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It’s the first blast of air that always gets me: ice-cold air conditioning, so perfectly purified and filtered and recycled that it’s like a snowflake on my tongue. As I stepped into the hospital lobby, my heart started beating faster and sweat flashed across my back. After a few steps, I caught the familiar smells: an astringent disinfectant, floor cleaner, wet hair. My underarms were damp now; I shaved my pits for a reason.

Over the last year, I’d spent enough time coming and going at the hospital that the reactions, for the most part, were just that: reactions. My heart pounding in my chest didn’t stop me from finding the elevator. The polo clinging between my shoulder blades didn’t keep me from finding Thomas Wheeler’s floor. I nodded to familiar faces, smiled, pretended not to see when gazes skittered away and then, when they thought I wasn’t looking, came back.

As I made my way down the halls, looking for Thomas Wheeler’s room, the sounds carried me back in time: the beeps of machinery, the echo of footfalls, the voices. A patient tech leaned against a gurney, doing something on his phone, and where his scrubs had ridden up, I could see a tattoo of Yosemite Sam on his ankle. That too, I thought. The little things. You wake up, and you don’t know where you are or what happened or what’s wrong with your eye, and it’s like everything around you means something special. You’re taking it all in, trying to figure it all out. Like everything about this place is a promise that things are going to be all right—the steady fluorescent light, the chrome, the white. You’re safe. Nothing bad can happen here. And that’s the first day.

When I turned the next corner, the timbre of voices—muffled, with that kind of strained, middle-class effort not to make a scene, but still unmistakably angry—plucked me out of my thoughts. I saw them a moment later: a man and a woman at the end of the hall. The man was white, on the early side of middle aged, with stubby sideburns and posture like a cop. The woman had the biggest tits I’d ever seen. That’s a fucking awful thing to think about a woman, but it’s the truth. She had Barbie hair—Barbie blonde, Barbie texture, like nothing that had ever grown on a human head—and she was wearing a leopard-print top with jeans that had been strategically ripped. The man was holding her by the wrists, talking in a low, furious voice as she tried to pull away.

“Because if you’re going to act like you’re insane,” he was saying, “I’m going to treat you like you’re insane. Get a hold of yourself!”

“Let go of me.”

He made a furious noise, but he released her. That was when he noticed me. He did the usual double-take, and then he set his jaw. “Can I help you?”

I showed him my badge. A badge is like a six-inch dick: it gets you in pretty much everywhere. “Everything okay here?”

His expression didn’t change much, but he said, “I thought the sheriff’s department was handling this.”

That gave me a moment’s pause; most civilians didn’t know where the sheriff’s department left off and the police department picked up, and it certainly wasn’t a default response to Everything okay here?

“Handling what?”

The woman answered, “What they did to Tip! What they did to his face!”

“Is that Thomas Wheeler? And who are you?”

“He goes by Tip,” the man said. “We’re his parents. And I still don’t know who you are or why you’re here.”

I settled for another six-inch-dicker: “This is just a routine follow-up.”

It looked like he wanted to argue—not for any particular reason, but because it seemed like his style. But he shook his head, glanced at a door down the hall, and said, “He’s with his friend .”

“God, Eddie,” the woman said, “let it go.” But she was massaging her wrist as she did so, looking at me like she was hoping maybe she could get me to start something.

I made my way toward the door the man had glanced at, while behind me, their voices resumed with that low-voltage tension. I gave a quick knock, waited a beat, and pushed open the door.

It was your standard, semi-private hospital room. In the bed closest to the door, a middle-aged man with an oxygen mask was sleeping poorly, twitching and mumbling. The TV above him was playing one of those daytime judge shows, where justice is served with a side of sass. The partition for the second bed was closed, and someone was whispering behind it, but as I stepped closer, the sound died.

“Tip?” I said. “Thomas Wheeler?”

“We’re in here,” a voice answered. And then, a beat too late, “Uh, who is it?”

I slid the partition back, and the rings jangled on the rod. It was different, seeing him now—in the bright hospital light, with sunshine coming through the window, his face bandaged, a special protective cover over his injured eye. But it was the same boy. He wore his blond hair in curtains, and he had honey-colored eyebrows and a generous mouth.The hospital johnnie couldn’t hide the lean build of someone growing out of late adolescence. His good eye was shut, but his chest rose and fell with quick, agitated breaths.

