Love is a Bloodhound

by Reid Astor

  "No, you're not," he spits, dropping his arm and jabbing him violently with the curb of the crowbar, before hooking it on his collar and yanking him forward. "Now stay on the fucking ground. Pig." He is abhorring the strange wave of euphoria that is sweeping over him as the lights flicker overhead, bringing DeLane in and out of a blaring white illumination. This isn't the kind of view he's seen in years.

  He hates to think that what he's feeling may just be nostalgia, that a little voice whispers to him in the back of his head, Now when were you ever this good when you were making cappuccinos, Niklas Alexeivich? "Why haven't you had any cases, pig? Are you too dirty?" He whispers down at the man. "No one wants to hire a dirty pig?"

  "The police-" he cries. "The police have been- breathing down my neck, checking all my papers twice- since Bacchus Trades- I haven't been able to make one move in my office without the police asking why-" he looks up, hazel eyes pooling with a beggarly look. "I'm not a good lawyer, mister, I'm not. I'm just good at looking away when someone wants to bypass safety regulations or run through loopholes. That's all I've known- And now I can't do that."

  "Dumbass," Lars snorts, pacing up to Niklas' side and knocking the DeLane aside the head with his gun, mocking. "The police would love to let you take down Svetlana Morris. Especially if we put one or two of them men of the law in your pocket."

  The man shrivels further into himself as the gun brushes his sweating brow. "You want me to take down... Svetlana Morris?"

  "Nah. We want you to work for her favorite boytoy here. And if that means taking her down, beautiful, just don't ask where the money's coming from," Lars says, pointing the gun away at last and muttering something about being a beautiful example of gun safety. "The place is already a legal smorgasbord of fraud, so you should be in your own element, eh?" he gives the man an ineffectual prod with his boot and heads back, presumably to retrieve his shirt.

  "I don't understand."

  "You don't understand," Niklas breathes, telling himself to be calm, the man is already on his knees. Slowly, he unhooks the crowbar, making a show of arcing it further away and, every so often, watching the man's eyes follow it sway forward before heading back. "Playing along with you, you don't want to cooperate. Now, you still don't, so your brain is obviously useless to me, why don't I-"

  For the first, satisfying time this evening, Daniel DeLane screeches, just a little. "I'll do it. Any of it! I don't care anymore! Just don't hurt me!"

  "Nikky! Play nice," Lars gives a theatrical gasp of offense as he circles back around, dressed, this time offering up Niklas' shirt and jacket. He looks down at the lawyer with satisfaction, then back at Niklas, eyes bright with pleasure. "Great job, by the way."

  He shrugs, not particularly proud of himself, and prods DeLane. "Get up." Without waiting to see what the man does, he tosses the crowbar to the bed, takes the clothes and preoccupies himself with becoming decent again. “Are we done here?"

  "S'ppose so." Lars shrugs. He looks to DeLane, who is making frail motions of rocking back and forth on his ottoman and trying to relight his burned-out cigar. "Hey, Danny, I'll come by tomorrow to give you the details on the case. Try not to have any bodyguards around," he winks to the man cheerily.

  In a brittle voice, DeLane says, "Take your time."

  "Also," the man adds, looking round the now trashed room to the adjacent, shut doorway. "I'm assuming your records are all over there? Footage and everything?" His smile turns feral. "Very nice of you to point out all your blackmailing material, Mr. DeLane. If you and your ladies don't mind, I'll go in and gather a bit of it for myself. I’d like to speak to them, too, get to know their services… their stories with you…"

  The man goes impossibly more pale.

  * * *

  They exit the club through the front door, and backtrack down streets that darken block by block until they make it to the shelter and Lars' car- by that point, Niklas can barely contain his shivering as the cold bites down hard and jolts his muscles. Even with a jacket, the wind funneling in through the streets combined with a sun hours away from rising makes the air bite; he walks all the quicker to keep the chill off. There’s a strange quality to it all, like he’s not sure what year he’s in, and the darkness of the city is keeping him from finding out.

