Collateral damage

And I panic, wrenching away as I jerk awake to fmysemyself back beside a noisy hotel pool, panting as though I’d just run a mar And I panic, wrenching away as I jerk awake to find myself back beside a noisy hotel pool, panting as though I’d just run a marathon. Evan is sprawled in a chair next to me watching me as I try to get the effects of the dream under control, sipping his scotch on the rocks with a speculative look on his face. I ignore him while I try to get a grip on myself. I’m painfully aware of the hard-on bulging against my swim trunks, knowing there’s nothing I ca abo about it except let time take its toll. Trying to get a handle on the dream itself is pointless, here, now, too, which leaves me in the unsatisfactory position of being unable to do anything about anything that second. I glare at Evan instead, settling for venting my multitude of frustrations on him. "What do you want?" I demand. His gray eyes sweep over me, that speculation far from fading, taking in everything. In that instant I’m reminded he was not only a player, but a cop, for a very long time. His instincts are far from dull, regardless of how much he drinks. "Some of whatever it was you were dreaming about," he replies sarcastically. Except he’s completely serious. It surprises me that he’s letting me see that. "I doubt it," I tell him coldly, trying to refuse knowledge of that oddly vulnerable expression in his eyes. It’s the first time since I’ve known him that something besides anger and pain and cynicism have appeared on those blank slates. Shit. What the hell is with me? This penchant for other men’s eyes is beginning to freak me out. He’s quiet for a time, staring out at the pool. Only I get the feeling whatever he’s looking at has nothing to do with the view in front of him. "You ever been in love?" he asks me out of the blue. I just stare at him, wondering where hellhell that came from. "Well, have you?" he repeats, glancing at me this time. "Supposing it was any of your business, no. I don’t think so. At least not the way most people mean," I answer eventually. At least not until recently, I add to myself. Freed nods. "Me either. At least not the way most people mean." I’m not sure if he’s mocking me or telling me something, so I keep my mouth shut, not wanting to invite confessions here at the poolside. My feelings are none of his business. And his are none of mine. Only he apparently doesn’t share that sentiment. "When I was coming through the Police Academy, I hung with a couple of like-minded assholes. We did everything together. We were that classes’ bad-ass Three Musketeers. Shit, we were trouble from the word ‘go’. I loved ‘em. I would’a killed for them. I would’a died for them. Only it’s too late, now." He swallows the last of his drink in a gulp and turns to look at me with that smirk that makes me want to punch him, only the agony in his eyes makes me look away. This definitely constitutes ‘more information than I needed’, I realize as I consider the implications of that raging loss in Freed’s face. "Com’mon, Lococco. Let me buy you a drink and tell you how I screwed up the loves of my life," he says, getting up and staring down at me, that smirk still in place. It does nothing to conceal the desolation in his face, though. I really don’t want to hear this, and he knows it, but he needs to say it, whatever it is. I sigh and get up, heading for my rooms without looking back to see if he’s following me. I let him shut the door to my suite and go find the bottle of bourbon I bought last time the cat came back to bed with me. The bottle is still nearly full. It won’t be by the time this is over, I know, and I crack it open and pour a splash into a pair of the hotel tumblers from the bathroom. I hand one to Freed and set the other on my coffee table as I go into the bedroom to get some clothes on. If I’m going to be hearing confession, I guess it’d better be the basic black get-up. Not a problem, since most of my wardrobe is black or gray. Color is optional for a killer. Even an ex-killer. When I reemerge, rolling my cuffs up over my wrists, Freed has appropriated the bourbon and poured himself a full tumbler. I can tell he plans on finishing the bottle. Maybe in the hopes of reaching that alcohol-induced coma he keeps trying for. "Have a seat," he waves a hand at the little seating arrangement in the suite’s ‘livingroom’ graciously, a host in my space. It pisses me off, but I sit down opposite him, picking up my glass, which he’s half-filled. This is going to be a barrel of laughs. "Sonny, Mike and me, we all applied for Metro Dade, and we made it onto the street beat as a bunch of flatfoots with ideas. None of us planned on staying in uniforms, no glory. Nah, we were looking at undercover work. We spent our off-time studying for the detective’s exam and making our plans for how we were gonna shake up the department with our brilliance." Freed’s voice is dripping with self-mockery. He pauses and spends a few minutes sucking on his bourbon. "The night we passed the exam, we went out and got hammered. We musta hit half the strip clubs in the district that night. Sonny was engaged at the time, but it didn’t stop him from getting laid that night, more than once. Me either. Mike claimed he was too blitzed to get it up, so Sonny an’ me, we got our rocks off with a couple of the off-duty