by Rhys Ford
Los Angeles’s mugginess followed them into the building, and the tight shotgun foyer beyond the unlatched metal security door was dark and heavy with stale air. The end of the long corridor ended in a rectangle of bright light, a second security door probably leading to parking in the alley.
A few yards in, the hall split off into a cross leading to apartments on either side of the building, and a narrow, steep stairwell took up a good section of the hall’s width, leading to the second story and down to a basement landing doubling as a laundry room. Dante peered over the railing, spotting mounds of wet clothing piled high in a couple of laundry baskets set near a churning dryer. One of the washing machines chunked through a cycle, slightly off-balance to Dante’s ears. He couldn’t help but grin, a familiar perfume carried through the corridor in a wave of heat from the tumbling machines. The sweet, soapy odor grew overpowering, and Dante took a step back, scraping at his tongue with his teeth to get the sting of cleanser out of his mouth.
“Fabuloso,” he murmured to Hank. “But man, they used a lot of it. I can taste it in my throat.”
“What?” Hank twisted his shoulders around, glancing back at Dante. “Are you looking at my ass?”
“No, stupid, that smell. It’s a cleaner. My mom used to wash my baseball uniforms with a little bit of it in the water. God, that takes me back.” He fell into step behind his partner, heading toward the back of the building. “Funny how your brain catches on certain things. My mom only likes the orange or pink one, but my aunt always bought the light green, like five or six at a time because they were on sale, then dropped them off at our house, so she was stuck with using it.”
“Why didn’t she just give them away or even—” Hank paused dramatically. “—toss them out?”
“Oh, you obviously didn’t grow up with a mother from my neighborhood. I’d pay good money to see my mom’s face if I came up with that as a solution.” His thoughts turned somber, caught in a bit of melancholy from the heat and scents. “Hope she’s doing okay.”
“That way. Probably the end unit. Jesus, that stuff’s powerful. Did they use the whole bottle?” Hank peered down the left corridor, then nodded toward the right. “Your mom. They’d call, right? If she wasn’t?”
“Maybe my aunt, but I think someone would. At least they’d call Manny, since he’s her brother. Or so I hope.” Dante went down the short, lightless hall first, moving cautiously across its stained short-pile carpet. “You said one-oh-four?”
“Yeah. Shit, door’s cracked open.” Hank fit himself in behind Dante, his jacket pulled back so he could reach his weapon.
“Could be the heat. No circulation, and those AC units on the outside apartments looked ancient,” Dante cautioned. “Just… let’s keep our heads on this.”
The corridor was hot and ripe, a floral overlay barely masking the rancid, greasy stink coming from the cracked-open door. Dante knew that stench and shuddered, breathing through his mouth as he pulled his weapon from his holster. Behind him, Hank’d gone silent, tucking himself against the wall. His partner’s gun cast a shadow on the end of the hallway, a dark gray puppet poised for a curtain rise neither one of them wanted to happen.
A sweltering wave broke free when Dante pushed the door open, pouring into the hall and choking them with a foul tide of rot and death. Forcing himself to go inside, Dante kept his weapon up as he shouldered the door open, then gagged on the redolent air hitting his face.
“Go to your left.” Hank choked, coughing when he came around Dante’s open side. “I’ll take the right.”
The one-room apartment was barely large enough to turn around in, and someone had cranked the heater on despite the rising temperature outside. Desert-hot, the vents were angled open, cooking the walls and turning the studio into an oven. Three full strides would have taken Dante from the front door to the kitchenette on the far wall, and another five to the full-sized mattress and box spring lying under the studio’s single window, its sheets rumpled and pillows tossed onto the carpeted floor. A beat-up sofa sat opposite the kitchen, a large badly done oil painting of flowers and butterflies hanging above its worn, lumpy back. A few books kept knickknacks company on a pair of leaning shelves on either side of the couch, and from the top of one, a one-eyed carnival-style purple dog forlornly stared out into the room, its white-striped face thick with spiderwebs and dust.
There’d been a glass coffee table in the middle of the room, but its frame lay in pieces around a facedown, headless man, his legs spread apart and partially sprinkled with the pebbled remains of the table’s top. Three holes punctured his back, promising large exit wounds out through his chest cavity, judging by the damage to his clothes and the sinkholes in his flesh.
