Page 46 of Beneath the Stain

“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 knowexactlyhow much it costs to get vomit out of a limo? Don’t worry about it, Trav. Man… these kids.Thiskid. 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… notmoralto 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.

TRAVANDJefferson 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 hadnotplayed 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?”