Page 42 of Shades of Henry
Lance and Henry cocked their heads. “What rent raise?”
Curtis blinked. “The uh… never mind.” He wiped his mouth hard and chewed the gum in his teeth harder. “He didn’t tell you. It was me and Zep and—”
Henry and Lance met eyes. “And who?” Henry asked. “Where were you?”
“The super’s office,” Curtis snapped back.
“Did you see Jackson? He was heading that way.”
Curtis’s lower lip wobbled. “He… I was giving Sternberg a blowie to get two hundred off rent, okay? And this guy busts in there, and Sternberg gets all ‘It just happens,’ and the guy makes him confess that it was a scam. Therewasno rent raise. That was something he told some of us to get free blowjobs. So not only am I a whore, I’m adumbwhore, because I didn’t even ask, I took his word for it when Zep and I went down with the cashier’s check.” He gave another vicious chew of the gum. “Fisher was giving some too. We wanted to spread it around because that fucker isfoul.”
“I’ll kill him,” Henry said. “I’m going to go find Jackson, and we’re going to kill him.”
“He wouldn’t let me beat the shit out of him,” Curtis muttered. “The guy—Jackson, I guess—told me that the cops would putmein jail but let him off. He’s right. But God,augh!” Curtis stomped off to his bedroom, and Lance met Henry’s furious gaze.
“I’ll take Curtis,” Lance said.
“And I’ll go see what’s up.” He was all the way out the door before Lance even thought to ask him what they were doing after this.
When Henry came back—not more than ten minutes later, Lance would swear by it—it was to drag Lance to a crime scene—and to doctor the guy who was supposedly going to save Henry’s ass.
“You need me to what?” Lance asked as Henry hauled him down the stairs.
“He hates hospitals and he’s bleeding. I told him you were a med student—”
“Doctor,” Lance corrected, although he’d been letting everybody else say med student for years. He’d been a student when he started at Johnnies—explanations were the suck.
“A resident’s a doctor?” Henry asked, wrinkling his nose.
“A sergeant is a soldier?” Lance shot back. Henry was leading him to the super’s office, and there were cops there already.
“Fine, you win, I’m stupid—”
“Wait! Is that thesuper!” They pulled short as paramedics passed by with a man on a stretcher who looked a lot like the asshole who took their money every month, only this guy was sheet white and covered in blood.
Henry made a sound. “Yeah, but he’s being treated. Rivers isn’t. Look—there he is.”
The man wearing worn cargo shorts and a tissue-thin T-shirt didn’tlookimposing until Lance realized he was dripping blood from a wound on his shoulder and talking to the detective in front of him like it was an ordinary day.
Lance shook his head. “Yeah, he’s going to need that treated.”
“Rivers!” Henry called, and Jackson Rivers turned his head and nodded.
His green eyes had a burning intensity to them, and his gaunt, square-jawed face was still pretty in a faded way. And God, he looked so tired.
Lance realized that maybe it wasn’t just porn kids who needed a nonjudgmental medical presence in their lives. “We can do this here or we can do this upstairs,” he said, and was relieved when Rivers stopped arguing and picked the apartment instead of the crime scene.
LANCE GRIMACEDas he stared at the network of scars on Jackson Rivers’s back and plucked at the edge of his wound with the needle. The super had been carted away in an ambulance, because apparently the guy who’d sliced Rivers open had come back to silence the guy who knew why he’d been in the security booth erasing all of the video footage in the first place.
Ugh! The whole thing made Lance itchy. He hadn’t even liked the superintendent—even less when he found out the guy had been blackmailing his kids for blowjobs. But going downstairs and seeing him hauled away in the ambulance had brought home just how close to danger they all were until whoever murdered Martin Sampson was found.
And seeing Henry’s brand-new hero, standing at the crime scene, giving a detective shit while he dripped blood through his shirt, had made Lance even more worried for Henry. Henry seemedinvigoratedsomehow. He’d been almost ecstatic when he’d come upstairs, more worried about Lance, about the thing blossoming between them, than he had been about proving his own innocence.
The fact was, Lance didn’t give a good goddamn who killed Martin Sampson—as long as the guy and all his associates with knives and heavy blunt objects stayed away from the people he cared about. Lance wasn’t a mystery kind of guy. The only puzzles that interested him were the human ones who presented themselves in the hospital or who interacted with him in his daily life.
Henry was his kind of puzzle.
And reluctantly, looking at the puzzle of scar tissue on Rivers’s back, he had to admit that Jackson Rivers was his kind of puzzle too.
