The Little Death (2 page)

There was no sound inside the house, but by itself that meant nothing. I pulled the Glock and held it out in front of me as I nudged the door all the way open with my foot, expecting the worst. You can’t go wrong by expecting the worst. If things turn out better, it’s always a pleasant surprise.

I let my eyes adjust to the dark before I went forward into the house. What I could make out were just shapes approximating furniture, nothing out of place until I stepped inside the living room. I almost tripped over something hard, and I wondered if it was an end table or a booby trap when my eyes fell on something on the carpet beyond it. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. It was amorphous and notable only for being darker than everything else around it, and then I smelled it. Blood.

Nick was home all right, but he was a little too dead to ask any questions. Just my luck.

2

I
WAS
hoping Hickey wasn’t the one of the cops who showed, and I thought I’d lucked out, but then my ex had to show up. Damn it.

His name was Kyle Gomez, always cute as a kitten in a mitten in his dress blues, his hair as glossy black as fresh tar and his eyes like two melted-down pennies, a coppery kind of brown that I swear seemed to shade darker or lighter depending on his mood. I always said he was too good-looking to be a cop, and that was still true. I could get a semi thinking about the hard body beneath that polyester uniform, and the secret tattoo on the inside of his right thigh, the sword with wings that only his lovers ever knew about.

Our break up wasn’t great. He said I drank too much, that I had no ambition, and I couldn’t deny either of those charges, but I wasn’t gonna change either, not even for him. What he didn’t know, what he never knew, was I did try. I just failed.

He still looked good. He may have had a pretty face, but his jaw could have crushed granite. He scowled at me, which was still sexy, and asked, “Do I even need to ask what the hell you’re doing here, Jake?”

I told him everything I knew—which was not much—as his female partner, an equally hot Asian chick named Kwan, took charge of the scene. While I stood outside waiting for the cops to arrive, I’d left the lights off, because I didn’t want to get my fingerprints on anything. Now they were on, and I could see what had happened to Nick.

He was splayed facedown on the floor in a dark stain on the mustard-colored carpet, a stain almost as large as the maroon-colored sofa that was between him and the wall. What I had walked into was a coffee table thrown over on its side, the only real sign of a struggle. Nick was wearing black hiking shorts and a Hawaiian shirt that looked like someone vomited fruit punch over a blue canvas. How much of that was blood and how much was the original pattern, I couldn’t tell.

Kyle moved out to the porch as the forensics team came in, shoving me out with him. “What the hell are you doing with a lame missing persons case? Are you that hard up for money?”

I jerked my head back at the body in the living room. “Doesn’t seem so lame now, does it?”

Kyle frowned at me, his brown eyes a deeper shade of chocolate. “This isn’t a detective show, Jake. You found a body, that’s all. Don’t draw conclusions that aren’t there.”

“It’s a hell of a coincidence.”

“But that’s still all it is. Now go home and sleep it off.”

There was an implication in that that I didn’t like. “I’m not drunk.”

He raised an eyebrow skeptically, and it suddenly brought back all the bad shit in our relationship. He was always too anal, too quick to judge. I wondered if all cops were like that—I hadn’t slept with enough to tell. “I can smell alcohol on your breath, Jacob.”

He only used my full name when he was at the edge of his temper. He was about a minute away from yelling at me like a bratty teenager. “Yeah, because I took a swig before I came in. One swallow doesn’t equal love, and it sure as hell doesn’t equal drunk.” I did that deliberately, because while Kyle was out and presumably proud, he didn’t like any mention of sex on duty.

Kyle glared at me like he knew it. “Should I call you a cab? You shouldn’t drive drunk.”

“I told you—” I paused, stopping my anger before it could get started. “I wish we could talk like actual human beings sometimes, you know? I don’t know what I did to make you hate me so much.”

That made his expression crack, and I knew I’d flipped his guilt switch. I loved to do that. “I don’t hate you. I just don’t understand why you want to destroy yourself.”

“I have a reputation to uphold.” We had to step aside as the coroner had finally arrived, and since Kyle stepped back into the house, I used that moment to escape. I was getting into my car when he shouted at me, “We may have to call you back for questioning.”

