Page 32 of Nightfire

Sam and Harry rose together.

Mike unclenched his jaws. It took effort. “Stand down, guys. Sit back down.” Man, he wished his brothers weren’t here, but they were and weren’t leaving. For the first time since he’d walked into Old Man Hughes’ house of horror and discovered that he’d landed into another shithole of a foster home, but that there were two other boys who immediately had his back, Mike wished Sam and Harry were less loyal. What he wanted was to quietly clear this up with Kelly and not have his brothers involved.

But Sam and Harry were hard-wired for loyalty. They weren’t about to let him face this alone.

Shit.

“Down, everyone,” he said, and Sam and Harry sat back down, on the edges of the couch. Kelly stood for another long moment, grim-faced, then finally sat back down. He pulled out a notebook and waited.

“Okay,” Mike said. He closed his eyes for a moment, almost tasting the cold steel in his mouth as he bit the bullet. “I was feeling restless last night. Went out around eleven. I wasn’t in the mood for trendy bars, martinis, picking up investment bankers.” No, he’d felt like going to a place as shitty as he felt. But he couldn’t say that in front of Sam and Harry because they’d beat themselves up over not recognizing that he felt shitty and busting their asses to make him feel better.

Sometimes Mike wished his brothers weren’t such stand-up guys. Wished they were worse friends. Wished they didn’t care so much about him.

“I, ah, tooled around a little. Ended up in Logan Heights, in a place called The Cave.”

Kelly held up a hand, spoke quietly in his cell, flipped it closed. Bent back over his notebook. “Okay. Get on with it.”

“I…drank. A lot.” Mike looked over at Sam and Harry. Both had poker faces. When Harry came back a human wreck from the war, essentially wanting to die, he’d tried the drinking himself to death thing, night after night for a while. He and Sam had let him, because it’s not easy to drink yourself to death, though God knows Harry tried. Mike and Sam had taken away his guns, wouldn’t let him swim out to where he couldn’t come back and for a very bad month there had put up unbreakable screens around Harry’s balcony.

But they let him try to drink himself to death because it was really hard to do and Harry wasn’t managing it.

Mike had his drinking moments too, only not with Harry’s good reasons. It had been touch and go whether Harry would ever walk again, ever spend a minute of his life without excruciating pain, would ever have anything resembling a normal life.

And Mike’s excuse? Nothing. Which was precisely what he felt sometimes—absolutely nothing inside.

It shamed him, but there it was. He didn’t even have Sam and Harry’s tragic childhoods as an excuse. He’d been securely wrapped in the strong embrace of a loving family until scumbags shot his mother and father and two brothers in a botched robbery and his childhood ended. That was on the 12th of March 25 years ago when Michael Patrick Keillor was ten years old. On the 13th of March of that year, he was already an old man of ten, broken in two by grief.

But until that day, his life had been charmed.

And he drank to forget his life from that March 13th on.

“Get shit-faced?” Kelly asked.

It was sort of a technical term. Drunkenness had its own taxonomy and ‘shit-faced’ was what he’d been.

“Yeah,” Mike answered quietly.

Kelly sat and looked at him, pen hovering over paper. “And?”

“I picked up this…” This what? Girl wasn’t the right term. Lady wasn’t right either. “Woman.”

Actually, she’d picked him up.

“Name?” Kelly was staring at his notebook and Mike had a sudden flash that Kelly didn’t want to watch his face as he recounted something depressing.

Mike didn’t answer, and Kelly finally looked up.

“I told you. Don’t know her name,” Mike said quietly and the three men winced all together. Man, not getting a chick’s name was bad. He’d fucked her, at least partially, but he didn’t know her name. There was really no excuse and he didn’t offer one.

Kelly was staring at him now, as if trying to get inside his head. Kelly was an alpha male, too and Mike didn’t ordinarily let men stare at him. He’d have bristled except he knew that Kelly was only doing his job. He’d forfeited his right to indignation.

“I gave you a name,” Kelly finally said. “Mila Koravich. Ring a bell?”

Mike shook his head. He doubted they’d exchanged ten words together.

“Working girl?” Kelly asked casually and this time Mike winced.

“No.” Though she might have been. Crackhead, filthy hovel of a place. She might have been. “Not that I knew of, anyway. She didn’t ask for money.” If she had, he’d have refused. Part of his no-go list. No married ladies, no addicts—though he’d sandbagged on that one—no working girls.