Undercover
Eliot Grayson
Copyright © 2021 by Eliot Grayson
All rights reserved.
This book was inspired by the True North Series written by Sarina Bowen. It is an original work that is published by Heart Eyes Press LLC.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Epilogue
You Will Also Enjoy…
Acknowledgments
1
Gabe
For the third time that week, Hot Scruffy Leather Jacket Dude stood by the true crime shelf, holding the latest bestseller in the genre and shaking his head slowly as he leafed through it. I watched him from the shelter of world religions, peeking over the top of a book that might or might not be about Buddhism.
I had no interest in Buddhism. But my usual section, science, didn’t have a good view of true crime.
And the book didn’t matter anyway. I only had eyes for the guy I’d been checking out for a couple of weeks now. So tall. Such long, muscular legs, encased in unfashionable medium-blue jeans. Who even wore jeans like that? Where did you buy them, lacking a time machine? I had no idea. Somehow they worked for him, along with the black jacket that made his shoulders look freaking enormous.
The unshaven cheeks and chin worked for him too. Ditto the old blue t-shirt stretched over his broad chest and his wavy, rumpled dark brown hair.
Who was I kidding? Everything about him worked for me, and I’d spent two weeks fantasizing about getting him to work for me in my king-sized bed, or possibly up against a wall. On my couch. No, not picky.
That thought brought a familiar twinge. I should be pickier. I wished I could be pickier, to the tune of having just one guy to be picky with all the time.
Not in the cards for now.
Hot Dude snorted in what sounded like irritation and slammed the book back into its spot, and I jumped and ducked behind the sign on the top of the freestanding religion shelf. Not that I needed to, really. At five foot nine, I could hide well enough anywhere.
I peeked out again. He’d pulled another book from the shelf and started his head-shaking and grumbling routine again.
I glanced around the bookstore. A few customers wandered and browsed, and a couple of little kids in the cheerful, rainbow-plastered children’s section at the front of the store were giggling and whispering. No one seemed to have noticed me acting like a creepy stalker—no more than people usually noticed me, anyway. My hair changed colors like some people changed their underwear, and this week I’d settled on purple with streaks of teal. My weird green-gray-blue eyes looked awesome with the teal.
Not that my target had noticed. He hadn’t even glanced at me once. Bastard. And I couldn’t have been more obvious, with my hair and the line of piercings down my left ear and the tightest skinny jeans I could possibly squeeze myself into. And the skin-tight Henley with the rainbow bear on it.
I might as well have been wearing a sign that said, Hey, tall and burly guy with the leather jacket! Want to fuck me?
Maybe a sign wouldn’t be the worst idea. Not like I’d ever have the courage to walk up to him and actually say it, after all. Not during daylight and in a bookstore.
I shot another glance at the front of the store. Vino and Veritas comprised a bookstore and an attached wine bar…and a little liquid courage might be just what I needed. Sober, I had all the game of the Moo U baseball team. Drunk, well…when I got a little sloshed, maybe smoked a joint or even took a tab of ecstasy, I pulled more guys than a rainbow bear.
But he’d be gone by the time I got a glass of wine down. A normal person might’ve sauntered over and asked him to have one with me.
Normal went out the window for me when I got kicked out of my Ph.D. program for missing my seminars and not completing my research. Too many nights at the club, getting high and partying and having wild—but never all that satisfying—sex with Joey, whom I’d dated for six months and regretted dating ever since.
Hot Dude traded his second book for a third, looked at it for about twenty seconds, and then shook his head, put it back, and stomped straight out of the bookstore, disappearing through the front doors and merging into the groups of people wandering through Church Street Marketplace.
I slowly replaced my book on maybe-Buddhism, my shoulders slumping. Why did I have to obsess over a probably-straight, certainly-uninterested guy when Burlington had so many hot, gay men who’d love to get to know me—some of whom might even be in the wine bar?
Maybe because they only wanted to get to know me until I stopped buying rounds of top-shelf liquor and/or got on my knees.
Yeah. Probably that. Fantasies had it all over reality.
With my distraction out of the way, I spent an hour looking at science journals and a new book on population genetics, spent a few minutes disagreeing with the author’s conclusions, and then took the book up to the counter anyway. My black Amex wasn’t going to spend itself, right?
I set my book and a couple of magazines down, and the extremely hot, muscular brunet behind the counter turned from some books he’d been sorting and shot me the kind of smile that made me wish I’d had a glass of wine before I went to check out.
“Hey,” he said, his voice warm and just this side of flirty. I’d spent a lot of time in V and V since it opened a year before, and I’d seen this guy more than once, though usually working in the bar. He really flirted with the female customers—had everyone from adolescent girls to grandmas blushing and smiling within seconds. Although he’d toned it down lately. I was pretty sure he’d started dating a guy, actually, and wasn’t that a lost opportunity for the rest of us. I knew he’d pinged my radar—not that I’d ever gotten up the balls to do anything about it.