A few feet away, a young Hispanic woman in a yellow tank top and jeans lay slumped in between the bed and the sofa, her dark skin ashen and purple. Flies picked at her once-pretty face, black specks crawling over her swollen cheeks, and her bare shoulders were beginning to show sign of bloat, a rip forming along the ridge of her collarbone.
An LAPD detective’s badge rested inches from the man’s flung-out hand, his other hand tucked under his body. Dante couldn’t see a gun, but he did spot the hacksaw balanced against the end of the mattress, its serrated edge thick with chunks of dried meat and skin.
“Shit, Montoya, that’s Vicks,” Hank gasped, swallowing against the gagging noise he made. “Okay, let’s step out and call it in.”
“Yeah, and I think that’s Martinez. Or it should be.” Dante swept the room one last time, covering for Hank as he fled the apartment. He was close on his partner’s heels, stepping quickly to get out into the hall and catch his breath. Panting, he was grateful for the cloying flowery taint in the air, anything to mask the putrid reek of decaying human flesh from his lungs. “But fuck, if it is, then who the hell did you talk to this morning?”
Thirteen
THE WORN light-gray T-shirt Rook pulled over his head was too large, and if the size wasn’t a clue the garment wasn’t his, the roughed-up LAPD silkscreened across its chest was a dead giveaway. There were a few small holes on its front and an indeterminate stain along the bottom left hem, and it’d been cold, left folded in the bathroom connected to their room, probably set aside for Dante to wear to bed again later that night.
Rook’s body heat quickly warmed it, and the fabric soon smelled deliciously of Dante, a whiff of his lemongrass cologne and the crisp brightness of his natural scent barely strong enough to tease Rook’s nose. It felt stupid and juvenile to wear his boyfriend’s T-shirt, a high school cliché for a man who’d not attended more than five days of school in a row during the sparse times he’d even been enrolled, but the urge to have something of Dante on him was too powerful to ignore when he’d seen the neatly folded shirt sitting on the bathroom counter.
He stood in front of the mirror with his mouth smarting of spearmint toothpaste, breathing in deeply and being caressed by the soft fabric, silently marveling at how the shirt clinging to his shoulders and ribs felt like one of Dante’s gentle hugs.
A hug he was very grateful for when he came downstairs to find his aunt Margaret standing in the main study, examining an oil painting hanging over the room’s massive fireplace, her elegantly boned face waxen and run tight with grief. Standing in a stream of milky morning sun, she looked more marble than flesh, a living, breathing Corradini reflecting on a pastoral, bucolic scene of long spotted hounds frolicking in the British countryside. Her pale blue eyes were unfocused when she turned at Rook’s entrance, but they sharpened quickly, hot and furious behind a flutter of her mascara-darkened lashes.
Margaret never cared for him. She’d made that clear a heartbeat after meeting him at the first family dinner he’d stupidly agreed to attend. Archie’d introduced him, then abandoned the fray. It’d been a brittle, formal dance of icy barbs and cold bloodletting, an emotional fencing match where he’d taken a baseball bat where rapiers were the chosen weapons.
His relationship with the rest
of the family had never recovered, and up until the moment he saw Harold’s mother, Rook hadn’t cared. Now there was no chance in hell she’d take any scrap of comfort from him, even when she needed it the most.
“Oh, I thought you were Archibald.” She clipped her words, severing their ends with a snap, as sharp and clean a cut as faceting a diamond. “So you’re living here now? Couldn’t wait until Harold was cold in the ground before setting up house?”
There was not a scrap of warmth in her, and despite the mourning she wore on her face, her trim, slender body was dressed for battle in a cadet-blue sweater set and black pants, her long, skinny feet tucked into a pair of kitten heels. Any other time, he’d have chuckled at the double string of pearls draped around her long neck, but today she’d worn them as a suit of armor, the familiar and hard strapped to her body to protect her from further blows.
Death hung on her, its skeletal arms wrapped casually over her shoulders, and it was all she could do to bear its weight.