Another boy sat in the chair next to him. They could have been siblings, but, of course, they weren’t. Even if that throwaway comment from Tip’s dad hadn’t been enough of a clue, it was obvious from how the second boy darted glances at Tip that he was deeply—and painfully—in love. Like Tip, he was blond, and like Tip, he had curtains. He had pink lips and perfect skin and eyes red from crying. I wondered how long it had taken him to put together the slouchily sexy outfit, complete with gold chain, that would look perfect for a hospital visit.

“Who are you?” the second boy said. Then he must have seen me—the blood-streaked eye, the scars—and his gaze ricocheted away, only to land on Tip and ricochet again. This time it landed safely on a taupe-colored wall.

Tip still hadn’t opened his eye.

“Detective Dulac,” I said. “Wahredua PD.” I gestured to the open chair and took it before anybody could say no. “Who are you?”

“Jordan Hodge.” He glanced at Tip. “This is Tip.” And then, squaring his shoulders like it might be a fight, he said, “He’s resting.”

“I can see that.”

One of the things you learn if you’re a cop is that people don’t like silence. As Emery put it one time, Nature abhors a vacuum, which was just proof, that he hadn’t got laid that week. But he wasn’t wrong. People don’t like silence. Hell, I don’t like silence. If you’d asked me a year ago, I probably would have said one of my strong suits was shooting the shit. But a lot changes in a year.

After about fifteen seconds of background noise—the lady judge on the television wanted to know if anybody had any receipts, so, you know the wheels of justice were grinding the shit out of crime once again—Jordan grabbed Tip’s hand and said, “I’m allowed to be here. I’m his boyfriend.”

I nodded.

“He’s not having a good day,” Jordan said, which sounded like something he’d heard someone say on one of those hospital dramas and which probably qualified as understatement of the year. “Do you need something? He’s supposed to be resting, and his parents are being—”

He cut himself off, but too late.

Tip didn’t open his eyes, but he did twist his hand free of Jordan’s.

“What happened with Tip’s parents?” I asked.

Jordan tried to recapture Tip’s hand, but Tip twisted away again. It was like watching two seventh-graders.

Finally, a flush filling his face, Jordan gave up and said, “Nothing. They’re just a lot sometimes.”

I waited.

“Do you, like, need something?” Jordan finally said. “We already talked to a detective.”

“I’d like you to tell me what happened last night.”

Jordan made a scoffing noise. “Somebody tried to kill him!”

“Tip?” I asked.

There are, I’m sure, people who are good at playing possum. Tip Wheeler was not one of them. He flinched.

“He doesn’t remember very much,” Jordan said. He leaned forward in his chair to brush Tip’s hair away from his forehead. Tip, for someone who was trying desperately to get himself cast as a coma victim, jerked away from the touch. “Because of, like, trauma.”

“Why don’t we start at the beginning,” I said, “and we’ll see if you remember anything as we go?”

“It was a gay bashing,” Jordan said. “That’s why they did it.”

When I looked at him, he shrank back in his seat. And then, with an expression I wanted to call defiance, he took Tip’s hand again.

Apparently, even for Tip, that was enough. He yanked his hand back and opened his good eye. “For fuck’s sake, Jordan!”

“I’m sorry,” Jordan stammered. “Were we talking too loud—”

Tip made a stifled, frustrated noise. “Can you get out of here? Get the fuck out of here! You’re driving me crazy!”

Jordan’s pink lips parted. His tongue darted out, then disappeared. He looked like he was about to cry again. “I’ll—I’ll get you some ice,” he whispered.

He got tangled in the curtain on the way out, and the rings screeched along the rod, and by the time he got himself free, his breathing was thick and uneven. The door shut hard behind him, and then the tinny voice of the daytime-TV judge blatted something about contracts.

Tip didn’t look at me. He closed his eye and re-settled himself on the pillow.

“You got bashed?” I asked.

Nothing.

The silence trick doesn’t work as well on people who are pretending to be coma patients. But it’s still good for some things. I sat there, letting the tension in the room bleed out. A machine beeped steadily, keeping time with the lady judge. I thought they could do a remix, probably. One of those autotune ones where they make it sound like people are singing. Show me the receipts. Where’s the contract?

“He thinks he’s helping,” I said.