dancers and went back out to find Mikey holdin’ down the bar, talking football with the barkeep. All totally innocent, right?" Evan glances at me to see if I’m making whatever connection it is he’s trying to point me at. I keep my expression blank, waiting to hear where this is going. "So, by now, I’m the one who’s too blitzed to get it up, or down, or anywhere except horizontal. Sonny tells Mike to get me home so he can go home and make nice with Caroline, and he heads out. So Mikey, the good partner, does what he’s told and brings me home. His home. No biggie, I been in and outta his place for the past three years, right? Practically every fucking weekend." This evolves into another one of Freed’s silences as he spends a few minutes reliving whatever happened, and absorbing more alcohol. Remind me to refrain from expressing my opinions on the psychiatric needs of others. I don’t recall having passed my psychiatry certification, but here I am, listening to a guy spill his guts about some deep dark secret that he’s trying to take with him to an early grave. I’ve had more fun hanging from a torturer’s rack, frankly. Freed must know his audience is underwhelmed, but it doesn’t shut him up. "He got me undressed and I passed out on his couch. Mikey went to bed. I had to get up sometime in the middle of the night to go puke, and I practically fell over him on my way back outta his bathroom. See, he slept on this futon-thing on the floor. So there I am, wandering around in his room in the dark, practically falling on him. I wake him up, no surprise, and he tells me to stop banging around and go to sleep. So I lie down next to him and pass out." That’s it? Years of suicidal angst about passing out in his partner’s bed? My lack of comprehension obviously shows, because Evan laughs and downs a huge swallow of the bourbon. "Funny, huh?" he says, grinning at me, more of that self-loathing in his expression. Self-loathing I understand. But nothing I’ve heard so far seems to justify that condemnation. "Only it gets better. When I wake up the next morning, hung-over as all hell, we’re lying there, buck-naked, in the same bed, and Mikey has an arm over me, his face against my shoulder, dead to the world. He’s dead asleep, I’m barely awake, and I’m lying there, feeling him against me, just…" Enjoying it. I understand that, I realize, having felt something similar after Vince and I finally passed out in my suite in Stockton. The bed was a little more crowded then, but it was Vince I woke up next to. It was the first time I’d shut my eyes on another man in almost twenty years. At that moment, in that place, he was no threat to me. I don’t usually trust anyone, especially not Mob button men with press coverage. But I trusted him. I still don’t know how I knew I could. Freed recognizes my comprehension and goes on. "Neither of us said anything about it, after. I mean, what the hell, nothing happened, right?" He looks to me for reassurance I don’t know if I givegive, and that he knows is invalid, even if I could. Because something did happen, something inside him. Something he wasn’t ready for, or sure about and it scared him to death. I know that feeling, too. I’ve been all too familiar with that sensation in the past two weeks. "So, anyway, Mikey and Sonny and I, we go on to be bad-ass plainclothes detectives, like we’ve bad-assed everything else. Until our Lieutenant hands us an undercover assignment about six months after we got our shields. Someone was dealing poppers in the gay bars downtown and people were starting to turn up dead. We were supposed to shut it down. Only Mike wanted off the assignment. Sonny didn’t think much about it and told me to back off when I started razzing Mike about how he didn’t want to set foot in those places ‘cause he’d be recognized by the clientele. Geezus, I was such a stupid prick. I couldn’t leave well enough alone. No. I had to keep bugging him. Until he came out to Sonny and me." Freed looks up at me, and I can see the blasted landscape of his soul in those dead eyes. "He gay gay. And neither Sonny or I had had any fucking clue. I totally freaked. I’d been in his bed, naked, for chrissakes. With his arm around me and his head on my shoulder. Jesus Christ. I went off like a nuke. I made life a living hell for him. I exposed him to the department. Got him tied to a desk job while they looked for excuses to ditch him, and Sonny, he just stood there, watching us come apart like I’d ripped the heart outta him or something. About six weeks after it all started, Mike responded to a call on his way home. He walked into an armed robbery at a gas station without even pulling his piece, and took a load of buckshot in the chest point blank. It was suicide. And I might as well have been the one who pulled the trigger. Sonny thought so, too. He didn’t say a word to me for almost eight years. Until we hooked up on the case that got me drummed outta the ATF. I took those bullets to save his life. All I wanted was for him to forgive me for what I did to Mike." "Did he?" I ask. It’s the first thing I’ve said since this whole confessional startedFreeFreed laughs, a sound completely devoid of humor. "He didn’t have the chance. As far as he knows, I’m dead. The bureau maintained the fiction that I was killed in the line of duty when their shrinks said I’d keep trying till I got it right, and