“So you just put on a onesie, walked into your boss’s office, set the computers up to hack, and left?” Danny asked, eyes bright. “That’s impressive. What if someone had caught you?”
Carl gave a wicked smile. “Well, I went out through the executive’s elevator,” he said. “You need a passkey to go up but not down. I know which closets to look in to find the mistresses, I mean skeletons—”
“Which gardens to dig in?” Molly quipped.
“Which hats to look under?” Grace added.
“Which vests to remove?” Chuck put in.
“Which assholes don’t want me talking,” Carl said, his mouth stern but his eyes dancing. “So I figured if I got caught there, no big deal. Anyway, I got back down to the service entrance, walked out the front, and kept going. Somewhere in the bottom of the laundry is my brown wool suit. Once it goes through the permanent-press cycle, it will no longer be brown, and it will no longer fit anybody nearly my size, so I think I’m safe.”
There was a scattering of applause, and Carl gave a sitting bow.
“Was it worth it?” Danny asked Stirling.
Stirling was chewing on a piece of meat, but he nodded enthusiastically. “So worth it,” he said after a hard swallow. “Fucking gold!”
“Nice!” Felix commended. “Did you get anything else while you were there?”
“Yeah.” Carl looked around and made sure everybody was listening. “If we can prove something illegal and potentially environmentally dangerous, I’ve got some big guns to back us up. The DOI does not like it when people fuck around with endangered species or potentially invasive species. Bad, bad magic in that. So if things get dicey—”
“You’ve got someone to call,” Felix said, nodding. “Excellent.”
When they’d been keeping the women safe in Lucius’s shelter, they’d needed Hunter’s contacts in the FBI because many of their bad guys had been law enforcement. This was much the same; they could con, grift, and steal, but sometimes they needed someone who could prosecute or imprison. Conning people into the legal net was also a fun game.
“Did you have to do something cool to get that?” Grace asked, his grin impudent.
“I had to slaughter a fifty-year-old woman in squash,” Carl replied, his eyes twinkling. “It was brutal!”
Michael laughed like the rest of the table, but he remembered the longer version of the story, how much Carl had liked Tamara Charter, and how much his friend Ginger had not wanted Carl to tell her the truth. He hoped the whole story would come out after dinner. He had the feeling that both women were dangerous, and only one was their friend.
BY THE time dinner and dessert were over, Michael had overcome some of the dreaminess that had ridden him since that afternoon. Part of it was probably the food, since they’d skipped lunch to play around in bed, but a lot of it was definitely the company. A person didn’t bring their space game to the Salinger dinner table—they brought their A game.
He was sharp enough to notice that Josh, while looking a little better, was also looking introspective and thoughtful throughout dinner.
As they were gathering to go downstairs, he was surprised when the young man nodded him over so they could walk together.
“’Sup?” he asked.
Josh gave him a quiet smile. “After you left last night to go pick up Soderburgh there, I had a chance to talk to my uncle some more.”
“Seems like a decent guy,” Michael said carefully.
“He is.” Josh sighed. “He started talking about my father and telling me what a sweet man he was and how he hadn’t deserved the life that got forced on him. At first I thought he was dumping on my parents. I got super defensive, and he tried to tell me how much I looked like my father and how I’d make pretty babies, and I told him I was gay and asked if that was a cheap shot.”
“Oh no,” Michael said, genuinely appalled. He’d tried to give advice—he had! And Leon di Rossi had walked into it like a big trap.
“And just when I thought my uncle Leon couldn’t be more of an asshole, he almost broke into tears and told me about you writing to your children to mind their mother from prison and how he just wanted me to know that he wanted to be part of my life.”
“Oh God.” Michael felt faint.
“And I was so surprised, I asked him to tell me the entire story, and because fuck my life and fuck cancer, I started to cry.”
“I’m so sorry.” Michael wanted to fall through the floor and out the other side of the world.
“Don’t be.” They were at the top of the stairs at this point, and Josh turned toward him, thin pale face earnest and almost transcendent with a quiet joy. “Because I started to cry, and Uncle Leon started to cry, and we both said, ‘That guy is the best guy on the planet!’ And we talked about how brave you were to give him that story when it couldn’t have been easy for you. You didn’t know him, and you were put in a situation where you must not have been comfortable, but you went out of your way to do something nice for Leon and for me. And I wanted you to know that it worked. We had something to talk about that we agreed on. And then we both agreed that kindness needed to be paid forward, which is a big thing with us, you might have noticed. And then we both agreed that my father got cheated, and I finally had to admit that I might have liked to meet him, after it was safe to do so. And then we both agreed to stay in contact after he had to go back to Italy, and then I cried a little more, because I guess it was that kind of night, and he asked me if he could hug me, and he sobbed like a baby. He thought his brother had been lost to him, and he just wanted a little piece of Matteo to hold on to.”
“Oh wow,” Michael said, completely at a loss. “I don’t know what to say.”
Josh hugged him, surprisingly strong for all that he looked like a stiff wind might blow him away. “Don’t worry about fitting in here, Michael,” he said softly. “I know it probably feels weird, because you’ve got an ex-wife and kids and prison and all the stuff that we don’t. But you are special. And awesome. And I want you here in my home. Thank you for giving me and Leon a place where we could connect. You’ll never know how important it was.”
And with that, Josh broke off the hug, probably because Grace was down at the bottom of the stairs calling up, “I think if you want to make out with him, Carl’s gonna beat your fragile bones to powder. Maybe let him go now?”
And with that, Josh winked and went down the stairs, leaving Michael to trail after him, thinking the world was the damnedest place.
“SO,” DANNY said, after setting up at the computer again. “Here’s where we stand. Chuck, you were supposed to find out about—”
“Why Napa,” Grace said as though he hadn’t spoken.
Danny stared at him, and then looked at Hunter, who shrugged. “He’s really excited about it,” Hunter said. “Let him go first and he’ll probably shut up for the rest of the presentation.”
“You know me.” Grace grinned at his boyfriend, all teeth, before going on. “So why Napa? Well, what’s the bald-turkey bird-boner pill called again?”