Beneath the Stain - Part 3 (2 page)

“And you are?”

Trav swallowed. “I’m the one person who knows his last HIV test was negative,” he said, thinking about getting that little nugget when Mackey was in detox.

The doctor narrowed his eyes. “Aren’t you a little old for this kid?”

“He’s twenty,” Trav said and tried not to be defensive. “And we’re not lovers. I’m just saying that I know things his brothers don’t—including that you need to do a rape kit. We can’t change that I know that, but I can keep it from getting out to the rest of the world.”

The doctor wasn’t giving an inch. “A title, Mr….?”

“Ford. I’m his manager. And”—God, this was such a fucking misnomer—“and his friend.”

The doctor nodded and turned around, dismissing Trav, and started giving orders. Trav thought he’d go back into the waiting room then, go back to the brothers, reassure them, tell them not to talk to anyone, but he paused.

Mackey was flat on his back as they cut off his clothes, and his full lips were blue in his pointed, white face.

Trav pulled out his phone and texted Jefferson instead.

Stay put. He’s going to be fine. Don’t talk to anyone not in the band. This includes Blake. I’m getting backup to take you home and help you handle the press if it comes to that.

They’re already here. Security kicked them out of the waiting room.

Fuck.

Trav backed out of the curtained enclosure and speed-dialed Heath.

“Trav? What the hell is going on? Allison from PR says the whole band just disappeared—you were supposed to give a thank-you speech or—”

“Heath, just shut up and listen. We need a handler for the band at the hospital here, and we need everybody involved to sign nondisclosure agreements. We need a liaison with the police department, and we’re going to need to give a press release. Are you ready?”

A stunned silence buzzed on the other end of the line. “Yeah, sure. Give it to me straight.”

H
EATH
PERSONALLY
did the announcing—after ten minutes on the phone with Trav, he said, “Look. I’ll handle the press. You get a hold of yourself—Jesus, Trav, I actually saw you take a bullet with less freaking out!”

“He
trusted
me!” Trav snapped, wishing he had a wall to pound. “He
trusted
me, and I fucked him over.”

Heath’s voice was almost gentle. “No, Travis. He trusted you and you kept it from being worse. You found him before he could be flashed all over the press, passed out in an alleyway.”

Trav let out a horrible sound, a sound he didn’t even want to own as his. “Heath… man, we’ve got to go to the cops ourselves. I can’t have his… this violation smeared all over the fucking press. Whatever you’ve got to do to keep this shit Mackey’s and my secret—”

“What about his brothers?” Heath asked doubtfully. “They’re pretty close, aren’t they?”

Only bi when high.

“Yeah. They’re claustrophobically close. We need to give him some fucking privacy or he’s going to come unglued.”

Heath grunted. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll contact the cops—the doc probably already has the rape crisis officer on his way. You handle Mackey and the boys. I’ll send an assistant there to get them to the hotel when they’re ready to leave, okay?”

Trav tried not to sound as upset as he felt. “Thanks. I appreciate it.” Then he grimaced. “And Heath? Man, you’re gonna have a helluva cleaning bill for the limo.”

Heath’s laughter came from a dark place. “You think I don’t know
exactly
how much it costs to get vomit out of a limo? Don’t worry about it, Trav. Man… these kids.
This
kid. Just keep him from self-destructing, okay? Just… just keep him together. It’s….”

“It’s, like, moral,” Trav said, feeling stupid and naïve but feeling right too. “It’s not… not
moral
to just fucking leave them on their own.”

“Almost poetic.” Trav could hear top-priced scotch hitting a crystal tumbler even as Heath spoke. Well, he was going to need it.

“You’re the one who put me in a box with rock stars,” Trav said bitterly. He thought about those quiet moments in the middle of the night, watching Mackey in his underwear assembling beauty with an acoustic guitar and cheap spiral notebooks. “What did you expect?”

“Not this,” Heath sighed. “I’m so sorry about this.”

“Me too.”

There wasn’t much else to say about that, so Trav hung up and watched some more as the doctors worked on Mackey.

T
RAV
AND
Jefferson watched the announcement from Mackey’s bedside later that evening. Mackey was still out of it—whatever had been mixed with the roofie to make it knock him out that quickly had been bad shit, and it had
not
played nice with the Rohypnol.

