Holding Out for a Fairy Tale (2 page)

He was glad it was too dark for anyone to see him roll his eyes. “Get the fuck out!”

Alejandro backed down the hallway, keeping Ray’s date between them. As soon as they made it to the living room, Alejandro threw the terrified young man back toward the bedroom and bolted out the door.

Ray just had time to move his finger to the trigger guard before his date tumbled into him. He scooped the man up and set him on his feet, then began gingerly touching his hair and back, checking for wet spots where Alejandro might have ripped his hair out. “Are you hurt?”

“Am I hurt?” The man’s voice was a high-pitched shriek. “You fucking psychopath, you nearly shot me!”

Ray chewed on his lower lip for a moment. He knew he hadn’t come remotely close to shooting his date. He’d rolled away before firing to make sure the bullet went behind him. He’d pulled the shot too far to the left to actually hit Alejandro just to avoid even the possibility of grazing the other man. The bullet, Ray was certain, would be embedded in the left side of the doorframe. It was possible the bullet casing had hit him when it was ejected from the chamber, but he was pretty sure he’d been far enough away that the casing would be somewhere in his sheets. Still, that wasn’t the type of reassurance called for.

Ray smirked, realizing the situation didn’t call for reassurance at all. “Blaine, I’m sorry you had to go through this. I know—”

“Blaine? It’s Bruce!” The man stumbled away from him, his eyes narrowing. His hunched posture straightened, and he dropped his hands to his side. He didn’t relax his curled fingers, but he clenched them into fists at his side rather than holding them up to instinctively guard his face. “You sick fuck! After all that, you can’t even remember my name?” He shoved Ray away from him. “Are you going to call the police or what? And can we turn a goddamned light on?”

Ray batted Bruce’s hand away from the hallway light switch. “Yes, but wait. Let me sweep the rest of the apartment first. I don’t want to kill my night vision and then walk into a dark room if I’m not sure that it’s secure.”

“What? Who the fuck thinks like that? Someone broke into your place, held a gun to my head, and you’re worried about your night vision!”

Ray sighed. Maybe getting the man angry wasn’t the best approach. “I’ll take care of it, okay?”

Bruce rubbed his hands over his face, obviously disturbed. He eventually took a deep breath. “Okay.” Bruce nodded. “I’ll call the police while you’re—”

Ray froze as he stepped back into the dark hall. He didn’t want to imagine what the rest of his evening might look like now. Calling in the shooting and the break-in would mean he and Bruce would both have to give statements, and his would have to include an explanation about who Bruce was, why he was in Ray’s apartment, and why he was in Ray’s bed.

Ray didn’t have anything personal against admitting that he enjoyed the company of men as well as women, but working alongside an openly gay partner for four years had shown him just how little tolerance his fellow detectives had for gay police officers. They had put up with his partner because he’d been friendly, likable, and so much better at their job than everyone else, that anything else would come across as petty, jealous bullshit. But he had also been honest about it from the start. They already didn’t like Ray, but they trusted him enough to be able to work with him. If he came out as bisexual, every officer he worked with would be left wondering what else he had lied about over the years. They would never trust him again. Deep down, he suspected he really was a complete bastard and that their mistrust was probably justified. He tended to color the truth at the best of times. On a professional level, though, he couldn’t afford to lose their trust.

“Hold off a second,” Ray shifted his pistol to his left hand and took Bruce by the elbow. “It might be best if I call it in. You said you wouldn’t be able to stay the night because you’ve got an early shift. If you’re still here when they show up, you’re going to be stuck giving statements until dawn.”

“Someone broke into your place and held a gun to my head!”

“And he’s long gone.” Ray used the same gentle tone he might use with a frightened witness. “I’m sorry you had to go through this, but spending the night being interrogated at the police station will only make it worse. I’m a police officer. I can take care of filing the report tonight. You’ll be called to testify when we arrest him, of course.”

Ray knew Bruce was already tired, he’d already had a few drinks, and the fight-or-flight response that had him trembling was tapering off. The adrenaline was fading, and Bruce was already starting to crash. He was too tired to argue, too tired to think.

