Frank Hazard grunted acknowledgment.

  “The doctor said all sorts of stuff about rehab and therapy and maybe surgery.”

  Frank Hazard tipped his head.

  “You ever listen to someone and know it’s all bullshit?”

  Hazard’s father touched his stomach, where cancer was eating away at him, and nodded. “Doctors serve up bullshit like it’s the best thing on the menu.”

  “What the fuck good is a detective with one arm? You want to tell me that?”

  “We’re all just what we are, son.”

  And suddenly, surprisingly, Hazard was crying. Not sobs, but silent tears streamed down his face, and he shook once, and that only hurt his arm more. For a moment Frank Hazard sat there, and then he stood next to his son, pulling him against his chest. Hazard cried and cried, and he smelled the old tobacco smell of his father, and the motor oil and the homemade laundry detergent that his mother made for two cents a wash. And when he had cried himself out, his father smoothed his hair and fluffed the pillows and helped him sit so that his arm didn’t bitch at him quite as much.

  “It’s not the end of the world,” Frank Hazard said.

  “I guess not.”

  And then they didn’t say anything for a while, and Hazard turned on a game show, and they watched—unwatched would probably be a better way to say it—as the clock ticked restlessly.

  “You asked me something,” Hazard said when he trusted his voice. “You asked me about John. Why I’m with him. After all the shit he did, all the ways he hurt me.” Hazard plucked at the blanket, unable to meet his father’s eyes. “Do you believe people can change?”

  From the hallway came the nurses’ chatter, and the squeak of a wheelchair rolling along the linoleum, and an electronic chirp-chirp-chirp.

  “I don’t know.”

  “He’s different. He’s a good man. He’s a better man than I am.”

  “I don’t know about that either.”

  “I love him. That’s about the fucking scariest thing I’ve ever said. Do you believe that?”

  “I do.”

  Again came the electronic chirping. Like the sparrow, Hazard thought in a sudden burst of bitterness. Like it’s being crushed inside a synthesizer. He drew a breath, tasting the old, familiar smell of his father’s tobacco, and he wished he could remember what he had felt as a child, what it had been like to look up to this man and love him unconditionally.

  “We’ll have dinner on Sunday.”

  “I’m not feeling like dinner, Dad. I know Mom’s worried, but—”

  “You should bring him to dinner.”

  Hazard smoothed the blanket, his fingers recording the pilled texture.

  “That’s the proper thing to do, isn’t it? Bring him to dinner. Introduce us to him. That is, if you’re not ashamed of us.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You really love him?”

  “I do.”

  “You know what that means?”

  “I do. I think I do.”

  “That’s good enough. Nobody knows all the way. Love can turn your heart inside out, tear you all to pieces, and you still won’t know it all the way through.” His big, callused hands settled on the bed’s rail. “Every day you learn a little bit more. That’s all there is to it.”

  “I’d like you to meet him. I’d like that a lot.”

  The hospital bed rail chimed under Frank Hazard’s hands as he slid them along the chrome. “You forgave that boy. All the things he did to you, you forgave him. You ever think you could do that for a stupid old man who spent too long being afraid?”

  Those big hands were still shimmying along the chrome, and the metal was still singing out until Hazard took his father’s hand in his good one.

  “Of course. We’re family.”

  HAZARD HAD TO POKE SOMERS UNTIL HE WAS AWAKE.

  “For God’s sake,” the blond man groaned, curling away from Hazard. “What are you doing?”

  “Waking you up.”

  “Couldn’t you—stop it, goddamn it. Couldn’t you have kissed me? Or brushed my hair? Or said my name? Ree, I swear to Christ if you poke me again, I’ll lose my shit.”

  “You’re grumpy.”

  “I wasn’t until you decided to drill through my ribs.”

  Hazard felt a smile on his face hot enough to singe the cotton bedding. “I’ll drill you for real.”

  Through a mask of sleep, Somers quirked an eyebrow.

  “If you’ll go to church with me.”

  “Fuck me,” Somers said, flopping back on the mattress.