Tip’s hands moved restlessly over the bedding before words burst out of him. “He’s not. He’s being really fucking annoying, actually.”

The arm of my chair was loose. I wobbled it a few times.

“I told him to stop,” Tip said, the heat drained from his voice now until he mostly sounded tired. Tired, and a little sloppy from whatever meds they had him on. “I just want everyone to leave me alone.”

“You can tell him as much as you want. Telling him won’t be enough.”

Maybe he heard something in my voice. Maybe it just wasn’t what he was expecting. His good eye opened, and he saw me for the first time. The horror came first, the fear that most people felt—a gut-level terror that this might happen to them too. For Tip, though, a kind of deeper horror followed, and in a dazed voice, he said, “What happened?”

“I cut myself shaving.”

He swallowed, and the sound was painfully dry in the little room. And then, voice trembling, “Is that what I’m going to look like?”

“As pretty as this? In your dreams.”

Shock. Then—well, not a smile, but something like the memory of one. He rolled onto his side to look at me.

“They won’t tell me anything. How bad it is, I mean.”

“That’s because you’re stoned.”

“I wish I were stoned. It still hurts.”

“And you’re in shock.”

“They have to tell me, though, right? I mean, I’m legally an adult. I don’t even have to let my parents in the room if I don’t want.”

“Is that why they’re in the hall? Did you send them to get ice?”

A hint of a flush worked its way up his cheekbones. He mumbled, “You don’t know what it’s like.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“Fuck,” Tip said, “I don’t know.” Then a little laugh escaped him. “Usually that works.”

He studied me for a while.

“You can ask,” I said.

“Is that the best they could do? Like, the scars, I mean.”

“I haven’t had the surgery yet. Surgeries. They like to wait until you’re fully healed, and some of these cocksuckers have been taking their sweet-ass time.”

“What about your eye?”

“It works all right. Looks like a dog’s asshole in the morning.”

He seemed to consider me. “You don’t talk like the other detectives.”

“Why should I?”

Tip pursed his lips, as though about to say something, but when he spoke, it was to himself, like he was committing something to memory. “I cut myself shaving.”

“Another good one is ‘I fell off my bike.’”

It was like watching the past play out in the present, the way the shadow of a smile came and went.

“Want to tell me what really happened last night?” I asked.

He smoothed the bedding out again, his eye dropping away from mine.

“It’s like Jordan said—”

“Not that part,” I said. “Start at the beginning.”

“It was just a party.”

“Out there?” I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

“A friend told me about it.” Tip’s hand stuttered to a stop. “He said—he said the guy who owns that house, the guy who throws those parties, they’re wild. Like, anything goes.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“Drugs?”

“I mean, people were—Jordan and I don’t—I never use any of that stuff.”

Which was interesting, considering a few minutes before, he’d been a connoisseur of getting stoned.

“Alcohol?”

His voice was sullen, verging on defiant. “I’ll be twenty-one in September.”

“Should I ask Jordan?”

“God, no.” But he went silent again. And then, his face flushing an even deeper red. “Like, sex stuff.”

“Hooking up?”

“Yeah, but, I mean, that’s anywhere. He said this guy has, like, you know.” And then—clearly about to die from embarrassment—he said, “A dungeon.”

It took me a moment to recalibrate. “You thought you were going to a BDSM party?”

He shrugged, but he still wouldn’t look at me. “It was all bull—” He glanced at me, calculating, and then continued, “—bullshit, anyway. Rory’s always full of shit. It was, like, mostly straights, but there were some cute guys, and you didn’t have to pay a cover, and they even had—” He seemed to remember, at the last minute, who he was talking to. “—other stuff.”

“And who’s Rory?”

“My roommate.”

“Where’s he?”

Tip shook his head as though he didn’t understand the question. Then he said, “God, he might not even know.”

That would have been quite the feat, I thought, since the party had fallen apart once the ambulance arrived. But it was possible that Rory hadn’t known who the ambulance was coming for, so all I said was “And what happened at the party?”

“Nothing.” But as soon as he said it, Tip touched his neck, and his gaze moved toward the window. “I mean, we were just having fun.”

“How much fun?”

Tip shrugged again.

“And then?”

Outside the room, footsteps moved briskly down the hall, echoing off the linoleum. And then they moved past us, fading.

“I went outside,” Tip said.

“Why?”

