by Rhys Ford
Two
IF THERE was anything Lieutenant Joseph Zanetti knew about, it was coffee and violence.
As a cop for nearly twenty years, he’d downed at least a million cups of coffee, both good and bad, and as for violence, seen more than his share of death, sorrow, and plain stupidity. He’d waded through the remains of bloodbaths, stepped over dead bikers dressed in full club gear and clutching weapons that did them no good in the end. He held on to the images of every child who’d had their light snuffed out way too early and stood over mummified corpses discovered in odd places, murder clearly evident even on their dry, desiccated flesh.
Death he could deal with. Violence could wash over Joe, and he’d barely blink. He’d been in the game too long to expect to see anything new delivered up on a bloody platter for him to be all that surprised about what humans could do to one another and themselves.
But as he steeled himself for yet another sip from the battered paper cup he’d rested on his SUV’s middle console, sucking down the sticky film off the top of a cold coffee was perhaps the greatest crime he’d ever have to face.
“If you brought one of those steel tumblers Ma keeps buying for you, you wouldn’t be complaining about it, Joe,” he scolded himself after scraping his tongue against his front teeth. “And why the hell am I sitting here on my day off?”
He knew the answer, and it lay in the by-chance spotting of a biker sporting a full patch on his back from a motorcycle club he’d thought long gone from the city. The roar of the Harley caught Joe’s attention first, rumbling around in the tight Chinatown street, filling the long stretch with its throaty, choppy purr. Thinking nothing other than the bike sounded good, Joe was about to make a right turn when the man sitting back on the bike’s long seat wove between the lines of traffic to sit between two small imports to wait for a red light to change. That’s when the rider’s colors popped out at Joe, its Viking-helmet-wearing bear’s head and rocker patches confirming what his brain nearly refused to accept.
Because ten years after being driven out of the city by Joe and the rest of the cops on SFPD’s Gang Task Force, the Vikings were possibly coming home to roost.
It’d been years since he’d been on the Task Force but he remembered all of the heavy hitters from when he’d led his team back then. The Vikings weren’t a club anyone wanted to mess with, and it’d taken a few years to break their hold on the drug supply lines they’d set up in Chinatown’s underground markets. He wanted to verify what he’d seen before he contacted the current GTF’s leader, Sgt. John Yang.
“No sense going to Yang with only a whisper of information and a half-verified patch,” Joe murmured, taking another sip of his hideously cold coffee. “Quick stakeout. How can that hurt?”
As stakeouts went, this one was unofficial but a hell of a lot more comfortable than any of the others he’d been on. Parked under a shady tree in the parking lot of an evenings-only sushi place across the street from the pub, his SUV was air-conditioned with padded seats and space for a cooler filled with ice and soda. It had been a spontaneous decision, driven more by the niggling suspicion of gang activity than anything else. Or, Joe supposed, he was purposely avoiding heading to his parents’ house, where a family gathering awaited him, complete with somebody his mother invited as one of her many matchmaking attempts.
“If it wasn’t for her marrying Dad,” Joe grumbled, “I would have serious doubts about Ma’s taste in men.”
He was about to call it a day after an hour when a door on the side of the pub opened up and a lanky teenaged boy ambled out, followed by one of the hottest men Joe’d ever seen. The kid obviously was his or at least related, judging by their similar strong features and dark hair. Their body language was familial, a bit of teasing and murmuring banter Joe couldn’t make out even as he rolled down his window. Dad was a few inches shorter than Joe, but his compact muscular body and long legs tickled a desire Joe thought he’d buried a long time ago. He didn’t have time for sex, much less relationships, but the sexy, scruffy man in torn blue jeans and an old gray T-shirt stretched tight over his sculpted torso brought a wet need to Joe’s dry mouth.
They talked, murmuring in low tones, and the kid turned toward his father and snapped his teeth at him playfully, probably showing off a lack of braces or something, because the boy looked about the age Joe was when his own steel gear came off. The dad’s words took on a bit of a warning tone—not quite a scolding but mostly cautious, and the kid grinned up at him, easily falling into their banter again.