  “It’s a promise.”

  Somers kept asking questions, but Hazard ignored him. He did, however, scramble eggs, and he let Somers help him with his shirt and tie and jacket since his arm was still in a sling. Hazard didn’t let himself think about how long that might last.

  They reached Wahredua’s First Methodist Church, a swooping building of dark wood and chrome that looked like a barn had crashed into a flying saucer. It had been built in the 1970s, of course, and it had aged surprisingly well. The stained glass windows told the Passion story, and the style reminded Hazard of an old comic book: flashy colors and rippling muscles. Jesus didn’t look like he was having any trouble carrying the cross today.

  Inside, the church smelled like poorly washed polyester and Lysol disinfectant, and the upholstery had as much scratch as a mean tomcat. The chapel was full, though, and Somers and Hazard got plenty of looks.

  “Ignore them,” Somers whispered.

  “I’m trying. It’s easier when you’re not sticking your tongue down my ear.”

  Hazard didn’t know what the man up front was called—a reverend or a pastor or a minister, he supposed. He settled on minister, at least for his own sake, and tried to understand. The Bible, Hazard knew better than most believing Christians. And he knew, as well as any layperson, the fundamental discrepancies between the major branches of organized Christianity. He had, at an intellectual level, a clear grasp of the major terminology of Christian faith: sin, repentance, forgiveness, grace, mercy. He could appreciate at arm’s length that significant cultural and historical and ethical contributions of the religion. But at the bottom of everything else, he just didn’t understand it. Not in the crucial, innermost way that believers did. So he listened and tried to figure out what he was missing.

  He was here because a boy had thrown himself out of a window, because an old woman had given up her life to stop a wicked man, and because his father was dying. He was here because he wanted to understand. No, that wasn’t right. It was deeper than that. And it was more urgent. He needed to understand because he felt like he was on the wrong side of a glass wall, watching everyone else live a life he couldn’t touch.

  The hymns droned on a bit but weren’t terrible. The praying was trite but no worse than anything Hazard had heard before. The sermon—or whatever it was called—had an interesting theological puzzle at its heart, which Hazard appreciated: how did one know if he had been converted, if he had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit and fire, if he had been changed? Within the ideological framework of the religion, it offered a nice challenge, and Hazard enjoyed turning it over in his mind throughout the sermon.

  But when they left, he still didn’t understand. They drove home together in silence, with Somers glancing over at Hazard. He felt the weight of those glances. He felt Somers’s intense curiosity—and, maybe he was imagining, his disappointment.

  At home, they changed clothes, and again Hazard needed Somers’s help. And they ate lunch. And they sat on the sofa watching TV, a recent sci-fi movie that Somers insisted on seeing now that it was on cable. And then, with no warning whatsoever, Somers sprang to his feet, planted hands on hips, and said, “All right, just say it already.”

  “What?”

  “Whatever you’ve been thinking. Whatever you’ve been chewing all morning. Tell me how stupid that service was. Tell me how you can’t understand why I would believe any of that crap. Tell me that I’m an idiot, or tell me that everybody in that church except you was an idiot, or tell me that they did a bad job of glossing the Greek, or tell me whatever you’ve been brooding about before I go out of my damn mind.”

  In the following vacuum, the only sound was the pew-pew of imaginary lasers in space, and Hazard thought vaguely that sounds couldn’t exist in space, and he wished to God he were in space right then.

  “They glossed the Greek just fine.”

  “Come on, Ree. What’s up?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m asking you why you wanted to go to church and—”

  “No. I don’t understand.” Hazard made a gesture, searching for words. “Why they believed. Clyde. He—what he did, John, I can’t understand. And Naomi. At the end, dragging herself across the stones, and the only thing she could think about was the Bible and how she could stop Jesse with the word of God. I don’t understand. I do, up here.” He tapped his head. “I know that there’s research about how belief in God activates the same brain centers as cocaine. I know that it fulfills some sort of biological function. I understand the cultural significance and social significance. But the end of it, what it means from the inside, that I can’t understand. And I need to understand, John. I have to understand or what happened with Clyde, with Naomi, it’s going to—damn it, I don’t know.”

