Ball & Chain

Nick wandered into the pantry, scanning the shelves. He grabbed a glass canister of white rice and stuffed it under one arm, then went off in search of a mixing bowl.



“I wonder why they didn’t take his phone, too,” Kelly called from the freezer. “I mean, they take a broken watch and slice him up on a guess that he’d swallowed whatever it is, but they don’t take his phone just ’cause it’s waterlogged?”



“We’re obviously looking for someone who’s never dropped his phone in a toilet,” Nick said. He poured the rice out into a stainless steel mixing bowl.



“Ha. Ha ha.” Kelly came up to stand beside Nick at the counter and placed the phone beside the bowl. “Considering you’re the one who told me to put it in the rice, you shouldn’t make jokes.”



“I live on a boat; I can get water out of anything.” Nick absently reached across the counter for a small glass jar of toothpicks and plucked one out to put in his mouth. He began taking the cell phone apart and shoving each piece into the rice separately.



Kelly leaned over the counter to rest his chin on his hand. Nick glanced at Kelly as he shoved the SIM card and battery deep into the rice.



Kelly was watching his face instead of his hands. “Are you okay?” he asked, voice gone soft and intimate.



Nick swallowed hard. “I don’t know. If Garrett hadn’t been up there with me, I would have taken Richard Burns’s head off.”



“Whether he deserves it or not, that’s not like you.”



“I know.”



Kelly straightened, then pushed himself up to sit on the edge of the counter. “It’ll take a while for that rice to do its thing. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on with you, Lucky? Maybe I can help.”



Nick stared at the counter, at Kelly’s hand resting against the white tile, his eyes tracing the lines of Kelly’s long fingers. Kelly tapped them against the tile, and Nick met his eyes.



“My dad,” he started, but he lost his voice before he could go further. He shook his head in frustration.



“Because he’s sick?” Kelly guessed.



Nick nodded.



“What did he say to you when he called for you to come see him? You haven’t been right since.”



Nick didn’t answer, chewing on the toothpick as he stared at the rice.



Kelly was silent for a few moments, then took in a deep breath. “When I was going through the foster system, I saw a lot of kids who were there because they’d been abused. This one kid, he was a few years older than me. Close to aging out of the system. He got word his mom had died of an overdose. He was all torn up about it, and I just couldn’t understand why. His scars were still healing. So I asked him. And he told me he was glad she was dead. He was mourning the mother he could have had. Should have had.”



Nick was silent, his eyes on Kelly the entire time.



Kelly patted his cheek and smiled sadly. “It’s okay to mourn. You do it for you, not him.”



Nick nodded and forced himself to swallow past the knot in his throat. “We’re not at the mourning stage just yet. He needs a new liver. He wants me to get tested to see if I’m a match.”



Kelly’s expression changed from one of gentle sympathy to something else entirely. His eyes sparked, and the lines around his mouth grew hard as he squared his shoulders. “He wants you to donate a piece of your liver?”



Nick nodded, unable to speak.



“Are you going to do it?”



“I don’t know,” Nick whispered. “I don’t want to. I want to let him die.”



Kelly nodded, frowning in sympathy. But then he shook his head. “You’d never forgive yourself. Even if everyone knows he deserves it.”



Nick lowered his head. “I know.”



Kelly grabbed at his shirt front and pulled him sideways until Nick was standing right in front of him, between his legs. Kelly hugged him fiercely, and Nick buried his face in Kelly’s neck.



“The decision you make, you make it for you. Not him,” Kelly whispered into his ear. “You make it for you. And I’ll be there.”



Nick gripped him hard, hugging him for dear life.



Kelly sniffed and smiled against his neck. “You do you, boo boo,” he said, his voice shaking with laughter.



Nick pushed away from him, fighting back tears with a surprised snort. “There’s something so wrong with you.”



“That’s why you love me.”



Ty couldn’t sit still. He bounced his knees, he tapped his toes, he cracked his knuckles. He finally picked up a pen and began twirling it around his fingers just to give his hands something else to do as he watched Zane fiddle with the laptop.



