Murder and Mayhem (25 page)

“You’re rich enough. You can hire an ass double and have him squirm around a car seat so it’s ready for you.” Rook snorted when his grandfather struggled to flip him off. “Want me to hold your fingers down for you, old man?”

“Shut it. I’m left-handed. I’ll have to practice.” Archie glared at a shadow skulking across the hallway near his room door. “Doctor or one of my stupid children?”

“Orderly. Well, someone holding a piss pan,” he said, craning to get a look. “And Alex’s mom isn’t too bad. Quiet.”

“She’s like a Milk Dud. Chewy and sticks to your teeth. Not bad, but let’s face it, in a box of chocolates, that’s not what you’re going to be reaching for first.” He shifted, groaning, then pushing Rook’s hand away when he reached for the call button. “Don’t call anyone. I’m just trying to get comfortable. Answer me this, are
you
doing okay? You’re not hurt or anything, right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” Rook grabbed the call button anyway, keeping it out of his grandfather’s grasp. “I wasn’t in the car with you, remember?”

“Idiot! I know you weren’t in the car with me. I’m asking because, after we got hit, I kept hearing some asshole open the door and say,
He’s not here. Stevens isn’t here
.” Archie’s voice wavered. He closed his fingers over Rook’s wrist, painfully digging his nails into the tender flesh below. “Who is after you, boy? And what do I have to do to stop them?”

The time went well past late and was into early dawn by Rook’s third cup of bitter diner coffee. The hours spent with Archie tore him down, and as a milky sun rose on Hollywood Boulevard, Rook sat staring out at the buzz of traffic inching across the soupy morning. He’d lost track of the trucks he’d counted ambling past the diner’s enormous windows, the panes speckled by dirt and insect splatter.

Perched on a busy corner near the shopping monstrosity erected to anchor Hollywood’s growing obsession with its own sycophants, the diner normally gave Rook a good place to sit and watch the area’s unique blend of tourists, locals, and the bottom-feeders desperate for anything coming their way.

In the too-early-for-food hours, however, pickings were mighty slim.

A sunbaked woman in a pink boa and star-spangled bikini stood on the median between the street’s lanes, her impossibly orange curls teased up into a crowning mess over her teak-hued wrinkled face. Her body shimmied with loose skin over her thighs and gut, flapping as she waved a sign announcing to passersby she was available as a tour guide to the stars. The veins in her arms were a black tangle thick enough they were visible from across two lanes of traffic, and Rook’s chest ached in sympathy when he caught her looking over her shoulder periodically to watch for cops.

Dante slid into the booth across of him, his legs jostling Rook’s as he got comfortable. A waitress sidled up to the table, a pot of hot coffee at the ready to top off their cups, and Rook half heard Dante thank the woman as she rattled back his order to him. Rook shook her off when she asked if he wanted something other than coffee, going back to stare at the older woman who could have been the server’s twin if they’d taken similar paths.

“You doing okay,
cuervo
?” Dante’s hand came down over Rook’s, pressing their fingers together. Their fingernails rubbed, a pearl on pearl sensation Rook realized he’d never really felt before. Something on his face must have piqued Dante’s curiosity, because the cop tilted his chin up and asked, “What? What’re you thinking?”

“It’s weird. How much you touch me. I never would have thought you’d be… so touchy.” His mind wasn’t firing right, and words he should have known were slipping away under the fugue swamping Rook’s thoughts, but he fought to find what he needed to say in his mind’s stew. “You’re out.”

“Yes…?” Dante drew the word out, confusion clouding his face. “And?”

“I mean, like, you’re really out,” Rook murmured, sliding his fingertips over Dante’s outstretched palm. “It’s weird. Because you… stroke and do things, like when we walk, you touch the small of my back. Like when we were in the hospital and I started to go down the wrong hall, then you caressed me there. In front of those cops. In front of everyone.”

“I’m not ashamed to touch you.” Reaching for the packets of sugar at the end of the table, Dante shrugged. “I’m gay. We’ve been… together, and even if it’s been a little bit crazy—you’re a little bit crazy—I like you. And I’m also half Mexican, so you’re going to see me eating burritos once in a while. There’s going to be a lot of really normal things you’re going to catch me doing. Just so you know.”