  Somers settled onto Hazard’s lap.

  “My arm,” Hazard said, wincing away.

  Ignoring him, Somers looped his arms around Hazard’s neck and brought their foreheads together. “You don’t understand, huh?”

  “No.”

  “Up here,” Somers tapped Hazard’s temple lightly. “You get it? But not here?” He tapped Hazard’s heart.

  “Yeah, but—”

  “You big, beautiful dummy: you’re going at it backward. It starts down here. All of it. A hundred percent. And then, up here, it takes on meaning.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Faith or belief or hope, whatever you want to call it, Ree, it’s about choice. Choosing to believe something even though you might be wrong. And then letting that belief take hold of you, grow in you, until that belief drives you.”

  “That’s insane.”

  “It can be.”

  “That’s why Clyde killed himself, is that what you’re saying? That he was poisoned by this belief. That he chose to believe in Walden’s bullshit, and because of that he threw himself out a window? If you’re right, that’s the most fucked up shit in the world.”

  “It can be.”

  “Will you get off me?” Hazard’s heart was pounding now, and his breath rasped in his throat. “Will you get the fuck off me? I can’t breathe.”

  “Ree.”

  “Just get the fuck off, all right? Just get off me. He threw himself out a fucking window because he believed? They tortured him. They put out cigarettes on his arms. They cut him. They beat him. They humiliated him. They locked him away. And he still believed all that bullshit. He still believed John Oscar Walden was Jesus fucking Christ. Get off me. Get off me, oh Christ, just get off, will you?”

  “Ree.”

  Hazard couldn’t stop himself; he felt the tears at his eyes, and he dashed his arm across his face, but they came back thicker and stronger, and finding his voice was like finding a whisper in a hurricane. “Please, John. I just need a minute.”

  “Ree, I believe in you. At least, I’m trying to.”

  “Yeah. All right.”

  “I do. I think about all the horrible things I did to you. I think about who I was. Who I still am, in some ways. The past doesn’t go away. I thought it would, but it doesn’t. It’s—it’s still here, still part of me, still part of who I am. It’s under new stuff, but it’s still there, and you should hate me for it. Maybe you do hate me. Maybe you can’t help it.”

  “I don’t. You know I don’t.”

  “No. I don’t know that, Ree. Shush, I’m not arguing with you. I’m just saying I can’t know it. You can tell me, and I can choose to believe you. I do believe you. I want to believe you. But I can’t know. I can’t see into your heart and your mind. All I can do is believe.” Somers was smiling now, an underwater smile. “Isn’t that messed up? But it’s true. All I can do is believe. And when I left Evie with you, I couldn’t know what you’d do. I thought I knew. I had a pretty good guess. Based on past behavior, all that stuff, I could made a solid prediction. But I didn’t know. All I could do was believe that you’d—” Somers’s chest hitched, an enormous spasm of pain contracting his voice, and that underwater smile splashed off his face. “—that you’d take care of my girl. Our girl. That’s all I could do. Believe.”

  “It’s not the same,” Hazard whispered.

  “Ree,” Somers said, tilting Hazard’s face up and kissing him once. He laid a hand over Hazard’s heart, and from the look in his face, Hazard knew he could feel the wild, painful thumping of Hazard’s heart. “It starts here.”

  And Hazard heard his father speaking again, his words of rebuke when Hazard wouldn’t—couldn’t—say why he loved John-Henry Somerset. You can’t tell me why, Frank Hazard said, and one of his big hands had gripped Hazard’s arm like iron. Not any more than I can tell you. But that was only partly true, Hazard realized. Because he could tell some of it. He could tell about coming back to Wahredua, about his first day with Somers when he had held the blond man’s jacket and Somers had offered to let Hazard punch him in the face. He could tell about the ending of their first case, when they had stood face to face with a killer and Hazard had chosen to trust Somers. Chosen. He had chosen to believe that this man was better. That he was different from the boy Hazard had known. He had believed. But Hazard hated that word, hated everything that came with it.

