Chapter Text
The rest of that night had passed in a blur. They found a landline phone in the butcher shop, and Coby let Drake handle the call while he kept an eye out for either of the two monsters coming for them again.
After that, things turned into kind of a blur.
There were cops -- two at first, in a car whose swirling lights painted the store’s interior, then more and more until Coby lost track. Drake had been pulled aside by two of them, the trio talking with an intense familiarity that suggested they knew each other from before Coby had even met Drake.
Coby didn’t have time to dwell on it. He got pulled aside by another of the police, a bawdy lady with pink hair and a cold slice of pizza in one hand bearing the unlikely name of “Detective Jewelry.” She kept asking him questions, letting her hapless lackey take notes on the answers for her.
“So what were ya doin’ here anyway?”
“I think I got brought here.”
“You don’t remember?”
“He knocked me out, and then I woke up here.” Coby tried not to shrink under that look of skepticism. “It was over in that building, across the street.”
He pointed. Both cops turned to look through the rain-splattered window. The detective turned back with unsettling slowness.
“What,” she asked, “Where you doing in there? I can’t imagine you had business.”
“I … uh…” He hesitated. There was the note, which would explain his presence. But it would also lead to questions he didn’t want Drake to have to answer -- since it was his name on the letter. He hadn’t been the one to send it, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to explain that to the detective, who looked bored and mostly just irritated that she’d missed the earlier action.
But in the end, they were going to find out about it sooner or later, so he pulled it out, handing it over to her. “He wrote this, pretending to be my friend there,” he tried, hoping this would head things off at the pass. “But I guess it was a trap.”
“You guess.”
He wondered if he could un-call the police. Or this particular police person. She was kind of a lot to deal with on a day like today.
But slowly, in faults and starts, he got her to listen to his story. He got the feeling she still didn’t believe him entirely, and he guessed he could see the problem. From her point of view, this had to look suspicious. He and Drake upright but clearly the worse for wear, and the two men who actually lived and worked here knocked out and tied up in their own home. He could understand the skepticism.
About half an hour into the questioning, for better or for worse, they found something else.
From there, things unraveled quickly.
As it turned out, the butcher -- Coby couldn’t stop thinking of the man in those terms even as the detectives shared his name, Mr. Fedlor, and that of his son William -- liked keeping souvenirs. Small ones, to be fair. Hands, mostly. They were tucked away in the rearmost shelf of their big industrial walk-in freezer, secreted in a cardboard box and wrapped in wax paper and plastic.
They found twelve. No two matched.
At that point, things got considerably easier for Coby.
The pink-haired detective started taking his answers to her questions more seriously. She was briefly joined by another detective, but after his third inappropriate joke about giving him a “hand,” she threatened to remove his intimate parts and throw them on the pile for the coroner to sort out with the rest. He wandered off after that, and gave her wide berth.
Coby wanted to go over to talk to Drake, but the onslaught of cops kept him just as busy, if not moreso. He was explaining things nonstop, sketching things in one of the detectives’ notebooks, gesticulating back out toward the street. At one point he handed over a key to an older cop who looked more gangster than investigator. The man left, and Coby could only assume he was going to collect the mountain of “puzzles” that Drake had received during this whole ordeal.
And it was an ordeal. He kept sneaking glances across at the other man, who managed to look put-together and businesslike despite the shoulder that he’d had to get popped back into place and the bruises all over his skin. He looked like he was there for work as much as the rest of them. But what must he be thinking, feeling now? Tonight had been pretty horrible for Coby, but Drake had had this whole thing hanging over his head for weeks. Isolated until he and Coby had made friends. Knowing that going to his old support system would quite possibly get him killed, or at least lose the lead he had on this crime. He couldn’t even vent, the way Coby did sometimes to Helmeppo.
Just alone, for weeks, with just his thoughts and the threats of a madman and the ghost of his friend.
Coby honestly just wanted to go over and give the guy a hug, but figured Drake wouldn’t appreciate something like that in front of his old comrades. So he just answered questions and wrapped his cold hands around the hot coffee they eventually brought him and watched the scene. A tall, lanky medic with a perma-scowl came and checked on Coby’s arm and head. He suffered that in silence, watching the coroner arriving to check out the scene -- a scary-pale blond man with some strange facial tattoos and a rather ostentatious cross necklace.
Coby wasn't sure what a coroner needed to do with a bunch of hands in a box, but he wasn’t an expert on any of this.
