The Good Cop by Dorien Grey Page B

the living room and sat down side by side on one of the love seats.
    “Did you hear how Jim’s doing?” I asked, putting my hand on his leg.
    Tom took a swig of coffee before nodding and saying: “Yeah, I stopped by to look in on him just before I left. He’s out of intensive care, but still in pretty bad shape. Several broken ribs, a ruptured spleen, and some internal bleeding, from what I understand. His partner…Cory?…was with him. He was lucky he ran for help, or they both could have ended up dead—the women, too.”
    “They seemed to have come through it pretty well, all things considered,” I observed. I’d only caught a couple glimpses of them after the incident. They both looked like they’d been in a fight, but I guess it wasn’t bad enough for them to have to go to the hospital. But Tom was right, they were pretty lucky.
    “What about the gay thing?”
    Tom put his cup down on the coffee table, made a slight grimace when he apparently moved his left shoulder too fast, then leaned slowly back upright and looked at me with another grin, as if apologizing for the grimace. “The two detectives who interviewed me first were the ones who talked to you: Couch and Carpenter. They wanted to know exactly what my relationship with you was. I skipped over the part about us spending a lot of time in bed together. But I did tell them we had been friends since college: you, me and Lisa,” he added, then scowled and shook his head. “Damn it! I hate having to run and hide behind Lisa! I hate not being able to just say ‘Yeah, I’m gay; so what?’ But I just haven’t been around the department long enough to do that yet. Maybe, in a couple of years….”
    Dream on, kid, I thought.
    He carefully leaned forward to pick up his cup and take another mouthful, draining it. “The taller one…Carpenter…did most of the talking. Couch didn’t say much but he glowered a lot. I got the feeling you aren’t one of his favorite people. It was pretty obvious that as far as he’s concerned, no real man could ever be friends with a fucking faggot. But they really didn’t push too hard. Later, two guys from Internal Affairs came in and I guess they had talked to the first two, because they didn’t ask any direct questions about it, either. But I’m not foolish enough to think I’m off the hook just yet.”
    I finished my coffee and offered to go get Tom some more, but he shook his head, then gave me a big grin.
    “You know one thing I found out about being shot?”
    Puzzled, I shook my head. “No. What’s that?”
    “It makes me horny as all hell!”
    I looked at him, wide-eyed. “Are you serious?”
    “Oh, yeah.”
    “And how in the hell are we supposed to manage that without sending you back to the hospital?”
    Tom reached over with his good hand and slid it behind my neck, pulling me toward him.
    “Improvise.”
    *
    I stayed with Tom until Lisa and Carol got home around eight. They were both shocked to find out what had happened, and Lisa was angry and a little hurt that Tom hadn’t called her immediately.
    The phone had rung almost constantly all the time I was there, but Tom had been advised not to talk to anyone—especially the press. I thought of volunteering to field calls, but immediately realized that would not be the smartest thing in the world to do, given the circumstances. A police officer involved in a shooting outside a gay bar having his phone answered by a man other than the officer himself…uh, no….
    I went home about nine o’clock, to find several messages on my answering machine: Jared, Bob Allen, Glen O’Banyon—now that was a surprise—Tim and Phil; all of them had heard I’d been at the scene of the shooting. How in hell they’d found that out, I have no idea, since while Tom’s name had been mentioned, mine certainly hadn’t. But I should have realized that a story like this would sweep through the entire gay community in a heartbeat. And the fact that Tom was gay was part