by Andrea Speed
“What?”
“It’s already been nudged over to the cold-case pile, and I don’t know why. All I know is someone high up in the department suggested our priorities laid elsewhere.”
That made no sense at all. I know a small-time club drug dealer wasn’t going to attract a lot of police resources, but brushing him under the carpet? That was nonsensical.
I knew I distrusted police. Now I knew why.
9
AS SOON as I could, I sidled up to Sloane and whispered to him, “Did Sander have a black book? A client list?”
He glanced at me with his curious wide-eyed stare, made all the worse by his lingering horror. But he was still completely fuckable. “On his phone.”
“No backups?”
He started shaking his head but then paused, getting a slightly dreamy look in his eye. “Maybe….”
“Where?”
Sloane was still a bit stunned, but he eventually snapped out of his daze and headed for the bedroom Kyle and I had ducked into previously. What I hadn’t noticed, mainly because I had my tongue down Kyle’s throat, was that the bedroom had two single beds, separated by a rather large bedside table. It was like something out of those ’50s sitcom, where they were trying to convince us straight married people never slept together. Probably true for the very closeted, but I doubt that was the message they wanted to send. Considering these were twin brothers, it was a little creepy, yet they probably couldn’t have afforded this condo separately.
Sloane sifted through an assortment of crap in the table’s single drawer, including condoms, Chinese food menus, and a spare set of keys, but finally Sloane pulled out a tiny black figurine in the shape of a bird, maybe a hawk or an eagle. When he held it out to me, for a second I didn’t understand. “Sometimes he backed stuff up. I don’t know if he’s done so lately.”
It wasn’t a figurine, it was a flash drive, just a comically shaped one.
I slipped it into my pocket when one of the cops appeared in the doorway, asking for my gun. I didn’t like it, didn’t want to hand it over, but I knew they confiscated weapons used in shootings. I’d get it back, probably too late to do any good. Luckily, that wasn’t my only gun.
As soon as we could possibly do it, I got Sloane out of there. On the drive downtown, he was curled up in the passenger seat like he was cold, now wearing an oversized jacket over a sweatshirt he’d hastily pulled on before we left. It made him look like a little boy wearing his father’s clothes. “I don’t understand…. Why is someone trying to kill me?”
“’Cause you look like your brother.”
“Huh?”
“Look, I don’t know the details, but I think Sander got involved in something bad, and someone wants to shut him up for good. Either he escaped and they’re after you ’cause they think you’re him, or they killed him and then realized he had an identical twin who could have substituted for his brother at any point.”
Sloane wrapped his arms around his knees and had the thousand-yard stare of an accident victim. “You think he’s dead?”
I held back a sigh. I wanted to slap him, tell him shit like this happened all the time and there was simply no point in acting like it was some shocking thing, because it wasn’t. Then I remembered he was a more or less normal guy, with a more or less normal life. This was a shocking thing to him. It may even have been the first time someone had tried to kill him. I envied his naiveté. “I dunno. He could have just left town. Would he?”
“Leave town without telling me?” Sloane thought about that for a very long time, long enough that the possibility was clearly edging toward fair to decent territory. “He wouldn’t…. I mean, why would he…?”
“He’s never left you to twist in the wind for something he’s done?”
“No!” He paused, the hesitation obvious. “Well, never for something major.”
“There’s a first time for everything.”
He looked away, lips working into a genuine pout this time. I almost felt bad for him, but then I remembered he’d probably slept with me as a way of manipulating me, so then I felt irritated with him. He’d have to decide if he preferred a dead brother or a traitorous one.
We went to my office, because it had a computer that hadn’t been eviscerated by gunfire, and was closer than my apartment. For some reason, I kinda didn’t want him to see my place, but whether it was due to the fact that trouble seemed to be following him or the fact that it was just a fucking mess was up for debate.
