“I bet he’s sorry,” I said slowly, “if you ask him. I bet he is. He seems sad.”
“I don’t care if he’s—”
“You’re back,” I said jovially, greeting Colin, cutting Ian off. “Which is good, ’cause I’m starving and I wanted to order tabouli salad, but I wasn’t sure if you liked it.”
“I’ll try anything,” he said cheerfully, and I saw the furtive glance at Ian. Between that and the way he fiddled with his napkin and bit his bottom lip, I could tell Colin was terribly nervous.
“So where do you live now?” Ian finally asked.
“In Marynook,” he answered. “It’s in Avalon Park.”
The entire lunch conversation was slow and painful and stilted, but we made it through, and when Ian got up to take a phone call, Colin leaned across the table and patted my face.
“Thank you, son,” he said, and since it was the closest I’d ever had to paternal anything, I smiled back.
When Ian returned, he wedged in close to me, no longer perching on the tiny piece of upholstered bench so he didn’t have to touch me. We were plastered together from shoulder to knee.
His father got up to make a call of his own, and as soon as he walked away, I turned to Ian. “You okay?”
He made a noise before he let his head fall forward, a motion he repeated often, the only tell he had that he wanted to be touched. I slid my fingers up the nape of his neck and gently pushed into the short, thick coarse hair.
“You’re doing really well.”
He grunted before he put his forehead down onto his folded arms. I gave his neck a last squeeze and let go.
“Don’t invite him to the game with us,” he directed.
I chuckled. “Okay.”
That day had been an icebreaker, and they weren’t close, but at least they had talked after that, upon occasion. Then when we had busted a large drug-trafficking ring that also dabbled in dog fighting and the wolf/malamute possibly husky hybrid had been discovered in one of the pens, Ian had taken one look at the predator and seen a kindred soul. The problem of what to do with Chickie Baby, as Ian named him, every day had been answered by me. His father was retired, had a huge yard, his wife worked days at a law firm, and the kids were all out of the house. When I suggested it, his father jumped at the chance to do something, anything, for Ian. And it turned out that Chickie was a great big puppy who only wanted love and attention. Unless you were trying to come up fast on Ian or break into his place. I shuddered to imagine the consequences of those two actions.
“Miro?”
“Sorry,” I said quickly, whipped back into the present. “Okay, so I’ll be here as close to six as I can be, sir.”
“You have my number. If anything happens and you can’t get him, call me.”
“I will,” I promised, turning and leaving the porch. Chickie caught me at the gate, stepping around in front of me, the whimper very sweet. “I’ll be back, buddy,” I said, petting him before he shot back to the porch when Colin called him. I waved from the car.
AT THE office, I had just made it to my desk when Kage walked up beside it, looming over me.
“Morning,” I greeted him. “Did Ian call you?”
“His CO called me so I’m clear that he’ll be gone for an indeterminate amount of time.”
I nodded even though that news made my stomach do somersaults.
“And you,” he said. “Where’s your doctor’s clearance?”
“In your inbox, sir,” I apprised him. “I went, I swear.”
He tipped his head at my arm. “And the wrist is good?”
“Cast should be off in six weeks, but it’s fine, really. I mean, I went off a balcony last night, so we know I’m—”
“Perhaps the smart thing might be not reminding me of that.”
It certainly might. “Yessir.”
When he left, I finally took a breath. I missed Ian already.
Chapter 8
SOMETIMES YOU went looking for one thing and found another. For instance, while my partner—the man I was secretly pining for—was away on a mission for the US Army, one of the many things I’d been doing was fugitive transport with my fellow marshals. That Tuesday, six weeks later, I was trailing after Mike Ryan and Jack Dorsey as they, with a whole contingent of state and local police, took Casey Dunn out to Northbrook where his body-dump site was.
Dunn was a cleaner for a Ukrainian arms dealer, took care of all the man’s enemies and put them in the ground under an auto salvage yard. As a stipulation of the agreement before he went into witness protection for rolling on his boss, he had to show the authorities where all the bodies were. They weren’t just interested in the body that Dunn’s brother, who testified against him, had seen him bury the night he followed him from their family home in Schaumburg. They needed a lot of murders to pin on Ivan Tesler; nothing in single digits would do. The thing was, when we arrived at what Dunn said was the second to last of the graves, all of a sudden he started screaming.