Dangerous Thing

by Josh Lanyon

  Had he ever had sex with a guy that didn’t involve ritual and role-playing? What was he like in bed with a chick?

  “Here’s mud in your eye,” I said. We clinked coffee mugs. I’m not sure what was in his but mine was straight coffee. Concussion and alcohol don’t mix, although by now my headache merely felt like the worst hangover of my life.

  Despite his misgivings, Jake seemed more relaxed than I’d ever seen him. I speculated it was because we were so thoroughly alone, unobserved by curious or judging eyes.

  “How’s the book going?” he asked idly, glancing at my open laptop. “What’s it called, Death for a Ducat?”

  “Wrong play. You’re thinking of Hamlet.” Jake snorted at the idea he would be thinking of any such thing. “Mine’s based on Titus Andronicus, the play so bad Shakespearean scholars have tried for centuries to prove Shakespeare didn’t write it.”

  “Good choice. So tell me what your book’s about.”

  I had told him several times what my book was about, but I had known even then he wasn’t really listening. I offered the highlights and Jake rolled his eyes or shook his head depending on how far out of touch with reality my plot machinations seemed.

  “Aren’t you supposed to write what you know?”

  “What do I know? I’m a thirty-something gay man with a dodgy heart. I sell books for a living. Who wants to read about that?”

  “Good point.”

  “I don’t have a lot of practical experience with crime.”

  “You seem to be a magnet for it though.”

  “Don’t try to cheer me up.”

  Jake grinned his crooked grin and reached for another chocolate. “It is a little suspicious from a cop’s perspective.”

  I set my coffee cup on the wooden floor and stretched widely. Despite the coffee I was crashing. This was the longest stretch of time I’d spent with Jake. I kind of hated for it to end.

  “How old is this place?” he queried, staring up at the wide and blackened ceiling beams.

  I focused on him with an effort. “This room was part of the original stage stop. It was built in 1847. The rest of the building isn’t quite as old. My great great grandfather started ranching in the early 1900s. He added on to the existing structure.”

  “It’s a nice chunk of property.”

  I nodded.

  “Funny to think of your relatives walking around these rooms, sitting where we are.”

  “Yep.” Not something I really thought about, but yes, I was the last of the line. At home in Pasadena that seemed incidental, but here I had a sense of history, of generations.

  Jake seemed to be pursuing a train of thought. He eyed the stacks of books, which I had neatly separated between paperbacks and hardcovers. “So this is kind of a working vacation for you?”

  I guessed that this was about as close as he would come to asking what had triggered my Bat-Outta-Hell. I prefer frankness, but our friendship was so delicately balanced, I wasn’t sure it could survive plain speaking. Not at this point.

  “Yeah, something like that,” I replied. “Turns out Granna was a mystery buff. She’s got a collection of first editions to rival the Library of Congress.” I filled him in on the thrilling discovery that my favorite mystery writer had a male pseudonym. “I’ve got this theory that Inspector Bull and Mr. Pinkerton are closeted gays.”

  I was mostly joking but Jake said crisply, “See, that’s the kind of queer thinking I despise. According to the fags everybody who’s anybody was really homosexual. You name it. Michelangelo, Alexander Hamilton, Errol Flynn, Walt Whitman. It’s pathetic.”

  His angry scorn silenced me.

  “You’re just kidding yourself if you believe being a fag is common or normal or some lifestyle choice.” His gaze was hard and shiny like river pebbles.

  “I don’t think it’s a choice. It isn’t for me anyway.”

  He said bitterly, “It sure as hell isn’t for me.”

  If it were, Jake would choose not to be gay. No news there.

  I squeezed the back of my neck, trying to ease the pain knotting my bruised muscles. Jake continued to glower into the fireplace, the shadows flickering across his profile.

  Cowboy wisdom: never itch for something you ain’t willing to scratch for.

  “I’m going to turn in,” I said.

  No answer.

