by Rhys Ford
“You know as I do, this isn’t the movies. Circumstantial evidence convicts as much as direct does. He’s only got her and me to focus on, and he just needs to connect a few dots from Harold’s dead body to a motive, even if it’s a lie. You think she’s going to be able to work if they drag this into court? He’s just got to keep digging at her, ask people a few questions and hammer at where she was the night Harold died.” Rook’s argument was solid, especially if Dante thought back to the sly look on Vicks’s face before they left the police station. “I’m not asking you to work on the case. Maybe just… hell, I don’t know. I owe her, Montoya. I can’t put her in a forget-about-it bucket because of what Charlene just did to me. She’s family. Kind of. And—”
“You owe her,” Dante finished for him. “In that squirrelly brain of yours, you owe her.”
“I’m not asking you to do anything illegal,” Rook murmured, sliding his hands over Dante’s thighs. “Just… help her. With anything we can hand over to the lawyers and say, here, look at this.”
If it was anyone else, he would have said no. Straight out of the gate. Without any hesitation, but Rook asking for a favor was new. It was kind of a thin olive branch, withered from abuse and neglect by other people, but still, an olive branch he was trusting Dante to take.
“Okay,” he replied, holding up his hand when a cocky grin broke over Rook’s face. “But hear me out. I’m going to talk to the captain first and see what he says. If Book tells me no, then it’s no, and I go dig up the number to that guy Hank’s old partner, Bobby, runs around with. He’s friends with a Brentwood PI. But if the captain tells me I can do a couple of things for her, you’ve got to promise you won’t stick your nose into it. Because if there’s one thing that cuervo nose of yours is good for, babe, it’s getting you into trouble.”
“Deal. Next question, anybody get back to you about the firebombing?” Rook’s fingers were on the move, tracing over the lines of muscles under Dante’s jeans. He was distracting, a spill of hair throwing shadows over his handsome face when his nails raked over the inside seam. Rook looked up when Dante let out a soft, mournful groan. “Oh, sorry. Talking. Yeah.”
“Later. Dios, but yes, later.” He stole a kiss and a little of Rook’s breath, flicking his tongue across Rook’s before pulling away. There was a bit more heat in his lover’s gaze, his elegant, graceful hands poised and still on Dante’s thigh. “As for the Molotovs? Just a few calls checking in with me but nothing hard to go on, other than the asshole probably had no idea what he was doing. They found a broken one on the walk at the side of the shop, so maybe he dropped it or fucked up the toss. So we don’t know that it’s connected to Harold. Could have just been—”
“If you say burglars, I’m going to be offended.” Rook dug his fingertips into a ticklish spot on Dante’s thigh, releasing him when Dante gasped. “And no, I don’t have any more enemies than I did the last time some assholes shot up my place. Oh wait, those assholes were cops.”
“Hey, it wasn’t me, cuervo. I was just the one to take you down,” Dante reminded him, tugging at a lock of Rook’s hair. “It could have been someone trying to rob the place and they gassed the front to cover up what they were doing, but it makes no sense to burn the place down.”
“They knew we were inside. Or guessed once we started yelling at each other.” Crossing his legs underneath him, Rook began tapping his fingers along the couch’s back, an odd rhythm Dante was beginning to recognize. “The tear gas was fucked.”
“Think you’ve got someone who wants you gone?” It was a possibility, one Dante couldn’t discount. “Competition. Who do you run up against all the time?”
“Are you asking me who I piss off?” Rook grinned at Dante’s lifted eyebrow. “Shit, who don’t I piss off? Vicks is the last cop who got mad at me. Competition for stuff I collect? Shit, there’s like fifty or more people who fight with me over things, but if it was a collector, they wouldn’t have targeted the shop. Too much merchandise.”
“There’s a lot of people who are of the mind-set that if they can’t have something, no one else can. I have a cousin who’d leave ice cream out after he got a bowl so it’d melt before anyone could have some.” Dante rubbed his thumb over Rook’s wrinkled nose. The light shifted, turning golden and sparse as the sun dropped below the building lines outside. “As much as I like you giving people the benefit of the doubt—”
“Shit, Montoya,” he scoffed. “I’m not. You can’t get a good profit if something drops below a certain condition rate. If someone was trying to burn me out to score my inventory, they’d want that stuff intact. What is it? Money, sex, or revenge, right?”
