Hard Line Read online

  He couldn’t let Ruby see the blood.

  He stood up and let himself out without speaking.

  And froze in the hallway. He could smell diri kole cooking, the thyme and garlic scents familiar and normally delicious, and hear his other siblings downstairs talking to Papa, and he realized he’d lost a fair bit of time. It was time to eat. It was dinnertime, and Manman was coming upstairs, saying, “There you are. I’ve been—” Then her gaze went from his face to his shirt, and that was the end of the quiet.

  Later he would remember this too, although this memory never made it past his lips to anyone else’s ears: his father looming over him, blue nitrile gloves on his hands, which clamped down on the wound in Tobias’s arm with thick cushions of gauze, his head jerking up when Marie began shrieking at the sight of her bloody scissors in the sink in the bathroom. Tobias would always remember the way Papa dropped into nearly inaudible, trembling Kreyòl. “Kisa ki rive ou?”

  What happened to you, he asked, bewildered, as if he couldn’t comprehend that it was Tobias’s choice turning the hall carpet red, Tobias who had acted.

  * * *

  When they got back from the hospital hours later, his brothers and sisters were in bed already, and Manman was waiting on the sofa in the light of a single lamp, her bare feet tucked up underneath her, a closed book resting on the arm of the chair—something about watercolors, a recent interest—her reading glasses dangling from the chain around her neck. Nadège Alcide rose and cupped his shoulders, holding him at arm’s length long enough to survey his face. Despite the lines of weariness at the corners of her eyes, she was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. When he was little, he’d thought she must be envied even by the great, perfect loa Erzulie Freda, Vodou goddess of love—a dangerous idea, for Erzulie could be jealous. It had been years before he’d broken the habit of whispering apologies to her image whenever he passed by the painting of the Rada loa—the good spirits—in his papa’s study.

  For a moment none of them spoke, and the ticking clock on the mantelpiece was the only sound. It reminded him of the guidance counselor’s office.

  “I’m okay, Manman.”

  He meant it. He’d lost that manic energy and felt like himself again, if a bit slower and stupider. He could feel Papa watching him, categorizing him, searching for a definition for this. His family often joked that Andre Alcide was half computer, capable of tracking a million bits of data, a million facts and diagnoses, but it had never felt truer than now, when Tobias knew he was a problem to be solved.

  Perhaps that wasn’t fair.

  He was very tired.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Non, non,” she murmured, and pulled him into a hug. Her eyes were damp and red when she finally let him go, and he dropped his gaze to the carpet rather than see her hurt.

  “Sit.” She gestured at the armchair, sat on the sofa, and took a deep breath. “Better to do this now.” His papa circled the coffee table to sit beside her.

  “Do what?” Tobias asked.

  “This.” She slid a packet of papers toward him.

  “Woodbury Residential Treatment Center.” He flipped through the pages, catching phrases like troubled teens and housed in cottages and intensive, individualized therapy. “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s a facility. They help boys who’ve been struggling with—”

  “You’re sending me away?” he whispered.

  “We’re getting you help,” Papa corrected. “The psychologist we met with at the hospital believes, and we agree, that inpatient treatment is called for. This place, Woodbury, it’s for teenagers who are struggling. They have psychiatrists there, but it isn’t a mental hospital, strictly speaking. No one will know why you’re going. This doesn’t have to affect your future.”

  “I don’t... I don’t need help. I’m sorry about what I did. But I’m not going to do it again. I didn’t mean to.”

  “What you did to your arm is a symptom of a much bigger problem,” Papa said. “I believe you that you weren’t trying to kill yourself, but that doesn’t mean that we can ignore this. We’ve got to treat the underlying cause.”

  “I’m not a disease.”

  “We can’t be cavalier about this, Toby,” Manman interjected.

  “Please don’t call me that.”

  Her lips tightened. “I apologize.” She exchanged a look with Papa, who nodded encouragement. “Tobias, you have to understand that the choices you’re making aren’t good for you.”

