Left on St. Truth-Be-Well (7 page)

Dale broke off the kiss with a gasp, resisting as Carson tried to pull him closer, and Carson was as helpless as a baby not to want, need, and crave.

Dale kissed his temple, and Carson took a deep, shuddery breath, and then another, and then a third. “Change of plans,” Dale said between breaths. “You leave Anastacio here tonight and come home with me. And then I’ll take you surfing in the morning.”

“That sounds like a relationship,” Carson said, trying to get hold of himself. “I fuck guys in broom closets. I don’t have relationships with them.”

Dale flicked him on the forehead. “Yeah, well, I don’t usually sleep with people I want to strangle half the time. It’ll be a growing experience for both of us, you think?”

Carson let out a breath that might have been a laugh. “I guess we all need to grow. Think Stassy’ll be okay here by himself?”

“Think you could ask him?”

“God, you’re bossy.”

“Yeah, I’m that way in bed too. Be prepared.”

Carson jerked a little. “I top in bed!” He was absolutely sure of this. Every broom closet fuck he’d ever had told him so.

Dale snorted and rubbed a thumb over Carson’s lower lip. Without meaning to, Carson went limp and soft and needy. Dale leaned close enough for his lips to brush Carson’s ear. “You let yourself believe that,” he whispered. “I won’t tell you different.”

“Nungh….”

Dale’s throaty laughter in his ear had him shaking, hard and aroused in his seat. “Be back around eight, Carson. Get some sleep, have some dinner. You’ll need your strength.”

He’d gotten out and shut the door before Carson was sure he could unbuckle his seatbelt and slide out of the car and not shoot off in his pants if he accidentally brushed his hard cock through his jeans.

W
HEN
Carson woke up in the dark, quiet room, he could make out Stassy perched on the dresser, devouring the rest of the pizza. Carson’s stomach growled, reminding him he was supposed to eat before Dale came back. “Hey, Stassy, feeling better?”

The young man nodded seriously. “I was sleeping on the dunes next to the hotel,” he said after a swallow of pizza. “God, I could sleep in a bed with clean sheets for a whole other week.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sorry that happened. If it makes you feel any better, I got a line on Toby, and he’s safe. He’s laying low with family, keeps asking for you. We passed on the message that you’re okay.”

Stassy had a sweet oval face with a slight dent in his chin (nothing compared to that valley Dale had, but it was cute), and that face lit up like a house fire with the news. “Yeah? That’s great to hear. Thanks, Carson.”

Carson shrugged and squinted at the clock. Seven thirty. Suddenly his heart started banging around in his chest like a clumsy repairman, hitting his ribs, stomach, throat, and, hey, wow, yeah, there you go, right in the groin. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and thought,
I have to pack for my date.

When he spoke, he tried to keep his voice so casual, Stassy would hardly notice he talked at all. “Yeah, actually, me and Dale are gonna go ask some questions on our own, you know, see what happened.”

“Can I come with?” Stassy asked, but he didn’t sound all that excited.

“Naw, you stay here and rest up, and maybe call your Uncle Ivan and convince him not to send his goons out to kill more people, if you can, okay?”

Stassy nodded glumly. “Yeah, that’s probably a good idea. I’ll put in a good word for you, though, Carson. You’ve been a stand-up guy.”

Carson moved to the mirror and started to brush his teeth, wondering if he needed to shave. “Thanks. I was worried about you, kid. I mean, I thought we were connecting, and then you up and disappeared. Needed to make sure you were okay.” Yeah. He had a day’s worth of brown stubble, made his soul patch look like a furry pitcher’s mound. He should probably shave. He’d shave if Dale was a girl, right? Yup. He spat and rinsed before pulling his little rechargeable electric out of his kit to plug it in.

Behind him, in the mirror, he could see Stassy nod. “Well, thank you. Why you getting all pretty?”

Carson shrugged. “We’re going to go question that freaky woman at the counter of the roach motel. Don’t want to scare her. Jesus, Stassy, how could you have stayed there longer than an hour? Seriously? You must be braver than you look!”

“Well, we got one of the good rooms, and Toby bought a couple of roach motels, so that helped. Which room did you get?”

“The ones with the sexual remains on the bed. Please tell me those weren’t yours!” Carson started a pass with the razor, but he still caught Stassy’s horrified expression in the mirror.

