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  “I’m getting that. I’m picking up on that signal pretty clearly, in fact. You guys have what Shaw would call some freaked-the-fuck-out vibes. Shaw, am I right?”

  “I probably wouldn’t have said fuck because I’m a gentleman and because in a quasi-Akkadian gematria, it yields an extremely unfavorable number. But, yeah, you guys are giving off a very freaked-the-fuck-out vibe.”

  “Why do you think that is, Shaw?”

  Shaw sighed. “Probably because they’re hiding something.”

  Peter had frozen, his hands deep in the potting soil. Paul led the charge. “You guys have a lot of nerve, coming into our home and accusing us of hiding something. We were sorry to hear about what happened to Tucker, and we’d love to help—if there’s an issue with providing legal counsel, we could see about—”

  “Cut the shit,” North said. “This isn’t about paying for a lawyer. You’re not going to soothe your conscience that way.”

  “We don’t have anything to hide, and we don’t need to soothe—”

  “Paul, I said cut the shit.”

  Paul hesitated. Then he crossed to stand next to Peter. He stroked Peter’s hair, and Peter turned into him, pressing his face against Paul’s leg.

  “We don’t—” Paul tried.

  “We know. We already know. So you either get to tell us your side of it right now, and we’ll listen and hear you out, or we walk out of here and take what we know to the police.”

  “We’re your friends,” Shaw said, his voice gentle as he squeezed North’s wrist in a silent reminder. “We want what’s best for you. But we want to help Tucker too. And we can’t do any of it unless you tell us the truth.”

  Paul was frozen. Peter had been seized by the same paralysis. The city glittered like steel below them. From this height, it had the illusion of faint movement, spinning slowly like the rowel of a spur.

  Finally, Paul managed, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  North opened his mouth.

  Shaw squeezed his wrist again. “I don’t know why you’re acting like this Peter, Paul. You know us. We’re your friends.” Paul opened his mouth, and Shaw spoke over him: “Yes, North too, even though you’re still holding a grudge about your party. He’s the one who got your wallet back senior year, Peter. And Paul, when that guy wouldn’t stop following you, North ran him off. So you need to quit treating him like he’s a stranger who barged into your life.”

  Three hundred feet below them, the sounds of traffic laid down a base for the sudden, jangled fluting of wind chimes—they hung at the far end of the balcony, where Shaw had missed them earlier.

  “It’s…complicated,” Paul said.

  “Jesus.” North wiped his face. “If you guys ever decide to play poker, be sure to invite me. Maybe I could pay off a credit card or two. It’s hot as fuck out here. Let’s get some drinks. Let’s sit down. And then you guys tell us about the pump-and-dump cryptocurrency and any other ways you’ve been involved with Rik Slooves.”

  Peter pulled back from Paul’s leg. His face was wet. But he nodded, cleared his throat, and said, “Love, bring some drinks out here so I can keep working.”

  North and Shaw sat. Peter continued to turn the soil with his hands. Paul came back with iced tea and tall glasses, but he only poured for himself, North, and Shaw; Peter stayed at the planter.

  “All right,” North said. “Stalling just makes it harder. You bought into cryptocurrencies. Why?”

  “Because it was a sure thing,” Paul said with a shake of his head. “That’s what Tucker kept telling us: it was a sure thing. Didn’t he tell you that he recommended the investment to us? It was a new type of cryptocurrency, and it was still cheap. He said you and he had decided to sink your life savings into it.”

  “Jesus Christ,” North muttered.

  “Peter and I like to diversify. We’re comfortable,” which was a word Shaw had heard his parents and plenty of their friends use, the kind of word that rolled off the tongue for people in Clayton and Ladue and the Central West End, “but we like to keep a hand in. We’re both interested in the technology behind cryptocurrencies, especially blockchain. So we put in some money, and we set up a few workhorse computers as mining rigs.”

  “Mining?” North asked.

