The Losing Game (29 page)

“You’ve got fifteen minutes, then I’m coming in.”

Lucas leaned across and kissed Dante’s cheek. “One day, you’ll let me have the last word. You will. You’ll see.”

Lois giggled. Dante harrumphed and folded his arms across his chest. At that moment, Lucas wanted to make some sort of declaration, but this wasn’t the time or the place.

“I won’t be long.”

Lucas left his coat on the passenger seat and walked to the Shaw’s front door without looking back. He took a deep breath and rang the doorbell.

Mrs. Shaw opened the door with a cheery smile that died as quickly as it had appeared. Her eyes went wide as saucers. “I thought you were the takeaway.”

“I want to talk to Mr. Shaw. Just for a few minutes. Then you’ll never hear from me again.”

“That man…,” Mrs. Shaw stammered.

“I know. I know what he said. I’m sorry. He shouldn’t have…. He was trying to protect me.”

She gathered herself quickly. “Well, he’s not the first person to do something stupid in the name of love, is he? You’d better come in.”

Lucas entered a large, square hallway, with a rug at its center. Four large suitcases lined the wall next to the staircase. Through an open door, the kitchen table was set for two.

“Have the police been to see you?” Lucas’s mouth was impossibly dry. He tried to swallow and ended up coughing.

“No. Would you like a glass of water?”

“No thank you. I’m on my way out. My friends are waiting for me. I just….”

“I know, pet.” She heaved a big, weary breath. “Richie will see you, but… I don’t know if you’re going to get what you came for.”

She pointed to a door. “Go on in.”

Lucas entered a large living room. Three sofas made a square with the fireplace. On the end of the one on the right, closest to the fire, sat Richard Shaw. He looked older than Lucas remembered him, and there was something about his face….

“He’s had a stroke,” Mrs. Shaw said from behind.

Shaw remained seated as Lucas approached, warily. There was no chance Shaw would pounce. His face drooped on one side. His hands lay limply in his lap. The faint smell of urine assailed Lucas’s nostrils, and it was this, more than Shaw’s ruined appearance, that made him cringe.

Mrs. Shaw came around the back of the sofa and stood behind her husband. Shaw lifted his eyes to Lucas’s, but he didn’t speak. Lucas stared down at him, long and hard, searching for answers to questions he couldn’t yet formulate into words.

“Won’t you sit down, Lucas?” Mrs. Shaw asked gently.

“No,” he replied robotically, as if someone else had supplied the word for him. The wind had blown right out of his sails.

“All right.” She drew in a deep breath. “I expect you want to know what happened, after Richie shot you.”

“No. Not really.” Lucas squeezed his left fist and felt, for the first time in two weeks, the muscles fully tighten. “Your husband has done nothing but talk and talk and talk. Every word out of his mouth has been lies and bullshit.”

“He won’t…,” Mrs. Shaw began. “He can’t talk at the moment. Not like he used to.”

“Go on, then.” Lucas took a step back and took a seat on the middle sofa, facing the fireplace.

Mrs. Shaw wrung her hands together. “My husband was—
is
—a drunk. He was drunk when he got in his car and ran over your sister. He was drunk when you confronted him at the pub and when he shot you.”

There was no anger or pity in her voice. Only a grim determination to see this through, and it was for her sake and hers alone that Lucas listened, hands gripping the edge of the sofa cushions, heart pounding in his throat.

“He thought he’d killed you.” Her forehead tightened into a pained frown. At the top of her cream blouse, her skin was crimson. “When he came home, he got down on his hands and knees and begged me not to leave him. For the thousandth time, he promised me he’d quit the drink.”

She shook her head. “You’re probably wondering how I could… and I can’t give you an answer. There isn’t one, and I’m sorry for that.”

Sitting down on the arm of the sofa, Mrs. Shaw gathered herself. Her husband bowed his head, at least, and reached for her hand. She drew away from him, and Lucas had a moment to wonder, and despair, at the pain she had suffered for her husband’s wanton lack of consideration.

“When we heard you were alive, we waited for the police to come. But they didn’t. Richie said you’d have kept your mouth shut because of the gun. You’d be in as much trouble as he was. But if there was evidence, or witnesses….”

“None so far,” Lucas said.

