His heart beat quick and shallow in the hollow below his throat. Surprisingly, the overwhelming terror didn’t take over, to Tom’s relief. That type of fear, he decided, must be restricted to his reaction to beefy, blond cute men.
Tom turned left, toward the waiting SUV. He would’ve loved to turn the other direction and speed away from the watching pair, but he figured driving toward the other vehicle was the least suspicious move he could take. Traffic was heavy, and he also hoped and prayed the glare of his headlights would blind the men long enough for him to drive past without being recognized.
Tom held his breath as he approached the SUV then passed it. He waited for the other vehicle to flip around and follow him, but it didn’t move. Tom watched it get smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror.
The tinier it got, the easier it was to breathe.
When Tom turned the corner six blocks past the SUV, his shoulders sank in relief and air flowed easily into his chest. He began to laugh a little.
“Escaping from a pair of government bad guys, no problem,” he said out loud, making another turn and heading toward the ATM
on Broad Street. “But make me go on a date
…well, forget that.” He laughed again, still breathless.
After getting his daily limit in cash from the ATM, he headed south. On the edge of town was a slightly dingy-looking hotel he’d driven by numerous times without even considering that one day he’d need to stay there.
“Good luck finding me now, bastards,”
he muttered as his foot pushed harder on the accelerator.
MacDougal popped a couple of antacids into his mouth, eyed the bottle gloomily and then shoved the whole thing in his coat pocket. He had a feeling it was going to be that type of day. He’d been doing this shit for sixteen years and everything he knew told him his fastest framer wasn’t coming back to work. Not today, not ever.
He climbed out of his pickup and glared at the early morning sky, taking the ominous-looking clouds as a personal offense. It was going to drop a fucking ass-load of snow. He knew that was true too.
Both of those things together, snow and no Darwin Bloom, meant that he was about to have a shit day to beat all shit days.
Shouldering his way through the plastic sheeting into the building, he saw three of the workers standing in front of him, eyes wide.
“Fuck,” he groaned. What had it been, three minutes since he’d arrived on site? The day had barely started and, from the look on the guys’ faces, something had already gone to shit. “What’s fucking wrong now?”
“Uh…boss.” Benny was the first to speak, gesturing with both arms at the building surrounding them. “Look.”
MacDougal looked.
He stared.
He opened his mouth but wasn’t able to make a sound.
Then he broke out of his paralysis and wandered through the building, faster and faster until he was almost running. The three workers tagged along behind him.
He stopped and spun around so suddenly, Benny almost bounced off his chest.
“It’s done,” Benny said, stating the obvious. The other two nodded, still looking shell-shocked. “All the framing is done.”
“Who did it, do you know?” Rick asked.
“Overnight? Who
could’ve
done it?”
Marco marveled. “The framing elves?”
“I know who did it,” MacDougal said, a slow grin stretching across his face.
“Who?” the guys chorused almost in unison.
“Bloom.” MacDougal shook his head, not able to stop smiling. “That fucking magnificent bastard. He said he’d be back last night to make up the work.” Looking around again, he laughed, a booming, rolling belly laugh. “Guess he meant it.”
It wasn’t a dream.
Tom knew that because he could feel the uncomfortably hard chair beneath his ass.
He could dream the sight of the judge, the assorted jury members, the hulking bailiff and Dave’s face, the face that had been haunting his nightmares for months. He could dream all that but there was no way he could be dreaming about the feel of hard wood under his butt.
Other than that, though, it matched all his nightmares. From the smirk on Dave’s face to the cottony stick of his tongue against the roof of his mouth, everything felt uncomfortably familiar to Tom. He’d been reliving this moment every night for months, waking up with a raw throat and no clue how he was going to be able to testify for real.
He scanned the spectators, pretending he wasn’t searching for Darwin. Tom’s sister caught his eye and gave him a small wave and a nervous smile. After a tiny nod he moved on, but the familiar blond head wasn’t anywhere in the courtroom. Tom knew it was stupid of him to think Darwin might have shown up, but his heart still deflated when his visual search came up empty.
