Desired by a Dangerous Man

by Cleo Peitsche

  I slowed my pace, veered off to the right and turned around, hunching my shoulders as if that would afford me more privacy. “Hi,” I said, feeling shy. “How is everything?”

  “Fine,” he said. Even if it wasn’t, he’d never admit it—especially over the phone. “I’m about to go into a meeting, and I wanted to hear your voice. For luck.”

  I smiled, flattered. “No news so far?”

  “We’re just getting started. How’s LA?”

  “Sunny,” I said. “Rob and I are making more progress than I thought we would. Sara didn’t bother coming down. Maybe there was a yarn emergency. A shortage of alpacas or something.”

  Corbin was kind enough to laugh. “If there’s anything to find, you’ll figure it out,” he said. “I can’t wait until all this shit is over and done with.” It had become our mantra.

  “Soon we’ll get our lives back,” I said, a little breathless at the strength of his conviction. His voice was so deep, so masculine. It was turning me on. “Corbin, however things turn out with your ex, I know we’ll be ok. And you’ll be ok.”

  “I never doubted us, baby,” he said, not even hesitating a moment. And it was true that he’d never questioned our relationship, never thought that we weren’t up to the task of dealing with the insanity of our lives. Not even when I was at my most jealous and insecure—though I still believed I’d had valid reasons given the circumstances.

  “Will you call me again tonight?” I asked.

  He hesitated. “It could be late. Don’t forget the time difference. Three hours.”

  “That doesn’t matter. I’ll be up. Hell, my roommate snores, so even if I’m in bed, I’ll probably be awake.” I glanced back at Rob, who was in the car, fiddling with the radio.

  “I’ll do that. Good luck, and be careful.”

  “It’s hardly dangerous,” I said.

  “Still.”

  I nodded, and I suspected Corbin knew that, could sense it. “Bye,” I said softly, not wanting to get off the phone. The work Rob and I had been doing had occupied my attention, but hearing Corbin’s voice made me miss him acutely and painfully.

  “Talk to you soon,” he said. The innocent words sounded like sex.

  I waited for the click, then realized he was letting me hang up first. So I did. Reluctantly.

  I turned and jogged to the car, slid into the passenger’s seat. The business cards dug into my back, and I twisted my arm around to pull them out of my waistband and shove them into my backpack.

  “Bad news,” Rob said. “According to the GPS, the storage facility is forty minutes away. I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.”

  The moment he said it, I realized I was hungry, too. “We could grab a snack now, then get dinner after.”

  He groaned. “Yeah, I was afraid you’d say that.”

  “Or we could eat dinner first. Help me out here. What do you want?”

  “No, we should check this out, get it over with. I was just hoping you’d be the bad influence.”

  We grabbed two jumbo orders of french fries from a drive-through. “If Corbin knew I was eating this, he’d kill me,” I said as I squeezed out the contents of a ketchup packet.

  “Why?”

  I swirled three gloriously greasy fries through the ketchup. “He finds my eating habits appalling.”

  “You get grief about clogged arteries?”

  I shook my head. “He loves rich food. It’s the fast food he doesn’t approve of. The last time he found a crumpled wrapper in my car, he made some super-healthy veggie thing for dinner that night. And the next night. And the next.”

  The fries were so hot that the grease scalded my tongue, but it didn’t stop me from demolishing my snack in under three minutes. Because Rob was driving, it took him longer to eat his, but I helped.

  When we reached the storage facility, Rob keyed in the code from the lease agreement.

  According to the posted map, JD’s unit was in the rear, out of sight of the street. I made Rob pull over so I could get an overpriced soda out of a machine.

  The fries had been salty, and my mouth and tongue were dry. I gulped half the soda, then passed it to Rob. “That’s yours,” I said.

  He pulled the key out of his pocket, and when he parked in front of the unit, I hurried to the locked door.

  The key didn’t fit.

  “Damn it,” I said. I turned to Rob and shrugged. Heaven forbid anything in this investigation be easy.

