Page 145 of Beneath the Stain

But he’d just come out in the middle of a mob scene, and Trav wasn’t sure if he wanted to applaud or weep.

It was brave—really fucking brave—but it also might have just lit the fucking fuse.

“Oh my God!” Delmont turned his head and spat. “It’s bad enough that kid is bringing faggots into my bar—he’s gone and fucking gayed up the entire town!”

He still had Trav by the collar, and he was pretty tall. Trav couldn’t clock him in the jaw, so he gave him two hard uppercuts to the gut instead.

Delmont dropped him and staggered back before bouncing off the bar and coming up with a roar.

Trav lowered into a boxer’s crouch, prepared to stop him like you’d stop a runaway horse—with a sharp spar to the chest—when Mackey leapt off the stage like a shrieking eagle and landed on Delmont’s back.

“Jefferson! Stevie! Get Grant out of here!” Trav bellowed, which was the last and only smart thing he did that night.

“THISPLACElooks like the jail inDukes of Hazzard,” Trav said glumly for the thousandth time. His nose ached, his lower lip was split, and the smell of wet metal and piss wouldn’t fucking leave him alone.

Mackey, sitting next to him on the cot with an ice bag over his eye, tagged him in the arm with his free hand.

“Ouch!” Trav muttered. “What was that for?”

“You’ve said it about sixty-eleven times, Trav. Is this the only fucking jail you’ve ever seen?”

“I was an MP, Mackey. Of course it’s not.” The pregnant pause seemed to accuse him, so he added, “It’s the only jail I’ve ever seen the inside of” before leaning back tiredly.

Kell and Blake were leaning back-to-back and dozing, each with a mess of gauze and ice packs in their laps. Kell had a bruise the size of an egg peeking out of his growing hair. Jefferson and Stevie had no such macho postures—Stevie’s head was in Jefferson’s lap, and Jefferson was asleep on Stevie’s hip, like little kids in the back of a car. Stevie had a splint around his middle three fingers, and Jefferson’s jaw was swollen and his ear was split. They’d picked Grant up, sedan chair like, and hustled him out of the bar, and then come back just when shit gotreallyinteresting and before the cops showed up. Nobody had let them dress even though they had clothes in the SUV and the town car, so Trav was the only one in the town’s single jail cell with a shirt on.

The fact that the shirt was torn and bloodied and would never be yellow again didn’t change the fact that it was his.

Next to him, Mackey seemed unfazed by the fact that Travis Ford had never seen the inside of a cell he wasn’t locking someone into. He seemed, in fact, absolutely gleeful.

“Look!” he said happily. “Over there—under the cot Kell and Blake are on—look!”

Trav squinted, and sure enough, someone had chipped through the industrial tan paint, revealing the red primer below. “Outbreak Monkey,” Trav read, not surprised. “That’s fucking adorable. This bringing back memories, McKay?”

Mackey leaned away from him and scowled. “You can get shitty all you want, Travis Ford, but it does not change the fact that this is not my fault.”

Trav scowled back at him, stung. “I never said it was—”

“Oh, yes, you did. You can’t even fucking look at me. Man, I played them two of our calmest songs to ease them down—I do that some nights, because you know how they get if they’re too wound up at the end! But this time, no. It’s our town, and it bit us in the ass—I did not know that would happen, okay?”

Mackey thrust his lower lip out and regarded Trav with a jagged sort of hurt, and Trav couldn’t do anything but look away.

“This place is awful,” Trav muttered.

Mackey leaned against him, apparently satisfied that they were square now. “It’s a jail, Trav. It’s not supposed to be a daisy field where you’re purred to sleep by sunshiny kittens.”

Trav fought and lost to the smile at the corners of his mouth. “Do they purr better when they’re sunshiny?” he asked, feeling his foot on solid ground for just a moment.

“Mmmaybe,” Mackey returned playfully.

Then the guard—who was looking at them all like they might start having ass sex right in the open cell—called out, “You faggots keep your hands to yourselves in there, you hear?” and all the good feelings went bye-bye.

“I’m not talking about the jail cell, Mackey,” Trav said glumly.

Next to him, Mackey sighed and deflated, becoming five six, 120 on a good day, a kid in his twenties, with long bleached hair and smeared guyliner, and not a rock and roll icon. Not right now.

“I know you’re not,” he said simply. “Man, you think you’re all a bad person because you got into one fight here as a grown-up? I’ve been fighting them assholes since I was five years old. Never fucking changes. They just get fatter and harder to beat.”

Trav grunted, not wanting to touch his broken nose. Yeah, an on-site paramedic had looked it over and made sure it was set, but the truth was, Delmont hit like a sledgehammer. If Mackey hadn’t been riding the guy’s back and putting the stranglehold on him, he really might have killed somebody.