My Busboy Read online

  He had claimed possession of the knife, I saw, but Bucky was doing everything he could to rip it out of his grasp. He grabbed Dario’s wrist, banged his hand against the floor, and Dario dropped the knife.

  Dario had a stream of blood sluicing down his face, either from Bucky’s fist or from when he’d tripped and landed face first on the balcony floor. When I saw him injured yet again, my anger flared, and I no longer worried about seeing stars and getting a decent breath of air. I just wanted to get Dario away from the fucker who was obviously trying to kill him.

  Gasping and spitting blood, I tripped across the balcony floor and dove on top of Bucky as he hovered over Dario. His hands were on Dario’s throat now, squeezing the life out of him. Dario’s eyes were as big as silver dollars as he slapped and clawed at Bucky’s face, trying to break away, trying to breathe.

  “Let him go!” I screamed, taking another fistful of Bucky’s hair and trying to yank him away.

  He spun on me then, releasing Dario, who lay gasping on the floor, clutching his throat, trying to suck in some oxygen like I had been doing a minute earlier. With hatred burning in his eyes, Bucky came for me, lurching forward like a stalking cat, his face a rictus of spite and murderous fury.

  Bucky was fast. Before I could react, he was on me. We wrestled on the floor, me struggling against his weight. Meanwhile, Dario, with blood filling his eyes and still gasping for air, groped blindly across the balcony floor for the knife.

  To my horror I saw he was too late. Bucky had the knife in his hand now, and he was using every ounce of his strength to press it toward my throat.

  Panicked, I kneed him in the nuts. His eyes shot wide, and at that moment I saw my opportunity. With a grunt of effort, I heaved him away enough for me to get my feet under me. I dragged Bucky up with me and pushed him back against the balcony railing. Frantically, I groped for the weapon, but with Bucky flailing and struggling against me, I couldn’t reach it. Instead, the knife reached me.

  Bucky drove the blade cleanly into my shoulder from the front. Pain rocketed through me. I cried out. Dario screamed.

  With a furious grin of victory sweeping across Bucky’s bloody face, he shoved the knife home all the way to the hilt, then spun me around and slammed me against the railing. The knife protruded from my shoulder, but Bucky didn’t care about the knife anymore. Bucky had other plans.

  His hands were all over me as he tried to hoist me from the floor. Suddenly I was staring down at the street, twenty-three floors below. I felt the top rail press against my back, then against my chest as Bucky flipped me around. Cool air rolled up the side of the building, caressing my face. I wondered if that delicious clean air would be the last thing I felt as I plummeted off the side of the building, leaving everything behind. Dario, my life, my future. And a jubilant, insane Bucky, gloating over his victory as he leaned over the rail and watched me soar screaming through the darkness to the street below.

  From the floor where he still lay, Dario sobbed, sounding more angry than anything else. Dario’s hands gripped my ankles, then tugged at my pant legs, trying to keep me grounded, trying not to let me slip over the rail. He tried pummeling Bucky’s legs with his fists to get him to release me, but still I felt myself being shoved higher and higher above the top of the balcony rail. Soon my center of gravity would carry me over.

  I tried to fight back, but the blade piercing my shoulder wouldn’t allow the freedom of movement I needed to escape Bucky’s grasp.

  Just as my center of gravity shifted and I began to slide off into the night, a voice cried out from the balcony next door. A familiar voice. A butch, Dragnetty voice. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I thought it sounded familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it.

  “Step back or I’ll shoot!” the voice bellowed.

  Bucky whirled to see who had spoken, and the moment he did, Dario’s scrabbling fingers dug underneath my belt and dragged me down to the floor at Bucky’s feet. Away from the railing. Away from death.

  Dario and I struggled backward away from our attacker while through bloodied vision I tried to see who it was standing on the balcony next door, holding a gun aimed at Bucky’s heart.

  “Stone!” Dario wheezed. He was still trying to catch his breath. “It’s Stone!”

  And then I knew. Thank God, I knew.