Sometime into the second or third hour of this police circus, a familiar figure came striding through the rain to the front door. One of the officers stopped him outside, and he began basically shouting, while gesticulating toward the butcher shop, the nearby cop cars and basically the whole scene in general.
Coby, who’d been told to stick around for now but currently had nothing specific he was involved with, hurried over. “Helmeppo!” he shouted. His roommate turned at the sound of his voice, snapped off something in low tones to the officer (which Coby thought was a bad idea. The blond man looked like he could snap Helmeppo in half without exerting himself) and turned to greet him.
“Coby! Thank goodness you’re all right!”
Coby accepted an awkward hug by the taller man, saying, “I’m glad to see you too, but how-”
“The police called me, Coby,” he said, releasing the hug and holding him at arm’s length. His fear was fast fading into a kind of anger, but the sort of anger Coby knew came from worry more than anything. He could practically feel the stress radiating off his friend. “They called me asking if I knew you, and when I confirmed it, I was half expecting the next thing they did would be asking me to come down and identify your body, not just tell them what you've been doing the past few weeks. What happened? What did you get yourself into?”
So Coby explained, with a bit less detail than he had with the cop. He honestly didn’t want to recount it again, but he figured it was going to eat at Helmeppo if he didn’t. And besides, he expected the news to come out in the papers eventually anyway.
When he got to the letter under their door this evening, Helmeppo stopped him and, with accusatory slowness, turned to look at the building across the street, with its empty windows and blanketing darkness. Then he turned equally slowly back to Coby.
“You thought your friend lived in there?”
“I didn’t know,” Coby said. “I was just so worried that something was wrong that even though it seemed weird, I had to check.”
He thought Helmeppo was going to say something snide, but instead, he sighed. “Of course you did,” he said. “Listen, if you let your compassion get you killed, I’m never going to forgive you.”
“Sorry,” Coby said.
“But you wouldn’t be you if you weren’t just like this.” Helmeppo seemed resigned. Looking around, he caught sight of Drake. “That the friend?”
Coby nodded. He already felt done in by this evening’s adventure and abruptly wanted nothing more than to go get about three days worth of sleep in his own bed behind a locked door. But somehow, Drake was still going strong. Someone had bandaged all his little wounds, making him look half a mummy.
“So where does he actually live?”
“I’m honestly not sure. Nowhere good I don’t think.”
Coby didn’t ask. He honestly had no intention of asking, even though he wanted to. But as though Helmeppo read his mind, he crossed his arms and said, “Ask him to stay over if you want, but if he brings any more murderers into your life we’ll have words.”
With a grateful nod, Coby made his way over to where Drake was still talking with another of the police. He looked up as Coby approached and a weary smile crossed his face.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” Coby replied. “Listen. If you want someplace to stay tonight, why don’t you come by? Our place isn’t big, but the couch folds out and my roommate makes the best coffee in the mornings. I’d feel better … I’d like it if you stayed over, too.”
He knew the answer instantly, as Drake’s expression fell.
“I can’t, not tonight,” he said, catching Coby’s gaze with his own. “There’s a lot to do, and they’ll need my old investigation notes from before and … well, a lot. There’s a lot to do. But I appreciate it, OK? But I’ll stop by in a couple days, and we can talk about everything then. Properly. All right?”
It wasn’t, but what could he do about it?
“OK. Good luck in the investigation,” Coby said, leaving Drake to his work and wandering back to Helmeppo. And when the cops gave him the all-clear fifteen minutes later, he regretfully left the scene and returned to his own apartment, his own room.
They had never felt so lonely.
In the days that followed, Coby started to think he’d imagined a lot.
Imagined that Drake had said he’d stop by. Imagined the times the other man had seemed to let down his guard around Coby. Imagined their friendship.
Garp insisted on him taking two days off, and when he hadn’t been sufficiently convinced Coby would listen, had closed the shop entirely. Ostensibly it was to fix the back door. Coby knew better.
He penned a quick note to Drake and left it taped to the front door just in case. It was still there, though a bit the worse for wear, when he went to check it before opening a couple days later. So he’d balled it up, and gone home to wait for his actual shift time and tried not to be upset. Drake didn’t owe him anything after all. And he had a lot going on.
Still, though…
Helmeppo kept trying to jolly him out of his somber mood, but Coby wasn’t in the mood for jolly. And Helmeppo didn’t have a lot of positive energy to spare anyway. Seemed work was keeping him busier than usual, often not seeing him home until three or four in the morning.
