Holding Out for a Fairy Tale (31 page)

Alejandro stopped climbing for a moment. “Do you have brothers?” he asked.

“No. I’m an only child.”

“You’re lucky. Brothers are a pain in the ass. Sisters too, obviously. Raymond and I were more than cousins growing up. We were friends. I’d have traded both of my actual siblings to have had him as a brother. But when we got older, I thought everything was a competition. I thought one of us had to come out on top, and I really thought that nothing else mattered. When I was young, it never occurred to me that our lives wouldn’t be us striving to outdo each other, but us against the entire fucking world. It should have been us against the world….” He shook his head sadly. “I let things get carried away. I betrayed him, and I drove him away. And when our parents and our uncles found out what happened, I let them shun him. I told them he betrayed us.”

“You lied to them?”

“Yes. I lied to them. But Raymond didn’t help. He’s always been so black-and-white, so fucking sure that there is only one path he can take in life. It’s all or nothing with him, and it always has been. I thought we were just kids playing a fucking game, and when things got personal, he decided the fastest way to win was not to play at all. He’s a hard guy to care about.”

“Some people might say that.” Elliot didn’t mean to smile, but he couldn’t wipe the expression from his face.

“But I still care about him. Since him leaving us was my fault, I took responsibility for it. I took responsibility for him. I put the word out that anyone who touched him, anyone who messed with him, would answer to me. And then I made sure that I had a reputation as the scariest fucker in this city so no one would dare try and take him out. I’ve kept an eye on him ever since. If someone threatens him, I kill them. If someone tries to hurt him, I kill them. If someone breaks into his place, or messes with his shit, I kill them.”

“Is there anything you don’t kill people for?”

“I don’t have the most creative approach to problem solving, but it’s effective.”

There were police vehicles on the ground now, but the helicopter was still hovering over the house. “I’m not going to kill you, though. Fucking with his life cost me my best friend. It cost my family more than I can ever say. It even cost me my own sister.”

“You killed her.”

“I did. But I made it quick. I promise you, Garcia wouldn’t have been so kind.”

“I have to arrest you.”

“You don’t think it’s a bit rude, to arrest a man who just kept your lover from getting killed?”

Somehow, Alejandro had found a solid surface to grab onto. He disappeared over the top of the bank in a flash.

Elliot scrambled forward, tucking his gun away and climbing up the gravel slope as fast as he could. He made quicker time than Alejandro, but Alejandro was already on the road above, already running. “Fucking hell….”

Elliot ignored the way the jagged rocks and thorn bushes cut into his hands, scrambling up the slope until he could pull himself up onto the concrete pavement above. Just twenty yards away, he saw Alejandro climbing into the silver Lexus. “Stop or I will shoot!” Elliot shouted.

Alejandro froze for a moment, his head peeking above the driver’s side door.

Elliot kept his finger on the trigger. “Step away from the car!”

“Do you think he would have survived the last twelve years as a police officer if it hadn’t been for me?” Alejandro sneered. “How long do you think your lover will last when I’m gone?”

A knife of doubt and fear cut straight through Elliot’s bravado with those words. For one horrible moment, he imagined walking into his house and finding Ray gunned down on the living room floor, just like the killers Alejandro had shot. The thought of losing Ray left him feeling hollow and dead himself. Bringing Alejandro to justice felt meaningless by comparison.

He thought about how desperate Ray had looked when Elliot had confronted him about taking off on his own.
This
, Elliot realized, was the fear that had paralyzed Ray that afternoon. This was why the other man had left him alone in bed without a word of explanation. Just as Elliot had come to care about Ray despite his best effort not to, Ray cared about him, too.

The idea filled him with warmth and fear simultaneously. He wanted to laugh, to fucking giggle, it felt so good. At the same time, realizing just how much Ray meant to him, how much he meant to Ray, compounded the icy fear inside him. Alejandro’s words, the thinly veiled threat they carried, cut through Elliot’s brain and left him helpless.

