Chapter 14 #3
“Shoulders like a linebacker,” Gideon said. “And speaking of….” His voice dropped, and he told Joey about Crosby then.
Joey’s vision went a little swimmy. Gideon’s hand on his elbow helped him get to the SUV, and he refused to shake it off, even though between the Crosby sitch and Joey’s father, the odds were pretty damned good they had a tail.
Fuck ’em, he thought, fighting off shivers in the SUV. Fuck ’em if they thought he and Gideon leaning on each other for strength meant they were weak. He’d show ’em weak. They’d rip their fucking throats out!
He was very aware of Gideon rubbing his back with his own shaking hand.
“He’ll be okay?” Joey asked.
“He’s at Garcia’s right now. After shift, we’re on for setting up a security system.”
Joey nodded, thinking of Garcia’s sweet little house in Queens.
So domestic. Natalia did the gracious holiday dinners at her gracious family house.
Clint had a house—and a husband, apparently—he kept secret and safe in Long Island.
Gideon’s apartment was too small for the unit, especially now that its population had grown.
But Garcia’s house in Queens—they’d gathered there the last nine months.
It had been the den-mother house they hadn’t known they’d needed.
You could eat pizza while sitting in front of the coffee table at Garcia’s house in Queens.
They had to make it safe.
“You okay?” Gideon asked.
“No,” Joey said, thinking about the many eyes that could be on them right now, hating those fuckers who were just waiting for them to show their throats. He turned toward Gideon and fisted his front collar before dragging him, unresisting, until their lips touched.
Gideon must have felt like he did, because their kiss wasn’t soft or comforting—it was monster, destructive, and angry.
And Joey pulled strength from it, the kind of strength that could lay waste to armies.
Bad guys didn’t know that a kiss could do this, because bad guys didn’t know shit.
They separated only to breathe, leaning their foreheads against each other as they panted into air that would soon be stifling.
“Gideon?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m tired of this shit.”
“Same.”
“Those guys watching us? My dad’s? The Sons of the Blood?”
“Yeah?”
“Let’s kill ’em.”
Gideon’s smile was as thin as his features, feral, a wolf showing his teeth. “Knives or guns?”
“I don’t care.” Joey laughed, and it was not a nice sound.
As Gideon started the car and pulled away from the curb, Joey caught sight of a guy in flannels and jeans, with a lean face and yellowing skin, glaring at them as they passed.
He had lank hair and a badger’s mean eyes, and he hawked spit at them, probably hitting the back quarter panel as they went.
Joey flipped him the bird behind his back, but he filed the face away. He had a feeling he’d see it again.
THEY DIDN’T have long to wait. The team worked feverishly—even Crosby, whose eyes were practically swollen shut from the beating he’d gotten.
Three days after Crosby was carted home, unconscious, Joey and Gideon were late.
The plan was that after logging out, the team would leave their work phones in their offices and take their burner phones with them as they all took different routes to Crosby’s house in Queens, but Gideon was going to stop by Shake Shack first, the better to grab food for everybody.
“Shake Shack?” Joey asked. “Couldn’t we just order pizza at Garcia’s place?”
Gideon gave him that thin wolf’s smile. “We could,” he said innocently. “In fact, we may want to do that anyway. But you know. There’s something I want to check out at Shake Shack.”
“What?” Joey asked, but he was belting up anyway.
“You know how the warehouses are about two blocks behind that strip with the Shake Shack and the frozen-yogurt place, right?”
“Yeah?”
“I… I want to check some shit out at those warehouses is all. Just….” Gideon’s shoulders twitched. “You know, our nice civil engineer?”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve been tracking water currents with the department of fish and game and the weather people and the water department—and I’ve got… let’s say I’ve got a theory.”
Joey liked where this was going.
They left the department issue at the fro-yo place (after checking to see if they had pre-packed half gallons first), and then they cruised the warehouse front, noting one that was clean and bustling when much of the activity down that area had been limp and uninterested.
“Who is this?” Gideon asked as they took turns with field glasses from the roof of a building two blocks away. “I mean, which company? Nobody’s this busy in this economy. Who—”
“Doesn’t matter,” Joey said, feeling that feral growl in his throat.
“Why not?”
“I spotted one of my tails. He’s reporting to that woman with the blond ponytail—the one with the Glock tucked in the back of her jeans.”
“Ooh… promising.” Gideon took the field glasses from him and stared for a minute, frowning. “Okay, then,” he said. “I gotta talk to Harding.”
