Page 99 of Constantly Cotton
“Your friend is a good man,” Jai said, and Burton was glad he’d gotten to know Jai in the past few years, because he knew he was sincere. “He deserves friends to make sure it is all well.”
Which is exactly what Ace had said when Burton had apologized for leaving Ace and Sonny without two employees in a shoestring operation. Then Ace had blown his mind by saying they’d actually asked Alba for a recommendation for someone they could pay under the table. The girl they’d rescued earlier on in the summer, the one whose parents had been taken away by ICE—Alba’s mother was fostering her, and the girl didn’t start school for another couple of weeks. She’d been asking to earn her keep, and while it wasn’t something Burton couldn’t understand—his parents had been solid middle-class and he’d grown up thinking that room and board were a given—Alba’s mommy had gotten it completely. According to Alba, her mother would have been fine if the girl had just hung out and been a girl, but when your whole world has been displaced, it was hard to trust in that type of kindness. So Ace paid the girl, the girl paid Alba’s mother, and Alba’s mother put money away to help the children travel when their parents could be found.
Burton got it—but that didn’t make him feel any less guilty.
“Well, if nobody makes a move soon, he’s going to be a good man with only Henry to have his six,” Burton muttered to himself. “We can’t do this much longer.” It was easier with three of them. Everybody got eight hours of sleep if they needed it, and a chance to go out and exercise. They took four-hour shifts, two hours at a time, one person at the scope or binoculars and the other standing back from the window taking the long view. On the one hand it was as thin a stakeout as Burton had ever been on, but on the other, it felt like overkill. It wasn’t like anything washappening, was it?
Of course, there reallywerea lot of super fit, handsome young men coming and going from that apartment. Notthismorning, of course. This morning, Henry was out on a case with Jackson, his boyfriend was at the hospital, and most of the young men were either at school or at a number of jobs that each one seemed to hold. The only exception was a sloe-eyed, dark-haired, slender young man with a quiet smile who Henry had identified as “Cotton.”
“Cotton?” Burton asked, surprised. “That’s a name?”
Henry had given him a flat look. “Yeah, Lee. All sex workers use their real names when performing. It’s totally safe.”
And for the first time in alongtime, Lee Burton felt his cheeks heat in a blush. Oops. There were some things he knew, but apparently lots of things he did not.
But Cotton was the only name they had for the kid—and he seemed dedicated to Jason Constance like nobody Burton had ever seen. He only left the apartment when somebody else was there to care for Jason, and he seemed to be the one on for getting him supplies. Burton had seen him come in loaded with extra clothes, extra bedding—even food, which was only notable because Burton didn’t see a lot of food going into that apartment. He didn’t even want to think about how they all stayed that impossibly muscled and thin at the same time.
And this afternoon, at one-thirty p.m., Cotton was the only person in the apartment with Jason Constance, and Burton was thinking this whole idea was a bust.
Until Ernie fell out of his chair and said, “They’re making a move! Now!”
Jai was up like a shot away from the scope and out the door, and Burton ran hot on his heels. Across the quad, they could see a couple of squat, muscular legs hammering up the staircase of the porn stars’ apartment, and while Jai and Burton were both running full-out, Burton knew they weren’t going to make it.
He screamed, “Jason, get down!”as the guy hit the landing, and then Jai rounded the corner to go up the stairs and staggered back, a knife in his shoulder.
Burton was surprised enough to pause, because this man had become his brother in the last week, but Jai was shooing him up the stairs. “Go!” he shouted. “Go!”
At the top of the stairs, the guy with the knife was shouldering his way through the door. He was built like a freight train, and apparently he was motivated, so with a wrenching, splintering sound, he went cracking through the door and tumbling into the apartment. Burton—knife drawn—raced hot on his heels.
He hit the landing and pivoted and saw the man standing, legs apart, in the process of aiming his gun. Burton didn’t even need to see where he was aiming it to throw his own knife cleanly at the man’s gun arm before he could fire.
The guy grunted, but stayed standing, switching his gun to his other hand. Burton was raising his own Beretta when he saw another knife—this one a chef’s knife—come flying through the air to bounce off the guy’s nose.
Thatmade him stagger, and Burton had time to aim his own gun and call, “Drop it, or you’re over.”
The man—squat all over, nose, eyes, ears, neck, legs, torso, all of it compressed into one mean muscle—gave him a dismissive glance and then turned to shoot again, and Burton dropped him in his tracks, and even with a silencer, the gun’s reports seemed unnaturally loud in the quiet apartment complex.
He turned his head to make sure everything was okay and saw, to his surprise, that shadow-eyed wraith of a kid standing in front of an exhausted, dead-on-his-feet Jason Constance in the tiny apartment kitchen that sat practically behind the door.
He’d damaged their dead guy’s nose with a thrown chef’s knife just before Burton had shot.
“Oh fuck,” the skinny kid breathed, staring at the dead man. “Fuck. Jason. Jason, there’s adead man on our carpet!”
“Jason?” Burton queried.
The kid glanced up at him, and Burton grimaced. Not a bad-looking kid, but fragile—Burton had seen that from surveillance.
Burton held the gun pointed up and grunted at the dead guy at his feet before kicking the gun out of his hand, holstering his own weapon, and glancing around the apartment. “Shit,” he said. “Jason, do we have any idea who this is?”
Jason put two hands on the kid’s shoulders and pushed him to the side. “Lee?”
Burton gave a tight smile of relief. “Sir! Damn. That asshole broke ranks and charged the steps. I swear we didn’t see where he was coming from.”
Jason nodded and glanced around the apartment. “Well, props for being prepared,” he said, shaking his head. “He would have had us. Thanks, Burton.”
“Thank Ernie,” Burton said. “But thank him later, after we get you somewhere safe. We’ve got to bug out, sir—”
“I’m coming with him,” the kid—Cotton?—said.