Shaw’s face twitched, but the meaning behind his reaction was indiscernible. It might have been involuntary and nothing to do with what Lucas had said.

“Then your friend came and took the gun. We didn’t know whether to be relieved or terrified.”

Mrs. Shaw closed her eyes, briefly. “After you left the hospital, we left for my sister’s cottage in Scarborough. We were fifty miles north of London when Richie had the stroke.”

Lucas didn’t need to hear any more.

“Did he ever once say he was sorry for leaving my sister to die all alone in the gutter?” To Shaw, Lucas said, “Did you? To God? To your wife? To anyone?”

Neither answered.

Lucas said, “Her name was Grace Elizabeth Green. She was thirty-one years old. She taught primary school, she loved to ride her bike, and she was hoping that 2036 was going to be the year she met Mr. Right. She was worried that if she didn’t, she might never get to have a family.”

Lucas swallowed thickly and pressed on. “She was my last living relative. We were born fourteen months apart, and we were close. We fought, like siblings do, but we loved each other. If it had been me that you ran over and killed, you wouldn’t be sitting there marinating in your own piss. She’d have killed you. She wouldn’t have hesitated. But I’m not my sister. I’m not half the human being she was. So you’re off the hook.”

Shaw would never apologize. A stroke hadn’t changed that.

Lucas steeled himself and said to Mrs. Shaw, “I wish your husband had gone to prison for killing my sister. But as for the rest… I don’t care. You no longer exist. You’re nothing. You’re no one.”

Mr. and Mrs. Shaw had the good grace not to speak.

Lucas waded through treacle to leave the room. The frigid night air roused him. A rough shiver coursed through his body. He steadied himself against the bonnet of the Shaws’ car.

Dante pushed open the passenger door from the inside. He didn’t ask Lucas how it went. He simply draped Lucas’s coat over his shoulders, and hooked his hand around the back of Lucas’s neck, squeezing it tight as a promise.

“Ready to go?”

“Yes.”

Lucas stretched the seat belt over the outside of his left arm so as not to press on his shoulder wound. He eased back into the seat slowly, positioning the tightening seat belt across his arm.

Dante didn’t pull away. Both he and Lois sat silently as the engine purred. The stars twinkled, and the world turned, completely oblivious.

At last, Lucas said, “That gun. I’ve never fired it, you know. Not while it’s been loaded. Not once.”

“Good or bad thing?” Dante asked gravely.

“Good,” Lucas said. “Definitely good.”

QUARTER PAST
ten, and Excelsior’s annual drunken raunch-fest was in full sway. Dante cringed every time one of the revelers approached. Mainly, people wanted to offer Lucas their concern and wish him a speedy recovery. Twice, however, Dante had been invited to dance.

Dante did not dance. Particularly when the dance floor was a writhing sea of handsy strangers, overdosed on seasonal good cheer and laced with pheromones.

A lone shark in a handmade suit circled the pool, a lock of his greased hair flopping over his forehead. His tie hung loosely about his neck, and he wielded his empty champagne flute like a harpoon. The little fishes scattered.

“Who’s that?”

“Who?” Lucas followed Dante’s nod, past the tables littered with spent crackers and empty coffee cups.

“Him. The guy with the teeth.”

“Ah. That would be Frederick Bradley-Jefferson. He’s one of the managing directors.” Lucas closed the space between them. “Also a die-hard homophobe, so don’t look at him too long.”

Dante bristled. “Has he ever said anything to you?”
Because if he had….

“No. He’d be hauled over the coals. But he’s slippery. I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could spit.”

Aside from
Freddie,
the usual collection of corporate types populated the dance floor and its borders. Dante would never have been able to adapt to working in an office, surrounded by glass and gossip and the ever-looming pressures of next quarter’s financial targets.

Dante questioned how well it suited Lucas, really. He was liked, that much was obvious, from the steady stream of well-wishers passing by their table. Or perhaps getting shot had afforded him some celebrity status that people felt might rub off and elevate their status at the watercooler.

Lucas tapped his foot to the beat of the music. He grinned at Dante, head cocked to one side, singing along under his breath, making no move to get up and dance. Dante suspected that under different circumstances he might—were he out with some younger, livelier beau.

Dante soaked up the sight of him and marveled at his good fortune.

