The General and the Horse-Lord (25 page)

Brian tried to stand, but Gabriel was looming over him. “Don’t even think about it.” He had his arm around Juan, and he beckoned Billy over, wrapped both of them up close to his chest. “Nothing to be scared about, boys.”

Billy narrowed his eyes at the man on the floor, pulled his foot back, but then he hesitated, didn’t kick him. He put his head back down on Gabriel’s chest, closed his eyes. Juan patted him awkwardly on the shoulder.

Brian sneered up at him. “What a sweet little ass. What’s your name again?”

Billy turned his head, looked down at the man on the floor, then reared back and kicked him in the balls. Or tried to. He mostly hit Brian’s upper thigh, and it was a symbolic gesture at best. John gave him a thumbs-up.

John looked at Kim. “What was the point of throwing the wok?”

Kim shrugged. “It made me feel better. Like I was contributing.”

“Now we’ve got oil on the floor. Okay, how much?”

Kim blinked a few times. “Nearly seven thousand. Okay, I’ll tell you the truth. Just over seven thousand. But that includes all the paint and equipment we need to repaint the living room and kitchen.” He looked at John closely, like he was getting ready to catch him if he fell. “Billy’s going to make the new curtains, so that will save some money. And if you don’t like the new couch, you can take it back. But you won’t. You’re going to love it, I swear.”

“Seven
thousand
?” For the first time all night, John found himself ready to hyperventilate.

Chapter 19

J
OHN
sat on the end of his bed, dressed in a towel. He stared across the room where his service dress blues hung, freshly pressed from the dry cleaners. Five rows of medals, and he sat on the end of the bed and pressed his hands between his knees. His hands were shaking. His knees were shaking. He didn’t deserve that Silver Star for conspicuous bravery. If he had an ounce of real honor, he’d snatch it off that uniform right now.

He’d had a dream the night before. He was a boy again, watching an old TV show. Chuck Connors had been an army man, falsely accused of cowardice. The drums started, the men standing in formation. Chuck marched in, and they’d stripped him of his uniform, his rank, tore off his hat and buttons while he stood brave and silent. They took his sword, broke it, and threw the pieces into the dust. Then he walked out of the fort, and they closed the log doors against him, forever. But in the dream, John was a boy, watching himself. Watching as they pulled off everything that had ever meant anything to him, left him dressed in a tattered blue shirt. He went off into the wild desert, on foot, not even a horse. What had that show been called?
Branded
. That was it. John could remember the tune as clearly as if it was 1965.

What do you do when you’re branded, marked with a coward’s name?

What do you do when you’re branded, and you know you’re a man?

He’d had the dream before, lots of times, when he wondered what they would do to him, what they would do to Gabriel, if anyone knew their secret. He remembered this, remembered loving Gabriel so desperately, then having to leave him alone, off to their lonely separate bunks, falling asleep to this poisonous little dream. It hardened his heart just a bit. It wasn’t right. They shouldn’t have had to live like that. They’d deserved better.

Shit. He needed to calm way the fuck down. He wasn’t going in to see the IG with tequila on his breath. He wondered if Kim or Billy might have a spare Valium in their bathroom? Or maybe Gabriel? No, not Gabriel.

He didn’t think he could bear to look into a medicine cabinet shared by Kim and Billy. He closed his eyes, lay back on the bed, imagining. Pink nail polish, watermelon and green-apple lip gloss, God knows what kind of jewelry, what kind of condoms and lube. He would not be able to keep his cool, faced with clear evidence that his baby was having sex. Kim was so clearly not mature enough for responsible sex, when he kept falling in love for forty-eight hours at a time, and there was no one on the green earth who was good enough for him, anyway. And Billy? Billy needed a little cowboy chastity belt or a heavily armed bodyguard. Oh, God, he would end up seducing the bodyguard, and he would wear the little chastity belt with leather chaps, his tiny butt hanging in the wind. It would be his newest mask.