He ground his teeth together. Ray might care about him, but if he didn’t stop Alejandro when he had the chance, Ray would never forgive him.

“I will shoot you!” Elliot shouted again, trying to convince himself as much as Alejandro.

In the dim glow from the dome light, Alejandro smirked at him in an open challenge. “No, you won’t.”

“Fuck you!”

The SUV spun out on the gravel, then began the reckless descent to the highway below.

F
OR
A
long time, Ray didn’t want to move.

He went through the debriefing and interrogation-style interviews that followed on autopilot. Somehow coffee happened. Carmen had come into the police station and been forced to prove she’d had nothing to do with Sophie’s actions, grilled about whether or not she’d actually taken her children out of town like she said. He’d watched his sister wander out of the police station, still crying. She looked at him for a moment, and the flood of tears came back. As much as he wanted to go to her and tell her it was all right, he didn’t think he could find the words. Nothing was all right.

He knew she felt guilty for leaving San Diego, for leaving when she might have had the chance to talk some sense into Sophie if she had stayed. Ray would never hold it against her. He was proud and grateful she had the strength to put on a brave smile and distance her own children from the nightmare their family had become. Still, he had no idea how he could tell her any of that when they couldn’t look at each other without him breaking down and her bursting into tears.

Somehow, he’d ended up back at Hayes’s apartment. Weird potato dumplings in a heavy marinara sauce happened. Cheap blended whiskey happened. He ended up in bed with Elliot’s warm body wrapped around him, enveloping him in the other man’s welcome and familiar scent. And Ray would have been content to stay there, wrapped in the cocoon of blankets and Elliot forever.

But that just wasn’t possible. At dawn—maybe dawn on the second day, maybe dawn on the third—Ray woke up to obnoxious laughter and the smell of freshly brewed coffee.

“I can’t believe you won.” A voice he didn’t know well but that he hated all the same came from somewhere across the room.

“I didn’t actually
expect
to be right. I made the bet as a joke.”

“Hayes?” Ray tipped his head up to see his partner, with sparkling eyes, sympathetic smile—and goddamned cowboy lover in tow—standing at the foot of the bed. The cowboy wrapped his arms around Hayes’s waist, rubbing it in. Ray was all but numb inside, but even so, he was surprised when the resentment he’d felt every time he looked at the two of them together didn’t burn back to life. There was nothing now.

“Seriously, Delgado? Six depressed, frantic voice mails, and I rush down here to find you with some random guy, in my bed. What the hell, man?”

Ray stared at them both, then sighed as Elliot’s arms tightened around him. “Come back in a week.” He dropped his head back down.

“Delgado?” Ray could hear the concern in his partner’s voice. “Is that the skinny FBI guy? Belkamp, right? What’s up?”

Ray glanced up at Hayes again, cocking a single eyebrow. “Have you thought about the full range of possible answers to that question, Hayes?”

That brought a little smile to his partner’s face. “Actually, he’s right, I don’t want to know. Didn’t really expect to see you again.”

“Yeah. Shit happened. Drug cartels, break-ins, contract killers, Internet theft, creepy professors….” Elliot nuzzled against the top of Ray’s head. “Ray lost his cousin Sophie. His place got trashed, mine….”

Ray felt Elliot’s sigh ruffle through his hair. “Did the crime scene clean-up crew say if they can get the blood out of the floorboards yet?”

Elliot groaned. “It’s soaked into the damn subfloor. And the last hotel we booked got blown up, so we figured this would be all right.”

There was silence at the foot of the bed. Ray kept his head down, buried his eyes and his senses in the crook of Elliot’s neck.

“Well, fuck. That’s two.” Hayes’s lover laughed.

“Two?”

“We saw the explosion at the Hilton on the news in the airport. Christopher said he bet that was you.”

Ray glared at both of them. “You’re worse than the damn bomb-squad guys, Hayes. Besides, this time I wasn’t anywhere near the explosion. The FBI wanted to stash me there, but I came here instead. Good thing, too. There was a drug-cartel leak inside the FBI’s Gang Task Force.”