“Usually. We can rule out sex, unless there’s someone out there I should know about.” That got Dante a sour look and an elbow nudge into his ribs. “So that leaves us money, which you ruled out—”
“Damn it,” Rook grumbled under his breath, rubbing at the back of his neck. “Shit, somebody out there might think I killed Harold and is mad about it?”
“Exactly what I’m thinking, cuervo.” Dante nodded, hating where his mind led him, but he wasn’t going to let someone try to destroy Rook, not when they’d just begun to knit their lives together. “Because unless there’s something else we don’t know about, all we’ve got left is revenge.”
“WAIT, HOLD up.” Hank glared at him from across the picnic table. “Let me get this straight. You asked Captain Book if we can dig into your boyfriend’s B and E case to prove that his dead cousin’s wife didn’t kill him?”
“Pretty much,” Dante conceded. “But the captain agrees with me. Vicks isn’t giving the wife a fair shake, and from what Book’s been hearing, that asshole’s got it in for Rook. Vicks thinks Rook and the wife—Sadonna—have something dirty going on and I’m some kind of a smokescreen for them.”
“That’s bullshit.” Hank’s voice carried across the parking lot, drawing attention from several people in line at the Korean-Mexican food truck nearby. “You’re asking me to believe Stevens gets into a relationship with you so a few months later he and some movie star he’s back-dooring can kill her husband and no one looks at him because they think he’s gay?”
“Yep,” Dante mumbled around a mouthful of kalbi taco, “Pretty much.”
“So much bullshit,” his partner asserted. “Not that I’m one of your boy’s fans, but who the hell would fake a relationship with you?”
Dante looked up from dredging a french fry into a small tub of kimchee dip. “Really, Camden?”
“That’s not what I mean. If I were gay, I’d fuck you,” Hank protested. “But that’s the point. I’m not gay. If he wasn’t gay, he wouldn’t fuck you. Or you fuck him. Not that I want to talk about either one of you fucking each others’ whatever. I don’t even talk to you about my wife and I having sex, not that we can switch like the two of you—”
“Three words for you, Camden. International Women’s Day,” he ticked off, chuckling at Hank’s confused look. “You, my friend, have a lot to learn about sex if you don’t think a couple—any couple—can switch off.”
“I’ll get a book—”
“You’re going to need more than a book,” Dante replied. “And yeah, I agree. Rook’s not with me for a long con. Sure, there are guys who do that. Vice can tell you stories, but there’s no gain for Rook or Sadonna. Harold’s money is his, or rather, Archie’s, and California’s a community property state for the most part. No one except Alex’s parents, him, and Rook are rich by their own right in that family. Everyone else is like a tick with its head buried under Archie’s skin, sucking him dry.”
“So what are we going to do, then?”
“There’s no we here, Camden.” He shook his head, but it was useless. His partner’s face flushed, drowning the scatter of freckles over his nose and cheeks. “Come on. I can’t officially investigate anything. As it is, Book said if he hears one word about me crossing Vicks’s radar, he’s going to shut me down. Me, I’m already stained from what Vince did. I
don’t want that on you.”
“You’re just slinging the bullshit out like ketchup today,” Hank blustered, reaching a long arm across the table to stab Dante in the chest with a stiff finger. “You and I are partners. This affects you. I’m in. I know that asshole Vicks. He’s mean and slimy. His captain thinks he’s golden because he’s got a solve rate, but it’s full of holes. Soon as the papers hit the DA’s desk, everything falls apart. I’ve had a couple of informers drift out towards the beach and end up in Vicks’s crosshairs. Easy marks for him but vital for me. Tossed them in a cell, and once they got out, they were ghosts. So if you’re taking Vicks to the mat, I’m going to be there to tag in.”
“You hate wrestling, and Camden, I can ask a lot from you.” Dante moved his kimchee dip out of his partner’s reach. “But don’t make me have to speak at your funeral after your wife kills you for working after hours on a case that’s not even yours.”