  “Trust.”

  “What?”

  “It’s like trust. I’m not going to—I don’t want to call it belief. I don’t. But I can say trust. You trust me. You trust that I’m telling the truth when I say I love you. Trust, not belief.”

  “Does it matter whether I call it trust or belief?”

  “It matters to me.”

  Somers, his voice low and pained, said, “I don’t care about going to that church, Ree. If you don’t like it, if you don’t believe it, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. If you’re thinking I’m crazy, if you want me to say it’s bullshit, I—I don’t know. If you want to call it trust, I’ll call it trust. We can just let it go, can’t we? We can work it out, right? You’re not going to go? Not because of something stupid like this, right?”

  “What you said,” Hazard asked, “earlier, about me. You meant that?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “You believe I love you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You trust me?”

  “Goddamnit, yes, I do.”

  “Because I sure as fuck love you, John. More than anything else in the world.” And right then hatred spiked inside Hazard, vicious hatred for John Oscar Walden and the millions like him who had taken this beautiful thing and twisted it, who had taken the love of a young boy and the trust of an old woman and turned it against them. And then the hate burned itself out, and he was left staring up at Somers, feeling something fragile and huge filling his chest. “I do. I love you.”

  “I love you too, Ree.”

  With a small grin, Hazard squeezed Somers’s ass. “I believe you.” Heat exploded in Hazard’s chest, and the smile turned serious. “But more importantly, I trust you.”

  CRIMINAL PAST

  KEEP READING FOR A SNEAK PREVIEW OF CRIMINAL PAST, THE NEXT HAZARD AND SOMERSET MYSTERY.

  THE DORE COUNTY INDEPENDENCE FAIR was already in full swing. At the perimeter of the fairgrounds, the biggest rides hulked: the Octopods, the Flying Kite, the Free-Swings, and the carousel. Then, moving deeper, the complex machinery gave way to shops, where men and women from four surrounding states sold kettle corn and taffy and carved wooden ducks and the same gag t-shirts you could find at any state fair in three hundred miles. And at the center, the games of skill and chance marched along the midway. The air smelled like sawdust and cotton candy, and the summer sun hit like an angry hammer. It wasn’t even noon, but Emery Hazard was sweating. And he was, to his own surprise, having a good time.

  In his good arm, Hazard carried Evie. The toddler was a blue mess, a controlled experiment of child and spun sugar that had gone terribly wrong, but she was having a grand time licking at the cottony puff and shrieking with excitement. Her blue, sticky hands left a trail up Hazard’s shirt, across his collar, and along one side of his face, where he’d fallen into the habit of letting scruff grow. Not a beard; a beard wasn’t allowed per department policy. But the scruff came pretty damn close some days, and Hazard didn’t mind.

  At Hazard’s side walked his boyfriend and fellow detective, Evie’s father, John-Henry Somerset. In a linen shirt open at the throat and khaki shorts, Somers looked like a rich boy who might have wandered away from his yacht just long enough to explore the fair. It was a combination of things: golden good looks, mussed hair, and a body like he swam five miles a day. He and Hazard had both grown up in Wahredua, had gone to the same high school, had been in the same classes. But Somers looked comfortable here—out of place, yes, but comfortable. Hazard didn’t know if he’d ever been comfortable in the whole county. He’d only come back because he’d had to, and although some good had come of it—Somers was the best example of that—this part of the world carried too many unpleasant memories.

  “I can carry her for a while.”

  It was maybe the hundredth time Somers had said that. Hazard ignored him, adjusting Evie’s weight, wincing at the sugary glue on her fingers as she clutched at his face to balance herself.

  “God, it’s hot.”

  Ahead, at the center of the fair, a children’s section was roped off. Although it wasn’t yet noon, children swarmed the inflatable jungle gyms, the sandboxes, and the trampolines. Already a line snaked away from the electric train as parents and children waited for a turn. Sweat slicked Hazard’s neck, his back, his arm. He shifted Evie again.