“You… You can handle the whole police report thing?’

“Absolutely.” Ray wrapped his arm around the man’s shoulders. “And I’ll call you tomorrow, just to follow up and make sure you’re all right.” He steered Bruce toward the door.

Ray ducked his head into the hallway to make sure it was empty, then walked Bruce to the elevator, keeping his pistol in his hand as discreetly as possible. “I just wish our evening had gone better. Hazards of a career in law enforcement,” he lied. “Maybe we could pick up where we left off sometime next week?”

Bruce gaped at him. “You’re unbelievable. You nearly shoot me, forget my name, and now you’re still trying to get laid?”

“You’re right, that was kind of crass.” Ray slipped his arm off Bruce’s shoulders. He slipped his hand down Bruce’s arm, took his hand, and kissed his knuckles. “Get some rest. I’m sure you’ll be all right.”

Five minutes later, Ray had secured his apartment, turned on the lights, bolted the door, and set the intrusion alarm. Having stumbled in trying to get Bruce naked as quickly as possible, he hadn’t bothered with the alarm earlier. He found the spent shell casing in his sheets, right where he expected it and made a mental note to buy wood filler to patch the hole he’d made in the doorframe. Then he pulled out his laptop and began to comb through his cousin Sophie’s social media accounts. The pages and accounts where she had posted hourly status updates since she turned thirteen hadn’t been updated in fourteen days. He tried calling her cell phone, not caring about the time. It went straight to voice mail. He pulled up a GPS application that usually pinpointed her location, but it couldn’t find her phone.

Frustrated, he tried calling her dorm room on the University of California campus, but there was no answer there either. She had paid extra for a single room, so she didn’t even have a roommate he could question. Despite not being able to get in touch with Sophie, Ray refused to worry.

He sent a text message to his sister, instead. Thirty seconds later, his phone rang.

“You are awake.” Ray tried to keep his tone casual.

“Of course I’m awake!”

Ray pulled the phone away from his ear as his sister shrieked over the frantic sobs and cries of what sounded like an entire army of worried mothers.

“Aunt Louisa’s been here going through Sophie’s room since noon. Now she’s crying at my kitchen table. Mama and everyone are here. Do you know Sophie’s missing?”

Ray switched her to speakerphone. “I heard something like that. I was just checking up on her Facebook stuff and trying to get a hold of her. Has Aunt Louisa talked to the police?”

“No!”

Ray winced, pretty sure that Carmen’s shout wasn’t directed at him.

“Jose, we do not throw balls in the house! Damn it, hold on….”

He listened to the muffled sound of his sister putting her youngest back to bed and smiled. She was trying to calmly explain that it was past his bedtime, past the dog’s bedtime, and past her bedtime too. With an exhausted sigh, she returned to the phone. “No, she hasn’t talked to the police. I guess the FBI is in charge, but no one will tell her anything about what’s happened. They said they’d have some
family liaison
person call her in the morning. Can you imagine that? Raymond, if you ever have to call a mother and tell her one of her children has been missing for a week, you will
not
tell her someone else will get in touch with her in the morning!”

“Yeah, no shit. How are you holding up?” He didn’t have to point out that she had just as much reason to be worried as Sophie’s mother, if not more. Carmen had spent eight years taking care of Sophie like one of her own—she was far more of a mother to their cousin than Aunt Louisa had been for a long time.

Carmen let out a bitter laugh. “How do you think I’m holding up? I’m a wreck. She hasn’t been home for a week, and the entire family is treating me like I’m some kind of monster for not knowing something was wrong. Apparently I’m not even allowed to be upset because I should have somehow magically sensed she wasn’t on campus.” Her sniffle squeaked through the phone. “So what are you going to do?”

Ray sighed. “Not panic. Carmen, I’ll go to her dorm first thing in the morning. I’ll check in with her professors, talk to the girls on her floor. If none of her friends or her boyfriend have reported that she’s missing, odds are she isn’t actually in danger. But I’ll find her, okay?”

“Can you talk to the FBI?”

