Breakfall (21 page)

Still fully dressed, Sean rolled out of bed and beeped the perimeter off.

They sat in the kitchen while Sean prepared mint tea for both of them.

“So what happened to you on this fine Saturday morning?” he inquired, noting the way Mark’s face was drawn. There was thickness to his left arm and a dark stain spread on the sleeve of his brown shirt.

“Oh, just a take-down. I’m working a case up in Alewife, one of those collaborative things, and somebody took a potshot at me but mostly missed.”

“Mostly?” Sean’s eyebrows shot up in alarm. “Mark, are you shot?”

“Just a flesh wound. Happens, you know. Can I have some honey in that?”

“Sure.” Sean scrambled to reach the plastic honey jar. “You shouldn’t have come. You should have gone straight to bed.”

Mark grinned. “You know, this job sucks most of the time. You get shot at, people call you names, it’s underpaid… but every so often, something like this happens. Man, I live for stories like this!”

“Like what?”

“Like what happened here tonight.” The shit-eating grin just wouldn’t leave Mark’s face.

“They caught two guys, Mark. I don’t see what’s so funny about that.”

“Yeah, except they caught the wrong two guys. When this lovely tea is all finished and you reset your infamous doomsday machine, you and I have to go to the station. You can convince my superiors that neither Asbjorn nor Dud is, in fact, the perps they’re after.”

W
ET
GRASS
pressed against Asbjorn’s face as he braced for another kick. A shot of pain lanced through his sore side.

“I’m not resisting arrest! Just fucking arrest me already!”

His voice was drowned out by the sound of a piercing siren from within Sean’s building, followed by the report of two gunshots.

Rough hands grabbed his wrists and cuffed him.

He heard two pairs of booted feet run, presumably trying to reach the source of disturbance within the structure. The third pair of boots was right outside his field of vision, and a knee dug into the small of his back.

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of law….” The words, familiar from television shows, hit him like yet another kick in the stomach, and time stretched to forever before he was sitting in the back of a police cruiser.

Within the hour, they were at the police station. He saw Dud’s tall figure uncoil, leaving the confines of the police cruiser ahead of him. At least he didn’t seem to be moving like he was hurt. Asbjorn shifted and winced.

Fucking rookies. Can’t handle the responsibility. Can’t follow fucking procedure.

Asbjorn was put in a small interrogation room with a mirror. He scowled at it.

At least half an hour passed before the beat-up, gray steel door opened and two plainclothes cops came in. “Heya, bud.” The taller one looked him up and down. His graying brown hair was overgrown, curling into ill-kempt locks that fell along his symmetrical, scruffy face. He didn’t look like a cop.

Undercover
, Asbjorn thought.

“You’re charged with resisting arrest and with an attempt to break and enter.” The tall guy leaned his hip against the steel table. “Wanna shed some light on that?”

Asbjorn felt pain lance through him again as he straightened in the hard, metal chair. “Asbjorn Lund. I require medical assistance. Your officers probably rebroke my rib.”

“I’m Detective Sergeant Hastings. I’ve been here for some time, and I’ll determine whether my men did any harm to you or not. First you answer my questions, asshole.”

Asbjorn was transported back a few years. Hastings’s face swam before his defocused eyes. He breathed shallow, careful breaths, centering himself. “This is Mark Falwell’s case. I’m willing to talk to him.”

“Detective Falwell isn’t available. You’ll talk to us, bud.”

Name, rank, serial number.

Asbjorn stared ahead. “It’s either Mark or an attorney, sergeant.”

“Okay.” Hastings took a deep breath. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Not ten minutes later, Sergeant Hastings entered the room again, his face unreadable. “Mark’ll be coming later. He vouches for you. That doesn’t mean you ain’t an asshole, though.” Hastings stripped off his blazer and tossed it over the chair, revealing a short-sleeve polo under his shoulder holster. His slender, muscle-roped arms were freckled and bore thin scars. A partially obscured tattoo gave Asbjorn a clue as to the man’s past.