  By some small miracle, Lars' car has sat untouched through the duration of two hours. Neither of them say a word as he unlocks it and they pile in.

  The exhaustion hits him as soon as he lands in the seat of the car, and with a small groan, he drops his head against the rest, clutching the cold-touched sides and leather of the seat. He shuts his eye and waits, willing the shivers to leave his bones. Lars is still rifling around without starting the car, breathing heavily. Snorting.

  He opens his eye and looks over, and flinches.

  Hunched over in the driver's seat, the man is gripping an empty pen case in one hand and what looks to be a bright blue credit card in the other, quietly running a short line of white crystal that dim street lighting. He’s a husk of a figure there, a simulacrum of something he can’t put a finger on, but Niklas catches on too easily.

  "What the fuck?" he whispers. He already catches on that he's largely being ignored. There is a serious temptation to knock the card out of Lars' hands, but he denies himself, reasoning he's too tired to let the night end with yet another altercation with his least favorite investigator. Instead, he turns his eye on it, gazing out into the street and the still figures of the homeless strewn across it. Disgust twists in his throat and like a tense muscle in his jaw. "Where did you get that? That shit fucks with your body."

  The inhaling sounds stop, and when he looks back, Lars is reclined and the pen and card have fallen into his lap. Even in the dim light, he can tell the man's eyes are lined with red and watering. "Yeah... I know."

  "You’re even more fucked up than I thought.”

  "What’re you gunna do, tell on me to my mum?" The man wipes his nose and starts the car, knocking the card away haphazardly to the floor. He gasps a little, a croak of a noise that almost sounds like satisfaction, like a drained wound. It must be setting in. "You know, about back there... I was... Shit, I just never expected you would be the bad cop." The words come out quiet, muffled by the whirring of the engine coming to life, but Niklas doesn't think he's misheard. "Shit. I was... impressed, Nikky. Fuck, I feel better."

  Niklas touches his chest, feels the beads of his rosary rise as bumps beneath his shirt. He pulls them out, and they are warm against his nearly numb fingers. "What happened is nothing to be proud of. I wasn't 'playing bad cop'. Your ‘playing possum’ plan was just not working anymore."

  "Ch- yeah. Well, playing possum got me some pretty sweet footage on him, so don't get too sour on me, sweetheart. I was just trying to say…” he goes on, slowly, and seems to lose his line of thought until a minute later, where he drawls, “…you're full of surprises." The car pulls out and cruises through the darkness, casting light on the path they'd just taken until Lars takes a turn for a roundabout. "Damn," he mutters, "I wish there was someone who sold liquor at this hour."

  Niklas doesn't mention the vodka he's been thinking about all this time, sitting in his fridge and waiting for a long journey to putting him to sleep for good tonight. He may trust Lars more than he used to after this night, but he won't drink with him. He can just as well trust Lars to want to fuck him hard and desperately- and he said so himself. "So it's settled then. I have a property lawyer. You'll arrange everything."

  Lars sniffs and wipes his nose again, fingers pale stretches bobbing in and out of darkness. He sweeps in and out of the streetlights the Toyota cruises beneath. Here he’s less of a man in the deep hours of the night and more like a specter, a disoriented predator skulking the forest and weaving barely in and out of presence. "Yeah. You're golden. Just keep doing what you're doing and don't do anything to piss off Lana or let on what you know about your dad. Better yet, hide that shit I gave you- I didn't look at it but I've got a rough idea. And yo
u don't want to let her on to-" he gives a cough, and Niklas isn't sure if it's out of congestion or otherwise. "-to our arrangement. That I'm helping you. You gotta- you gotta let her think she's in control."