“Cops thought it was safer after… some stuff happened down there,” he replied softly. “It’s just temporary.”
“Temporary. The last thing you are is temporary. You are like a tick no one can shake off.” She sniffed at him, her tone brittle and glittering. “So what’s on today’s agenda for you? Headed to play down at the little store of yours? Not a care in the world when the rest of us are dancing around Archie’s feet hoping for a scrap or two? Maybe you should take over for Harold down at the office. Since you’re shoving your way into everything. He’s just going to be swept under the rug, so you can walk all over his memory. Just like you walked all over his body that day.”
“I’m not…. Look, I didn’t kill Harold. I didn’t want him dead. No one did,” Rook said as gently as he could. “I just wanted—I wasn’t there to hurt him.”
“It doesn’t matter what you wanted because it’s not going to bring him back. He’s dead. My son is… dead.” Her teeth were bared and her coral-lipsticked mouth curled up and stiff with disgust. “He spent years hiding behind that woman’s skirts, pretending to be normal so his grandfather wouldn’t toss him out. Then you stroll in and spit in his face. What makes you so special that Archie forgives you for being a fa—”
“Watch yourself, Margaret,” Archie rumbled, his cane thumping on the floor as he walked into the room. The Pomeranian was on his heels, an orange poof of fur who’d inexplicably thought Archie hung the moon and the stars. “Losing Harold was a tragedy, but there’s no reason to take it out on Rook. Boy didn’t do anything wrong.”
“He did everything wrong,” she spat back, hands clenched into fists at her sides. “Harold tried to be who you wanted him to be, but it was never good enough. He was never special enough for you, but this one is? You’re a hypocrite, Archie, and once you get Beatrice’s son dancing to your tune, you’re going to cut him loose just like you did Harold. My boy worked himself down to the bone for the company, for you, and the least you can do… never mind. I just came by to tell you they released Harold’s body, so we’ll be able to plan his funeral. I’m hoping you find some time in your busy schedule to attend. At least pretend he mattered to you. For the family’s sake.”
She was heading to the door before Rook could reply. He had the words. Soft, mournful, and consoling, but Margaret wasn’t going to listen. He stepped in, hoping to… he had no idea what he was hoping for. Maybe to offer her something—anything—to make her feel better, but she shoved at his shoulder, stiff-arming him to get past.
“They’re going to find who did this to him, to your boy. I promise you, Margaret, we’ll find out who killed him,” Archie called out to her, and she stopped at the door, her shoulders shaking beneath her sweater.
“You killed him, Archie. You killed him a long time ago. The first time you told him no grandson of yours was going to be gay, you stabbed him right in the heart.” Margaret turned, her icy glare glittering with unshed tears. “And you continued to stab him every day after that. I don’t care who killed his body, not when I know who killed his spirit. And Rook, enjoy this while you can, because he’s going to turn on you. Just like he turns on everyone else. The only reason he’s even halfway decent to you is because he feels guilty about your mother. I’ll let you know when the funeral is, Archie. All I ask is that you show up. And without your pet poof.”
Her quick footsteps echoed with a fading machine gun report when Margaret left the room. The dog tap-danced around Archie’s feet, then dashed back out down the hall, chasing after Margaret. Rosa asked after her, an indistinct query returned with a sharp slap of a reply, but Rook couldn’t hear what either woman said. Archie reached for him, clamping his cold fingers over Rook’s upper arm and squeezing hard enough to make Rook wince.
“She’s just angry, old man. And hurt.” Patting his grandfather’s hand, Rook nodded toward one of the room’s broad chairs. “How about if you sit down, and I’ll get Rosa to bring you some coffee?”
“No, Margaret’s right. You’re right. I treated Harold like shit. All of them like shit. I still do. Even Alex….” Archie snorted, shaking his head. “And that’s right up there with kicking a kitten. I’ve got to do better by them. I just don’t… know how.” His grandfather eyed him, assessing Rook thoughtfully. “I need you to keep pushing these people… the cops… everyone in this. Your cousin should have been happy, and he felt like… I had a hand in keeping him from that. Leave the murderer to the cops, but… maybe you find out what you can about the boyfriend. Maybe I can at least do right by him.”
