Chapter 3
Sam
Chief Somerset and Mr. Hazard live in a nice neighborhood of older homes near the high school.
It’s the kind of place anybody would like to grow up in.
The houses look like real, old houses. I know that sounds dumb, but that’s the only way I can say it.
Not cookie-cutter stuff, I mean. The sidewalks are cracked and uneven, and the streets have big tar patches.
Everybody keeps their lawns clean, and it’s a good mix of young families and older couples.
A real community, which you don’t see all that much anymore.
That’s where I go Friday after my shift ends.
Chief Somerset—Mr. Somerset—is my mentor. We usually meet twice a month, but this is an emergency. He’ll understand.
Mr. Hazard, I’m not so sure.
I park on the street. Colt’s truck is in the driveway—he’s their son.
Evie, their daughter, left her bike by the curb, so I wheel it up to the porch.
The sound of a lawnmower floats over everything, the day sweet with spring.
They’ve got tulips all along the porch’s skirting, and even though they haven’t done much work on the flower beds yet, it all looks real nice. Like a family lives here, I guess.
When I knock on the door, Colt answers. He’s about to turn eighteen, and he finally gave up on having long hair, thank God.
He’s a nice-looking kid. He looks a lot like Mr. Hazard, actually, even though they’re not biologically related.
But when he had his hair long, he looked like one of those sheep that somebody forgot to shear.
“Hi, Sam,” Colt says. “Come on in; I’ll get J-H.”
He jogs toward the back of the house without waiting for an answer, so I step inside and shut the door. From the back of the house comes the sound of another door opening, and then Colt screaming, “J-H! J-H!” And then, like a kid who thinks he’s an adult, “John-Henry Somerset!”
The lawnmower cuts off, and Mr. Somerset calls something back, but I can’t make out the words.
“You can come back here,” Colt shouts, and then he thumps down the steps toward the basement.
I make my way to the kitchen as Mr. Somerset comes inside.
He’s wearing an old Wahredua Wildcats T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, mesh shorts, and an old pair of sneakers stained from cutting the grass.
His hair is blond and always a little messy.
I guess it’s not really a secret that I think it looks good; that’s why I changed how I wear my hair.
One time, a lady who was visiting saw him in St. Taffy’s and sat in his lap and said she wanted to feed him grapes, and the guys at the station still talk about that.
The way I think about it is that he’s all the guys you wanted to be in high school.
Right now, he’s kicking one foot, trying to shake off little shreds of grass that are clinging to his leg.
He smells like hot skin and gasoline and fresh-cut grass, and when he looks up, he smiles.
“Hey, Sam. How’s it going?”
“Pretty good, sir.”
He takes another look at me, and his eyes crinkle. I think that’s when he’s trying not to smile. “You sure about that?”
I shrug. “I guess not so good.”
“Have a seat. You want something to drink?”
“No, sir. Thanks, though.”
He gets himself a Diet Pepsi from the fridge and leans against the counter. “How was work today?”
“Pretty good, sir.”
“Where were you patrolling?”
“Market Street most of the day. They’ve got the riverfront market opening tomorrow.”
He winces. “God, I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right, sir. It was pretty smooth.”
“What’s going on?”
So, I tell him about my conversation with Chief Peterson.
When I finish, Mr. Somerset says, “Well, I guess it’s good to know I left my mark on the department.”
“Oh! Oh no, sir. God, no, that’s not what he meant—”
“Sam, it’s okay. I was joking. I mean, there was some self-pity mixed in there too, but it was mostly a joke.” He cracks a smile. “Fifty-fifty.”
I don’t know what to say to that, so I smile back, but it feels pretty miserable.
“Let’s try that again,” Mr. Somerset says. “I can see why that would be frustrating, getting that kind of feedback. Especially when that’s not a part of the job most people would anticipate.”
“I’m not saying Chief Peterson’s wrong, sir. I just—I don’t know what to do.” And then, even though I’ve been there less than five minutes, I ask the question I told myself not to ask: “Would you hire me? If it were you, I mean.”