  “Step away from them, Bucky!” the detective ordered. “Do it now, or I’ll shoot you dead!”

  Bucky tore his eyes from the man with the gun and gazed down at Dario and me, now cowering against the railing on the opposite side of the balcony.

  Bucky’s face was bloodied. His hair, what I hadn’t ripped out of his head, was wild. For a moment, a single, fleeting moment, I remembered him as he had been years ago. Fresh-faced and handsome. His whole life ahead of him. Smiling. Sincere. Innocent. Unscarred by drugs. Unscarred by hate.

  And as if my thoughts had entered his head as well, Bucky continued to ignore the man with the gun, and smiling now as he used to do all those many years ago when we were young and our lives were just beginning, he gave me a little wink. He gazed for a moment at the stars overhead. Then closing his eyes in what I will always believe to be a plea for forgiveness, Bucky threw himself over the railing into the night.

  “No!” I screamed, reaching out, but it was too late.

  Moments later we heard a horrific thud down below. The screech of brakes. The cries and screams of pedestrians.

  Twenty-three floors above the mayhem, Detective Stone spoke calmly into his cell phone on the balcony next to mine, ordering police units and an ambulance.

  After a moment of reflection, I realized the ambulance was for me.

  On the floor beside me, Dario tore off his shirt. Bunching the fabric into a ball, he tucked it carefully around the knife still protruding from my shoulder. With the bleeding staunched for the moment, Dario fell into my arms, pressed his face into my uninjured shoulder, and wept.

  I closed my eyes. Somehow, feeling Dario safely at my side, a smile found me. I opened my mouth to speak, but he pressed a fingertip to my lips.

  “Hush, Robert, hush,” he said. “Just stay quiet. Rest.”

  The flame of pain in my chest died down to a barely troublesome flicker. I began to fade, but before I slipped away completely, I heard the distant wail of sirens far below.

  They’re coming for me, I thought, tilting my head to bury my face in Dario’s hair.

  With his heavenly scent washing through me, I let myself slide into darkness.

  Epilogue

  THREE DAYS later, Chaz lay slack-jawed in his hospital bed, staring at first Dario, then me, as we related our story. What had been an egg-sized lump on the side of Chaz’s head, administered by Bucky with a brick, had receded to the size of a cherry tomato and was still red, but that had been the least of his injuries anyway. A sickeningly orange slathering of bactericide protected a long row of stitches on his cheek, and another smear of the stuff covered the most horrific of his injuries—a twelve-inch jagged line of stitches that tore a path from his bicep to just shy of his wrist. His stomach was swathed in gauze where a flap of skin had been peeled away in the knife attack, then sewn back on by the Mercy emergency room staff. All in all, he had 106 stitches, and every one of them made me cringe.

  Chaz would have some scars to show for what happened, but so far it appeared the scars would only be physical. He was already talking plastic surgery for the face wound, so he still had a long road to recovery before he could put this whole episode behind him. In that respect he was a lot worse off than Dario or me. Yet he seemed to be taking a calm, philosophical approach to the rigors that lay ahead of him, which in anyone else I would have found admirable. In Chaz I found those attributes astonishing.

  I had no idea he had such courage inside him.

  Dario had escaped his confrontation with my insane stalker with nothing more serious than the second black eye I’d seen him sport since I’d met him. That and a few scrapes and bumps left him as handsome and unsullied
as ever.

  I never was particularly handsome, so I didn’t need to worry about any aesthetic damage, or so I kept telling myself. I carried my arm in a sling strapped tight to my chest to immobilize it while the stab wound to my shoulder healed. That shoulder was wrapped in gauze like Chaz’s tummy, but still I had gotten off easy, and I knew it. I had a few scratches and contusions, but nothing important had been punctured by Bucky’s knife apart from my ego and a tendon or two. Other than that, most of the skin from my forehead had been removed from a run-in with my living room wall, and I was missing part of a tooth. Still, I considered myself lucky to have survived.

  Needless to say, I was a step up on Bucky, who hadn’t survived at all. Nor had the street-corner mailbox he’d landed on after taking a swan dive off my balcony.

