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Whiskey shrugged. “I found him. If he wanders off, he wanders off, but in the meantime, we can afford to feed him.”
    “That makes no sense at all,” she muttered.
    He paused for a minute, trying to find words for the way that wordless, sobless crying had sunk into his soul and refused to budge. “He cried. He’s got a story. Cops come, no story. Maybe I’m interested.” Besides, both of them had perfectly good reasons for a lingering distrust of policemen to hang out in their psyches like the ghost of doobies past.
    Fly Bait sniffed. “God, Whiskey, you are such a woman sometimes.”
    Whiskey rolled his eyes. They both knew that if he were a woman, they would have been doing something entirely different when that car had gone through the rail.
     
     
    T HE bed in the berth was small, yes, but it could fit two, and eventually Whiskey pulled a blanket up over his shoulders and set his phone to wake him once an hour so he could check on Patrick’s breathing. Around four in the morning, the boy moaned and rolled over in his sleep, snuggling like an infant.
    Whiskey sighed. “You know, kid, it’s a good thing I swing this way sometimes.”
    It was wonderful, actually. The boy was trusting and soft. Whiskey didn’t trust it himself —he’d been jumping political hoops for far too long to have any faith in innocence. With a grunt, he pulled some of that crusty blond hair back from the delicate, small, round, pretty face and tried to analyze the kid’s motives even in his heavy, drug-induced sleep.
    “Easy to trust, isn’t it, kid?” he muttered. “Easy to trust when you’ve got all that money to give you faith, huh?”
    He said the words and then felt immediately guilty. The kid was as helpless as a tadpole in a shrinking pond. Whatever had happened to him, Whiskey thought it was more than apparent that he’d gotten here, in this tiny berth and in Whiskey’s bed, by trusting the wrong person.
    The kid mumbled something in his sleep. It might have been anything, but Whiskey could have sworn he said, “Dad.”
    Aw, fuck no! Not Daddy issues. Oh, Jesus. Kid—how did you end up here? But it didn’t matter, because as the kid snuggled in closer, Whiskey’s insomnia seemed to melt away. It was four in the morning, Whiskey had done his good deed for the decade, and Daddy issues or no Daddy issues, Whiskey was going to get some top quality, armful-of-twink sleep.
     
    At 8 a.m. his alarm went off, and he wriggled out from between the kid and the wall muttering, “Fuck my life” repeatedly and trying very hard to ignore that the kid’s presence against the front of his body had made his morning wood difficult to deal with.
    And then, to make matters worse, he got to the bottom of the bunk and threw on a clean (holey) T-shirt and a clean (holey) pair of jeans over his boxers, and looked up to find himself under the scrutiny of a shockingly blue (bloodshot) pair of eyes.
    “You’re not Cal,” the kid said, the picture of befuddlement.
    “Nope,” Whiskey said, finding his tennis shoes (holey) and putting them on without socks (because those were holey too, and that was where he drew the line.)
    “Where’s Cal?” the kid asked plaintively. “And why do I smell like a sewer? And why does my mouth taste like ass?” Those blue eyes closed and the kid groaned. “Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry, why does my head feel like a fuckin’ bomb?”
    That last came out as a whimper, and Whiskey watched as tears leaked out the corners of the kid’s eyes, making tracks down the grime left from his little foray into the river.
    “Fuck my life,” he muttered, and then reached around in his drawer for a bottle of ibuprofen. “Be right back.”
    The kid hadn’t moved when he came back with a big bottle of drinking water and broke the seal. “Here, kid. I’ll give you something for the pain, but you’ve got to drink this entire thing, okay?”
    The kid whimpered, and Whiskey put strong, tanned