The doctor told Trav privately that if Mackey hadn’t been brought in, he might have stopped breathing within hours of passing out.

“He’s just so small,” the doctor said, shaking his head. “And I take it he just got out of detox? He had very little fat reserves and no way to metabolize what was in his system.”

Trav swallowed, and the word “rehab” assumed epic proportions in his head, lit with gold, neon, and sparklers. Mackey’s body couldn’t have taken much more of what he’d been dishing out. This thing with the Rohypnol? That was just icing on the “Mackey needs to clean up his act” cake.

“I hear you,” Trav said, his voice sounding unfamiliar, his throat feeling like a cat box, full of sand and gravel and shit.

“And thankfully, that’s all he’ll need to worry about,” the doctor said clearly. “The specimen we collected was negative for HIV.”

Trav had been fighting the urge for the past five hours, and fighting it so successfully he barely recognized what it was until he lost. His eyes filled up and he blinked hard, willing himself to get his act together.

“That’s good,” he said. AZT was a bitch. Heath had gotten bitten once by a perpetrator who’d gotten away. Trav had been in the infirmary, recovering from a gunshot to the shoulder, and he and Heath had deepened their lifelong attachment to each other playing chess between Heath’s bouts of violent vomiting.
Mackey, thank God, there’s your fucking break.

The doctor told them he wanted two days’ observation, and Trav said he’d be there for it. Heath’s promised assistant showed up, a dapper, crisp woman in her fifties named Debra, with short gray-blonde hair and cheekbones that spoke of an early career modeling. Jefferson elected to stay after a hug from Shelia and one from Stevie. Debra rounded everybody else up into a new town car, complete with a promise to stop somewhere to eat on their way to the hotel.

Trav’s last thought of the bunch of them was to remind them they were moving their shit to the new (and newly furnished) house the next day, so they should pack. He quietly gave Debra permission to pack his stuff, and to gather Mackey’s as well.

“He shouldn’t have anything untoward,” he said, grimacing. “We got rid of his paraphernalia two weeks ago.” Besides lubed condoms, there shouldn’t be a damned thing that would make her blush, and given what she did for a living, Trav was pretty sure the lubed condoms were tame. “If you could have some clothes sent over when Jefferson needs picking up—jeans, underwear, shower shoes, a clean button down, clean T-shirt—I’d sure love to shower and change.”

Debra nodded briskly, not batting an eyelash. Trav wondered if she’d raised a football team or something, because the woman had a poker face that would put most MPs to shame.

She left and Trav was alone with Jefferson, leaning back in the hospital chairs and scanning the (many) news channels for Heath’s press release. Mackey was positioned on his side, one arm stretched out over his head, the other hand tucked under his cheek, like a baby after prayers. His hair fell in his pale face, and every so often, he shivered. Trav pulled up the covers as close to his neck as he could.

Jefferson played on his phone for a while. When he broke the silence, Trav was actually relieved. It felt like his entire being had been focused on watching Mackey’s thin chest move up and down.

“Mr. Ford?”

“Yeah?”

They were whispering.

“Why didn’t they turn him on his back?”

Trav took a deep breath and looked at Jefferson. Was it an idle question? Did he suspect?

Jefferson was looking directly at Trav, his blue eyes open, gnawing on his lip with slightly prominent teeth. He was probably the plainest of the boys—he and Stevie tying for least attractive—with his round face and completely average cheekbones and chin.

But those eyes were direct and honest.

Trav couldn’t lie to those eyes, and he’d lied to a lot of criminals and bureaucrats in his day.

“Why do you think?” he asked, trying not to be bitter.

Jefferson swallowed hard and took a deep breath. “What’s Mackey going to say about that when he wakes up?”

“I don’t know. What are
you
going to say?”

Jefferson laughed softly and closed his eyes. He leaned forward and rested his weight on his elbows. “Me and Stevie, we’re damned good at not talking, yeah? We’re like a… a cul de sac, you know? Nothing goes straight through. All the cars and the houses and the people just sort of get caught at the end. That’s me and Stevie with secrets. We tell each other, and that’s as far as it goes. It’s the telling each
other
that matters.”

Trav closed his eyes, then opened them. “What about Shelia?” he asked. This seemed the time for it.

