by Rhys Ford
Table of Contents
Blurb
Dedication
Acknowledgments
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Copyright
Cops and Comix
By Rhys Ford
A Murder and Mayhem Short
It’s all fun and games until someone leaves a dead body on the floor.
Life for comic book store owner Alex Martin usually runs to the mundane. Sure, he has a regular influx of geeks and freaks, but for the most part, it’s a familiar weird. That all changes when he opens up Planet X Comics one morning and finds a corpse in the middle of his shop.
When Detective James Castillo is called in to investigate, Alex is torn between wanting to climb the man like a tree and giving him a wide berth. Luckily for Alex, the handsome detective is just as interested in him—as a suspect in the murder.
To the Five and Elizabeth North
For making all the death and geekery fun.
Acknowledgments
TO MY beloved Five—Jenn, Penn, Tamm, and Lea. My life without you all would be joyless. And easier to cook around. But still… joyless. Sour cream is good.
To my other sisters whom I adore, Ree, Ren, Lisa and Mary.
Thanks as always go to Dreamspinner—Elizabeth, Lynn, Grace, Liz and her team, Naomi (who is forced to suffer through my flailings), Amanda, Andrea, Sue, Paul and the rest of the Ark. Seriously, thank you.
THERE WAS a dead body on his floor. Well, the comic book shop’s floor, but it was his shop, so technically it was his floor.
And if Alex’s heart kept trying to squirm its way out of his rib cage as it fled in terror, there would soon be another one.
Leaning against the steel-reinforced glass door to his comic book shop, Alex pressed his fist against his chest and willed his galloping pulse to calm down. His racing heartbeat not only ignored the scolding, it seemed to kick it up a step, until it felt like he’d injected jalapeno juice directly into his veins. Fear apparently mimicked an overdose of Mexican food—or at least that was how Alex saw it.
Outside, Los Angeles continued on its merry way as if there weren’t a dead body lying facedown in front of Planet X’s bargain table.
A scrubbed-out butter container with his leftover pad thai hit the floor when his already cold fingers went numb. Some part of his brain hoped the top hadn’t come off, more because the pad thai’d come out pretty well, considering it was the first time he’d cooked something that exotic. Belatedly he wondered if he should check on the man, if it was a man. From where Alex stood, he couldn’t actually tell.
He took a step toward the too-still form on the universe-patterned industrial carpet he’d scored from a theater closing but then nearly stepped on the dropped butter container and stopped in his tracks. Normally he was through the door by nine, anticipating opening the shop at ten, but today he’d been running a bit late. Thankful for the single designated space he got from the strip mall, he’d parked his Mini up front and got out, figuring he’d just open a little bit early and do anything he needed to catch up on while he waited for customers.
But now, with a dead body, it looked like Planet X probably wouldn’t be opening anytime soon.
“Shit, it’s a crime scene,” Alex said to no one in particular. The dead body surely didn’t care. If it even was a dead body. “How long do they need to keep the store locked up for a crime scene? God, that was selfish. Shit, how long has he been there?”
That had to be probably the dumbest thing he’d said in his lifetime. Obviously the man wasn’t there before the store closed. His night crew did get lazy sometimes, but they weren’t so dim as to not notice a dead man lying in the front of the shop.
Alex studied it and pushed his new glasses up on his nose. He was still getting used to the wire frames. After so many years of wearing thick black plastic, he’d let himself get talked into a supposedly more modern look. He suspected his mother’d had a fondness for Harry Potter.
“Okay, maybe someone’s just screwing with me. It’s probably a mannequin or something.” Alex peered through the dim store. “Josh. He’s an asshole. He’d do something like this.”
Alex left his keys in the door and forced himself farther in. The carpet was mostly purple with swirls of stars and planets that formed patterns over the floor. It was difficult to tell if there was blood or not, but Alex was fairly certain the large stain by the man’s ribs hadn’t been there when he left yesterday.