The man turned, giving Joe a good look at the tight ass beneath those battered jeans. Then he surprisingly pulled his son into a fierce hug. It was hard to watch, mostly because Joe could count on one hand the times his father ever embraced him. There’d been a few slaps across his shoulder and a thousand hair ruffles but never anything as unadulteratedly affectionate as the slightly grubby father fiercely hugging his son out in the open. The boy’s arms came up, returning the embrace, but then something changed between them when the boy struggled a bit and the father’s deep laughter rolled over the street, a teasing lilt in his undistinguishable words. The teen pushed at the man’s shoulder when they separated, and a sleek white van half-filled with teens and driven by a harried-looking middle-aged man with a full beard and a broad smile pulled up.
“Joey, unlock the door and let your grandma inside. It’s hot out here. Do you want me to die of heatstroke?” His grandmother’s raspy muted voice shook Joe out of his reverie, and he peered toward the passenger-side window, where her heavily ringed, petite hand rapped at the tinted glass. “Are you deaf, Joey? Can you hear me over that horrible music you listen to?”
“Hold on, Nana.” The doors unlocked with a flick of a switch, and Joe leaned over to open the door, then held his hand out for his grandmother to take as she fought with a couple of plastic bags, lifting them up into the cab. “Wait, let me get out and….”
Getting out would mean blowing his surveillance, and a quick glance over at the sidewalk gave him not only a good look at the hot guy but at a second one, stepping up to the curb from the shadowy overhang of what looked like a garage next to the alley behind the pub.
Still, it was his grandmother, and she barely kissed five feet tall on a good day.
“I’ve got it. Thank God someone thought to put a step thing when they made it. Who are they designing for? The Jolly Green Giant? Take the bags. There’s food in there for you.” She heaved herself up, a trim eightysomething-year-old woman with a froth of impossibly blond-caramel hair and vivid red lipstick wrapped over and around her thin lips. “I was coming home with some of the girls and I saw your car, and I thought, look, there’s Joey and he probably didn’t bring himself something to eat. You’re going to waste away. You, without a wife. Not that you need a wife, being the gay, but still, you should eat more. There’s tacos in there. And some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I didn’t know what you were hungry for. A couple of apples, but I tucked a banana in there for me. I need the potassium, you know.”
She was a slice of the East Coast Italian family Joe and his brothers went to visit during the summer when they were kids, and by the time he was ten, Antonina Zanetti decided Tina, her daughter-in-law and Joe’s mother, wasn’t doing enough to keep her family alive, well, and happy. Mike, Joe’s father, wisely decided to stay out of it and built himself a shed in the backyard, filling it with old cast-off recliners and an enormous television—a proto-mancave before they were a thing. The family braced themselves for outright battles, but Tina and Joe’s Nana kept to sniping instead, knowing it was better not to make anyone choose a side. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t take cheap shots at each other.
“Nana, how did you get here?” Joe sighed, resigned to his grandmother settling into the SUV. “And hold on, let me get you something cold to drink. It’s hot as hell out there.”
“I walked from home. It’s not far. What?” she exclaimed, placing a hand over her pink paisley shirt. “Two miles. Maybe.
It’ll be time to tuck me into the ground next to your sainted grandfather the day I can’t walk two miles to bring my favorite grandson something to eat while he’s… working.” Peering out the windshield, she gave Joe a sly smile. “Or are you working? You’ve got something going with the Keller boy? Huh?”
She was a tiny powerhouse of a woman who was the first one he came out to as a shaky-voiced fifteen-year-old kid, afraid God would hate him and the family would toss him out on his ear. Nana was his first warrior, the woman who battled his demons when they overwhelmed him and encouraged him to pursue painting even as he chased after his SFPD star. She’d held his secrets and stood by his mother when he got shot at the age of twenty-five in a drug bust gone wrong, putting aside years of acrimony and backbiting Joe wasn’t so sure actually existed, especially when his mom nearly broke down and reached for Nana instead of his dad.