“Ew! No! But you know, I think one of the boys who changed the sheets was loaning rooms out by the hour. There were a couple of rooms with busted locks that got a lot more use than they shoulda.”

Carson paused for a second until the whirring heat was uncomfortable against his skin. “Okay, so your lock wasn’t broken?”

Stassy looked uncomfortable. “Uhm, no, Carson. Not with what we were doing in there, right? I mean, shouldn’t that sort of thing be, uhm, you know. Private?”

The shaver slipped, and his soul patch almost went the way of the stubble. Wow. Nothing like seeing yourself reflected in the eyes of an idealist, right? With a sigh, he trimmed the soul patch a little closer than he’d planned and dumped the stubble in the trash before packing the thing away.

“Yeah, but it was broken when we found the body. I’m thinking that someone broke the lock to drag that guy in there.”

“So?”

“Well, I don’t know, Stassy, did he kill the guy on the porch and drag him inside? Did he invite him inside and then kill him? Did one person kill him and the other one hide the body? Seriously, these are questions we’ve got to get to the bottom of, before the cops start looking too closely at you!” Beard taken care of—would aftershave be overkill? He’d never slept with someone he’d wanted to strangle before either. Maybe not. He fished some out of his kit.

Stassy gnawed on a crust ruminatively and then looked stricken. “Oh geez, you don’t think this will get Uncle Ivan in trouble, do you? I know he’s worried about me. I don’t want the cops looking at him!”

“Ivan can take care of himself, kid. I’m more worried about you.” Just a little aftershave, right? Oh hell. Maybe that was too much. Maybe he should take a shower. Maybe he should just grab Stassy and haul ass to Chicago—that would be good, right? Just deliver Stassy and let Ivan’s lawyers take care of it?

“Yeah, that’s nice, Carson, but I’m more worried about Toby. They’re not excited about strangers here, but they’re
really
not excited about Toby. I guess he was sort of a fuckup or something in high school.”

“I am aware. Don’t worry, the guy he works with at the youth center has his back. We’re going to go ask the hotel people some questions—”

“Won’t the police do that?”

Carson winced, not wanting to explain the deal between Dale and his brother. Not that he didn’t think Stassy wouldn’t understand, but Carson felt an odd surge of protectiveness: he didn’t want anyone to see Dale as anything but self-contained. Carson had gotten a glimpse of the frustrated brother and the devoted son. Like Stassy said, those things were private.

“Yeah, but they don’t seem that quick on the uptake. I don’t trust your fate in their hands, right?” He wet a comb and ran it through his hair and then repacked the shaving kit and put it on the bed. He grabbed another T-shirt, a fresh pair of socks and underwear, and his clean jeans, and walked into the bathroom for a look-see, wondering if he should take anything else.

“Yeah, that’s sweet,” Stassy said from outside the bathroom. “I’d feel better if you weren’t acting more like this was a chance to get laid than the deal with my life.”

Oh for fuck’s sake—Carson had had enough. “You know, Stassy, you got this thing in your head, like I’m a big player, but you know something? My last girlfriend got pregnant with someone else’s baby.” He pulled the shower curtain back and slammed it forward for no other reason than because he was pissed. “She told me this in a note, if you feel me, that she wrote on the way to her wedding. You want to guess when that baby was born?” He peered around the corner to see if Stassy could still see him from the dresser, but Stassy had apparently moved back toward the bed. “I’ll save you the trouble. I found out about it the same night you and me had a meet in a broom closet. So I get that it’s nice for you to pretend that I’m the world’s biggest fucking manwhore, but the truth is, when someone with a good smile is nice to me, I might just be ready to give them the time of the fucking day, are we okay with that? Oh fuck. Jesus, how long have you been there?”

Apparently the reason Stassy had disappeared from the dresser was to let Dale in while Carson was midrant.

“Long enough to hear that you’re okay with me being nice to you. Are you ready to go?”

Embarrassing. Just no other word for it. Carson snagged the shaving kit off the bed and rolled it up in his change of clothes as he spoke. “Yeah. Enjoy your privacy, Stassy. I’ll be back sometime tomorrow morning.”

Stassy nodded, looking miserable in the corner of the room, and Carson sighed. “Look, we’ll bring you something good for breakfast, okay? Bagels, some shmear—it’ll be okay.”

“Toby?” the kid said forlornly, and Carson just wanted to pat him on the head and make it all better. Young love, right?

“We’re working on it. Don’t forget to call Ivan.”

