by Rhys Ford
Armed with a venti skinny vanilla latte, a chocolate croissant, and a pound of peanut M&M’s for later that afternoon, he strolled into the morgue prepared to beg, borrow, and steal any time she might have to spare to jumpstart his case, his partner and best friend, Kel Sanchez, ambling along beside him.
The morgue was, as always, a cold, hard place to walk into. At first glance, the place was starkly professional and edged with clean lines, resembling more of a futuristic R&D think tank than the first place a corpse stopped on its journey toward its final rest. The dead were all that mattered here, and none of the staff, as far as Kane knew, cut corners when chasing down answers to questions most people hated to ask. There was a bit of the macabre humor often found on crime scenes dotting the walls and desks, little mementos reminding the living that death came for them all. He smiled at the plastic skull vase filled with pink daisies but sobered when he thought of the number of times he’d gone through the double doors at the end of the hall.
He’d started his day early, rolling out of bed before the sun thought about kissing the city’s horizon, and even the dog hadn’t been willing to go outside to go to the bathroom by the time Kane had his first cup of coffee. He’d left Dude asleep on the still warm bed and kissed what he’d hoped was the top of Miki’s head under the mound of blankets tucked against the far wall.
Kane was going to probably end his day the same way, moving aside a sleeping dog and digging Miki out of the blankets so he could kiss him good night.
“No woman is going to want M&M’s this early in the morning, Morgan.” Kel flirted with a teasing smile at one of the residents walking by. The woman rolled her eyes, obviously used to Kel’s ways, but her snort was more amusement than disgust. “Is that how you smooth things over with Miki? Candy? And it’s not even good candy. If you’d been serious, you would have gotten Godiva’s.”
“We’re in San Francisco, asshole,” Kane shot back. “It’s Ghirardelli’s here, remember? And just you watch, boyo, I know what I’m about.”
“You just think you can serve up anything you want in that look-at-me-Lucky-Charms accent of yours and you can get away with stealing the moon.” Kel sipped at his coffee, then blew at the tiny opening in the lid. “Damn, this shit is hot. I’m telling you, I called ahead. They’re stacked knees to armpits in dead bodies. There’s no way in hell we’re jumping the line.”
“A package of M&M’s says you’re wrong,” Kane replied, rattling the bag. “I don’t want anything other than verification of ID. I’ve got a name, but I don’t want to go off half-cocked in this. Not with Book holding back the DA’s office for me. He just handed me the case to piss them off, but we step wrong in this and he’s going to have our heads. We get ID verified, and then we’ll start asking questions.”
“I’ve got one question.” Kel nudged him with his elbow. “Is the case we’re working on that woman’s murder or are we going to go looking for St. John’s mother? Because my gut tells me we might be starting off with the first but we’re going to end up with the second.”
“I don’t know if he wants her found,” Kane admitted, shouldering the morgue’s door open and holding it so Kel could go by. “But if she turns up—dead or alive—that’s going to be for him to deal with. I just got to make sure he doesn’t fall apart while doing it.”
It turned out Kane didn’t have to beg. The pleasant-faced doctor stood over the woman’s body while an assistant took photos. Horan looked up when the inspectors entered, her eyes lighting up behind her face shield at the sight of either the coffee or the M&M’s. Pulling off her gloves, she strode over to the cordoned-off area where morgue visitors were allowed to stand. After tucking her gloves into her pocket and putting her face shield on a rolling stainless steel table, she took the coffee from Kane’s outstretched hand and murmured a soft litany of thanks.
“If those M&M’s and whatever is in that bag are for me, you can put them on the table next to you. And if they aren’t, whatever you want isn’t ever going to happen,” she teased. “You don’t walk into my lab with a bag like that if they’re not mine. That’s just not right.”
“They’re yours. The other’s a pain au chocolat. I brought them hoping I could get you to look at the woman you’ve got on the slab right now.” Kane set the bags down. “Bribes are still yours.”
“I don’t call them bribes, I refer to them as gifts I sometimes share with my staff as a thank you from the SFPD for jobs well done.” She eyed the M&M’s. “Except for those. The yellow bag is mine. As to your gunshot victim, she’s connected to another case that came in—or may be connected—I’ll leave it to your side of the wall to figure it out.”
