Page 44 of A Deal with the Devil

“If this is another party question, you’re fired,” he answers. “Tell Jonathan his adoption is off. He can get a cat instead of a baby—much easier on everyone.”

Please don’t disappoint me, Hayes. Please don’t prove I was wrong about someone else.

“I just got a call from a woman who says she’s Trace Westbrook’s mom.” My voice is quiet, hesitant. “She said he broke his nose…and she doesn’t want to go to the hospital because they’ll ask questions.”

I hug my knees tighter, waiting for him to clarify this, to explain why he’s helping these people instead of letting them hang.

Instead, I hear only a curse and the screech of tires. “I’m turning around. They’re in Laurel Canyon, but I don’t remember the exact address,” he says. “Get it, phone it into my car, and meet me there.”

“Meet you?” I do not want to be a part of this. And if I meet this kid’s parents and it’s as bad as it sounds, Hayes might end up dealing with multiple broken noses. Including his own.

“Yes,” he says. “I need the black bag in the linen closet in my bathroom. Get it and get there as fast as you can.”

He’s so cool and collected under normal circumstances that hearing him sound worried is deeply unsettling. “Tell me why you’re helping these parents cover up a broken nose,” I say, my voice hard. I will quit on the spot if I don’t like his answer.

“I will,” he says, “but first, I need that address. Now.”

* * *

I pull up to a sprawling rambler, framed by short, stocky palms and gnarled old fig trees. Hayes’s car is already there, so I grab the bag and head to the door. A woman answers, looking like death warmed over. “He’s upstairs,” she says, clutching her robe around her. A small pale face peers over the couch at me, eyes wide and sad, hair matted to her head.

I put my anger on hold and run up the stairs, two at a time.

The kid in the bed looks even younger than I’d have expected, and Hayes is holding his hand, talking to him about skiing with feigned calm. He glances over his shoulder. “Valium,” he says. I open the bag and begin fumbling through bottles until I find it. “Get me two and a glass of water.” There’s no doubt this is an order. There’s a degree of don’t fuck with me in his voice I’ve never heard before.

I run to the bathroom beside Trace’s room and fill a disposable cup with water before I run back, handing it to Hayes along with the pills.

“I need you to swallow these for me,” he says to the kid, who begins crying. “It won’t hurt, I swear. You aren’t going to feel a single thing.”

Hayes gives the boy the pills and holds the cup to his lips, still discussing ski slopes, his voice so calm even my breathing slows.

When the boy’s eyes droop and then close, Hayes reaches into his bag and withdraws a very, very long needle. Between that and the blood, I feel like I can barely stay upright.

“I need you to hold him down,” he says quietly. “Can you do that?”

My jaw falls open to argue, but I see he means it, and maybe it’s bad judgment, but I trust him. Implicitly. “How?”

“Grab his shoulders,” he says. “Make sure he doesn’t jerk while I’m injecting the lidocaine.”

Swallowing, I do as I’m told, going to the opposite side of the bed and leaning over him. He looks like he’s out cold, but my hands band around his biceps as tight as I can anyway.

Hayes glances at me. “You’re looking a little pale,” he says. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” I reply, my voice breathless and threadbare.

He holds Trace’s jaw with one hand and with the other presses the needle into the upper bridge of his nose, right beside his eye.

“Oh, God,” I whisper.

“Hold him, Tali,” he growls. “Just look away. I need you. Don’t pass out on me now.”

I close my eyes, trying to hold it together. I’ve never thought of myself as someone prone to acting like a girl, but I’ve also never seen a needle that fucking big aimed at someone’s eye.

“What was the name of that ride at Universal?” he asks, in that same calm voice he was using on the kid. “The Harry Potter one.”

I breathe through my nose. “I don’t…I don’t remember. There was the Hagrid one. Oh, or the Hippogriff? Why?”

“You can look now,” he says. I open my eyes and his mouth quirks upward. He was distracting me like a child, and it worked.