Whiskey and Wry (Sinners Series) (4 page)

He was no closer to finding Sinjun than he’d been when he’d finally rolled into San Francisco a month earlier. It had taken him more than three months to get to California, hitchhiking and working his way west from Montana. A few days on the street told Damien he wasn’t cut out for dumpster diving anymore, and the flophouse’s vacancy seemed like a godsend.

Even if he had ID, he knew he couldn’t use it. Whoever had been shooting at him back at the nuthouse probably would also be able to hunt him down. Damien debated going to the cops or the paper nearly every day when he woke up, but he stalled. He had nothing to put in front of anyone to say he was Damien Mitchell, and the truth was, he no longer trusted anyone to help him out. Walking into a cop house could mean either his freedom or a one-way ticket to the man who wanted to put a bullet into his already fucked-up head.

“Fucking ties me to working the sidewalk.” He ground his teeth. “Worse than when we were touring.”

His stomach mumbled a bit in discomfort, and Damien reached for the package of Nutter Butters he’d spent a buck on at the Quiki-Mart. He unhooked the window screen and slipped out onto the narrow fire escape, then reached behind him to grab a sheet to protect his bare back from the building’s brick exterior. The building’s jutting overhang kept most of the rain from pouring down the fire escape, but a few thick drops hit his toes when he tried to stretch out. Tucking his legs up, Damien stared out at the city beyond.

Somewhere out in the lights lay Miki, unaware that his best friend was still alive and kicking.

“Kicking,” Damien snorted to himself. “Guess you can say I’m kicking.”

He’d remembered nothing when he’d woken up, groggy and restrained to a metal bed. The story he’d been spun about a life lived as Stephen Thompson echoed as a lie in some recess in his head, and even now, he had doubts about his sanity, especially on those days when he could recall nothing of his previous life other than the sound of his best friend’s laugh and the music they’d made together.

If anything… that music could
not
be a lie. If it was, Damien knew he’d climb to the tallest building in the city and kiss the sky good-bye. It was the only thing that kept him sane, knowing he had that kind of life inside of him… that need to create sound out of nothing more than his heart and soul.

The band surfaced once in a while, fragments of time spent in cramped vans, then buses. A hatchet-nosed woman named Edie often swam in and out of his consciousness, nagging most of the time but sometimes cajoling him along. His body remembered things instinctively, from the feel of strings beneath his fingers and, sadly, the plumping up of his mouth when he bit into a peach. Playing Russian roulette with food made him nervous, so he’d stuck with as much packaged shit as he could find, grateful to discover he and peanut butter were good friends.

And in all of it, there was music… both his own and haunting symphonies he’d practiced over and over, sometimes to the point of his fingers bleeding and crippled in his worst nightmares. If only he could more clearly remember the people screaming at him to practice.

He snorted, amused at the irony of his life. “Fucking hilarious some of that damned classical shit is paying my bills now.”

His head began to hurt, the scars along his skull throbbing from the residual heat of the day. Threading his fingers over the crinkled skin, Damien tried to ease the nerves beneath his shaggy black mane. He’d let it grow, hiding the scars under his thick hair and a black leather cowboy hat he’d gotten off of a trucker back in Iowa.

The keloid down his chest seemed to be shrinking, its angry purple color fading slightly to a disgruntled violet. Pink starbursts puckered its edges, marking the lines of staples or stitches the doctors had used to hold his insides together. It was an ugly gash down his sternum, but Damien found himself rather fond of it. If anything, it was a battle wound. Saluting the stars with a half gnawed-on cookie, he leaned back and rubbed at his naked chest, soothing the ache growing there.

“Just give me some time, Sinjun,” Damien whispered up into the fog-veiled, dusky sky. “Give me some time to find you so I can find myself again.”

