Cole McGinnis 05 - Down and Dirty (2 page)

There’d been a momentary glance at the sidewalk, long enough to spot the stars for Perry Como and Eartha Kitt. His attention even caught on one set into the walk for Burton Holmes, and Bobby spent about half a second wondering who the hell Holmes had been before his eyes once more wandered up Ichiro’s long, muscular body and snapped to the tightness of his ass clenching under his soft jeans.

Sadly, that’s where Bobby’s eyes were fixed and not where they needed to be—mainly on the fire-engine red Ford Focus barreling out of the cross street directly across the boulevard.

The first sign of trouble should have been the opening blare of what sounded like graduation music bouncing through the streets. French spooled out alongside the music, a rumbling baritone competing with a full-bodied bass as they oompahed words over a ceremonial jangle. It wasn’t until Bobby spotted the flaming-red car screaming through the intersection and as the speakers’ fuzziness cleared up it dawned on him he was hearing the Canadian national anthem.

In Southern California. Without a damned Mountie in sight.

Unsure about where the out-of-control Focus was going, he somehow crossed over the sidewalk before the car threaded through a frightened scatter of pedestrians and flung Ichiro up against the truck, covering the man protectively as the car whizzed by them onto the sidewalk. The inker rolled under him, a flash of muscle and bone beneath Bobby’s legs and chest. An elbow caught Bobby’s chin, but they were too tangled up to do anything more than hope for the best.

Metal keened as the small Ford tore through the space between two trees, its side mirrors peeling off and shattering upon impact. For a second, Bobby thought the car would lodge itself between the massive trunks, but either God had a sense of humor about suicidal tiny specks on wheels, or the driver was going too fast for mere mortal wood to stop her from reaching her goal. The Focus emerged through its Death Star run with long scrapes on its sides, its red paint gouged down to bare metal, and if anything, it picked up speed as its driver gunned the engine one final time before plowing into the showroom’s window.

Glass went everywhere, and a horrific crunching of smashed steel overwhelmed the blaring music for a brief moment, metal pinging like popcorn kernels on a hot plate. One of the trees gave in to its damage and toppled over, crashing to the sidewalk in a furious spit of dirt and bark shreds. Leaves scattered across the cement, one branch nearly burying Ichiro’s motorcycle.

From inside the showroom, the Focus’s driver-side door creaked open, and a small, slender woman crawled out, her arms raised in triumph as she took in the damage she’d caused to three classic muscle cars. Taking a deep breath, she joined in on a chorus of the anthem still endlessly blaring through the Ford’s speakers, her fists pumping in the air as she danced around the carnage.

“You okay?” Bobby checked over Ichiro’s legs and ribs, trying not to get hard at the press of the man against his crotch and belly.

“What the hell, just… what is wrong with her?” Ichi coughed, rubbing at his chest.

“Yeah, no words. Probably pissed off because she drives a piece of shit car that shakes when it gets close to blue-hair speed,” he replied softly. He was about to say more—or at least help the younger man to his feet—but his cell phone rang out loudly. “Shit, that’s your brother texting me. I recognize that foul ring anywhere.”

Feeling like he’d been caught boldly fondling Ichiro in broad daylight by Cole, Bobby got up and checked his phone. What he read made his stomach clench, and the blood in his veins ran to ice. Ichiro’s phone sang as well, and when Bobby looked up from his message, he saw Ichiro wobbling to stand up.

“What… why?” Ichi’s pupils were blown out, dark and hungry with shock. “I…. Oh God, Jae. Who would… shoot…?”

He couldn’t believe the words either. Not those words. Not the echo of a past rearing up to bite Cole McGinnis once again. The blood of another lover had been spilled over him, and for all Bobby knew, his best friend would be burying another piece of his heart in cold, hard dirt before the day was out.

“Yeah, I know, Sunshine.” Bobby slammed the tailgate back into place, then gathered Ichiro up from the sidewalk. “Come on. Let’s get you into the truck, and then we can head over to the hospital. Cole’s going to need us right now—something fierce.”

H
IS
TONGUE
was sour with the taste of Jae’s blood.

The world was sideways—so much pain, fear, and a deep, bone-chilling sorrow Ichiro would have given his soul never to feel again in his lifetime.

And amid the cries and burbling sounds of frightened people, he’d somehow gotten dried flakes of Jae’s spilled blood on his mouth.