This time, Mr. Somerset grins. “Sam.”
When I say, “I know,” it’s a lot grumpier than I mean it to be.
For some reason, that makes Mr. Somerset smile even bigger. And I can’t help myself after a few seconds, and I’m smiling too.
“You know there’s a pretty easy solution to this,” Mr. Somerset says. When I don’t say anything, he continues, “You establish some community relationships so you can prove to Peterson that you can do the work he wants you to do.”
“Right. Okay. Yeah, I can do that.” It does sound pretty easy, now that Mr. Somerset pointed it out.
“Uh, so, where would you volunteer, sir?” And because Mr. Somerset says it’s better when people think for themselves and when they take the initiative—and because one time, Mr. Hazard wanted to go to bed and I’d stayed too late talking and he said I’d probably be able to think more clearly if I didn’t have Mr. Somerset’s dick in my mouth—I hurry to add, “I mean, there’s my gran’s church. ”
“That could work,” Mr. Somerset says. “Do you have a connection there? Besides your grandma, I mean. Do you worship there?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, you could still ask. Or you could find something you’re passionate about, Sam. I think that would be more meaningful. What are some things that you care about? Something you’d like to advocate for?”
Before I can answer, the front door opens, and Mr. Hazard’s voice carries into the house.
“—because it looks like a fucking trap when you’re lying in wait for me to get home.”
And then another voice answers, and it’s Detective Dulac. “Bro, I wasn’t lying in wait. That’s some Renaissance Faire bullshit. I just pulled up and—”
That’s when they reach the kitchen.
Mr. Hazard looks at me and says, “What are you doing here?”
Detective Dulac slouches against the wall and gives me the once over. Then he purses his lips like he’s blowing me a kiss and says, “What’s up, beefcake?”
Mr. Hazard and Detective Dulac are about as different as you can get.
Mr. Hazard is a big guy. He’s got dark hair and these bright yellow eyes.
He says what he’s thinking, which is a good thing, because Dad always says you should say what you mean.
And he’s smart, too. But what I would tell somebody, if they asked me about Mr. Hazard, is you don’t want him looking at you. That pretty much sums it up.
Detective Dulac, on the other hand, is…well, it seems like he’s always looking.
He’s about my height, a few years older than me, and he’s got these freckles that make me think he was one of those kids in school all the teachers liked, because they didn’t know what he got up to behind their backs.
A couple of years ago, he was trying to rescue Ashley—that’s Colt’s boyfriend—after he’d been kidnapped.
The girl who took Ashley had made a lightbulb bomb, and it exploded when Detective Dulac went into the house.
He survived. (Gran would say, Obviously.) But the glass cut up his face pretty bad, and for a while, we all thought he might lose one of his eyes.
Last year, he saw a doctor about the scars, and they’re pretty much gone now.
You can’t even see them unless you know what you’re looking for.
Detective Dulac makes jokes about it sometimes.
I guess it’d be hard to be that handsome and have something like that happen to you.
I don’t say anything back, by the way. Detective Dulac’s the kind that Gran says talking back only encourages them.
“Gray,” Mr. Somerset says, like it’s a warning.
“What?” Detective Dulac’s doing his innocent look now. “It’s a good thing.”
“Why are you here?”
“Do you remember when he got hired? He was a skinny White kid spiking his hair up in front.”
Mr. Somerset rubs his forehead. He does that sometimes when he has a headache, like when we’ve been having one of our mentoring sessions and the sun is too bright or something. He says to Mr. Hazard, “Why is he here?”
“Not that it’s bad to be a skinny White guy,” Detective Dulac says. “Skinny White guys have those giant horse cocks.”
That’s when Mr. Somerset chokes on his Diet Pepsi.
“I’ll see him out,” Mr. Hazard says.
