Colt

Louisiana, 2018

In a rundown office near the state line, a man more booze than bloodstream listened to the phone ring out. He knew why the blocked number was calling. He recognized this pattern from too many trial runs and one “if this is who I fuckin’ think” that left the line silent as the dead. He’d be the first to admit there was a bit of lost time he’d had to swim back from, but it beat the alternative for now. He still had work to do.

So Colton Harkan filled a coffee mug by emptying another bottle, tossed it to a pile of clattering green glass and waited. The machine picked up after five blaring bell tones, but there was no message—never any message these days.

Three sips later, the phone rang again.

Got some nerve, asking for my help now.

Because this wasn’t the only time his line had lit up this way, a semi-regular occurrence in the years of lack and wandering. The first time the blocked number had called, Colt wasn’t sure it was real. He was blacked out on more than booze, too shocked when he picked up to that familiar, staggered breathing…

“Hello?” he’d asked, expecting nothing.

It wasn’t nothing.

An inhale, deep and slow. Then a held-breath quiet, tense as a budding thunderstorm. A stuttered, low exhale, too like a mountain mist and no, it couldn’t—

“…Ev? Is that—”

Click.

Nope. Had to be a dream. Because if it were real, and Colt had asked after him like that, not caring if his voice were breaking? The line never would’ve gone dead. Couldn’t be Everett. He’d have answered, once.

But damn if Colt hadn’t broken that too.

The next time the phone rang late at night, Colt happened to be of clearer mind. He’d picked up to nothing but that breathing on the line and decided to let it ride, just to see what would happen. The call lasted a whole seven seconds. Colt gave no hint he suspected who it was.

When it kept happening, Colt wondered after his sanity—not for the first, or likely last time. It was one thing to know the man was calling, to let it ring out in annoyance, even pick up if he happened to be there. But Colt had started waiting for the calls, proof that somewhere, Everett was…well, he was somewhere.

Maybe he just wanted to see how long it would take for Everett to give up the game, to admit that yes, it was him, or yes, Colt was right about the Combs case all along. On particularly bad nights, he’d open his throat to the welcome burn of whiskey and wonder if Everett called when Rachael was home. Or maybe she did up and leave for good, even after that hospital scene on his last night in Mason.

Colt wasn’t sure either way—not because he couldn’t find out, but because he didn’t want to know. Nothing Everett ever said about his wife seemed to matter. Couldn’t imagine that changing after Rachael…had her say.

Either way, the calls kept coming, the space between them dwindling until finally, that shit was happening damn near every night. What could he even be calling for in the first place? Colt pondered that question for weeks, choosing to ignore that his fixation made him buy a better phone, a model closer to this century with an actual functioning machine. For the business and all. Told himself it was for clients. So he could pay the bills and track the bastards who mattered.

But it was all for four messages he would never delete.

The messages totaled not even thirty seconds, but they proved Colt’s theory on the caller behind the blocked ID. The breathing…it sounded like him. Not Everett Kane, Lead Detective. Not the man at the head of an investigation. The messages Colt saved sounded like Ev, like a half-furnished apartment they’d almost called home.

The phone rang again and jolted Colt from his thoughts. He grunted and shot the last of his whiskey, lit up a cig and ripped the cord from the fucking wall. If he kept letting it ring, he’d answer in a rage fit to match one of Everett’s—exactly how he’d scared him off last time.

Until now. When he needed something.

And that’s just way too damn familiar.

He raked a hand through his overgrown hair and wandered to find today’s bottle, purchased fresh from the corner store. He knew he was too tired to fight the memories tonight, but that wouldn’t stop him from trying to numb them anyhow.

It always started with thinking back on that month they spent in his old one-bedroom, dubbed “serial killer chic” by an Everett in better spirits than the first time he’d seen it. But at the close of the State Rodeo investigation—their biggest case and even bigger mistake—Everett was busy worrying over a different kind of error.

Around the time they caught Combs, Rachael finally got her answers about Kelly, and Everett’s new forwarding address had become Colt’s rundown sofa. Colt was still unclear how much she knew about the others, but it’d been enough to kick him out for a time. Everett had gone by the house only once for some things, but every day after, he’d move bits from the house-pile into Colt’s space.

A lamp for the living room. A pan for eggs in the morning. Everett himself in Colt’s full-size bed.

But if Colt was honest, it started earlier than that.

Somewhere in their four years apart, he’d stopped trying to convince himself otherwise, stopped pretending there was a version of him that wouldn’t always be gone on Everett Kane. It became more ritual than memory, edges worn soft as oft-folded paper, thinking back on that roadside that started it all.

So close to life undercover—to Rosa and Jared and all the forgetting that took—it was no wonder he’d picked a thrill with such a narrow margin for success. At that point, Colt was begging for a wreck, not so particular on the how.

But he got another miss with another bullet instead, because Colt wasn’t ready for Everett’s question that day, or the way his eyes bugged when Colt answered with nothing but silence. How at the same moment, Ev’s lips parted for a short, stuttered breath…

Fuck. If he’d known then how it would all go now?

Well. He still probably would’ve done it anyway.