“Montoya, let me say this once and only once.” Hank stuck a fry under Dante’s nose, waving it furiously. “You’re like a brother to me. Hell, I love you more than I love some of my own brothers. The younger ones—the ones I never learned their names because I was already in high school by the time they came around—but still, love you more than them. My wife loves you, but she adores the fuck out of your boyfriend. So let’s be clear on this: I will be helping you.
“Now then, I got some vacation time coming, and so do you.” Hank smugly coated his fry in Dante’s dip, then popped it into his mouth. “The big question is, where do we start?”
“Have I ever told you I loved you, Camden?” Dante swallowed at the lump forming in his throat. It dislodged to his chest, threatening to choke him further, and Hank looked away, suddenly interested in a pair of skateboarders working tricks on a cement pylon.
“Couple of times,” Hank replied softly. “I’d like to head this off at the pass before Vicks puts any effort into building a flimsy case on them just to bump to his numbers up, because you know he’s that kind of cop. It doesn’t matter if someone’s guilty or not, he just wants to hand the DA someone’s head on a platter. After that, he can walk away.”
“Even if Sadonna never sees in the inside of a courtroom, she’s going to get tarred and feathered. You know how this city is. She won’t be able to grab a Double-Double without paparazzi on her ass.”
“Question remains, where do we start digging?”
“Right now?” Dante slid the contested bowl of dip back across the table toward his partner. “I say we start with the merry widow and see where we go from there.”
Seven
BERGAN’S CURIOS and China Shop sat on the corner of broken dreams and fanciful hopes. It was a small West Hollywood business tucked in between a pool hall frequented by Filipino wannabe gangsters and a shop of tasteless shoes made for large-footed women and drag queens caught in a never-ending sale of any sequined item. The space ran up and down all three stories of the building, cutting a wedge through the dreary single-window apartments on either side. If there ever was a Bergan, he was long gone before Rook ever crossed the store’s threshold. Instead, the shop was manned by a permanently scowling short man who sat perched on a barstool and despite the various hours Rook dropped in to peruse the ever-changing selection, always seemed to be working Bergan’s front counter.
Wizened, with a hook nose, the man was more goblin than human, and the baring of his yellowed teeth could possibly have counted as a sneer, but Rook categorized it as simply the man’s one and only smile. Never having learned the older man’s name, Rook thought of him as Hoggle and came by frequently to dig through the inventory for treasures, sometimes stepping over one of the scrawny, often-stoned young men hired to stock the store’s shelves. He’d slept with a couple of the stock guys when he was younger, but they were as transient as the merchandise, oftentimes as nameless as the shop’s owner. Apathetic and underpaid, they were a sea of mostly pretty faces who knew nothing about the inventory they handled and pretty much were told to shove something into any empty space, making it next to impossible to shop for a specific thing amid the flotsam and jetsam Los Angeles washed up on Bergan’s front stoop.
The shop was a mess, untidy and jumbled, with hardly any light, dirty windows hemmed in by narrow aisles on the outer walls, and a sea of heaped knickknacks in the occasional clearings in the center of each floor.
Rook loved the place nearly as much as he loved Montoya, coffee, and a well-cooked egg.
He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, happily sorting through a pile of mechanical tin toys when a dark shadow fell over him, blocking out what little thin sunlight came through the narrow window behind him. It was large, too large to be any of the slender men shuffling from floor to floor, rearranging the shop’s inventory, but sometimes the light played games on Bergen’s upper floors, throwing odd, menacing shapes against a wall, only for it to turn out to be something as silly as an inflatable Bozo punching bag. Still, while it’d been a long time since he’d had an icy tickle run up his spine, it was a sensation too familiar for Rook to ignore.
“I am not going to say hello like some stupid cheerleader in a horror movie.” Dusting his hands off, Rook peered into the shadows.
There was movement, an unsteady shuffling, then the creak of one of the old shelves being jostled, a cascade of ping-ping-pings rolling out of the yellowed dimness surrounding him. Getting to his feet, he bit back the urge to call out, reminding himself he’d just promised not to. Time bent oddly in a curio shop, and Bergan’s was no different. Its corners held the whispers caught in mirrors and fortunes told over long-washed-away tea leaves left to steep in silver pots.