  I rose and went into the bedroom, stripped off and rolled myself in my sleeping bag, the flannel feeling like a caress on my aching body. The old feather mattress felt like a cloud beneath my tired bones. A dusty cloud, granted. I sighed and then nearly jumped out of my skin when Jake spoke from right above me.

  “Roll over. I’ll rub your back for you.”

  “Uh —” My voice made a sound it hadn’t made since it changed.

  I turned on my belly and Jake unzipped my bag like you’d unpeel something soft and vulnerable in its shell, which is how I felt as he laid his big hands on my shoulders.

  “Relax.”

  Oh sure. I caught my breath then expelled it as Jake rested his palm on the small of my back. He didn’t move, didn’t speak. I waited; the hair at the nape of my neck prickled. There was something unpredictable and dangerous in the silent dark.

  There was a whole lot about Jake I didn’t know or understand.

  “Stop thinking,” he said quietly. “Just let go. Let yourself feel.”

  I closed my eyes and concentrated on the weight of his hand, the dry warmth of his skin, the length of his fingers. Hard hands. Callused fingertips. But the touch was comforting. You wouldn’t think that something as simple as someone resting their hand on your back could comfort, but it did. The heat from his hand seemed to wash through my body, suffusing my nerves and muscles. I could feel that touch through to my genitals, as though he had cupped my balls.

  He flattened the heel of his hand against the base of my spine, smoothing back and forth. I felt my spine lengthen, my hips spreading. It wouldn’t take much to turn this into something else, but Jake’s touch was non-erotic. He began to knead my back and shoulders, slowly, thoroughly, but still easy, still … gentle. He worked his way along the length of my arms, lightly stroked the back of my fingers. I shivered. Within a couple of minutes I was utterly relaxed, basking in that healing warmth.

  I murmured my pleasure. He made a soft sound that could have been a hushed laugh.

  Resting his hand on my tailbone once more, Jake positioned his other palm in front and slid his hand up the length of my spine as though erasing the kinks, vertebra by vertebra, until the pads of his fingers pressed into the base of my skull. He gave the back of my neck a gentle squeeze and I gave another shiver.

  “Better?”

  I nodded.

  Jake repeated that careful pushing motion over and over until I was melting through the flannel bag lining into the ticking of the old mattress. I felt flushed, boneless, totally at ease. My head stopped hurting for the first time since I’d left the hospital. You hear about the healing power of touch. I felt it now — and from the last person I’d have expected.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been treated to a simple back rub. There was a lot to be said for being touched, stroked, petted.

  At long last Jake’s hands stilled.

  “Good-night,” he whispered.

  “‘Night,” I mumbled on the edge of sleep.

  A moment later sleep disappeared in a jolt of awareness as Jake kissed the nape of my neck and ... departed.

  Chapter Six

  Judging by the small off-color mushroom cloud hanging over the hill the next morning, Sheriff Billingsly and the county appeared to be waging war on drugs.

  Jake suggested we drive into Basking for breakfast.

  We wound up at Granny Parker’s Pantry where we had the spacious dining room with its shady view of Main Street America Past all to ourselves.

  We ordered from a large lady in a sunny yellow uniform that matched the building’s exterior perfectly.

  “After we eat I�
��m going to do some checking around,” Jake remarked, tossing his menu aside. “Can you keep yourself entertained?”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “I just want to check out a couple of things.”

  “Like what?”

  He shrugged.

  Into my silence he added, “One guy poking around asking questions is enough. Two is going to attract the wrong kind of attention.”

  I supposed I should be pleased that he was showing an interest. And this was his area of expertise, not mine. But his assumption that I would toddle off and amuse myself shopping or sightseeing nettled.

  The waitress brought our breakfast. Jake had his usual smorgasbord: slab of ham, four eggs, biscuits & gravy, and large orange juice. He regarded my bowl of oatmeal, forehead wrinkling.

  “That’s it? That’s all you’re eating?”

  “Unlike you I don’t have to sustain the equivalent of a small country.”

  Unexpectedly he reddened. “This is muscle, not fat.”

