Hell You Say

by Josh Lanyon

  “I am disappointed,” he said.

  “Don’t be,” I said.

  Betty Sansone came puffing up. She leaned against the tail of the Mercedes. “Savant’s gone,” she said.

  Garibaldi turned to me. I shrugged. He pointed at me, abracadabra style. “You will die.”

  “So will you. That’s life.” I turned to the gatekeeper. “Get out of the way.”

  Peter looked to Garibaldi. Garibaldi seemed momentarily nonplussed, as though he couldn’t understand why I hadn’t died to order. The other car door opened. Ava got out. “Grab him!” she commanded.

  Peter and Betty moved forward, then stopped as the familiar sound of sirens in the night came wafting on the breeze. Betty turned and pelted back toward the house.

  Garibaldi stretched out both hands as though he planned on levitating me. “Spirits of the Abyss, Lords of Hell, cast your darkness on his shell. Break him, burn him, in the night, destroy my enemy with thy might —”

  “Open the gate, Peter,” Guy’s voice said from the other side of the iron bars, and Peter spun to face him.

  That prosaic request seemed to throw Garibaldi momentarily off his stride. He swung around, the cape gently unfurling in his wake.

  “For Christ’s sake, stop him!” exclaimed Ava. And when no one moved, “Pull yourselves together.”

  For Christ’s sake? I bit back a shaky laugh. “Come on, it’s over,” I said. “The cops will be here in less than a minute.” I walked toward the gate. Motionless, Peter blocked my way, one hand gripping the metal bars.

  “Peter,” Guy said urgently, “Don’t make it worse. Let him out.”

  “No,” cried Ava. “Listen to me!”

  “Lady, get real,” I said. “Or do you think you can kill me, Guy, Savant, and the caterers — and the cops won’t notice?”

  Peter moved aside, swinging open the gate, and squeezing out past Guy. He disappeared into the night, his footsteps fading as he ran.

  Garibaldi said to me, “Death and despair is your future now.”

  “Blue denims and prison food are yours,” I said and slammed the gate behind me.

  “Are you okay?” Guy asked. He put his hands to my face as though examining me for signs of bewitchment.

  “Yes. Thanks to you.”

  “I’m sure you’d have come up with a Plan B.” He seemed to recall himself, letting me go.

  The blue sedan screeched up the drive, swerved around the Mercedes, and began to honk furiously for us to open the gate. Ignoring this, I said to Guy, “Savant is stashed in the shed with the trash bins. Have the cops use luminol when they examine the sculpture by the swimming pool. I think it’s an altar.”

  His eyes looked stricken. Then he said, “What do you mean? Where will you be?”

  I said, “Will you do me a favor? Keep my name out of it, if you can?”

  “What are you talking about? They all know you were here.” He gestured to the frantically honking Betty, and Garibaldi and Ava who were arguing furiously across the top of the Mercedes.

  “I don’t think they’re going to have much to say to the cops. The last thing any of them want is another witness to testify against them.”

  Guy’s eyes were colorless in the moonlight. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I am. And for reasons that I can’t go into, I’m pretty sure the cops won’t push you to offer my name up. There’s plenty here to convict them all without me.”

  “But…if I take credit for finding Savant….”

  “You might be able to redeem yourself in the eyes of the faculty and parents who believe this was your fault.”

  The sirens were getting louder.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said. “Or this will be moot.”

  “Adrien, this is…”

  I said, “Merry Christmas, Guy.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I was trapped in a Perry Como Christmas special.

  It had started at the crack of dawn. Dauten, mini-cam in hand, shouting stage directions like Cecil B. de Mille, gathered us around the towering Christmas tree and filmed us taking turns opening our presents — an embarrassing wealth of presents — not a tie in the bunch.

  “Everyone look at Emma. Look surprised, Emma!” Dauten would command. Or, “I missed that! Adrien, pretend to open that one again.”

  But I’d have been lying if I said I wasn’t touched. Natalie and Lauren and (according to the card) Lauren’s inexplicably absent husband had gone in on software called Journey to the Wild Divine, a kind of video game with biofeedback sensors. Emma had made me a colorful assortment of bookmarks. Dauten and Lisa had bought me a ticket for one of those Atlantis all-gay cruise ship vacations. Everything had been so carefully chosen and was so eagerly offered; it was excruciating.

  The gift exchange segment was followed of necessity by sharing a “wee dram” with Bill. Then we had to comparison shop the booze. Luckily, while we could still walk, the traditional suicide feast was served.

  This was followed by charades. Yep, charades.