And Juan? What if John and Gabriel were thrown in jail? Juan would not be left with a single man to respect and look up to. He would grow up with his mother’s bitter words in his ears and no men to love, and his masculine soul would be trampled. It would be drugs, maybe. No, he would avoid the drugs, join the Marine Corps, just so he could be around men who would not disappoint him. And the Marines would send Gabriel’s baby off to war.

How could he keep them all safe if he was thrown into the brig, disgraced? Was he going to end up a fucking jailbird? They couldn’t take his degrees away. He still had a PhD, an engineering degree. Would they let him teach? Somehow he didn’t think leadership seminars would go over in prison. Or he might be training the Aryan Nations to take over the government. Not what he had planned for his retirement career.

John sat up, took a long pull from the bottle of tequila. Screw it, the IG could think what they wanted. Other than the tequila, there was nothing in his stomach besides Pepto-Bismol. He lay back down on the bed, stared up at the ceiling, carefully checked from corner to corner. No cobwebs. Oh, God. He was Out. Of. Control. “Help.”

Gabriel stuck his head into the bedroom. He had a towel around his waist, was wiping the last of the shaving cream from his smooth brown cheeks. He looked carefully at John, splayed out on the bed, the bottle of tequila in his fist. Gabriel started grinning. “I know what you need.”

He started humming, a stupidly addictive tune, dancing a little in his towel.

“Oh, no. Not that.”

“She’s a very kinky girl, the kind you don’t take home to mama.”

“No. Not ‘Super Freak’. That’s gonna push me right over the edge.”

Gabriel was swinging his ass, and he hit the play button on the CD player by the bed. “Come on, baby. Let’s get the blood moving.” He danced his way to the end of the bed, pulled John up by the hands, and wrapped him up in his big arms. He smelled like Gabriel, warm and spicy, cedarwood and orange and male skin. “Why do we need these towels?”

He pulled his off, tossed it to the end of the bed, then slid his fingers into the top of John’s towel. John was already dancing to the music, unable to stop himself. “I’m starting to hate this song,” he said, and did a tricky little spin. When he spun away, Gabriel pulled his towel off, threw it on the bed.

Gabriel reached out for his hand, spun him again. They were singing, Gabriel with evident enjoyment, John because he couldn’t stop himself. Gabriel pulled him in close, and they were dancing belly to belly, hips swinging to a rhythm that could only have come out of 1981. “‘She’s a super freak, she’s super freaky….’”

Kim came through the door, stumbled to a stop so suddenly that Billy piled into him from behind. Their mouths dropped open in unison, then Billy covered his mouth, started to giggle.

John pointed toward the door. “Out.”

Kim blinked, turned around, and pushed Billy out the door. John heard him whisper, “Billy, quick! Get the cameras!”

John walked like an Egyptian over to the bedroom door, reached down, and turned the lock. “We may need to get a dead bolt.”

Gabriel reached for the bottle of tequila. The next song was playing. He took a long swig. “‘Might as well face it, you’re addicted to love.’”

J
OHN
was back to himself by the time they took a taxi to the lawyer’s office. Some dancing, some laughing, some love, and then lunch with his boys, listening to Kim’s plan to get a fiber-optic scope with a camera to slip under his bedroom door. His wonderful life, full to overflowing.

Gabriel called the lawyer a shark with a grudge, and agreed with Mike they didn’t have to like him. John felt weirdly dislocated driving onto the base, the airmen at the gate saluting him, standing at attention, then walking into the IG’s office, with everyone snapping to attention when he passed. He felt like he was back home, but strangers were living in his house.

Gabriel leaned over his shoulder. “You can’t go home again. Are any of these kids even legal drinking age? I don’t think so.” John looked back at him. His face was sorrowful, just a little angry. This was as hard for him as it was for John. Gabriel had joined the army when he was eighteen.