But now Detective Dulac is grinning, and he’s still watching me. I know my face is turning red—I can’t help that—but I stand there because anything else will only make it worse.
“He’s not skimping on leg days, either,” Detective Dulac says. “Are you, beefcake?”
“I guess not,” I say because sometimes you have to say something, even if it’s only going to make things worse.
“Good God, Gray,” Mr. Somerset says, and he still sounds like he’s choking on the Diet Pepsi.
“I’m just saying if you dropped him in the Pretty Pretty, it’d be like feeding time at SeaWorld.”
Mr. Hazard cocks his head. “Which tank?”
That takes the wind out of Detective Dulac’s sails for a minute. The thing with Mr. Hazard is you never know if he’s serious.
“Okay,” Mr. Somerset says. “Goodbye, Gray. I don’t know why you decided to drop in right now, but thank you for finding a way to make it excruciating for everyone.”
“Beefcake doesn’t mind,” Detective Dulac says. “Look at him, he’s eating it up.”
“Can you do something, please?” Mr. Somerset asks.
“Were you talking about the orcas?” Mr. Hazard asks.
Mr. Somerset gives him a look I’ve seen Gran give my dad before. “I remember a comment about feral detectives following me home. Well, you brought him into the house, so you can get rid of him.”
“Get rid of me? Bro!” But Detective Dulac looks like a big kid when Mr. Hazard takes his arm. “Slap a slutty mustache on him, and you’d have Grade A twink bait.”
“I’m so sorry,” Mr. Somerset says to me.
“Oh relax,” Detective Dulac says as Mr. Hazard tows him out of the room. His voice keeps floating back to us. “You’re not the first straight guy to discover he likes a dick in his mouth.” I think he’s talking to Mr. Hazard when he says, “Bro, seriously, what do you do for arm days?”
“Stop talking.”
“Jesus, what crawled up everybody’s ass today?”
“Asses,” Mr. Hazard says, his voice fading as they move toward the front of the house. “Plural. And have you considered trying not to be a poorly functioning nymphomaniac? A year of celibacy clearly hasn’t been enough.”
“Who said anything about celibacy? I’m not a monk. Bro, wait, wait, wait, I need your help—”
The front door opens and shuts. When Mr. Hazard comes back, he looks at Mr. Somerset for a moment and does a little shrug, like it’s not his fault. But Mr. Somerset keeps looking at him, so Mr. Hazard turns to me and says, “You could report him, you know. For sexual harassment. We’d be witnesses.”
“Ree.”
“We’d be delighted to be witnesses. I’d insist, actually.”
It makes me smile, but I shake my head. “He just likes to talk.”
“Maybe an anonymous report,” Mr. Hazard says, but mostly to himself, and you can tell he likes the idea.
“Did you want to join the mentoring team?” Mr. Somerset says.
“Abso-fucking-lutely not. I’m going to finish the laundry.”
He makes his way downstairs, and a few seconds later, he says something I can’t hear, and Colt starts laughing.
“Okay,” Mr. Somerset says. “Sorry about that.”
I shake my head.
“What were we talking about?”
“Volunteering at my gran’s church.”
“Right, well, you could definitely do that, but you might want to think about something you’re really passionate about. If you don’t care that much about the church, it’s going to come through, and you want people to see that what you’re doing matters to you personally.”
“I guess,” I say.
I must have sounded pretty glum because Mr. Somerset laughs.
“We can brainstorm some ideas. There are a couple of food pantries. And I know you’re good with kids, so we could talk to the high school, see if they have anything they need help with.
Maybe something you’ve got a family connection to. Besides the church, I mean.”
Mr. Hazard’s voice comes up the stairs. “You can volunteer at Gray’s nonprofit, the intimate partner violence one, since he’s clearly trying to rope John and me into helping.” A beat passes, and he adds, “That was a real mind-fuck of a sentence.”
Mr. Somerset’s eyes get a little wide, and he does this tiny shake of his head. “Yeah, definitely don’t do that.”