Chapter 8

Working in deep

End of the line

Black river at my feet

Red fire down my spine

Getting harder every day

To hold onto what is mine

—Working In Deep

“KIERA JOYCE Morgan, if you don’t get out of my face, I’m going to—”

“Going to what, Con? Punch my face?” Kiki inspected her brother’s scowl, then gave him one just as fierce. “See? I can do Big Bad Connor Morgan face too. Except the difference is I know you’re not going to do anything other than spit and growl at me.”

“I’d risk the suspension,” he snapped, pacing another length of the waiting room to distance himself from his younger sister.

“You might,” Kiki agreed with a nod. “But you won’t risk Da being pissed off about it.”

He couldn’t shake Kiki. Not without causing a scene or earning himself a black mark on someone’s ledger. Rubbing at his face, Connor mumbled through his fingers, “What do you want, Kiki? I told you everything I know.”

“Really? Because I don’t seem to get it.” She rounded on him, poking her finger into his chest. “I want to know why you left a family thing to go down to an old crime scene. And—”

“And it’s none of your business, Kiera,” Connor said flatly.

She must have finally realized he meant business, because his little sister took a step back, dropping her hand down to her side.

“I told you I was standing outside when I saw something moving out of the corner of my eye. I didn’t have time to think about what that was, and no, I don’t know what the fuck is going on. I didn’t see who started the van. I didn’t see who locked its steering wheel in place, and I sure as fuck don’t know why someone would do this to Forest. What I do know is that it’s none of your fecking business about why I was there or why I’m here now. So step back a bit, colleen, because there’s nothing more I can give you.”

The smell of the hospital was making him sick. The not knowing what was going on ate away at Connor’s patience, and he’d locked horns with the doctor in charge more times than he could count. If he pushed the man one more time, Connor was fairly certain he’d be marched off the floor and out the hospital’s sliding glass doors before he could blink.

“How about if you let me decide if you’ve got nothing more to give me?” Kiki stood next to him, her hands on her hips. It was hard to reconcile the gun-toting, badge-wielding inspector with the frizzy-haired little girl he’d once carried on his shoulders so she could see the dragons at a Chinese New Year parade over the thick crowd. “I’m going to do my job, Con. It’ll be nice if you help me with that.”

Kiki was right. Connor knew she was right, but it didn’t mean he liked it. Talking to his sister would mean taking his eyes off the doors, and Con wanted to see the doctor’s face when he walked out, because in that moment before he searched for Forest’s next of kin, the plain truth of the situation would be plastered on his features.

“Make it quick, Kiki.” His sister stood in front of him, and Con was doubly glad she’d gotten her height from their mother, because he could see right over her head. With one eye on the doors and a drifting attention area around Kiki’s face, Connor said, “I don’t know when they’re going to be done with him.”

“I’m not going to talk to you like you’re a civvie, Con. I need to know your impressions—especially about Ackerman. Okay?” Kiki didn’t wait for her brother’s consent, calling up her case notes with a tap of a stylus on her tablet’s screen. “Let’s start off with Ackerman. No past history of drug arrests, although his adopted father was a known pothead. Medical marijuana license issued to Franklin Marshall, and he apparently debated opening up a dispensary but never followed through.”

“And?” Connor frowned. “What’s that got to do with Forest?”

“Do you think there was any validity to the drug tip you guys got on Marshall? From what I can tell, you’ve been around Ackerman a lot in the past couple of months. You’d have had time to observe any traffic.”

“I think the strongest thing he does is booze,” he said, shrugging. “His apartment’s clean of pot stink, and there wasn’t any paraphernalia lying around.”

“So you’ve been in his place? Above the studio? Could something have been hidden there? Maybe you didn’t see it.”

“There’s barely enough room for a flea to turn around in that shit hole.” The door bumped out, and his heart seized on that slight ripple, but it was only the air-conditioning kicking in. “Most druggies will use at home. I came through the door first after the shooting, so he wouldn’t have been able to stash anything from me. Not enough time. There was nothing there, Kiki. Not even a whiff of pot.”