Someone at the cold, numb vacuum of an American hospital—he wasn’t sure who—gave him Cole’s jacket to hold onto. Where or how they’d gotten it, he had no idea, but Ichi clung to it, a macabre ill-formed teddy bear made of nightmares and comfort. They’d taken everything else, or so Mike’d told him, and somehow someone’d missed a small speck of Jae’s blood on the leather. Ichi didn’t know what happened to Jae’s clothes. He supposed a police officer took them as evidence. Powder-burned and punctured through with hate-flown steel, Jae’s shirt was being picked apart for whatever it was the police looked for—someplace in the warren of Los Angeles’s grinding bureaucracy.

Another someone muttered forensics was a waste of time. Ichi couldn’t track whose voice cut through the high-keen chatter around him, but it rankled something in his spine, and he stiffened, ready to snipe back, but the moment was gone before he could gather up the thin threads in his mind.

Everything was just so—damned cold.

He dealt with blood on a daily basis. It was a constant in his life. He knew the smell of it, especially laid over with the scent of chemicals and astringent. The feel of it sliding under his fingertips, even through black latex gloves, was familiar. Mingled with the slight grit of ink, it permeated his life nearly as deeply as the art he drove down under his clients’ skin.

So why was the smell of Jae’s blood so horrible?

Why couldn’t he get it out of his nose?

And why was it so bitter on his tongue?

Some part of his mind flittered over a worry about getting sick—a constant sharp-fanged terror skulking in the shadows of his life and work. It flopped about, a broken butterfly searing its cracked body on the hot cement of Ichiro’s pain and worry. He knew Jae was clean. Fuck, they’d talked about the risky things they’d done when they loathed who they were. Hatred made a man do foolish things, and when that man hated who he was, it was easy enough to kill off his greatest enemy—himself.

But they’d come out of that violent storm whole and hearty—only to have an echo of a dead friendship fold back over and try to extinguish Jae’s life.

“Here. Drink this. You’re as white as a fucking ghost.” A hot cup of something was shoved under his nose, and Ichiro blinked, the flare of his dug-in fears suddenly doused by the tall, gruff-voiced older man Cole loved as a brother. Whatever was in the paper cup smelled as bitter as the taste of Jae’s blood on Ichi’s tongue, but he took it, numb from grief.

Even with the hot liquid scalding a path over his tongue and down his throat, Ichiro couldn’t quite figure out if it was some kind of tea or the remains of a brown crayon left too long in a cup of bitter melon soup. Swallowing, he felt the caffeine hit his bloodstream, juicing up the nightmares grazing in his mind. Startled by the flare of alertness, they fled, leaving him alone with Bobby and the crackling clang of the hospital’s waiting room.

“What is this?” Ichi gasped through the sour stew. It wasn’t getting any better. If anything, the liquid’s oily residue seemed to be spreading, coating his teeth and the insides of his cheeks. “It’s horrible.”

“Supposed to be a cappuccino.” Bobby gave him a small smirk, but it was halfhearted, pulled down by the heavy weight of Jae’s shooting. “Or at least that’s what the machine said—cappuccino espresso something or other.”

“I think you read it wrong.” He grimaced, shakily setting the cup down on the table next to the bank of seats he’d claimed as his new home. “Because this is more capuchin piss than anything else.”

“Drink it anyway. You need the sugar,” Bobby insisted.

They sat there, cold rocks in the hot stream of blue uniforms and hospital personnel. Sometime in the past few hours, they’d lost Mike to the cops as well. Something about the American justice system was skewed, because in the wake of an ambulance arriving to whisk Jae to the hospital, a mob of policemen descended upon the couple, taking Cole down and arresting him when he insisted on going with Jae.

Cole got there after Ichiro’d arrived, his face bled white from a bone-shattering fear Ichiro hoped he’d never have to experience for himself. Blinking slowly, Ichi suddenly realized he’d gotten the jacket from Cole as he rushed by, shoving the leather into Ichiro’s hands before disappearing into the depths of the hospital’s surgical ward.

None of the blue-uniformed crowd gathered near the swinging doors stopped him. No one moved to tell Cole he couldn’t go through the doors, and from the purpling swell under his right eye, it looked like he’d already won one battle to reach Jae’s side. The determined look on Cole’s face practically dared someone to start round two, because he seemed ready and willing to raze the city if someone so much as looked at him wrong.