actually bought it on the job. They forced me into retiring, and I’m collecting a psychiatric pension under a false ID they created for me. As far as Sonny is concerned, I got what I deserved, when I let Guzman plug me." "How do you know what he thinks?" I ask. Devil’s advocate. Because I can’t claim to know anything, myself. Except what I’m told. "Maybe he’s the one you should be telling all this too." "You don’t think I did? Oh, not the part about winding up in Mike’s bed, but he knew I blamed myself for what happened to Mike. Knew it was eating me alive. Knew it would kill me if he didn’t say he forgave me." Evan has lived so long with his self-hatred I wonder if there’s anything else left for him. Maybe a bullet would be a mercy, after all. There’ve been times when it would have been true for me. And there may be again, if I can’t find Vinnie. Or if he’s dead when I do. "So maybe you need to try again. Find this Sonuy. uy. Tell him your story, even the part about falling into bed with Mike. Make him understand." "How the hell can I do that when I don’t fucking understand, myself!?" Freed snarls, eyes tearing. Abruptly, I understand what my roll is here, as father-confessor. I am a mirror for Freed, as much due to our rather noticeable resemblance to each other as out of simple proximity. A homophobe with homoerotic inclinations. How Evan figured it out, I don’t know. Maybe it takes one to know one. Which also explains McPike’s awareness of the impact his news would have on me. I just can’t see Vinnie and McPike together. Not like that. Something unaccustomed tightens inside me uncomfortably. Jealousy? The idea of Vince with someone else is making me jealous? Geezus, I’m in deep. Over-my-head deep. And I realize something else, too, as I sit there, thinking about this. "You ever tell Sonny you loved him?" I ask. Freed pauses mid-motion as he’s lifting his glass to his mouth, staring at me with rage flashing over his face. He slams the glass onto the table and leans forward towards me as if he’d like to disembowel me on the spot. "Whaddayou mean, tell him I love him?" "Just what I said," I answer calmly, sipping from my own glass for the first time. "Tell him you love him. Tell him you’ve had dreams about him. Tell him you want to fuck his brains out. Whatever. See what happens." Freed stares at me as if I’ve mutated before his eyes into some three-headed alien from outer space. He blinks at me and slowly comprehension starts to seep through his eyes like raindrops down a pane of glass. "This is about Terranova. Isn’t it?" "I thought we were talking about you. Your baggage. Your sexual identity." I stare back at him, daring him to say whatever it is he’s thinking. He does. "You’re in love with Terranova, and you never told him. Hell, maybe you didn’t even know it, till he went missing on you. That’s what makes him special, isn’t it?" He watches me for my response, one I shield from him. "Vinnie isn’t the subject under discussion, here. And even if he was, what I feel for him, about him, isn’t really any of your concern. And if you think I give a damn what you feel for Sonny, you’re wrong. But I think you give a damn. I think you’d give more than a damn to come clean with him, whatever that means, exactly. And I think until you do, you’re gonna keep looking for the easy bullet. The one that’ll end the pain. And that that’ll get you off the hook with Sonny, somehow." Evan just looks at me with those empty eyes for a long minute, then finishes off his bourbon and gets up, heading for the door without a word. As he opens it, stepping out into the hall, he looks back over his shoulder for a second. "So where do we meet deVega’s people?" he asks me. I tell him, and he shuts the door, leaving me and my bottle of bourbon unfinished. The meeting with deVega’s contacts gets us one step closer to my objective. We make it through that level of scrutiny with a deal in place. The Salvadorans will watch my back on a single visit to a single operation, and if it goes well, will discuss further business dealings with me at their compound outside San Salvador, in the mountains to the east. This is where I kiss Freed and his tortured fantasies goodbye. "Like hell," he says. "You’re not coming with me." I refuse to give in to this. The last thing I need is for him to pull one of his suicide stunts in a Central American jungle somewhere. "If you think I’m gonna let you walk into a situation like this our our own, you must think I’m a total idiot. I’ve got a million-dollar bonus at stake here. It may be peanuts to you, but it’d fix me for scotch for life," Freed tells me, that grin in place. I glare at him, determined to ditch him somehow. I have my pilot on stand-by to fly me to El Salvador, where I’ve made arrangements to buy a Vietnam surplus Huey to get around the jungles in. I’ve also made arrangements with some of my former military contacts to meet me there. The Salvadorans are not the only army I’m assembling. If I have to use force to get back what they stole from me, I want to be sure I can actually count on it being where I need it, when I need it. I refuse to argue with Evan, so I just shut up, hoping he’ll take that as a ‘yes’, when all it is, is a polite way of winning the argument. In point of fact, I’ve already deposited a million dollars in Evan’s name in an escrow account that’ll clear in about three