touched, despite its inherent dangers, was so often her undoing.
Greg’s mind was elsewhere. “Last night, when your boyfriend came over, it was because he heard me?”
“Yes,” she said, wondering how many other private moments and personal conversations Marc had been privy to.
“That son of a bitch,” Greg said, terribly concerned for his own welfare.
Every cloud had its silver lining, she supposed. Apparently Greg remembered more than he let on. Making him feel accountable, after he knew he’d been taped, was better than nothing.
“So is it legal?”
“Yeah, it is. A judge has to sign an order first, but it’s just a formality.”
She let out a frustrated breath. “What can I do?”
“Let me get this straight-a homicide cop is dating his suspect? You can sue his pants off, and the department, for gross misconduct.”
“No,” she said quickly. “I don’t want to get him in trouble.”
He was silent for a moment. “Okay. Leave it to me. I’ll take care of it.”
That sounded even worse. Her brother-in-law had always been protective of her, in a way that was disturbingly unfamilial. “No, Greg. Just drop it. You have enough to worry about with Samantha.” She paused for a moment, dreading what she was about to do. “She says you want full custody.”
“Stay out of this, Sidney,” he warned. “It’s none of your business.”
“You made it my business last night. On tape,” she reminded.
Greg was wise enough to bite back his anger, and his response.
“Don’t drag her through the mud, Greg. If you can’t come to an agreement with her, fine, use your lawyers. But don’t try to get the girls on grounds of infidelity. Don’t make Dakota and Taylor pay for Samantha’s mistakes.”
“She’s a drug addict, Sid,” he said softly.
Tears flooded her eyes, spilling over onto her cheeks. This was an incredibly ugly thing to face, and she didn’t want to. God, she hated getting involved in Samantha and Greg’s problems, being pushed and pulled between them, stuck in the same role she’d been forced to play with her own parents. “Let’s do something about it,” she urged. “Put off the divorce, and convince her to go to rehab.”
“My girlfriend wants to get married,” he said. “I’ve been trying to convince Samantha to kick the habit for years. I can’t do it anymore, Sid. I need to get on with my life.”
After Sidney hung up the phone, she stared at it for a long time, wondering why she was so worried about everyone else’s life when she couldn’t begin to manage her own.
Marc drank himself into a mild stupor, slept it off all afternoon, and woke up feeling refreshed instead of hung over. He showered, raided the refrigerator and went for an early evening jog even though it was still hot.
On impulse, he stopped by his next door neighbor’s house on the way home. Tony Barreras was the kind of friend he never knew he wanted and wasn’t sure why he had. Whatever the reason, they’d been close for years, and he was always there when Marc needed him.
Tony answered the door shirtless, barefoot, clad in ragged fatigue shorts. A colorful hand-woven bandana held his dark, shoulder-length hair out of his eyes, giving him the look of a bohemian vigilante. At his feet, an ancient white pit bull thumped his tail against the ground.
“Hey,” Tony said in greeting. “Where’ve you been?”
Marc shrugged. “Around. Working. You know.”
He walked away from the door, leaving it open in welcome. The dog, having known Marc too long to expect any kind of attention, returned to his lounging area beneath the front window. “You want a beer?” Tony asked, looking over his shoulder. “Water?”
“Yeah. Water.”
He grabbed a plastic bottle out of the refrigerator and chucked it at Marc, then plunked himself back down on the couch in front of the tube. “So what’s up?” Tony asked, his eyes on his favorite video game, Doom or Duel or Death-whatever the name of it was. His focus was on the screen, but Marc knew the way his friend’s mind worked. He could hold a conversation, wield the video controls and listen with another ear for the phone or the doorbell, one of which was always ringing.
Tony had some warped kind of ADD. He multitasked like a whiz, but couldn’t concentrate on one thing at a time. Trying to talk to him when he wasn’t also listening to music or playing video games was actually more difficult.
“Hard day?” he continued when Marc didn’t respond. Tony didn’t need to look at his face to know his mood.
“You know homicide,” he said vaguely, watching a soldier bloody everything in his wake on screen. Having first met Tony in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, Marc had always found his taste in entertainment strange. “It’s always hard.”
“Another body? A woman?”
“Yeah.”
“Damn.”
That pretty much summed it up, so he drank his water in silence. He didn’t know how he’d forged this strange friendship, but it had become a comfortable one, in which he didn’t have to explain himself or even talk, if he didn’t want to. Sometimes he sat on Tony’s couch and watched him play video games while his mind drifted, neither of them saying a word.
“You know what you need?” Tony asked.
“To get laid?” he replied, feeling moody.
“Well, yeah. Always.” Then he frowned. “What happened to that hot little blonde? She dump you?”
Marc didn’t know which one he was talking about, but it didn’t really matter, because his relationships always ended the same way. “A while ago.”
“What’s wrong with you, dude? Don’t you know how to tell a woman what she likes to hear?”
Marc pondered that. “What if you didn’t have to? Wouldn’t you rather find one you could be totally honest with?”
“Being honest is one thing. Doing it with finesse, rather than brutality, is another.”
“Thanks for the advice, Mr. Finesse,” he muttered. “Where’s your woman?”
Tony didn’t have an answer for that, because his notoriously short attention span extended to his dealings with the opposite sex. He stood up and switched off the video game monitor abruptly. Reaching into the cigar box that was always on top of the television, he pulled out a Baggie and some rolling papers. “This is what you need. Maximum Relaxem.”
“No,” Marc said shortly. “I don’t.”
“Sure you do. You’re wound up so tight you’re about to snap.” Tony sat down and started rolling a joint. “This stuff here is purely medicinal. Like taking a pill for anxiety.”
Marc didn’t like being thought of as anxious, or uptight, but compared to Tony everyone was. “You know I can’t. Besides, pot makes me paranoid.”
“Not this kind. It’s one hundred percent guaranteed to cure whatever ails you. Either that, or knock your ass out.” Tapping a silent tune with his bare foot, he licked the paper, securing it in place.
“You do realize you’re soliciting an illegal substance to a cop.”
Tony just laughed. Marc had been looking the other way while Tony sold pot for years. He’d known what Tony did long before he moved in next door to him, so Marc didn’t think it would be fair to bust him now. “This isn’t solicitation. It’s a gift.” He put the joint into a plastic bag to keep it fresh. “Give it to your mom if you don’t want it. Maybe it’ll help her more than that
Marc shoved the bag in his pocket, having no intention of turning his mother on to marijuana. The so-called faith healer she visited once a week had been fleecing her (and Marc, for it was he who supported her) for the better part of a decade. Once, she’d even stopped taking her insulin for a short period of time because that damned witch doctor said he could cure her diabetes with “spiritual cleansing.”
His mother’s mental and physical health was fragile enough; she didn’t need to start doing recreational drugs. “Can dogs get stoned?” he asked suddenly.
“Sure. Whispers ate my stash once,” Tony said. “He got really faded.”
Marc glanced at the dog lying beneath the window, whose tail had started thumping at the sound of his