And Coby was back to his old routine. Lazy mornings of books and TV, then long empty shifts at Coffee Cravings and home to an empty apartment.
Strangely, the traffic to the coffee shop picked up slightly in the wake of the attack. It was mostly gawkers looking to see the street where a “real serial killer” had caused so much death. Luckily, Coby’s name had been kept out of it, so while the occasional tourist asked him if he knew who the ones who escaped, not a single one of them ever even thought to guess it might be him.
It had actually been a somewhat decent day about a week later. Over a hundred people had stopped in, and Coby had been kept steadily busy between serving customers and cleaning the place up. Closing time fast approached though, and as evening rush hour faded, so did the flow. Almost time to go home again. Maybe he should order some Indian food for dinner tonight, he thought as he checked the supplies, to see if he needed to bring anything out front from storage.
The door jingled. Coby finished the count of lids quickly, then stood and turned. “Hello, how can I - oh.”
Drake stood there, just inside the front door. He looked around the shop, taking in the fading walls, the aging furniture and the wild coffee-themed art on the walls before finally looking to Coby. “Hey,” he said uncertainly.
“Hey,” Coby replied, not sure what else to say. Part of him wanted to pretend like nothing was different. Part of him wanted to demand to know where he’d been, why he’d just gone silent like that. Part of him even, absurdly, wanted to tell Drake to leave -- Coby wasn’t sure he was prepared to hear whatever Drake had to say, especially if it was combined with why he’d been gone so long.
For his part, Drake remained over by the door, as though prepared to bolt.
This sucked.
“The usual?” Coby asked. That should be a safe place to start.
Drake hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah. That would be great.”
Coby took a little longer pulling the simple order together than usual. Behind him, he could hear Drake’s slow steps approaching the counter.
He hated that this had gotten so strange.
Finally, he turned back, setting the pastry bag on the counter and holding out the coffee. When their hands accidentally brushed, Coby forced himself to remain neutral. Drake pulled the coffee in close, averting his eyes again.
Silence dropped like a weight between them.
“So, how are you doing?” Coby ventured. The bandages were gone, and the visible wounds were all pink but mostly without scabs. They must not have been deep. He felt relieved at that much. And his shoulder didn’t seem to be bothering him. That was good.
That was great, honestly.
Drake shrugged. “Nothing serious,” he said. “How about you?”
Coby laid one hand over the other arm. The bruise was still tender and looked horrendous, all mottled green and yellow and purple. But it was healing too. “Nothing serious,” he mirrored.
“Oh. Good.”
Silence again.
As it stretched longer this time, Coby debated what to do … and made up his mind. It might be awkward for both of them, but if there was a chance this would be the last time they saw one another, he was going to give Drake a piece of his mind. Be blunt and straightforward and let him know exactly what he was thinking.
“I’m really glad to see you again.”
Drake looked up from his coffee, surprise written all over his face and in his posture. “Seriously?”
“Of course.” Coby smiled. “I’m mad at you for taking so long to visit though. I thought maybe after what happened you were mad at me. Or maybe, since you’d solved the mystery, you were just going to move on and forget all about this place. I don’t think I could have blamed you, but I was angry, a little. And worried. A lot.”
Looking utterly baffled by this, Drake said, “I waited because I wasn’t sure you’d want to even see me. It was my fault that you had to deal with all that.”
Coby chuckled. “No-”
“I got you involved,” Drake countered.
“If you think back, I think you’ll find I got me involved,” Coby said. “I intruded on your puzzle solving, I kept bothering you.”
“They called you out using my name.”
“And I went,” Coby said. “You made it clear there was real danger and I went anyway. Drake, I’m an adult, more or less. My decisions aren’t your fault.”
Drake didn’t look convinced, but he at least stopped arguing, which Coby decided to count as a win. Instead he allowed a small, somewhat rueful smile and said, “I guess I shouldn’t have waited so long, then, to come clear the air.”
Coby held up a finger, asking Drake to hold onto that thought a moment. He went over and flipped the sign on the door to “Closed,” then grabbed his thermos of water from behind the counter and headed over to Drake’s traditional table. The other man followed, sitting across from Coby, their seats pretty much the same as the first time they’d worked on one of the “puzzles” together.
“So can you tell me what actually happened now?” Coby asked.