  I didn’t doubt it. What I’d seen of Jake so far was all lean mean fighting machine. I was surprised he’d be sensitive about it.

  “I didn’t say you were fat. I said there was a lot of you.”

  With an evil glance, he subsided into his coffee cup. I realized the waitress had heard this exchange and was scandalized to the fibers of her hair net. Do heterosexual males not discuss weight? Was it something in the tone of our voices? Or was she alarmed because she had pegged us as the infamous dope dealing, 9-1-1-calling foreigners? Whatever it was, I hoped Jake didn’t take notice. He was so comfortable under his imagined cloak of invisibility. I didn’t want this vacation from his warped reality spoiled.

  I had my third cup of coffee as Jake polished off the last of his fried eggs.

  “I guess I could drop by the library. I need a copy of Titus. I forgot mine at home.”

  Jake nodded, not really listening.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said at last, wiping his plate down with biscuit, “about who tipped the sheriffs to the pot.”

  “It could have been anyone. Hikers.”

  “Where are these archeologists camped? Just over that little mountain, aren’t they?”

  “Yes.” I followed his line of reasoning. “Anyone of them could have noticed the stuff growing and called the cops. But why?”

  “Retaliation? You’re threatening to pull the plug on their sandbox.”

  “Maybe.” I dwelt on this. “That’s pretty vindictive for a bunch of pothunters.” But were they all amateurs? Students were not technically amateurs. Dr. Marquez and Dr. Shoup were not students and did not strike me as amateurs either. Dr. Shoup seemed like a man who took things — himself in particular — seriously. “Maybe there’s another purpose behind calling the cops. Maybe they need me out of the way.”

  Jake looked pained. “‘Out of the way?’ Adrien —”

  “No, listen a sec, Jake….” He listened grimly. “Suppose the point of that phone call was to keep me busy with legal hassles so I wouldn’t have time to worry about who was digging what up where.”

  “Huh?”

  “Suppose, just suppose, there’s some — some — skullduggery going on in Spaniard’s Hollow?”

  “Don’t tell me, let me guess,” Jake said. “They’re digging for buried treasure.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that.”

  Jake’s eyebrows rose. “You don’t? That’s something.”

  “It’s just a theory.”

  “Or that crack on the head.”

  “Yeah, but that’s to the point, isn’t it. Who hit me on the head, and why?”

  “They weren’t trying to kill you or they would’ve finished the job.”

  “Not kill me, just get me out of the way.”

  “Agreed,” Jake said crisply, “because you got in the way of searching Harvey’s trailer. That doesn’t have anything to do with skullduggery in the mountains.”

  “It might.”

  He pushed his plate away. “Last night you were talking about a cop’s gut instinct. My gut instinct tells me these two things are not connected.”

  “Let’s hope the equipment is functioning this time around,” I commented. “Two months ago your gut told you I was a serial killer.”

  Jake’s eyes narrowed like a tiger tired of playing with his food.

  “Hit rewind.” He tapped his forehead with his index finger. “I didn’t think you were a serial killer. I thought you were not telling everything you knew, which was right. I thought you were not being stalked.”

  “Which was wrong.”

  “Which was ....” He took a deep breath.

  “Wrong,” I prompted.

  “Wrong,” he conceded.

  I grinned. “Just wanted to hear it.”

  * * * * *

  Following breakfast Jake and I went our separate ways, agreeing to meet back at the car by noon.

  I suspected the real reason Jake didn’t want me playing Watson was he would be homing for the sheriff substation where I would be even more persona non grata than he. That was okay by me. I had my own hypothesis, and I could do my own kind of footwork in the library.

  I found the library wedged between a coffeehouse and a feed store. It was the kind of place I love, the kind of place they don’t build anymore: weathered brick trimmed in white gingerbread. According to the brass placard by the front door Basking library had been built in the 1923.

  Inside it was dark and quiet. Antique tables, lovingly polished over decades of dents and scratches, gleamed in the light of green banker’s lamps. Ceiling-high bookshelves were crammed with faded volumes. This was my turf just as the mean streets of LA were Jake’s.