My overhead light bulb blew out as soon as I flipped the switch, and the flash of light made Sloane jump and let out a frightened yelp. I turned on the light in the foyer outside my office and then turned on my desk lamp, so there was some light in the room before I shut the door. The light in the foyer came through the opaque glass that used to say Spencer & Falconer. “Don’t worry. If anyone was shootin’ at us, we’d never see the muzzle flash, just feel the shot.”
“Was that supposed to be comforting?”
“No, realistic.” The blinds were all closed, so it was unlikely any of the dim light in here was getting outside, but I was just gambling on the fact that at least one of the gunmen having a new hole in him was going to slow them down.
I plugged the bird-shaped flash drive into my computer, and we lucked out, as it wasn’t encrypted. There were lots of files on it, though, a hodgepodge of images, text files, and video files. The file names were random letters and numbers that may have meant something to Sander but seemed like gibberish to me. I started randomly clicking things, just to see what I could turn up.
First thing that turned up was naked pictures. Since I was looking at a dick and balls without context, I had to ask, “This ain’t your brother, is it?”
Sloane, who was pacing with his arms wrapped around him, came over to my relic of a computer screen to look. As soon as he did, he reared back, as if I’d offended his delicate sensibilities. “Fuck no. Sander manscaped, for one, and for another, he didn’t bend to the left like that.”
“Thought not, but I wanted to make sure.”
Despite his earlier offense, Sloane leaned down, looking over my shoulder, suddenly interested. “That’s what’s on the flash drive?”
“Porn seems so pedestrian now, doesn’t it?” A random sampling was revealing that the photo files were indeed naked men, sometimes with no identifying features besides the general idiosyncrasies of male genitalia.
The first video clip I opened had a poorly lit clip of men having sex from an oblique angle, although Sloane managed to identify Sander as one of the men in the scene. The other guy was pudgy and un-manscaped, so it was an odd match. This was a client, certainly.
But all the film clips were similar. Somewhat out-of-shape men with Sander in poorly lit rooms, filmed at inconvenient angles, with spotty sound. Sometimes you could see little more than a fleeting glimpse of faces. “I didn’t know he was into filming himself,” Sloane commented.
Except that wasn’t it, was it? That wasn’t why all the film clips or the pictures. To me, this looked like a smorgasbord of blackmail, or perhaps even a stockpile of ammunition. It would explain why someone wanted Sander dead, if they got word that he had it. I had a feeling some of the naked, unremarkable men were very rich men, perhaps even powerful men.
I looked up at Sloane, who was now standing back and biting his fingernails. “You said you filled in for him from time to time. Who were your clients?”
He shrugged, uncomfortable with the topic. “Just guys.”
“No, not just guys. You weren’t giving out twenty-dollar blowjobs in back alleys. These were guys who could afford you, and somehow I don’t think you were paid minimum wage. So who were they?”
He looked at me with frightened eyes. He’d gone from sex pot to scared kid in about an hour. “I don’t know their names, not their real names. I mean, yeah, they were obviously not poor—one had a pinky ring the size of a Chihuahua’s head—but they were just guys to me. White and kinda flabby and sometimes
kinda smug.”
“You never took a look in their wallet, maybe while they were in the shower?”
“No! I’m not like that.”
Oh good, I found myself saddled with the only hooker with integrity.
Most of the text files were gibberish, perhaps encrypted in a way I was unfamiliar with, but one was unencrypted and was simply a list of surnames: Nelson, Reilly, Johnson, Clarke, Gibbons, Wuhl. There were numbers assigned to their names, although not in sequence.
I played another video clip and asked, “Do you recognize any of these places?”
Sloane snorted derisively. “It’s a little dark.”
“Not that dark.”
Sloane looked down at me skeptically. “What does this mean? Why are you asking me about clients?”
“Because I think your brother may have been up to his pretty neck in blackmail.”
“What? Who would blackmail him?”
I scowled up at him. Was anyone really that stupid? “He’s the blackmailer.”
That made him do a slight double take, eyes wide and mouth opening in shock. “Sander would never do that!”
