The Intersection of Purgatory and Paradise (2 page)

“But your land’s not mortgaged.”

The frustrated look on Doug’s face was replaced with a smug grin.

A half block ahead, a woman following a toddler down the sidewalk stared at them for a moment, then scooped her child up and crossed to the other side.

Doug’s eyes followed the woman.

“I can’t imagine you working here without having some place out of town to escape to.”

“It’s not that bad,” Doug said. “Besides, it’s always been my home. Where else would I go?”

“You could come back to San Diego with me,” Christopher suggested, thinking of the career and friends who were still waiting for him back home. “Or we could both go to Miami.” Doug had spent four years working in Miami, and even though he didn’t talk about those years, Christopher often found him fiddling with the surfboards stacked in the corner of his garage on weekends.

For the briefest of moments, Doug’s controlled expression slipped. He froze midstride, his arms and legs rigid. “This is where I belong,” he insisted.

And before Christopher could analyze his expression, before he could press for an answer, the moment was gone. Christopher knew there was no point in pressing the issue. Doug wasn’t going to leave Montana, no matter how much homophobic or racist bullshit he had to deal with.

“I really do have to go. If I don’t get those timecards done, none of the guys are getting paid.” Instead of a bump to his shoulder, Doug nodded and hurried down the block to the county sheriff’s office.

Christopher chewed on his bottom lip and hurried after him, willing to drop the subject. No matter what he tried, bringing up Doug’s four years as a member of the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Department was an instant way to kill any conversation. Christopher wanted to understand what could make Doug talk like he deserved the way some people in Elkin treated him, but Doug always walked away when he tried.

When Christopher caught up with him, Doug increased his pace. He forced himself to smile. “Right. Have fun with the timecard stuff. I’m going to run.”

“Again?” Doug slowed down a little. “Didn’t you run this morning?”

“Yeah, I did. Now I want to run again.”

Doug slowed down once he was about twenty feet ahead. “Don’t push yourself too hard this time!” he called back over his shoulder.

Christopher shrugged. He could never
not
push himself, and they both knew it.

T
HE
ROCK
came out of nowhere. It smacked Christopher in the back of the head with a crack that echoed around the street. He stumbled forward, dragging his feet as the world went black. His field of vision filled with splotches of neon light. He had to brace himself with his hands on his knees to keep from falling over. The screech of tires and laughter behind him cut through the pain. He bit back the panic paralyzing him and forced himself to move. He staggered off the sidewalk toward the hedge separating him from the parking lot on his left.

“No one wants fucking perverts like you jogging past our playgrounds!”

Christopher turned his head in the direction of the voice and took in everything he could, adding details to the list of evidence he was collecting in his head. He noted the make and model of the vehicle, a newer Dodge Durango with dark, tinted windows. A young man, obviously still a teen, was standing on the passenger seat, half out the window. He was holding on to the roof rack with one hand. The driver’s side window was down, and Christopher saw another boy behind the wheel. He didn’t recognize either of them, but he would be able to identify them later if he had to.

He shoved his way through the hedge, desperate to put the illusion of a barrier between himself and the road.

“Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing?” a high-pitched voice shouted from across the parking lot.

The SUV peeled away, and the laughter faded.

“Chris?”

Christopher turned toward Brittney McAllister, the woman his lover had almost married once upon a time. He let her slip under his shoulder and guide him through the cars in the parking lot to the coroner’s office.

“Hi,” he whispered, delicately reaching toward the back of his head. “Am I bleeding?”

“Yeah. Sit down on the steps, let me take a look.”

Christopher lowered himself onto the concrete and bent forward.

Even though getting to know Doug’s ex had been awkward, Christopher was grateful for any ally he could get in Elkin. For a while, he’d really believed once he’d settled in, people would stop comparing him to his brother and warm up to him. He’d been stupid and naive. The people of Elkin would never welcome someone they considered a threat to their children, and he was too closely connected to his brother’s case for them to ever see him as anything but a potential pedophile.

Christopher winced as Brittney used her fingernails to lift his too long hair.