“See, gay? Not a thing to advertise when I was growing up.” Rook pressed his lips together. “I got used to hiding it. Okay, just not really talking about it. Think it’s why my mom left. You know?”

“You really think that?” Dante shook a creamer out into his coffee, stirring as he looked up at Rook. “You think she left you there with those people because she thought you were gay? You were what? Seven? Eight?”

“I told her I liked boys like she did. I thought she was going to vomit.” He shrugged, refusing to let the image of his mother’s disgusted look surface up from his memories. “She split the next morning with some guy she’d just met. Hard not to make that connection, you know?”

“So when Archie….” The cop exhaled hard, clicking his tongue against his teeth. “You figured your grandfather would be the same way.”

“I came at him, you know? Because he was this thing to be conquered, not an actual person.” Rook leaned on his elbows, jostling the table. “Archie was like the bogeyman. He was why Beanie—my mom—left home. And then she left me.”

“How did he get a hold of you, then? Call? Sent someone?”

“He didn’t know about me. Beanie never contacted them, and I’d… well, when you and your partner came around to fuck up my life, she figured I might need a lawyer or something. She gave me Archie’s name and where everyone lived.” It’d been an odd night, cradling his drunken mother as she railed against her father’s machinations while pushing Rook to give her money. “I don’t know if she called someone or… anyway, he found me out… and there we were. Shit, I can’t even think here, Dante. Tonight… yesterday. So much has fucking happened. I just know today when I thought—when I saw him there in that damned bed, he looked so fucking small, and it…
killed
me. Inside.”

“Archie loves you. He was glad to see you were okay.” Dante snorted at Rook’s incredulous smirk. The waitress returned, filling their cups and dropping off Dante’s plate of bacon, scrambled eggs, and toast. Pushing the plate between them, Dante tapped the fork at Rook’s elbow and said, “You eat and I’ll talk. Or I listen and you eat and talk. But either way, you eat.”

The fried pork crumbled on Rook’s tongue, nearly cardboard tasteless under the ashen worry he’d heaped on himself. Chewing, he swallowed, catching a hard glare from Dante when he tried to put the bacon back onto the plate. Another bite and his stomach rebelled, but he continued chewing, chasing the bite down with a gulp of scalding sweet coffee.

Rook’s words bubbled up from inside of him, percolating until he couldn’t breathe, and the emotion they carried tightened his throat. He had to speak, had to get out the one thing he couldn’t take back down, because it would burn into his soul and he’d carry the scar of its swallowing for the rest of his life.

He sounded small when he spoke, so far away from the man he thought he’d become. Instead, Rook found the broken child inside of him—a child he thought he’d buried years ago when his mother faded into the distance behind a roar of engine noise and blue smoke.

“I was so fucking scared, Dante,” he whispered, looking back out at the woman standing in the street, hoping to feed on someone else’s dreams of touching the stars. “Just so damned fucking scared.”

The bacon fell away, disappearing somewhere. Rook didn’t know or care because his world was suddenly filled with Dante, the cop’s—his cop’s thick arms wrapping around him, pressing him into a broad muscled chest where a heart beat in strong strokes in time with Rook’s own fluttering pulses. Everything around them faded, sliding away from the walls Dante erected around them.

Rook heard nothing. Felt nothing other than the man who’d come around the table to embrace him, to hold him steady as his world fell apart and he had nothing to stand on. The edge of a cliff suddenly appeared beneath Rook’s feet, and he stared down into the blackness of loss, mourning a grandfather he thought he’d lost and possibly would never ever truly be loved by. A step forward, and Rook knew he’d tumble down, shattered on rocks he’d sharpened with his own acidic tongue… only to be saved by Dante’s touch.

“I almost lost him, ’Toya,” Rook mumbled into a crease in Dante’s shirt. The man smelled of coffee, soap, and tired male, a familiar comfort he’d grown too used to. He’d have to let go soon, too soon, but for now, for then, Rook allowed himself to hold on as tightly as he could, unwilling to be flung back in the maelstrom he’d been thrown into. “God fucking damn it, I’m not… I can’t do this. I can’t
care
.”

