Making Promises (27 page)

“You are a really good man, do you know that? Mutti—she has talked about you for weeks. After you brought her lunch yesterday, she thinks you hang the moon.”

“Yeah, just don’t tell her about my designs on her son’s body—that sort of brings a mother’s esteem down a few notches.” Another silence. Then, shyly, “Perhaps I should keep my designs on your body to myself then?”

Shane blushed. “I was hoping you had some of those,” he muttered.

He’d wanted Mikhail to know how good he could make it in spite of how much like a pinup he was
not.
“Maybe you could, you know, share them with me when you get back, right?”

“I’m looking forward to it,” Mikhail said with absolute sincerity.

Shane opened his mouth to say something when his radio crackled.

“Shit, Mickey, wait a minute.” He hit mute on his phone and listened.

Levee Oaks and L street. Shit. Shit shit shit shit shit. Domestic dispute—

and who knew which one was stoned on what. Didn’t matter—both the Rivas could be fucking insane.

He picked up the radio. “Officer Perkins—responding. Be at the scene in less than five.” He started the car and hit the talk button on his phone again. “Mickey, I’ve gotta go—I’ll see you later tonight, okay?”

“Absolutely,” Mikhail said. “Be safe.”

“Count on it.” Shane rang off and his radio buzzed again. “Perkins.” 158

“Perkins, this is Calvin. Dude, that nine-one-one call was pretty intense. Do me a favor, man, and wait for me, would ya?”

“How far out are you?” Shane asked. The only problem with waiting for backup was that Donny and Rachel Rivas had three kids. If the kids were in foster care, fine—let them get some of their meth out on each other while he waited for backup. If one of the kids was involved, well, that was a whole other story.

“I’m out on Elkhorn, just out of the station.”

“Well, I’m here. I’ll just nose around a little—no door knocking ’til you get here, I promise.” Shane signed off and parked the squad car in front of the overgrown lawn. There hadn’t been enough rain to green up the valley this winter, and the long, mostly brown weeds seemed to highlight the disrepair the rest of the Rivas house stood in.

Shane got out of the car, slammed the door, and heard a child screaming around the back of the house. Well, shit.

He later gave himself credit. He didn’t just go running into that house, half-cocked and ready to shoot. He crept up to the side of the house and looked around the corner and saw one of those things that wake cops up in the middle of the night.

There was Donny Rivas, with his oldest daughter—about seven years old—caught up under the armpits with one arm, a hunting knife in the other hand. He was using the hunting knife to carve slow patterns into the flesh of her upper thigh.

“Now where’s the stash, you little shit? It was in the fuckin’ house, and now it’s fuckin’ gone—you’re always creeping around—where’d ya fuckin’ put it!”

Shane’s heart dropped. Well, shit, this was really not a waiting-for-backup situation. It violated every law in the be-a-cop handbook, but he was going to have to step up and do something.

“I didn’t I didn’t I didn’t!” The little girl’s wail was terrified, and what she said next was worse. “The baby ate it, I couldn’t do nothing, and now she’s sick!”

Oh fuck. Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck. Shane pulled out the radio at his belt, and buzzed Calvin. “Calvin, send an ambulance—there’s an overdosing infant on the site.”

“Fuck—where are you?”

“Side of the…
fuck
!”

Rachel Rivas was running at him with a kitchen knife, shrieking. He dropped the radio and ducked the clumsy swing, getting a good view of her stringy brown hair and her rotting teeth as she launched herself at him.

She swung again, and the knife bounced off the Kevlar he was wearing under his uniform. He took a step back and reached for his extendable billie club at his waist, only to have his elbow connect with a solid body.

Donny Rivas grunted and fell back just as Shane got the club out and knocked the knife out of Rachel’s hand. She screamed and fell backward, gibbering, and Shane tried to turn so that his back was toward the house, only to find Donny had him securely around the shoulders with one arm while the other was plunging the knife downward.

The knife found the gap between the Kevlar and Shane’s rib cage and ripped through his flesh and grated on his bone. Shane howled and threw his big body back against the house, and he heard Donny groan as his stringy junkie’s body was squashed up against the wall. The hand holding the knife was driven further down before Shane threw himself back again and Donny was forced to let go. Shane managed two steps out, away from the both of them as they were panting and whining, their pain magnified by their withdrawal symptoms, and he pulled his gun from his holster and held it out with shaking hands.

“You two,” he barked, “calm the fuck down. I’m a fucking cop, you’re both under arrest, and there’s an ambulance coming for your kid in case you forgot to give a fuck.” He had to yell that last part over the sound of the approaching sirens, and he managed to hold the gun up while his blood ran down his side and his vision blackened, until he heard Calvin’s voice from the front yard.

“Perkins! Perkins! Where the fuck are you, man?”

“I’m right here!” he called. Breathing was suddenly difficult, and he remembered the feeling of a punctured lung from the last time he’d ended up in the hospital. He heard the sound of Calvin approaching and tried really hard to hold it together.

“Calvin?” he rasped, pulling in a tortured breath, “how many ambulances you got out there?”

“Three,” Calvin said, coming up the side of the house. “Oh my God… Shane, you’re covered in—” Donny picked that moment to whimper, and Calvin shifted his gun and his focus to the two moaning junkies, writhing on the ground. The knife at Donny’s feet was covered in Shane’s blood, and Shane’s arms were shaking as he tried hard to think.

“Get their weapons,” he said, fighting for some more air. “Now, Calvin. Don’t have much time.”

Calvin jumped to, kicking the knives off and far away from Donny and Rachel’s grasp. From inside the house, Shane heard the sounds of policemen and rescue workers and frightened children. Peripherally, he heard backup coming alongside him, but he was focused on Calvin.