If it was a mannequin, it was a damned good one, because its knuckles were hairy and banged up in places and its black sweatpants and hoodie were rumpled enough for Alex to catch a peek of bruised, pale skin over the waistband. He couldn’t see any evidence that the body was anything but human—and a deceased one at that.
“Shit.” His day’d gone from crappy to apocalyptic, although—he grimaced—probably not as bad a day as the guy on the floor. A very dead guy. “Sorry. Um, sir. Okay. Let’s check your pulse. Maybe you’re just… resting.”
He put his hand on the man’s back, hoping to feel breathing or something, but Alex felt nothing pushing back up against his palm. Nope, the man lying on Planet X’s carpet was definitely dead, human, and from the smell, rotting at an alarming rate.
Alex didn’t know what exactly dead smelled like, but he kind of knew what dead felt like. Sort of.
The closest thing he’d come to handling a dead thing was when he’d gone fishing with his uncle one summer and caught a perch. He’d been excused from cleaning the flopping thing because he was six, and in retrospect, he hadn’t even been sure if the hook’d been baited. More than likely they’d given him a pole and told him to dangle it over the pier like the other boys were doing—a pole he’d almost dropped into the water when the fish bit his line and he’d jumped up in surprise.
There’d been pictures and oohing over him, and when it was all said and done, he’d wondered out loud when it was time for the fish to go home. His uncle explained quite frankly—and brutally in Alex’s mind—about death and how the fish was now going to be dinner.
That was when he’d started screaming blue bloody murder, and it’d been the last time his uncle took him with them. While he’d never caught another fish ever again, Alex probably would still scream blue bloody murder.
Much like he almost did when something in the man’s side churned about and a dark splotch on his skin ripped apart, spilling out something startlingly like blackened, chunky cottage cheese.
His stomach lurched, and Alex practically leapfrogged over himself to get to the front door. He almost didn’t make it. The mall’s bedraggled lily bushes took the brunt of his vomit, but it was mostly water and coffee. He’d lost too much time waking up late and scraping a hairball or five off the living room carpet to make himself something for breakfast.
Yep—Alex stared at the pool of ick he’d just tossed up into the landscaped green buffer between the sidewalk and the parking lot—mostly water and coffee.
“Hey, man, you going to be open soon?” Alex found himself looking at a pair of black leather shoes. Glancing up, he recognized the man who owned the printing shop a few doors down. “I’ve got to go take a piss, and I don’t want to use ours. Yours is a lot cleaner.”
“Um, no,” Alex burbled around his moist tongue. “I’ve got to call the cops. There’s a dead guy in my store.”
The man frowned and peered through the door, his eyes narrowing in disgust. “Well, shit, now where am I going to go take a leak?”
DETECTIVE JAMES Castillo parked his unmarked sedan behind a row of orange traffic cones set up in front of the crime scene. He’d gotten the call on the DB while he was getting coffee a
few blocks away, and he’d called in his location, reluctantly accepting to take on the case. Reluctant mostly because of where the dead body had been found.
He’d grown up with geeks for brothers—hell, he had a hard-core love for more than a few sci-fi shows, but pulling information out of somebody who spent his life parsing out the differences between stormtrooper uniforms or arguing about exactly what Gygax meant by halfling wasn’t his idea of a good time.
Planet X sounded like a day spent listening to nerd babble as he tried to figure out exactly what was important information or speculation.
Because, God, his brothers loved to speculate.
No, he’d prefer a straightforward murder in suburbia any day, where the neighbors were in everyone’s business and the motive usually came down to sex or money—sometimes even both.
“Who found the body?” James asked, flashing his badge at one of the cops standing guard by the door. He’d beaten the forensics team to the site, which wasn’t a problem since he had booties and gloves in the trunk of his car, but he wanted to question the witness before the details got fuzzy.
“Over there, talking to Mancha. Witness’s name is Alex Martin. He owns the store. Has for the past five years. Before that, it was his father’s. Says he only touched the body to see if help could be rendered. Got sick in the bushes over there. At least he had the stomach to make it outside first.”