Darwin’s pursuers, on the other hand, were easy to spot. One sat in the second to last row, tucked between an overweight man in a Hawaiian shirt and a mousy-looking woman clutching an oversized purse in her lap. The other one was close to the front, two seats away from Anne. Maybe it was just his paranoia kicking in but the two potential shady government agents were blatantly obvious to Tom, with their identical suits and hair and impassive expressions.
The prosecutor, Cameron, was there and Tom focused on him. They’d gone over and over everything before the trial as far as what to expect, what to wear, say, do. There was a comfort in Cam’s suited, stuffy presence—a small comfort, but enough for Tom to fix his eyes on the man and try to block out the rest. The judge, jury, audience and even Dave faded to his peripheral.
Cam’s gaze flicked over him and his forehead creased slightly. Tom tried not to make a face. He’d made an emergency, off-the-shelf suit purchase that morning, since the suit Cam had helped him pick out hadn’t been one of the items he’d stuffed frantically in his one suitcase the night before. Tom brushed away the thought. Although his apparel might not be up to Cam’s standards, at this moment, the suit substitution was the least of his many worries.
The most pressing of which was that Cam was asking him a question. “…you tell us in your own words what happened that night?”
Tom breathed in, trying very hard not to look at Dave. He’d gone over this question with Cam a number of times. He knew how to answer. “I left the club early, about eleven thirty, and went over to the diner across the street.” His voice was a little rough but it was functional. Tom relaxed minutely. One of his major worries had been that his voice would shut down completely. So far, so good.
“Alone?” Cam prompted.
“Yes.” He was tempted to take a sip from the bottle of water in front of him but Tom didn’t want to chance showing anyone how hard his hands were shaking. Plus, with the way his palms were sweating, the water bottle would probably slide right out of his grip. No wonder his mouth was dry—all the moisture in his body was seeping out of his hands. “Alone.”
Tom tried to refocus but panic was creeping up his spine, closing his throat. His gaze scanned the courtroom again, although he had no idea what he was looking for—a sympathetic face, maybe? He skimmed past his sister, not wanting her obvious nerves to make his worse, and his gaze landed on the bailiff, who came sharply into focus.
The man was huge, straining the seams of his uniform. His dull black hair looked too long and unkempt for a law enforcement officer. His thick mustache was classic 1980s cop and an ugly scar cut a thick path across his left cheek. Despite that, Tom could tell he was an attractive guy under all that hair.
When the bailiff met his stare, Tom’s head jerked back and he bit his tongue.
There
was
a good-looking guy under all of that—
Darwin
!
Cam cleared his throat. “Mr. Cooper?”
Tearing his gaze from the disguised Darwin, Tom forced himself to concentrate.
His fear dissolved and all he felt was relief and wonder. Despite the danger, despite Tom not believing him, Darwin had kept his promise. He was actually here. And knowing he was helped Tom to focus.
He took a deep breath, sure now that he could do this. After months of loneliness and terror and nightmares, he wasn’t about to help the psycho who had caused it all get away with the terrible things he’d done.
Tom focused on Cam’s face, not allowing himself to even glance at the hulking bailiff.
It was enough to just know Darwin was there. He answered each question just as they’d practiced, walking the jury and judge through that incredibly sucky night. He told them about everything, from Dave interrupting his
huevos rancheros
at the diner, all the way to waking up the next morning in the hospital, amazed he wasn’t nearly as dead as he’d expected to be.
“Is the man who assaulted you here today?” Cam asked.
“Yes.”
“Can you point him out?”
Tom stretched out his arm, pointing directly at the man who had derailed his fairly happy life and thrown him into a wasteland of fear. He looked right at Dave.
He didn’t know if it was due to Darwin’s reassuring presence or if Tom had just had enough of terror running his life, but his stomach had settled back to its normal spot and there was no tremor in his voice or the hand he held out, pointing at his attacker.
Dave looked back at him, his eyes lit with hate.
After Dave’s arrest, details of his life had been all over the internet and on the news.
His younger brother, who had been gay and barely out of the closet, had killed himself a few years earlier. Since his death, Dave had steadily sunk into a pit of rage.
