Page 16 of Under Cover
He remembered what broken ribs felt like, but the bullet impact, even through the vest, was a special sort of panic. He didn’t even want to think about the ways Garcia made it better.
But he did, starting with that touch on his forehead, pushing his hair back. Maybe Garcia was just a handsy guy. Some people’s families were like that, and Garcia seemed like the type. But that didn’t mean it hadn’t been a comfort. In a way, so had the ration of shit Garcia gave him for running up to the room behind the stairs without backup.
“I was right, wasn’t I?” he asked, carefully spacing out his breaths.
“I’m glad the kid’s okay,” Garcia admitted, but maybe that’s because the kid was sitting on the bed next to him, leaning his head on Crosby’s arm.
The kid started to talk, his voice dreamy, his teeth chattering from the shock.
“Is… is… is Jesse okay?”
“Yes,” Garcia said immediately. “He and his brother and the boy are in protective custody.”
“Good.” Then Kurt whimpered and said one more word. “Ryan.” He started to cry silently, and he didn’t move until the EMTs got there and started to shout directions to each other on the landing. The general consensus was they had to move the body on the staircase before they could treat anybody in the little closet/room, so Crosby and Kurt had to wait to be seen.
As much as Crosby wanted an apartment of his own, he figured he wasn’t going to move into the closet anytime soon. The room may havesounded romantic as a little hideaway, but the truth was, only the window saved it from being a deathtrap. Listening to the EMTs swearing as they tried to fit the dead perpetrator onto the stretcher was dark comedy.
By the time they’d figured out how it was going to work, Crosby decided he wasn’t going to sit there and wait for them.
“Help me up,” he said to Garcia.
“No.”
“Help me up!” he insisted. “Do you want to make them come down here to get me? Here, you help me, the kid helps me, we can be up the stairs before the next unit gets off the elevator.”
Garcia grunted. “This is stupid, and your commander is going to kill me.”
“He doesn’t have to know,” Crosby breathed. “He’s your commander too.” Adrenaline and injury were giving him the shakes—he could feel it coming on. But he needed to stand up, and he needed Garcia to stop hovering over him because it gave him ideas he shouldn’t have. “Kurt, I’m going to lean on you. Are you game?”
“Sure,” Kurt said, his voice low and sad. “Here, hold on to my hand.”
Crosby trusted him and pushed up, while Garcia offered him a hand from the front. Lev-er-age! He stood, eyes watering from the pain in his side, and remembered all the squat thrusts he’d been doing, not to mention the hours running to amp his cardio. He locked his core and used his thigh muscles, one hand on the railing and the other wrapped around Garcia’s wiry, hard bicep.
Ooh. Nice.
It was a good thing he was in too much pain to get handsy, or he’d be down for a good grope, and he had no cultural excuses for it. His parents were repressed Irish, down to his mother’s sensible shoes. Gah! He’d known it when the guy had bopped through the door, all tight and hard like that. Crosby didn’t really think of himself as gay, but he’d had a few exceptions that probably made him bi. Guys who hit him just right, guys he liked to look at, and a few who’d hit on him that he’d gotten to touch. In the end he’d accepted it, that he could like it with a guy same as with a girl, but he hadn’t had a relationship of more than a week or two. Cop work was too demanding—and too homophobic.
But Lord, this guy was hitting his spots.
His foot slipped a little, and white lightning zapped him in the side, stopping his breath, forcing his thoughts to the here and now of what his body was doing. He must have made a sound because Garcia was suddenly closer, one arm wrapped around his waist while he gripped Crosby’s bicep with his far hand and took some of his weight. One step at a time, one breath at a time, he made it to the top of the stairs, arriving as the next crew burst out of the elevator.
“You tried to do our job for us?”
Crosby recognized the girl—sweet, early twenties, blond and blue-eyed. She’d been there when he’d gotten mauled by the dog.
“Didn’t want… you to….”
“He didn’t want you to get stuck on the stairs,” Garcia muttered. “Jesus, Crosby, you say bupkis all day, and now you want to talk?”
“This is Garcia,” Crosby said, smiling in spite of the clammy pain-sweat enveloping his body. “He’s… impatient.”
Wendy Parsons and her partner, a fit Asian man in his early forties named Brian Kim, both snorted and hustled the stretcher to where he stood.
“He’s the impatient one?” Kim asked acerbically.
“They had a hell of a time getting the body out of the stairwell,” Garcia told him. “I think he didn’t want to have to hear all the bitching if you had to go down into that tiny room.”
“That’s the Crosby we know and love,” Wendy said, coming to his other side and helping him sit. She glanced up, and her blue eyes took in Kurt, who was huddling back in the stairwell. “Who’s your friend?”