No one even dared to meet his desperate, searching gaze, their eyes sliding away from his tense body as Cole stalked through them.

It was hard seeing his brother so torn apart. Ichi clutched the jacket tighter, wishing he’d done more—could have done more—to wipe away the anguish on Cole’s face. The heartbreak and fear emanating from Cole as he rushed to Jae’s side gouged deep furrows of pain into Ichiro’s heart. It was bad enough to worry for Jae. Worrying for Cole felt like enormous stones pressing down on his already laden chest.

“I wish someone would tell us something,” Ichiro muttered. His English was suffering. The pure accent-free tones he’d worked so hard to achieve were gone, leaving him with a stumbling thickness over certain words. It was a trivial thing to focus on, especially since they didn’t know how Jae was doing. “Why would they arrest Cole? I don’t understand it.”

“Because cops deal with what they find. Cole had blood all over him and a weapon.” It was a truth Ichi didn’t want to hear, not from Bobby’s mouth, and he forced himself to unclench his fists, or he’d punch Bobby in the face. Eyeing Ichiro, he continued, “I don’t like it any more than you do, but they had to take him in. It’s procedure, and the first person you look at in a shooting is the spouse. He wasn’t arrested. Just taken in for questioning, and they probably did a gunshot residue test on him. They
have
to eliminate him as the shooter, Sunshine.”

“It’s fucking stupid,” Ichi growled back. “A blind man could see Cole would never hurt Jae. Like he’d shoot someone.”

“Look, we’re lucky that one of the patrol guys found a witness. Someone at the cat-shit coffee shop actually saw the shooting. She went in to dial 911. Fuckers put her on hold.” Bobby leaned forward, rocking a bit in the chair. “Took her a bit before she just chucked it in and went back outside, but by then, they’d already dragged Cole down to the station.”

“I can’t believe they thought he’d do that. Cole! You’ve met Cole. Anyone who’s met Cole would know better. Even a stranger.” The idea of his fierce-willed older brother shooting anyone was mind boggling, and Cole murdering Jae wasn’t even something… it was impossible. “He should have been here. He
needed
to be here! Took too long to get him released and now—shit, suppose it’d been too late? Suppose—”

“They needed to exclude him, Ichi, but yeah, there was a better way of doing it. The asshole who fucked with him is probably going to be driving a desk for a few weeks. O’Byrne’ll see to that.”

Bobby took up more space than Ichiro felt comfortable with, and the heat from the man’s body bled off the cold from his skin. Ichi breathed him in, pulling in Bobby’s strength with each pull of his lungs. The older man made him feel safe or at least not alone. There was a coldness inside that didn’t seem to get warm no matter how much hot coffee and tea Ichiro poured into himself.

“Hey, you look like you’re about to pass out there, Sunshine. How about if we take a walk or something?” Bobby rumbled, his dark eyebrows pressed in over his knuckle-fractured nose. “You could probably use some air. Play your cards right, and I might even buy you another cup of shitty coffee.”

There was a spicy flirtation in Bobby’s words. Habit or… something else, Ichi didn’t know, but Cole’s best friend definitely rumbled with a rough sensuality every time he spoke.

The man was handsome in a rugged, woodsy way with strong features and a light scruff over his jaw. His hair ran to a color Ichiro thought of as mink, with a faint bit of silver dusting through the close crop. He’d have loved to see it a bit longer, enough to wrap his fingers in while he guided Bobby’s hard, profane mouth down over his cock. There was something piratical about the former cop, a bad boy born to wear a badge and a gun, with only a thin, steel-strong ethical spine holding him to the straight and narrow.

Bobby Dawson was a scoundrel and a rogue, a bit of a rebel with a dangerous smile, and Ichiro found himself drawn to the man Cole called his best friend as if he were a moth and Bobby was the only light source left in the universe.

Dawson was
not
someone Ichi wanted to focus on at the moment, and he damned his dick for even straying in that direction.

“Air?” Ichi snorted. “God, I think I need something to drink more than I need air. Hell—”

A commotion erupted near the doors as a blood-speckled surgeon emerged through the sea of blue uniforms. There were so many people cluttering up the space, and Ichiro caught a glimpse of a traumatized Scarlet being held up by her Korean lover as the doctor waited for everyone to gather in. Maddy joined the fray from an adjoining hall, Mike trailing behind her with his cell phone plastered to his chest to drown the noise out of the call he’d been making.