Bone Music (Burning Girl #1)(48)

“All right, I trust you.”

Ed nods. It’s the closest they’ll ever have to a tender moment.

“I want the strike team rolling in when we land.”

“Cole—”

“I don’t want them to strike, Ed. I just want a show of force.”

“You want them rolling in right as we set down next to the building he’s sheltering in? That could be chaos, Cole.”

“Pageantry, Ed. The word is pageantry.”

“Fine. You’re the one who knows what this guy’s capable of.”

Ed’s baiting him.

He doesn’t bite.

Ed begins tapping instructions into his mobile phone.

“So wherever this place is,” Cole asks, “it’s not exactly the middle of nowhere?”

“It’s close,” Ed answers. “Just a little ways north of Tucson.”

“I imagine Tucson would object to being depicted as the middle of nowhere.”

“I don’t know. I’ve got an aunt there, and she says that’s exactly the appeal. Any idea why he picked this place?”

“Quick escape from this mess he caused with the bikers.”

“Seems like he’d want to get farther away. He’s certainly had enough time. What do you think?”

“About what?” Cole asks.

“I’m just saying, you know him a lot better than I do. What’s your guess?”

More bait. Again he doesn’t bite.

He needs Ed. Badly. And if Ed wants to take this moment to express some disapproval of the tortured path Cole and Dylan have walked together, the man’s allowed. There are only a few of Graydon’s dark secrets Ed doesn’t know, and the ones he doesn’t, Dylan knows all too well. Cole can’t afford to make an enemy out of Ed or anyone else. Not now, not today.

“Symbolism,” he answers.

“Symbolism?”

“The location’s going to have some kind of symbolism. That’s all I can figure.”

“Symbolism related to what?” Ed asks.

“His beliefs.”

“Beliefs? The guy’s a scientist and a soldier, not a preacher.”

“Actually he manages to combine the worst of all three,” he says.

“I see,” Ed says. “Well, you’d know.”

“Ed?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you just ask me what you want to know?”

“Fine. Is there some kind of involvement between you two that might be clouding your judgment here? If that video’s real, a meeting like this . . . We’re talking a week of prep, negotiations. At least. This could be an ambush, Cole, and we’re flying right into it.”

“My involvement with Dylan’s work is exactly why I’m obligated to take this meeting.”

“You know what I’m asking.”

“You want to know if he took me out to the Hotel del Coronado and did things to me that made me forget my own name? Is that it?”

Ed just stares at him. The man’s no homophobe. His reticence probably has more to do with an aversion to discussing his employer’s personal life. If Cole’s mother were in this seat, Ed would be just as demure on the topic. But can Ed hear what he’s really asking? If Cole’s judgment around Dylan is warped by libido now, that means it was warped by libido two years ago. And two years ago, he did a lot worse than rush into an ill-advised, last-minute meeting in the middle of Arizona with a man who might be capable of bending steel with his bare hands.

Ed seems to realize this. He slouches back and turns his attention to the view.

The Airbus H155 is supposed to be one of the quietest helicopters millions can buy, but Cole can feel every thump of its rotary blades in his bones. From this altitude the desert looks like a vast sea whose sandy bottom has been churned up by a global apocalypse. A place without borders or habitation, even though they crossed the California state line only minutes ago. It’s not hard to imagine Dylan living out here like some hermit.

Correction. It’s easy to imagine Dylan living out here like some hermit.

Easier than accepting Cole should have been keeping better tabs on the guy. And that he didn’t because the mere thought of Dylan hurt him in ways that suggest Ed Baker’s right; his judgment when it comes to Dylan has been clouded.

It wasn’t the Hotel del Coronado.

It was the Montage in Laguna. Not as historic, but just as luxurious.

And, yes, on more than one occasion during their visits there, Dylan did make him forget his own name. But Cole had been foolish enough to think theirs was a passion bred by the secrecy of what they’d embarked on together, a fleeting, if white-hot, intimacy their special project had produced in them both. If it had occurred to him that Dylan was, quite literally, playing him like an instrument, such thoughts took a back seat to the shared intensity of their ambitions. Or that’s where he tried to shove them so he could justify letting Dylan shatter him in the bedroom.

And the great, miserable irony is that Cole’s never been one for relationships.

He still balks at his mother’s insistence that he find some handsome young banker or lawyer to marry. When he was in college, before gay marriage became the law of the land, he’d delighted in his freedom from the conventions and rituals that seemed poised to doom the ambitions of his fellow Stanford overachievers; his freedom from the reality of some wife’s biological clock or her bewildering emotional needs weighing down his potential life’s work. Back then the road ahead had seemed clear of obstructions, an endless stream of professional accomplishment and occasional release at the hands of gorgeous, skilled professionals who made regular appearances on his favorite porn websites.