Putting the coffee down, Horan picked up a tablet, then keyed in her password to unlock the screen. Kane could see the report she pulled up was only half filled, but enough was there for him to get started on digging through the woman’s life.
“I had her name as Sandy Chaiprasit, but I was hoping we could confirm that with a driver’s license or something in her personal effects. They took her purse into evidence and I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet,” Kane said, leaning against the counter, being careful not to dislodge any of the equipment behind him. “Or at least that’s the name she gave Edie Price, Miki’s manager.”
“Price was the other victim, yes?” Horan asked. “Is she doing okay?”
“Yeah, she is out of recovery and in a private room,” Kel replied. “They’re hoping to watch her for a few days, and then she can be released. I don’t know if she’s planning to stay in the city or not. Morgan here might have more information there.”
“I don’t know yet. I don’t think anyone’s talked about it, but I’d rather she stay in the city so we have access to her as we work on the case. She lives down in Los Angeles, so it’s not that she’s far, but traveling with a gunshot wound isn’t a good idea.” Kane brought his mind back to something Horan said earlier. “You mentioned you think she’s connected to another case. How?”
“Not necessarily how, but what.” She tapped on the screen a few times, opening up attachments to her unfinished report. Turning the tablet around, she zoomed in on what Kane thought was a woman’s thigh. “Do you see this? Same symbol was on a middle-aged Chinese man who was killed in an alleged robbery night before last. His was on his chest, but the same marking. Neither are well done, more like the kind of tattoo someone had done in prison or someone’s garage. Definitely not professional ink quality, and patchy.
“I would say, if I had to guess, they were done not by machine but by hand, possibly with a single needle and ballpoint pen ink.” Horan pulled up another page, putting the woman’s tattoo next to another rendering of the symbol, this one on a stretch of darker, hairier skin. “They’ve finally started to fill in the gang database with known markings. This one came up, but there wasn’t any information around it, it just referred me to the Chinatown Gang Task Force.”
“Holy shit,” Kel murmured what was going through Kane’s mind. “Do you see that shit, Morgan?”
“Do you recognize it?” she asked, turning the screen so Kane could get a better look.
“Oh yeah, I know it.” Hell, he did more than recognize it. Kane’d kissed it, bitten it, and washed soap from the muscled curve of the upper arm it sat on. He knew the taste of the symbol, or at least the one he’d been intimate with, and now more than ever, he was going to hate what he needed to bring to his own front door. “It’s the jacked-up almost-kanji symbol they put on Miki when he was a baby and the same one that was on the guy in Vegas, the dead one they lost. Jesus, last thing I want to do is pull him into something with this much death, but it doesn’t look like we have a damned choice.”
Chapter Three
Damien: Shit, that was… shit.
Rafe: I’d tell you to fuck off but that would mean you’d have to put some effort into something, and since you couldn’t seem to work your fingers on your guitar, I don’t think you’d be able to stroke your own dick off, Mitchell.
/>
Forest: Guys—
Damien: At least I was in tune!
Rafe: Yeah, if only tone-deaf Mongolian throat-singing penguins bought the fucking album.
Forest: Hey, guys… come on—
Damien: Listen you wanking—
Miki, glancing up from his notebook: Swear to fucking God, if I have to shove my fists into your mouths to shut you up, I’m okay with that. Trying to think here, fuckers.
Damien and Rafe fall quiet, shuffling about while making apologetic noises at each other.
Forest: (disgusted) Why the hell doesn’t anyone listen when I tell them to knock it off?
Rafe, muttering under his breath: Man, I love you but you’re kind of going to end up driving kids to school in between arena shows. You’re not really all that scary, even if your husband drives a tank at work.
—1:00 a.m. Saturday Recording
DAMIEN MITCHELL was both Miki’s savior and personal devil.
