Tad sat at the gate, slouched in a chair, waiting for his connecting flight back to LAX. Even full of painkillers, speed, and steroids to the eyeballs, it was all he could do to hold himself up. Every muscle, every joint, every part of him he could feel ached, a bone-deep, grinding throb that resonated through him with every heartbeat. The best dope he could get only dulled the pain, it didn’t come close to stopping it. He was so tired he could hardly see straight, and the way he felt, if he sneezed, his head would fall off. But his fuck-up was fixed, and, yeah, okay, he’d had to ice some poor sucker to wrap it. At least Bobby wasn’t pissed at him anymore. He hated to disappoint Bobby, who put up with a lot of his crap without kicking him out. Only friend he’d ever had, Tad knew, and the only person on earth who had ever given a shit about him. You just didn’t let people like that down.
A goth girl of eighteen or nineteen walked by and slouched into the bank of chairs across from Tad, eyeing him. She wore a torn black T-shirt under a distressed black leather jacket with the sleeves cut off, black sweatpants, and pink tennis shoes. She had short hair dyed purple, a nose ring, lip ring, eyebrow ring, and nine ear studs showing. Tad would be real surprised if she wasn’t wearing more gold and steel in her belly button, nipples, and labia. She gave him a twist of a smile — yep, there was the tongue stud — and he managed a lifted lip in return. Probably saw him as a kindred spirit, and what the hell, probably he was. Some of the kids who dressed the part were wanna-be’s, some of them were nihilists, some of them true anarchists. You could usually tell after thirty seconds of conversation which they were, but right now, he couldn’t summon the energy needed even to wave her over and see. Not that it much mattered if she did come over; he wasn’t in any condition to slip off to the john to snort some coke, smoke a joint, or screw, if any of those were her pleasure. Truth was, he liked Bobby’s kind of woman anyhow, the pneumatic bunnies who pumped dick as well as they did iron. Not that he’d had much interest in that area lately. Well, except for that royal fuck-up in the gym with Wonder Woman.
The announcer came on and garbled something out. Tad didn’t have any idea what she’d said, but people started to get up and shoulder their carry-on bags or tow them behind them on little leashes, like Samsonite dogs who didn’t want to go for a walk and had to be dragged. Tad didn’t have any luggage. If he needed clean clothes, he bought them and threw the old stuff away, shirts, pants, underwear, socks, whatever. It was a trick he’d learned as a street kid in Phoenix a thousand years ago. If you have to travel, better to travel light. If you don’t have nothin’, nobody can steal nothin’ from you. You don’t have to remember anything, and if you have to split, you can do so without looking back. He had his e-ticket printout, a wallet, five hundred or so bucks in it, a couple of credit cards, and his ID. That was his luggage, and it was zipped into a back pocket. Unless somebody came up and did a butt slash and rob, he wasn’t gonna lose that. And if he did? Fuck it. It didn’t really matter, did it? You could get another wallet, more cards, more money. None of that was important.
The goth girl got up and sidled in behind Tad as he moved toward the woman taking tickets. She said, “I got some coke. You wanna do some, head to the bathroom when you see me go there.”
Tad lifted his lip in his half-assed grin. “Cool,” he said.
But he doubted he’d see her when she went. He was in first class, and he’d bet she was in tourist, unless she was slumming, and he didn’t think she was. Besides, he had his own coke, and he knew how pure it was. Street drugs were always risky. Maybe if he felt better in a little while, he’d share that with her. Find out what she could do with that tongue stud.
He planned to crash when he got back to Malibu, and sleep for a week. Maybe by then, he would have recovered enough to pick up the Hammer again. Now that everything was copacetic with Bobby, there was no need to fly to Hawaii or even slow down biz. Life was normal again, such as normal was, and he could get back on the road to Hell as soon as he was able.
Jay was almost hopping up and down he was so full of whatever it was that he had to say.
Michaels smiled and waved at the seat. Jay headed in that direction, but he didn’t sit.
“Okay, tell me. You caught our dope dealer?”
Jay frowned, as if that thought was the last thing on his mind. “What? Oh, no. If we were doing a movie, that would be the A story. What I did is figure out the B story. Well, at least part of it.”
“You want to run that past me again?”
“Okay, okay, look, I was all over the DEA guy Lee and the NSA agent George. Nothing, no connection. But I expanded the search, and I came up with Lynn Davis Lee and Jackie McNally George.”
“Who are—?”
“The ex-wives. Lee and George met their wives in law school, got hitched, went their separate ways a couple years later. Both are divorced.”
“So am I, Jay. So is roughly fifty percent of everybody who got married in the last twenty years.”
The younger man grinned. “Yeah, but Lynn Davis and Jackie McNally were roommates in law school.”
“Really? That is an odd coincidence”
“It gets better, boss. Lynn Davis — she dropped her married name after the split — is a lawyer and part-time teacher in Atlanta. From what I was able to determine, she… ah… prefers the company of women to men.”
“How shocking. So?”
“Same deal with Jackie McNally. She is very low-profile about it, but apparently she is also a lesbian.”
Michaels thought about that a second. “Hmm.”
“Yeah, you see where I’m going here? Doesn’t that seem, well, queer, that two guys married and then divorced college roommates, both of whom are lesbians?”
“Doesn’t speak highly of the boys’ lovemaking skills, but it also doesn’t prove anything, does it?”
“Nope. But what if Ms. Davis and Ms. McNally had the same sexual preferences before they got married? From what I can tell, that was the case.”
Michaels chewed on that for a moment. “Ah,” he said, beginning to understand.
“It makes sense,” Jay said. “There are a lot of places where — laws notwithstanding — being gay is still a problem. Federal agencies aren’t allowed to discriminate about such things, but you know how it is. Come out as gay, you put a glass ceiling over your own head.”
Michaels nodded. That was true, like it or not, especially in security agencies. The theory was, an openly gay operative wouldn’t be a problem, but somebody in the closet might be a candidate for blackmail, if he or she didn’t want to be outed. And he had a pretty good idea of where Jay was going with the rest of it, but he didn’t say anything, just waved for him to keep rolling.
“So, consider this scenario. Lee and George are… well, let’s say, men’s men. They know that being that way is likely to top them out at a low level in a lot of agencies. And lesbians have the same problems.”
“So you think we have a case of two gay men marrying two lesbian women to provide each other with solid heterosexual backgrounds?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Jay said. “Having an ex-wife or husband on paper would forestall some tongue-wagging, especially if you were discreet from then on. Only now, Lee and George, who maybe aren’t so close anymore, really don’t like each other. Might explain some things.”
Michaels nodded again. “That could be. You did good, Jay. Thanks.”
After Jay was gone, Michaels thought about it some, then reached for the com. He wanted to talk to John Howard. An ugly idea had just entered his mind, and while he hoped things wouldn’t go down that road, he had to check it out.