  Rob drained the soda, then got out. “Can I try?”

  Biting back a sarcastic comment about his lack of faith in my ability to use a key, I handed it over. If the situation had been reversed, I would have wanted to do the same.

  “Well, we know it likely goes to a padlock,” he said as he tried a third time. “Just not this one.”

  I tilted my head, then glanced down the row of locked units. “Is it me, or does this lock look really new?”

  Rob dropped into a crouch. “It’s not you,” he said, squinting at the lock. “It’s dry out here, dusty and hot. This thing? I don’t think it’s been on here a week.”

  “And it definitely hasn’t been out here for a month,” I said. “I don’t have my lock-pick set.”

  “Where is it?” Rob asked, standing.

  “At home,” I admitted. “Sara gave me the key to JD’s apartment…” I trailed off with a guilty shrug.

  “Ok. Let me see…” He pulled out his wallet.

  When we were after a bounty, it wasn’t uncommon for us to have to break into someplace or other, and for that reason we often carried a set of essentials. Rob’s kit used to include nothing but zip ties. He traveled light. I, on the other hand, liked my gadgets, my eavesdropping devices and full lock-picking sets. And it was all at home.

  Padlocks could be difficult. We generally didn’t bother with anything complicated, and the low position of this lock would only make it trickier.

  “You don’t need to,” I said. “Whatever’s in there belongs to Sara, and she can have the lock cut off.”

  “Shh.” He dropped into a crouch.

  I crossed my arms and turned around. The car was pulled up close enough that it maybe sorta blocked what he was doing, or at least would give any casual observer something to focus on.

  And to think that I’d once told Corbin that I never engaged in illegal activity in the course of my job. Strictly speaking, it had never been true, but ever since then I was more acutely aware of when I was crossing a line. Since meeting Corbin, I’d crossed a hell of a lot of lines. This one, at least, couldn’t be blamed on him.

  Technically Rob was the one messing with the lock. I sighed. It had been five minutes. In another five, maybe he’d admit defeat and we could go get something more substantial to eat.

  “Phew.” He stood. There was a hollow thunk as he yanked back the metal slide.

  “No way,” I said, astonished. He pulled up the door. Cold air rushed out to greet us. It carried the smell of plastic, of dampness… At least, the combination reminded me of basements filled with wet clothes.

  “I’ve been practicing,” he said.

  “Why?”

  He shrugged, and I struggled not to smile. “It’s because of Jennifer,” I guessed. “Are you practicing your B&E skills to impress a federal agent? Doesn’t that seem kinda backward?”

  “There’s a lot about her you don’t know,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  “Maybe you do know,” he said, sounding miffed, or as miffed as he was capable of. “Let’s dissect my pathetic love life later. Right now, this is all that matters.” He motioned at the storage unit’s dark, cavernous maw.

  I went to the car, leaned over the door and flipped on the headlights. Because of the vehicle’s angle, the light mostly bounced into the storage unit’s side, but it was enough.

  There were canvases there. Dozens upon dozens of them, carefully wrapped and placed on pallets, likely to keep them from getting wet in case of a flood.

  “T
his isn’t where I’d store artwork,” I said, turning on my phone’s flashlight and sweeping it back and forth across the lot.

  “Agreed,” Rob said.

  “You think this is JD’s oeuvre?”

  Rob peeled back the tape on one package and lifted away the bubble wrap. “Oh, yeah,” he said. He shot a look over his shoulder, a mischievous grin on his lips.

  “What?” I asked even though I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  “You might think I know it’s JD’s painting just because it’s signed, but you’d be wrong.”

  I stepped forward to take a look.

  The painting was a mess of colorful smears, more like something an elephant had dragged its trunk through than actual artwork. Not that I was an authority. In fact, I knew nothing about modern art.

  “You don’t see it,” Rob said, practically howling with laughter.

  And then, I did.

  Cocks.

  Hundreds of impressions of them.

  “Cock art,” Rob said.