“You know my number,” I responded, not caring all that much. It was possible the cops would call me in for questioning, but unlikely. It’d be more likely that Kyle would call me himself, for his own reasons.

I drove to my second office to think. It was this dive bar called Sully’s, tucked into a part of town that wasn’t so much bad as dead. Sully’s was one of the few businesses still open on a block full of sullen tenements and abandoned storefronts with window grates taking the place of shattered glass. The only spots of color were graffiti tags, explosions of color too intense to read. The only people I ever saw on the streets were the homeless or the muggers, as even the residents had the good sense to find another way to go.

Inside, all the dark wood seemed to suck up the feeble lights coming from the overhead fixtures, pathetic little funnels hanging from the ceiling that looked like heat lamps, and there was only a smattering of fellow losers cooling their heels in the shadows.

I took a worn stool at the end of the beer-soaked, cigarette burn-scarred bar and tried to decide if I wanted to continue with this case. Wasn’t much to it, and let’s face it, the only reason I took it was ’cause Sloane was so fucking hot. That and I needed the money. The detective handbook says that’s good enough.

Finding Nick dead was a coincidence, that’s what I told myself. But it didn’t feel right. Then again, considering the amount of whiskey I’d chugged, I bet nothing would feel right.

Speaking of which, a glass was placed in front of me, and I glanced up to see Lau standing there. “You look gloomier than usual,” he said in his deep, sonorous voice. It was as dark as the whiskey and twice as warm.

Lau was a huge Samoan man, nearly seven feet and three hundred pounds of pure muscle and hard fat that was almost better than muscle. His hair was a frizzy black nimbus, and he had a tribal tattoo that crawled up the side of his neck, jagged black blades like the scales of some nasty beast. I didn’t know much of his story, mainly because he was a man of few words who preferred to listen as opposed to talk. He was just an occasional bartender. He owned Sully’s (which was named after his cat), which explained why the bar was never vandalized. They took one look at him, and after their lives stopped flashing before their eyes, they ran away as fast as they could manage. If you valued your life, you left Lau alone.

The joke was on them, though. Lau was a pussycat, as gentle as they came. He even knit; he gave me a scarf he made for Christmas.

“New case,” I told him. “Should be simple, but it already seems fucked up.” After downing the drink in one gulp, I told him what had happened in the few hours I’d been on this case.

He listened as he always listened, like he was a Wailing Wall, a stone monument to people with nothing but regrets, and after I was done and he topped off my empty glass, he said, “You were letting your dick do the thinking again.”

“Again? It’s all I do, isn’t it?”

He frowned at me, which was a fearsome sight. Just by the way his forehead furrowed, I knew he was wondering if this was somehow attached to my guilt over Spencer’s death. He’d encouraged me to see a shrink or something, but why? He was my shrink, and I only had to pay him for the booze. “Why don’t you use my office, get on my laptop?”

“And do what?”

“Investigate. You know, like a real detective.”

“I am a real detective. I have the scars to prove it.” But I knew what he meant. I’d had a cursory look at some of the details, but nothing major. I needed to do that before I continued… if I continued. I wasn’t sure.

So I went back to Lau’s office, which was a tiny square of a space behind the bar, a claustrophobic room almost completely filled up by a plain wooden desk and a surprisingly plush and extremely large desk chair, made to take his incredible frame without snapping. His laptop looked like it had been slightly squashed, which was certainly understandable. His hands were huge, and while he wasn’t overwhelmingly handsome, I did sometimes find myself wondering how big his dick must be. It musta been the size of a third leg. How he hid it in his pants, I’d never know.

Eventually I found some stuff on Sloane and Sander Granger. They were wannabe models (as far as I could tell, they hadn’t exactly set the world on fire), and while they hadn’t landed a big gig yet, they were gorgeous. I got to see their equally hard, sculpted bodies, stripped down to nothing but Speedos, spray-tanned to a golden brown, as hairless as exotic cats. I didn’t go for that look—too plastic; I liked my guys with some hair on their chest—but they were still threatening to give me a hard-on. Beautiful boys. As a pair, they looked lethal.

