Free Unquiet by Melanie Hansen

lashed out at Eliot like that in the equipment shed, was able to put aside his selfish hurt and pride long enough to see Eliot’s actions weren’t normal. If only he’d tried harder to get Eliot’s parents to see there was something wrong with their son. If only he’d done something about Eliot’s blatant cries for help, like the night on the ledge.
    “You were just a child yourself, Loren,” his therapist had told him, her voice gentle. “Your friend obviously has a serious mental illness, one that you in no way would have been equipped to handle. That was his parents’ job, not yours. The burden was theirs, not yours.”
    At face value it made sense, and it was probably true, but Loren wasn’t able to forget hurling those vicious words at him—“you crazy son of a bitch”—how he’d turned his back on him when Eliot needed him the most.
    The computer chirped a little tune at him as it finished booting up, flashing the password prompt, and Loren signed in with his badge number, mousing over to the search function. He typed “Eliot George Devlin” into the search window, plus Eliot’s date of birth. A few seconds later, Eliot’s current home address, telephone number, and rap sheet appeared, and Loren scrolled down in disbelief—drunk and disorderly, trespassing, criminal traffic, resisting arrest. Jesus, Eliot , he thought with sorrow, then in the next instant pounded his fist on the desk in a fury.
    Why was this happening? Hadn’t anyone gotten Eliot any help in all these fucking years? Loren was able to go on with his life after what happened, and he’d managed to carve out some happiness for himself with both his career and a long-term relationship that came to an amicable end a few months ago. And meanwhile Eliot was down here in Phoenix, getting arrested, his life seemingly having gone nowhere.
    There was one definite way he could think of to get some fucking answers, so he looked up Dr. Rebecca Devlin’s address and scrawled it on a piece of scratch paper before clicking into the police department’s shared database and opening up a blank CI Report form. For the next fifteen minutes, he typed busily as he proceeded to “wash” the information he’d gotten from Slats out into written form while it was still hot in his mind.
    When it was finished, he wrote a short e-mail to his ATF handler and attached the report to it, sending it up the chain to the people far above his pay grade who made the decisions on where to go from here. He could tell Slats was a little disappointed when Loren didn’t pull his gun and run out of the bar while shouting into his cell phone for backup as he charged to the rescue. Unfortunately life wasn’t like Law and Order , everything tied up in a neat bow during a one-hour episode. Bureaucracy happened, just like shit did, and Loren suspected Slats was more motivated by the thought of some sort of reward than any true altruistic desire to help.
    Powering down the computer at last, Loren snatched up Dr. Devlin’s address and banged out the door.
     
     
    “HOW MUCH you make tonight, sweet thing?”
    Eliot looked up from sorting his cash into piles and shrugged. “About a thousand, give or take a few hundred.”
    JJ stopped wiping down the bar top and leaned against it, sipping a beer. He poured Eliot a shot without being asked, and Eliot downed it before shoving one hundred dollars in the bartender’s direction. JJ grinned and stuffed it into his tip jar.
    Eliot handed him another one hundred dollars. “Give this to Benny,” he said, meaning the DJ, and JJ winked at him before sliding the money into the cash drawer to give to the other man later. It was 3:00 a.m. and the club had just closed for the night, the last patron having been shooed out by JJ just minutes earlier.
    JJ leaned back across the bar, reaching out and trailing his fingers over Eliot’s bare arm suggestively.
    “Great set tonight, Angel. I think my dick has a permanent zipper mark imprinted