  He nods, half-thoughtful, half-tired. It occurs to him that Lars doesn't want Svetlana to know about them not just because of the operation behind her back- perhaps he's really compromised by him, as Germaine suggested. He had half-believed her. "You don't really sleep at night, do you?" he observes as they exit Scarborough, rolling into the southside coastal boulevard. The desolation is something to witness at this hour, and Niklas regrets saying anything. He'd rather have this in silence.

  "What do you take me for, some kinda night crawler?" Lars replies, scoffing. His hands play on the wheel, beating a rapid tapping rhythm softly over the engine purr and the whistling of wind blowing in. “A guy sleeps when he needs to sleep.”

  He doesn't reply, taking to watching the glittering shore and the black horizon. The clock on Lars' sound system reads 03:38. The man makes no effort to put something on.

  By the time Lars pulls up at the Ishmael, they've been riding in general silence for fifteen minutes through virtually nonexistent traffic. They sit momentarily, Lars making no motion to unlock the car, and finally the man turns and looks at him. Niklas finds that the coke has set in and is in full swing, because Lars' eyes are dilated, blown and framed in deep, tired-but-alert red.

  He doesn't say anything, doesn't move, just breathes and stays there, that intense and empty coked-up stare piercing through him.

  "Let me out," Niklas says, finally, tone level. He realizes that he is ready for anything from this man- to punch him, to kiss him, to talk business with him. Or all at once.

  Wordlessly, without taking his eyes off him, Lars unlocks the car. One end of his mouth creeps up in a half-smile and his expression hardens, following some unknown line of thought. His face, Niklas realizes, is twitching ever so slightly.

  Fucking cocaine. Shaking his head, Niklas turns away and opens the door, putting a leg out. He doesn't look, just throws off the words, "Get some sleep," and steps out. He's stopped by the man's hand round his wrist, so sudden he almost stumbles into the curb. "Wha-"

  "Hang the fuck on," he grunts. "You're never gonna tell me about your eye, are you?"

  Niklas gives him a half-puzzled, half-annoyed look. He's already learning to tune this man out, but that's not entirely a good thing. Men like Lars Verdura should always be watched. "There's no point." Slowly, he reaches his free hand to slip his wrist free, but Lars persists.

  "Tell me. How can it be such a big deal, huh? A girlfriend take it out?"

  A girlfriend... he imagines how that would have gone. If a girlfriend did this to him back then, the person he was would have... He likes to think he would have never spoken to her again. Would have become this way anyway, learned from the loss of an eye and compensated and moved along his way and scrabbled together his wits enough get into college.

  "No," he says, slowly, and finally shakes loose of Lars' grip. He steps back on the curb, feeling the chilly air blast him and sting his chest as he breathes in. Calmly, he adds, "I took it out myself. I was eighteen." With that, he turns around without hesitation and goes for the backdoor shop keys in his pocket.

  The thumping noise behind him- barely audible over the growl of the still-parked car- causes him to look back around. Lars is a tangle all over the driver’s side door, leaning part way against the sidewalk and, unsaddled in his seatbelt, breathing in gasps.

  Fucking cocaine. Lars may be trying to say it, but Niklas is already thinking it. “You can’t drive like that,” he says, tonelessly, as he reaches the one key he needs to get in. He doesn’t quite process where his own logic is going with this. What is he going to do, offer the man a blanket to sleep homeless out in the street instead of driving to wherever the hell he goes to stay?

  “Fuck off,” Lars grunts, surprisingly sour in tone, “just let me breathe. Just give me a second.”

  “Call Ray,” he suggests, running a forefinger across the teeth of his key. “You can’t park out here. Especially at night. At least move your car to the alley and sleep there.”

  “You’d…” It’s an agonizing pause until Lars speaks again. Niklas can only imagine the thrumming and the haze of the high he must be riding through. He never fucked with cocaine- never that he could remember, at least, but the memories of intense ganja highs are enough to make him remember how bright and terrifying everything could be in a high. The palpitations of your heart telling you to be afraid of things that weren’t there, things that couldn’t happen vividly playing through your mind, the intensity of every color and the awareness of each line of the spectrum running into your eyeball.

