Strange Bedfellows
Page 1
Table of Contents
Synopsis
By the Author
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
About the Author
Other Rob Byrnes Titles Available Via Amazon
Books Available From Bold Strokes Books
Synopsis
If politics makes for strange bedfellows, perhaps no bedfellows are stranger than Grant Lambert and Austin Peebles.
Austin Peebles is a professional politician with a problem: a prominent rightwing blogger has come into possession of a compromising cell phone photo of the congressional candidate…an image that could derail his campaign.
Enter Grant Lambert—a professional criminal who lives so far below society’s radar he’s never even registered to vote—and his partner in life and crime, Chase LaMarca. If Grant and Chase can make the picture disappear, they’ll make a cool $30,000. It sounds like easy money to the cash-strapped criminals, but then more pictures turn up, the double- and triple-crosses begin, and Grant, Chase, and their gang of gay and lesbian confederates find themselves immersed in the brutal sport of politics, as the stakes grow larger and the bedfellows get stranger and stranger…
Strange Bedfellows
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Strange Bedfellows
© 2012 By Rob Byrnes. All Rights Reserved.
ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-797-4
This Electronic Book is published by
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P.O. Box 249
Valley Falls, New York 12185
First Edition: September 2012
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Credits
Editors: Greg Herren and Stacia Seaman
Production Design: Stacia Seaman
Cover Design By Sheri (GraphicArtist2020@hotmail.com)
By the Author
Holy Rollers
Strange Bedfellows
Acknowledgments
Thanks as always to my agent, Katherine Fausset; my editors, Greg Herren and Stacia Seaman; my partner in crime, Becky Cochrane; and my partner in life, Brady Allen. And thanks to David Green, Greg Crane, and Illyse Kaplan for bravely reading early drafts; and to Nick Donovan for letting me fictionalize him… or did I?
To Anthony Weiner, in appreciation for the inspiration
Chapter One
Most times, a sneeze wouldn’t have been that big a deal. Most times, it was something that just happened. But most times a guy didn’t sneeze while he was standing in the after-hours darkness of a store he was robbing and pretending to be a mannequin while a cop trained a flashlight near him through the plate glass window.
Which is why it sort of became a big deal when Chase LaMarca sneezed.
“Shuddup,” said a hiss from the shadows. That hiss came from his partner, Grant Lambert, who said it so quickly Chase could hardly see his lips move. Which was the point.
Chase waited until the beam from the flashlight moved away from him before he said, “I didn’t do it on purpose. It was just a sneeze.”
“Sounded like a trumpet.”
“For someone concerned about making noise, you’re sure talkin’ a lot.”
“Shh!”
They fell back into silence and froze as the light made another sweep across the room. When it was trained away from them, they could see the silhouette of the cop outside on the sidewalk.
Chase felt his pants pocket vibrate. “Now my phone is buzzing.”
“Shh.”
Out in front of the store, the cop was talking into his radio. They couldn’t hear the words but knew that was never a good sign.
“We’re gonna have to make a break for it,” said Grant. “If he’s calling for backup, we don’t wanna be standing here when they arrive. The minute this guy turns away…”
Which is when the cop aimed the beam back into the store. And directly into Grant Lambert’s eyes.
The patrolman held the flashlight in one hand and the hand mic wired to a radio clipped on his belt in the other and said, “I don’t see anything. Except maybe the ugliest mannequin in mannequin history.”
“That’s why Jackson Heights ain’t Madison Avenue,” said the dispatcher on the other end of the radio. “If everything looks secure, move on.”
“Coulda sworn I saw something move in there, though.”
“Probably your eyes playing tricks on you. Move on.”
The patrolman flicked off his flashlight, then—just to reassure himself one more time, ’cause it sure as hell looked like something had moved in there—walked to the front door and tugged. It was locked tightly. Yeah, must have been his eyes playing tricks.
But one more look through the glass couldn’t hurt…
“Think he’s gone?” asked Chase, trying to spot movement in the darkness on the other side of the window.
Grant, still frozen, again talked out of the corner of his mouth. “I think so.”
“’Cause I’m vibrating again.”
“Ignore it.” Still seeing nothing outside, Grant started to let himself breathe.
“But if someone is trying that hard to get in touch with me—”
“It can wait.” He froze again when he saw the silhouette of the cop reappear, then nudged Chase, who also froze.
The beam reappeared, slowly sweeping the store’s interior. This time, Grant turned his head slightly, so the light wouldn’t blind him again.
That was probably a mistake.
The patrolman clicked the button on his handset and said, “A mannequin moved.”
“What’s that?” asked his dispatcher.