  “It’s a process,” Peter said, “that’s kind of hard to explain. A finite number of coins exist in most cryptocurrencies, so they’re a resource like a precious metal. And by having your computer do a certain kind of work, you can get rewarded with cryptocoins. But the work takes a substantial amount of computing power, and there’s an element of luck to it—again, like mining. Like mining, you can make a lot of money at it, but it’s not a sure thing.”

  “We know a few things about computers,” Paul said with a surprisingly boyish grin, “and it was a fun change of pace to set up the rigs and get them going.”

  “And what happened then?” North asked.

  “The crypto’s price went up, up, up. And then it started to fall. Tucker gave us a heads-up, and we sold. We did all right, although it wasn’t this kind of life-changing investment the way Tucker had talked about it.”

  “Tucker said you lost money. He said you were furious.”

  It was hard to tell in the day’s brilliance, but it looked like a flush was climbing Paul’s cheeks. “I was upset. I thought we were going to make a lot of money. The only reason we did all right was because we’d been mining. I—I didn’t tell Tucker that. I only told him we’d lost money on the investment, which was technically true.”

  Shaw took a sip of the tea, which was too sweet, leaving his teeth gritty with sugar. “Tucker also said he only involved you in one of these deals, but you recognized the term pump-and-dump when North used it a few minutes ago. Go ahead and tell us the rest of it.”

  A furrow appeared between Paul’s eyebrows. “I didn’t know the term, actually, but it’s self-explanatory, and when North said it, I knew immediately what he was talking about.”

  “What’s the problem?” North asked.

  “Well, I think someone is lying, and I don’t know if it’s Tucker or Rik.”

  “Years of marital bliss tell me it was Tucker.”

  “Why do you think someone was lying?” Shaw asked.

  Paul leaned back in his seat; he thumbed away condensation from the side of his glass. “Rik called us up out of the blue. He said Tucker had given him our names and suggested we might be interested in another investment opportunity, but that doesn’t sound like what Tucker told you. We hadn’t talked to Rik in, God, six or seven years. We knew him—he came to all those parties when he was separated from his wife, and it seemed like for a while, every time we turned around someone else was talking about sleeping with him.”

  “He was a predator,” Peter said bitterly. His hands, black with dirt, clenched fistfuls of soil. “He shouldn’t have been allowed to do that, to go after kids half his age without anybody batting an eye. Somebody should sue the college for letting that happen.”

  Paul shifted in his seat to rest a hand on Peter’s shoulder. After a moment, he said, “We were already together, so that was about the extent of our interactions with Rik. Then something happened with his son, and he got back together with his wife, and he stopped coming to parties and picking up young guys.”

  “What did you say when he called you?”

  “I said we weren’t interested. He was polite, but I could tell he was disappointed. That was the end of it. Or so I thought.” Paul directed a look at Peter, but Peter was staring down into the soil. “He called again, a week later, and asked us to come to Chicago. His treat. He wanted to talk to us about the investment, and he wanted to do it in person. He suggested a couple of days in the city, then the weekend at a cabin on the lake.” A dry smile touched his mouth but didn’t reach his eyes. “When he said cabin, he meant a chateau kind of thing. He sent pictures.”

  “Did you go?” Shaw asked.

  “I w
ent. Peter didn’t want to—”

  “I couldn’t go. I was busy with our business.”

  “Why did you go?” North tilted the glass of tea at the condo. “You’ve got a nice place. You’ve got your business. You spend two weeks on Mykonos every summer.”

  “Why, why, why,” Peter said to the soil.

  “Because I got greedy.” Paul was definitely flushed now. “I got stupid. I could tell you I was interested in the investment side of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, and that’s true, but I’d already gotten my knuckles slapped once. I should have learned my lesson. Instead, I did it all again.”

  “You invested in his next crypto recommendation?”