Drake nodded. “Yeah. I think it’s OK now. They’re both waiting for trial. I’m actually re-applying to join the force again. No formal apology from the department or anything, but my old supervisor told me they had some opening and I’d be a good candidate, which I think is their way of saying they should have listened before, instead of thinking I was being too emotional.”
“Who was it?” Coby asked. “The friend who he killed? If you don’t want to say, you don’t have to, but if it was enough to make you emotional at work, you must have been close.”
“Well…” He could sense Drake’s hesitance, so was surprised when he continued, “It wasn’t quite like that. He wasn’t a friend, and we weren’t really close at the time. But he was … it was my dad.”
Coby felt his eyes widen. His father? That explained so much, a tidal wave of a revelation.
“He wasn’t a good man, and he was tied up in some really bad business,” Drake continued. “He moved here to lay low. He was that angry guy who stopped in here a couple times. Honestly the world might be better off without him. But I always figured it would be his own actions that got him killed, you know?. That he got murdered in such a weird way -- that the person doing it had toyed with him, it got to me. And so did him coming to me for help.”
“That was unusual?”
Drake laughed bitterly. “No. But before, he’d just come tell me what I was going to do for him. What expectation he had for me, and I, like an idiot, usually did it. This time was different. He was different. He came to me, afraid and begging for help, and I let him die because I didn’t move fast enough. Maybe if I’d been a better son, the killer would have seen him as a person with connections and found another target. Instead, he thought my father was just going to some cop and made his final move.”
Oh man, he was carrying all that, all this time? Coby protested, “But if your father was here with friends-”
“No one watching them for any length of time would mistake them for friends,” Drake said. “They didn’t even report him missing when it happened. After a while they just sold off what he left and split.”
Coby tried to imagine walking around with all this in your head, eating away at you. He couldn’t fathom it.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Sorry you couldn’t save him.”
“It’s not like that,” Drake said, waving off the apology. “I just wanted you to understand why it was hard for me to be honest about this. I was actually a little worried, when we started talking, that he might take me off the target list. Part of me almost hoped he would. But I just wanted to focus on the killer, and not think about any of the rest of it.”
Coby nodded. “Thanks for telling me. And for letting me help. When I consider how many of the people who stopped in here once in a while then disappeared might have been among the victims…”
“Yeah. With my investigation, I thought he had killed six, maybe seven,” Drake said, staring down at his own hands. “The number they found … he’s been at this a long time, and no one noticed.”
“Until you.”
Drake didn’t answer and Coby didn’t push it. That had taken a lot out of Drake to even say. He didn’t want to make him regret it.
Instead, he said, “So, what now? Being back to working with the police sounds good. Are you moving back to your old neighborhood?”
Drake glanced up at him, evaluating. “I was actually thinking I might move here. It’s a quiet neighborhood. And a lot more neighborly than I first thought.”
In spite of the seriousness of the previous part of the conversation, Coby grinned. “Sometimes,” he said. “It’d certainly be good to know there’s someone like you around, in case anything else bad happens.”
“I could say the same,” Drake said. “Honestly, when you showed up in that stairway, I’ve never been so glad to see someone in my life. And then you just threw yourself into the fight -- thanks, by the way.”
“Garp taught me to defend myself, and I’d be an idiot if I didn’t use that to defend the people I care about,” Coby said.
He intended it simply, but he didn’t miss the sharp, surprised look that earned him. So he steeled himself and added, half expecting it to be a joke from Drake, “You had to know that, right? I’m not exactly a puzzle aficionado. Some of those notes almost gave me nightmares. But you seemed like a really great person, and I wanted to help you.”
“Huh.” Drake seemed to be trying to work through something himself. But he didn’t seem bothered by what Coby was saying.
On the contrary.
“Come over this weekend,” Coby said. Catching Drake’s eye, he added, “You can meet my roommate. You might hate him and he’ll definitely hate you at first, but I think it’d be fun.”
“You have a very strange definition of fun,” Drake said, shaking his head -- but there was still that smile on his face.
“I get that a lot. But if you’re going to be around, I’d like to hang out a lot more, so it’ll be better if you two figure things out now.”
Drake looked down and shook his head, and for a moment Coby felt a chill -- had he misread? Had he overstepped? But then Drake looked up again, and Coby could see.
He was laughing.
“Yeah, he said, and Coby finally felt himself relax. “Yeah, I’d like that.”
He hadn't liked what happened. But despite his words to Helmeppo, he thought he might like Drake.
Time to see where this led.