Jefferson’s smile grew sweet. “She’s getting to be our other house, you know? Like every cul de sac has three? But me and Stevie, we got some secrets older’n her, and she knows it.”

“Secrets like what?” Trav asked, suddenly hungry for them. What made these boys? What secrets forged them, their loyalty and indifference toward each other? What made a Mackey James Sanders?

And that sweet smile shuttered. “Take your pick, Mr. Ford. I can tell you why Mackey don’t like Blake and who kept Mackey supplied with coke. I can tell you why Mackey didn’t go home for Christmas last year and why the whole family thinks Stevie and I are related. I can tell you why Stevie’s mom ain’t talked to us since we left home and why Stevie’s dad wants us to come back real fuckin’ soon. But I wanna know what happened to my brother, so you better pick a good question.”

Trav took a short breath and then a longer one. “So much to choose from,” he muttered. Then: “Okay. I’ll tell you what happened to Mackey, and you tell me which thing I most need to hear.”

“Fair enough,” Jefferson said calmly.

Trav closed his eyes and said it in his head. He’d had to tell Banneker’s parents that their son had killed himself. This moment should not be that hard.

“Your brother was drugged—
hard—
and raped in an alleyway. The rapist left DNA—and was, blessedly, HIV negative.”

Jefferson nodded. “That’s a motherfucker. You gonna tell Kell?”

Trav didn’t even think about it. “Nope.”

“Good. Kell does his best, but he’s not real bright. Until Mackey makes nice with Blake, he ain’t gonna listen much.”

Okay, all those questions. Now was his chance. “Why doesn’t Mackey like Blake?”

Jefferson grimaced. “’Cause he ain’t Grant. That was a weak try, Mr. Ford. I coulda told you all sorts of stuff.”

Trav smiled in spite of himself. “I’ll just have to ask Mackey himself,” he said softly. His hand, which had been resting on the bed near Mackey’s head, suddenly twitched all on its own, and he used the movement as an excuse to push Mackey’s hair out of his eyes.

It occurred to him that Mackey wasn’t the only one with painful secrets.

He looked up at Jefferson, suddenly curious. “So
are
you and Stevie related?”

Jefferson grinned delightedly. “There ain’t a state in the union that wouldn’t let us marry, if we were a boy and a girl.”

Trav snorted, amused. “That’s not saying much. Most states will let first cousins marry.”

Jefferson kept grinning and nodded. “Yup. That there is true.”

Trav suspected he was being played. “I’ll bet a thousand people have asked you and you haven’t given any of them a straight answer.”

That playful grin on those crooked teeth was as innocent as a sociopath’s. “You’d win that bet, Mr. Ford. Kell and Grant came closest. It’s the name thing, you see? All us boys have our daddy’s last names as our first names?”

Trav’s jaw dropped. “I had not heard that!”

Jefferson shook his head in disgust. “Everybody’s heard that. It’s why Mackey’s name is really McKay.”

Oh. Well, hell. “I had not heard that either,” Trav said, feeling
stupid.

Obviously Jefferson felt the same way. “You ain’t done your homework, that’s all. But Kell and Grant sat Stevie down alone and asked him if anyone in his family had the last name of Jefferson.”

Trav narrowed his eyes. It was a child’s game, and the boys had played it to perfection. “Does somebody
outside
his family, who is still related by
blood
, like a half brother or a bastard brother or someone born out of wedlock, have the last name of Jefferson?” he asked, grimly amused.

There was no grimness in Jefferson’s amusement. “You figured that out right off, Mr. Ford—you ’bout got the whole town beat!”

Mackey’s hair was rough under his fingers, but Trav was okay with that. He’d let himself be distracted. “Well, no offense, Jefferson, but I’ve talked to Mackey, and that doesn’t sound hard to do.”

That fast, Jefferson was serious and sober. Trav felt bad. The boy—and Trav couldn’t delude himself anymore, they were
all
boys—had been proud of himself for a moment, happy and free. One mention of their hometown and all that went away.

“Wasn’t hard to fool the town at all, Mr. Ford. Fool them about knowing who your daddy was, about so and so’s mom fooling around and so and so’s dad wanting to touch your ass when you didn’t want it touched. Fool them like Mackey did in a thousand different ways—wasn’t a hard place to fool. But it’s a damned hard place to get out of your head.”