“How’s it going? This all for you today? We have a new astronomy book on the front display. The author’s from Vermont.”
I automatically shook my head, and then I reconsidered. “Actually—did you see that guy who just left? The really tall guy in the leather jacket?”
The clerk rolled his blue eyes and scoffed, somehow looking suave instead of goofy, like I did when I made that face. “Yeah, true crime guy. I was hot just looking at him in that jacket. Isn’t it kind of warm outside? It was already heating up this morning when I got to work.”
I’d been hot looking at Hot Dude too, but not for the same reason.
“Yeah, it’s a little weird, right?” Come on, come on, give me something…considering how many times I’d seen Hot Dude in here, he had to be around even more than that, right? Unless somehow the stars had aligned and led me here at exactly the same times he came in. Like fate.
Right.
“Eh,” the clerk said, shrugging his broad shoulders. “We get weirder. This all for you?”
“Does he ever buy anything?” I asked desperately, ignoring the clear hint to pay and let him get back to work, since there wasn’t anyone behind me in line. Should I be asking all these questions about another customer? Was I about to be put into the we get weirder ca
tegory? Realistically, I’d probably already ended up there. “I mean, he looks at the books for a long time.”
“I asked him last week if I could help him find anything else, since he didn’t seem to like our selection, and he growled something at me about not having money to throw away and left.”
A little shiver went down my spine. Mmm, growling. God, there was something so wrong with me.
And…if I could think with my brain instead of my dick for a second, hang on. There was something even more wrong with someone who spent enough time in a bookstore to be mentally nicknamed by staff and customers alike not being able to afford to buy a book now and then.
“Hang on a minute,” I said, abandoning my book and magazines and trotting over to the true crime section. I’d been watching Hot Dude so creepily closely that I knew exactly which books he’d looked at, and I pulled all three out of the shelf, adding two more that looked interesting on impulse. I carried the stack back to the counter and dumped them down. “These ones too.”
The clerk eyed me suspiciously. “For you?”
“No, for him.” At the look on his face, I added hastily, “I’m not going to follow him or anything—you know, weird.” He raised one dark eyebrow in a way that said more than words could have. “Yeah, I know, okay, but I love books. Right? You see me in here all the time.” He nodded. “And it sucks to love books as much as that guy probably does but not be able to take them home. Besides,” I said, leaning on the counter a little and summoning some of the charm I knew I had, dammit, when I wasn’t feeling so insecure, “I want to support the coolest new queer-inclusive hotspot in town. A sale’s a sale. You don’t need to tell the guy who bought these for him. Just give them to him the next time he comes in, and tell him you have a rich, eccentric customer who buys books for random other customers sometimes.”
He hesitated, but I knew I had him. The books I’d picked out for Hot Dude were going to come out to close to a hundred bucks, and I didn’t think bookstores had such a high profit margin.
Finally he sighed, shook his head, and started to ring it all up. I mentally fist-pumped, but I kept my smile normal and friendly.
If I acted any crazier, he might change his mind.
Yeah, I’d definitely upgraded myself to we get weirder.
Alec
Fucking Burlington.
Fucking Vermont.
I shouldered my way through the mob of chattering, grinning, fancy-coffee-drinking idiots streaming out of the nearest yoga studio, dodging for the millionth time to keep from getting smacked in the face by someone’s goddamn yoga mat.
Fucking yoga mats.
I’d never even seen a yoga mat, at least as far as I’d noticed, until Assistant Director Kyle handed me this case.
“We think they’re bringing it in rolled up in yoga mats,” he’d said—way too seriously, in my opinion, because who the hell could take drug smugglers who used yoga mats for their product seriously?
AD Kyle, that was who.
“You’ll need to keep a low profile,” he’d continued. “Stay undercover, be casual, check out the leads you have there.” He gestured at the manila folder he’d laid on his desk. “There are two yoga studios in Burlington we suspect of doubling as fronts for small-scale heroin sales. And we need to figure out how they’re getting the product across Lake Champlain. We know it’s coming in that way, but we can’t narrow it down. Once you get a better handle on it, you can decide what kind of team you need to back you up.”
And so I’d left Albany a few weeks before, packing mostly jeans, t-shirts, and a heap of boxers, the kind of clothes a seedy guy who might hang around drug dealers would wear, and regretfully leaving most of my Fed suits—and my will to live—at home.
I felt better in a suit, sort of like I imagined medieval knights might’ve felt in their armor. My suits wouldn’t stop a bullet, or even a sword, but they didn’t require a choice when I got dressed in the morning. And they marked me for what I was: a serious guy with a serious job, someone no one would try to make small talk with. Or hit on.