  “The choices I’m making,” he repeated. “It feels like you’re the ones making all the choices.”

  “Do you know what it felt like to see you bleeding like that, to find your blood in the bathroom after you went to the hospital? After everything that Ruby has been through, can you imagine how upsetting that was for her?” Her voice broke and Papa put a hand on her arm.

  “I’m sorry,” Tobias whispered.

  She cleared her throat. “Your psychological state is very fragile right now, and I will not lose you this way.”

  Tobias put the packet on the coffee table and dragged his hands through his hair. His skin felt like it was on too tightly. He couldn’t breathe. He didn’t—he didn’t like this, didn’t like any of it.

  “We love you,” she continued. “But this behavior...you need help, and we can’t give it to you. You need mental health specialists, and we can’t—I don’t think it’s good for your siblings to witness this. They’ve already been through so much.”

  “You’re sending me away.” He could barely get the words out. He could barely think them.

  “Only until you’ve gotten things in hand again. Only until you’re better.”

  “When do I go?” he asked dully.

  “Tomorrow morning,” Manman replied. “I’ve already packed your things. Go upstairs and get some sleep and tomorrow...it’s a fresh start, Toby.”

  He opened his mouth to tell her, yet again, not to call him by that childhood nickname, only to stall out. It wouldn’t make a difference anyway, and he didn’t want them to think he was being combative.

  “All right.” He didn’t say anything else, nothing about the terrible stillness inside him at leaving. Nothing about the hot tears that he fought back with gritted teeth.

  What would be the point of saying any of that? It wouldn’t make them keep him.

  “All right.”

  Chapter Two

  2017

  “We need to talk,” Sullivan Tate told his boss darkly, holding up his coffee-stained white button-down. He was wearing only his slightly less damp tank undershirt now, and while he’d planned to look a little more professional for this conversation, he was out of patience. “If I get one more beverage thrown at me, I’m going to quit. Coffee, Raina. He threw coffee at me.”

  Raina tapped one long red nail against her color-coordinated crimson mouth as she considered him from where she was seated at her desk in front of the window, paperwork strewn around her. Her glossy black hair was up in its customary chignon, her copper-hued skin was flawless, and her black suit was perfectly tailored to set off her figure to enormous advantage. He sometimes wondered if there was a rule that models should continue to be fashionable after they hung up their stilettos, because her glamour never faltered for a heartbeat. “Did you get burned?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure? We could sue.”

  “Your concern is duly noted, but it was cold, and that’s beside the point anyway. I want a better job.”

  She stood up, hitching a hip against the desk. He’d triggered negotiation mode, and in negotiation mode, Raina refused to sit while others stood over her. “You seem very serious this time.”

  “I am very serious this time. There was enough tequila in his mug that I’m lucky no one lit a cigarette around me or I’d be on fire right now.”
/>   “Who puts tequila in coffee?” She wrinkled her nose in disgust.

  “Child support-avoiding dirtbags.” He dropped the remnants of his nice shirt in the trash before coming to stand beside her at the window. They were in an older part of Denver, full of grand, crumbling red-brick houses and steep crayon-green lawns. Raina had chosen the two-story Colonial they used for office space with the same attention to image that she did everything else, finding the perfect balance between the modern, technologically advanced investigative agencies of the future and the smaller, more affordable and—to be frank—sketchier agencies of the past.

  He was pretty sure that drive for balance was why Raina had hired him in the first place. She met with the upper-echelon clients concerned with privacy and status on her own, only pulling Sullivan into meetings when she needed to impress someone expecting a rougher element. On those days, he’d roll into the office wearing big black boots, ratty jeans and a T-shirt that showed off his tattoo sleeves, his dark hair gelled and sprayed into its full, gravity-defying, mohawked glory, and he’d curse every time he opened his mouth.