“How bad can it be?” He cocked his head at the cop. “Was the store closed for a long time? Deceased in there for a while?”
“He says no. Night shift closes the store at nine, then takes about an hour to lock the place down. So if he’s telling the truth, the DB’s only been in there twelve hours at the most, but it’s in a serious state of decay.”
“So, transported.” James contemplated the man standing a few yards away. “I’ll take a look inside—a quick one. Then if you can have him ready to talk to me, I’ll take over.”
His mind should have been on the job, but James’s cock had other ideas when it perked up at the sight of the tall, slight brunet in glasses standing next to one of the uniforms. From the serious—and slightly green—look on the man’s face, James figured the civilian was connected to the scene in some way, especially since he was talking to the biggest asshole to wear a blue uniform in forever. The rainbow Bird of Prey silhouette sticker boldly displayed on the store’s glass front door was a good omen, and James took a moment to study the store’s owner.
Alex Martin was attractive. Even flustered by a dead body, he was alarmingly good-looking, though not normally James’s type. No, usually he liked a sturdier man, one he could grab hold of and not wonder if he’d break an arm or shoulder, but the man’s tousled sable mane looked soft, its length nearly begging to be grabbed and tugged on during sex. His mouth was a sin waiting to happen. Full and lush in a sharply angled face, his lips balanced out his enormous owlish eyes, their color masked by the flash of sunlight on the man’s wire-rimmed glasses.
He wasn’t dressed the way James would think a fanboy would show up for work in a comic book store. A pair of worn but expensive jeans made the most of his long legs, and a collarless button-up shirt poked up from the V of his dark green sweater, his sleeves ruched up to expose most of the man’s sinewy forearms. A pair of black Chucks covered his feet, but they were practically new, or Martin took very good care of them. From the looks of the slimline gold watch on the man’s slender wrist, James supposed the man was used to having money or at least knew how to appear as if he’d been bathing in a silver tub since the day he was born.
Yeah, James decided, he definitely was going to interview Martin before he headed in to look at the body. There was something off about the man owning a mecca for geekdom, and damned if he wasn’t going to find out exactly what that was.
ALEX KNEW the man was a detective as soon as he got out of the black sedan. Actually, he looked more like he’d be rappelling down a steep cliff to rescue a busload of Swedish Bikini Team hopefuls while holding off a yakuza kidnapping squad with little more than a knife and a winning smile, but a detective wasn’t much of a stretch.
The man was dressed in black, an unrelieved black of jeans, T-shirt, and leather jacket. Broad-shouldered and trim-hipped, he pulled off his sunglasses, tossed them onto the car seat, then slammed the door behind him. A quick flash of metal—a badge by the look of it—was shown to one of the four cops who’d shown up to hold vigil on Planet X, and he was through the blue line, striding with powerful long legs to the shop’s front door.
The day was overcast, but the sun was bright enough to pick up the blue sheen in his black hair, and Alex looked away, wondering if the man was as hot up close as he was from a few doors down. Behind him, a woman murmured appreciatively when the detective glanced to where Alex stood, and he felt his face go red at the man’s assessing, keen gaze.
“Oh great. Look who’s here. Castillo,” one of the older cops muttered under his breath. “Damned homo. We’ll be here forever.”
“He’s not so bad,” another cop—the lone female in the group—answered.
“That’s ’cause you’re both chicks,” the grizzled cop snarled.
“And that kind of shit is why you’re still driving around in a squad car waiting for your get-out date. He better not hear you, or you’re going to be gumming your morning doughnut,” she shot back, then eyed Alex carefully. “Sorry. Hopefully no offense.”
“Oh no, none taken,” he replied absently. Alex wasn’t surprised she’d figured out he was gay. Hell, his own mother said she’d known he’d like dick before he even entered kindergarten, a declaration that made him very uncomfortable at the time since really, whose mother assessed a child’s sexuality before he could even fully recite a multiplication table?
