Shattered Glass (26 page)

adult.”

She finally stopped moving in front of a large set of polished wooden doors which opened into a courtroom. “Peter, right now you have to worry about two things. Cai might be denied bond, and you are probably going to be at least questioned, if not detained, by the Federal Prosecutor.” “Why would they deny bond?” I asked. At sixteen Cai was hardly a hardened criminal, but I knew the answer even as I asked. “They skipped town.”

“He knows how to disappear,” she affirmed. “And they’ll use the fact that the feds want him in order to prove he has a history of violence.”

“He’s not going to get bond,” Peter said, all emotion drained from his face. My earlier thoughts bore out; when Peter was most emotional, he shut down.

“I didn’t say that. He hasn’t been charged with a crime by the federal prosecutor yet. That’s in our favor. And there’s no murder weapon or witness who saw the actual shooting.” I failed to catch Angelica’s careful wording. “Then why did they jump to prosecute?” I was confused. Most prosecutors wouldn’t even file with that kind of case.

“Cai’s girlfriend is making a deal. She says Prisc raped Cai, and Cai went back there, got a gun from the living room, and then she heard a shot.”

“That bitch! She’s a lying smack addict,” Darryl screeched, his voice echoing in the enormous halls. Half the courthouse turned around.

“She’s lying,” Peter echoed. “Prisc didn’t rape him. And he didn’t go back there.”

“She was pressured,” Angelica said, ”Cai says she’s terrified of jail. But, Peter, they have evidence he went to the hospital and requested Cambivric.”

“What’s that?” He and Darryl asked nearly at the same time.

“It’s a drug they give rape victims to reduce the risk of exposure to HIV,” I said, leaning against the wall. Dammit.

“Oh God,” Peter whispered pressing his hands against his forehead. “Fucking stupid. How did I not know?” “Let’s get through this, and then we can help him. His mother is here now,” Angelica soothed with a hesitant pat to his arm. “This works in our favor. But you’re no longer his legal guardian, you’re a suspect in your father’s murder at worst. And at best, you’re complicit in Cai’s flight. There’s only one person the courts would even consider releasing Cai to…” Her pause made my brows rise while my brain went through every person that could have a single—“Austin?” Angelica smiled.

“Say what now?” I said, doing my best Wile-E-Coyote-plan-backfired blink.

Three Against One—And Not in the Fun Way I grasped for the nearest metaphorical branch to avoid being pulled over the edge. “I’m not approved for foster care. They’re not just going to release him to me.” “You don’t need to be,” Angelica informed me. “His mother was flown in. You just need to have her staying with you.” My thoughts flat-lined. Peter stared at the floor with his fucking typical unreadable expression. Darryl glared under perfectly arched and plucked brows, as if anticipating my negative response. And Angelica’s attack was double-barreled: her damn kitten eyes
and
her placid smile.

Fuck!

“Austin, he’s a good kid. I’d take them myself but with his case and my others, the work hours for the next few months are going to be ridiculous."

“There’s an entire fucking world out there and you pick me?” “You have a stable home—”

“I’m a single man very recently outed. He’s a sixteen-year-old boy!”

“You’re a decorated police officer—” “Working on the guy he killed’s case!”

“Allegedly.”

“No, I’m pretty sure I’m working on the case. No alleged about it.” Only, I wasn’t. When I got back to work, I’d be off this case.

“Why do you have to be a smartass about everything?” “Because everyone else thinks I’m a fucking dumbass. I have to do something to prove them wrong.” No one was making an argument about this arrangement but me. If Luis were here he’d suggest they just shoot me and get it over with.
This
was just a slow, cruel, torturous death of my meticulously planned future.

“What you’re asking me to do is literally toss my career away.

Much as I despise Delmonico and think Marco is an idiot, I can’t take their chief suspect into my house. What kind of message would that send?”

“That you think he’s innocent, and they should start hunting for the real suspect. They’re not even looking anymore, Austin.

