Bound: Chinatown Demons, Book One

by Rhys Ford

  “Brutish, yet effective,” a man said, his voice softly accented with an odd cadence and a hint of the British Isles. “And I imagine you are tender at the moment, but the best thing right now is for us to get you sitting up at least. It’s not good for the… blood circulating through you to stagnate in one spot. Odd things could happen.”

  Spencer placed the voice, recognized the brandy snap of Dr. Xian Carter’s sardonic, liquid tones, but for the life of him, he couldn’t think of any reason he would be in the man’s presence. Unless…

  “Am… dead?” He finally choked out, trying to get his tongue working again. Since his eyelids seemed glued down despite his feeble efforts to lift them, Spencer was content to simply lie still, letting the twisting ache in his bones seep away. “Morgue?”

  “You’re not dead. Nor have you come back to life while I was performing an autopsy,” Carter finally murmured. There were sounds of him moving around; then the sharp prick in Spencer’s arm dug down again. “Hold still. I’m going to take out this IV. You needed fluids. You were… dehydrated.”

  His eyes finally responded to his commands, and from the stabbing shards of glass pouring out of an overhead light, Spencer instantly regretted opening them. Hot tears gathered along his lashes, streaming down the sides of his face until they felt crusty and sore.

  “Come on, let’s get you up.” Carter was closer now, close enough for Spencer to smell the faint burnt rice scent of popcorn green tea on the man’s breath as he worked an arm under Spencer’s shoulders. “I’m also worried about your lungs filling up with fluid if we don’t get you moving. You’ve had a rough few nights.”

  “Few?” His words were stronger now, his tongue responding to the moisture wicking through it.

  Risking another bout with the stabbing lights, Spencer slowly opened his eyes. The glare still hurt, but the burn wasn’t as deep, a scrape across his corneas rather than the acid wash he’d gotten a few moments before. Either Carter was stronger than Spencer imagined, or maybe it was because he felt so damned weak. After all, the man had no problems levering him up, then sliding him sideways until he rested against the soft cradle of warm cushions. The motion left him with a slap of vertigo, and Carter murmured something he couldn’t make out, but Spencer didn’t have the strength to ask him to repeat it.

  Spencer wasn’t prepared for the rush of vomit purging itself from his stomach when he got upright, but Carter certainly was. A fluorescent green bucket appeared under his chin before he could complete his first heave, and the hot fluids worked out of him in a quick gush, leaving only a sour hint of its passing and a saltiness on Spencer’s tongue.

  “What… sick? Where am I?” A vise seemed to be attached to either side of his temples, squeezing Spencer’s brains in, but he couldn’t seem to grab a hold of it when he lifted his hand to his head. “Shit.”

  “Sip this. I’ll hold it.” Carter held a small rice bowl up to Spencer’s lips, its vivid orange sheen dulled by a splash of a fragrant, meaty broth. “Tiny sips. You need the protein, but not so fast that you’ll puke again. There’s nothing left in there for you to bring up.”

  The first drop of broth on his withered tongue sparked something deep in Spencer. Some hunger he didn’t know raged up from his belly, and Spencer fought down the urge to yank the bowl from Carter’s hands and down everything in it. The bowl was refilled three times before Spencer gave himself time to breathe, irritated at Carter’s slow, deliberate measures of broth, but his belly felt too tight to take much more than the man would give him.

  “What happened?” he choked out between sips. The light didn’t hurt his eyes as much, but he still felt weak, rubber-boned and loose-fleshed. He was wearing a set of soft black scrubs worn thin from use. The material clung to his shoulders and thighs but hung loose on him, as if made for a much larger man. Definitely not Carter’s. “How long have I been here? Why am I here? I don’t even know where here is. Need to call work—”

  “You were attacked. Your captain knows you’re here. He’s got you down for a few sick days.” Carter held the dish up again, then set it down when Spencer shook his head no. “As for what happened, what do you remember last?”

  “Being hungry.” The vertigo was back, and an itch began to crawl up Spencer’s side. Reaching down to scratch, he found a frustrating swath of gauze and tape covering him from his hip up to his ribs. The spot was tender, burning when he pressed down on the area. “I was taking a walk to clear my head. Couldn’t sleep. Dumplings. I remember wanting dumplings.”

