Orientation (Borealis Investigations Book 1) Read online

  “No. I can’t. I cannot do that, do you understand? If I talk to the police, it’s official. If they catch him, if they arrest him, if they prosecute him, there will be a trial. It’s all going to be public—”

  “That’s not necessarily true,” North began.

  Matty talked over him, his voice rising. “Do you know what my dad would do? My dad would kill me. He would kill me with his bare hands. And my mom. Do you have any idea—no. No. I am not going to the police. I’ve got money.” He fumbled in his pocket, produced a wallet and began stacking crisp, hundred dollar bills on his knee. “I can pay you. I know you don’t do anything for free, but I can pay. If you give me some time, I can pay double—”

  “No,” North said.

  Shaw’s hand closed reflexively around Matty’s. Then, forcing his breath to softness, Shaw stood. “Matty, I need to talk to North alone for a minute.”

  “I said no to this Shaw.” North leaned forward, elbows on knees, his gaze pointedly excluding Matty. “We’re not doing this.”

  “Matty, step outside.”

  Shuffling the hundreds into his hand, Matty stood, his gaze rocketing between the two men for a minute, and then he went to the door. As he opened it, Pari’s voice swam in from the outer office.

  “Shaw, God help you if you threw away my Oikos—oh. Hello.”

  “Umm,” Matty said.

  “Pari,” Shaw called through the door, “Matty is a client. Could you make sure he’s comfortable while North and I discuss something?”

  Pari drifted into the doorway like the smoke from a burning house. Her dark hair was down, spilling over bare shoulders, and today her bindi was a rich vermilion. She eyed Matty and immediately shifted into professional mode. “Good morning.”

  “Hi,” Matty said.

  “You’re a client?”

  “No,” North said.

  “Yes,” Shaw and Matty said.

  “Would you like to come with me? I can get you some coffee or tea. Maybe a snack.”

  “A snack sounds great,” Shaw said.

  Pari ignored him, smiling and taking Matty by the arm. “Can I tell you something? My boyfriend is driving me crazy. He’s cute, but I can’t ever get him to do anything cute with his hair.” She was already walking him out of the office. “I really need you to tell me what you’re doing with yours. Is it product? He can’t stand it when I talk to him about product, but I really think that’s what he needs.”

  “About that snack,” Shaw called after her.

  Pari flipped him the finger behind her back, still guiding Matty into the outer office.

  “Ok, Pari,” Shaw said, trying to project the proper amount of authority. “That’s great. Just get him coffee, will you?”

  “I don’t want coffee,” Matty began. “I just want to know if you’re taking the case—”

  Shaw pushed the door shut and slumped against it in case Matty—or Pari—had any ideas about coming into the office. He let his chin drop to his chest. For a moment, he was with Carl again, in the alley, with the blood running into his socks, and the pain in his groin like sodium metal about to incandesce, and Carl wasn’t moving, Carl had his head tucked into his shoulder the way he had once when Shaw had caught him napping. The pain that night in the alley had been physical; the pain now was psychological. But it was no less pain. Be here, Shaw told himself. Breathe.

  When Shaw brought up his head, North was looking at him.

  “Maybe you can’t see him.”

  And for a moment, Shaw thought North was talking about dating, like he was prohibiting Shaw from seeing Matty. “What?”

  “Maybe it’s a bad angle.”

  Shaw shook his head.

  “The camera. The blackmail tape. Maybe it’s like that free porn you like to watch, the amateur stuff people upload where they’ve just got the camera on a tripod and all you see is an ass bouncing up and down.”

  “I do not watch pornography.”

  North’s eyebrow went up.

  “That was research.”

  “You were researching in your compression shorts. With the lights off. And your hand down—”

  “I don’t know why we can’t take this case. He’s being blackmailed, and he’s just a kid. He needs help.”

  “You know why we can’t take this.”

