Page 5 of Constantly Cotton
“Sorry, Lance,” he murmured, rooting through the black bag until he found a box of them. Sliding a pair on, he tried to make himself invisible again while he helped clean up.
“No worries,” Lance told him gently. “Just want my guys protected, right?”
Cotton nodded, although he sighed inwardly. Yes, the entire flophouse got the memo: Cotton was fragile. Don’t yell at him, don’t say boo to him. He was having a hard time figuring out life right now, and they all had to be careful or he’d flip out on them and probably cry himself sick.
Gah! He would really like to be a grown-up at the table.
But this wasn’t about him.
“Is he going to need surgery?” Henry prompted. “Because that could be bad at the moment.”
“No, it’s a through-and-through,” Lance murmured, probing the wound. “And it appears to have missed all the fun things—intestines, kidneys, liver, other important organs—but it’s crusted over with blood, and the risk of infection here is hellific.” He grimaced. “Billy, is the spare key to our apartment still hanging in the kitchen?”
“Yup,” Billy said, moving from his huddle on his own bed and reaching for a pair of basketball shorts hanging off the dresser that sat between the two beds making up most of the room. Billy slept naked. “What do you need?”
“Well, we have a guest bedroom and about eight sets of twin-sized sheets,” Lance muttered. “If you could grab half of those? We’re going to need to keep his bedding clean. Also, I’ve got big bed pads in my bag. Once we resheet this bed, we’re going to need to spread one under him or he’ll seep into the mattress.”
In spite of the gravity of the situation, Cotton couldn’t help what came out next. “Ew.”
He expected sharp words again, but Lance and Henry both nodded.
“Seriously,” Henry said. “Sorry, Cotton. We’ll replace the mattress if it’s bad.”
“And we may want to lay down mats,” Billy said, sliding into flip-flops and heading out to the hall.
“We’ve got some in the same closet,” Lance called, and Billy grunted, his dark hair sticking up all over his head, his pale brown skin even paler from lack of sleep. He hadn’t made it into the military, but he still walked like a soldier, shoulders swinging, stride crisp—even when he was wearing flip-flops and neon orange basketball shorts and heading through the flophouse on an errand.
“What happened to him?” Cotton asked, drawn to the man’s face—slack in unconsciousness but still very appealing—again. “It looks like he’s been shot twice and beaten by a baseball bat.”
“I’d say beaten with the butt of a pistol,” Henry said clinically. “But yeah. He was driving a busload of kidnapped kids back to Sacramento, and apparently the mobsters who stole them wanted them back.”
Cotton grimaced. “A busload of kids?” That didn’t make sense! Did someone just drive off with them? Had this wounded man been caught in a Tom-and-Jerry military game where people kept trying to grab the bus back? He couldn’t wrap his brain around what Henry was saying.
“The kids had been taken from their families in Sacramento,” Henry clarified. “They were being shipped down to Vegas to be auctioned and—” He couldn’t hide his shudder. “—sold. Some friends of ours intercepted them on the way to Vegas, and this guy—Colonel Jason Constance—volunteered to drive them home.”
“And the mobsters attacked him on the way back?” Cotton finally felt like he was getting the picture. “That’s horrible! Why didn’t he have help? Why isn’t he in the hospital?”
The face Henry turned toward Cotton was bleak. “Because at least one person in the military branch Constance was in contact with was making money off the sale. Someone was giving the mobsters guns, and they were supposed to pay him with the proceeds from this shipment of kids. So Constance is in danger of being court-martialed, he’s in all sorts of trouble in Washington, and the mobsters probably want to clean up what’s left of him since he stopped the sale from going through. The whole world wants this poor guy’s scrawny ass, and the only way to give him a chance to fix it is to—”
“Wait, I got this one,” Cotton said, his heart actually aching for the unconscious officer currently bleeding on his bed. “To keep him away from the hospital and keep him hidden.”
Henry smiled in obvious relief. “Got it in one,” he said. He looked to where Lance worked, motions crisp and defined like someone who knew what he was doing. “Now it’s up to God and Lancelot.”
“Lancelot’s busy,” Lance snapped, interrupting his own muttering. “Go talk to God.”
THE NEXTfew days were, as Lance said, touch and go. Cotton was aware—peripherally—that the flophouse apartment was being watched. He wasn’t sure by whom, but it was supposed to make him and the others feel safe and guarded.
He mostly just forgot that anything outside the apartment was real.
Inside the apartment, or inside his and Billy’s room, there was only Jason Constance and the endless round of things that needed to be done to keep his tired body from failing completely.
The flophouse had an inflatable mattress for emergencies. They never knew when John would send a new model to the flophouse itself, whether for a night, a week, or a month, so they had some place to stay before their checks started coming in. Billy had started sleeping on the mattress because Billy was a nice guy, and sometimes Cotton was too exhausted to move.
Lance had given everybody in the flophouse nursing lessons, starting with “Never forget the gloves” and ending with “Wash your hands until they crack. Here’s some butter to make sure that doesn’t happen.” In between there was “Here’s how to give a sponge bath” and “Here’s how to use the touchless thermometer” and “Here’s how often he can take these medications.”
Cotton didn’t film scenes anymore. Supposedly he still worked for Johnnies when John needed a guy to hold lights or remake sets, but there was almost always somebody at the office to do that, so Cotton rarely got called. In addition to residuals from his old videos, he collected a small paycheck, essentially for breathing, he figured, and because John knew that he was having trouble figuring out what to do with himself now that he was no longer—could no longer be—a sex worker.
Something in his heart or his brain broke, and he just couldn’t anymore, and he didn’t know what to do. It was the only thing he’d ever been good at. He’d been kicked out of the house before he finished high school and had lived on the streets, turning tricks to eat, until he’d hit on one of the Johnnies boys—Reg. He’d just turned eighteen, but Reg had been less interested in banging him and more interested in making sure he was okay, so he’d turned Cotton’s care and feeding over to his boss, John Carey.