“And if he’s the murderer?”
“Then don’t get killed.” Archie sniffed. “Honestly, boy. It’s like I’ve got to tell you everything.”
“You’re asking me to stick my nose in where Dante told me to stay the fuck out. As much as I love you, old man, I piss him off and my already messed-up life’s going to go to shit.” Rook held his hand up to stop Archie from chiming in. “I’m not going to promise it’ll come to anything, but I’ll ask around. I’ll see if Davis Natterly knows anything about what was going on over there. He was friends with Harold. If I don’t get somewhere, maybe Dante will have more luck when he talks to Sadonna again.”
“Don’t count on it,” his grandfather rumbled. “That girl’s sneaky. For all we know she’s lying about Harold having a boyfriend to throw us off because she’s the one who killed him. Just be careful. I’ve already lost one grandson. I don’t want to lose another.”
ROOK FELL in love the very first time he saw Los Angeles. It’d been after a long, hot few days, and through the dirty window of a Greyhound bus, his snotty nose pressed flat onto the glass so he could make mist ghosts with his exhaled breaths. He’d been young, maybe more than six but less than nine, a stretch of years where life was a blur of bruising knuckles, teary apologies, candy bribes followed by neglect. His mother’d gotten it into her head to break away from the carnival circuit and begin to systematically destroy any relationship she had in the city by begging to stay, then stealing either food, money, or husbands before dragging Rook off to her next victim.
Something happened, a huge yelling and screaming something, then a big boom, followed by an eerie silence Rook now knew all too well. Then Beanie rolled as much of their lives that would fit into a large duffel bag, and they’d stolen away into the night, somehow ending up on a bus from Nowhere Fucksville to Los Angeles. He didn’t remember where they’d been running from—or even who—but he’d known he’d come home the moment he’d seen the city’s skyscrapers cradled against the far-off blue mountains with the morning sun painting the sky a pale pink cotton floss.
He was tired of running, and as the city slipped around him, Rook realized for the first time in his life, he’d found home.
There was something inelegantly beautiful about Los Angeles. Its ugly-pretty streets and jumble of mean and sweet spoke to a thread in Rook’s soul he couldn’t capture no matter how hard he tried to grab it. He’d fallen in love. Hard, and the City of Angels became a sparkling d
ream, as elusive as a dust mote and as breathtaking as any starry sky he’d ever seen. Pulling into the Greyhound station, Rook drank the city in and swore to himself, one day he’d live there. They’d left LA much like they left everywhere else, too quickly for Rook to feel comfortable and leaving behind tears, screaming, and heartache.
They’d returned to the carnivals and came back to LA while on the circuit, but he’d not stayed. It was too soon, he’d been too broke, all of the same lies he’d heard from Beanie until one day he’d said enough to his old life and left it behind to chase a dream he’d had behind a wall of misted ghosts and through one fist-blackened eye.
“Different now,” he reminded himself. There were other memories, warm enough to tighten his belly as he got caught at the light a few yards away from Potter’s Field. His day was full of echoing images, welcome thoughts of a wicked smile, silken words slick and hot with a whisper of an accent, and strong, capable hands on his body. Shifting in his seat, Rook gave himself a moment, then frowned when a text from Dante lit up his phone. “Going to be home late. Don’t wait up. Eat something. Nice, Montoya. You’re worse than Manny sometimes. I’ll grab something to eat after Davis drops by.”
The building looked exactly as he’d left it, its front window still busted out but covered with a snarky wooden sign he loved. Cutting through the side alley, Rook pulled into his covered spot behind Potter’s Field when a too familiar lanky Latina detective stepped out of an ugly green sedan parked near the shop’s back door.
O’Byrne looked worn out, as if she’d shoved as much of the day as she could get in before her two-in-the-afternoon drop-in on Rook. Her jeans were creased, and a bit of her long black hair had escaped the ponytail she’d secured at the base of her neck. The woman’s eyes were hard, nearly as flat as her mouth by the time Rook put the SUV into park and got out. Flashing her a smile did little to lighten her mood, nor did his casual offer to get her a cup of coffee as he strolled toward the store’s side entrance.