“This mannequin. One minute the light’s in his eyes, the next minute he’s looking away from me. Meaning that’s a man, not a mannequin.”
It took the dispatcher a few beats to follow. “You say ‘a man, not a mannequin’?”
“Ten-four.”
“Gotcha. I’ve got backup on the way.”
“You hear sirens? I hear sirens.”
Grant parted his lips slightly. “I hear ’em. Is the cop still outside?”
“Yeah,” said Chase. “Standing by the front door.”
“Let’s get the hell out of here.” He backed up a few feet until he was hidden behind a rack of cheap suits, where the bottom of a rope ladder dangled. He began climbing.
Below him, Chase said, “I’m buzzing again.”
“Shut up and move.”
Up above the drop ceiling, they stood precariously on wooden beams and hauled up the ladder, rolling it into a tight coil before carefully navigating those beams to a cheap aluminum vent cover on the wa
ll. It wasn’t screwed into the wall—they knew that, since they’d been the ones who’d unscrewed it to gain access—so Grant kicked it aside and, on hands and knees, crawled through the opening into a narrow staircase leading to the apartments upstairs. Chase, still holding the rolled-up rope ladder, followed.
A single bare forty-watt bulb hung from the ceiling, the only illumination in the hallway. Through the murkiness, they began to descend the stairs but stopped as the pulsating red light from a patrol car flooded the foyer below them.
“That was faster than I anticipated,” said Grant.
“Up,” said Chase, who was already climbing the stairs toward the roof.
Now two police officers trained their flashlights through the shop window, and—judging by distant sirens growing nearer—more were on the way. They’d again tried the door to the shop, and again found it locked, so looking through the window was the only immediate option that occurred to them.
“You’re sure one of those mannequins moved, right?” asked the new officer. “Absolutely sure?”
“Not one of those mannequins,” said the first officer. “The one that moved isn’t there anymore.”
“That right?”
“That’s right.”
“So where’d it go?”
The cop who’d first interrupted Grant and Chase while they were trying to make a dishonest day’s living sighed in exasperation. “What I’ve been trying to tell everyone is that it wasn’t a mannequin that moved. It was a man.”
They stared through the window for another thirty seconds. “So what did the mannequin look like?”
“Man.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“Beat up,” the first officer reported. “Sort of old and beat up. Gray hair…needed a shave.”
The second officer took his beam off the interior and shined it on the first officer’s face. “Wait a minute. Are you tellin’ me you see a mannequin in there that looks like some kind of bum and you think it’s a mannequin, and not a bum?”
“Not once he started moving.”
“I mean before that.”
The first officer shrugged. “Figured maybe they were going for the gone-to-seed look.” When the second cop frowned, he added, “Hey, guys that look like bums gotta buy their clothes somewhere, right?”
“I guess.”
The second officer turned his flashlight back to the interior and waved it around until he at last found something that didn’t seem right.
“Up there,” he said, as the beam danced along the ceiling. “That ceiling panel’s been pushed aside.”
The first cop’s flashlight found the target. “Think that’s where he went?”
“I don’t know. But if he’s still up in the ceiling, we’ll get him out.”
Minutes later, Grant and Chase caught their breath and watched from the roof as three more patrol cars rounded the opposite corners—one heading the wrong way down the one-way street—before pulling to a stop in front of the store.
“This isn’t good,” said Chase.
“No, it isn’t,” Grant agreed.
“And now I’m buzzing again.”
Grant scowled. “I’m about to throw your phone off the roof. How’d you like that?”
Chase ignored him, took the phone from his pocket, and glanced at the screen. “It’s Jamie Brock.”
“I knew it wasn’t important.” Grant took another look five stories below, to where seven or eight cops now stood in front of the store, some with their guns drawn. He grabbed Chase’s arm when he saw a few of them break off and approach the door to the stairway. “We’ve gotta get out of here, lover, so put your toy away.”
Chase held out the coiled rope ladder. “And what do you want me to do about this?”
“Keep it. We might need it to get off this roof.” He took another look over the side of the building. “Well…it could mean the difference between a sixty-foot fall and a fifty-foot fall, so I guess that’s something.”
They darted through the darkness across the roof, then vaulted over a thigh-high brick wall onto the next roof, repeating the process twice more until they were nearing the end of the adjoined buildings.
It was when they were crossing the second to last roof that two large men emerged from the shadows. Even in the open air, Grant and Chase could smell marijuana. They froze for a moment, until they realized they were looking at a couple of teenagers. Very big teenagers who looked like they could pull both their heads off their shoulders without effort, but still teenagers.
For their part, the teenagers didn’t quite get that they weren’t dealing with run-of-the-mill middle-aged white guys who just happened to be dashing over the rooftops of Jackson Heights, Queens.
