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“They’ll lie,” he said. “People always lie.”
Emery and John-Henry traded a look, but neither of them said anything.
They left Tean and Jem at the fringe of the party, where tassels of light fluttered against the darkness, and the brocade of voices and music and the distant, plaintive cries of big cats gave the night texture. Then, together, Jem and Tean walked back to where they’d been attacked, and Jem recovered the paracord and antenna from where he’d dropped them.
“All right?” Jem said, breaking the silence between them.
Tean nodded. But he didn’t look all right: even in the half-light, shadows hollowed out his eyes, and tension Jem hadn’t seen in a long time pulled at his face.
“I’ll be faster next time,” Jem said. Tean looked at him, so Jem clarified, “I won’t let that happen again.”
He didn’t know what to call the look on Tean’s face, but after a moment, Tean nodded.
“So,” Jem said, “what now? Go back to the resort and be good little boys like Emery and John-Henry told us?”
“No. Not while Missy’s still in trouble.” Tean was silent for a long moment, and in the dark, with the party like a TV backdrop, the silence had the sense of movement, the way water looks still but runs fast. “I know we should let the police handle it. Emery and John-Henry seem to know what they’re doing, and they’re going to look into this. For all we know, North and Shaw are going to find Yesenia tonight or tomorrow, and it’ll all be a misunderstanding.”
“A misunderstanding didn’t put that bloody poncho in Missy’s room.”
“That’s what I don’t understand,” Tean said. “Why would she have it in her room?”
“Are you asking because she’s not an idiot in general, or because it makes no sense to leave a bloody t-shirt in the reservoir and then bring another piece of incriminating evidence home?”
A gleam of a smile. “I should have known you’d think of it too.”
With a soft laugh, Jem said, “Never mind. Give me your big speech. Tell me the sequence of events doesn’t make sense or something like that.”
“None of it makes sense.”
“No.”
After another of those silences, Tean said, “I guess I’m trying to say that I know we shouldn’t be doing this. I mean, Emery and John-Henry aren’t wrong. We’re in way over our heads.”
Jem’s phone buzzed, and he glanced down to see a Facebook friend request from August Paul Lopez. He looked back at Tean. “Is this the part where I’m supposed to tell you we’re going to do it, God damn you, and don’t try to stop me, and you can have my badge, but you can’t have my gun?”
“What?”
“You’ll have to catch me first, copper.”
“Wait, I thought you were a copper. What kind of badge were you turning in?”
“You know we’re not going to stop trying to prove Missy is innocent. I know we’re not going to stop. So, what are we doing?”
Tean thought about that for a while. “Feeling guilty about doing the right thing? And also struggling with my social conditioning to do what authority figures tell me to do? And maybe a little bit of waffling because I’m scared and I don’t want anything bad to happen to you because we were trying to help one of my friends?”
“God,” Jem said, appraising his husband, “maybe I’ll wear the hat.”
“Huh?”
“The cop hat. And the belt, maybe. With the cuffs jangling.”
Even in the dark, even under the brown of Tean’s skin, the blush exploded like fireworks.
“Maybe then you’ll do what I tell you.”
The blush deepened, but Tean said, “Grunting and saying, ‘yeah, uh huh, oh’ isn’t exactly an instruction manual.”
“I could write you an instruction manual if that’s what you want.”
