Clear Water (25 page)

“Whiskey, wait….” Fly Bait had the presence of mind to take her IV on its little wheeled rack, and she started chasing him down the hall.

Whiskey ran straight into Patrick’s father, who was standing right outside a clearly labeled OR waiting room, looking on as Patrick’s gurney was wheeled through the swinging doors.

“Where’s he going?” Whiskey asked plaintively.

Shawn shrugged and winced. Besides the burns, he’d apparently had some bruises and cuts too—and he had his own IV to boot. His gingery-gray hair was grizzled and flying in every direction, and his tanned, freckled face was blackened with soot. He looked as lost and as frustrated as Whiskey felt. “They said his brain was swelling and they needed to relieve the pressure, and they needed to set some of his injuries. I guess his arm was broken pretty badly, and his ribs had cracked and punctured his lung….”

Whiskey blinked back tears. “Yoga. How’s he going to teach yoga? He was looking forward to it all summer, teaching yoga, making his tuition money… how’s he going to do that…?” Oh, God. There were so many greater things he needed to worry about. There were—but all Whiskey could think about was Patrick’s big blue eyes, the shy smile, the way he had of looking forward eagerly at the same time his shoulders shrank back, like he was excited about something but trying not to get hurt too.

“He was really going to do that?” Shawn asked in wonder, and Whiskey slammed back against the glass window of the waiting room, rocking his head so hard against it that the thunk made Fly Bait suck in a breath.

“Of course he was,” Whiskey whispered. “Jesus… how could you not believe him?”

Shawn looked a little bit uncomfortable—and then he just looked away. “Well, you know him, I guess. I mean, he’s not really reliable, right? I mean—”

“Has he ever lied to you?” Whiskey asked. “As an adult, has he ever lied to you?”

Shawn shrugged. “Sure, uhm… well, I mean—”

“He told you he was getting his shit together, and you said ‘yeah, right!’ and he stopped. But other than that, has he ever lied to you?”

Shawn kept his vision focused on the OR doors.

“
Answer me!
”

Shawn Cleary looked back and shifted on his feet. “What do you want me to say?”

Whiskey shook his head. “Not a fucking thing. Go back to your room. Someone will tell you if he’s going to be okay, I’m sure. I’ll stay here and wait, because I actually give a shit, and no, motherfucker, not once has he
ever
lied to me. Your fucking kid tells you there’s a bomb in your fucking office, and he’s
begging
you to listen, and you can’t. Man, he’s got your eyes, but mostly, I guess you were the fucking sperm donor, because I don’t see a single thing he got from you that counts.”

“What in the
fuck
did you just say to me?” Shawn Cleary was suddenly right there in his face, and Whiskey wanted a piece of him.
God
,
he wanted to take him out.

“He’s a good man!” Whiskey shouted. “He’s a good man—and you… you couldn’t even listen, could you!”

“I’m sorry!” Shawn shouted back at him, so close Whiskey could smell his breath. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I didn’t fucking listen! I’m a shitty parent! What do you want me to say?”

“That’s about it!” Whiskey snapped, and then slammed himself back against the window again and listened to himself as his voice broke. “And I want you to say he’s okay. I just really, really want to hear that he’s going to be okay.”

Suddenly Fly Bait’s little brown hands were on his shoulders, keeping him anchored, and she was petting him, and he looked down at her and realized that she was in tears.

“Me too,” she mumbled, and his eyes got bright and he hauled her in against his chest and pretended his eyes weren’t blurring too, and that his hands didn’t ache and that his head didn’t hurt like a sonofabitch and that he knew for certain, like the sun was going to rise, that Patrick was going to be okay.

D
OCTORS
showed up eventually and made the three of them sit down in the waiting room since they weren’t going to hang out and be treated. Whiskey got himself a spiffy new IV, this one in a different vein, and a new bandage, and a stern talking to from his nurse, but he wasn’t really aware of that. He and Fly Bait managed to hold hands, and although they didn’t usually say much to each other, that contact—that said everything.

About an hour in, Whiskey heard a rough voice and realized it was his own.

“So,” he said, and Fly Bait looked at him. “You know, that first night. Loretta came and got you, and we went out and then, you know, time for ice cream, and you know what he did?”

Fly Bait shook her head. “It had better not be gross,” she murmured, but the acid was gone.