“Got any money, gramps?” one of them asked Grant.
“Get out of our way,” was Grant’s terse reply.
“My friend asked if you had any—” The second punk stopped mid-sentence when Grant stared at him, then backed up a few steps. “Okay, man, we don’t want no trouble.”
Chase, who was tired of carrying the rope ladder, tossed it at the second kid’s feet. “Here. You might need this to get down.”
Grant and Chase crossed over one more rooftop before coming to an abrupt stop. On the other side of the last thigh-high brick wall was a sixty-foot drop to a trash-strewn alley.
“Sure could use that ladder about now,” said Grant.
“Oh, Grant, paralysis is not necessarily better than death.”
They looked behind them, barely noticing the stoned teenagers who’d been disarmed by a single stare from Grant Lambert.
It was hard to be certain in the darkness, but it sure as hell sounded like there was activity coming from where they’d started. Which probably meant the cops were just a few rooftops behind them.
Without a word or another glance, Chase grabbed the nearest doorknob and was pleasantly surprised that not only was it not locked, but it opened into another barely lit stairwell. Grant followed him through the door and quietly shut it behind them.
They made it down to the third-floor landing when an apartment door opened. An older man with fussily curly white hair stepped into the hall, not noticing them at first. In one hand he held a trash bag; in the other, a small blue plastic bag and a leash attached to a cocker spaniel. His eyebrows jumped in alarm when he saw Grant and Chase behind him on the stairs.
His first and only reaction was to plead, “Don’t hurt me!”
Grant gave him a look that was considerably less intimidating than the one he’d given the teenagers. “Hurt you? Now why would we do that?”
The man seemed slightly hopeful he wasn’t about to be mugged. “You’re not with those ruffians who hang out on the roofs? Those…those…” His hands made a little flourish. “Those gangstas?”
Grant shook his head. “Nah, but we’re borrowing your stuff.”
“My stuff?” The man looked confused. “What?”
Chase flashed his wallet too quickly for anything inside to be visible. “NYPD. It’s all okay, buddy. We’ll take it from here.” He leaned down. “C’mere, Fluffy.”
“Mitzi,” the man corrected him.
“Mitzi, then.” He took the leash out of the not-quite-convinced man’s hand. “Come outside in five minutes. We’ll leave Mitzi tied to a tree.”
“But…”
Chase flashed him an ingratiating—yet somehow authoritative—smile. “The safety of the public depends on this, sir. There are some dangerous characters out there pretending to be cops.”
“Right,” said Grant as he liberated the trash bag from the man’s other hand. “So we’re gonna outsmart ’em by pretending to be civilians. Kind of like a double-cross.”
Chase, half dragging the cocker spaniel—who wasn’t at all sure she wanted to follow the stranger—and Grant, carrying the trash bag, began descending the steps as the man looked on.
“Will my Mitzi be all right?”
“More than all right,” Chase reassured him, taking the st
airs two at a time without turning around, leaving Mitzi no choice but to keep up with his pace. “This is a hero dog. Probably get a photo in the Post.”
“And anyway,” added Grant, “what could go wrong?”
“Well…” Grant and Chase were almost to the second floor when the man thought to call out. “Wait!”
Grant kept going, but Chase turned as the man hurried down the steps and offered him the blue bag. “You’ll have to clean up after her.”
“We won’t need her that long,” said Chase, giving the leash a bit too much of a yank, if Mitzi’s growl could be considered a complaint.
They were almost to the first landing—almost out of that building and on their way to safety—when the man called out, “And you’ll get rid of those gangstas, too?”
“Top of my list,” Grant called back to him.
Out on the sidewalk, two teams of cops strolled by as Grant emerged from the doorway with the bag of trash. Chase and Mitzi followed closely. No one probably would’ve looked twice at them if one of the cops hadn’t tried to pet the cocker spaniel.
She nipped him.
“Mitzi, no!”
“No harm done,” said the cop who’d been nipped, while his buddies giggled. “Better watch yourself. Looks like there was a burglary down the street.”
Chase’s hand went to his mouth. “Burglary! Oh my! That explains all the police officers.”
One of the other cops nodded toward Grant, toting his trash bag away from them at a fairly rapid pace for trash bag-toting. “You know that guy?”
“Yeah, he’s my neighbor. Mr.…Mr. Mitzi!”
The cop made a face. “Mitzi? I thought that was the dog’s name.”
“I…uh…he…I named her after him. He’s sort of like the dog’s godfather.”
Implausibly, that seemed to work, because the cop yelled, “Hey, Mitzi, hold up there!”