He never regretted following Damie that rainy night a long time ago. They’d been so young, so damn skinny, and so fucking hungry to take a bite of the world. It was funny, he could remember everything about the moment he heard a British-tinted voice call up to him from the alleyway below. Miki could still feel the uneven scrape of the fire escape’s peeling paint on the palms of his hands and the back of his neck where he leaned against its side. He’d been eating noodles—he thought he remembered—beef chow fun dry style, and the back-kitchen cook had shoved a few pieces of fried gau gee into his bowl that night, drizzling the crispy dumplings with a bit of shoyu and Coleman’s mustard.
He remembered the gau gee because he’d eaten it first, savoring the stinging saltiness of the shoyu-mustard mixture and the green-onion-rich pork inside.
There’d been a heavy rush that night, and his hands were wrinkled from hours of washing dishes and scraping food into bins. He’d been too young to waiter but old enough to bus tables, a distinction he was happy for because he was shitty with people yet could still score some of the tips at the end of the night. He’d run away from Shing and Vega only a few months before, living in hollowed-out foundations of old buildings or a rooftop he could reach climbing up a fire ladder.
He’d been listening to his music player, the first thing he bought when the restaurant’s owner handed him his pay envelope, cash instead of a check because he had no identification and he’d been willing to work for less than minimum wage. Food came with the gig, something Miki had been very thankful for, because what little money he made, he needed to save. He didn’t feel safe in Chinatown, but there was nowhere else for him to go. He avoided Shing as much as he could, skirting the area he knew the family frequented, and Vega was nowhere to be found, not that Miki had been looking for him. Others had pushed their fingers and other things into him, but Vega and Shing actually had owned him—or at least that’s what it’d felt like.
Miki was calculating how much it would take him to get out of the city when Janis Joplin cycled up into his playlist. He loved her voice, adored her writing, and he’d found every scrap of song she’d ever sang to load onto the battered device he’d gotten from a thrift store. Singing along with the woman he’d connected with, Miki hadn’t heard Damien’s approach, nor did he hear him stop beneath the fire escape Miki often used as a place to eat his late-night dinner.
But he sure as hell heard Damien when he cut through Janis’s song with a loud shout calling him out to play.
Miki answered that call. Keeping the job at the Chinese food place was a no-brainer, and so was moving into Damien’s roach-infested studio a few blocks away and then stealing a couple of bug bombs from the storeroom so he didn’t have to worry about sleeping with his mouth open. It took him about three weeks to believe Damie was serious about starting a band and wanting him as a lead singer, but as soon as his brain latched on to the idea, Miki hadn’t looked back.
Now, after everything they’d gone through and sitting pretty in a gorgeous refurbished warehouse with a full fridge and soft beds, Miki watched Damien attempt to add a third pickup to an old beater guitar they’d found at a going-out-of-business music store and wondered if he shouldn’t have questioned his sanity the moment Damien Mitchell asked him to be a part of his band.
Because the damned jerk never listened to a single thing Miki said… or at least not until the situation bit him in the ass and there was nothing else to try.
“That’s not going to work,” he said for the third time. “There isn’t enough room and what good is it? It’s going to sound like shit.”
“It can be done,” Damien muttered around the screwdriver he had clenched in his teeth. “I just haven’t done it myself before. Do me a favor, unwrap those strings.”
“No, because you’re not going to get this to work. You already have a three pickup with the Gibson, and you hate it because you hang your pick on the middle pickup.” Miki reached for the packages anyway, digging through the stack until he found a set of Ernie Ball’s. “Why are you going to make one yourself when it’s just going to piss you off and you won’t play it?”
“I’ll play it because I made it,” Damien reasoned. “Haven’t you ever done something just because you really wanted to do it?”
“Yeah, that’s how I ended up with you,” Miki replied, stretching out over the beanbag he’d dragged into the studio’s workroom.
“You sure that wasn’t just you looking for someplace to hide?” His brother in all but blood pinned Miki with a look as sharp as the end of the guitar string Miki’d just poked into his thumb. “Kind of like what you’re doing right now, about Edie and your mom.”