  “No, I don’t. I’m not saying we should—”

  “Matty wants us to steal the recording. Or destroy it. And that means breaking any number of laws—”

  “I’m not saying we should do anything illegal—”

  “—and even if we did, there’s no guarantee we’d destroy every copy, and that guy might just release it anyway to screw Matty once we think we’re done.”

  “I’m not saying that we steal. But—”

  “You shouldn’t work this case, Shaw. If I still had my license, if I could handle it solo, maybe. But not you.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t. Don’t make me say this.”

  “Because Matty is attracted to me?”

  North’s eyes narrowed; the blue puffiness around one almost pinched it shut. “That’s interesting.”

  “You know what I mean. You think I can’t be professional—”

  “Because of Carl.”

  The alley. The blood. The pain that hooked from low on Shaw’s waist down, between his legs.

  “This isn’t anything like that.”

  “It was your first date, Shaw. The first date you ever went on.”

  “Not the—”

  “The first date with a guy you cared about. And some maniac cornered you in an alley, damn near killed you, and killed your first crush.”

  Shaw was amazed at how stable his voice was. “He wasn’t my first crush.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “This isn’t the same. No, North. It isn’t. And even if it were, I’m fine. That was years ago. I’m better. I’m healthy. I’ve processed it, and I’ve moved on.”

  North mouthed processed it like he was licking a battery terminal.

  “I know the laws as well as you do. I know what we can do to help Matty. And I know what we can’t do.”

  “If you’d just—”

  “This is why we started this place. This, North. Right here. To help people that nobody else would help. I don’t like the fact that this kid is so afraid of coming out that he can’t go to the police, but I can’t change that. I can’t convince him his life would be a hundred times better if he’d drop the act and just be himself. But I can help him with this problem, right here, right now.”

  “Shaw, I’m telling you—”

  “And we need clients. We need work. We’ve been dark for months, North. Nothing on the radar. And now we’ve got work, we’ve got a client who’s begging us to help, and you’re going to, what? Send him packing and turn off the lights again? We might as well just close the business and go home for good.”

  One of those typical North smiles flared and died like a struck match. “You do realize you live here?”

  “I know that.”

  “And you can’t really go home because you’re already home.”

  “Well. Yeah. But it would have ruined the point. And I was making a really good speech.”

  “You were.” North got up, stretched, and then settled the Carhartt jacket in place again. “This is you picking up a stray again. You know that, right?”

  “He’s not a stray.”

  “Sure he is. You’ll tell me if this is too much?”

  “Yeah, of course. I’ve made some really good gains with my therapist, North. I mean, I’ve done a lot of processing. I’m moving forward with my life.”

  “And you’re doing yoga now.”

  “Yeah, right. Exactly. Yoga is really going to help me live in the moment.”

  “And it’s important to live in the moment.”

  “Yeah, really important. In fact, I booked us both a session on Saturday at
this Bikram place that I think—”

  “I’m not going to that. Which moment?”

  “What? I already paid for the—”

  “Which moment is it important to live in?”

  “Well, that’s the whole point—”

  “Could it be any moment? Like, could it be the moment Matty was clutching at you, crying on you, falling on you?” Another match-head flare of a smile. “Could it be the moment he grabbed your hand and you chubbed up?”

  “I didn’t chub up. I’m a professional. I’m a professional detective. And Matty’s just a kid, he’s barely—I mean, why are we even talking about this? There’s nothing to—I don’t even know how we got on this topic.”

  “The moment. That moment you popped a boner so hard you just about tore through your nice, new yoga pants. And then what would we do on Saturday?”

  “I, um. I have another pair. They were having a sale. And I’m so glad you said ‘we’ because the class fee isn’t refundable and I really think you’ll—”

  “No, that was just a figure of speech. I’m definitely not doing yoga with you. I was just pointing out the potential problem of that raging hard-on.”

  Shaw’s throat and mouth were dry. Very dry. “I don’t have a raging—” Then, “What you said, that didn’t happen, so you can just drop it, ok?”

  “Sure.”

  “Great.”

  North gestured to the door. “After you?”

  “I’m.” Shaw twisted in his seat. “I’m going to sit here for a minute. To do some thinking.”