“He’s listed as a professional drummer. You think a musician isn’t going to take something if it’s offered to him?”

“I’ll be sure to ask Kane and Sionn that next time I see them. They might want to be on the lookout for Miki and Damie’s stash,” Con shot back. “What are you leading around to, Kiki? That he’s involved in some shit Marshall left for him? Because I haven’t seen it.”

“Let’s talk about the van, then—stolen from a Canadian couple who drove it down from Vancouver.” She consulted her notes. “Talk to me about the first thing you thought when you saw it.”

“Truth? I thought someone couldn’t park.” He stopped to recall what was on his mind when he’d seen the van jump the curb. “I didn’t think it would keep going. There’s a cash machine across the street from the Amp that’s got a camera. Did you get any footage from it? It’s not a lot of street between the building and the corner. Maybe they got something on a feed?”

“It’s been requested. Hopefully the bank manager won’t be a douche, and their legal department will just hand it over. I’ve got a witness saying they saw a person—maybe a man—but he had on a hooded sweatshirt, so she didn’t get a good look at his face. That’s why I was hoping you’d spotted him. Maybe you remember him? She said he was walking with his shoulders hunched over—like he’d been scolded.”

“Probably busy hiding his face.” Connor didn’t want to admit to Kiki he’d been more focused on Forest than paying attention to the surrounding area. Not yet. It was too new. He wanted to soak in his feelings first, and then there was the terror of Forest’s injuries. He was worried too sick to focus. “No, I didn’t see that guy. Could have been hidden by the van. Depending on the angle. That thing was huge and skewed at the right angle; it took up a lot of the open visual.”

Talking to Donal was one thing. Sharing his intimacies with his siblings would have to wait. He had no idea when and how he was going to tell his family. Although, considering he’d spent a good amount of time exploring Forest’s mouth after the wall collapse, he probably should give it some thought—like what the hell to say to his mother.

“How about someone from his past? Maybe someone he knew from the system?” Kiki tapped through her screens. “He was in eleven homes before Marshall petitioned to foster him. Mom’s got a sheet longer than a California King, mostly soliciting but a few drug busts. Kid was on track as a repeat, but I guess Marshall put an end to that. Maybe she got into something and it’s coming down on him?”

“I’ve not—” Connor stopped himself. “You opened his juvie?”

“Yeah, I opened his juvie, Con,” Kiki sniped back. “It’s my damned job. I do things like open files and dig into people’s shit so I can figure out why someone’s killed innocent bystanders, and here’s a news flash, even if they aren’t innocent bystanders, I dig around in the shit anyway, because no one deserves to be murdered, including your friend, Forest.”

“Look, I don’t know what the fuck is going on, Kiki.” He scraped his hands through his hair, suddenly realizing it’d grown out long enough to tug on. “Forest—he hasn’t done anything to get this kind of shit left on his door. Anything he did as a kid? It’s gone, water under the bridge.”

“Really? What the fuck aren’t you telling me, Con? Why the hell are you circling the wagons around this guy?” Height wasn’t the only thing his sister’d inherited from their mother. No one in the family could shake Kiki off something once she’d gotten her teeth into it, and usually it was a quality Connor admired in her. At that exact moment, it wasn’t her most appealing trait.

Stepping in closer to her brother, she whispered hotly, a low hiss only loud enough for the two of them to hear. “Give me one damned good reason why I shouldn’t ask you what you’re doing with a guy who by all accounts is a piece of trash more than a few guys fucked, balled up, then tossed away? Because it doesn’t make sense to me, Con. Not one fucking bit of sense.”

HE HURT everywhere.

Well, Forest amended, not in some places he’d normally hurt after waking up feeling like he’d been beaten half to death, but it was pretty close. No, he thought as he blinked away the sting of tears in his eyes, he felt more like the times he’d been shoved in a dryer and endured the tumble after his foster father turned it on.

But for the life of him, he couldn’t remember which one had done it.