He shot her a smile for trying and continued. “He said he wanted to thank someone, so he went up on the deck because there were stars there, and he felt like he was closer that way.”

Fly Bait’s fingers tightened in his. “God,” she muttered. She looked over Whiskey’s body to where Shawn Cleary sat, looking at the two of them in sort of a puzzled way. “Your kid is pretty fucking awesome,” Fly Bait snarled. “He really is. And I can’t believe you wouldn’t believe him.”

Whiskey kept thinking about that slender, pale figure dancing among the shadows with the light fixtures and the pipe, twenty feet off the ground without a net and with shoes held together by duct tape and a prayer. “Do you,” he asked, his vision still lost in that darkness, “have any idea what he went through to warn you?”

Shawn Cleary scrubbed at his face with his hands. “Who
are
you people?”

“We’re his friends,” Fly Bait told him, and Whiskey looked at her, surprised. Fly Bait did not scrap, she didn’t argue, she didn’t get on people’s cases.

He let go of her hand to wrap his arm around her shoulders. “We’re from Fish and Game,” Whiskey said, trying not to smirk because it just sounded so absurd. “One night I went out walking, and I saw this yellow car crash through a guard rail, and one guy got out, and your son didn’t. So I got him out.”

“You know,
normal
people would have called the police,” Shawn said distastefully.

“We’re not normal,” Fly Bait said, almost to herself, and she met Whiskey’s eyes in time for him to say, “We’re more like two-headed frogs.”

He expected her to smirk back, but instead she looked like he’d smacked her upside the head. While he was trying to decide what to say, she stood up, grabbed her IV unit, and walked over to Shawn Cleary and slapped him
hard
in the face. Before he could even respond, she said, “I’m going to go call my girlfriend, you homophobic motherfucker. When Patrick comes to, you’d better fucking let us in the room.”

Shawn looked after her, blinking in total confusion. “Wait. If she’s going to call her
girl
friend, what are
you
doing here?”

Whiskey looked back at him, weary beyond belief. “He told you he was gay and you ignored that too.”

“Fine!” Shawn snapped, throwing his hands up and then wincing when the IV needle pulled at his flesh. “Fine! I’m the bad guy! I didn’t believe he was gay either. But you’re… you’re not a stupid kid—those FBI guys were fucking listening to you, you’ve got some pull. What are you doing with
my
son?”

Whiskey pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “Falling really, really in love with him. You got a fucking problem with that?”

He was surprised when Shawn Cleary didn’t say anything. He turned his head to the side and saw that the guy was wiping tears away with the back of his hand.

“I missed him,” Shawn said brokenly. “Almost every day. Every day since he was sixteen. I mean, he’d go out with friends….” Shawn laughed a little now. “I guess he’d go have sleepovers with boyfriends mostly. But… almost every day. He’d get up when I was eating breakfast and sit down at the other end of the table and eat something that gave me a heart attack just looking at it. And we wouldn’t say anything, right? But it was damned near every day. And then… then he just wasn’t. He just wasn’t there. And I’d ask myself why I’d miss him, because we never talked. He’d just look at me and wait.” Shawn laughed humorlessly. “Wait for me to complain about something, probably. Bitch about work. About the car. About how much money he spent. But he’d wait. And then he’d say bye and go do what he was doing. And I never thought to ask what that was. Sometimes he’d tell me, you know? I thought if it was important he’d tell me. But it was important, and I didn’t listen. And now I gotta wonder, what was he waiting for, if I wasn’t going to listen?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Whiskey said. He felt mean. He felt angry. He felt like someone should suffer because he’d watched Patrick disappear into the dark and he hadn’t come back out yet. “At the end, he wasn’t waiting for you anymore. He was waiting for me. And I showed up.”

There didn’t seem to be anything else to say to that. They sat there side by side, and then Fly Bait came back and leaned on him and got him a blanket and made the nurse bring him something to eat. Pudding. Tapioca pudding. It wasn’t bad.

ATF and the FBI and the DEA came and debriefed him and Fly Bait and then practically killed them with questions and more questions about Patrick’s involvement.

They told Whiskey the name of the guy in charge—who had been busted, actually, thanks to Whiskey and Patrick—but he forgot what it was until it hit the papers. In the meantime, it was up to Whiskey to clear up any misapprehensions the police had about Patrick’s involvement.

