Whiskey and Wry (Sinners Series) (10 page)

Or both. Both sounded like a good idea. If he was with the man much longer, he’d need something sharp to carve the man out. He was going to need to find a way to exorcise Dee.

Either that or find a way to keep him.

Sionn spoke first, spotting the goose bumps prickling Dee’s bare arms. “You need to put on your jacket and come with me, boyo. And don’t think about giving me any of your lip. It’d be pretty easy to knock you out and toss your fucking body over my shoulder. God Almighty knows, it won’t be the first time I’d thought on it.”

“
You
need to be less bossy,” Dee grumbled, but handed the guitar over to Sionn. Shrugging the fleece on, he pushed its too-long sleeves up over his wrists. “I couldn’t play with it on. And I needed to…
play
.”

He almost said Dee shouldn’t have played at all. He didn’t want to share the angelic-faced musician with his long legs and kissable mouth with anyone. The cowboy hat was a mistake too, Sionn thought. It gave the young man a sense of wild, something that begged to be tamed. Flexing his fingers around the guitar’s neck, Sionn tamped down the urge to shove Dee into a dark corner and bite at his cold-blushed lips.

Instead, he gave the instrument back and picked up its case, careful not to spill any of the money lying on the shell’s red velvet insides. Singing for the crowd might turn the man blue from the cold, but from the bills Dee was plucking from the case, it was apparently profitable.

“About a hundred.” The guitarist’s damned, haunting mouth twisted into an assessing pout-smile. “Not bad. I’m still rusty, though. My fingers are fucking hurting. My calluses were all gone before. But it’s enough, I think.”

“If that’s rusty, then God help their wallets when you break off the cobwebs.” Sionn held the case while Dee put the guitar away and locked it up. “You sounded plenty good,
a rún
. You should be playing someplace big. Not here in front of a burger joint for coins.”

Dee bent forward to tuck the cash into Sionn’s front pocket, the back of his hand sliding down Sionn’s thigh before he could pull away. His fingers burned through the soft cotton fold of Sionn’s pocket, and he nearly put his hand over Dee’s to keep him there.

“That’s for the window that asshole shot out.” Dee slid free, bending down to pick up his guitar. “Sorry about that.”

Sionn could feel the tired and scared rolling off of Dee. If the past week had been rough on him, he couldn’t imagine what Dee felt like. Cupping Dee’s chin in his hand, he gently guided the man back around to face him.

The guitarist’s cheek was hot in Sionn’s bare palm, and Dee shivered at Sionn’s touch but didn’t pull away. They were someplace Sionn couldn’t say would be safe if he kissed Dee the way he wanted to. Instead, he rubbed his thumb over Dee’s jaw, then let his hand fall away to his side.

“You’re trouble, Dee boy,” Sionn muttered under his breath. “But I get you. I do. Something shitty’s happened to you, and I’m guessing you’ve got nowhere else to go. But you’ve got my word that I’ll help you.”

“That guy was shooting at me, Sionn.” It wasn’t a surprise to hear Dee admit it. Sionn’d shot dead the last person who’d tried to kill him. He didn’t have anyone else he knew of on his ass, so it had to be Dee the gunman was after. “I can’t bring that to you. It’s not—”

“You’ve got to trust someone, Dee. If not me, then who? Who else do you have?” The edge of Dee’s mouth felt too cold, and Sionn went back to rubbing some warmth into his cheek. “I can handle myself. Probably a damned sight better than you can. Just let me know what to expect and it’ll be all right. But you’ve got to talk to me, boyo… and trust me.”

“Betcha say that to all the boys who get your place shot to shit.” Dee smirked at him through his fingers, but the humor didn’t push away the shadows in his troubled eyes.

“No, you piece of shite, not all the boys,” Sionn grumbled as he took the hat from Dee’s head and ruffled his hair. “Just the one I seem to want to fuck.”

S
IONN
’
S
place was different than Damien had imagined it would be. Tucked away in Chinatown, the building shouldered up against smaller buildings, stretching up five stories to look down its nose at the street traffic below. Sionn’d parked his Jeep in one of the nearby lots and hurried Damien across the street, jogging behind him with the guitar case in the hopes of beating the rain.

Three feet away from the building’s entrance, they lost their race when buckets of water dumped out of the sky above.

