by P. A. Brown
He couldn’t see any lights from any of the nearby houses. He could barely make out a distant brightening on the horizon. Day would be coming soon, relieving the night to its secrets.
The dog’s barking became frenzied. On the other side of the bed he heard the phone’s dial tone change to the blatt-blatt sound.
“Hang it up,” David said. “If it rings, don’t answer it. Does that phone have call display?”
“Yes.” The phone clanked against the wooden floor as Chris fumbled to find it, then there was an abrupt click and the annoying sound died, as he put the receiver down.
Almost immediately the phone rang again.
“Don’t answer it! What does the call display say?”
“Unknown number. What the hell is going on, David—”
“Probably a cell.” It occurred to David that Chris might recognize the voice. He left the window and eased around to the foot of the bed.
“Answer it.”
“What?”
“Answer it. Tell me if you know who it is.”
He picked up the receiver, cutting off the ring in midtone. “H-hello?”
The oppressive silence that filled the room thickened. After a century of failing nerves, Chris set the phone back down.
“He hung up.” Chris’s voice grew stronger. “Who was it, David? Will you please tell me what is going on?” His voice changed again, grew scared. “That was him, wasn’t it?
Kyle’s killer?”
“That was him.” David eased around to Chris’s side of the bed. He crouched down on the floor and almost immediately Chris was in his arms. He hugged him with one arm, keeping his gun arm free. “He seems to have developed a bit of a fixation on you.”
“You think?”
Outside the dog went ballistic. The sun’s early light was beginning to fill the room.
David stood up. “Get dressed.”
Chris grabbed the clothes he had hastily discarded the night before and struggled into them. He rubbed the sleeve of his shirt over the blond stubble on his face. His red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes met David’s over the curve of his arm.
“You think he’s out there now?” Chris asked.
“He was close enough to know we spent the night together.” David set the Glock down on the rumpled bed long enough to slide his shirt on over his linen pants and do up the first three buttons. He scooped the gun up again. “He wasn’t very happy about it.”
“He’s watching us?”
“’Fraid so.”
“And you think I know this guy?”
Friday, 5:55 am, Cove Avenue, Silver Lake, Los Angeles David’s face changed, seemed to grow colder, flatter. His cop face. Chris hated the change.
“He’s targeting you. That much is clear.”
Up the hill, the Templetons’ terminally stupid yellow Lab was giving itself a voice hernia. Chris’s eyes tracked to the window, now streaked with shadows from the leafy branches beyond.
The dog abruptly went silent. Someone next door had finally woken up and dragged him inside.
“You don’t think he’s still out there, do you?”
“I don’t know.” David pulled his shoes on, lacing them up quickly. He pulled out his cell and flipped it open. “I'm going to call Martinez. If he’s out there, maybe they can pick him up. I’ll wait for him downstairs. Stay here. Don’t go near the windows.”
Chris didn’t bother with shoes. In bare feet he followed David to the door, only stopping when David threw him a stern look. He stood at the top of the stairs, watching David vanish into the shadows pooled at the bottom. He danced from foot to foot, nerves taut, everything around him, except his heart, moving in slow motion. Sound was magnified, the light scuff of David’s shoes on the tile floor, the whisper of tree branches against each other outside, the distant sound of a car alarm.
Finally he heard a car door slam outside and David opened the front door. He bolted down the stairs, nearly tripping on the bottom step, only keeping himself from pitching out the door onto his face by catching the atrium wall. Light spilled over the transom, and the walls of the atrium glowed pink in the morning light.
Chris crowded in behind David who tried to get him to go back into the house. Chris ignored him. Together they stepped into the stone courtyard. From the nearest crape myrtle a pair of mockingbirds complained of the intrusion.
Shadows still gripped most of the hillside. Chris stared at the grille of his SUV. He blinked. There was something wrong with it.
“Get back inside,” David said. “Now.”
Chris ignored him. Against the gold wrap-around grill of the SUV something red was just visible in the growing light. Chris stepped out of the courtyard. A sharp, familiar smell invaded his nostrils.
“Chris—”
David tried to grab him, but he slipped past the outstretched hand. He knew that smell all too well.
The SUV was spray-painted bumper to bumper with blood-red foot-high letters, words that screamed FAGGOT and COP FUCKER and DAVID FUCKS BOYS. Too late, David’s fingers closed over his arm and jerked him back into the enclosed courtyard.
*****
Twenty minutes later, Chris could see the other cops’, who had answered David's call, thoughts tracking fast and furiously over what they knew and what they guessed. He could see a lot of them reaching conclusions that now seemed so obvious. “It would explain a lot,” he heard one cop mutter to another, who nodded sagely.
“It explains everything.”
“Jesus, you think you know a guy...”
“Always thought he was kind of funny.”
And so on and so on, round and round the fucking mulberry bush. The air crackled with the mechanical voices of radio calls being broadcast over the morning airwaves. Car doors opened and closed and Chris caught the flash of a camera lens as it captured David’s ruin.