  Jagged shards of cloudy memories jabbed at Spencer’s thoughts, diverting him away from the meandering walk he’d taken from his studio apartment. Yesterday’s hard pace through the district came back to him in fits and starts, broken puzzle pieces falling into place, thrown by an uncaring hand. There were parts he could remember clearly, passing under the gate and giving a silent salute to the dragon statue squatting over the street, and then an array of wine-red dresses embroidered with fanciful flowers hung in a storefront window above sun-faded stuffed animals of dubious shapes. There was a skip and a beat, and he remembered the church.

  Then came a spark of pain and the clotted, ruined meat smell of unwashed flesh and rotting teeth. Spencer’s hand clenched around his gun, a phantom muscle twitch, his mind scrambling to find some way to protect him from the hazy events unfolding from its foggy recesses.

  “I got stabbed,” he said slowly, his surroundings shifting out of focus while he struggled to recall what led him to waking up on the medical examiner’s couch. “I shot the guy.”

  “Well, technically,” Carter drawled with a sarcastic sniff, “you shot me.”

  “Shit, they’re going to take away my badge. Star. Fucking SFPD and their stars,” Spencer mumbled. “The paperwork. What happened to the guy with the knife?”

  “He got away,” Carter replied. “I had a choice between chasing after him or saving you. So I chose you. If you think winging me is going to make you a lot of paperwork, imagine what I’d have to fill out if I let a cop die in a Chinatown back alley.”

  “Guy cut me up bad. I didn’t even see him come out.” Rubbing at his still pounding head, Spencer sifted through the fragments he couldn’t seem to make sense out of. “I remember you showing up but… shit ton of blood. His. And mine. Not much else after that. Other than… you did something. To him. You hit him or something. Why here instead of a hospital?”

  “You weren’t going to make it to a hospital. Not in your condition. And even if you lived that long, they wouldn’t have been able to help you.” The examiner faded in and out of a blurry cloud for Spencer, and he had to concentrate to keep Carter centered in his line of sight. “I brought you here because it was closer and I could stabilize you while the EMTs got here. You weren’t as injured as I thought you were. I carried you back here, the med techs came by to help patch you up. Then they left when you told them to fuck off because you weren’t going to the hospital.”

  “Sounds like me. Thing is, I’ve got easily thirty pounds on you, and you sure as hell don’t look strong enough to lift me.” He eyed the lanky doctor sitting on the coffee table in front of him. Pulling up the hem of his borrowed tunic, Spencer stared momentarily at the blinding white bandages covering his ribs and side. “Even if you live right upstairs from the park, there’s no way in hell you could have gotten me up here. How’d you pull that off?”

  Carter’s endearing smirk was both sarcastic and sexy. “Would you believe me if I told you… for all intents and purposes… I’m a demon?”

  Spencer leaned his head back and stared at the pale-haired man who’d flitted in and out of his thoughts since the first time they’d met. Taking a deep breath, he replied, “Bullshit.”

  Six

  “A DEMON?” Sancho eased himself into Johnson’s empty chair. “You’re shitting me.”

  “Nope, that’s the bullshit line he fed me. Called him on it, and the asshole just laughed at me.” Spencer wasn’t going to risk shaking his head, no
t while it still throbbed as if he’d gone on a ten-day bender. “Bastard did me a solid hauling me in off the street, but he’s sketchy as hell.”

  “Carter’s a weird one, not going to lie,” the older cop murmured, leaning back in Johnson’s office chair until it complained about his weight with a low screech loud enough to draw the attention of every other inspector in the bullpen. He ignored the glances, rocking the chair back and forth. “Told the captain you insisted on not going to the hospital. Said he kept you there because you got knocked on the head and wanted to make sure the slices you got didn’t get infected.”

  “Totally sounds like me,” Spencer acknowledged ruefully. “I hate hospitals.”