“Over the phones?” Joey asked, surprised. The guy who was putting the screws to Crosby was working for NYPD Internal Affairs, and their assumption had been that they could easily be tracked or recorded on their phones pretty much from day one of this whole mishigas.
“No, Joey, in person. You’re going to stay here and track their movements and try to figure out who in the fuck is onloading what here—Crosby said there were drugs filling the streets. You know where drugs often come in from? Two hints, and the answer’s not the Rio Grande.”
“Ports, Gideon. I’m not stupid. I see where you’re going.” He might have sulked then, but he realized Gideon was trusting him. “So while I’m here, you’re going back to the office to talk to Harding.”
“And to get a covert vehicle, not the I’m-a-government-official SUV,” Gideon confirmed. “Watch for me.”
“What do you think Harding’s going to say?” Joey asked.
Again, that feral wolf’s smile, the one Joey Carlyle had thought he owned but knew now he hadn’t sharpened nearly enough. Gideon’s smile was as sharp as his chin, his nose, his fierce lethal brain.
Joey felt a lust rising, for blood, for sex, for Gideon, that he’d never known existed.
But first….
“See you in an hour,” he said. “And Gideon?”
“Yeah?”
“Bring my crossbow.”
That smile only widened.
AN HOUR later, Joey emerged from the shadows of the alleyway to hop in the front seat of the nondescript sedan, heart thundering in his ears.
“Half a block,” he managed. “Turn left behind that outbuilding.”
“What’s back there?” Gideon asked.
“A great make-out spot,” he cackled.
Gideon scowled. “Now?”
“Did you bring my crossbow?”
“Yeah, yeah, I did.”
“Did Harding agree?”
“As long as we’re defending our lives,” Gideon said virtuously.
“So, let’s go make out,” Joey said. “Right now.”
“Oh,” Gideon said, getting it. “Now.”
Killing bad guys was remarkably easy when they were mean and dumb.
“Do you see them?” Gideon asked softly as they emerged from the car, Joey with the crossbow tucked under his jacket in the front and the knives tucked under his belt in the back. Gideon had his own knife in a sheath at his side, and of course a gun, but they didn’t want to fire their weapons today.
Their weapons and ammo were highly regulated, and that’s not what this was about.
“So,” Joey said, pulling into the shade of the brick outbuilding, making sure it was at his back.
He was angled slightly—Gideon had the view behind him, toward the open water, and he had the view behind Gideon, toward the alleyway, both access points that made the two of them vulnerable. “You feeling naughty yet?”
“Feeling horny,” Gideon said, and that blunt word from his usually refined mouth actually did make Joey harden under his stretchy black slacks.
Joey’s laughter went throaty and evil, and he caught Gideon by the hips and pulled him forward. Gideon wrapped on arm around Joey’s shoulders—strategically, so their views remained unobstructed—and murmured against his mouth, “Do you see them yet?”
“Yup,” Joey said, running his tongue along the seam of Gideon’s lips. “You got one on your seven, one on your eight.”
“Yours are at your nine and eleven,” Gideon murmured. “A knife and a baseball bat.”
“You got a knife and brass knuckles.”
Gideon growled, and Joey felt him reach under his own jacket for his sheath, while Joey pulled his crossbow out with one hand and a fixed blade from his back sheath with the other.
“Hello, faggots,” one of their assailants laughed.
Together Joey and Gideon turned outward, back to back, weapons in hand, and Joey couldn’t see Gideon’s face, but he could hear the growl in his voice.
“Hello, boys. Did you think we were stupid?” he asked.
The men in front of Joey gave nasty little laughs, and the four assailants closed in.
Joey’s one regret was that he couldn’t watch Gideon in action.
As he squared off with his opponents, he heard Gideon talking to himself.
“To the right, motherfucker, to the left, one hop this time, everybody slit your throat!” And then a series of feints and gasps that to Joey’s fevered imagination sounded very much like the battle was choreographed to the song.
But Joey’s own attackers were getting closer, and Joey recognized the guy with the stringy, curly hair who had seen him and Gideon kissing in the SUV. He was carrying the baseball bat.
He was also the one who’d called them faggots, and Joey bared all his teeth as he wielded his knife. “How ya doin’?” he asked. “You ready to party with a real man?”
“Suck my fat one,” the guy said, and Joey laughed unpleasantly.
“For that?” he said. “I’ll cut it off.”
The man closed in, with the bat coming heavily off his shoulder, and Joey waited until he got close enough to swing, the thing lifting off with a sense of lots of power but no velocity. Then he aimed the crossbow at his hip and fired, hitting the fuckwad squarely in the upper abdomen.