Father Complex (Hazard and Somerset: Arrows in the Hand, #4)

by Gregory Ashe

“He’s an asshole.” “Sometimes. But he’s our asshole, and he loves us, and he has so many good qualities, so we’re nice to him and we put up with it, right?”

“Ree?” “I’m listening.” “Great. So you heard that part about organizing your coupons by expiration date instead of first by redemption value and then by cash value?” Hazard’s head swiveled. “Are you out of your mind?” “It’d be nice to know when I needed to use them.” Somers flashed a smile. “What are you thinking about?”

“Someone screaming ‘faggot cocksuckers’ isn’t exactly reason to hide,” Hazard said drily. “If it were, I’d be living in my mother’s basement.” “They could make a TV show out of that,” Somers said. When Hazard rolled a scowl toward his husband, Jalisa grinned. “You have no idea,” Somers told her. “They’d go antiquing, and she’d want to buy what she thought was a table runner, and he’d ruin it by telling her it was some sort of Victorian mourning garb and giving her a forty-minute explanation of funeral customs.” “That was one time!” Hazard snapped. “And this is why I never tell you stories about high school!”

“God, you know, I think I actually like it when you get this grumpy. It’s like I turned this corner, and now I want more and more of it.” “You are a moron,” Hazard said and strode off.

Redshift and blueshift. The color of light changed depending on a star’s movement relative to earth. Which goes to show, Hazard thought, the wet earth and young grass spongy underfoot, which just goes to show, his smile like a razor opening and closing, which just goes to fucking show, he pushed his hair back when the wind’s cold hand raked it into his face, that any message, anything you want to say, gets fucked up the farther apart you are.

Through the windshield, Hazard watched as the driver of the other car turned in his seat, checking on the passenger. Then the driver’s door opened, and a man got out of the car. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with a thatch of blond hair and a Cardinals tee. He was handsome in a rough trade kind of way, and right then, he looked royally pissed. Hazard tried not to groan. It was North McKinney.

Oh no. I love when these crossovers happen. 😂

“No,” Hazard growled, his fingers closing around the handle. “I’ve got this whole fuckfest under control.” “I knew you did,” Shaw said. “I knew it! I was telling North you had it under control, but he said you didn’t. He said you were going to get your piss nozzle capped if we didn’t help you, which I thought was a strange expression because I’ve heard piss nozzle before—it’s one of North’s Best of March 2020 swears—and

Shaw loves Hazard so much. 😂

“Well, yeah, I mean, North is definitely in some sort of state of arrested development, and I guess calling it child lock is actually pretty accurate. That’s why I have to be the responsible one, you know, like doing surprise cheese-checks and making sure his salad gets tossed, which did you know actually has another meaning, and one time we were visiting this guy in prison and—”

Shaw. 🤣

“No Pepsis,” North said. “I’m a guest,” Shaw said, raising his chin. “It would be rude not to accept.” “He didn’t offer you one. He stated a fact. They’ve got some Pepsis. That’s a statement.” “It’s an implied offer.” Then, in a worried whisper, “John-Henry, it was an offer, wasn’t it?” “Sure—” Somers began. “No Pepsi!” North said over him. “For the love of Christ,” Hazard said. “Get him a fucking Pepsi before I put a screwdriver through my eye.”

Poor North with Shaw’s soda addiction. 🤣

“Great,” North said to no one in particular. “This is fucking fantastic. You know what? You can deal with him when he decides to give all the drapes a ‘kitten haircut’ at three in the morning.” “What the fuck is a kitten haircut?” Hazard asked. North folded his arms across his chest. “Really? That’s the part you fixated on?”

“This is my son,” Hazard said. “Colt, this is North McKinney. He is…here.” After a moment of silent consideration, North said flatly, “My condolences.” And for some fucking reason, that was apparently the perfect thing to say because Colt grinned.

“Don’t judge me,” North said as he rocked the screen door open with his hip. “It just got scratched by some twatholes.” “He’s a goddamn child, for fuck’s sake,” Hazard said. “Watch your motherfucking language.”

Pot meet kettle. 🤣

“There’s no such thing as the ethereal plane.” Shaw burst out laughing. “Oh my God. I forgot how funny you are. Your sense of humor is one of the one hundred and seventeen reasons we’re a perfect match as best friends.” “We are not—” “Let it go,” Somers said in an undertone.

“What are you doing?” Hazard asked. “I’m looking for your juicer,” Shaw said, voice muffled inside the cabinet. “That will be the easiest point of contact to extract the ethereal essence.” “We don’t have a juicer.” “I’m pretty sure you do. I saw it in a dream.” Hazard had to blink a few times to de-stroke from that.

“Stay inside that cabinet,” Hazard said. “What? Why?” “I don’t know. Maybe you know. Maybe you saw the reason in a dream.” “I did have a dream about us playing hide-and-seek. Is it hide-and-seek?” “Yes,” Hazard said. “That.”

Why the fuck are you two clowns even here?” “The clown college burned down,” North said. “Our clown car ran out of gas,” Shaw said. “We got caught in the middle of a clown three-way.” “Gross, North.” “What? You’ve literally invited Hazard to be in a three-way like, I don’t know, eight times, and don’t tell me it’s the clown part because clowns can have three-ways. It’s their God-given right as Americans. Well, if they are Americans, I guess.”