They’re sitting on their complacent—” “I wouldn’t look either!” I yelled, catching the attention of various whispering passersby as my voice echoed in the halls.

“There’s a fucking witness, he was at the scene, he’s done it before. Who the fuck could possibly believe he’s innocent besides these two dipshits,” I hiked a thumb at Darryl and Peter, “who apparently think he’s the next coming of Christ. But not me. I am not joining the Cult of Cai.” “I believe he’s innocent,” Angelica said.

“Did he tell you that?”

“You know I can’t reveal anything he said. But I think I’ve made myself clear.”

Damn her gentle smile. Damn her calm, rational voice. And

damn her reproachful, guilt-laden eyes. And damn Peter, too, while I was at it. And his fucking bunny slippers that made me interested enough to pay attention to him in the first place. I was burning those fuzzy fuckers the moment I saw them again.

Which reminded me, he was suspiciously silent.

He didn’t make his usual plea with his eyes, or use his body and my feelings for him, he didn’t even raise his gaze from staring at the marble tile. Despite all of Angelica’s cajoling, what finally had me considering agreeing to do this was Peter’s lack of comment.

Maybe he understood the gravity of my situation. I needed to believe that. I needed to believe he comprehended the fact that, should I go back to work, taking Cai in would make me a pariah amongst other cops who would already have enough trouble dealing with my being gay. Even Luis would probably distance himself from me.

But, if I didn’t say yes, Cai would likely spend months awaiting trial in a jail cell. Could that kid survive? Even with Angelica up to bat for him, I was only mildly convinced of his innocence. It seemed everyone who spent time with this kid developed some sort of blind affection for him.

I wasn’t kidding about the Cai Cult. And I had reached my fill of Peter’s complete and total lack of self. There’s sacrifice and then there’s martyrdom. Peter teetered too close to the latter relative to his ‘brother’. Besides Peter being a whore, besides his shaky morals; and his, at times, anti-social personality, the largest hurdle between Peter and me was going to be his absolute and total devotion to Cai. That kind of reverence was abnormal.

Wasn’t it?

Ultimately, I had to admit that the question wasn’t about Cai at all. It was about Peter. It was about how much was I willing to give up for someone who was a complete stranger little more than a week ago. He lifted his face from studying the floor. The entreaty in Peter’s eyes alone might have compelled me to do it; the slow rise of deep blue, shining with such hope, slammed into me like a boxer’s fist.

“It’d be the end of my being a cop,” I said to him. “Not just the FBI. I’d be frozen out of every agency.” He nodded succinctly, remaining stoic. “What is it with this kid?” “I owe him,” Peter stated solemnly.

“Owe him what?”

“Everything. I owe Cai everything.” He didn’t explain that statement. I wasn’t expecting him to, not with Angelica watching us with an intensity that bordered on rude. The devil inside me questioned if she wasn’t suggesting this whole scenario in order to ruin my career in retaliation for my sins.

“And he’s my brother,” Peter added to my stare.

“Your firm’d better give me a job after this,” I muttered to Angelica.

“The firm would have given you a job long ago had you not shown your buttocks to one of the senior partners,” a modulated voice behind me said.

My back instantly straightened, and I rotated slowly on stiff legs to face my father. “Maybe the senior partner shouldn’t have told a fifteen year old boy that he was an ass?” “I don’t see the correlation,” Desmond Glass said, giving Peter and Darryl a look so full of distaste, the tip of his nose

nearly became one with the space between his eyes.

“Really? Calling me an ass…me showing my ass? You got nothing?”

“Your dad’s a silver fox, prettyboy,” Darryl informed me while giving my father the once, twice, and three times over. “If I was into old men, and he didn’t already have something long and hard stuck up his ass.”

Maybe I could like Darryl.

“Why are you here?” I asked my father.

“Angelica has requested I represent your…friend. Which of them is it?”

“Both,” Angelica said at the same time Peter and Darryl muttered, “Neither,” while I contributed my ever-intelligent, “Huh?”