Tom had been the third man Dave had attacked but the first one he’d forced into his vehicle. In his gut, Tom knew that if the couple walking by the parking lot that night hadn’t called the police, Dave would have killed him. Tom would’ve died thinking that stupid Andrew was the best boyfriend he’d had. What a sad thought.
Looking over at the scruffy bailiff, Tom was suddenly, violently grateful he’d lived long enough to be able to know Darwin. No matter what happened between them after the trial, Tom was just glad he’d had that time with the big construction worker.
“Mr. Cooper.”
Once again, Tom was snapped back to reality by an attorney—this one for the defense. He stiffened, ready for the attack Cam had warned would probably happen.
Tom concentrated on relaxing the rigidness in his body as he waited for the first question.
“Why were you in the diner that night?”
Tom blinked. As tough questions went, this one was definitely on the easy side…at least it seemed to be.
“To get some eggs,” he answered, eyeing the defense attorney warily.
“Eggs?”
“Yes.” Tom resisted shifting in the hard chair, folding his hands together tightly instead. He didn’t want to give any impression of discomfort or untrustworthiness to the jury.
“Kind of late to be getting eggs, wasn’t it?”
Tom shrugged a little as he answered.
“Not really. I was hungry.”
“You were hungry.”
The attorney nodded in a knowing way that made Tom scrunch his forehead in confusion. He stopped himself before looking at Cam for guidance and just watched the defense attorney steadily. There couldn’t have been anything wrong with saying he was hungry, could there?
“Why not go somewhere closer to home?”
Understanding clicked into place and Tom had to stop himself from rolling his eyes. “Because I was already close to the diner.”
“Really?” the attorney asked, as if he didn’t already know the answer. “Where were you before you went to the diner?”
“A club.” If the attorney was going to go to the gross place of blaming what happened to him on his gayness, Tom wasn’t about to make it easy for him.
“A club,” the lawyer repeated. “The club across the street?”
“Yes.”
“The gay club?”
Tom glanced at the jury members, wondering if this was going to sway them, especially as all twelve appeared to be extremely straight Midwesterners. “Yes.”
“So are you gay?”
Cam stood up. “Objection. What does Mr.
Cooper’s sexual orientation have to do with this case?”
“My client is being accused of committing a bias crime,” the defense attorney countered. “Doesn’t that make Mr.
Cooper’s sexual orientation relevant?”
The judge paused for a moment and then nodded. “I’ll allow it.”
With a slight, satisfied thinning of his lips, the attorney asked again, “So, Mr. Cooper, are you a homosexual?”
“Yes.” Whether or not this biased the jury against him, all Tom could do was tell the truth. Cam had instructed him to answer the defense attorney’s questions truthfully and succinctly. He couldn’t get much more truthful or succinct than his single word answer.
“So around eleven thirty that night, you left the gay club and went to the diner across the street.”
“That’s right.”
The lawyer tilted his head in put-on curiosity. “Why did you leave so early?”
“Early?”
“Leaving the club before midnight,” the defense attorney clarified. “Isn’t that when the place is just warming up?”
Tom was not about to spill his pathetic Andrew tale to the courtroom. It was enough that he’d just had to tell everyone about the violence of that night. He tried to make his shrug as casual as he could. “I was bored. And hungry.”
“You were bored,” the lawyer repeated, putting as much disgust in the word “bored”
as if Tom had said “high on crack” instead.
“So you thought you’d have a more… interesting time at the diner?”
Once again, the truth, that the dingy diner and mediocre eggs had seemed so much better than going home to his lonely condo, was too depressing to say out loud. “I was hungry.”
“Right, you were
hungry
.” Again with the high-on-crack emphasis. “Are you sure you weren’t looking for something else at that diner?”
“What?” Tom was honestly confused.
“You didn’t have any luck finding someone at the club to hook up with,” the lawyer began, his tone hard and judgmental now.
“That’s not—”
The attorney ran right over Tom’s attempt to interrupt, “So you thought you’d have better luck trying to pick up my client.”