Stassy’s grimace was reassuring. If you were looking like you didn’t want your parents to know something, that meant you were at least a little engaged in saving your own skin. “Yeah, I will. If I tell him I’m gay, he’ll believe me. If you tell him I’m gay, he’ll think you turned me that way.”

“Oh Jesus fucking Chri—”

“I’m sorry, Carson! You’ve got this rep. Maybe you’re right and you don’t deserve it, but that doesn’t mean you don’t got it!”

“I’ll tell you what I got. I got to go eat something, and I got to go find out who killed the idiot in your old hotel room, and apparently I got to go surfing tomorrow because my life will fucking end if I don’t. And somewhere in there, I got to have my head examined, because I can’t even fucking believe this is my life!”

Carson tucked his little roll of shame under his arm, double-checked his pocket for his key, and then stalked out the door. He heard the slam behind him and knew Dale had followed, and he looked around for the pickup truck Dale had talked about.

He saw it: big, candy-apple red with a roll bar on top. It could have been one of those obnoxious ones, a redneck’s dream machine, but it had primered spots on the back and the bed had a big toolbox and a surfboard rack, and generally it looked lived-in, so Carson forgave it for being fuck-me red and really freakin’ big.

“Looks comfy,” he said, trying not to sound sarcastic, because he wasn’t being that way. “Needs a dog.”

Dale nodded with unexpected enthusiasm. “It does, right? I’ve been combing the ’net for something big in our area. I want, like, a cross between a Newfie and a Great Dane, you know?”

“Why, so it can eat Manhattan?”

Dale laughed and nodded like a little kid. “Exactly!” He pulled the passenger door open for Carson, who rolled his eyes and boosted himself up onto the bench seat, and did the belt.

Dale swung himself up into the truck and paused, looking at the keys in his hand. “Did you love her?” he asked into the sudden stillness.

“Sherri?” Carson asked, not even wondering anymore how much Dale had heard.

“Yeah. Did you love her?”

“A little,” Carson admitted on a sigh. “She was fun, you know? I like fun. You sort of value people who make you laugh.”

Dale glanced at him sideways. “Yeah. Yeah, you do. Is there anyone out there you loved a lot?”

“Not so much. You?”

Dale thought about it, and his smile amped up extra high, with a blinding edge of smartass. “The girl who first put out for me. Man, I will love her to the day I die!”

Carson laughed, and then his throat got tight for no reason he could put a name to. “What about your first guy?”

A considering silence. “He was great. He was a friend, still is. Moved to Des Moines, married a pretty girl, had lots of babies. They send me Christmas cards, it’s all good. You?”

Carson looked straight ahead before closing his eyes. “Frat party hookup. He blew me behind the dorm building. Never did catch his name. Are we gonna drive this heap across the fricking street or not?”

He kept his eyes closed when he felt Dale’s hand—long-fingered and warm—squeezing his thigh. “You’re gonna remember the holy fuck outta my name, okay, Carson?”

Carson nodded and swallowed, then very deliberately returned the grip on that warm hand. “Yeah, I hear you.”

“And I don’t plan to forget yours.”

Carson managed enough self-possession to be irritated. “Thank the fucking gods, now are we gonna go?”

But Dale didn’t take any of his shit. The comforting hand on his thigh became the strong fingers at his chin, and Dale turned Carson’s head and forced Carson to meet his gaze directly. “I mean it, Carson. I’m not going to hurt you, and I may change your life. Don’t be so stubborn about it. It’s going to happen. It was probably going to happen the minute you walked into the café this morning, but all the rest of it just makes things more exciting. I’m not going to ask if you can handle that, because I know you’ll give me all sorts of bullshit about being able to handle anything, but I am going to ask you to trust me to do it right. Can you do that?”

How many people had he talked down from cliffs with that syrupy country-boy voice? Or did he just look at them with those heavy-lidded eyes and they jumped off the cliffs all by themselves? Carson breathed deeply through his nose and smelled a little bit of sweat and, reassuringly, brushed teeth.

“I’m not a player,” Carson muttered, still stung.

“That’s understood.”

“I never woulda hit on Stassy if I knew it was gonna freak him out.”

“I figured as much.”

“I just don’t go home with random anyone.”

“But when we’re done playing junior detectives, you’re going to go home with me.” Dale’s tone brooked no argument, and Carson was out of fight anyway.