There wasn’t a bright color in existence that Nana Zanetti didn’t love or wear at some point in her life, and the more something sparkled, the better. She had firm opinions on pasta, family, and beer, with a special hatred for the Los Angeles Dodgers and a deep, abiding love for the Chicago Cubs, despite being from New Jersey. Her showing up at one of his stakeouts shouldn’t have surprised him, but her knowing the guy on the curb did. Joe leaned back in his seat, keeping one eye on the two guys across the street from them and the other on the tiny dynamo dressed in blinding pink paisley separates nesting herself in his SUV after shoving a pair of rhinestone-embellished sunglasses on top of her head.
“You know the shorter guy? Keller, you said?” It felt weird grilling his grandmother, but Joe knew she’d shrug it off like water beading on a duck’s shoulders. If ducks had shoulders. “How do you know him?”
A motorcycle engine cut through his words, and Joe glanced back to the street and swore when he spotted a greasy-looking guy on a bike pull up to the curb to engage in what sounded like a heated conversation with the men. The rattle of the bike drowned out their words even more so than the ambient street noise had between the guy and his kid, and not for the first time in his life, Joe wished he had superhearing… or a listening device stuck on the outer wall of the pub so he could hear what was being said. It looked like something big or at least heated, especially when the bigger guy on the sidewalk leaned toward the bike rider and said something to make the patched club member flinch.
“Los Lobos,” Joe murmured, writing the name down on the notepad he’d left on his console. Sketching the biker’s patch as quickly as he could, capturing as much detail as he could, he left off when he was mostly satisfied with it and used his phone to catch a zoomed-in photo, hoping it would hold up. “I need a better phone. Been a long time since I sat doing surveillance. You’ve seen that guy before, Nana? On the bike? Actually, what the hell would you be doing down here? At a biker bar?”
“It’s not a biker bar.” She sniffed imperiously. “It’s a nice place, and one I’ve been going to for years. We come here after we’re done playing canasta. Levi took the pub from his uncle when that man went to Florida to chase after that blond hussy he fell for. She led him a merry chase, let me tell you. Last I heard, they were living on a houseboat, lying naked in the sun, and getting their bits all browned up. Can’t be good for you. There’s some things that God meant to be left untanned.”
“Levi?” Joe studied the man.
“His parents are hippies. Or were hippies. I think he’s got an older brother named Hendrix. He’s named after the blue-jean guy. Guess he should have been happy his dad didn’t like Dickies.” She chortled, snapping off the end of her banana. “Get your nana a water, Joey. It’s hot outside. Can’t believe you do this for a living. Anyway, Levi’s a good boy. Raises his son right.
“The mother skipped out before the kid was even dried off, but Levi’s done right by him. Very polite. Helps out around the pub sometimes but not behind the bar. Kitchen work’s for him. Buses tables once in a while.” Nana didn’t skip a beat as she finished peeling the banana and took the opened bottle of water Joe handed her from the cooler. “I try to give him a good tip, and he’s always there to help us get Fran into the cab when it’s time to go. You know how she gets after a couple of Long Island iced teas. Thinks she’s Ethel Merman or Barbra once she gets liquored up. Wouldn’t be so bad if she could sing, but the woman sounds more like Biz Markie than Streisand.”
From the outside, St. Connal’s looked like a typical Irish pub—a bit of polished wood, white paint, and brick walls wrapped around the building with a welcoming, propped-open double door. Signs hung from the outer walls on either side of the front entrance, done up as old-country in swinging placards with a wolf wearing a halo staring out under the pub’s name in gold letters above it. The place looked solid, and if the paint on the front door was to be believed, it’d been sitting on that corner, welcoming people into its doors since the early 1930s.
But he’d seen a Vikings club member outside its door only a couple of days ago, and that meant it wasn’t a place Nana needed to be.
“How often do you go in there?” he ventured carefully, knowing the older woman was fiercely independent and any move by a family member to curtail her would be met with nearly lethal results. There was talk about his uncle Paul once telling his nana she needed to go into the kitchen where she belonged during the beginning of the ERA movement, and from everything Joe heard about that afternoon, Uncle Paul was lucky he escaped with his life. The old man still flinched whenever someone sharpened a knife near him, and the sound of an oven door apparently made him pass out like a fainting goat. “I mean, once a week? A month? How well do you know this Levi guy?”