  “Because you’re a professional detective.”

  “Right.”

  “You are pathetic.”

  Shaw sighed. “I know.”

  Chapter 4

  North and Shaw left the Borealis office at six, when the April sun was just a drowning ember on the horizon. Matty didn’t have any more information about the man who had filmed him, but he paid their retainer in cash. The cash was all North wanted out of the boy; North wasn’t sure he would have trusted any more information about the case. He didn’t like Matty Fennmore. Shaw had been right—brutally right—about their need for a client, and so North accepted the fact that they were, for the moment, employed by the boy. But North didn’t have to like it.

  Their office, located in the house that Shaw owned courtesy of a trust fund left by his grandfather—against his parents’ wishes—had a garage, but North never used it anymore. Part of it was the inconvenience of doubling back through the alley. Part of it was parking his maroon 1990 Dodge Grand Caravan next to Shaw’s sleek little Mercedes SLC 300. The juxtaposition was painful enough, but what was worse was the way it reminded North of the Chevelle. Tucker had been right about selling it; they had needed to sell it to pay all the legal fees. But there was something offensive about seeing the Grand Caravan in the Chevelle’s place, and street parking was plentiful in Benton Park, a small neighborhood on the south side of St. Louis—and North didn’t worry about anyone jacking the rusted-out minivan.

  “I thought you said you were going to get something else,” Shaw said as they reached the Grand Caravan. He yanked on the latch meaningfully—the door only opened from inside. “I thought you told me you and Tucker were looking last weekend.”

  North climbed into the driver’s seat, reached across, and opened the door. “Tucker was busy with work.”

  “Tucker’s always busy with work.”

  Let it go, North told himself. Let it slide. But he didn’t. He said, “Anyway, this is fine for now.”

  “You hate this car.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “It smells like there was a murder in here. And like wet dog. Oh. It smells like someone murdered a wet dog in here.”

  “Roll your window down.”

  Shaw did, and he made an assholishly exaggerated effort at cranking the manual window. When he’d finished, he slumped back in the seat, panting.

  North pushed on the gas a little harder than he should have. The Grand Caravan lurched forward, gurgled, and stalled halfway into the street.

  “Don’t say anything,” North growled.

  Shaw just lay there, panting and fanning himself like he’d been building the pyramids.

  With another gurgle, the minivan came back to life, and North urged it north toward Gravois. “It’s those toothpick arms you’ve got. You’ve got as much muscle as a chicken bone.”

  “Chickens have muscles. They’re fast. Have you ever tried to catch one?”

  “I said chicken bone, not chicken. And you wouldn’t have so much trouble with the window if you ever picked up anything heavier than a yoga mat.”

  Shaw grinned. “Why would I do that when I have you around? Big, steel-toe, boot-wearing, floor-stomping, hard-hat, blue-collar guy like you? Fight all day and fuck all night, right?”

  “Not since Tuck turned thirty,” North muttered.

  Shaw’s hazel eyes were bright, and something worked its way over the sharp features of his face. It was his typical attempt at restraining himself whenever Tucker came up in conversation. All he said was, “I think you could get a decent auto loan if you wanted. I could go with you. To look at cars, I mean.”

  Thumbing his wedding band, North grunted and focused on the road, taking them away from Benton Park and toward the luxury of the Central West End. Shaw’s words stung when North knew they hadn’t been meant that way. They stung because North had thought the exact same thing: take out a loan, buy something semi decent. Not something like the Chevelle. But something that hadn’t witnessed what smelled like the equivalent of eight stray cats giving live birth in the backseat. Tucker had said no.

  And Tucker had every right to say no. After all, Tucker had stuck by North through the worst of it. Tucker had stuck around when most guys would have pulled up stakes, filed for divorce, and run for the hills. Tucker had stuck when the bills had piled up, when the attorneys ran up ungodly hours, when court dates got pushed back, when it came to the appeal.