There was the one thing Miki hated about Damien Mitchell. It was the ability to punch through the walls Miki built up over the years, the thick, full-of-glass-shards fences he layered around himself. He knew he kept people at arm’s length. That wasn’t a surprise. Until Damien came along, he’d bled out emotionally every time he interacted with someone, a part of him constantly seeking someone to help him stop the pain, stop the terrors that lived in his soul and mind. The world hurt. Since as long as he could remember, it stabbed at him, carving him into little pieces for stronger and meaner people he couldn’t fight to consume.
Damie was the first brick in his wall, an anchor for Miki to build on, but that also meant he had an easy in. And if there was one thing Damien was never afraid to do, it was to pick Miki apart and scrape off the scabs he’d been ignoring.
“Edie’s going to be fine, remember? She’s already fighting with them to go back to LA. I tried to get her to stay here, but she said she would rather live with a pack of dogs by the river than share a place with the two of us. It’s like she’s been on the road with us or something.” Miki sucked on his pierced thumb pad, making a face at the taste of blood. He was sick of tasting his own blood, but life seemed to always serve him up a spoonful now and then. His knee hurt a little bit, more from the cold than overexertion, although the physical therapy he’d done two days ago stretched him out to the point of aching, and scrambling over the cement planters to get to Edie hadn’t helped. “I don’t know what this has to do with my mother. I told you, they’re not going to hand over the package to me until… actually, we don’t know when. Kane said he’d ask about it today, but Edie might have to ask for it.”
“Doesn’t she have to prove that it’s hers?” Damien asked, returning to digging at the guitar. “Or because it was handed to her, that makes it hers?”
“I guess that’s how they’re going to look at it, or at least Kane hopes.”
Damien’s eyes flicked up for a second, settling on Miki as he said, “Is that what you want? Do you want to know what’s inside that envelope? Or do you just want to bury it back up again?”
“Fuck you,” he spat. Miki was… angry, and he couldn’t find the beginning of it, the point where it started. “I wasn’t burying anything. She wasn’t even on my radar, now all of a sudden some woman I never knew existed is in the middle of my life, and there’s another one that�
��s dead that I can’t do anything about. How the hell is that hiding?”
“What are you going to do if they hand you that package? Are you going to look at it or are you going to shove it into one of the steamer trunks you’ve put all the Sinners stuff in?” It was another jab, a small slice but one so accurately aimed, it felt like Miki’s guts were pouring out when Damien turned back to the guitar. “I know you. I love you, but you pack everything away. Shit, you pack Kane away—”
“You fucking take that back.” The beanbag shifted underneath him as Miki struggled to sit up. “I do not hide Kane.”
“Really? Because I asked you if you are ever going to write him a love song and you told me you’re not ready to share him,” Damien responded, putting down the screwdriver. His blue eyes were alert and as sharp as always, but the sympathy in his brother’s face was almost too much for Miki. “What I’m saying is you keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, for somebody to hurt you. Shit, Sinjun, you’re pissed as fuck because I wasn’t here to deal with Dave and Johnny’s deaths. And I’m not saying it’s wrong to feel that, but—”
“I know. I fucking know it’s stupid.” Their road trip as a band had opened up old wounds for everyone, but Miki felt like he’d spent the time digging pieces of metal out from under his skin with a plastic spoon. He felt savaged by his emotions, the whispering thoughts he couldn’t chase away. They were like gnats, swarming into his nose and mouth, and they turned to a powdery bitterness on his tongue when he tried to stamp them out. “I just can’t… I can’t sort shit out in my head. It’s getting harder to write anymore, and….”
Damien set the torn-apart guitar to the side and tossed the screwdriver into the band’s toolbox. Crossing the small room, Damie nudged Miki’s leg with the back of his hand. “Move over, Sinjun.”
He moved.
The beanbag was big enough for both of them, but it was a little bit tight. It wasn’t the first time he’d shared a closed-in space with Damien, and it probably wouldn’t be the last, but for some reason, this time Miki couldn’t breathe. He sat on the bubble of some hard mix of emotions, and Damien was a thumbtack headed straight for him. Miki had never feared Damien, that was never anything he even remotely associated with his brother, but as Damien lowered himself into the microbead-stuffed oversize velvet pillow, Miki’s stomach clenched and he tasted metal in his spit.
