David Kent - The Triangle Conspiracy

Sean pulled the bottle to him and swigged from it. “Want a drink?” he offered.

“No, thanks.”

“More for me.”

“I could get you a glass,” Faith said, looking at him.

“I don’t want to dirty any of your glasses. I put in a load of laundry this morning, by the way.”

“So I saw. Thanks.”

They sat in silence for a few seconds.

“Have you told Mom and Dad that you’re here?” Faith said after a while.

“Nope. None of their business. If I did, you know how it would go. Dad would just try to find out what the two of us talked about. Always being the captain, trying to control us the way he controls his department.”

Faith said nothing.

“Come on, admit it. I bet you five thousand dollars that every time you talk to the old man on the phone and mention that you’ve talked to me or e-mailed me he wants to know what it was about. We live in three separate states, and he still wants to control the way you and I talk to each other.”

“No bet,” Faith said.

Sean nodded. “I knew I was right.” He leaned back against the couch and closed his eyes. The bourbon had taken the edge off, and he was in the gray in-between area. He’d been a bit shaky through the whole encounter on Shields Boulevard with Monica and Britt, but he’d started on the bottle as he drove back here, feeling flushed with knowing how he’d unearthed Daryn McDermott. Now he wasn’t quite totally shit-faced either. He might get shaky again if he had any more, but for now he was somewhere between the two. Having a little more might be nice, but he’d drunk all of Faith’s beer this morning and he didn’t think she had anything else in the house.

Faith was looking at him again. She tucked one of her long legs up under her-the same way she’d also sat on the couch at home when they were kids-and turned to face him fully. Her eyes, solid green and just as angry at times as their father’s, locked onto him. “You drank those three bottles of Harp I had in the fridge this morning.”

Sean twirled the whiskey bottle in his hand. “Yeah. It was a long drive in from Tucson.”

“You finish off that whole bottle right there, straight, by yourself?”

Sean thumped the bottle on the coffee table, then checked to make sure he hadn’t scratched it. It was good wood, and he didn’t want to nick it. “You got something to say, sister, say it.”

“How did you get to be ‘on leave’ from ICE? How could you just pick up and leave and come to Oklahoma to do a freelance job?”

Sean blinked. So his sister had shifted into full interrogation mode. “Hey, two can play that game. What’s your job? ‘Special projects’? Come on, you can do better than that.”

They stared at each other for a long moment.

“So we both have our little secrets,” Sean finally said. “Big deal.”

Faith leaned over and tapped the whiskey bottle with a fingernail. “Your secrets have anything to do with this?”

“What?”

“You having any trouble with this, Sean?”

Sean made a snorting sound. “ ‘Any good Irish cop worth his salt likes a good drink now and again,’ ” he quoted.

“Yeah, and you see where it got Seamus, too.”

Sean shifted on the couch. “He was due to retire anyway.”

“Bullshit,” Faith said. “He could have worked another ten years. They let him retire so he could keep his pension and it wouldn’t tarnish all the commendations he got while he was on the force.”

“What’s your point, Faith?”

Faith folded her hands together and squeezed. Sean saw her knuckles turn white. This was what she had done since she was a teenager when she was talking about something intense. She’d stopped biting her fingernails at sixteen, but then started doing this trick of squeezing her hands together so hard that they hurt.

“Say it,” Sean said.

“We have a family history,” Faith said. “And you’ve been in a really stressful job situation, with the switch to DHS these last couple of years. I guess…I guess I just want to know you’re not losing control.”

Shit, Sean thought. Shit, shit, shit. We don’t see each other for three years, but still she reads me like a cheap paperback, just like when we were kids. Faith could always close herself up, but me…I’m an open book to her.

Sean flexed his own hands, just to make sure they weren’t shaking. Then he very carefully took Faith’s smaller hands in his, and pried her fingers apart. “You should quit doing that,” he said. “One of these days you’ll break your own fingers.”

Faith didn’t smile.

Sean cleared his throat. “Don’t worry about me. Yeah, I’ve been through a lot. Yeah, I like a good drink now and again. It helps smooth out the hard edges. I’ve seen some stuff down along the border…”

Faith nodded. “I know. I’ve seen some stuff these last couple of years myself.”

Sean let go of her hands. Suddenly it felt awkward, the old Kelly family reluctance toward physical affection. “I bet you have.”

Faith stood up. “What next? You want to do some sightseeing tomorrow, or what?”

“Maybe,” Sean said. “You set your own hours or what?”

“More or less. Right now I’m just finishing up paperwork on this latest project. Sometimes I have to pick up and go at a moment’s notice, so when I’m just hanging out in town doing office work, I’m pretty laid-back on the hours.”

“And your boss likes this?”

“My boss is in another time zone. As long as things go the way they’re supposed to, and as long as he can reach me at any time, he doesn’t care if I’m not in the office nine-to-five.”

“Nice work if you can get it,” Sean said with a smile.

“Sometimes,” Faith said, not smiling.

Sean’s smile faded. He thought of something that had happened when he and Faith were nine and eight, respectively. Sean had wanted a new bicycle desperately, but their father was still just making a patrol officer’s salary and they couldn’t afford it. So Sean-who never believed anything his father said about money-put his old bicycle under the wheels of his dad’s car, and the next morning his father backed over it, destroying the bike and the tire of the car as well. Sean blamed it on one of the neighborhood kids. Joe Kelly, in his wrath-he never believed anything Sean said either-had turned to Faith, as he often did. Sean had teased Faith mercilessly in those days, daring her to tell even the tiniest of white lies, saying she was physically incapable of lying. He had begged her with his eyes not to tell the old man, but she looked straight at Sean and said, “He did it, Dad. I saw him. Sean did it.”

Joe Kelly had beaten Sean’s butt so hard that Sean was sore for ten days. Faith had watched the beating in silence, tears streaming down her face. And Sean never got another bicycle, ever. Sean hated Faith for a long time, with the kind of hate only adolescents are capable of managing. But then some things happened with Faith and she was away from the rest of the family for a while, and when she came back, Sean didn’t hate her so much anymore. The incident haunted him for years, and when they were both in college, he’d called her one night and brought it up again.

“I never should have put that bike there, Faith. I put you in the position of wanting you to lie to protect me, and the old man put you in the position of having to rat on me. We were both wrong, Dad and I. You held on to the truth, as much as it hurt.”

Sean looked at his sister now, framed in the lamplight of the messy living room. They were both a long way from what they used to be. Looking at her, thinking of how she evaded any specifics about her job, Sean thought that Faith had probably finally learned how to lie, and that it was tearing her up inside. The thought saddened him.