weeks, regardless of what happens in El Salvador. What he does with it is up to him, but I figure he’s earned it, what with one thing and another. When I reach the Broward County airfield that morning at three a.m., Evan is waiting on the plane for me. He looks like he’s spent the last two nights sleeping on the little Lear. There’s not much I can do except give in gracefully, so I ignore him as I give my pilot the go-ahead to take off. I’m interested to see Evan has switched from bourbon to something colorless in honor of the flight, and I’m downright amazed, halfway through it, when I realize he’s been drinking water. Just water. He’s not looking very good, which I guess is no surprise, given the fact that his blood has been ninety proof for years, now. Suddenly running on empty, he’s sober for the first time since I’ve known him. I can tell, because the pain in his face is etched deep without the usual anesthetic to numb it. He smokes without let-up the whole flight, and it’s a positive relief when we finally make landfall in El Salvador’s capitol, San Salvador. DeVega’s group meets us at the hotel the next morning before daylight, and we take off in the helicopter for the well-hidden cocaine processing plant I have in mind for my first conquest. It’s one of Mel’s, a small outfit, and according to my contacts, still operational. It’s got ‘target’ painted all over it. With the Salvadorans at my back, and Freed beside me looking cranky enough to blow us all up, the local yokels give up without much of a fight. The automatic weapons I’ve arranged for the Salvadorans to be carrying are a fairly significant incentive for Mel’s former employees to accept employment under me, instead of continuing to struggle along on their own. We leave a handful of the Salvadorans to keep an eye on things, then head back for the capitol city and a conference with deVega’s people. Everyone agrees that it went well, that there’s a brilliant future ahead for us all, and we’re in business. I am invited to the splinter group’s mountain enclave two days later to provide a detailed list of businesses I intend to reclaim. And so I near my goal. I occupy myself with getting my people in place, Freed and my pilot procuring a second, larger helicopter, and by the time the day rolls around, we’re as ready as we’re going to get. The idea is, Evan and I will go in as honored guests and check the place out. Depending on what we find, the rest of the troops will drop in under cover of darkness to liberate anyone inside the enclave. Naturally there’s more to it than that, but that’s the condensed version. The safety net is, if my team hasn’t heard from me by this time tomorrow, they come in, guns blazing in the assumption that everything’s gone to hell. Hopefully it doesn’t come to that. We arrive at the camp by mid-morning, greeted by the titular head of the military functions of the group, a short, squat mustachioed man who looks like he could be a body double for Pancho Villa, even down to the bandoleers crisscrossed over his chest. He’s introduced as General Jorgé Esteves. General, in my opinion, is a little self-aggrandizing for the head of a group of terrorists, but hey, that’s just me. And maybe, judging by the look on Freed’s face, him, too. We get the grand tour, the enclave a run-down colonial-era house that’s definitely seen better days. The place is a former coffee plantation now engaged in bringing all the benefits of the coca leaf to first world junkies everywhere, and funneling arms to organizations the CIA chooses to aid in spite of national laws to the contrary. We are in the heart of U.S. destabilization policy, here. We are proudly shown the crop fields under their camouflage netting, and after a surprisingly decent lunch with the ranking officers of this enterprising little militia, we get the tour of the house and grounds. The house is the officer’s barracks, enough remnants of the former occupant’s wealth remaining to make it remarkably comfortable considering the remoteness of the location. The main outbuilding is where the coke gets refined, bakers’ racks of white powder drying under heat lamps powered by a diesel generator out back. We are carefully steered away from the half-dozen or so smaller outbuildings, glossed over as storage. That, naturally, leaves me to conclude that if Vince is anywhere, it’s in one of those buildings. Freed is on the same track, bless his demented little mind. Leaving me to distract ‘El General’ and his officers with a discussion of business, Freed excuses himself and vanishes. I keep half my attention on what’s going on outside the large study we’re in, hoping I won’t hear anything, trying to focus enough on the conversation going on around me to not tip my hand. When Evan slips back into the room, looking as if he never left, I can finally give all my attention to what’s being discussed. It really is tod I&d I’ve sworn off running contraband, because I could make a fucking fortune. If I needed one. Of course, if I touched this one, Vince would never have anything to do with me once he found out. Instead, I’ll have to settle for getting him back, or seeing him buried, and shutting down the government drugs-for-arms pipeline. Or at least this particular conduit. We wrap things up and head back for the capitol to stage our rescue effort, praying Vince is actually up there, somewhere.