“Of course not, ’cause he was always honest with you.” I disconnected the flash drive and wondered where I should keep it. My first thought was the office safe, but that was too obvious. It was the first place someone would look. I had an idea of a safe place, but how was I going to get there with Sloane shadowing me? I didn’t want him to know where I was dropping this, for his own safety if nothing else. I pocketed it for now and shut down my ancient computer. I may or may not have copied some documents to my hard drive—I have to admit the throbbing of my face was distracting me a little. There’s nothing like your head feeling like an infected wound to turn your thought processes into jelly. “Did you recognize any of the places or not?”
“It was too dark. I couldn’t tell.”
“Make a guess.”
He glared at me like I was the asshole. “I dunno! Maybe… one of those lamps looked like the kind they have in the Roosevelt.”
“The Roosevelt?” An old-world luxury-style hotel, baroque in its elegant decay, expensive and very much the property and playground of the rich. When it was open.
It was closed now and had been for the last few months. Initially it was closed for renovations, including a big new conference room, but rumor had it the owners of the hotel had run into financial issues, hence the renovations slowing to a crawl. Now no one was sure if or when the hotel would reopen again.
Had Sander entertained a client there before it was closed? I was trying to remember when it closed down. There were a few upload dates on the flash drive—did they correspond? I was trying to remember when I saw a shadow out in the foyer.
A person, turned into a shadow by the light behind them, moving slowly toward my door.
Sloane saw it finally and gasped, and I whispered to him to be quiet as I grabbed my shotgun from its hiding place. “Get behind the desk,” I told him, standing between it and the door. The shotgun was ready to go, because there was no point in having an emergency weapon that I’d have to pause to load. There were spare shells in my top desk drawer, but unless my aim was complete shit or there were a dozen guys behind this one, I shouldn’t need them. The one good thing about a shotgun is you usually don’t engage in epic shootouts with them. Either they get the job done right away, or you end up too dead to care.
The doorknob rattled ominously before the man got it open, and I leveled the shotgun at waist height, which would guarantee a lethal hit on a short or average-sized guy, or would take the legs out of a taller guy. I had a sudden flashback to the day Spencer died in a hail of bullets, which made me grasp the shotgun that much harder.
The door swung open slowly, and I had my finger resting lightly on the trigger, ready to twitch. But I could see that the man’s hands were empty and hung loose at his sides. The halo of light behind him set off the highlights in his hair, and that with his muscular figure let me know this was Tyler, even before my eyes adjusted to the light/dark contrast. “Tyler?”
His mouth opened and closed wordlessly, and I heard liquid pattering the floor in a regular rhythm. Blood was dripping from his right hand and had made a gory trail from the foyer. He found his voice finally and said, “I didn’t know—”
His pale eyes rolled up inside his head, and Tyler fell like a marionette whose strings had just been cut. I tried to catch him with one arm, still holding the shotgun in case the men who did this to him weren’t long behind him. But as he lolled in my arms, his warm blood soaking into my shirt, I had a feeling the thugs were long gone. They’d just wanted to drop off their present.
10
THE ambulance lights painted the buildings in lurid shadows of crimson and black, and if there had actually been people on this block, they’d probably have come out to look. But this part of town was as dead Spencer was.
I called Kyle right after the ambulance, but he arrived ten minutes after it, still not believing I could be in so much trouble in such a short span of time. When he saw me standing there with blood on my shirt, he came up to me with a gasp. “My God, are you all right?”
“Yeah, it’s not my blood,” I told him, pulling him into the lobby of my building for some privacy. Most of the guys out there were just beat cops who had no idea I’d already been at another crime scene, but they would find out soon enough, and I’d be lucky not to end up cuffed and shoved in the back of a black-and-white.
“What the hell is going on?” Kyle asked, brown eyes almost popping out of his skull. When he got exasperated, his eyes became wild things, and his dusky skin seemed to flush darker. “What have you gotten yourself into, Jake?”