  There was one computer, monopolized by a pugnacious senior cross-referencing mysteries featuring feline detectives. Knowing that could take awhile, I bee-lined for the librarian, requesting books on local history. She directed me toward Mark Twain and Roughing It.

  “I was hoping for something on Basking itself. The gold rush years, mining history. Maybe lost mines?”

  She looked stumped but then brightened. “Our local historical society put together something like that a few years back. You can probably still buy a copy at Royale House. The museum is right around the corner.”

  “Great. Thanks.”

  From the way her eyes flickered behind the rhinestone-framed glasses I wondered if my reputation had preceded me. I gave her a reassuring smile and headed for the wooden card catalog located beneath a display of artwork by patients of the local hospital — the mental ward apparently.

  I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for. I knew there were mines on Granna’s property, no mystery there; this was mining country. I had never heard of the Red Rover, nor of any mine that had panned out in a big way. It was logical that archeologists would be interested in old mining camps. But why this mining camp? The Sierra Nevadas are sprinkled with abandoned mines and placers. I couldn’t find a mention of the Red Rover in any book or article.

  It was getting on toward lunch. I walked over to Royale House and bought one of their Histories of Basking Township.

  “You’re not taking the tour?” the girl at the counter inquired sardonically. She was tall and slender with long black hair shiny as a raven’s wing and beautiful sloe eyes. Part Indian, I thought. The Tuolumne Reservation was on the other side of the pine forest, and the Tule Reservation by Porterville was one of the largest in the state.

  “What tour?”

  “For three dollars you can walk through the house. Three stories. Count ’em, three.” She pointed to a shelf of Walkmans which must have taken the place of a decrepit tour guide. “For another two dollars you can enjoy high tea on the patio.”

  Soggy egg salad sandwiches and tea from tea bags if I knew my Historical Society high teas.

  “Who were the Royales?”

  She quoted, “In 1849, Abraham Royale came west to make his fortune in the gold fields.” She paused to verify my rapt attention.
“Abe wasn’t much of a miner; however, he did make his fortune by marrying the only daughter of a wealthy Chinese merchant. Unfortunately polite society — such as it was in Basking in those days — would not accept the “slant-eyed” daughter of a Chinese immigrant. Royale was an ambitious man. He traded in his Chinese bride, minus her dowry, for a local girl.”

  Something told me this was not the official version. “What happened to the Chinese bride?”

  She smiled, her teeth very white. “There’s no record. Probably died of a broken heart like all gently reared girls of her era.” So said the girl of this era.

  “Tactful. What happened to Royale?”

  “Ah. Now there’s another story. Royale’s golden-haired Anglo bride ran off with the smithy a year after their society wedding.”

  “The smithy?”

  “The blacksmith. Smithing is an ancient craft you know. A real manly man kind of profession.”

  Her tone was needling although I couldn’t imagine why. I asked, “Did Royale die of a broken heart?”

  “No. They say —” her voice lowered dramatically “he died of the curse.”

  “Curse? What curse? Don’t tell me the broken-hearted Chinese bride put a hex on him. What kind of gently reared girl behaves like that?”

  She tucked a silky strand of black hair behind her ear. “To be honest there are several stories. The only thing we know for sure is Royale fell down the staircase right over there and broke his neck.”

  I turned to inspect the ornately carved grand staircase. Falling down that would be like tumbling down a cliff. I nodded toward the enormous portrait hanging over the marble fireplace.

  “Is that Royale?”

  “That’s him.”

  At ten feet tall Royale made an imposing figure. Dark hair, dark eyes and curling mustachios. A man cast in the heroic mold.

  “One legend goes that he saw the ghost of his first wife and fell to his death.”

  “Is the house haunted?”

  She shrugged. “Not that I’ve noticed. Not that I believe in ghosts.”

  Wow. How unstereotypical Native American.

  As though reading my mind she added dryly, “Don’t tell the tribal elders.”