Chapter 2

People talk about tears

About the agony they’ve cried

They made you salted ground,

Left to fallow, dead inside

Made you wear their pain

Right on your broken skin

Covering in ink and blood

Doesn’t hide them from within

—
Reclaiming of D

H
E
TASTED
blood. Was choking on it, really, and some part of Damien’s brain fought off the cloying shadows wrapped tight around him. His limbs were sluggish and he hurt. Most of all… he hurt.

God, there was just so much pain.

The terror ate him, gnawing with a ravenous hunger through his defenses. A sound echoed, familiar and sickening. It took him a moment to figure out what it was and why he flinched when he heard it. Coming up out of the chaos in his mind, it dominated his fears—a wet smack-smack-smack noise that brought with it a rush of red-hot pain.

Everything began to hurt. His skin burned, and he could feel the cracks forming in his bones, a twisting anguish, as if he were being torn apart. Something in his side wrenched, and then the screaming started.

And for a moment—lying in the dark—Damien would have given anything just to make everything go away. Anything to have the black rise up and swallow him so he wouldn’t have to feel anything ever again.

He remembered that sound. It came to him as sharp as lightning crackling across a night sky. Those were his bones breaking, cracking bit by bit under the hard smack of fat angry fists. He felt his skin split under the blows, in too many places to truly feel anything other than the awful tearing rip, crevices at first, then chasms as the hits widened the wounds until they were deep within the flesh.

His mouth filled, sticky sweet with fear-thickened saliva, and throughout it all, his tiny child mind cried, unable to find the key to making the pain stop.

There were many reasons. Words flung at him as the hammering continued, unabated and furious. It was a storm of pain, layered in time and relived in a single long, agonizing moment, until Damien no longer felt anything other than the burn of his bruised flesh. It’d been a relief in some way. Overloaded, his system couldn’t absorb anything more, but the shouting usually continued, punctuating every stroke and punch.

“Faggot. Goddamn queer.”

He’d been too young to understand what the words meant at first. Later, when he did, he’d tried denying them, begging through the blood for his father to stop.

His father.

And the woman who lurked further back in the shadows, stumbling down drunk and uncaring. He’d reached for her, hoping she could make it stop… make the pain go away, but his hands touched nothing but cold air, whispering through the space where she should have been.

And throughout it all, the pounding continued.

The wet on his face broke through the dream, and Damien lurched up, flailing to fight off the blows. His chest ached from the cold, and the scar running down his breastbone was puckered tight, twisting in until it felt like a line of knots in his skin. He was freezing, and the wind had shifted in the early morning, angling the rain in through the window he’d accidentally left open.

Stumbling to his feet, Damien fought to gain some balance, but his legs were unresponsive, his muscles cramped from the cold and past hurts. The tips of his fingers ached when he latched them onto the window sash, and his shoulders trembled as he tried to shove the frame down. It took him a few tries before the old-fashioned sash window gave in, and the glass rattled when he finally got it to go down.

Slumping back onto the mattress, Damien sat against the wall, too numb and freezing to do anything but shake from the night terrors and the cold.

The hands in his dream didn’t belong to the man who’d come to him at Skywood. No, that man had been polished, an urbane sophisticate whose sole purpose appeared to be to convince Damien he was insane. The woman he’d been with was no better. There was something off about them. Something he couldn’t pinpoint at the time. Sitting against the wall of the cheap rented room, Damien finally realized why they’d seemed so odd.

They were about as far from the truth as could possibly be.

The man in his dream stank, a greasy film of odor and foul language slicking everything he touched, including his son. Nothing was ever good enough… no one was ever good enough. The most fearful place in the world was behind the front door. Outside, Damien was safe, an object of preening pride and boasting, but once that thick white door closed, the calm was shattered and monsters crawled out of the darkness.

Childhood was a tangle of confusion and something Damien wondered if he’d even survived.

Rubbing at his face, he was shocked to find a thick sheen of sweat on his skin. Despite the chill, his body was dripping from the fear he’d brought up out of his memories. It was too early to do anything useful. Wrapping a thick quilt around his shoulders, he sat cross-legged and quiet until the shaking in his limbs eased.

