“Four years.”
“And you’re still using the gum?”
“Look, I’ve heard quitting smoking is almost as hard as quitting heroin, okay?”
Tobias grinned helplessly. He liked Sullivan so much. “So you didn’t kick the habit so much as you just switched delivery systems.”
“Four cold, lonely years.”
“Oh, my God.” Tobias rolled his eyes, still painfully amused. He took another slug of his drink and winced. He didn’t understand rebelling via substances. Between the alcohol and the cigarette, his mouth tasted horrible.
Sullivan angled his body to the right and poked Tobias in the stomach, making him jump. Sullivan laughed, turning still farther, and the camera went click again.
“Fuck,” he said loudly. “I knocked over my bev-er-age.”
Tobias laughed too, playing along, and waited while Sullivan went down on one knee and took a couple more pictures from that angle before standing up and starting to mosey farther down the alley.
They made their way to the cross street, where they turned left and came to the mouth of the underground parking garage. Sullivan hesitated there for a long second.
“Think it’s assigned parking?” Tobias asked.
“If it is, I can find out what he drives.” He flicked the cherry off his cigarette, then put the filter in his pocket. “Head back to the car. Take this.” He shoved the small camera into Tobias’s fumbling hands but held on to his drink. “Still have that business card I gave you? If I’m not there in twenty minutes, it means I got busted. Call Raina and tell her everything. She’ll know what to do.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“You promised to obey in the field,” Sullivan reminded him, his dark eyes hardening, and Tobias stared at him for a long second.
“You better be so careful,” he said finally, and shifted his things into one hand so he had another free to yank Sullivan in for a kiss. It started out angry, almost biting, but softened as Sullivan refused to bite back, instead cupping Tobias’s face in his hands and gentling the pressure of his lips.
“I’ll be fine,” Sullivan whispered, and then he smacked Tobias on the ass—which, bruises, ow—and jogged away.
And Tobias headed for the car, pausing only to drain his 40 into the gutter. He kept the bottle to recycle later, though.
If it hadn’t been for his worry about Sullivan, it wouldn’t have chafed at all.
Middle ground.
That didn’t make the twenty minutes go by any more quickly, though. On the plus side, he did get a chance to check his voicemail, where he found a message from the woman he’d called at the human trafficking website looking for a contact in the interest of tracking down Mama and—by extension—Ghost. She apologized for the delay in her response and gave a spiel about interviews and donations. Tobias deleted it. Even if it’d been what he was looking for, it was a little late now.
When Sullivan got back, he held up a hand before Tobias could say a word, and scrawled out some notes about the vehicle that’d been in the 2600 C spot. “Spratt drives a dark green Range Rover. Camera? Let’s take a look at our options.”
* * *
Sullivan thought of that kiss later. Tobias’s fingers locked in his shirt outside the parking garage, his lips demanding and worried in the dark. It was an outlier.
He was pretty sure Tobias still hadn’t entirely put together what was coming up. He was vibrating in the passenger seat like a shaken-up bottle of soda, his eyes always on the windows of the townhouse, as if he’d forgotten Sullivan was there.
Sullivan couldn’t reconcile the two. A kiss like he couldn’t bear to let go. Complete obliviousness to what he was going to ask Sullivan to do. As soon as he realized what had to happen, he would ask, and damn the consequences to Sullivan. Tobias might be sorry about it. He’d probably get those big blue eyes working. Hell, it wouldn’t even be an act, because inside, he was soft. He didn’t want to hurt people, didn’t want to anger people. He’d feel bad, but that wouldn’t stop any of this from unfolding.
Sullivan understood. Ghost’s safety was more important than Sullivan’s job or feelings. He even understood why Tobias felt that way. Tobias had hired him, Tobias wanted it casual, Tobias had always made his priorities clear, and Sullivan had never been at the top of that list.
That kiss, though. It hadn’t felt casual or unimportant. It sure as fuck wasn’t professional. It was...if Sullivan had dared to trust it, he’d have thought that kiss was evidence of something real growing between them.
But he didn’t dare, because he wasn’t stupid. That wasn’t how the world worked.
Chapter Twenty
As they drove back to his house, Sullivan wrestled with where to go next.
The obvious answer, of course, was to tell a reliable cop.
Unfortunately, neither he nor Tobias were in the habit of hanging around with cops, and walking into a precinct would be incredibly dangerous; there was no way of knowing whether they were getting someone who would rescue Ghost and catch the bad guys or if the cop in question would hand them over to Spratt and/or blow their brains out. Raina had contacts in the police department but wasn’t close enough to any of them to trust their ethics without doubt, not with the risk of bullets in the brain as an outcome.
The district attorney’s office wasn’t much of an improvement. Both he and Raina knew plenty of lawyers, several who seemed ethical, but he wasn’t sure he’d trust his life to any of them. The other problem with going the lawyer route was that it would take time. The district attorney’s investigators didn’t work like cops—they were meant to scare up evidence about existing cases and subpoena witnesses through guys like Sullivan.