“You got this?” he asked, and his voice sounded high—almost casual—and Calvin nodded numbly. “Good,” Shane said, feeling wise and calm. And that was when he blacked out.

I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take…

“Mad World”—Gary Jules

LATER, it would hit Mikhail and hit him hard that not once did he think Shane had broken his promise. When he looked outside after class and did not see the car, his first thought was to call and see what the hold up was.

When there was no answer, his stomach went cold, and he told himself he was being foolish and dialed again.

The second time, someone picked up, and there was a hollow sound of corridor echoes behind the voice, which was good because Mikhail did not immediately think of another man in Shane’s bedroom. He knew that sound. That was a hospital sound. That was a hospital sound, and the man who answered was not Shane.

“Uh… hello?”

“Shane?” Abruptly Mikhail felt lost. He fought the very real bolt of cowardice that told him to just hang up and walk home and pretend that it was not Wednesday and that Wednesdays had never meant anything beyond the middle of the week, and even that did not mean anything unless he was working a faire on the weekend.

“No, no, he’s not out of surgery yet. Who is this?” Mikhail had not left the dance studio yet, which was good because he sat down on the floor. If he’d been outside he would have sat down on the ground in the poorly lit parking lot next to the dance studio, and he would have been killed.

“This is a friend,” he said weakly. “Did you say surgery?”

“Oh God… you didn’t know… of course he didn’t know, Jeff, you asshole, or he probably wouldn’t be calling Shane’s phone….” That last part sounded like the man was talking to himself, and Mikhail tried to pull together a question or something intelligent and what he managed was,

“You are the Jeff that eats dinner at Deacon’s?” There was a silence, and then the man on the other line said, “And you are the person that Shane won’t admit he’s dating because he’s afraid you’ll bolt madly for the hills.”

Mikhail swallowed hard. Ouch. And yet, completely the truth. “That would be me,” he said, and his voice fell limply into the darkened room he was sitting in. “How… what happened? How badly is he injured? I… oh, God. I cannot get there until tomorrow, the busses don’t run that late, and I can’t leave my mother alone….” He was blathering. He was thinking out loud. He was panicking. “Fuck,” he interrupted himself. “Please, just please tell me he’s going to be okay.”

There was a digestive silence on the other end of the line. “It’s probably going to end well,” Jeff said carefully. “The knife—”

“Knife?”

“Yes—he was stabbed from behind—the guy went around his Kevlar with a hunting knife and slid between some ribs and punctured a lung. I think he nicked something else vital, and now it’s all about stopping the bleeding and dumping antibiotics into him so he doesn’t get an infection. Don’t worry about not being here tonight—he probably won’t come to until tomorrow. If you could make it then, I’m sure he’d appreciate it.”

“Nobody called me,” Mikhail said, almost to himself. “Of course nobody called me. Nobody knew about me. Nobody knew about me because I couldn’t even tell him I’d see him next week. I kept telling him reasons he wouldn’t show. And now he’s been hurt and nobody knew to call me….” He was starting to shiver and shiver hard, and he might have gone into shock, right there, just from hearing bad news, if Jeff’s voice hadn’t cut through the muzz of his head as he sat on the floor.

“Honey… honey… look, sweetheart….
Motherfucker
! Now snap out of the guilt-death-spiral and fucking listen to me, okay?” Making Promises

“Da,” Mikhail said weakly, and Jeff-the-voice-on-the-other-line started to give him directions.

“First, I want you to go get a jacket or something—you got something to get you warm?”

“Da,” Mikhail said, and went to get his jacket and his scarf and put them on. He moved into Anna’s cubicle and took the afghan from the back of the chair and wrapped it around him. It wouldn’t do much when he walked home, but here in the studio it started to take the shivers away.

“Good. I’ve got your attention. That’s fucking awesome. Now, you’re right—we didn’t know about you—or how to get hold of you, and that’s something you’re going to have to fix or live with, right?”

“Da… I mean yes. I understand. I… you understand, last time he was in the hospital, nobody visited. He was there for a month, and nobody visited. I cannot bear to think of him alone there, thinking nobody would come….”

“Christ,” Jeff muttered. “Well, now that is something I didn’t know, so I guess we’re even. No worries—hell, what is your name?”

“Mikhail, but”—and he blushed because there was no reason to throw in this detail except that it felt incredibly important—“Shane calls me Mickey.”

“Well, then, I should probably call you Mikhail or he’ll bust my teeth out when he can stand. Okay, Mikhail, don’t worry. He’ll be here in the morning—”

“You are sure?” And oh dear God, did he not sound pathetic, like a child, but he could not help it.

Jeff, whoever he was, had a way of being both gentle and crisp.

Vaguely Mikhail wondered if he was a doctor—they could do that too.

“Yeah, Mikhail—he’s too damned big and too damned tough for this to level him. Now he’ll be here tomorrow and the next day, too, and you can make up for not being here tonight. We’re all here. Deacon, Crick, Benny, Andrew, Jon, Amy—hell, even the baby is here in the hospital, waiting for him. He’s not going to shake us until he tells us all to piss off, and even then he’d better be damned convincing, okay?”

Mikhail could breathe as he couldn’t earlier. “Okay,” he echoed, the word sounding small and lost as he said it. There were a couple of 164

heartbeats of space between them, and it suddenly occurred to Mikhail that, “Oh God. I shall have to meet Deacon.”

“There is a distinct possibility,” Jeff said dryly. “But you’ve been pretty good at ditching out of that one so far.”

“You do not understand…. He talks about Deacon like… like a father and a god at the same time…. I am not the man you bring home to a father and a god. I’m the man you hope the father and god never finds out about.”