“No!” Whiskey told one sharp-faced woman. “Patrick may have known the guy dealt drugs, but he
didn’t
know about this! If he had known about this, do you think he would have led us into an ambush? How do I know he wouldn’t? Because he got a broken nose and cracked ribs when his ex-assfucker beat him up, that’s how. Besides.” Whiskey’s face fell a little, and the righteous anger that fueled him for a minute dissipated like fog off the delta. “Besides,” he repeated, “Patrick wouldn’t do that. He’s a good man. He lived on my boat wearing Walmart clothes and hand-me-down flip-flops for the chance to have people who liked him for him. This whole drug thing—it’s all about greed and being an asshole and mass hurting of people. And that’s not Patrick. He wouldn’t hurt….” Whiskey’s throat worked, and he almost couldn’t swallow. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly unless he was feeding it to a frog.”

There was a silence then, and the people disappeared, and Whiskey was left with Shawn Cleary just looking at him.

“What the hell is this thing with frogs?” he asked irritably, and Whiskey and Fly Bait started laughing, low and private, and they never answered.

Finally, though, a doctor came out of the doors to the surgery and looked purposefully for someone to talk to. Whiskey practically knocked Shawn over in his hurry to be the person the doctor
had
to talk to.

“Patrick Cleary?”

The doctor was middle aged, white, and perfectly average—average eyes, average build, as featureless as a hospital wall. But he did have a lovely smile. “Young Mr. Cleary is doing well. He’s stabilized and in a medically induced coma until his brain swelling goes down. He was developing a blood clot, so we put in a shunt, and it doesn’t look like the pressure was enough to do any damage. He may be disoriented when he wakes up, and he may not remember things that we think he should, but—”

“Well, that won’t be much different than usual,” Shawn Cleary said to himself, and Whiskey scowled at him. The man subsided, and Whiskey looked back at the doctor.

“When can we see him?”

The doctor eyed the three of them pointedly. “He’ll be out of it for at least eight hours. That’s plenty of time for the three of you to bathe, change your clothes, and get some sleep. You all look like the cat’s breakfast twice removed—
I
wouldn’t want to wake up to any of you.”

Whiskey grinned at him and nodded, but Shawn looked disgusted, and Whiskey wondered how long he was going to enjoying pissing the guy off. “He’s going to be okay?” Whiskey asked, just to be sure, and the doctor nodded.

“It’s looking like. Things can go wrong—but it’s looking good.”

Fly Bait grabbed Whiskey’s hand and squeezed, and for the first time, Whiskey let his muscles tremble and his aches settle. All of the adrenaline that had held him up flooded out, and
now
he could smell the stench of fire, hot metal, and a walk through the dusty weed fields that clung to his skin like mucus.

“God, Fly Bait,” Whiskey mumbled. “Where the hell are we? I don’t even know which hospital we’re in or how far we are from home.”

He didn’t realize how really tired he was until he let tiny Freya Bitner wrap her arms around his shoulders and say, “It’s okay. Letty just texted me. She’s in front of the hospital right now in a rental car. She’ll take us home.”

Whiskey held her tight, because in spite of how mundane that sounded, he knew—maybe for the first time, he knew—what it was like to know that home was the living, breathing person who made welcome in your heart.

Patrick
Zero Fucking Up, Sir

P
ATRICK
woke up calling for Whiskey. The dumbasses taking care of him thought he was asking for a painkiller, until after what felt like forever, there was a familiar, gruff voice, growing God-thankfully closer with every snarl.

“He’s not asking for alcohol, sweetheart, he’s asking for me! That’s my name! Well not my
real
name, but it’s close enough!”

“Whiskey?” Oh, God. Whiskey had been there—Patrick had heard him. Something about
No, you dumbshit, stay away from the fucking bomb!
Or that might have been a voice in Patrick’s head—Patrick wasn’t sure. But he
was
sure that Whiskey had been there, and that had made it all worth it.

See, Whiskey? I’m not a fuckup. You were right. I’m a good guy.

And then Whiskey was there, peering down at him, his longish hair falling in his face, clean-shaven and wearing one of the shirts without the holes.

Patrick squinted. “You dressed up,” he observed, and Whiskey nodded, a sort of semi-hysterical sound squeaking past his throat.