Lily and Lois had moved to the next table and were deep in conversation with another woman. They seemed content. Dante didn’t want to rush them home, but he was finding it increasingly difficult to endure keeping a respectable distance from Lucas when all he wanted to do was dig his fingers into his thighs with Lucas riding his cock.

Over the noise of some popular dance tune that he didn’t recognize, Dante said into Lucas’s ear, “Show me your office.”

Lucas bunched up his shoulders at the contact, and laughed. “Why?”

“Because I want to see where you spend your days.”

“And you hate this party.” Lucas sidled closer and laced his fingers through Dante’s. His eyebrows lifted, and he tilted the side of his head in the direction of the foyer.

They took the lift to the third floor and alighted into a dimly lit lobby. A bland corridor, regularly punctuated on each side with closed doors, extended to the left. To the right, a large open-plan floor space was filled with a thousand identical low-partitioned cubicles, like cells in a honeycomb—where the worker bees spent their eight hours a day.

Lucas took Dante’s hand and dragged him to the left. “I hope you weren’t planning on having your wicked way. This place has cameras in every nook and cranny. No microphones, though. We can talk.”

“Talking is good.”

Lucas put his finger to the security pad outside a door with his name on it.

“You have your own office?”

“Human Resources. People need privacy when they come to see me.”

Dante immediately went behind the desk. He swiveled on Lucas’s chair, pulled at his drawers, which were locked, and flipped the monitor out from its stand. “That’s loose.”

Lucas rolled his eyes. “Anyone would think you’d never been in a corporate office before.”

“I haven’t.”

Lucas went to a filing cabinet against the wall, pulled it open, and fingered the files, reaching in and extracting a set of keys. He came around the desk and unlocked the drawers, motioning that Dante should take a look.

There was nothing of interest: the usual stationery items, neatly arranged in an organizer tray. A lined notepad, some manila files, all empty. In the bottom drawer, a hard-backed copy of Excelsior’s code of practice, an annual review, and some brochures for what looked like team-building workshops.

Lucas perched on the edge of the desk, right arm folded across his chest over his left, staring at Dante. Amused. He waited for Dante to close the drawers before he slipped down onto Dante’s lap and circled his good arm around his neck.

“What do you think?”

Dante turned them both in the chair, skidding Lucas’s feet on the carpet, forcing him to settle his full weight on Dante’s thighs and go with the motion. “You get a nice view.”

Orange and white lights dotted the coast of Roseport Island and lit the bridge. Under an iron sky, too thick with cloud and fog to see the stars, the sea lay flat and slick. Like it might have been solid, made of polished glass.

Dante fingered the end of Lucas’s tie, contemplating the tiny wedge of pale stomach he could see through the fold at the front of his shirt. He hated it here. This room made him feel stifled and trapped.

Lucas rested his chin on top of Dante’s head. “Do you think it’s really over?”

Dante tightened his hold on Lucas’s waist, as if he could squeeze out Lucas’s last unwanted bubbles of worry. “Yes. Unless the police uncover some evidence that implicates Shaw or you. Which I don’t think will happen. Forensics were their best hope, and they’ve come back with nothing.”

Lucas hummed, his breath like summer against Dante’s scalp. “What about Denny?”

“Denny is Shaw’s closest friend, and his employee. He won’t say anything unless it’s to save Shaw’s skin.”

Lucas shifted on Dante’s lap, relaxing into the embrace. The chair wasn’t big enough and the circulation was going rapidly from Dante’s thighs, but he wouldn’t have moved for anything.

“I wanted Shaw to be sorry. To say it. But regardless of the stroke, it was never going to happen. Not from him.”

The Richard Shaws of this world didn’t apologize. The recurring thought reared its ugly head. Perhaps in that regard, Dante and Shaw weren’t all that different from each other.

“Hey. I’m fine.” Lucas drew back, his eyes narrowing into a look that Dante had begun to recognize all too well—the don’t-bullshit-me glare. He lifted Dante’s chin. “Are
you
all right?”

“Yes.”

Lucas didn’t look entirely convinced. He had a special radar for Dante’s emotional state, and he was right. Dante wasn’t completely fine. Dante and Lucas were free to do what normal people did. They could go out on dates, get to know each other better, fall in love. He was out of practice and out of touch. He cared so much for Lucas, but if anyone was going to fuck this up, it was him.