“Can you hear me, Mr. Ackerman?” A man spoke. Then a bright light flashed over his eyes, and Forest tried to shut them, only to find one of his lids was pressed up by someone’s cold finger. “Pupils are responsive. Forest, can you—”

“Yeah, I hear you.” He tried blinking again, wresting away the control of his eyelid from the man’s finger. “Roger, Roger.”

“Do you mind if I call you Forest?” The man continued his examination, probing at Forest’s hips and side.

“Sure,” he said through his chattering teeth. “It’s too fucking cold.”

It took Forest a moment to realize where he was. A hospital. One that didn’t seem to mind also doubling as a meat locker. He didn’t just hurt, it was also cold, and more than a little of the room’s iciness crinkled pain through his bones. Shivering, he tried burying himself under the blankets but found he was lying pretty much bare to the breeze, draped only in a hospital gown that left his naked ass stuck to the sheets.

“I’m sorry. I promise I’ll make this quick,” the man said.

“Yeah, I’ve heard that before,” Forest muttered to himself. “Usually they were the ones doing a dip and dash.”

Forest could make out the man’s face, and then the fuzziness around his vision cleared enough for him to see. A name tag pinned to the balding man’s blue scrubs declared him to be Doctor Wyatt, and Forest nearly jumped out of his skin when the man’s almost too warm hands pressed down into his abdomen. Someone stood to the side, just out of Forest’s cloudy field of view. The grizzled older man flashed a smile at Forest when they made eye contact. Forest couldn’t tell if he was a nurse or another doctor, but it didn’t really matter. He needed to find his clothes and get the hell out before they charged him five hundred dollars for an aspirin he never swallowed.

If he could only get his legs to work.

“I can’t move—” His knee jerked up, and Forest nearly nailed the doctor in the chin. The other man—an attendant according to his hospital badge—moved in to help Forest get his limbs under control. His leg muscles had another spasm, and the older man massaged Forest’s shins, his fingers working to get Forest’s blood flowing.

“I’m almost done. Just making sure nothing’s making Rice Krispie noises,” Wyatt murmured. “You’ve been out for a couple of hours, which is a bit of a concern since you arrived with a linear skull fracture. We’re going to keep you overnight, and we’ve been running tests just to make sure you don’t have internal bleeding. I need to ask you a couple of questions. Is that okay?”

“Sure.” Unless the doctor had a sudden urge to calculate how many apples little Susie had after a hurricane came by at sixty miles an hour. He’d never been able to figure out the whole tossing words in a math problem.

“Do you know what day it is? Do you know where you are?”

“Sunday.” Forest tried to find the date in his memory, but his head began to throb, and he gave up. “And I’m in a hospital freezing my nuts off.”

“Who’s the governor of the state, do you know?” Wyatt left off feeling Forest’s ribs and went back to another pass of his flashlight over Forest’s face.

“I gave up keeping track after John Pepys died in that tragic gardening accident,” he drawled. “Unless the guy comes around and tells me I’ve won the lottery, it doesn’t make much of a difference to me.”

“So, current events, then?” Wyatt frowned. “How about—”

“What happened to Stumpy Joe Childs?” the attendant asked suddenly.

“Choked on vomit, allegedly, but not necessarily his own,” Forest responded automatically. “Because you can’t really dust for vomit.”

“Kid’s fine, doc.” The attendant’s sun-weathered face crinkled under his broad grin.

“Good. I’m done. Let’s get some blankets on him now.” Wyatt dodged the blow like a master, straightening his glasses. The two men helped spread a stack of warmed covers over Forest’s shivering body, and then Wyatt pulled a chair up to sit next to the hospital bed.

Forest didn’t care that the man was sitting too close to him for comfort or that the attendant turned the room lights up before he left. All that mattered in that moment was the blankets’ heat spreading into his body and the sudden relief he got as his joints and muscles loosened.

“I’m going to want to do a couple more tests—just some blood work because your pressure’s a bit low—but I wanted to talk to you about the man waiting for you.” Wyatt had on a face Forest liked to call the tree hugger. He’d seen its sympathetic variations in social workers and new teachers who hadn’t been dragged down by years spent working in the system. “He says his name is Connor—”

“Morgan. He’s out there?” If he hadn’t already been on his back, Forest would have fallen over in shock. “Shit. That’s—kinda cool. Damn.”

