Page 39 of Endangered Species
“Can we please stop calling him my brother?” Webster said with a groan.
“I mean, we can, but does that make it any less true? Your mom married his dad. That makes you brothers,” Wyatt said smugly before adding, “I saw his picture. His mugshot was online. He’s very pretty.”
Webster laughed at that. “I don’t think anybody would describe him as pretty anymore. He’s more…” Webster trailed off, struggling to describe Cy in a way that made sense. No words seemed to exist that would make them understand how much Webster adored him. “Rough, weathered, huge…”
Wyatt snickered. “I bet.”
Webster shook his head but didn’t bother to respond. Instead, he googled Cy, his heart squeezing as his mugshot popped up, not of Cy now but at seventeen years old. He’d been so clean cut and baby faced, his skin much lighter than it was after years of pumping iron in the hot sun. It seemed almost incomprehensible to him that the seventeen-year-old boy with his long lashes and huge brown eyes was the same man who’d pounded him into the mattress last night, who’d told him he loved him, who could toss him around like a rag doll one minute and cuddle him the next. He loved both versions of Cy in equal measure but in completely different ways. Seventeen-year-old Cy had been Webster’s brother, his protector, the only person in the world he could count on. But thirty-eight-year-old Cy was that and so much more.
“Shoot me the address for your nurse friend, and we’ll take you to pick up the dog. I think you should maybe get a shower and some sleep before you hop in your car and try to interact with the public,” Linc said.
“Do I look that bad?” Webster asked, trying to see more than an inch of his face at a time in the mirror.
“Bro, you look insane. Like, people would cross the street to avoid you,” Wyatt assured him solemnly.
Webster shook his head then gave Linc the address Cy had made him memorize. He leaned against the cool glass window, closing his eyes, drifting off before they even made it to the highway.
* * *
Rosie was very confused about her surroundings. She’d run around the entire house sniffing everything, her little nub of a tail making her whole butt wiggle. The nurse, whose name he’d never even gotten, had given Webster a tiny bit of some fancy gourmet dog food and a leash before sending him on his way with a promise that he’d update her about Rosie’s progress.
After Rosie scarfed down her food and had a walk, she promptly made a bed out of Webster’s discarded clothes while Webster finally stepped under the scorching hot water, sighing contentedly as the jets pounded against his muscles. He scrubbed himself for an hour, relishing the hot water and the scent of his expensive soap and the need to not wear shoes in the shower. When the water turned tepid, he jerked off, his head against the tiles, eyes closed as he thought about Cy. He didn’t last long.
Once he’d shaved and combed his hair, he threw his prison glasses in the drawer, putting on his spare pair, designer tortoise shell frames that looked ridiculous with all the ugly bruises marring his face and body. He could see the fingerprint bruises Cy had left on his inner thigh when he’d fingered him the night before. Webster bit his lower lip, pressing his fingers against the marks, before shaking his head. This wasn’t accomplishing anything.
He groaned as he fell onto the mattress, feeling ridiculous as he rolled around on the bed, burying his face in his pillows. Fuck. How could anybody miss pillows this much? And blankets that didn’t scratch? His bed was heaven. Pure fucking heaven.
He was asleep before he even realized it, dreaming of his mother and Dooley and even Cy’s father before startling awake hours later when he remembered there shouldn’t be a warm body beside him. He bit off a cry when he found big blue eyes staring at him and a butt wiggling with excitement that he was awake.
“Are you supposed to be on the bed?” he asked Rosie, genuinely unsure if there were rules about these things, before deciding Rosie deserved a little luxury, too.
He stumbled into the kitchen and made himself a frozen dinner, eating it without tasting it. When he realized he couldn’t go back to sleep, he opened his laptop and began to go back through Cy’s case with fresh eyes and his new list of names, looking for anything that could help clear him of the charges against him. When he once more came up with nothing new, he turned to examining the cases of the other six hundred plus inmates who may have been wrongly convicted.
He wasn’t sure how long he lay in bed, laptop balanced on his thigh as he scribbled notes on a legal pad, but when there was a knock on the door, Rosie began to bark like a maniac, racing to the front door and back onto Webster’s bed in the time it took him to realize the sun was up. He’d worked through the night.
After throwing on pajama pants, he took a quick look through the peephole, swinging the door open for Linc who held several cups of coffee and two dozen boxes of donuts. Webster wracked his brain, trying to recall a time when Linc had ever brought him breakfast. “Am I going back to jail?” he asked suspiciously as he eyed the food. “What’s going on?”
“Get dressed. The rest of the guys will be here in a few minutes.”
“The rest of the guys?”
“I called Jackson, Shepherd, and Calder. Hurley is going to hold down the fort at the Miami office so Jackson can be here with us. We need all hands on deck if we’re going to figure this shit out.”
Webster frowned. “Shepherd and Calder don’t even work for us anymore.”
“Look, this shit is inner-circle only until we have enough to bury these fuckers. Got it?” Linc asked, dropping the coffee and donuts on the counter. “It’s not that I don’t trust my other guys, but this is…” He shrugged. “This is family business. So, we keep it quiet.”
Webster swallowed the lump in his throat. “We can’t do anything until Cy’s free, Linc. I won’t lose him again. If I can’t figure out how to prove he’s innocent, then he’s going to end up dead or doing even more time just for protecting me.”
Linc clapped him on the shoulder. “We won’t leave him behind. He’s important to you so he’s important to us. But, in the meantime, we need proof. You’ve clearly been up all night. So, what have you got?”
Nothing.“They’re really good at framing people, especially people who don’t have anybody to speak up for them. Nothing specific came up to prove any kind of judicial misconduct, so I started looking at it from a different angle. I took one specific judge and started looking at how she sentences people. There’s a clear bias based on race, gender, income level.”
Linc leaned against the counter, crossing his arms. “What does that prove?”
“I don’t know yet, but it’s something. Calder’s PI license is still active, right? I’m going to need access to bank statements, property records, everything. They aren’t doing this for kicks. They’re all profiting somehow. We just have to follow the money to prove this is not just your everyday average bias, but actual malice.”
The doorbell rang, and Linc nodded towards Webster’s room. Go get dressed, I’ll get the door and fill the guys in. We need to get out in front of this thing.”