“Okay, I got around the basic password protection, but there’s a little extra encryption on this thing,” Zane finally told him. “I would call him paranoid if he hadn’t ended up dead.”



“I can’t believe he was one of Burns’s guys,” Ty said, shaking his head. “Was he recruited before or after Deuce and Livi started dating?”



“I don’t know, Ty,” Zane said without taking his eyes off the laptop screen.



“Would Dick really put a spy into Deacon’s future in-laws?”



Zane glanced at him. “I don’t know, Ty.”



“I mean, that seems like a stretch even for Dick. I wonder if Deuce dating her was what brought Dick’s attention to the Stanton company, or if Milton really did plant that seed?”



“I don’t know, Ty,” Zane repeated obediently. “Why don’t you go ask him? Maybe he’ll tell you more than he told me.”



Ty sighed heavily, shaking his head. “He won’t tell me anything, he’ll just glare at me like he used to when I was little and make me feel like I’m ten. You know who should talk to him? Dad. It’d be just as uncomfortable as it was when Irish was interrogating me; I bet he’d tell Dad anything. Are you listening to me?”



“No, Ty.”



Ty snorted and cocked his head at Zane. His brow was furrowed and his curly hair was a bit awry from running his fingers through it so many times. He had his tongue stuck between his lips and probably didn’t even realize it. Ty stood, stepping behind Zane to massage his tense shoulders. “I’m sorry, I’m distracting you. Carry on.”



Zane rolled his neck, leaning into Ty’s hands. Ty was silent, letting him work. He still didn’t understand what Zane was doing, but finally Zane sat back and put both hands in the air triumphantly. “Eat that, DOD!”



“You got through?”



Zane nodded and clicked one more button that turned the blue screen of the laptop into the normal desktop screen Ty was used to seeing. Dozens of files littered the screen, most of them labeled in some sort of numerical code.



Ty rested his chin on Zane’s shoulder, dejected. “This is going to take a while, huh?”



Zane nodded. “Might want to take a seat.”



Nick sifted through the bowl of rice with great care, placing each piece of the cell phone on a microfiber towel he had found in a drawer. Kelly watched over Nick’s shoulder. When they had all the pieces, Nick began putting it back together.



He held the reassembled phone in his palm, and he and Kelly both scowled at it.



“Let’s hope it’s charged,” Kelly said.



Nick turned it on and held his breath. The sound was garbled and the screen was a digitized mess as the phone powered on, but they could sort of make out what they were seeing on it. Nick first went to the list of recent calls. Kelly scrambled to get his own phone out and take pictures of the screen. They got partial lists of Milton’s last calls, then moved on to the text messages. Some of them were beyond comprehension, but others were clear enough to make out. Kelly took photos of all of them.



The phone began to make a metallic whirring sound.



“Oh, that’s a bad sound,” Kelly said.



“No, it’s not.”



“Yes, it is.”



“Just shut up and keep taking pictures.”



“That’s an ‘I’m going to blow up’ sound,” Kelly insisted.



“I know, but we only have one chance to get this shit.”



The phone popped, and they both jumped. The smell of burning electronics accompanied a sizzling sound, and after the first threat of fire, Nick dropped the phone into the bowl of rice. It sparked and fizzled, and the smell of burning rice mingled with the lingering aroma of industrial-strength cleanser in the kitchen.



Kelly huffed and sniffed at the bowl of rice. “Told you.”



Nick glared at his profile. “What did we get?”



Kelly flipped through the photos of the text messages on his phone. “It looks like he was setting up a meeting, maybe. These times are from the other night. How the hell was he getting service to send these texts?”



Nick leaned over and squinted at the photos. They were basically poor copies of a rough original, and some of the words were unintelligible. But reading through the last dozen or so texts painted a pretty clear picture, and it wasn’t hard to fill in the blanks. “He was setting up a buy.”



“A buy? Like, what, he was selling something?”