But the detective being gay—that left Alex speechless. He was the kind of man Alex lusted after but never in a million years approached. He didn’t go out with hard-bodied, tough-faced bad boys. Hell, he didn’t go out at all, so running into a hot gay man wasn’t even something he’d ever done—even if he’d had fantasies about being frisked by a broad-shouldered cop.
Although by the looks of the detective eating up the sidewalk with his long strides, Alex soon would be doing more than just running into one; he’d actually have to make conversation. And about a rotting corpse in the one thing he’d been truly successful at—his shop.
“Mr. Martin?” Castillo, as the cops called him, was heartbreakingly gorgeous up close, and worse, he smelled good. Like fresh-linen-and-coffee good. “I’m Detective James Castillo from LAPD. Can I have a few minutes of your time, please? To talk to you about what you found in your store?”
Castillo had a few years on Alex’s late twenties, but they were damned good years. His black hair fell over two soulful brown eyes, and the man’s mouth crooked in an off-kilter rueful smile, as if he was kind of sorry Alex had started his day off with a dead body. The low purr of his voice grabbed at Alex’s spine and tickled up and down his back until his balls danced in response to even the purse of the detective’s lips. He was golden skinned and laughed a lot, if the tiny lines around his deep honey-colored eyes were anything to go by.
The man’s strong, large hands were on his hips, pulling back his leather jacket enough for Alex to spot the leather straps of his harness and the weight of a weapon nested into his side. It also gave him a clear view of the man’s rock-hard stomach, because Castillo’s gunmetal-black shirt fit him tightly enough that his abdominal muscles stood out in faint shadow.
“Mr. Martin? Alex?” Castillo repeated softly. “You okay?”
“What? Oh yeah, sorry.” Alex tried to get his tongue to work, but the presence of the man pressing into his space was nearly too much for his tired brain to handle. “Yeah, I’m fine. It’s just… been a long morning.”
“Let see if we can’t shorten it up a bit?” The detective looked around the area, and his gaze fell on the coffee shop tucked into the corner. “How about if we grab something hot to drink, a
nd I’ll take down your statement?”
“Sure, okay.” Alex heard himself and winced.
“Why don’t you sit down at that table, and I’ll get you some coffee. Black? Cream and sugar?” Another purring rumble, and Alex had to tell his knees to be strong enough to carry him to one of the metal café tables outside of Drip and Stir Coffee.
“Uh, cream and sugar,” Alex mumbled, pushing himself to follow Castillo. The man’s jeans snugged up into his ass, and Alex was given an incredible view of two firm, rounded cheeks moving beneath black denim. He plopped down in a chair, scraping its metal legs on the cement, and watched Castillo open the door, suddenly remembering his manners. “Oh, um… thanks!”
“Don’t mention it,” Castillo replied smoothly. Then he was gone, swallowed up by the coffee shop’s interior.
Alex exhaled and leaned back against the chair’s hard wooden back. His legs were shot, nearly gummy at the thought of dead bodies, hot detectives, and an empty, echoing stomach reminding him he hadn’t eaten since early last night.
“Damn it.” He glanced back at Planet X’s front door, where he’d accidentally dumped his lunch. “I probably should have cleaned that up before the cops got here.”
“Cleaned what up?” Castillo’s former purr now had teeth, and they sank down into Alex’s nerves as the man put down two cups of coffee on the table. “I hope you weren’t talking about the deceased. You seem like you’d have more sense than to mess with a crime scene, Mr. Martin.”
“No! I wouldn’t—” Alex protested softly. “I dropped my lunch in the doorway. It’s probably all through the carpet by now.”
“Ah, the noodles?” The detective slid one of the cups in front of Alex. “No, we got that up off the cement. They’ll be bringing a gurney in, and yeah, it would contaminate the findings. Have a sip, and let’s see if we can’t figure out what this mess is all about.”