“What time is it?” Too lazy to reach for the alarm clock he’d covered with a washcloth to damp the light, Damien nudged it with his foot, knocking it off a crate. It fell backside down, and the red numbers glowed an ominous too-dark-early for his liking. “Too damned early to play anything. Someone’ll kick my ass.”

The walls were thin. Even tucked away into a small attic space far from the main floors, his playing seeped down to the lower rooms. If he picked up a guitar to play himself into exhaustion, someone would be at his door before he could finish a single song.

Warmth eventually sank through his skin, and Damien pulled his legs up, resting his chin on his knees. His hands still ached, more from long hours of playing, although the cold definitely danced its merry jig on them.

“Can’t wait to see Miki’s face when I tell him I’m playing Finnegan’s.” It’d been a couple of weeks since he’d been offered a corner at the pub’s outdoor café space, and Damien still couldn’t believe it. Anchored on the pier’s walk, he’d scanned the crowd, hoping in some corner of his heart to see his friend’s face amongst the strangers. Shaking his head, Damien whispered, “But you’ve never come. Fucking hell, dude, I’m running out of places to look for you.”

The gas station map of San Francisco he’d taped up against the long wall across his bed was marked up with highlighter ink and notes. He’d spent his mornings walking through neighborhoods he’d barely known existed before he’d begun his search and came up empty every time. None of the warehouses came close to what he’d had in his mind.

He grabbed his pillow, crossed his legs, and hugged it to his chest, staring at the map in the too-bright cherry glow from his alarm clock. His eyes drifted back to the pier, fixating on the green dot he’d stuck over the pub’s address.

He’d only seen the owner a few times since he’d been back, but whenever he caught a glimpse of him, something in him unfurled. After the first time playing on the patio, he’d somehow become enough of the scenery to get a free cup of coffee from the bar. The second time earned him a basket of garlic fries and the company of the manager, a jaded woman named Leigh whose hair seemed in a constant state of unicorn poop.

Leigh turned out to be a source of food as well as gossip, not someone Damien wanted to piss off, especially since she seemed determined to fatten him up like he was a little boy who’d nibbled on her gingerbread house. She rambled on about a lot of things, moving from politics to the state of lettuce, but most of all, she seemed to always come back to one thing… Sionn Murphy.

He’d learned Sionn had come over from Ireland when he was a teen to live with his maternal grandmother and that the man had an aunt living nearby who was getting pissed off that he didn’t come over for dinner. He’d also found out the man had a sweet baritone and knew all the words to “Greensleeves.”

Leigh also felt the need to tell Damien Sionn liked men for more than just a night of drinking and watching the telly.

That gleeful whisper into Damien’s ear seemed to lodge there, worming through the clouds in his memory and spreading its invasive tendrils into the recesses of his foggy mind.

“Guy is hot,” he acknowledged, wrapping the quilt even tighter around his cold shoulders. “Fuck, that damned mouth.”

He’d also found himself staring at the man’s hands, enraptured by Sionn’s strong fingers and broad palms, especially when he raked through his mink-brown hair, disheveling the longer strands so they fell forward onto his face. Trapped in the corner of the patio, he’d drift off in his playing, finding himself drawn more and more to Sionn’s wide shoulders and long legs. The man’s deep gray eyes caught his own stare once, and Sionn’s wicked mouth crooked a smile in Damien’s direction, leaving him flushed and hot beneath his cowboy hat.

Thank fucking God for that hat.

It kept the rain out and his blushes hidden. Most of all, it allowed him to sneak peeks at Sionn’s ass when he leaned over to clean a table. He was the kind of guy someone would buy a house with, argue over what color to paint the kitchen, then grumble good-naturedly when he lost. Sionn Murphy would be the man to climb a tree to rescue a kitten, say it could only stay one night before off to the pound it went, then spend the next twenty years coaxing it to let him give it belly rubs.