“I’m not sure, but I intend to find out. Do me a favor, and take Sloane into protective custody. Not officially, though.”
“What the hell do you mean not officially?”
“Take him to your place, and don’t tell anybody, not even your partner, okay? It’s imperative you don’t tell another cop. Right now you’re the only one I trust.”
“This is crazy! You know that, right?”
“Yeah, I know. But I think I know what I’m doing now.”
His look was so deeply suspicious it was honestly wounding. “I think enough people have been hurt tonight. You should come with me, and we’ll work this out.”
That almost made me laugh. What was there to work out exactly? But I knew he was just trying to help, save me from myself. He was good at that. I was touched that anyone beside my bartender cared. “I need you to trust me, Kyle.”
His exasperated look came back. “Trust you to get yourself killed? I think it’s high time you get some help here.”
I could tell he wasn’t going to let this go. One of the most endearing—and irritating—things about him was his stubbornness. I moved in closer, close enough that I could feel his body heat and smell the coffee he must have been chugging by the gallon. He took a tentative step back but then leaned forward slightly, as if to smell me. I bet I smelled like cordite and blood.
I cupped the side of his face and asked, “Do you love me?”
I’d caught him off guard with that. I saw the confusion in his eyes, and he looked for a moment like he might deny it, but of course he relented. “I wish I didn’t.”
I stroked his cheek with my thumb and tried to look as innocent as I possibly could. This was very difficult, as I’m not sure I’ve ever been innocent in my life. “Then trust me. If I need help, I will call you, and I’ll expect you to drop everything and come running.”
He rolled his eyes. “Jake—”
Whatever he was going to say, I silenced him with a kiss, passionate enough to distract him as I dropped the flash drive into his coat pocket. There was no one it would be safer with, especially if Kyle didn’t know about it.
I have to admit, it was still nice to kiss him. He must have felt the same way, because he grabbed me tight enough that my ribs creaked, and while the bruises sang sick little song
s, I remembered how it had been last night, how he’d made the pain go away. I knew I had to keep him sweet, but I kept forgetting I was supposed to be a heartless bastard about all this. It used to be so easy.
I broke away before we both got a little too into it, and said, “I’ll be all right. Just keep Sloane safe, okay?”
Although it took Kyle a moment to shake off, he did, the lust in his eyes being replaced by his natural wariness. “You have to call me in one hour. If you don’t, I’m coming after you.”
“Kyle—”
“Don’t argue with me! And once you get back, I expect a full explanation, none of this trust me bullshit. Understand?”
“Got it.” He may have been a Goody Two-shoes, but I could only push him so far before his dark side came out. And since he was a cop, you know he had a real ugly one. Still not as ugly as mine, but I knew better than to push it.
We came out as the ambulance was pulling away. Tyler had been stabbed a couple of times, and according to the paramedics, he had some pretty ugly bruises on his stomach and back, suggesting a beating—a beating where they’d been careful to avoid hitting his pretty face. Maybe it was a halfhearted attempt to kill him; maybe it was just a vicious warning. I just wasn’t sure if it was solely for him or split between me and him. I guess I’d find out.
Before the other cops noticed I was there, I slunk off into the shadows, and I was down the alley before I heard one of the beat cops ask Kyle where I was. I hated to leave him in such a hard spot, but I knew he could get out of it with no problem. The good thing—possibly the only good thing—about being such a square was people always trusted you, even if they were corrupt themselves. Hell, especially if they were corrupt. They could never see even a tiny bit of themselves in Kyle; therefore, he must have been the most trustworthy guy in the world. Must be nice. Would’ve been nicer if Kyle could appreciate that “get out of jail free” card.
I had only one potential lead: the Roosevelt. Yeah, the place was supposedly closed, but how had Sander been able to film there so close to closing? Maybe it was closed at the time, which begged the question how it happened. So I was going to find out. That’s what detectives are supposed to do, or at least that’s what those Murder, She Wrote reruns taught me.