“I just need to reassure you that you’re safe here,” the doctor continued. “He says he’s a close friend of yours, but—I have to be honest with you, Forest, your CAT scan results are… troubling. I don’t want to let you go back into a situation where you’re going to be hurt.”

“Hurt?” Forest’s head ached harder, and he struggled to get his hand out from under the heavy blankets. “I think a wall fell on me. Didn’t it? Last thing I remember was Con showing up, and then all of a sudden—bricks.”

“The injuries I’m concerned about aren’t from the accident today, Forest. I’m talking about the ones you got earlier.” Wyatt’s face grew graver, and his eyebrows fought the wrinkles on his forehead for dominance. “You’ve had major trauma to many of your bones and joints. Those weren’t from accidents. Someone deliberately hurt you, Forest. And from what I can make out, pretty badly. Do you want to tell me about that?”

“Not fucking really.” The doctor didn’t know what he was asking. It was like casually suggesting Forest strip naked and roll around in broken glass threads. Then for good fucking measure, taking a bath in the Dead Sea. He didn’t want to think about the fists that made those breaks, especially since, other than his mother, he didn’t even remember a lot of their names. Shaking his head, he said, “Yeah, no. Look—”

“Part of my job is to make sure that once you walk out of here, you’re not going back to a very dangerous home situation.” The doctor leaned closer, and Forest smelled the mint on his breath. Placing his hand on Forest’s arm, Wyatt said, “I can’t let you go home with that man out there if he’s the one who tore you up like this. It wouldn’t be right.”

“Dude, most of this shit is old,” Forest grumbled. “Long before Connor came around. A lot of it’s from… just shit that happened, you know? It’s not Connor. Hell, can’t you tell how old the crap is? Like isn’t it healed over or something?”

“I don’t know how long you’ve been with your friend, Connor,” Wyatt said softly. “You’re very young, Forest, but I’ve seen men… take in younger boys and think they can do what they want with them. I don’t want that for you.”

“Okay, way off base,” he protested from his prison of blankets. “Connor didn’t do jack shit to me. Hell, I’m pretty sure if I even told him what some of my fosters did to me, he’d hunt them down and kill them.”

“I’ve talked to him,” the doctor admitted. “He’s aggressive—”

“He’s a cop!” He was too tired to fight off any more of the doctor’s insinuations, but the idea of Connor doing to him what many of his foster parents did turned Forest’s stomach. “No, really—”

“Forest, I’m saying these things because someone has to. Just because someone is a police officer, it doesn’t mean they are going to treat people nicely. A lot of violent people seek out a career in law enforcement because it gives them a sense of power.” Wyatt patted Forest’s arm again.

“Yeah, I know.”

He’d spent a good portion of his time on the street hiding from a couple of cops. Not because they’d take him in to CPS, but because those were the assholes who usually wanted something hot wrapped around their dicks and not pay for it. They were also good for a beating when Forest refused them, and he’d learned that lesson really quickly. Never say no to a cop unless he had a clear shot at running away.

Marshall spent too many years fighting to break Forest of the habit of running. He’d run often, slinking into the underground and falling back into what he’d been doing before Frank found him. It was a familiar life. One he felt comfortable with. And every time someone knocked Forest’s brain loose from his skull, Frank’d been there to pick up the pieces, dragging Forest back to the Sound until he finally just got tired of running.

“Really, not Connor. He’s a white hat. Shit, his mom probably knitted it for him.” Forest snorted, and that set his head off again. “Hell, the only reason I’m shocked he’s out there is because I figured he must be sick of my shit by now. This is like the third time he’s dragged my ass out of the fire. At some point, the guy’s just going to get up and walk away.”

“I don’t think so,” Wyatt disagreed. “From my conversations with him, I get the feeling that he’s not going anywhere, Forest. No matter how hard you push or how many brick walls fall on you. He doesn’t seem the type of man who is going to just let you go.”