The lobby was little more than a square of tile wide enough to hold four or five people, with an elevator door on either side. Dark and smelling of fried noodles from the restaurant next door, the space felt sticky and hot despite the cold coming through the crack under the foyer’s glass doors. The elevators were old, with wood paneling and an accordion door blocking anyone from entering. A tiny key on Sionn’s key ring fit into a slot by one of the elevators, and the man rattled the door back, letting Damien inside. Sionn got in behind him, punched the top right button of the two uneven rows set into the wall, and the car lurched once before heading up.

Given the entrance, he’d been expecting a long, narrow hall with doors leading off into equally tight apartments. What he got was an open-spaced loft with glass tile demiwalls separating out rooms and a view of San Francisco Bay being pounded by a chilly storm.

“Holy shit, this place is awesome.” Damien set his guitar down and stepped into the main living space. The wood floors beneath his wet sneakers squeaked slightly from the damp rubber treads, and he guiltily hopscotched back and shed them by the door. “Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Sionn replied. “I’ll go get us a couple of towels and some coffee. Go make yourself at home. I’ll be right back.”

A large burgundy sectional took up a lot of space near the bayside slice of the loft, arranged to mostly face the big-screen television anchored to a brick wall. A dining table sat opposite, with a weight bench and some exercise equipment set up farther away. The rest of the loft was hidden from view behind glass-tile stands or curving plaster walls rising about ten feet from the floor, far below the space’s open-beam ceiling.

Damien padded over to the sectional and settled into a corner of the sofa, stretched his legs out, then rubbed away the sweat forming on his palms. It felt good to stop moving. He’d spent most of the week running, looking over his shoulder for murdering blonds or an elusive warehouse that seemed to never be where he thought he could find it. The only constant in his life appeared to be Sionn and the pub, and he’d fucked that up without even meaning to.

“You can do this, Damie,” he told himself. “You were going to do it anyway. Just fucking tell him the truth, and if he thinks you’re nuts, then you can walk away. Easy enough.”

Except walking away from the broad-shouldered Irishman would hurt. Even if they’d not done anything more than share cups of coffee and talk at times—one fucking hot kiss did not count—he’d come to depend on having Sionn near him. Solid as granite, the man became someone he’d clung to, even as he kept his distance. Damien
liked
knowing Sionn was there.

He’d woken up that very morning determined to hunt Sionn down at the pub. His empty pockets and a knocking on his door from a pissed-off building manager drove him to the sidewalks so he could make some cash. But when he saw the Irishman standing in the crowd, Damien took it as a sign he’d made the right choice in talking to Sionn.

Lying on the man’s couch, exhausted from playing for hours and damp from yet another soaking, Damien was no longer so sure. There was too much to lose.
Sionn
was too much to lose.

It had been a hell of a fucking hot kiss.

Somewhere around one of the opaque glass walls, a coffeemaker gurgled, and the smell of beans giving up their juice floated through the loft. He shed the fleece and tossed it to the ground, worried it was too wet to lay on the suede sofa. Lulled by the sound of the rain outside and the soft couch cushions, Damien forced himself to sit up, scrubbing his face violently to slap some sense into himself.

“I’m just so damned tired,” he mumbled through his fingers.

“Here.” Sionn nudged his shoulder and passed over a wide, thick towel. The man had changed out of his wet shirt, throwing on a tank top instead. “Coffee’ll be done soon. I’ll go dig up some clothes for you.”

“Thanks. Let me sit here a bit first. I’m kind of shaky. It’s fucking cold.” Damien used the towel to get as much of the water out of his hair as he could. His hat was somewhere in Sionn’s Jeep, probably lost beneath a pile of Finnegan’s T-shirts and some water bottles.

Looking up at Sionn was probably something his nerves could have done without. It was bad enough to see the man bend over tables. Up close and personal was a breathtaking torture. No, Damien moaned into the edge of the towel, he didn’t need to see Sionn’s muscled chest under the too-thin gray fabric or his powerful arms bunch up as he grabbed a laptop from a nearby black-lacquer side table. The man’s body radiated heat, and Damien shuffled farther back into the couch, needing some distance.

