Awakenings #2
Wow. Brady hadn’t even thought of that. “I think the coroner is a friend of Cuthbert’s,” he began apologetically, but George shook his head.
“Yes, but the medical examiner reports to the county DA. I get that there’s sort of a corruption network going on here, but the ME’s office is pretty clean, and the DA is under a lot of scrutiny.
So as scary as the sheriff’s office can make things, there are ways around Arlen Cuthbert, you hear me? ”
Brady nodded, and it occurred to him that what the sweet-faced nurse was talking about was networking and channels.
He wasn’t talking about shooting his way through the ME’s office for justice.
“Thanks,” he said weakly. “That’s good to know.”
“Have faith,” George said, his voice soft as he gave the three men heading for the little house a quick glance.
“You know there’s bad guys with badges, but you’re here, and that means there’s good guys with them too.
And you know that sometimes the cowboy with the black hat is the one with the best intentions.
You’re alive because you thought outside the law enforcement box.
We can keep you that way, but you’ve got to trust us for the same reasons, okay? ”
Brady nodded. “You, uhm, seem to know a lot about what I’m thinking.”
George shrugged. “That giant bald guy with the terrifying laugh? He’s one of the best, kindest men I know. But if you ever tracked down all his aliases to see his real rap sheet, he’d probably give you nightmares.”
Brady swallowed, remembering Jai clutching the chicken stick as Eric jumped in the back of the sedan. And he remembered George and Amal plotting to get him out of the hospital so the people who wanted Brady dead would never know he was there.
“I’ve got enough nightmare fuel as it is,” he decided. “And plenty to do without adding that to my list.”
George gave a satisfied smile. “See? You’re going to fit in just fine!”
Maybe he would. With a little wave, Brady turned toward the house and started to jog toward the three men who had saved his life.
Until he saw anything different, he was going to have to trust that hadn’t been a fluke.
Once in the house, he took off his cross-trainers and left them against the kitchen wall/entryway, where they joined several other pairs of enormous shoes to fill.
The kitchen table had donuts and bagels on it, complete with a schmear bar and some lunch meat and vegetables for bagel sandwiches, and there were three kinds of donuts, including the strawberry kind Ernie had made for Brady two days before.
Brady paused to grab a plate—one donut, one bagel with schmear—before joining the others in the living room, where they’d arrayed themselves on a futon, a stuffed chair, and on the floor.
Brady recognized almost everybody—Burton, Ernie, Jai, Eric, and Ace—but there were two men he hadn’t seen.
One was obviously military. Late thirties, maybe closer to forty, with dark hair threaded with silver, and tired eyes.
The man was still handsome, and Burton sat next to him on the futon, both of them obviously refraining from manspreading out of decorum.
At their feet, cross-legged as only the young and lithe could manage, sat Ernie and another young man.
This one was, well, quite fit, but also almost ethereally beautiful, with enormous haunted brown eyes and an angel’s mouth.
If this was the oft-mentioned Cotton, Brady could see why Eric had been without words for him. That was a lot of beauty to manage.
Jai sprawled in the stuffed chair, and Ace and Eric sat cross-legged across from the futon, in front of the TV, their meals balanced on their laps and cups of coffee on a battered coffee table.
Ace indicated Brady should sit down on the ground across from Jai, so he set his plate on the coffee table and lowered himself to the clean if worn carpet.
“Sorry about the tight quarters,” Ace told him. “Sonny wanted to bring in the kitchen chairs, but I told him that would just make the place more crowded.”
“Not a problem,” Brady said, conscious once again that he was being offered hospitality by people who were literally giving him all they had. He smiled and raised his donut to Ernie. “Thanks again for these.”
Ernie grinned, and even through his obvious delight at being noticed, Brady could see he looked troubled.
“Should we get right to it?” he asked.
They all glanced at each other, and Ace started to speak.
“Okay,” he said. “So, about what? Nine days ago?” Everybody nodded, and he continued on. “A couple of fellas who absolutely had to die, died. The Lord works in mysterious ways and all that. But the things they were doing—”
“Raping children and filming it,” spoke up the sloe-eyed angel sitting practically knee-to-knee with Brady. “It’s important we say it, Ace, because they’re the victims here, and it needs to stay front and center.”