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  He shook his head. “That’s the title. It’s on the reverse along with a whole set of initials that I imagine are the men who contributed their paintbrushes. No LB for Bowlst. No ED, either. For erectile dysfunction, in case you didn’t get it. No ED.” He was trying not to laugh.

  I smacked his arm. “Focus. Do you think there’s any DNA on these?”

  That set him off laughing.

  “I meant from the skin,” I said, scowling, but I took a step back from the canvas, suddenly suspicious of any splotches of white.

  “I’m sure there is, but we don’t have the resources to test it.”

  Meaning that we’d have to go through the courts, get warrants and so forth, turn the painting over to the detectives working the case. Detectives who might be part of the conspiracy against Massimo.

  I moved to the side, my light working along the canvases. The toe of my sneaker kicked something, which banged along the ground.

  I looked down, then knelt next to a pallet and stuck my hand underneath. My nose wrinkled as my hand pushed past cobwebs, and I tried not to think about black widow spiders or territorial rats—like imagining them and their sharp fangs would make them manifest, spring forward to puncture my fingers…

  My fingertips touched cool metal, and I grabbed it, yanked my hand back so quickly that the pallet’s rough wood scraped against my wrist.

  Standing, I turned the chewed metal lock over in my hand. “Try the key in this,” I said. I would have tossed it at Rob, but I didn’t want to hit him in the partial darkness, so instead I walked it over.

  He paused in his gleeful perusal of the X-rated artwork. “Check this one out,” he said, tapping the wrapper he’d peeled open like a banana.

  I took a look. It was a very realistic and well-rendered self-portrait of JD. Nude. Of course.

  Between his legs, the impression of a flaccid penis was pressed into the canvas. In bright red. Because the portrait was scaled down, the phallus was proportionally large; however, it wasn’t a particularly large or impressive cock. I looked at JD’s sly, sexy grin and doubted he’d gotten many complaints.

  “The key fits,” Rob muttered. “Someone cut off the lock. Whoever came here was looking for something. I wonder if they found it.”

  I turned the painting over, curious to see the painting’s name. “The best of us both,” I read aloud. It was dated just six weeks prior. “Let’s get photos of the fronts and backs of all these paintings. We can cross-reference them to the business cards I swiped.”

  Rob grinned. “Do you think he made the dicks bigger on the commissioned paintings? You know, inflating them a little to keep the patrons happy. I wonder if any of these canvases have a glory hole in them.”

  I rolled my eyes and quickly rewrapped the painting and carried it to the car.

  “What are you doing?” Rob asked.

  “It’s a souvenir,” I said. “Take photos of the others.” I had a very good reason for choosing the self-portrait, but if Rob was going to be immature about the whole thing, he didn’t deserve to know it.

  But I couldn’t stick to my guns, and I ended up telling him over a meal of enormous burritos. “That title… I think it’s Bowlst and JD together. The best of us both.”

  “I’m as vain as the next man,” Rob said, “but I don’t think that being told that my dick is my best feature would flatter me.”

  “Really?” I had to think about it. Not about Rob—dear god, definitely not that—but about vain men and their relationships with their penises. Maybe Rob had a point. “You think they were having a fight or something when he did that one?”

  “Could be. I don’t know how we’re going to test the DNA on it, though.”

  “Maybe we don’t have to,” I said. “What if Bowlst was the one who broke into the storage facility? Suppose he didn’t find what he wanted because it didn’t have his initials tagged on the back?”

  “I don’t follow,” Rob said. “I mean, what you said makes sense, but it won’t help us get closer to identifying the killer, and we already know that Bowlst was the boyfriend.”

  I leaned in. “We could announce a special art sale to lure him out. We could say we have art by the late JD, featuring his secret lover.”

  Rob shook his head. “Even if he heard about it, even if he believed it, it’s not like he’d be dumb enough to flip out or go on a rampage.”

  “He might.” I pushed the bowl of spicy salsa across the table.

  Rob waved it away. “Even if he did, so what? The guy was having an extramarital affair with a man who was murdered. He’s a public figure. He doesn’t have to be the killer to be worried about details of his shenanigans leaking to the public.”