They had separate Facebook pages, which was funny since they were identical twins and seemed to have identical tastes. Sander’s last post was simply
Going to Heat—C U bitchez!
As potential last words, they were slightly worse than
What?

It turned out Sander had a Twitter feed, so I went there and found there was a message posted at the time of 10:10 p.m., ten minutes after Sloane said he’d last heard from him. His final tweet read:
Im in! Gained access to Serpent Club. Score!

Serpent Club? What did that mean? According to Sloane, he’d gone to a party at Nick’s, met a “silver fox,” and left with him. Had Nick been lying? What the hell was the Serpent Club?

A Google search turned up some reptile aficionados, but nothing that seemed to apply to Sander or Nick. I called Sloane to see if Sander had ever said anything about a serpent, but since his phone was off, I didn’t bother to leave a message.

When Lau came in to check on me, I asked him, “You ever heard of the Serpent Club?”

He gave me a funny look, like I was making a joke he didn’t understand. “No, but then I’m not into lizards. Why?”

“The missing hottie Tweeted about joining it shortly after his brother last heard from him. He seemed excited about it.”

Lau shook his head and shrugged his massive shoulders at the same time. “Sorry. If it ain’t a type of microbrew, I can’t help.”

It could have been nothing, but I made a note of it before thanking Lau and leaving for my shitty apartment. Along the way, I called Red and asked him to meet me there.

Red was a lowlife scumbag who acted as an “informant” for me whenever the mood struck him. He was a junkie and occasional thief who seemed to know every rock to crawl under, and all the denizens that lived there. His real name was Trevor, but he didn’t answer to it anymore. The only reason he did favors for me was because he had a crush on me.

I got home before Red arrived, giving me time to hide my DVD player. Not that he would dare to steal from me, but hey, I couldn’t take that chance. I had a two-room apartment (three if you counted the bathroom) above a used book store only two blocks away from the office. Since I was the only tenant when the bookstore was closed, I had a lot of privacy and peace, which I valued. Also, this place was hard to find. You had to go around back, where the “service entrance” was, and there was a side staircase that led up to the hall outside my apartment. It would have been great for extra security if the lock wasn’t broken, but it didn’t matter much, as my door was pretty damn secured. Call me paranoid if you want, but at least I’m still alive.

I had just nuked some cold pizza by the time Red arrived. True to his name, he was red-faced and red-eyed, with the build of a five foot nine toothpick; he couldn’t have been a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet. His hair was a tangled mop of reddish brown hair, not quite curly, with brown eyes that had a typically wide and wary look, like he knew some bad shit was about to go down and he was going to be the first out the door when that happened. He was dressed in ratty jeans, worn sneakers, and a surprisingly new-looking green T-shirt, over which he wore one of his traditional plaid shirts. “Great, you got food?” he asked before he even closed the door.

The most surprising thing about Red, something no one ever expected, was his faint Scottish accent. His parents had moved to the States when he was a kid, and while he’d lost most of the accent, he still had a trace that some people misidentified as Irish or a speech impediment. Red never talked about his folks beyond an explanation for the accent, and you couldn’t help but wonder what the hell happened. They kick him out? Were they dead? Did he just have nothing to do with them anymore? Red hated talking about himself, but like most inveterate gossips, loved talking about other people.

I let him split the pizza with me, although my stomach was rough enough that I couldn’t sink more than one slice. Red happily scarfed the rest, barely pausing for breath. It wasn’t that he didn’t have money; it was that he forgot to eat at times. The wonders of being a junkie… not much different from being a drunk like me, I guess.

As soon as he was done eating and was chugging a soda to wash it all down, I asked him if he’d ever heard of a Serpent Club. After raising one bushy, pierced eyebrow at me, he asked, “That a description of some guy’s dick?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“Huh.” He scratched his head and thought, looking down at a nowhere spot on the floor. Sometimes Red looked barely legal, like seventeen, but he was actually twenty-three. I imagined when the drug abuse caught up with him, and it would, he would age twenty years overnight. “Can’t say I have, but I’ll ask around. People are always up to shit somewhere.”