  He’d be lying if he said it wasn’t fun to play the brute, especially since it didn’t fit the more upscale image of their firm.

  Raina was a monster about money—if it didn’t build the client base or contribute to first-rate work, she was a notorious tightwad. Any parts of the first floor that clients might see were exquisitely arranged; the second floor was a cesspool of unfinished renovation. Raina’s office was downstairs, her furniture slick and polished, the chairs leather, the windows shining. Sullivan’s office, on the other hand, was in a closet near the upstairs bathroom. Because nothing larger than a fifth-grader would fit inside, he didn’t have a desk, just a tray that Raina had handed over with such a blank expression that he was certain she’d been laughing wildly at him in her head. Usually he sat in the kitchen next to the constantly complaining fridge, his laptop propped up on his knees because the table wobbled. He spent hours each day violating every rule of ergonomic practice possible, and when he did get out into the world, it was to have assholes throw doctored coffee on him.

  Really, everything about his job sucked. He should’ve stuck with the game plan he’d sketched out when he was six and become Sherlock Holmes. Holmes might’ve had an opium problem, but the great detective had probably been spared carpal tunnel.

  “Talk to me.” Raina’s eyes, dark and deep, met his. “We’ll brainstorm.”

  He sighed. The air conditioning was up high to combat the August temperatures, and he shivered in his damp undershirt. “I feel like a mouse in an exercise wheel. Running fast and going nowhere.”

  “Pretty much the definition of serving subpoenas for a living. But I can’t spare you. Cases come and go, but you’re the most reliable source of revenue.”

  He’d been expecting that response. “You could serve some of the subpoenas and I could do some of the actual cases. Split the interesting ones and the boring ones fifty-fifty.”

  “We could, but I don’t want to.” She smiled when he gave her a baleful look. “The good part about being the boss is that I can delegate all the shit work to you.”

  “What if I find an intern? Someone to take over the subpoenas for college credit or something?”

  She lifted an exquisitely groomed eyebrow. “What would I need you for then?”

  Yeah, he’d walked into that one. He cleared his throat. “Okay, try this out. I do a couple of the more interesting cases on top of my current workload. If it turns out I can balance it, we’ll stick with it.”

  “A raise wouldn’t—”

  “I don’t want a raise,” he said in disgust, wondering what the hell went on in her brain sometimes. “You think this is about money? I’m bored. And underutilized, which offends me on a purely theoretical level, but mostly I’m bored.”

  “And we all know what kind of trouble you’ll get into in that state.” She thought about it for a moment. “This forces me to babysit you.”

  “I’m more than capable and you know it.”

  “You’re more than capable when it comes to tracking people down, yes. And the coffee stain on your shirt notwithstanding, you’re very capable at interacting with horrible people and getting out in one piece. But the rest of our cases require more discretion and experience than serving subpoenas does.” She stared at him like she was trying to see the inside of his skull. “Be honest. How big a problem is this?”

  He scrubbed a hand over his jaw. “I’m not going to quit over it today. But if something doesn’t change, it’ll happen. Sooner rather than later. I’ve answered all the questions I’m going to find in this work.”

  She looked out the window, heaving an irritated sigh. “You and your unending quest for complication. You make me so tired sometimes.”

  He shrugged. He’d long since given up on trying to alter that part of his personality. A few minutes passed while she thought about it, long enough that he was tempted to get up and find something to do. Then Raina made a considering noise and tipped her head closer to the window. He followed her gaze and watched a tan sedan pull into the driveway. The man behind the wheel was barely visible from this angle, but Sullivan recognized the car.

  The Devoted Uncle.

  Sullivan pursed his lips. “Give me the Devoted Uncle. It’s not like I can screw that one up. If I can solve it, you split the subpoenas with me and give me half of the fun cases from now on. If I can’t solve it on my own, I’ll stop bitching for...six months.”

  “A year. And that includes the bitching you do about cleaning the kitchen.”