A young airman escorted them to a conference room. The table was set with water, and there was a coffee mess in the corner. The airman fixed their coffee, giving John admiring looks from under her lashes. She handed him a cup, smiling. “I hope I can take your graduate seminar in leadership next semester, General. I’m nearly finished with my master’s in history at UNM.” He wondered how Johnny Cash had felt when he’d been thrown into the clink, and the deputies had asked him for an autograph.

He took his coffee, sat down next to Gabriel at the table. Gabriel had overheard. “I wonder if you’re going to have time to teach a graduate seminar? In between watching the basil grow?”

“I’ve been wondering about that myself.”

Gabriel gave his knee a squeeze under the table.

The young woman who came into the room caused the lawyer-shark to sit up and take notice. She was a beauty, dark hair cut in a bob and big dark eyes; an elegant figure in her service dress blues. John thought she looked vaguely familiar, wondered if he’d come across her in his last years in service, when she must have been a baby lieutenant. She was wearing captain’s stripes now. She put down the folders she was carrying, made her way to their side of the long table, and shook hands. “General Mitchel, I’m Captain Curtis.” She turned to Gabriel, studied him for a long moment. She glanced back at John for a moment, smiling, her dark eyes wide with appreciation. Gabriel was a very handsome man in his dress uniform.

You have no idea
, John thought.
You haven’t seen him in a flight suit
. John looked at Gabriel’s glum face. The shark had told them it would be a bad sign if the IG gave them a woman or a junior officer. And Curtis was both. She was still standing. “General, gentlemen, I wonder if you would indulge me for a moment?”

The shark was already shaking his head.

She touched John briefly on the sleeve. “Sir, I have an old friend in my office who would like to say hello to you and CW-5 Sanchez before we begin. Would you mind?”

John could use all the old friends he could get. Something about her dark eyes, the shape of her face. Who did she remind him of? “Yes, of course.” He looked at Gabriel. He was studying her as well, his bottom lip caught between his teeth.

They walked down the hall, and she pushed open the door to a typical military office: green metal desk, computers with a wild tangle of electrical cords underneath, standard-issue metal venetian blinds on the windows. She had a small pot of African violets on the window sill, and the violets were trying hard to bloom, one tiny purple flower reaching for the sun. The man sitting next to the desk stood when they walked in. He had dark hair and eyes, like her, and a smile that lit up the room. He was dressed in jeans and a white button-down oxford hanging loose. He looked at them both, and John remembered a small, dusty boy, lips cracked from the heat, feet bleeding in his sandals, handing him a letter. Begging him to help his father. “Abdullah!”

He was laughing now, and crying, and his sister ducked out of the office to give them some privacy. He went into Gabriel’s arms first, hugged him, and then John held him and stroked the dark hair. “You look so much like your father when I first knew him. Tell me how he is. I haven’t spoken to him since Thanksgiving.”

“He’s okay. Some pain, you know. Arthritis where the bones were broken. He says the pain is just to remind him he’s still alive. He’s hot on the trail of some papyrus fragments that are alleged to have parts of an unknown Egyptian-Greek story. He says to tell you to come visit him, see if you can help him translate the demotic.”

Gabriel pulled up chairs, reached out for his hand. “Why are you so tall? Did you grow up while we weren’t looking? I thought your dad was joking when he said you were at Julliard. I didn’t think they let little boys play those big cellos.”

“I’m in San Francisco now, at the Conservatory. I had to leave New York. It wasn’t safe. It… it’s been hard for us. Since 9/11.”

John studied his beautiful Arabic face. “Abdullah al-Salim. You have a home with me, anytime you want one. I hope you know that. How is San Francisco?”

“Weird. Cool. When I first arrived, the other guys in the strings section of the orchestra gave me a tee shirt that said ‘I Only Look Like A Terrorist’. San Francisco humor. I knew I had found my place. Some parts of the country, wearing that tee shirt would get me shot.”

Captain Curtis stuck her head back into the room. “Your lawyer is rumbling like a volcano about to blow. Do you want to get our business done, and then maybe we can all go out to dinner?”