Okay, to be fair, maybe no one chatted with me or hit on me because I had a—serious and manly, obviously—version of resting bitch face. Resting pissed-off face. Whatever.
I headed for the bookstore several blocks from my cookie-cutter business hotel. I’d taken to stopping in whenever I had a few minutes free. They had a great true crime section, meaning that their selection included even more ridiculous absurdity than usual. Flipping through overblown, breathless, far-fetched accounts of kidnappings and murders and investigations the authors had nothing to do with was always good for a laugh.
Even funnier, not a single one of those books told its readers how much of law enforcement involved sitting around drinking shitty coffee and making endless phone calls to bureaucrats demanding some file or report for the umpteenth time.
Or liaising with detectives about staking out yoga studios.
Yeah, that’d really have them on the edges of their seats.
And my hotel room didn’t offer much by way of amusement to distract me from the possibly illegal yoga mats. Just my case files, a TV that I didn’t watch, and a comfortable king-sized bed to sleep in alone. A couple of framed prints, one of a sailboat on Lake Champlain and the other of Vermont’s fall foliage. A window with a view of a nice old church and a glimmer of the lake. A desk and a single chair.
I’d probably spent more time in bland hotel rooms like that one than in my own Albany apartment over the last three years, and I didn’t really care most of the time—one place to do paperwork and sleep alone was basically the same as the next. That morning it’d felt duller and emptier than usual. I’d gotten coffee and a blueberry muffin from the coffeeshop down the block from the hotel and spent a chunk of the day going through the BPD’s files on local drug dealers…and then I couldn’t take it anymore, especially since I’d been in fucking Burlington long enough that the girl behind the counter at the café recognized me and started pouring my coffee before I got to the front of the line.
Yep. Edge-of-your-seat stuff right there.
So I deserved a break, and Vino and Veritas was the only place within range of the hotel I could think of to go to, even though I’d been in there too often already, including the day before. Everything else had ‘artisanal’ somewhere in the window, or ‘craft’ in the store name. Ugh.
Vino and Veritas did have a lot of rainbows in the window, and a big neon sign with the name—thankfully not lit up during the day. But at least the bookstore half of it stayed quiet even when the marketplace along the street outside started to get busy.
Sure, customers went in and out pretty regularly. But they were soft-spoken customers, and they had the good taste to be buying books instead of possibly fentanyl-tainted yoga mats. Even the kids playing around in the children’s section didn’t bother me. Kids who liked books were maybe one of the three classes of human beings I could tolerate, right up there with old ladies who didn’t take anyone’s bullshit and coffeeshop employees who didn’t talk too much.
The guy behind the counter looked up as I came in, his mouth dropping open for a second, and an odd look on his face.
Hot, but not my type, and if I was his, still nope.
I tried to bypass the counter, making a circle and heading for the science fiction section this time, just for a change of pace, but a quick, “Excuse me!” forced me to turn around.
Well, shit. Maybe he wanted to get on my case about coming in all the time and not buying anything. A vague, fuzzy sense of guilt assailed me. And then I wondered if he meant to accuse me of shoplifting. That’d be ironic.
“Yeah?” I didn’t sound all that friendly, but then again, when did I sound friendly?
When had I stopped being able to sound friendly? At some point growling at people had become a reflex, as automatic as avoiding them in the first place if I possibly could.
Shit. Maybe I should work on that.
“Um,” the guy said. “So this is
kind of weird, but…” He trailed off, brushing his hand over the back of his head and shifting awkwardly.
The gesture showed off his bulging left bicep. Still not my type, but damn. Worth a look.
“Okay?”
“We get a lot of kind of odd people in here,” he said after a pause. “You know. Eccentric.”
Was he building up to telling me to get the hell out? I’d been called worse than eccentric, but I hated it when people beat around the bush.
“I can leave.”
I’d already turned back toward the door when he said, “No, no, not asking you to leave! Just, yeah. So another customer bought you some books.” He reached under the counter and pulled out a paper Vino and Veritas bag with a sticky note on it. He whisked the note off and tossed it into the trash can behind him, but not before I caught what it said: True Crime Guy.
I hid a wince. Yeah, I’d been in Burlington long enough to have not just a standing coffee order, but a fucking nickname.
And someone had been watching me. I’d noticed several regulars checking me out, including a couple of women, a man in his late thirties who always came in with a little girl, and a twenty-something guy with crazy hair.
But this was different.
It sent a little frisson down my spine. Being watched might not be in most people’s comfort zones, but for an FBI agent on an active case it could mean a lot worse than that.
I stared down at the bag. “Who bought this stuff?” This stuff, I saw as the clerk pulled the books out, comprised five different hardbacks from the true crime section. Three of them I’d already flipped through, but the other two I hadn’t gotten to yet.
One of them was about El Chapo, and the other about Pablo Escobar.
Undercover (Vino and Veritas) Page 1
