The Ranchers Son (17 page)

“That was making
love, Ethan.”

Ethan gripped his
hand and laced their fingers, and for the longest time, they stared up at the
wooden ceiling together.

And Adam was at
peace.

Missoula wasn’t a
big city, not compared to Chicago, but it was the second most significant in
Montana and had enough shit going down to keep the cops busy. Clearly today was
one of those days, and Ethan ended up killing time at his old desk, lying back
in his chair, with his feet up and a mug of coffee resting on his stomach.

“Anytime you want
to jump in,” one of his colleagues said as he walked by escorting a young man
with jeans falling around his thighs, cursing and yelling about police
brutality.

“Vacation time, my
man,” Ethan deadpanned.

He was lying, of
course. Waiting to see Chief Flynn was like waiting for a death sentence to be
carried out. The resignation letter in his pocket was burning a hole there, and
the acid in his stomach was enough to have him wishing he could go back to bed.
He hadn’t even told Jen yet, and he probably owed her an explanation. Adam had said
he would come too, but instead, Ethan had asked Gabe to take Adam out again, a
little farther afield, to get a better sense of Crooked Tree and see what he might
remember.

Sitting there, he
kind of wished he was working, apart from the drunks and the kids causing a
ruckus. All this waiting around was killing him, but Chief Flynn had warned him
to sit at his desk and keep his nose out of anything until he came back from a
division meeting. Actually, the way he was feeling—confused and tight and
bursting from his skin—he wasn’t interested in stretching his brain to anything
else. Jen had said she’d be back in an hour max, but that had been two hours
ago.

She had news,
she’d said, and then she’d not been here when he arrived. Something about local
trouble. He didn’t ask and she didn’t say as she left with her temporary
partner, Fielding, from across the bullpen. So now Ethan sat here and had way
too much time on his hands.

“Okay, Allens, my
office,” Chief Flynn said as he appeared from nowhere and sailed past Ethan’s
desk.

Ethan followed him.
Every step closer to the office was another moment of hesitation warring with
the decisions he’d already made.

“I’m happy to
extend your leave,” the chief said. “If that’s what you wanted to talk about.
You have way too much vacation time built up, and Human Resources is on my ass
to get it down before you lose it.”

“That isn’t it.”
He closed the door behind him, and as Flynn sat behind his desk, Ethan saw his
expression change to one of confusion.

“This is a closed-door
meeting? What’s wrong?”

“I….” Ethan wanted
to say the right thing. He pulled out the envelope and placed it square on the
desk. “I want to thank you for my time here, but I’m giving in my notice.”

Flynn stared down
at the letter and Ethan relaxed a little; this whole “fucking up your career in
one step” was going quite well. That was until Flynn smacked his fists on the
desk and stood, leaning over and shouting right in Ethan’s face.

“I call bullshit!”

“Sir—”

“Don’t
sir
me. You’re one of the best here and you’re going? Where? What for?”

“My family needs
me.”

That statement
took the wind out of Flynn’s sails and his bluster died a little. Not much, but
enough for Ethan to think he wasn’t going to shout again. The whole bullpen
probably heard all that.

“Jesus, Allens.”

“I am sorry.”

“This is a fucked-up
situation.”

“I get that.”

“You’re a career
cop.”

“Not as a priority
over my family.”

Flynn went silent,
tapping his finger on the letter and evidently thinking hard.

“Three months,” he
said. “Compassionate leave, or whatever box I have to tick on the form. You
come back in three months and tell me you don’t want to be a cop, and I’ll hand
this in personally.”

“Sir—”

“I don’t give a rat’s
ass about what you’re going to say. This is how it works. Take your vacation
time, and if you decide to come back, I’ll take you in an instant.”

“Sir—”

“Dismissed,
Allens.”

Ethan left,
closing the door behind him. He felt a hundred different emotions. Pride that he
was of use to this precinct, pride that he was good at his job, alongside a
healthy dose of what he could only call relief. Then there was the poison
inside that he would be lying to his dad. He should just go in and call Chief Flynn
on his high-handed bullshit, but somehow he didn’t push open the door and do
that. Instead, he spotted Jen across the room; telling her was the next shitty
thing he had to do.

She held up a hand
indicating five, and he slumped back in his desk chair, staring at the detritus
of his cop life: the files, pens, trays, the photo of Justin that sat on one
corner. No picture of him and Justin, nothing with his dad in it. Just a picture
of Ethan’s little brother on his own.

Was Justin taking
over his life? Or rather, he knew that was true, but was he going to let it go
on being this way? Was he going to let Justin get in the way of a relationship
with his dad, or with Adam? Could he be the bigger man with his dad, the kind
of man Adam needed?

Jen ran past.
“Ten,” she said, with an added “Sorry!”

Which left him again
with way too much to think about. Adam, specifically. Last night had been…

Life-changing?
Awkward? Wrong? Right?

He didn’t know how
to catalog what had happened, but he knew what his heart was feeling. In love,
or at least in lust, for all those things that could have happened twelve years
ago.

If his seventeen
-year-old self had kissed Adam
thoroughly when
Adam was
fifteen,
instead of one soft
kiss, then maybe the whole infatuation he had with his friend’s brother would
have stopped right there.

But it hadn’t, and
Ethan had battled way too many what-ifs over the years.

Which brought him
back to last night. Losing it as a kid on his first date, with Adam sprawled next
him making noises of want and need--- and sensible Ethan had left the room.

Getting Jen’s call
last night had him lying awake, and it just added to the angst of handing in
his notice. As soon as she told him she’d found out some tattoo information but
needed a fresh eye on it, Ethan had said he’d be in the city by eight. She told
him she’d email it, but Ethan was using the distraction as an excuse to get the
hell out of the bedroom where Adam lay curled on his side facing away from him.