Three black-and-whites already crowded the narrow, dusty street when an unmarked car approached. Light from the newly risen sun streamed from behind the ghostly trunks of the native Sycamores and the Italian cypress trees and reflected off the untinted windshield as the car halted behind David’s unmarked.
David’s partner stood beside the SUV, shading his unreadable eyes behind a pair of cheap Ray-Bans.
David’s face closed up. He approached Martinez stiffly, nodding coolly at him as both men took in the defaced truck.
David said something Chris couldn’t catch. But he had no problem seeing the way Martinez’s gaze lingered over the nasty words or the way he kept glancing at David, taking in his partner’s unshaven face and half-buttoned shirt.
At one point he threw a narrow-eyed, speculative look at Chris, staring so hard at his bare feet that Chris felt like tucking them up behind his ankles. He glared back, daring Martinez to say something.
David ignored all the inquisitive looks he got from his colleagues. Only when Martinez pointed to the edge of the house did David react. With a terse nod he drifted over to stand under the larger of the two crape myrtles, which Chris’s grandmother had planted forty years before.
Ignored by everyone, Chris drifted with him. He stopped near a spray of lavender blooms, his toes sinking into the prickly Manzanita ground cover underfoot, wondering what the hell he was doing. Did he want to hear what this nasty piece of work was going to say?
Martinez’s voice carried far in the still morning air. “You want to tell me what’s going on, partner?” he said. “You call in this squeal, and I’m thinking we got a line on this doer, then I show up and... what?”
“What do you want me to tell you, Martinez?”
“Tell me to fuck off. Bop me in the nose for thinking what I’m thinking. Anything.
Just don’t tell me this looks like what I think it looks like.”
“And what’s that?”
“Dios, Davey, don’t make me say it. We’ll find who did this; I’ll personally rearrange his face for him. Just tell me it ain’t true.”
Friday, 7:35 am, Cove Avenue, Silver Lake, Los A
ngeles David stared at his partner of six years and thought about lying. Martinez was giving him an easy out. Pretend like it hadn’t happened, that he was a victim of a sick prank pulled off by deviant freaks. That he was at Chris’s place on police business.
He could lie and Martinez would pretend to believe him. Safety in fiction. Then he glanced over at Chris, hovering on the edge of his own house, trying so hard to be invisible. The worry on his beautiful face twisted David’s gut. Chris was already blaming himself for this mess. For ruining David’s life.
A lie would only seal the grave of any relationship he might have forged with the younger man. Some things couldn’t survive that level of betrayal.
He faced Martinez, folding his arms over the thick barrel of his chest. The weight of his service weapon pressed into his ribs.
“I’m gay, Martinez. And I think it’s time I stopped pretending otherwise.”
“Come on, man. That’s crazy—”
David froze him with a look. Martinez pressed his lips into a thin line and muttered something in Spanish. David only caught the word “loco.” Crazy, again.
David glanced at Chris.
“Crazy or not, it’s what I am.”
And he turned and walked back to Chris.
Without a word he took Chris’s arm and led him up the step to the front door. Only when he closed the door behind them did he drop Chris’s arm and march through the atrium into the living room. Chris hurried after him.
“Why did you do that?”
Silently David yanked shut the vertical blinds on the picture window. The room was plunged into shadow.
“David—”
He took the stairs two at a time. Chris followed.
David stepped into Chris’s walk-in closet, dragging out a matching leather luggage set and carelessly tossing them onto the unmade bed.
“Pack,” David said. He pointed at the suitcases. “Enough for at least a week. You can stay at my place tonight, but after that things are likely to get too hairy, so you’ll have to book a hotel somewhere. If you want, get one out by the hospital, then you can visit Des once he comes around—”
“Why am I not just coming back here?”
“Alone?”
“Why not with you?” Chris planted himself in front of David. “What was that all about out there with Martinez if you’re just going to brush me off?”
“I’ll be lucky to be employed next week, let alone in a position to be of any use to you or anyone.”
When Chris made no move to pack, David started pulling things out of the closet, with no regard to what he was grabbing. Wool pants fell on the floor amid silk blazers and something that looked like a zoot suit straight out of the forties.
“They can’t fire you!”
David frowned at him, holding two crumpled dress shirts in his big hands. His mind was working furiously, trying to see how things were going to unfold. Knowing it wasn’t going to be pretty. He wondered if he’d even be able to shield Chris from the worst of it.
“It’s going into the weekend. I’m damned lucky the captain’s on vacation, or he might just put me on desk duty right now. As it is, the machinery won’t get rolling until Monday, but if the damned tin collectors get involved, there’s no telling what level they could take this to.”
“Who or what are the tin collectors?”
“Internal Affairs. They collect badges. Sometimes they even take them off cops who deserve to lose them.”
“I’m not even a suspect anymore. You said so yourself.” Chris looked scared. David wished he had more time to explain things. “What can they charge you with?”
“Bad judgment. You may not be a suspect, but you’ve never formally been discharged, either. And fraternizing with victims or witnesses is not exactly a business practice the LAPD approves of.”
“I was never charged with anything in the first place.”
Chris sat down on the bed, surrounded by the clothes from his closet. David finally came over and sat down beside him. He picked up one of Chris’s cold hands.