She hissed. “Those rotten little bastards! Come on inside. I’ll call Doug.”

Christopher caught her wrist. “No. He’s got enough shit to deal with, thanks to me. It’s fine.”

A sharp-toed shoe nudged him in the lower back. “It’s an open gash! It is not
fine
. It’s going to need stitches,” she said, pushing his head down farther. “I think it’s about a quarter of an inch too long for glue.”

“I’ll go….” Not to the clinic or the small hospital it was attached to. Being the head of the county search and rescue team, Doug was almost as well-known at the hospital as he was in the sheriff’s office. If Christopher went to the clinic, he wouldn’t even get back to see a doctor before Doug showed up. “I’ll go to the urgent-care center down in Ronan.”

Brittney stopped poking the back of his head and sat down on the steps beside him. “He’d want to know.”

Christopher tried to shake his head, but the black splotches exploded across his vision again. “He’d want to arrest them.”

Outrage flashed in Brittney’s eyes. “He should arrest them!”

Christopher sighed. “And how would it look if he did?”

“Like he’s doing his job.”

“You think anybody in this town besides you would believe that?”

“Sheriff Daniels would.”

“No he wouldn’t. Daniels is a decent guy, but he’s a cop. He’d think Doug was abusing his authority to get back at some kids who were picking on his boyfriend. And everybody else….” Christopher couldn’t say it. There were enough people in Elkin who assumed he was as much a monster as his brother had been. They wouldn’t assume Doug was trying to protect him; they would assume Doug was trying to conceal whatever crimes they imagined Christopher was guilty of. “He’s got it bad enough as it is.”

Brittney sighed. “Fine. Let me lock up. I’ll give you a ride.”

“Can’t you just do it? You stitch up bodies after autopsies, right?”

“Bodies don’t feel pain, and the only risk of infection I have to worry about is my own. I don’t have topical anesthetic or a way to sterilize instruments except bleach and rubbing alcohol. Plus they might want a CT scan to rule out a concussion.”

“I don’t have a concussion. I didn’t black out. I’m fine. Bleach will kill the bad stuff, right?”

She leaned back, her lips curling. “Uh, no.” She elbowed him in the shoulder gently. “Besides, even in medical school, I was more comfortable working with cadavers. You’re either accepting the ride from me, or I’m going to drag Doug over here so he can give you a ride. What’s it going to be?”

Christopher tried to shake his head, but it hurt too much. “You.”

Brittney hurried into the coroner’s office and emerged again, free of her crisp white coat, with a stack of towels in her hands. She draped one over the seat of her tiny Mazda Miata, then gave Christopher one to hold over the wound.

His phone rang halfway into the hour-long drive. He fumbled with the towel and phone, but he relaxed when he saw the caller ID was showing an unknown number.

“Hello?” he answered.

“Hi. Is Christopher Hayes available?”

“This is him.”

“Mr. Hayes, this is Melinda, from the Baker County School District. I got your message from yesterday, and I just wanted to call and let you know we decided to go with another candidate.”

“Another candidate?” For a substitute teaching job he had applied for a month ago, and they had reposted yesterday.

“I’m afraid so. It’s a glutted market, and we have so many candidates who already have their Montana certifications, you see. But thank you for calling to follow up.”

“Sure,” Christopher managed. “Thanks for letting me know.” He hung up quickly.

Brittney glanced sideways at him. “No luck with the job?”

“Nope. Apparently they’re going with someone else.” He shoved his phone back into the pocket of his running pants. “Someone who hasn’t applied yet, because they put the listing back up on the job service website yesterday.”

“They didn’t! Damn it, I’m sorry.”

Christopher almost had to laugh. “You know what? I’m not. If I were in their position, I wouldn’t want to hire me, either. The parents in this town might lynch any school administrator who dared give me a job.”

“Well, I’m still sorry,” Brittney said gently.

He repositioned the towel, folding over the bloody spot, and held the dry terry cloth against his head. “Why does he stay here?” he asked, not really expecting an answer. “He’s gotten three offers to buy his place in the last year.”