  “Fine.”

  They shook on it, and he ran upstairs to change. His heart was already pounding, excitement racing through his veins at the very idea. Excitement and a good deal of relief. He needed this, both for the sake of his sanity and because it was the next step to the dream job.

  Opening his own agency. Taking the cases that interested him, working through the riddles no one else could solve. A dozen interns on staff so he’d never have to serve another fucking subpoena again.

  Not that he was going to tell Raina any of that. She was a cutthroat sort of dame, and if she knew he was planning to become a competitor someday, he wasn’t sure she’d comply with furthering his training at all.

  When his phone buzzed, reminding him of the tornado that was his personal life, he hesitated, but eventually decided to ignore the text message for now.

  He had a client to meet.

  His job involved enough assholes that he’d learned a long time ago to keep spare clothes in the office. When he was wearing a fresh Henley, he checked his hair to make sure it wasn’t too messy. Most days he used a little gel to brush the dark strands straight back so they’d stay out of his face, and it’d held out fine against the coffee-throwing bastard. He looked as professional as a guy with the sides of his head buzzed could possibly look.

  Back in Raina’s office, she was behind her desk and the client was making himself comfortable across from her.

  Their longest-standing client, the Devoted Uncle was Nelson Klein, a local insurance adjuster who came in once a year like clockwork. He was solid in that bulky way that was almost as much fat as muscle, and his frizzy, blazing-red hair was going thin on top, something he combated with an unconvincing combover. He was always brisk, occasionally bossy, and frequently bad-tempered—none of which spoke clearly of grief, but then, it had been more than two decades since his sister had been murdered and his young niece had gone missing.

  Sullivan wondered if it was habit alone that still had Klein running searches all these years later.

  “I assure you, we take the search for Nathalie as seriously now as we did the first time we looked for her,” Raina was saying. “Sullivan’s appointment is not a sign of lack of interest or effort. On the contrary, he has more time to apply to her cause at the moment, and believe me when I say th
at he’s the best researcher I’ve ever had on staff.”

  Sullivan reached out to shake hands with Klein, who got up slowly—he was busy giving Sullivan a sharp up-and-down, gaze lingering on the haircut. “The best, huh?”

  “If there’s a way to find out what happened to her, Sullivan will find it.”

  Klein’s grip was tight. “If you say so.”

  Sullivan returned Klein’s gaze—the man’s eyes were small and brown and bloodshot—until Klein released him. Sullivan tugged out the small moleskin notebook he habitually kept in his back pocket and snagged a pen from Raina’s desk before sitting down. “Okay.” He thumbed to a fresh page. “Start at the beginning.”

  * * *

  “The girl’s dead,” Raina said, once the Devoted Uncle had gone. She was pulling up the case number in the database so he could look up the files she’d compounded over the years. “You know that, right?”

  “Yeah,” Sullivan agreed. People didn’t go missing in suspicious circumstances for twenty years only to pop up out of nowhere one day, alive and kicking. Almost certainly, her body was in a shallow grave somewhere, and the chances of finding and identifying her at this point were minuscule.

  It was, in all likelihood, an impossible puzzle to solve. He could barely stand still, he was so eager to get started.

  “If you find anything, it’s going to be a corpse.” Raina’s expression was half concerned, half cold. She probably thought he’d get involved emotionally, only to break down when he realized that this case wouldn’t have a miraculous ending where the girl was reunited with her family and lived happily ever after.

  Raina might not be wrong about that emotional involvement thing, but it wasn’t going to stop him, and he wasn’t walking in blind. Sullivan wished he could be shocked by the idea of a ten-year-old girl vanishing, but you couldn’t serve subpoenas for as long as he had and not learn that some people didn’t give two shits for their own kids, let alone someone else’s. Call him a cynic, but just once he’d like to come across a dad who paid more child support than he was ordered to by the courts. Just once.