  Paul nodded. “I spent four days up there. I met with Rik, cryptocurrency experts, other people on his team. They were all smart, but they couldn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. In reality, it’s an investment like anything else. What convinced me was the high-rise condo, the car service, the dinners, the place on the lake. Rik said it was a sure thing; he told me Tucker had bungled the timing on the last one, and that’s why he was handling things personally. He was apologetic. He offered to compensate us, which he had to know I’d refuse.”

  Stretching out his legs, North took a long sip of the tea. Then he said, “Let me guess: it went badly.”

  “We lost big time.”

  “North always tells me it’s rude to ask, but I think this time it might be ok. How much?”

  Paul ducked his head.

  “Rounded up? A million fucking dollars,” Peter said. He pushed himself up from the planter. His hands were black. He looked like he wanted to say more—a lot more—but instead he turned and headed inside. Moments later, a door slammed.

  “Holy shit,” North said.

  “I was stupid,” Paul said. “I was so goddamn stupid.”

  Shaw swirled his too-sweet tea. He considered Paul: the devastation in his expression, the slumped shoulders, the way one hand clutched at the khaki shorts. “How long have you and Peter been fighting?”

  Paul made a noise that might have been a laugh or a sob. He wiped his eyes. “Is it that obvious?” After a few sniffles, he said, “Since March. That’s when the cryptocurrency tanked. Flatlined, really. And Rik wouldn’t return my calls. I even flew up to Chicago. He rented that damn place on the lake; I burst in on a Ghanaian family that was trying to have a nice weekend. Almost got myself arrested. And things got so, so much worse when Rik moved here. That night at Teddi’s, we didn’t know he was going to be here, and when Peter saw him, I honestly thought he might—”

  “Might what?” North asked, his words whipping away on the breeze.

  “Make a scene. I don’t know. Pick a fight.” Paul took a defiant gulp of his tea. “I don’t know.”

  “Kill him?”

  “God, don’t be dramatic, North. Of course not.”

  But the fear in his eyes gave the words the lie.

  “What happened after the party?”

  “We came home.”

  “And Peter—”

  “Don’t finish that question.” Paul’s voice was shaky, his knuckles white around the glass. “If you want to be our friends, don’t even ask. We were here all night. Both of us. Together.”

  A horn beep-beep-beeped down on the street. It might as well have been on TV.

  “I want you to watch something,” North said. “And I want you to tell me if this reminds you of anything.”

  Paul took a bracing swig of tea. He nodded.

  North played the video of Tucker walking in on Rik and the younger man. Paul flinched at the end, when Tucker started screaming, but otherwise he seemed interested rather than upset or afraid. When the video finished, he looked up and raised his eyebrows.

  “That looks bad for Tucker.”

  “The subject line in the email was ‘Blast from the past?’” North pocketed the phone. “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It was sent from an anonymous email address.”

  “I assume you’re saying that because we know a lot about computers. Anyone can set up an anonymous email address, and anyone with half a brain can figure out how to send it with their real IP address hidden.”

  “That doesn’t remind you of anything from college?” Shaw asked. “Or after college, for that matter? You don’t know of anyone walking in on Rik while he was having sex with someone else?”

  “It sounds like his wife. If you’re talking about the past, she’d be the one who’d be jealous and upset, right?”

  “What about after college?” North asked.

  “I told you: I didn’t have any contact with Rik after he reconciled with his wife. I didn’t have much contact with him when they were separated. I definitely didn’t keep up on his personal life after he moved to Chicago. If someone wanted to hurt Rik because he was cheating…” He trailed off; something kindled in his eyes.

  “If someone wanted to hurt Rik?” Shaw prompted.

  “Not because of cheating, but God, I completely forgot.” Paul straightened in his seat. He looked like a man raised from the dead—or a drowning man thrown a life preserver. “Rufus. Rufus has wanted to get back at Rik for years. Years and years. Rufus hates him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Rik got him expelled.”

  Chapter 21

  IN THE GTO, they headed to the Southampton payday-loan business that Rufus owned and operated. But when they got to Payday Pickup, the acne-speckled teen behind the bulletproof glass couldn’t help them—or wouldn’t. Rufus wasn’t in. That’s all he would say.

