchatting!”

“Right there!” he said, standing up crisply. Then, to Dale and Carson: “Look, guys, my little brother worked hard to live his life damned straight for a gay man. If there’s any way you could get him out of this jam, I would so appreciate it, you feel me?”

“Yeah, I gotcha,” Dale said. “You serve us up some fish tacos, and we’ll serve you up a heaping platter of justice.”

It was Carson’s turn to crack up, but Cliff just shook his head. “God, you are so weird!”

He walked off and Carson struggled to breathe.

“You think that’s funny?” Dale said, taking a sip of water, and Carson nodded through his cackles.

“I think that’s fucking hysterical. Jesus, if I had a dime for every time someone said I was off my rocker, I’d be a fucking gazillionaire,
fucking
gazillionaires. It’s just so good not to be alone in the weirdo section of humanity’s department store.”

Dale chuckled. “Is that where you buy the cracked pots and the loony bins?”

Oh God!
Someone who could play too! “And the lams under the bed and the mixed nuts—”

“And the maps to La La, and the fruits and the flakes—”

“And a big old box of fucking crackers!”

And that was it. The two of them had successfully achieved point of no return on the laughter scale. They were barely pulling it together when their food arrived.

Carson took a deep breath and settled down to his steak fajita, which was damned good. He was chewing blissfully in that anticlimactic silence that followed a good laugh when Dale spoke through his own (gag!) fish taco.

“Why Stassy?”

Carson stopped chewing. “Ung?”

“Why Stassy? He seems like a nice enough kid, but why was he the one you were groping in a broom closet?”

It was hard to swallow past the lump of sudden intimacy in his throat. “He liked me,” Carson said simply. “You know. Sometimes, isn’t that enough?”

“Were you lonely?”

Carson put down the fajita and sighed. “There’s no way to answer that without sounding like a complete wiener. Maybe ask me how many times I jerk off a week. It’s less personal.”

Dale’s mouth pulled up, but his eyes remained compassionate. “At least five for me. I’m lonely too.”

Carson smiled slightly and nodded, accepting the offering. “Well, loneliness lets you do embarrassing things.”

He picked up his fajita then and ate quietly. The food here was really pretty good.

A
FTER
lunch, Dale called his brother from the car. “Yeah, Glen, check the 911 records. He was alive when Carson was on the road, so he’s cleared. You may want to check the voice box of the department of health, they should have something to go on too. No, don’t want to be a cop, just don’t want to see my friend in a jam. Yeah. He’s a friend. No. Not that kind yet. Yeah, if he comes to be that kind, I’ll bring him to dinner if he’s not back in Chicago, because, hey, it’s where he lives. God, get out of my life!”

He hung up then and grunted.

“Who’s at dinner?” Carson asked, starting the car. Dale had been right, and it was raining in big drops, which brought a chill to the humid air.

“My mom, Glen, Glen’s wife, Julie, and their horrible son, Alex.”

“Horrible?”

“He’s two. He’s got a thing with his body fluids and how they should be your body fluids. I like kids, but this one makes me wish they’d had a puppy instead.”

Carson laughed, then paused before backing out of the space. “So, where to now? We go back and question the parrot lady?”

Dale shrugged. “We could try. Usually she works nights, so we may want to put that off. I really have to report to my second job in an hour anyway—need to be at the center when the kids get out of school.”

Carson grunted, feeling suddenly tired. This guy’s day was pretty damned busy. “You want me to drop you off somewhere?”

“Naw, my truck’s back at the café. Drive to the hotel, go in, catch a nap. I’ll be back around eight, if you want to go talk to Beatrice.”

“You think your brother’ll talk to her first?”

Dale shook his head. “Nope. It’ll take him at least a day to get over the fact that I said something good.”

Carson had to laugh at that. “I never had a brother. You’re sort of making me grateful.”

Shrug. “It’s payback. I was the kid who could do no wrong in school, and Glen was the fuckup. He joined the force, I went to community college instead of State, and here we are.”

Damn. It was so simple. “Why didn’t you go to State?”

Silence: for a minute, Carson thought he’d overstepped his bounds. But then, fuck it—the guy knew about Stassy, knew about Bridget, knew his dirty-comedy secret. Like he said—time for payback.

“My mom and dad had just broken up. I don’t know. Felt better for Mom if I stayed. But Glen didn’t see it that way. Thought I was quitting and giving up.” Dale tipped his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. “I guess he didn’t see that I loved this place too. It’s all good.”

Carson thought about it. “Well, you know. I’ve got my degree in communications, and as far as I can see, we’re both doing exactly the same thing with our lives.”

Dale’s easy laugh flooded the entire vehicle, and Carson grunted and tried to still the tingling that flooded his entire body. God, the last thing he needed was to meet this guy in another broom closet, but that’s what would happen, wouldn’t it. That’s where he did his guys.

Carson pulled up in front of his bottom-floor room and parked, tilting his head back and sighing.

Dale’s hand was warm as he started massaging the back of Carson’s neck, and Carson gave in for a second, closed his eyes, and let that warmth and counterpressure sink into his muscles. God, last night had sucked.

“You got some board shorts in that pile of laundry, Chicago?” Dale asked seriously, and Carson was too relaxed to get feisty over such an odd question.

“Naw, are you kidding? It’s still snowing in Chicago.”

Dale made a sound of disgust. “Now, that’s no way for a man to live. Tell you what. We’ll go talk to Beatrice tonight, and when I come back tomorrow morning, I’ll bring you some shorts and an old wet suit. I got tomorrow off at the FA. I’ll take you wave boarding. It’ll be good.”

Carson turned his head slowly and looked Dale square in those hazy-lidded blue eyes. “You promise?”

Dale’s mouth flattened and turned up, and he pulled Carson closer. “I never promise, and I never fuck around about surfing,” he said, and while the softness of his lips against Carson’s temple felt like a promise, nothing about this moment felt like fucking around. Carson tried to pull away, to say something, to object, but that hand on the back of his neck was firm. Carson was a strong guy—his job was physical, he worked out when he could—but he didn’t think to resist.

Dale used his other hand to tilt Carson’s chin just so, and Carson was waiting for him when their lips met.

Soft. Hard and sweet. Kind and strong. Did you ever think you were craving ice cream until someone gave you steak instead? Carson opened his mouth and Dale’s tongue swept in, and Carson groaned, allowing Dale to plaster him against his seat. Then Dale unclicked his belt and pushed the kiss further. He splayed a big callused hand across Carson’s throat, and scrabbled his other through Carson’s short hair. Carson cupped either side of Dale’s neck and held him, wanting him close, wanting him closer, wanting Dale, all of him, down his throat, in his ass, skin to skin, bodies lunging.