“I want you to tell me what happened,” Sionn said softly. He opened the laptop, powered it on, and waited for it to cycle up. “Everything, okay? I’ll take down some notes, and we’ll go to the cops together—”

“Oh hell to the no,” Damien shot back, shaking his head. “No cops. Are you insane? Suppose that guy knows a cop—”

“Were you always this paranoid?” Sionn’s eyes flickered with amusement at Damien’s scowl. “My uncle is a cop. A captain. The guy that showed up to take your statement… you know, the one you skipped out on… he’s kind of an uncle too. I
know
the cops. They’re going to protect you. I’ll protect you. Now start talking to me, Dee. Why do you think someone shot at you?”

Sionn meant what he said. Damien could see that. Even as worn out as he was, he could hear the sincerity in the man’s rough, accented voice. They knew nothing about each other, but here he was, promising shit he probably couldn’t deliver, because Sionn was probably the type of guy who rescued dragons from maidens and helped trolls with their goat infestation.

After what seemed like an eternity of running, Damien was just too fucking tired to take another step. Taking a deep breath, he plunged forward, falling into the scary nothingness of the unknown and hoping beyond hope that Sionn would catch him before he hit bottom.

“First off, my name’s not Dee.” He took the laptop out of Sionn’s hands, ignoring the scrape of the man’s fingernails against his palms. “Here. Hand me that. I’ll show you something.”

A quick search brought up the Skywood fire, and he turned the screen around for Sionn to see, tapping at the ruins of the institute in the picture. The man read through the article, his eyes flicking down the screen, and when he finished, he gave Damien an odd look.

“This place… it’s a mental institution?” Confusion trampled deep lines into Sionn’s handsome face. “Why?”

“Because my real name is Damien Mitchell and I supposedly died in a car accident… along with some other guys in my band.” Damien took a deep breath, pushing himself past the rusty grief that welled up every time he thought of Dave and Johnny. “
That
place is where somebody—I don’t know who—stuck me. Then a guy showed up to take me out. Problem is, I don’t remember a lot from what happened before I woke up there. And I sure as fuck don’t know why that guy is trying to kill me.”

T
HE
old woman’s blubbering was getting on his nerves. He’d spent less than an hour with her, persuading her to tell him about the man she’d rented the attic space to, but either she was stupider than she looked and really didn’t know anything about Mitchell—something he’d thought impossible—or she was holding out on him from some sense of loyalty. He doubted the loyalty and would have been amazed if the woman actually had any idea about the concept. No, she was something cheap and disposable, much like any other dried-up whore on the far side of her life, and stuck under a billow of dingy gray hair and nicotine stains.

Even an hour was too much time to waste on her, but Parker had hopes. Slim, but still hopes she’d know something to lead him to Mitchell.

And like other women in the past, she’d disappointed him as well.

She’d also infuriated the hell out of him. Being duct-taped to a chair and beaten with a blackjack didn’t seem to do anything other than make her piss the floral housecoat she wore over her flabby, old body, and Parker hissed, stepping clear of the urine puddle soaking into the room’s cheap acrylic carpet.

“Do you have any idea how much these shoes cost?” He wasn’t expecting an answer. Not through the strip of silver tape he’d finally affixed across her sunken cheeks. “What is it with your kind and ruining my shoes? It’s like you can’t help yourself. It’s why you can’t have nice things.”

Looking around the apartment, Parker shuddered, seeing his trailer park childhood in its furnishings. Doe-eyed children gazed out at him from velvet paintings on either side of an ancient television, its weight barely held up by a damp-swollen particleboard entertainment center. A musky-smelling floral couch took up most of the living room, its puffed fabric upholstery covered by a yellowed, bubbled plastic slip. The plastic creaked as he sat down across from the woman, and Parker sighed, feeling cracks in the cover pinching at his tweed pants.

“Has everything in this place fallen to shit?” He gingerly inched closer, wincing at the tugging along the backs of his thighs. Parker hooked his hands into the rungs between the chair’s legs and yanked the woman forward, jerking her across the carpet. “Now, since you have nothing to say to me, let’s get to the interesting portion of this afternoon’s entertainment.”

It was easy enough to find the television’s remote, tucked away into a magazine rack much like the one his mother once had. Parker turned on the box and flicked through the channels until he found something he liked. The old woman quivered, her eyes rolling up to their whites as he turned up the volume until the tiny apartment bounced with the sound of a game show, its clacking, spinning wheel and scantily clad hostesses brightly smiling through pounds of makeup while they showed off household items Parker couldn’t have been paid to take.