“North and Shaw need to get back to St. Louis.” “No, we don’t,” North said. “We’re working, for your fucking information. The only way I could get Shaw to come was if I told him we were going to your birthday party.” “You’re my kryptonite,” Shaw said with a shrug.

I love that North had to pretend they were going to a birthday party for Hazard to get Shaw to work. 💀🤣

“North and Shaw?” Somers shook his head; they had asked the St. Louis detectives to stay with Colt and Evie, to which North had grudgingly agreed, at which point Shaw, talking faster and faster in a Pepsi rush, had attempted to convince Colt that maybe he was a baby witch and also maybe, just maybe, his familiar was a barn cat named Jambo.

“All right,” Hazard said. “Outside.” “I knew you’d save us,” Shaw said when they stepped out of the house. He undid his bun of auburn hair and redid it. “I could feel your psychic weight approaching.” “My psychic what?” “Like gravity. The dark well of your presence.”

“No, no, no, it’s more like, well, I mean, look at him, he’s obviously got a lot of physical mass—I’d describe him as a man of carriage—” It took that long for Hazard’s brain to catch up. “What the fuck?” “Well, I mean, your derriere—” This feeling, Hazard realized, was horror. “Stop. Talking.”

So, what the fuck are you doing in Wahredua?” “Delivering newspapers,” Shaw said. “Political campaign,” North said. “I’m up for state rep.” “Federally licensed Lunchable inspector.” “Pizza delivery, the kind where the guy has a really big piece of Italian sausage.” “Gross, North. Um, oh! Singing telegram!” “Selling wrapping paper door-to-door.” “Oh my gosh, that’s so cute!” North shrugged and blushed some more. “I was trying to make up for the Italian sausage.” “You did! That one was so sweet.

“You did such a great job raising him,” Shaw was saying as he continued to hug Aileen. “And now you’ve got this amazing family, and everyone loves everyone, and oh my God, did you know your hugs are like catnip, only if the cat were made out of clouds, or maybe that toilet paper with the commercials about the family of bears who are always talking about their dumps.”

“I’d put this hug in my hugbox, only North ran it over and said that was a lesson for—North, what was it a lesson for?” “Who the fu—who knows? And it wasn’t a hugbox, whatever that is. It was an old Huggies box you filched out of a dumpster.”

“And,” North growled, “Shaw insisted that we give Emery his birthday present in person. I’m going out on a limb here, but I’m guessing that’s because the birthday gift is a psychic soulgaze or the breath of a baby sparrow or the echo from a wind chime that Robert Frost liked to shove up his own—” North’s eyes cut toward Aileen, and he mumbled, “—exhaust pipe.”

“It’s a three-part gift, and it’s a very good gift, and Emery is going to love it because, yes, I admit that I stumbled a little the first few times, but now that I really know him, you might even say now that I’ve been inside him—” Somers choked on his spit. “Excuse me?” North asked. “You have never been inside me,” Hazard snapped. “Psychically,” Shaw said with a beatific smile. “Because of our entanglement. Now I know the perfect gift.”

North waited until she turned away. Then he looked Hazard in the eye, smirked, and whispered, “Muffin.” “Say it again,” Hazard whispered back. “And you’re going to be pulling Robert Frost’s whatever-the-fuck out of your own exhaust pipe.” For some reason, that only made North’s grin bigger.

North and Hazard had beers. They’d immediately started talking shop, each of them shooting down the other’s ideas, both of them listening and cutting in and waving their beers dramatically. “Oh my God, they’re, like, best friends,” Colt said in an undertone. “I know,” Somers said. “It’s kind of annoying. Don’t tell him, bubs. He thinks he doesn’t like them, and weirdly, that actually makes it easier in some ways.”

“The better value,” Hazard was saying, “is the salon with the hoof-and-nail parlor expansion because you get six of the Fillies, including Kandi, that’s with a K and an I, and you can’t get her anywhere else, and your dollar-to-Filly ratio comes out at—”

“John, it’s simple math, and if he’s going to be buying toys while he’s supposed to be on the clock, he might as well do so economically. The formula I wrote for the spreadsheet calculates toy-to-child happiness in one column and a toy utility index that is based on the cost of the toy, the child’s satisfaction, the relative difficulty of acquiring the toy—”

“Shaw and Emery,” Shaw began again, a little more hurriedly this time. “Two souls, one heart, one body—” “One body?” Hazard asked. “What the fuck does that mean?”

Shaws haiku for Ree. 🤣

“Yeah, Shaw, what the fuck?” “Besties forever,” Shaw finished. “It’s ok if you don’t have a present for me, Emery. I wasn’t expecting one.” “I don’t know why you would be. It’s my fucking birthday. Next week.”

“No, it’s not embarrassing,” Shaw said. “It’s just, you know, emasculating. But he’s going to cover it up with lots of swearing and talking about fuckery and horse sodomy and goat buggery and, I think maybe, um, something about the degeneration of the entire fucking human race.”

Then Hazard turned and climbed to the seat again. He looked down at North and Shaw. He wondered if Somers was right and if he actually liked these two. He wondered how long he’d been underwater, if maybe there’d been some brain damage.

He so likes them!! 🤣

Hazard scowled down at the knuckleheads. “And for your information, this isn’t any of those things.” He readied himself for the next pitch. “This is called being a dad.”