Ford stared at the beer mug sitting on the bar. He’d been sitting on the same barstool at Marino’s for two hours in the middle of the afternoon and in that time, he’d watched the foamy head on his beer disappear but hadn’t taken a single drink. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to drink. He wanted to have all the drinks. But he lived too far away from Marino’s to walk, and in his present dark mood he wasn’t sure he could stop at one or two or twenty-five, and he wasn’t getting behind the wheel after that.
So instead of drinking the beer, he stared at it until the lack of condensation dripping down the outside of the mug proved the amber liquid inside was now room temperature. That had gotten more than a few comments from his brothers and sisters in blue who were playing darts in the back and checking each other out in the front. He’d ignored them. He didn’t care what they thought or didn’t think. None of it mattered.
After four days of being shut down every time he tried to reach out to Gina to explain, he wasn’t sure if anything mattered any more.
Of course, he’d known that was a possibility when he’d accepted the assignment from Rodriguez to check out the box Gina’s brothers had left. But knowing something could happen and having it actually happen were two very different things. One result made him drink a few beers. The other made him want to drink a few kegs.
The barstool next to him scraped against the floor as someone scooted it back and sat down. The flash of red hair in his periphery told him who it was before Frankie even opened his mouth.
“When Shannon called and said you’d been sitting here staring at your beer for the past two hours, I thought she was just trying to get in my pants again.” He winked at the woman behind the bar, who just rolled her eyes. “But here you are, like a man about to snap and, oh, I don’t know, join the police department or something.”
Ford cut a dirty look at his older brother. “I am a cop.”
“I know you are, moron. That’s what makes it funny. I give you shit for being a cop. You tell me to go eat smoke. We flip each other off and all is right with the world.” Frankie picked up Ford’s beer and took a long drink, then grimaced and set it back down on the bar. “You are fucking up the flow of things almost as much as this shitty, warm beer.”
He flipped off his brother. The idiot just laughed and clapped him on the back. Then, he threw some bills on the bar and stood up. “Come on, you’re coming with me.”
“Why?” Ford asked as he eyeballed his brother, not trusting where the impulsive giant was going with this.
“Because sitting in a cop bar talking about your feelings,” Frankie said, making the last word sound like an infectious disease, “is not something I want to do.”
That made two of them. “We aren’t talking about my feelings.”
Not now. Not here. Not anywhere. He was going to sit here and stare at his beer and not think about Gina Luca and how he’d fucked up the best thing to have ever happened to him. He put his elbows on the bar and laid his arms on either side of the beer mug and gave it his full attention.
Frankie snorted, obviously unimpressed. “But we will be talking about your feelings, because your head is wedged so far up your ass right now that you are insufferable even for you.”
“Insufferable.” Ford picked up his beer and took a swig of the lager that was so flat and warm that he immediately regretted it. “That’s a big word for a firefighter.”
“There you are.” Frankie grinned down at him. “I knew you were lurking in there somewhere. Now get your scrawny ass up before I pick you up and embarrass you in front of your little buddies in blue.”
Scrawny? What the fuck? “I’m six two.”
“Exactly. Scrawny. Now get a move on, baby brother. Finian is on shift tonight, and Fallon and the rest of our lovely sisters still aren’t talking to you, so that means knocking some sense into your thick skull is up to me.”
Ford didn’t want to go. He wanted to sit here at Marino’s and glare at his shitty room-temperature beer and snarl at anyone who had the balls to try to talk to him. But he knew Frankie. He’d known him his whole life. And never in all those years had the eldest Hartigan sibling ever backed down from a single solitary thing.
His brother had two speeds: full throttle ahead and dead asleep, which meant that if his brother was all in for making Ford come with him then he really was all in. At six feet six inches tall, Frankie was big enough to throw Ford over his shoulder and haul him out of Marino’s. Ford couldn’t let that happen. He might be a complete idiot, but he still had his pride.
“Fine,” he said, adding enough distaste to the word to make sure his brother knew his exact thoughts on the matter, and then stood up and walked out of Marino’s.
If he’d thought Frankie would be any more chill when they were both sitting out on his deck looking at the grass that Finian had painstakingly planted and watered for months, then he was wrong. Frankie was even more of a pain in the ass in his own environment, where he’d pulled out every detail of the Gina fiasco with the subtlety and gentleness of a Mack truck skidding across an ice sheet and smacking into a snowman.
“So, let me get this straight,” Frankie said while staring at Ford like he’d never seen a dumber human being in his life, which, since he worked with firefighters, was really saying something. “First, there was the thing at the hotel, which you fucked up.”
“I didn’t know Gallo and Ruggiero had set her up, and when I mentioned I hadn’t been expecting her, she ran.”
“Yeah, because—newsflash—chicks have egos, too.” Frankie took a drink of his beer. “And then when, by the grace of some benevolent force in the universe, you get the opportunity to hang out with her again, you fuck that shit up by not being honest.”
“I didn’t lie, regulations kept me from being able to tell her the complete truth.”
“You went to the same Catholic school that I did. Do you really think Sister Mary Helen would say that a lie of omission didn’t count if it was work-related?”
“Fuck you,” he grumbled and flipped his brother off.
“That’s what I thought.” Frankie returned Ford’s middle-finger salute with one of his own. “And then, because you’re not a big enough asshole already, you don’t do whatever the fuck it takes to make Gina understand that you’ve seen the error of your ways after the disaster of epic proportions at Mom’s house, and instead slink away back to your cop shop until you go over to her house under false pretenses again and snoop around for evidence of her brothers committing a crime.”
“It was for her own good. If someone else had gone in there and found something, they wouldn’t have been able to protect her against the fallout like I would.”
“So, you’re the hero in all of this, is that what you’re saying, baby bro?” When Ford didn’t answer, Frankie went on. “Because you sure as shit look like the heel to me.”
“Thank you, Professor Hartigan. I wasn’t aware of how badly I’d screwed everything up.”
“Well, it’s a good thing she was just a piece of temporary ass and not someone who actually mattered.”
The world turned red. Ford shot up and bum-rushed his brother, wrapping his arms around his waist and taking him down in a picture-perfect tackle. After that it was total chaos, complete with jabs, elbows to the ribs, and a flipped deck chair. They wrestled for control, delivering as many punches as possible before they were both laying side by side on the deck, surrounded by chairs that had been knocked over—or in one case, broken in half—and breathing so hard he would have thought they’d just tangled with a pack of elephants. Well, judging by the feel of his jaw, he might have.
“You are such a dumb fucker,” Frankie said, his words sounding funny because of the right hook Ford had delivered to his big brother’s mouth.
Ford was too tired and achy to sit up and smack Frankie around for the comment. “How’s that?”