  The throb in his head subsided by the time he’d gotten back to his place. After a quick verbal battle with Carter, Spencer limped home in a cab, arriving a bit chilled from the cold rain and the thin fabric of the scrubs Carter put on him. He didn’t want to think about the medical examiner’s hands on his naked body or how the dark-eyed man with his wicked smile undressed him. Still, his thoughts invariably wandered back to the moment he’d woken up to find Carter staring at him from his table-side perch.

  Whatever his attacker used to stab at him seemed to have bruised Spencer down deep into his muscles. Nearly everything ached along his side, and there seemed to be a hitch along his ribs whenever he moved the wrong way. There were too many questions he had for the doctor. Namely, how the hell did Carter get him to the second-floor loft apartment nearly five blocks away from the tearoom he’d been heading for, and why couldn’t he remember a damned thing about the attack that laid him low enough to miss a couple of days of work?

  There were only a few pink slashes along his skin, but dark bruises rose to mottle the area, stretching from his hip up to nearly his nipple in a swirling sea of blackened purple and red. The lump on his head remained tender, screaming in waves of sharp pain when Spencer prodded at it. But nothing seemed to be too broken to crawl to an actual doctor.

  “Question I’ve got is, how the hell did Carter even find you?” Sancho asked softly, playing with a stapler he picked from Johnson’s cluttered desk. “And where the hell is your partner?”

  “He works late, I guess. Said something about finishing up the reports on the mummy John Doe case and was walking home with some food.” Spencer tried to map out the route Carter said he was taking, but his knowledge of the area was too sketchy to nail down anything odd about Carter’s providential stroll through the Chinatown district in the wee hours of the morning. “I don’t remember a damned thing about it. Can’t recall anything past the dragon gate on Grant.”

  “Maybe you should go see a real doctor.” Sancho snorted. “Okay, that was shitty because Carter is a real doctor, but hell, when was the last time he worked on anyone who bled?”

  The cop’s words bounced around in Spencer’s thoughts, déjà vu of another conversation, a protest he halfway recalled, but it whispered away before he could grab it. He caught himself rubbing his side, wondering at the slight burn under his flesh. Falling behind on his caseload was bad enough, but the fragmented hiccups of time in his memories annoyed the hell out of him. Something had happened. Something more serious than what Carter told him. With another press of his fingers against one of the pink welts under his dress shirt, Spencer made up his mind to dig into the doctor’s explanation and find out for himself exactly what went on.

  “Lieutenant’s probably wondering what the hell I’ve done on this case so far, and I’ve got nothing other than…” Spencer opened up the report he’d gotten from the dead man’s autopsy. “Absolutely fucking nothing. Wallet was empty except for a couple of old coins. One of the guys living at the SRO I’m at said there’s a transient woman named Lily down at the pier who saw something. You know her? You’ve worked down there.”

  “Can’t say I have. But to be honest, usually, it’s kind of rare now for one of the homeless to stick around in one spot unless they’ve got some anchor there. People drive them out, or they end up losing in some territory war with someone else looking to take over their spot.” Sancho shrugged. “Haven’t worked that side of the city in a long time. Everyone I know is probably long gone. Either cracked out and dead from their habits or wandered off into the great unknown.”

  “Might be my only lead. Or at least someplace to start. I’ve got people chasing down the fabrics our killer wrapped the vic in, but that’s going to be a bitch. Who knows when it was bought or even if it was purchased in the city?” He quit staring at the variegated paint lines on the wall next to his desk, and went back to going over the results from the coroners’ report then pulled out the crime scene photos, staring down at the remains of the man scattered across the storeroom floor. “No fingerprints. No evidence left from whoever got into that place. Sure as hell didn’t walk into the back door lugging a body. And the guy was definitely killed elsewhere.”

  “Assuming he was murdered,” Sancho interjected.

  “Yeah, there’s that.” The creep of a suppressed want crawled up Spencer’s throat, his body missing the burn of something harsh and numbing in his coffee. Another couple of aspirin chased down by a mouthful of lukewarm coffee and Spencer was back at the reports. “Cause of death is undetermined. Carter writes that the guy was dead when someone started to hack him apart and tear open his face—”

  “Tear open his face?”