“You already care,
cuervo
. No stopping that once it happens.” Dante’s fingers were in his hair, stroking away the prickles across his scalp. “I’ll have the waitress pack this up, and we can eat it back at the—”

“Fuck the hotel,” Rook grumbled, pulling away from Dante to rub at his eyes. “I want to go and lie in my own goddamned bed, on my sheets, and let you hold me. For however long you can be there, but fuck it, I’m sick of running away—from me… from the psycho that’s out there… even from Archie. I’m tired of it, ’Toya. I just want to go…
home
. And I don’t even have a goddamned home. Can you do that for me, Dante? Will you just take me home and… stay there with me? For a little bit?”

“I can do that,
cuervo
.” Dante caught the waitress’s attention, motioning her over. “And babe, I’ll hold you for however long you want me to. And even then, I
might
not let you go.”

It was quiet in the middle of Hollywood.

The morning had turned dewy and gray by the time Dante got Rook up into his loft above Potter’s Field. Within seconds of the elevator doors closing behind them, the skies were a threatening black, crackling with the promise of lightning and fury. Pouring a senseless Rook into bed was less trouble than Dante thought it would be, especially after a judicious application of a pain pill, ibuprofen, and tooth-brushing. With the loft’s blackout curtains drawn, the rooms were plunged into a thick darkness, and Dante stumbled a bit as he left Rook sleeping off his trauma to get his head around the murders.

Spartan was one word Dante had in mind about Rook’s place. Its dearth of furniture was sad in a way, as if Rook never planned on having more than one person in the apartment—himself. While comfortable, the couch was kept company by pieces of lawn furniture, but Rook’s coffeemaker definitely was geared to a heavy user. Brewing up a strong carafe of Italian roast, Dante contemplated the deaths he’d been assigned, then retired to the living room space to construct and file reports on his laptop. He spent nearly two hours doing paperwork, serenaded by Rook’s soft snuffling and melodic murmurs before turning his attention back to the murder board in his notebook.

A ping from his e-mail turned out to be an information dump from a detective working Vice in West Hollywood, and Dante read through the initial message, then shot off a promise of beer, eternal gratitude, and future favors. Running briefly through the notes was dizzying, but he quickly picked out familiar names among the stacks of references in the other detective’s reports.

“Rook’s got to be the center of it,” he mused, sipping at the rich black coffee. Scribbling down the key people gave him a laundry list of names whose sole connection was a nebulous dotted line to his irascible lover. Drawing a large square in the middle of a blank page, Dante sat staring at the empty block until his cell phone burbled a cheery tune. Shaking his head at the number, he answered the call
.
“Yeah, Camden?”

“Montoya!” Hank blasted through the speaker, and Dante pulled the phone away from his ear. “Just wanted to touch base. I’m still out for a couple of days. Doc won’t sign my release form yet.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I want to share a car with a ginger howler monkey. Tone it down a bit. I don’t know what’s louder—you or the explosion,” Dante teased. “Can you hear me?”

“Oh, I can hear you. I’ve got speakers on this thing. Wife made me go into the bathroom and close the door. Says I’m breaking her eardrums.” His partner’s voice dropped a notch. “Better? I’m working on volume controls. Are you back at work? Or did the captain pass our stuff off to someone else for right now?”

“Well, my ears aren’t bleeding, and no, he gave me a day, but shit’s happened.” After filling Hank in, Dante paused long enough to take a sip of his cooling coffee. “So what do you think?”

“It’d be easier if we could run this down together, but it’d be a tossup who’d kill me first, the captain or the wife.” Hank grumbled under his breath. “The Pigeon didn’t seem too broken up about her sister. Are we sure she’s out of the game?”

“Pretty sure. She’s been clear of Vice for a while now, and everything seems to check out. Our victim in the townhouse definitely was on track to go clean. She was known to Winters, one of the detectives down in WeHo. Apparently he was working with her to get information on current players, which included her former partner. Pigeon wasn’t on the negotiation table there, but the sister, Dani, was.”

“Strong-arm on Pigeon’s part or loyalty on our vic’s?”

“I’m going with loyalty. Pigeon’s the one who suggested Jane go talk with WeHo. From what he’d gotten from the vic, there’s stuff that might have even rolled over to the feds.” Dante called up an e-mail he’d gotten from the other detective. “Winters said Pigeon’s involvement was cloudy, so he didn’t think he’d get anything solid on her, but our vic had some good stuff against the ex-partner, Madge, and a few others who were running some dangerous cons. Jobs that included our original victim, Dani Anderson.”