Ace grimaced. “Point taken, son. These two guys were a couple of baby-raping fuckers who were giving the children in the preacher’s church chlamydia, if we need our gross-meter maxed out.
These men died. They left a phone, pointing to other people they may have been sending pictures to.
Brady here, being a good guy, was trying to get his boss to turn that phone over to the powers that be—”
“The DA, or the FBI, or the detectives in Los Angeles,” Brady filled in, and everybody nodded.
“That’s a good list,” Ace said. “And that brings us to what happened next, and that’s on you to tell us.”
“I had it in my hands,” Brady said, his voice aching with anger.
“And I said we needed to turn it over to the FBI, to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children—there was a goldmine on that phone. I….” He swallowed sickly.
“I couldn’t look beyond a couple of pictures, but we get workshops on this shit.
Pedophiles share pictures. Very often they share pictures with people who really don’t want you to know their secrets.
The phone had the potential to be key. And I was standing there, watching Roy Kuntz’s body smoke and trying not to puke, and Cuthbert yanked it out of my hands.
” Brady shook his head. “We argued about it, but I got called to the next scene, the preacher’s house, and had to leave.
I’m the one who called the FBI, Missing and Exploited Children division.
The guy went out watching his own homemade porn, and there was—Christ, there was a day care center right next to his office.
My contact, Jessica Chambers, showed up, and I…
.” He grunted with frustration. “She was solid,” he said, almost to himself.
“I could have sworn she was solid. But over the last week or so, she’s gotten more and more…
distant on the phone, and I swear to God, the last time, she had to go to the bathroom to talk to me, and she told me to stop calling her. ”
He paused and glanced up at the room and realized that there wasn’t a raised eyebrow or a sign of disbelief in the lot. But then… he frowned.
“You all knew most of this,” he said, remembering how Ace had introduced the subject. He frowned. The Lord works in mysterious ways. “How did you know all of this?” And then boom, like a lightning bolt. “And how did you know about the chlamydia? That… I didn’t even know about that.”
All of those sympathetic, angry, allied faces went carefully blank, and he gasped as things fell into place.
He turned to Eric, feeling betrayal shaft through his heart. “Did you kill the Kuntz brothers?”
“He did not,” Jason Constance said. “He wasn’t even in town when that happened.”
“Well, I arrived as it was happening,” Eric said, casting him a glance that was a muddle of hurt and resignation.
Brady turned back toward them all. “Then who—”
From the corner of his eye, he saw Ace open his mouth, and then Burton said, “Let’s just say it was a group effort. We all contributed something to that.”
“I didn’t,” Cotton said quietly. “But I would have.” He met Brady’s eyes, and Brady realized that for all of his loveliness—and there were envious angels out there, Brady was certain—his enormous brown eyes were hurt, perhaps eternally.
“I know what it’s like to be preyed upon,” he said softly.
“I’d do anything to protect a child from that. ”
Jason Constance reached down and squeezed Cotton’s shoulder, and Brady felt some of his anger—his righteous indignation at finding himself in a nest of unrepentant murderers—fade.
Arlen Cuthbert had ripped the phone out of his hand, enabling more monsters to walk the earth.
Brady knew—knew—most of the men in this room had done only good things with the resources they had.
The Kuntz brothers had been monstrous—and they’d needed to be stopped.
If these people had stopped them, it had been because they’d rightly guessed that nobody else would.
But still… he needed a beat. He pushed himself to his feet and sensed rather than saw an electric tension fill the room.
“I’m not… not going anywhere,” he said gruffly, suddenly claustrophobic. “I… I promise. I just… need some air.”
He wobbled his way out through the kitchen, hearing Eric’s voice in the background and then Ace’s, calm and adamant, saying, “No, I got this.”
Ace gave him the courtesy of letting him get outside first so he could lean against the sun-heated stucco wall like a stunned lizard.
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. In. Out. Repeat if necessary. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
The sun was directly overhead now, and the front of the house was nicely warmed. Brady’s skin thought about being too hot, but decided maybe he needed to bake for a minute, to have the confusion and achiness cooked out of his bones.
He closed his eyes then, trying to clear his thoughts, and he kept them closed as he heard the screen door next to him slam and smelled motor oil and harsh detergent.
He’d been hoping for Eric’s sandalwood and vanilla, but then, Eric was a newcomer here too.