Angelica took the crossed-arms-hip-jut stance and made it formidable. And she did it at only a little over five-feet four inches tall and wearing a pencil skirt tight enough to show every mole. “Any minute now I’ll have the press outside, a boy fighting for his life in there,” she jerked her head to the door behind her, “these two boys questioned by federal agents and prosecutors, and a sixty-year-old man and his thirty-year-old son cannot manage a professional conversation?” “Are you thirty?” Peter asked with a jaw drop.

“I’m twenty-six,” I said indignantly. “Twenty! Six!” “I apologize,” my father said diplomatically—to her. To me he nodded swiftly and then swiveled his gaze to Peter and Darryl. “I’ll need to be briefed before we meet with the

prosecutors.” He pointed his leather attaché case down the hall and motioned for Peter and Darryl to move ahead.

“Austin?”

“Just go with him, Peter. And for God’s sake don’t lie to him.

You can see Cai if he makes bond.”
And if you’re not arrested
. I was already suspicious about why he hadn’t been arrested yet.

Even if they knew he wasn’t responsible for Nikki the Nail’s death, they had to assume he had some culpability. Maybe his age at the time was factoring in?

Down the hall a stream of suits filed into a side room. From the way they held themselves and the dark suits they wore, I read FBI all over them.

“Men in suits,” Darryl sighed, catching the line of men and pointing a slim finger. “Eeny meeny miney homo…” I almost felt sorry for the them. Them being the FBI agents.

Catching Peter’s brief flicker of fear, I reached out and brushed my fingers against his just before he walked away. He fisted his hand, which was the only acknowledgement I got for the gesture. The last I saw of him was Darryl leaning over and whispering something in his ear.

“With everything happening all at once, the pressing question in the front of my mind is: Do you love him?” “I met him a week and a half ago, Angel. Of course I don’t love him.” I laughed harshly.

The marathon-long talk with Angelica over the weekend had been cathartic, yes, but between us both, the level of melancholy that settled in over those sixteen hours was draining.

Now it was as if that feeling was a physical being possessing me; and instantly the sadness and guilt enveloped me.

“Yet you’ll risk your job, me, your father, your friends for him?”

I shook my head, ”No. I took a few risks because of him, but not for him.” How did I explain this weight to her? As succinctly as possible considering she had to go defend Cai soon. “Since I was sixteen there’s been this heaviness in my chest. The second I’d meet a woman who wanted to settle down, the pressure eased. As it got closer to the point of actually getting married or moving in together, the pressure would start bearing down again.

So I’d fuck it up and find another one and another.” I peeked into the courtroom to make sure we still had time—and maybe to gather myself. When I turned around she was leaning back against the wall, both hands wrapped around the handle of her carrying case resting against her thighs. “I didn’t have that with you, Angel. The pressure, I mean. Not in any unbearable way. Probably because you and I were something more than lovers. But last month it started to change. Right after that kid I told you about hung himself.” I took a place next to her, crossing my legs at the ankles while the wall supported me.

“At first Peter was like that moment when the pressure eased, but it never quite lifted until I acknowledged I was gay.” Saturday, during our long discussion, we had talked about her affair with my father. We talked about Jesse and Dave. I held her while she cried. But she didn’t ask about Peter. And we didn’t discuss my new found sexuality.

“Just like that?” She asked.

“As terrifying and painful as our breakup was, the pressure evaporated,” I snapped my fingers. “I wasn’t obsessed with, or in love with, or even enamored with Peter. It was that feeling of

relief that I was chasing.” I wasn’t going to explain to her that it was more than that now. Things were too strained.

Neither of us would be over this soon. That much was clear by the awkwardness of our stances. While we were dating, and even before that, we would hold hands or I would wrap my arms around her shoulders, and she would lay her head against my arm. Now we stood shoulder-to-shoulder, both hurting and missing what we had, neither of us reaching out to comfort one another.