  Gravois to Arsenal. Arsenal to Kingshighway. Some asshole had double parked on the south side of Tower Grove Park, and North jacked the wheel to the left. The Caravan lurched and spat and hissed. It felt like he was driving the equivalent of a cement truck. Not that the Chevelle had been the most responsive car in the world, but at least the Chevelle had muscle, had looks, had style. It all went back to that one bad night in Clayton.

  North cranked his own window down; April air, humid and green from the park, flowed over him. His thoughts tangled together the mess that was Matty Fennmore and that night in Clayton. True, North hadn’t wanted to take Matty’s job because he worried about how it would affect Shaw. North hadn’t wanted to take the job because he didn’t like Matty, didn’t like the way Matty touched Shaw, didn’t like the way Shaw’s eyes glowed like a cat’s in the dark. But most of all, North hadn’t wanted to take the job because it would be the first job on which he, North, was a sidekick. His license was suspended until the appeal was granted, and he was relegated to trailing Shaw like a dog on a leash.

  And that, more than anything else, was why North had bitten the bullet and agreed to take the case. It hadn’t been Shaw’s speech about going home and turning off the lights that had persuaded North, not really. It had been the realization that he, North McKinney, was a cowardly bastard. And it was the recognition that this situation was entirely of his own making.

  At this hour, on the stretch leading up to I-44, Kingshighway was a parking lot, and the April air soured as it carried exhaust into the Caravan. North grimaced. He eyed the low thistle of skyline. He thought about Clayton.

  That whole night when North’s life had turned to shit was off kilter. The background details were clear: North remembered the humidity of the early summer evening sticking his white shirt to his chest, the purple haze of sky, the diffuse granularity of the security floodlights in the moisture-rich air. But the night should have had a focus. A center. It should have been centered on Marvin Han
son, the guy who jumped alimony and child support and had broken his ex-wife’s arm on his last visit. The night should have been centered on the wrecking bar in his hand, on the whistle of metal through the air as Marvin swung and dug a nasty trench across North’s cheek. It should have been centered on the Sig P238, on the way it bucked in North’s hand, and on the cheap, Halloween-store effect of blood splotching the front of Hanson’s tank. Only it hadn’t been an effect. It hadn’t been a cheap, Halloween-store trick.

  Instead, though, that humid night spun on the wrong axis. It spun around Shaw. It spun around his lean frame spilled at the bottom of the parking garage stairs, a bloody abrasion on his temple, his hazel eyes open-shut-open like a telegraph North couldn’t read. The whole night spun around what seeing Shaw like that, thinking, if only for an instant, He’s dead, had done to North: gone through him like a backhoe, ripping up everything in North right down to the bone. The rest of the night—Hanson, the wrecking bar, the bloody furrow under North’s eye, the Sig, and the trick flower of blood—all took place second stage. Even when the criminal charges showed up. Even when Hanson pulled North into a civil suit. Even as the suit dragged on, the bills growing like weeds. Even through all of that, at night, sleeping on the couch when Tuck wouldn’t let him in their room, through all of it, North could only see the tangled limbs, Shaw’s delicate frame at the bottom of the cement steps, and his breath would turn into fish hooks, and he knew he’d shoot Marvin Hanson if he had it to do over again.

  “—no carbs for the next thirty days, so I hope you don’t mind that I threw out your Bread Co. gift cards.”

  The Caravan was rolling past Barnes Jewish, the major trauma center that took up several blocks. The hospital was a vertical maze of skywalks and towers and brick and glass. In that glass, the April buds of dogwood and cherry trees in Forest Park wavered like ghosts. The park, which faced the hospital, was the heart of the city: it held the Zoo, the Art Museum, the Missouri History Museum, the Muny, the Science Center, and several other, smaller features. It had hosted the 1904 World’s Fair. On one end stood Washington University; on the other North and Shaw’s alma mater, Chouteau College—the university’s little sister, like Barnard and Columbia. And here, growing out of the college and the hospital and the park, was the Central West End. Here was where they would find Allure, the bar Matty had cruised.