Ethan then stared
for the longest time at the horse on Adam’s back as he slept. The work was
exquisite; that wasn’t done by some back-street artist with no license. It was
art. Possibly the kind of art that would round out a portfolio or put the
artist in the show. The detail of Smoke’s coloring, the way the gray darkened
around the neck, then lightened towards the rump onto the black tail with its individual
strands of hair, was so perfect.

Had Adam
remembered Smoke when he got the tattoo done? Did that mean he still had a memory
of Crooked Tree after he left? That didn’t sit well with Ethan. Why would Adam
leave and not come back if he knew where he was from. Was this memory loss just
from the attack in Chicago?

All those questions
and more held him on edge, waiting for the ax to fall.

“Allens,” Jen said
on a sigh as she dropped into the chair opposite him.

“Is that blood?”
Ethan sat up in his chair, looking at the darkness spread across her jacket.

She looked down
and grimaced. “No, soy sauce,” she muttered, stripping off the jacket and
throwing it on the floor.

Something made
sense. “Jesus, Jen, did you take down Soo Yin?”

They’d been
tracking illegals working in the shop chain owned by Soo Yin, formerly of the
Chinese Secret Service. Trafficking, drugs, you name it, Soo was part of it. Ethan
and Jen had been working the case for over two years.

She wrinkled her
nose. “Nope, just one of his satellites.” She held up her hand as Ethan opened
his mouth to protest that they’d agreed to hold off until they could go after
Soo Yin himself. “It wasn’t my call. The Eighth had the shop under surveillance
and they were there when a worker called in 911.”

“So, Soo Yin?”

“He’ll go underground,
no doubt.”

Ethan sat back in
his chair. “Fuck.”

“Word,” Jen said.
Then she switched back abruptly to the matter at hand, clearly not willing to
spend time moaning about their case being fucked over. Ethan was okay with
that, he’d compartmentalize the fuckery and a little later he’d explain to Jen
how he was leaving.

“So, what do you
have for me?”

Jen stood up,
pushing up with her hands on the desk, and yawned. “You’re going to want to see
this. But coffee, I need coffee.”

Ethan waited
patiently by the new-but-still-crappy machine and added a couple of minutes for
her to sip the brew.

She half grimaced,
half smiled. “This is shit coffee,” she muttered. “Follow me.”

Ethan followed her
from the bullpen, turning into the main corridor and to the last room on the
right, an op control room.

What the hell?

She pushed open
the door and stepped in. Ethan was close behind, and he saw the board before
she began to explain.

“I needed to
sketch this shit out,” she said, rolling her neck. Then she drank more coffee
and stood directly in front of the board.

Right in the
middle was a blue box with the name
Adam Strachan
in the middle; to the right of his name was
Justin’s name. A line connected them. Thereafter things became muddled, but
Ethan had read enough incident boards to work out a general picture.

He tapped the
photo of a storefront: “Marks and Punctures,” a tattoo and piercings shop. “Is
that where Adam got his tattoo?”

“Artist name of
Stretch, aka Billy Molan, a star of the tattoo world. That is where he worked
from 2004 to maybe three years ago. Tattoo artist to the stars.”

Ethan peered
closer at the shop and its address beneath. “In Wyoming?” he said disbelievingly.

“You better
believe it, E. LA types travel into the Cowboy State to get their ink.”

“Okay. So, does he
remember Adam?”

Jen put her hands
on her hips. “He’s dead. Twenty-two to the brain, execution-style. Happened a week
back, no leads, no CCTV, no motive.”

“What?”

“Not only that,
but you go digging and the file is shut down, so many red flags I could start a
flag-selling shop.”

“So Billy’s files
are closed.”

“Yep. Access is
way above our pay grade.”

“Did you ask the Chief
to—?”

“Way above his pay
grade too.”

“This is Federal?”

“Looks like the
FBI is involved somewhere in this.”

“You think it’s
connected to Adam?”

Jen cast him an
incredulous look. “Your boy turns up, beaten and left for dead, a week before
the guy who tattooed him is shot?”

“Too much of a
coincidence. It’s pretty thin, though.”

“There’s more. I
got a friend”—she raised her eyebrows at the word
friend
—“to dig deeper,
to the things above my pay grade.”

Likely it was her
brother-in-law who was an ex-hacker. Well, he told everyone he was an
ex
-hacker,
but Ethan was convinced the gentle-looking guy was still active.

Jen gestured to
the red lines from Adam’s box to a box with a big red question mark in it and
three names written under. She read the names out loud. “Ian Bancroft, Mark Gregson,
James Mahone.”

“Who are they?”

“Possible aliases
for your boy.”

“For Adam?”

“I don’t know what
happened, but the man you know as Adam
Strachan
has been around. Ian was a laborer, Mark
worked in a coffee shop, and James? He’s the interesting one. He worked on a
ranch in Wyoming and disappeared a month ago, just before two federal agents men
were shot there—murdered and left in a field. You know what this is, right?”

“What?” He
couldn’t think about a general conclusion.

“This is witness-protection
shit, Ethan.”

All the energy
left Ethan in a huge rush. He fell into the nearest chair, staring up at the
board.

Really? Witness
Protection? This was a Department of Justice issue?

That would answer
so many questions. Had Adam witnessed something? Had he been taken into witness
protection? Was that where he and Justin had been? Wait, Justin?

“And Justin? Did
your brother-in-law find anything on him?”

Jen shook her head
sadly. “He couldn’t find anything. We just don’t know the parameters to
search.”

Ethan understood
that with his head, but his heart broke a little at the words. Why couldn’t it be
easy? Why wasn’t there a database he could get someone to hack into? Somewhere
they could pull out random information that could help?