“If I can’t stay here,” Chris said. “Then why can’t I stay at your place? Oh, shit—”
“What is it?”
“I have to call Petey.” Chris scrambled to pick up the bedside phone. “He thinks I’m going to Denver on Sunday—”
“Whoa, wait a minute.” David grabbed Chris’s hand again before he could lift the phone. “What do you mean, Denver?”
“He booked me for a conference there—I’m replacing Becky. It was a last-minute thing. I forgot all about it...”
David’s eyes narrowed. His mind whirled with new thoughts. “Does anyone else know you’re going on this junket?”
“No. I told you. It was last-minute. I only learned yesterday—”
David swung off the bed and drew Chris against him. He was smiling.
“That’s perfect.”
“What is?”
“You, my friend, are going to Colorado. No one will ever find you there.”
The house echoed with the sound of someone’s fist on the wooden door. Chris jumped. David stepped back, his gaze gravitating toward the front of the house.
“Martinez.” David tossed the last pair of shirts he’d been holding to Chris, who caught them limply. “I have to go talk to him. Be ready when I get back.”
“David—”
“I’ll drop you at my place, but then I’ll have to go in to work for a while.” Suddenly David pulled Chris back into his arms. He kissed him soundly on the mouth. “You a half-decent cook?”
“Sure, I—”
“Good. There’s a market down the street from my place. We can grab some stuff there. You stay for two days, and Sunday I’ll take you to the airport.”
“And when I get back?”
“With any luck the worst of this will be history.” David cupped Chris’s chin in his big hands. He forced a smile. “I can’t promise anything beyond that, Chris. Maybe it won’t be so bad. But if things do get bad, hell, I always wanted a sugar daddy.”
Chris didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. David kissed him again, leaving him a little breathless.
“I have to go talk to Martinez,” David said when the pounding resumed. “Be down in twenty minutes, packed. I’ll have the car ready.”
Friday, 8:20 am, Cove Avenue, Silver Lake, Los Angeles David was true to his word. He had the car unlocked and was standing beside it when Chris descended the front step. He passed the gauntlet of cold-eyed cops who stopped what they were doing to watch him dump his suitcases into the backseat of David’s unmarked.
Martinez was standing beside David. It was obvious the two had been arguing.
Martinez seemed loath to let the argument go. “This is crazy, man. You want to throw your life away? For what? Some cheap joto loco?”
Chris curled his lip at the man. “Listen, you fat—”
David put his hand on Chris’s shoulder, silencing him. He swung around to face Martinez. “That’s the way it is, Martinez. This is one genie you can’t put back in the bottle. I’m sorry it came out this way, but I’m not sorry for what I am.”
Chris slipped into the passenger’s seat and pulled the door shut; it made a solid clunk.
He rolled the window down in time to hear Martinez say, “What you are is a cop.”
David waved his arm impatiently. “I’m still a cop,” he said. He slid in beside Chris and leaned out the open door. “And until someone says otherwise and makes it official, I’m going to keep doing my job, too.”
Martinez stalked back to his car, which was parked behind David’s. Chris tensed when he grabbed something off the front seat and walked stiffly back. David slammed his door shut.
Chris eyed Martinez as he approached his side of the car. He pulled his arm inside the open window.
Martinez leaned down to meet David’s gaze. “You wanted these—well, here are your copies.”
Ignoring Chris, he tossed a bundle of loose papers into the car. Most of them l
anded on Chris’s lap, and several sheets skidded to the floor at his feet.
He bent to retrieve them.
The topmost image caught his eye. He frowned down at it.
“What are you doing with my picture?” He held up a five-by-eight photo taken of him on a street somewhere. In the reproduction the grainy background looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it.
He glared up at Martinez, who smirked at David.
Martinez showed his teeth and his muddy brown eyes were full of malice when they met Chris’s. “We were showing it around to see who might remember you. He forget to mention that?”
“He knows,” David said. “He also knows he’s no longer a suspect.”
“Not sure everyone agrees with you on that. His friends have a nasty habit of ending up dead. You might want to remember that.”
“Which in most people’s books makes me a victim,” Chris said. He was pissed at David for not telling the asshole to fuck off. The least he could do was tell him to shut up.
When David did neither, Chris jammed the pictures into a haphazard pile on his lap.
He grabbed the other sheets to put them all together. That was when he saw the other image.
This one was a pencil sketch. Done in surprising detail.
“What are you doing with a picture of Trevor?”
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CHAPTER 21
Friday, 9:20 am, Cove Avenue, Silver Lake, Los Angeles BOTH DAVID AND Martinez swung around to look at him.
“Who is Trevor?” David asked.
Chris shrugged uneasily, his gaze moving between both men.
“A...guy I know,” he said. “Just a guy...”
“Trevor who? What’s his last name?” David reached in and snatched the picture out of Chris’s fingers. “You got an address on him?”
He tried to sound casual, knowing he was unnerving Chris, but unable to keep the tension out of his voice. He could hear it in Martinez’s, too, when he leaned down and braced his elbows on the open window and asked, “What’s he to you, this guy?”