He’d fallen into a game of cat and mouse, one Rook knew all too well. The scrape of feet was deliberate, an uneven scour of soles on the shop’s slightly dusty floor. He caught sight of a bulky shape moving through the outer shelves, working in toward the landing. The silhouette was too massive to be any of the stock boys, and as far as Rook knew, only the diehards ever made it up to the third floor where most of the lighter inventory was kept since, much like the shop’s owner, its creaky lift never made it up to the third floor.
A few steps more and the shape caught the light again, illuminating Vicks’s face before he turned to step around a worn velvet chair.
“Huh,” the cop grunted, stepping out of the darkness, his brutish scowl pulling free from the shadows. His gaze flicked over Rook, and his cheeks plumped with a thin smile, but the menace in his eyes remained as he padded into the dusty space. “Hello, Stevens. Fancy meeting you here.”
There were times when only sarcasm in its rawest base form could satisfy the tickle in the back of Rook’s throat, but this didn’t seem like one of those times. He didn’t like the way Vicks loomed, pressing into the tight space between the toys and the walnut hutch someone filled with cheap porcelain bunnies. Especially when he felt like a rabbit whose briar patch was just invaded by a bear.
“I’d ask how you found me, but that’s not as important as why,” Rook challenged Vicks, lifting his chin up slightly to meet the man’s hard gaze. It didn’t make up the differences in their height, but it was enough to give Vicks pause.
There was no way around the cop, and Rook’s phone was in his jacket pocket, the garment flung over the chair Vicks rounded earlier. Tamping down the panic creeping up from his belly, Rook didn’t care for the smirk on Vicks’s face or the tilt to his head when he caught Rook glancing at the staircase behind him. Fear nipped at Rook’s nerves, throwing up whispers of what happened to former cat burglars caught in the dark by a bully with a gun.
He’d taken beatings from cops and carnies both, their fists and batons battering his body until it hurt to breathe, to think, and he’d folded in on himself, praying for someone to stop the pain or for God—a mute and deaf God—to take him into the dark so he could stop feeling the meat on his bones turn to mush. Some of the beatings were Rook’s stupidity catching up with him, but other times—frightening, lonely times—he’d simp
ly been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’d looked at someone wrong or took the last piece of potato in the mess line, and the next thing he knew, he was breathing hard through his mouth and counting his teeth with his tongue.
Vicks had the look of a man who’d use his fists, who’d take his time and layer on the pain until Rook could no longer pull his fingers in tight or bend his knees. He couldn’t risk Vicks touching him. Not with the open staircase there. It would be a simple matter of chucking Rook over the unstable rail and watching him plummet to the first floor, bouncing off the banisters on the way down.
“What the fuck do you want, Vicks?” Rook pressed. Bravado was only going to carry him so far, and Rook needed to get out as soon as he could before Vicks let loose the anger he seemed to have bottled up behind an extremely shaky control. “I told you everything I knew, so what? You couldn’t hold Sadonna, so you’re coming back ’round to me? You’ve got no reason to be on my ass.”
“Well, first off, finding you was easy. I’ve had a couple of my guys following you ever since I got the call you’d gotten hit.” He gave up all pretense of benign aggression and instead moved in for the kill, as it were, pressing into Rook’s space with a few strides across the floor. One of the toys met its fate beneath his heavy leather hiking boot, its squished body releasing a dribbling caterwaul before being pushed into the soft wooden floor. “Came to ask you a few questions about what happened to your store.”
He had to be losing his touch. There hadn’t been a whisper of a tail on him that morning, but it’d been a while since he’d had to worry about such things, years even. And now it was all tumbling back on top of him.
Because he just couldn’t walk away.
“Cops came and took my statement. Montoya’s too. That’s going to cost you about three large.” Nodding at the toy’s flattened limbs, Rook faked a grimace. Judging by the faint flare of Vicks’s nostril, he could still lie with a straight face, convincingly enough to worry a cop. It took away some of the sting at being followed, but not enough to soothe it away. “Hope you brought your credit card.”