  “Au contraire, mon frère,” I said, though I didn’t have the perfect followup to the expression, which I’d been dying to use ever since my Paris trip. “When we make the sale to him, we can hint that we know, see how he takes it.” I forked up a clump of partially melted cheddar. “Ok, so it’s ridiculous, but right now we have absolutely no access to Bowlst. We need to talk to him. This is better than nothing.”

  Rob still looked skeptical. I couldn’t blame him. It was a long shot at best.

  He ordered another beer. “This PI work is more difficult than I thought it would be,” he said. “But it’s more interesting, too.”

  I decided not to tell him how painfully boring it had been to follow Neil and Massimo around. Selfish of me, sure, but whenever Rob and I worked together, it was always more fun.

  Chapter 12

  Back in the motel, I let Rob shower first while I checked the mattress for signs of bedbug infestations. It seemed clean enough, though I wasn’t completely sure what to look for.

  When Rob came out, I went in, taking my phone with me—I didn’t want to chance missing Corbin’s call.

  My precaution was in vain. No one called.

  I showered, toweled off, and applied hand lotion to whatever skin I could reach. It couldn’t counteract whatever harsh cleanser was in the small square bar of motel soap.

  Good thing I hadn’t used the shampoo. That was one advantage of having a mess of curls for hair… If I skipped a shampoo, it didn’t make much difference.

  I’d brought one of Corbin’s T-shirts to sleep in, along with a pair of yoga pants I’d bought on sale a year earlier. Worried about creepy crawlies, I pulled my socks as high up to my knees as possible.

  Rob was already in the bed closest to the door. He was looking at his phone, but I could tell from the slow blinks he took that he was minutes away from sleep.

  “Did you take your contacts out?” I asked.

  “Don’t need to. They’re good for a month.” He plugged his phone into the charger.

  “Well, I miss your glasses.”

  “You used to check your reflection in them,” he said.

  It was true. “Where’s Millie?” I asked. The dog didn’t belong to Jennifer, but she sure as hell didn’t belo
ng to Rob, either.

  Rob didn’t answer for a long time. I was busy putting my dirty clothes into my hanging bag, and I assumed he’d simply fallen asleep, but just as I was zipping the bag closed, he said, “Jennifer’s taking care of her.”

  “Really?” I turned to look at him.

  “Jennifer is housesitting for me,” he said with a lazy grin that I knew was a bit forced.

  He liked Jennifer, and Rob didn’t get attached to anyone. I’d never seen him throw himself at a woman before, and while I didn’t know the details of what had happened, they’d definitely spent some time together.

  Not enough time, at least not by Rob’s estimation.

  As for Jennifer… She clearly liked him, but her situation was complicated.

  Jennifer had told me that she was seeing someone else, an on-again, off-again sort of relationship. The man had been her trainer, and I guessed he was at the very least a spy, and quite possibly an assassin. Regardless, whenever he went off on a job, they both knew there was a chance he wasn’t coming back.

  For that reason, they broke up whenever he left.

  The whole situation sounded heartbreaking. The guy was forty-one, which seemed too old to be living like that. I was glad that Corbin had quit. Five years of it had fucked him up. Sure, he was well-adjusted, but there was a darkness to him.

  The things he had done had taken their toll.

  I couldn’t imagine what he would have been like if he’d stuck with it another eleven years. It made me wonder what kind of relationship Jennifer could really have with her guy. Maybe the constant life-or-death stakes gave their time together a certain urgency?

  “What are you thinking?” Rob had an arm across his forehead, shielding his eyes from the bare overhead light bulb.

  “You and Jennifer,” I answered truthfully. “We had a little chat the other day.”

  This made him sit up, wide awake. “What did she say?”

  I shrugged and ducked back into the bathroom for my phone. “She likes you, and it’s complicated,” I said as I turned off the bathroom light. I padded to my bed and got in.

  “It is complicated,” he said.