  “Yeah, whoever did this worked up a full Egyptian thing of going into the nose to remove the brains, but the back of the guy’s skull is cracked open like a coconut. Comes off like a teapot lid. But says here they don’t know if the damage was all intentional. The professor I got a hold of pretty much shoved me aside. What I need is something besides some old woman who might have seen something. For all we know, our vic donated his body to science and someone decided to see if they could actually do a mummification.”

  Sancho snorted. “Seriously?”

  “It’s a real thing. There’s a whole documentary about this doctor who did the full ritual and embalming to see if he could.” Spencer tapped the notebook he’d brought in with him. “Watched it last night. He’s on the East Coast, so I put a call in when I came in. Maybe he’ll get back to me and I can ask him to look at what we found. Carter’s report said he and his team are going to continue to work on IDing the guy, or at least giving us something to go on. If he’s a donated body, then the only crime we’ve got is abuse of a corpse for leaving him in that restaurant. But until then, I’m going to continue to treat it like a murder.”

  “Gonna wait until Johnson gets in before heading down to the piers?” Another squeaking aria accompanied Sancho’s rocking. “She showed up the first day you were out, but I haven’t seen her since. Lieutenant’s probably got her on a watch list.”

  “She didn’t leave me any notes and not one damned email,” he admitted. “Not answering my messages either. So, I don’t know. Maybe she’s done being a cop. Just wish she’d tell the SFPD that so I can have someone besides you sitting at that desk.”

  The headache aside, Spencer worried at the possibility that his partner dove straight down into a bottle and hadn’t come back up. Already erratic and on a short leash with the department, Johnson didn’t seem interested in building any kind of relationship with her new partner, other than one where she did as little as possible and argued with anything Spencer threw at her to bring clarity to their cases.

  “And when the hell are you going to get yourself someplace real to live? Man’s got to be able to come home to something larger than a shoebox.”

  “Hey, I leveled up… or down, really. It works for me. Cheap, easy to get in and out, and close to work.” The wording in Carter’s official report held none of the man’s fluid playful tone, scraping out only the dry basics of what he’d found on their unknown victim. “ME’s office says it’ll take another day to get fingerprints, but they’re hopeful, so I’m going to be spinning my wheels. They might get at least a decent partials. Whoever killed that guy did a number on his hand
s. Scraped off nearly all the ridges, then destroyed the rest of his prints with that long salt pack they think our vic was put into. Either way, I’m going to be stuck knocking on doors and chasing down anything I can find.”

  “And your partner?” Sancho stood up slowly, working his shoulders out of a stiffness Spencer knew all too well.

  “I’m going to swing by her place and see,” he replied, gathering up everything he’d laid out on his desk. “Because I’ve been where she’s at, and it’s not a pretty place to sit. Maybe it’s time to tell her that and she turns things around before rock bottom smacks her in the face.”

  §

  “Ricci, a word,” Lieutenant Chang called out from the edge of the break room, motioning for Spencer to follow him. “Want to talk to you about how you’re doing and what’s going on with your partner.”

  A born and raised San Francisco Native, Eugene Chang had the look of a man who’d come up through the ranks and unexpectedly found himself in charge of the people he’d worked shoulder to shoulder with for decades. A few silver threads burnished his dark brush of short hair, and his face wore a few of its years in crow’s feet and laugh lines. But the man was tireless, keeping up with the young men and women in his charge and willing to lend a thoughtful insight when someone was stuck in a rut on a case.

  He’d welcomed Spencer warmly when he first showed up on Chang’s doorstep, and while the man struggled at times with his social graces, Spencer had to admit he was a pretty good boss. The man knew when to give his inspectors room to explore a case and when to tell them to shut it down. Since he’d first sat under Chang, their relationship steadied out to one of mutual respect and the occasional low-grade joke.

  The look on Chang’s face told Spencer the man was not in a laughing mood.

  “Actually, I was going to swing by Johnson’s place before I hunted down a potential witness to the mummy case.” Spencer followed the barrel-chested Chang into the lieutenant’s narrow office, set a few feet away from the bullpen. His superior nodded at the door, silently asking it to be closed, and Spencer stepped in, shutting them off from any noise and prying ears. “Has she spoken to you, sir? Because she hasn’t been in contact with me.”