“For a Marine, I’d have thought your men would be better trained, Hastings.”

Hastings’s eyes met Asbjorn’s lazily. “Oh yeah? And what would you know about that?”

“The Marines talk a good talk, but it’s the Navy where things are shipshape.” Asbjorn grinned. “I’d bet
my
old unit wouldn’t be losing their cool, beating up a guy they just arrested.”

Hastings looked him up and down. It felt like minutes before he broke the intrigued silence. “So tell me about that alleged broken rib of yours.”

Not much later, Asbjorn sat in the visitor’s chair of Hastings’s cramped office, chasing two ibuprofen capsules with a cup of acrid, lukewarm coffee.

“Wanna see a doctor?”

“No.”

“Wanna press charges?”

“Yeah.” Asbjorn’s bright blues lifted to Hastings’s languid stare. “I’d love to press charges and have your men suspended, ’cept if I do that, the case will make its way into the papers. Once that happens, Sean’s case will become public, and the perp will go after him again.”

“Sean…?”

“Gallaway. The student whose room that was. My… friend I was just checking on.”

“Friend, eh? Navy has got a bit of a reputation that way.” Hastings’s mouth twitched in a barely suppressed smile.

“You have a problem with that?”

Their eyes met again, and Hastings shook his head. “Nah… but his case is something of a sensation ’round here, y’know. This perp’s been floating ’round for, what, three years? And this Gallaway kid’s the first one to step up and do the right thing.” Hastings shrugged apologetically. “We feel kinda protective of him. He’s our only link.”

“If you feel so fucking protective, you may keep in mind that he hates being protected. If it had been up to me, he’d have been staying at my place.”

If there was one thing Asbjorn didn’t handle well, it was embarrassment. He hated the feeling of warmth on his cheeks and the sudden fullness in his chest. He hated the way his airways constricted, leaving him stranded with a progressively reddening forehead and cheeks.

Right then, he started to feel just that.

His thwarted effort to do good. The disastrous arrest. An undeserved police beating. Having to control himself and not hit back. Curling in a fetal position, protecting his recently broken rib. Feeling like an idiot. Almost admitting to a relationship—with another guy.

To another guy.

To a Marine, for Chrissake.

The silence stretched until it broke. Hastings reached for the bookshelf behind him. He removed a massive Departmental Regulations Handbook and pulled out a small bottle of Johnnie Walker Red housed behind the thick volume.

He cocked his eyebrow. “Want some?”

“Yeah.”

Asbjorn watched as Hastings poured a bit into two coffee mugs and shoved one across the desk toward him. They raised the whiskey in a silent toast. It went down hot and rough and sweet. The pain of it was a welcome distraction from his pain elsewhere.

“You can’t protect him like he was a girl.” Hastings’s words came out of nowhere.

Asbjorn’s head snapped up. “I don’t treat him like a girl.” His tone was defensive.

“Hey, just sayin’. I had a case just last year. Two guys on the force, they got together. Hey—no problem. Except they were partners. We do have rules against fraternization—regardless of gender—but the captain decided to turn a blind eye, just to see how they handled it. They stopped working together well. Had to have them separated. You know why?”

“Necking on stakeouts?”

Hastings shot him a disgusted look. “No… they were pretty low-key about it, ’cept they wouldn’t let the other take any risks. They were so fucking overprotective of one another they fought to take the bullet for one another instead of just taking cover. Almost succeeded, too.”

Asbjorn let the words sink in. It seemed plausible. “I dunno how to act around another guy. It’d be easier if he were a chick.”

Hastings knocked his drink back and shrugged. “Only so much I can help you with. I could tape up your ribs.”

“Maybe it’s not broken.”

“Maybe I wanna check.”

As Asbjorn eased out of his button-down flannel shirt so Hastings could poke around, his thoughts were with Sean. Maybe he really was unreasonably protective. Maybe Sean needed breathing room as much as Asbjorn did.

Knowing that didn’t make doing the right thing any easier.