“The FBI doesn’t like me.” Ray bit the inside of his cheek, surprised at how hard it was to keep from laughing. “I can find her without them.”

“Raymond, just because one FBI agent kicked your ass doesn’t mean they’re all jerks….”

“Technically, last week brings the total number of FBI agents who have kicked my ass to two. Although, the first guy might have been justified.”

“First guy?” Carmen giggled.

Ray smiled and didn’t even try to fight the flush through his cheeks as he remembered the week he’d spent screwing a hot federal agent not eight months ago. Even though he’d ended the week with a black eye and a cracked rib because he said something to piss the man off, it had been one of the hottest weeks of his life.

“Yeah, I’m not telling you
that
story. It’s personal.”

“Suit yourself. You’ll call them in the morning?”

“No. He was an okay guy, but the rest of them are assholes. Every single one of them.”

“They’re the ones investigating. And I know Alejandro has gone to look for her, too. Things could get really nasty if you two run into each other….”

If Alejandro was actively looking for his sister, Ray thought it would be nice to have someone else on his side. Alejandro was a psychotic enemy, and he lived in a world where there were seldom good explanations when someone disappeared for a few weeks.

On the other hand, Sophie wasn’t a part of that world. Sophie was twenty-one, a college student, and tended to party too much. San Diego was only a five-hour drive from Las Vegas, and Ray knew she’d been eager to go ever since she was busted trying to get into one of the casinos with a fake ID at nineteen. She was also just as much of a closeted nerd as Ray, and he wouldn’t put it past her to spend days at a time lost in a programming project, forgetting about mundane things like attending class and eating. Maybe she’d had a fight with the new guy she was dating and had gone off with some friends for some girl time. He’d never heard her use phrases like
girl time
, but anything was possible.

Even the FBI’s involvement didn’t necessarily mean something was wrong. If they could identify her as a relative of Alejandro Munoz, they might jump at the chance to investigate, even if they were just investigating a college co-ed spending the week letting loose in Vegas.

He gritted his teeth and tried to think of any alternative. He sighed. “I’ll talk to them. But, she might just have gone to Vegas for the week. Do you still have her spare key card?”

T
HE
NEXT
day, Ray swung by his sister’s house to grab the spare key to Sophie’s dorm room. He reassured his sister once again that Sophie was probably just fine and headed north on the I-15 to the regional FBI office. The newer office building was four stories, with sleek black windows and equally shiny black siding. It looked like any other office building until you realized the twelve-foot ornate iron fence encircled the entire building and parking lot and that it was topped with a thin line of razor wire.

Ray hated coming here. Aside from his issues with individual FBI agents because he was just a police officer, he had to check his weapons with security in the lobby and wait for an escort from the Regional Gang Task Force office—if they decided to see him at all.

He fidgeted in the blue plastic chairs in the lobby, watching a dozen men and women in virtually identical dark suits shuffle in through metal detectors.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

The shout came from a massive blond man at the edge of the crowd. He had furious brown eyes, one of which was still slightly black. He had features that were often called chiseled, although with his nose bent and still taped, he didn’t look particularly handsome.

“Good morning, Special Agent Hathaway.” Ray waved and smiled brightly.

He’d spent the last week suspended from work because of new FBI agent James Hathaway. When Ray had left a message with the task force office to have someone collect his report about the money leaking out of Alejandro’s accounts and the gang war that was looming as a result, Special Agent Hathaway read enough back reports to know about Ray’s relationship to the cartel leadership. He hadn’t bothered to note Ray’s position as a homicide detective. Hathaway assumed Ray was a criminal informant in police custody rather than a police officer and had treated him like a criminal. Once he understood the magnitude of the theft Ray had heard rumors of, he tried to handcuff Ray and put him in protective custody—inside a solitary confinement cell in a federal detention center.

In all fairness, if Ray had been a criminal informant, protective custody would have been the way to go. But Hathaway hadn’t even bothered to check, much less listen to Ray as he tried to explain and find his ID. Special Agent Hathaway had tried to throw Ray into a car, so Ray threw him into a wall, elbowed him in the face, and then threw him into a food cart. It had seemed like a good idea, at the time.