“To get some air. I don’t know. I was just minding my own business. I walked around a little bit.”

“Were you on something?”

“No! No, I just—I was hot. And there were a lot of people and stuff. Anyway, I was walking around, you know, and I stayed pretty close to the house because I didn’t want to get lost.” His words picked up steam, coming faster. “Have you seen that place? That house is, like, in the middle of nowhere. Trees everywhere. And then this guy came up to me.”

“From where?”

“The forest or whatever.”

“He was hiding in the trees?”

“I don’t know. He just walked out and came right up to me. Abig guy, like, probably over six feet.”

“Taller than you?”

“Yeah, definitely. And he had this bottle in one hand, and he asked if I had a light, and I said no, and he kept walking straight at me, and I told him again I didn’t have a light, and then he was right there in front of me. And he hit me in the face with the bottle.” Tip dragged his gaze back to me and licked his lips. “And that’s the last thing I remember.”

“What’d he look like?”

“He was big.”

“You said that.”

“I don’t know. Oh, he had a beard.” He gestured to show that the beard had been long.

“Race?”

“Huh?”

“Was he white? Black? Latino?”

“Definitely white.”

“Age?”

“I don’t know, man. Maybe, like, forty?”

“What kind of clothes was he wearing?”

“Just, you know, jeans and a shirt. Oh! And one of those leather vests bikers wear, you know?”

“Yeah, I’m getting a pretty good picture. What about anything distinctive? A birthmark, a mole, a scar?”

Tip frowned as though thinking. “Yeah. Yeah, he had a tattoo of—of a swastika. On his neck.”

I nodded.

“That’s why Jordan said it was, you know, gay-bashing.”

“Are you gay?”

“What? Yeah.” He didn’t say obviously out loud, but it was there.

“And that’s all that happened? He walked out of the woods, asked you for a light, and hit you in the face with the bottle?”

“That’s all.”

“What do you remember after that?”

“I told you: nothing. I think it was, like, shock. Because of the trauma.”

“Right,” I said. I gave the arm of my chair another jiggle, just to see if it might pop off.

Tip was still staring at me.

“Anything else you want to tell me?” I asked.

He touched his neck again. Probably thinking about that swastika neck tattoo. “Like what?”

“Anything. Something strange you noticed about the party. Someone you talked to. You’d be surprised how often little details like that trip people up.”

“I don’t know. No. I mean, I don’t really remember.”

“Okay. And you told all this to the detectives?”

Tip nodded.

“Where was Jordan?”

It caught him off guard; I could tell by the panicked, blurted “Huh?”

“Your friend. Or is he your boyfriend?”

“He’s not—we broke up a couple weeks ago.”

“He’s here, though,” I said. “That’s something. Where was he during the party?”

Tip didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. The door opened, and Jordan came into the room carrying a cup full of ice.

“We split up at the party,” Jordan said. As he handed the ice to Tip, he settled into his chair again. Then he put his hand on Tip’s arm and looked me in the eye. “We have an open relationship.”

One thing they teach you as a detective is not to say uh huh .

Sometimes, though, it doesn’t stick. So, I said, “Uh huh.”

Jordan’s eyebrows drew together. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I just want to make sure I get this straight. While you—” This was for Tip. “—were casually taking a stroll, in the dark, outside, at a party you thought would have some wild sex stuff and, disappointingly, didn’t, you—” Jordan now. “—were doing your own thing. Because you split up. At the dungeon sex party. Because you’re in an open relationship. But you also broke up a couple of weeks ago. And that’s why you didn’t see this guy come out of the woods and bash your boyfriend in the face with a bottle.”

Dropping his head, Jordan mumbled, “You don’t have to be an asshole about it.”

Tip looked at me for a moment longer. Then he rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. His face contorted in slow motion. And then he started to cry—not sobbing, just tears leaking down the side of his face. The protective covering for his injured eye caught the tears; I could see a pink wetness wicking along the material.

“His emotions are all messed up because of the stuff they gave him,” Jordan said, and he chafed Tip’s arm. “Are you done? He needs to rest.”

“If you think of anything,” I said as I stood, “give me a call.”

Tip still wasn’t looking at me, so I gave two of my cards to Jordan and started for the door.

But Tip’s voice floated after me, and it had a fractured quality. “Does it get better?”

I hesitated. And then I said, “Not really.”