M
ARK
PULLED
Sean through the door of the police station.

“Who’s in charge of Lund and Seevey?”

“Hastings.”

Mark nodded to the dispatcher, waving Sean along. “C’mon, let’s go! All I seem to be doing recently is getting your buddies outta jail.”

Mark knocked on the doorframe of Hastings’s office, and Sean took in the scene: Asbjorn, shirtless, the sergeant examining a series of deep and developing bruises on his torso, and a bottle of whiskey on the desk. “We’re here. Hey, where’s Seevey?”

“He passed out in his cell. It’s quiet there, so I figured I’d let him sleep.”

“And this guy?” Mark’s eyes didn’t quite meet Asbjorn’s.

“Ah… a misunderstanding of sorts. The boys thought he was our perp and got carried away. He thought the boys were the perp, and he got carried away too. He got worked over a bit trying not to resist arrest. So they say.”

Sean was pissed off something fierce. He’d told Bjorn he’d be fine. He’d discouraged Bjorn from cosseting him. Asbjorn’s fears were unfounded and ridiculous. Sean was capable of protecting himself and resented any insinuation to the contrary. And now his sleep was disturbed and his strobe light got shot up by the police, and he had to accompany Mark to get Asbjorn and Dud out of the clink.

He edged into the room behind Mark, looking over his shoulder. Sean’s angry scowl was wiped off his face at the sight before him. The expanse of well-muscled, pale flesh showed extensive bruises and lacerations up and down Asbjorn’s torso. The tall policeman—Sean remembered him in an onrush of memories—pressed his fingers against Asbjorn’s ribs.

“That hurt?”

“Yeah… but not like it’s broken.”

“All right, then. We all lucked out.”

Sean watched his friend wince in pain. His stomach flipped in an onrush of déjà vu.
And this happened how, exactly?

“Asbjorn.” Sean eased his way into the room, nodding to Sergeant Hastings. He crouched next to Asbjorn’s chair and looked up into haunting blue eyes. He put his hand on Asbjorn’s arm for balance. “Are you okay? What happened?”

“It’s nothing.” Asbjorn didn’t meet his gaze. His long arm reached for the coffee mug and he tipped it up to his lips, draining its contents.

Sean turned to Sergeant Hastings. “How did this happen?”

“Misunderstandings occasionally do occur when two parties try to protect the same person.” Hastings’s lips quirked up. “No charges will be pressed. Your friend here feels it would attract public attention. That would be bad, considering the threats that have already been made against you.”

Sean straightened. He wanted to embrace Asbjorn, chew him out, apologize, kiss him, take him home, care for him. He wanted to nurture and protect and do all those things Bjorn had allowed him to do when he was injured only a couple of weeks ago.

He wanted to love him.

Yet all he could do was just stand there, motionless, his heart melting with unexpressed emotion.

A
SBJORN
GLANCED
in Sean’s direction. Along with whiskey, he had the bitter taste of defeat and humiliation in his mouth. “I think we all better turn in. Thank you for coming in to identify me.”

Sudden sadness gripped him. He wanted his sunshine back. He wanted to hold him, nuzzle the top of the perpetual halo on his head, run his hands up and down his back, his sides… just hold him.

But he couldn’t. His sunshine, being a man, needed his space.

Asbjorn stood. “Thanks for the drink and the company, sergeant. Gimme a call so I can return the favor someday.”

Hastings grinned. “Sure will.”

He saw Sean bristle, and sighed.

“Mark, can I get a lift to my place?” Asbjorn felt exhaustion descend upon him.

“Sure. We can drop off Sean as well.”

Asbjorn felt the silence spread.

When in doubt… ask.

“Where would you like to be dropped off, Sean?”

Sean seemed to hesitate. After all, Asbjorn was not exactly extending a heartfelt invitation. There was no contact between them, not even a proper meeting of the eyes. Asbjorn was known to need space.

“My place is fine, thanks. I wouldn’t want to impose.”