  “You’d leave your own detective to die in the cold?” Lars is saying. He could be speaking to the curb for all a bystander-witness could tell. His hand has crawled up to his face, touching his nose, and Niklas wonders if he has a nosebleed- and, if he does, if that’s cause to care. In a way, he is concerned, but in another way he doesn’t want Lars in his home.

  “It’s still the cusp of summer. You will live.”

  “You Russians have no mercy.”

  Undeterred, he marches forward and wraps an arm around Lars’ torso, heaving the man up and back into the car. Dampness brushes his cheek on his blind side- whether it’s blood, snot, or anything else, he can’t tell in the darkness. Lars is surprisingly firm and rigid against his body, like he is alert, just shaking. “In the car. Drive it in the alley and park it and you will be fine to sleep for the night.”

  The man laughs into his shoulder. “You think you get an idea of me and all’a sudden you’re giving me orders, Diamond Eyes?”

  Niklas brushes his cheek against his and considers the moment, considers the sleepiness heavy behind his eyes. Diamond eyes. What does that even mean?

  He considers this man, right beneath his finger in this very moment, when in so many other points Lars is a loose cannon, barely directed, doing bumps of crack and running his op beneath Svetlana’s knowledge.

  He turns his head and kisses him before any more words can slip out between them. In all other moments it hasn’t been anything but the contact of bodies, the heat of blood and the absolute lust dripping off of Lars’ lips and hands and skin- but somehow in this quiet, with no interference in senses, it hits him harder.

  Maybe it’s because he initiated it as no show, no payment. Lars turns his neck and comes into the kiss, shuts his eyes and seems to accept it- does he feel the jerk of the nerves in the arm, the neck, the chest when this happens? Niklas wonders as he parts his lips and takes in the trace taste like cocaine and iron and numbness on the tip of his tongue and intensifying the beat of his heart.

  Maybe, it’s because he knows that for the first time, he is playing the game. He takes a fistful of Lars’ jacket and yanks him further in, then pushes him away with a satisfying, wet noise. “Maybe I do know, you junkie,” he says as he steps away onto the curb and turns away, throwing over his shoulder, “Just get off the no-parking zone.”

  He needs that drink right about now.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sleep that night is a heavy, alcoholic death, but waking is like the resurrection he didn’t want to happen.

  He wakes up with a virulent headache pounding through his temples like marbles popping and stretching in his veins, and drops right back into the futon again. Somewhere below a car putters and full-out roars up the road, and sunlight- cursed sunlight- has already penetrated the room and lit up the moldy ceiling, light itching into his eyeballs and sending heavy nausea down his throat.

  He wonders for a second if he’ll be sick, finding with every succeeding breath that he can be relieved and breathe easy. Thank God I'm not opening till later, he thinks through the haze of pain, and rolls over-

  Niklas' body meets an unexpected resistance in the form of another person.

  What?

  He blinks, shakes himself free and sits up
so he can see, ignoring the throbbing protest that jackhammers in his head. He would definitely remember if he let someone crawl into his bed to sleep with him. He had drank a lot, yes, but it wasn't that much.

  Hastily, before he gives himself any disturbing mental images, he sets to examine (images- especially of the heavy kisses crushing his lips the night before- haunt him, things that echoed up in dreamy haze through even the heaviest drunken sleep). He shakes the shoulder of the figure. He can't tell anything about them at first, concealed as they are in the sheets and with a hood up, but under his hand he feels softness, a slight form bundled in several layers.

  Well. At least it's a woman- or probably one, anyway. With slightly more confidence now, Niklas turns her over, and blinks as Viola's childlike face comes into view, the tangle of her red hair strewn across her face. She looks even younger asleep, her full lips parted and her freckles throwing constellations across her cheeks, unmarred by her usual flustering. Her breath is soft, unobtrusive- a gentle sleeper, this one is.