  I still couldn’t believe it was jealousy that drove Bucky to do what he did. Nor would I ever understand why he had chosen to end it all the way he had, blithely taking his own life as if it held no value whatsoever. The whole episode was almost beyond comprehension, yet still, it left me with nothing but sympathy for the man who had perpetrated it.

  Bucky had always been a friend, and somehow, even after everything he had done, I still thought of him as a friend. It seemed I at least owed him that much. For somehow I knew in the end, Bucky wasn’t the real culprit. The real culprit was the meth that twisted him into what he became.

  There but for the grace of God….

  Still, life goes on.

  Happily, I watched Chaz and Dario begin mending fences. Funny how a couple of near-death experiences can put everything in perspective. Now they were having more fun ganging up on me than they used to have sniping at each other.

  At the moment, Chaz was lying there in the hospital bed shaking his head. He still couldn’t quite believe it all either.

  “So poor Bucky was the stalker.”

  I nodded.

  Chaz nailed me with a piercing stare. It was almost as if another knife were coming at me.

  “And you opened your door and let him in even after the police told you not to.”

  “Bingo,” Dario muttered under his breath. I’d been hearing about that brief lack of judgment for the past three days.

  “Bingo,” echoed another voice behind us, and the three of us turned our variously injured heads toward the door to Chaz’s hospital room, where Detective Stone leaned casually on the doorjamb, arms crossed, ankles crossed, staring in at us like a zoo visitor checking out a trio of aardvarks. Oddly enough, it was through a smile that he added, “Nobody ever listens to the cops.”

  It appeared someone had finally pressed his suit. His hair was neatly cut, and he looked rested for the first time since I’d met him. Actually, he was so dashingly handsome standing there, I thought he might have been plucked off a cover of GQ. The bulge in his trousers was still proudly on display as well. That prompted me to poke a finger in Dario’s rib cage, which elicited a sharp “Yeowch!”

  Detective Stone stepped into the room, and to my surprise, he pulled up a chair and placed it on the opposite side of Chaz’s bed from where Dario and I were sitting. The three of us watched every move he made. He really was a sexy guy. If it annoyed him being eyeballed by three battle-scarred gay men in a hospital room, he didn’t let it show. He seemed strangely relaxed now that the case was over.

  “How’s everyone holding up?” he asked, but it was clear he was directing the question more to Chaz than to either of us.

  Dario and I sat stupefied as Chaz eked out a miniscule smile, which was the only kind of smile he could accomplish with all those stitches sewn into his cheek. “I think I’ll live,” he said. “Thanks to you.”

  The detective’s smile was as tender and soft as the angular, jutting line of his clean-shaven jaw was not. “I’m glad,” he said, and for punctuation, he slipped Chaz a little wink.

  To my utter and undying amazement, I saw a blush rise to the detective’s ears when Chaz’s hand came out, and with nothing more than a fleeting glance in our direction, Stone slipped it between the two of his.

  Dario nudged my foot with his. “Holy shit,” he whispered under his breath.

  Detective Stone glowered then. He removed one of his hands from Chaz’s to brush the tail of his sport coat aside and mockingly show us he was armed. When Dario threw both arms in the air as if to say, “Don’t shoot!” he smirked and once again cupped Chaz’s hand in both of his.

  Chaz merely lay there looking supercilious, or as supercilious as one can look when one has been carved up like a Christmas goose by a psychopathic homeless meth addict. Dario took pity on the two men and tried to steer the conversation away from the astonishing development of their burgeoning relationship. That and the fact that apparently Detective Stone was as queer as the rest of us. Who the hell could have imagined such a thing?

  At least it explained why the detective had spruced himself up. Chaz was nothing if not finicky when it came to the fashion sense of the people he obsessed over. Apparently I was the exception to that rule.

  While I was still wrapping my head around all this, Dario asked, “Why did you come to the condo that night, Detective? How did you know something was wrong?”