  I kept that frozen smile in place, despite the headache, despite the indigestion, despite the nerve-shattering shrieks of laughter and screams of delight. I knew how Scrooge must have felt spending that first Christmas at his nephew’s: a smiling shipwreck victim sharing supper with cannibals.

  From dawn to dusk there was no letting up of the relentless holly-jolliness, and every single moment I tried to tune out, to think back over the events of the past week, one or the other of my self-appointed family members would make an effort to re-engage my flagging interest.

  Didn’t anyone want to take a nap or go for a walk or watch TV? No, they kept hovering. Did they have me on a suicide watch? And here I thought I was coping so well.

  It wasn’t until Emma finally went off to play the piano that Lisa said very casually, “We saw Jake on the telly last night. He’s certainly getting a lot of press. I expect they’ll make him Chief of Police one of these days. Have they found That Boy yet?”

  She meant Angus. Peter Verlane had been picked up within hours of the police raid on Garibaldi’s Bel Air estate. “They think he’s in Mexico, maybe,” I remarked.

  “So you’ll have to hire someone at the bookstore, won’t you?”

  “Yes, and I don’t want to talk about it now.”

  She smiled a fleeting satisfied smile, leaning back against the sofa cushions. Emma, seated at the piano, plinked out “My Favorite Things” for the third time in a row.

  “Unbelievable,” Bill remarked, “that Oliver could have been involved in that stuff — in murder — it’s absolutely unbelievable.”

  “I believe it,” Lisa said. “He was always a tad too…intense. Something in his eyes…” She shivered delicately.

  “When I think of the possible ramifications,” Bill said. “Some of the deals he was part of.” He knocked back another snootful of Laphroaig and held the bottle up for me.

  I shook my head.

  “He took a lot of people in,” Lisa said. “As for Ava…any woman who would even think of wearing red satin to her wedding is a danger to herself and the community.”

  “I heard on the news that they found over a hundred scrolls in his wine cellar. Scrolls written in blood by people selling their souls to the Devil.” Natalie’s eyes sparkled with ghoulish delight. Come to think of it, maybe she was a good fit for the bookstore.

  “Fifty-six,” I said. “They didn’t just sign their souls away. They signed off on property, making Garibaldi the beneficiary of their wills.”

  “So bizarre.”

  Lauren, who had been rather subdued all day — pining perhaps for her missing, life-sized Ken doll — said, “Human sacrifice. That’s the part I can’t believe. And in Bel Air, of all places. How many people did they kill to honor their so-called demon?”

  “Who knows? So far they’ve confessed to five, including the girl they left at Angus’s to try and implicate him.”

  “He was already implicated,” Lisa reminded me too sw
eetly.

  I ignored this. Over at the piano, Emma began “My Favorite Things” yet again.

  “He was obviously insane,” Bill said. “Oliver, I mean. It’s amazing he never showed any sign of it. You wouldn’t believe the genius the man had for business.”

  I opened my mouth, but thought better of it.

  “Adrien, you look so much like your father,” Lisa said suddenly.

  The rest of them studied me with interest. Bill reached over, poured me another shot from the bottle of his magic elixir Laphroaig.

  Lisa prattled on. “It’s uncanny. Of course, he has my eyes. And my nose. And my hands. And he gets his love of the arts from me.”

  I bit my tongue — one of the two things I was truly sure were my own.

  The phone rang, mercifully halting what appeared to be the “Chopsticks” version of “My Favorite Things.”

  Natalie said brightly, “I guess we’ll see all the details on Sixty Minutes.”

  “There’s a guy on the phone asking for you,” Emma called.

  Before I had time to acknowledge the surge of disbelieving hope, she corrected herself. “I mean his name is Guy.” She was smiling, finding that amusing.

  How had Snowden managed to track me here? Witchcraft?

  Emma waited at the phone like a junior PA, ready to jettison this unsolicited call if I said the word.

  I glanced around. Everyone in the room seemed to be looking at me, smiling at me, waiting for me to decide.

  Oh, well, what the hell.

  I took the call.

  About the Author

  A distinct voice in gay fiction, multi-award-winning author JOSH LANYON has been writing gay mystery, adventure and romance for over a decade. In addition to numerous short stories, novellas, and novels, Josh is the author of the critically acclaimed Adrien English series, including The Hell You Say, winner of the 2006 USABookNews awards for GLBT Fiction. Josh is an Eppie Award winner and a three-time Lambda Literary Award finalist.

  Find other Josh Lanyon titles at www.josh.lanyon.com

  Thank you for buying this book. It is only because readers like you continue purchase fiction that writers can still afford to write.

  ~ Josh Lanyon ~