Shattered Glass(73)

But, if I didn’t say yes, Cai would likely spend months awaiting trial in a jail cell. Could that kid survive? Even with Angelica up to bat for him, I was only mildly convinced of his innocence. It seemed everyone who spent time with this kid developed some sort of blind affection for him.

I wasn’t kidding about the Cai Cult. And I had reached my fill of Peter’s complete and total lack of self. There’s sacrifice and then there’s martyrdom. Peter teetered too close to the latter relative to his ‘brother’. Besides Peter being a whore, besides his shaky morals; and his, at times, anti-social personality, the largest hurdle between Peter and me was going to be his absolute and total devotion to Cai. That kind of reverence was abnormal.

Wasn’t it?

Ultimately, I had to admit that the question wasn’t about Cai at all. It was about Peter. It was about how much was I willing to give up for someone who was a complete stranger little more than a week ago. He lifted his face from studying the floor. The entreaty in Peter’s eyes alone might have compelled me to do it; the slow rise of deep blue, shining with such hope, slammed into me like a boxer’s fist.

“It’d be the end of my being a cop,” I said to him. “Not just the FBI. I’d be frozen out of every agency.” He nodded succinctly, remaining stoic. “What is it with this kid?”

“I owe him,” Peter stated solemnly.

“Owe him what?”

“Everything. I owe Cai everything.” He didn’t explain that statement. I wasn’t expecting him to, not with Angelica watching us with an intensity that bordered on rude. The devil inside me questioned if she wasn’t suggesting this whole scenario in order to ruin my career in retaliation for my sins. “And he’s my brother,” Peter added to my stare.

“Your firm’d better give me a job after this,” I muttered to Angelica.

“The firm would have given you a job long ago had you not shown your buttocks to one of the senior partners,” a modulated voice behind me said.

My back instantly straightened, and I rotated slowly on stiff legs to face my father. “Maybe the senior partner shouldn’t have told a fifteen year old boy that he was an ass?”

“I don’t see the correlation,” Desmond Glass said, giving Peter and Darryl a look so full of distaste, the tip of his nose nearly became one with the space between his eyes.

“Really? Calling me an ass…me showing my ass? You got nothing?”

“Your dad’s a silver fox, prettyboy,” Darryl informed me while giving my father the once, twice, and three times over. “If I was into old men, and he didn’t already have something long and hard stuck up his ass…”

Maybe I could like Darryl.

“Why are you here?” I asked my father.

“Angelica has requested I represent your…friend. Which of them is it?”

“Both,” Angelica said at the same time Peter and Darryl muttered, “Neither,” while I contributed my ever-intelligent, “Huh?”





Everybody Hurts

Angelica took the crossed-arms-hip-jut stance and made it formidable. And she did it at only a little over five-feet four inches tall and wearing a pencil skirt tight enough to show every mole. “Any minute now I’ll have the press outside, a boy fighting for his life in there,” she jerked her head to the door behind her, “these two boys questioned by federal agents and prosecutors, and a sixty-year-old man and his thirty-year-old son cannot manage a professional conversation?”

“Are you thirty?” Peter asked with a jaw drop.

“I’m twenty-six,” I said indignantly. “Twenty! Six!”

“I apologize,” my father said diplomatically—to her. To me he nodded swiftly and then swiveled his gaze to Peter and Darryl. “I’ll need to be briefed before we meet with the prosecutors.” He pointed his leather attaché case down the hall and motioned for Peter and Darryl to move ahead.

“Austin?”

“Just go with him, Peter. And for God’s sake don’t lie to him. You can see Cai if he makes bond.” And if you’re not arrested. I was already suspicious about why he hadn’t been arrested yet. Even if they knew he wasn’t responsible for Nikki the Nail’s death, they had to assume he had some culpability. Maybe his age at the time was factoring in?

Down the hall a stream of suits filed into a side room. From the way they held themselves and the dark suits they wore, I read FBI all over them.

“Men in suits,” Darryl sighed, catching the line of men and pointing a slim finger. “Eeny meeny miney homo…”