  Stone patted Chaz’s hand gently and laid it atop Chaz’s chest, as if setting it aside for later. Something about his demeanor changed once he relinquished Chaz’s touch. He was a cop again. I could see the transformation in the way he sat, the tilt of his head, the cool way his eyes found their way to each of us in the room, studying, analyzing, reading.

  Then he relaxed a bit, as if coming to the conclusion that perhaps he was with friends after all. Or at least with friends of the man he was beginning to care about. He cleared his throat, gazed down at his lap to check a readout on his cell phone, which had emitted a minute beep a moment earlier, then turned his eyes back to us.

  “It was all too pat,” he explained. “When Robert dialed Chaz’s number on the phone I’d found in the alley where he was attacked, I realized everyone in this case knew one another. You were all friends. That brought my attention back to Bucky. The one whose attack started it all. I realized then that everything we knew of that attack was only what Bucky had told us. There were no witnesses. And it was the same with Chaz’s attack. No witnesses. Everything we knew about the case so far had been relayed to us through one pair of eyes. Bucky’s.”

  Stone paused for a moment to lean in close and study Chaz’s face. He seemed to decide we weren’t wearing Chaz out, so he continued, but before he did, he laid his hand on the bed in such a position as to brush Chaz’s sheet-covered leg with his fingertips, as if for no other reason than to make contact. To be close.

  Dario’s hand found mine, and I knew he had noticed the detective’s clandestine move as well and found it as romantic as I did. Together, Dario and I fought back smiles. My heart swelled to see the way Chaz gazed at Stone. I realized it was the way he had once gazed at me.

  And, praise Allah, the way Dario still did.

  Stone continued. “When I thought of Bucky’s injuries in that first attack, I finally realized they could very easily have been self-inflicted. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before. None of the cuts were too serious. They were all centered on the left side of his body, while Bucky was right-handed. Then when I learned Bucky had snuck out of rehab on the very night your cat was strung up off the balcony railing, I knew I had my man. Then it was just a matter of tracking him down.”

  “Dario figured out the wounds were self-inflicted as well,” I said, “but by the time he did, there wasn’t much we could do about it. Bucky was already inside the condo.”

  “After you let him in,” Dario groused for the hundredth time.

  I rolled my eyes at the ceiling and said, “Oy.”

  Stone heaved a sigh and studied Dario’s face. His eyes warmed into what looked to be an apology. “I should have figured it out sooner,” he said.

  For a moment longer, Stone continued to stare at Dario before turning his attention back t
o me. “The only unfinished business Bucky had was with you, sir,” Stone said. “You were obviously the reason for it all. The only way for Bucky to finish what he had started was to come after you. When I called you back and you didn’t answer your phone, I knew beyond a doubt he had already made his move. When I arrived at your condo, I heard scuffling. But I couldn’t get inside, and you were obviously a little too preoccupied to answer the door. Your neighbor was peeking out into the hall, trying to figure out what all the ruckus was next door, so I moved her aside, slipped through her apartment while she cussed me up one side and down the other, and presented myself on the balcony next to yours. The rest you know.”

  Before I could open my mouth to say anything, Stone turned to Chaz and asked, “When are they releasing you?” It was as if he had fulfilled his obligation to Dario and me to explain what had happened, and now he had more important matters to deal with.

  “Tomorrow,” Chaz said. He was holding a hand over the wound on his cheek. Obviously it was starting to hurt. Perhaps his pain meds were wearing off. “They’re letting me out tomorrow.”

  “Good,” Stone said. “You can come home with me and recuperate, if you like. You won’t be too spry for a while, and I have a week’s vacation time available. I thought maybe I could help nurse you back to health. We could—you know—get to know each other better.”

  I could see Chaz was touched by what the detective said. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, and he seemed to be at a loss for words. Finally he muttered shyly, “If you want.”

  Stone blessed him with a heart-stopping smile. “I want.” The detective turned to glare at Dario and me as if daring one of us to say anything. Dario whistled a tuneless air between his teeth, and I took a glance through the hospital room window to see what was going on outside, which turned out to be nothing even remotely as interesting as what was happening on this side of the glass.