  Their phone calls to Rufus went to voicemail.

  His Creve Coeur McMansion was dark and silent.

  “Well, Shaw, my bantling boy,” North said, back in the GTO with the air blasting. “Fuck.”

  “I thought Rufus got expelled for cheating,” Shaw said.

  “Who knows what the fuck really happened? These people are supposed to be our best friends, but they might as well be strangers. Peter and Paul blowing a million dollars on a bad investment? Rufus getting expelled for something with Rik? Percy and that weird voicemail? And Tucker. Fuck me. Every time I finally think I understand—” He broke off, hating the quaver in the last word.

  Shaw rubbed his knee. “You can talk about Tucker if you want. It doesn’t bother me.”

  North shook his head.

  “Then I change my mind. It makes me jealous. I go crazy. I’ll have to show you all the wicked things I’ll let you do to my body to keep your attention on me.”

  Against his will, a smile quirked the corner of North’s mouth. He reached over, cupping Shaw’s face with one hand, his thumb riding the crest of Shaw’s cheekbone. Then he pulled Shaw’s hair.

  “North! Jesus! Oh my God, I think I’ve got a bald spot now.”

  “That kind of wicked?”

  “No, you stupid horse’s ass!” Shaw pounded him once in the chest. Then again. Then he went back to massaging his scalp. “Fun, sexy, tantric wicked. Not playground-bully wicked. What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “Guess I got my signals crossed.”

  They tried Percy, just for shits, but the receptionist at Herbert and Galleli said he was working from home. When they called, they got voicemail. When they went to his Washington Ave loft, the strip under the door remained dark, but North could have sworn he heard someone moving around inside. No one came to the door, and after five minutes of knocking, a frazzled white lady opened the door on the other side of the hall and bitched them out to hell and back.

  “Change of plans,” North said, rubbing his face when they were back in the GTO. The air conditioner was struggling to keep up with the swampy Midwestern heat. “You’re not going to like this.”

  “If it’s more of the bullying wicked things, I’ll let you do some of them, but only if you also do that thing I like where you’re all the way in me and then you—”

  “Pap
erwork.”

  “North, no.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, please. I’ll be nice to Pari for a whole week. I won’t borrow any of her icebox cake, and I won’t share her frozen sherbet, and I won’t go halfsies on her lattes.”

  “First of all, you can only call it borrowing and sharing and going halfsies if the other person agrees. Second of all, yes, paperwork. We’ll try finding those dickwads again later tonight.”

  Shaw moaned—whinged—all the way back to the office.

  The puppy was ecstatic to see them. Pari was less ecstatic. North and Shaw did paperwork. More correctly, North did paperwork while Shaw finished setting up some of the promotional materials in the front office. Pari listened to someone called Lil Nas X so loudly that the chronometric time-travel agent who occupied the office above them stomped on the floor. North asked Pari to turn it down. She turned it up. He said a prayer to the water stain in the hallway that Shaw thought was an appearance of the Virgin, and then he took a few long looks at his ex-boyfriend, who was stretched out on the floor, as he sorted flyers. The drawstring shorts were riding up again. The inside of his thigh was white against the rest of his long, coppery legs.

  When Pari went home early, after an overwrought and (North hoped) fake excuse having something to do with Truck’s niblings and a circumcision party, North dragged Shaw into the office.

  “I was right in the middle of something,” Shaw said, trying to look serious, although laughter danced in his eyes.

  North pushed him down over the desk. He dragged the drawstring shorts to Shaw’s knees and used one boot to force them down the rest of the way. He got the lube and a condom. He prepped both of them. He took his time, until Shaw was moaning and rutting against the desk. The fuck was quick and spectacular, both of them getting off in minutes, and then North lay across Shaw’s back, sweat pasting them together.

  Shaw made a happy noise, and North kissed his ear.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been a shit to you,” North whispered.

  Shaw found his hand and brought North’s knuckles to his mouth.