Nick nodded and pointed at the text message. “It’s shorthand. He was meeting a buyer at eleven last night, and he wanted money wired. Apparently his buyer had cash instead and they were arguing over payment. I can’t tell more, it’s too fuzzy.”



“You think he was selling the defense contract technology Stanton’s company is developing?”



Nick nodded grimly. “Yeah, I do. Odds are he either tried to cheat them, or he changed his mind, so his buyer killed him. I’m guessing they thought he had the information on him, but he didn’t. That’s why they came back for his body.”



“So, what are we talking here? A flash drive? A memory chip? It has to be something small enough to swallow if that’s where they were looking. And his room hadn’t been tossed.”



Nick shrugged. “I’m not a techie. We’ll take it to Garrett, see if he knows. See what they’ve got off that laptop.”



Kelly nodded and stuffed his phone back into his pocket. They left the mess they’d made. There was no one to complain about it now anyway.



Kelly glanced at the freezer as they headed for the steps. “Hey, maybe one of them will donate a liver to your dad.”



Nick looked over his shoulder at Kelly, his eyes wide.



“I’m just saying. Three perfectly good livers sitting in there,” Kelly said, completely deadpan. “Nobody’s using them. I’ll go get one for you.”



Nick gaped at him. “How the hell did you ever pass your psych evals?”



“I cheated off your papers.”



Nick rolled his eyes and started up the stairs.



“The Navy gives bubble tests. When in doubt, go with C.”



“Kelly.”



“Get it? Navy? The sea?”



“Kels, shut up.”



“Oh, come on! You love puns.”



Nick laughed, unable to stop himself.



Kelly plucked at his shirt as they headed up the steps, stopping him. Nick looked back at him, one eyebrow raised, expecting another joke. But Kelly was turning to head into the kitchen again. “You know, the cook hadn’t been dead but for a few minutes when we came down here yesterday.”



Nick nodded, his eyes darting toward the bottom of the steps. It dawned on him where Kelly was going with that. “How’d the killer get out?”



“Yeah.” Kelly glanced up at Nick. “The steps are the only way in or out, we would have seen them leaving from the hall upstairs. Or hell, maybe even passed them on the steps.”



Nick waited a breath, then stepped to stand beside Kelly.



“You think it’s possible they hid well enough for Ty to miss them?”



“No,” Nick said immediately. They descended the stairs again, standing at the bottom to look around the massive kitchen. It was mostly open. The cabinets had glass faces, and the counters and islands all had open shelves beneath. “There’s nowhere to hide down here, not unless you get into one of the ovens.”



Kelly grunted. “And there was definitely no one in the freezer; I went in there.”



Nick paced a few steps into the kitchen, craning his head to seek out impromptu hiding spots. “I mean, you could do it, I guess. There’s . . . I don’t know. You’d have to be really slick.”



“Or small,” Kelly added. “I bet a woman could have hid down here.”



“But someone that small wouldn’t have been able to pick Milton up and hang him on that meat hook. There were two people. No way they could have hid, not from Ty.”



“True,” Kelly said, his shoulders slumping.



Nick’s attention turned from the shiny appliances and bright white counters to the stone walls of the room. He peered upward, noticing the architecture for the first time, the way the room itself was laid out. “This was a chapel,” he said in surprise.



Kelly glanced up, pursing his lips. “So?”



“Well, a Scottish church built in the late nineteenth century, there would have been a pulpit on the right side of the chancel. Sometimes the pulpit had a space beneath it or behind it.”



“How do you know that?” Kelly asked.



“I think I saw it in one of those house makeover shows,” Nick admitted, shrugging. He retained all kinds of normally useless information from books, podcasts, and TV shows he kept on as background noise when he was working. He’d never lost a trivia game.



“Okay, which side was the right side?”



Nick pointed toward the wall that abutted the rest of the house. They scanned over the stone carvings, the same angels they’d seen on the fireplace in their bedroom. Nick didn’t see anything that looked like a hidden or raised space where the pulpit would have stood, but he saw something else he recognized.