“It’s his home. His ancestral home. Four generations of his family worked to build that ranch. Selling it would be like throwing away all their hard work.”

“I understand that. I do,” Christopher said. “I just wish… I wish Elkin was different.”

“It won’t change without people like Doug.”

“It won’t change. Period. What really gets to me is how he brushes it all off and keeps smiling politely. It makes me insane!”

“It’s better than it used to be thanks to him. And a lot of people in town respect you both.”

“I know,” Christopher admitted. “Logically, I know. I just wish he’d get angry about it, too.”

“You’re preaching to the choir, Chris,” Brittney teased him. “Ever since we were kids, he bottles everything up inside until he makes himself sick.”

His phone buzzed, and he dug it out again. “Hey, I got another text from my partner,” he announced, suddenly in a better mood. Technically San Diego Homicide Detective Ray Delgado was his former partner, but each text and note in his e-mail about Ray’s current cases gave Christopher’s endlessly grinding thoughts something to chew on. The texts had been steadily increasing since the beginning of April, and with his birthday looming in less than forty-eight hours, Christopher was damn grateful for the distraction.

Every time he stopped moving, he remembered the photographs Brittney had taken of his brother’s body after the suicide. He’d never been able to forget the letters Peter had carved into his body before he’d hanged himself, the coagulated blood forming the words “Happy Birthday” on his forearms. Considering how many years it had taken him to recover from the things Peter had done to him, Christopher knew Peter’s suicide shouldn’t have upset him. But now, with his birthday on the horizon and nothing to do but think about his bastard of a big brother, the familiar mixture of hatred and grief was eating away at him. Christopher would have given anything to be back in San Diego, laughing with his partner at the gym, instead of sulking in the shadow of the bluff where Peter had died. “What’s your partner working on now?” Brittney asked.

Christopher scrolled through some of the details. Ray Delgado wasn’t texting him about a case this time. “Well, shit….”

Brittney pursed her lips. “What?”

“This has got to be some kind of joke.”

“Oh, come on, what?”

“He wants me to be his best man.”

“Best man? That sounds like fun. When’s the wedding?”

Christopher scrolled through the text. “Sunday.”

“What? He wants you to be in the wedding party with five days’ notice?”

“Five days’ notice, and this is the first I’ve heard of him thinking about marrying anyone.”

“Wasn’t he seeing someone?”

“Yeah, but they just got together four months ago, and Delgado’s not really out of the closet. Hell, Delgado couldn’t say the word ‘gay’ without turning purple a year ago. They can’t….” Christopher shifted the towel and tried to imagine Ray asking his boyfriend to marry him. Could the partner he remembered, the man whose relationships didn’t typically last beyond breakfast the morning after sex, be settling down?

I
T
WAS
late evening by the time Brittney dropped Christopher off at the park where he’d left his car. He drove home carefully, going out of his way to avoid driving past the ruined lot where his brother’s home had once stood. Even going near the street made him choke up, so he avoided it. It was dark by the time he turned onto the last bumpy dirt road leading to the ancient farmhouse Doug had nervously started calling “theirs.”

The house and barn were covered in a new coat of dark blue paint. After a long, miserable winter where people seemed to shift their lives permanently indoors, Christopher had declared war on the endlessly encroaching prairie. There was something resembling a yard now, thanks to his efforts. His small vegetable garden lay in neatly tilled empty rows. His fourth attempt at planting the hot peppers Doug spent most of his grocery budget on had been reduced to insignificant brown stalks by yet another late frost, and he was tempted to give up.

But there were other chores around the place.

With nothing to do over the last twelve months except recover from getting run down by Elkin’s previous sheriff, Christopher had tackled any and every job he could find at the ranch to keep himself busy. But most of them, like his garden, had been exercises in futility.

He parked outside the garage and let himself into the house, chewing and swallowing one of the pain pills the urgent-care clinic had sent home with him. Even though the doctor at the clinic had assured him he didn’t have a concussion, his head was killing him.