“Sometimes twice a week.” Her shrug was the same one she gave when discussing world events she had no impact on, as if going to St. Connal’s was simply a part of life, like rain and ants. “Sometimes once. Depending on how it goes. If Mass runs late, then we stop by. Especially if Father Greer is doing the sermon. Nothing like a good chocolate stout to wash the taste of someone else’s sin from your mouth. Levi’s been there for years now. That’s the second motorcycle guy I’ve seen here. I don’t think he likes them, but I heard him tell the other one that Friday was good to go.”
“This Friday? Or when?” Joe looked up sharply, watching the men carefully, noting the bike’s license plate as the guy recoiled again, then drove off. “How many times have you seen bikers there?”
“Just that one time. And, well, that one that just left. The other one was there wanting to do a private party in the back room that night, but Levi told him he couldn’t have all the people he wanted.” She bit into the banana with relish, chewing carefully between sips of water. “Levi was by the kitchen door, and the bunch of us were at our normal table. The other guy was big, but Levi wasn’t going to budge. Couldn’t really. The back room fits maybe fifteen people. I know, we did Margie’s birthday party back there. Levi let us use it for free, didn’t even charge us for bringing our own food in. Some places do that. He’s a good boy. Rolled out a small fridge so we could put our cold salads in there beforehand and heated up the hot food in his ovens.
“You know, you could do worse than Levi,” Nana murmured, dropping a bombshell into Joe’s lap. “He likes both sides of the sheets, if you know what I mean. He’s a good-looking guy, and I’ve met his family. Good people, if a little weird, but really, who isn’t. I mean, look at your mother. I mean, I understand her wanting to name your brother Michael, because it’s not only your father’s name but her father’s name, but that at least left my Joseph’s name for you. Not that it’s weird. Just odd she didn’t call him Joseph Michael. Or even Michael Joseph. You do better with the name anyway. You’re a spitting image of my Joey. Handsome man. Couldn’t hold his liquor, so he lived like a nun on water and juice, but still sainted.”
“Nana, everyone you love is sainted,” Joe replied softly, kissing his grandmother’s temple. “I’m just not so sure Levi Keller is.”
“Like I said, you could do worse,” she reiterated, wag
ging a stiff finger under his nose. “And you might not do any better. I’ll introduce you, but right now, we need to go to your parents’ house and try to choke down some of that slop your mother calls lasagna. I swear, I don’t know what your grandma Penny was thinking, teaching her to cook her noodles halfway before putting them in the pan, but the woman—God as I love her—should be shot just for that.”
Three
A PHONE call at eight in the morning normally didn’t jerk most men out of bed into a blind panic, but Levi not only owned a pub where odd things happened, but being a father of a teenaged boy, any phone call was a potential cry for help or heralding of disaster. It took him a moment to sit up and find the chirruping device he’d put on a wireless charger when he finally collapsed into bed at three in the morning. Having one bartender call in sick was bad enough, but when the serving staff fell victim to the same flu on a Monday night filled with blue-haired ladies intent on partying hard after a rousing bingo session at the nearby Catholic church, Levi really missed having Declan to pinch-hit.
“Okay, I’m coming,” Levi snapped at his phone. “I can’t even find my eyes yet. Hold on.”
“Mr. Keller? This is Stacy at Forest Break,” a chipper woman said before Levi could say hello. “I’m hoping—”
“It’s only Tuesday. He’s not even been there three whole days and there’s already a problem?” Sitting up, Levi rubbed at his face, trying to scrape the sleep out of his eyes. His sheets felt rough, and he pondered why until he realized he’d fallen asleep in his jeans, his T-shirt flung over the boxy nightstand Declan made in woodshop a few years back. “Okay, lay it on me. What did Deck blow up this time and how much is it going to cost me?”
“Actually, Mr. Keller,” Stacy burbled. “It’s not anything he’s done so much as… well, we don’t normally allow our campers to reach out to home so early in the excursion, but Declan sounded very distressed, so the senior counselors decided to make an exception. Are you okay with him setting up a video call with you in five minutes?”