“What? Who?”

“Nobody you’d know. Some new asshole named Hathaway. Sanchez misses you, by the way. Jenkins, too. You should stop in and say hello since you’re in town.”

“Delgado.” Ray felt the bed dip slightly with the added weight of another body. “Sophie….”

“I don’t really want to talk about it. Like I said, come back in a week.”

“No, I don’t think that’s a good idea. Why don’t we give you guys a chance to get dressed, then we’ll get some lunch.”

Ray tilted his head up again, glaring. The sudden anger burning inside him was irrational but consuming. “We’re not naked you shit! Jesus, you really think so little of me? You think, after the girl I helped raise bled to death all over me that the first thing on my mind would be getting laid?”

“Delgado, you know I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I know what you meant! I know you’re trying to be supportive! I know I shouldn’t be pissed about what you said, but…. Do you think knowing you didn’t mean anything by it makes me feel any better about the way you automatically assumed?”

Elliot’s grip on his shoulder made him twitch. “Over. Thinking.”

Ray sighed and pushed himself upright. He ran his hands through his hair. “I know. I know. I’m just a mess right now.”

“Yeah, I get that.” Hayes smiled. He grabbed Ray’s T-shirt and hauled him across the bed. His larger, taller frame was huge compared to Elliot’s, and the crushing bear hug his partner pulled him into enveloped him completely. He tried to get away, to get back to the anger and rage, but Hayes just held him tighter. “You can’t go to lunch in boxers and a T-shirt. If you need to read too much into everything I say so you end up too angry to think, go ahead. If you need to skip the bullshit and just smack me, go ahead. I might be a bit out of shape, but I can still take anything you can dish out.”

Ray accepted the hug. He needed it. He needed the reminder that he still had some human connection in the world. But the one thought that broke through the grief and anger was that Hayes didn’t feel right. Sitting there with Hayes’s arms wrapped around him didn’t feel right.

He forced himself to nod and slipped back up to the pillows, back to Elliot. He ran his fingers through Elliot’s close-cropped hair. “Lunch?”

Elliot leaned shamelessly into his touch, and Ray found something inside him pinging from the simple gesture. Elliot shrugged. “Food is overrated. There are still two boxes of strawberry Pop-Tarts from the last time I ran to the store.”

“That’s settled, then,” said Ray. “We’re going to lunch.”

T
HE
SKY
should have been overcast. It was two days into February, and of all the months of the year, February in San Diego should have been cloudy and depressing. Instead, it was bright, clear, and nearly seventy degrees. Just as the weather seemed to delight in not matching the occasion, the mourners didn’t seem to have the class to be stoic and reserved either. Ray’s aunt, mother, and grandmother stood in the front with Carmen, and their devastation was etched on their tear-streaked faces. But the rows of family around them were aloof, there to keep up appearances and nothing more.

Sophie’s father and remaining brother were absent, but that was because Ray’s testimony had put them in prison years ago. Ray had to wonder if they believed the police account of what had happened or if Alejandro had lied to them all and blamed it on him or Garcia. He half hoped Alejandro had done just that. As much as he hated Alejandro, he didn’t hate his Aunt Louisa enough to subject her to the truth.

He’d kept his distance, staying over fifty yards from the grave site, but even that was too close for his extended family. Across the cemetery lawn, his nephew held up a red matchbox car and waved at him. Ray smiled and gave the boy a little wave before Ray’s own mother shot a cold look his way and turned the boy around. Carmen was the only one who hadn’t glared at him. But she hadn’t looked at him at all, and somehow that felt worse.

He felt as if he deserved their accusations. Regardless of who had pulled the trigger, he was the reason Sophia had always hated their family, the reason she’d tried to go into federal law enforcement, why she’d started this entire fucked-up mess. But even if he felt like he deserved their scorn, he still needed to say good-bye. There was a part of him that would have given anything to be standing there beside his mother and sister, to feel their arms around him, to be able to mourn without any doubts about whether he even had the right to be upset.