The Little Death | Andrea Speed 2
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I KNEW he was trouble the moment he walked in the door. A tall, sexy glass of water, he had the body of Michelangelo‟s David, packed into a pair of blue jeans and a Tool T-shirt so tight you could see what he had for breakfast: a shot glass full of orange juice, and a grape. His hair was silky black, a fall of shadow crowning a ruggedly handsome face, with eyes as brown as chocolate kisses and skin the color of caramels. I could have eaten him with a spoon. “Are you Jake Falconer?” he asked, his voice a smooth baritone coming out of pouty lips that probably had made many men dream of what he could do with them. “That‟s what it says on my business cards,” I replied, leaning back casually in my chair, pretending he didn‟t just give me a semi. “Who might you be?” “Sloane, Sloane Granger,” he replied, surprising me. I was expecting something exotic. “I was told you were the man to see. My twin brother is missing, and I‟m afraid something terrible has happened to him.” “You have a twin?” My mind went to a very dirty place, and I enjoyed the thought of being double teamed by the hunky Granger twins for a second, before snapping back to the here and now. I gestured to the chair in front of my desk, and he had a seat. Sloane, unaware of my brief sojourn into the gutter, nodded politely. “Yeah, Sander Granger. He‟s two minutes
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 3 older.” “Sander?” I wondered what kind of sick parents they had. Sloane and Sander? They sounded like a law firm. “Hell of a name. So when did he go missing? Why do you think something terrible happened to him?” Sloane settled into the chair in a way that made me jealous of the seat. He ran a hand—a big hand—through his hair, messing it up in a way that made it even more irresistibly sexy. “It was last week. He told me he was going to that new club, Heat. You know the one?” I nodded. “It rings a bell.” Actually, it set off the fire alarm. Every “alternative” gay publication in the city had run at least one full-page ad for the joint. I didn‟t go in for gay clubs, mainly because they were too noisy and overloaded on twinks, who weren‟t my thing at all, but I‟d read the ads anyway. Heat promised “foam parties” (whatever those were), swimsuit contests, and more. It sounded like another cheesy nightclub desperate for business in the recession-wracked downtown corridor. “Anyways, he left at eight and called me around ten to tell me he was going to this party with Nick… and that was the last I heard from him. I thought maybe he spent the night at some trick‟s place, that he‟d come home the next afternoon, but he never did.” “You talk to Nick?” “Yeah, but he said Sander got picked up at the party by this silver fox, and that was the last he saw of him. He didn‟t know the guy, didn‟t know where they went.” I scratched my head, made a show of thinking, when all I really wanted to do was take a slug of whiskey from the flask in my top desk drawer. Whiskey helped me think, even
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 4 though Spencer, my old partner, claimed I just said that so I could openly drink on the job. “I assume you‟ve been to the police.” “Of course! But they didn‟t seem to care. The guy I talked to told me my brother was an adult, and most likely he‟d just run off without telling me, that I‟d get a postcard from him in a few months or something.” That wasn‟t a surprise. Adult men rarely disappeared involuntarily, although when they did, the reasons weren‟t pretty. “Was the cop‟s name Hickey?” He looked adorably confused and after a moment‟s thought shook his head. “I dunno. Can‟t remember his name.” “Sounds like him.” There were a lot of dicks at the cop shop—not the good kind—but Hickey was the King Dong of the place. “So why do you think something bad‟s happened to him? Not to give credence to the boys in blue, but Sander could have run off.” Sloane sighed heavily, looking at me with those softly moistening doe eyes. This guy was a hot piece of ass, and he knew it. “He was getting threatening e-mails, and he got a final one the night of the party. I hacked into his e-mail and read it. It said, ‘Tonight’s the last night you’ll ever have’.” “You let the cops know, I take it.” “Yeah, but since Sander himself never took them seriously—he thought they were from some troll he encountered on a message board—they didn‟t take them seriously either.” There was a lot in his story that didn‟t make sense, but I was still intrigued. Okay, mainly by those rock-hard pecs barely constrained by the taut fabric of his T-shirt and the
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 5 noticeable bulge in the crotch of his jeans like he was trying to smuggle a salami through customs. But hey, I‟m only human. I know it‟s all a cliché: the hard-drinking detective with the run-down office and a lifetime of regrets and bad luck propping up his spine, but far be it from me to bust a cliché. Sloane didn‟t kiss me or tickle my balls, but obviously those possibilities were still on the table, pending the outcome of the case. His credit card was nice and shiny, and I felt like I was taking its virginity, but that just made me want to run it again and again until it begged for mercy. Yeah, it probably had been too long since I got laid. If only Sloane would help me with that problem. I watched him leave, his ass so incredibly edible in those tight jeans of his it was all I could do not to lunge out from my desk and bite it. Although the door of my office had a window, it was opaque, so I could only see his shadow once he closed it. Still, it was a sexy silhouette. I slumped back in my seat and pulled the flask out of the drawer. I had to fulfill the cliché, so it was a silver flask filled with cheap rotgut, which I swigged with abandon even while wincing at the taste. So yeah, I‟m the cliché, a private dick with a cheap office and a dead partner and more debt than I could possibly pay off in a month of Sundays. Not that you could tell from my door. Used to be there was a name painted on the window, but that wasn‟t true anymore. The hail of bullets that killed Spencer, my partner in snooping, destroyed the original door, so this was the replacement. I was supposed to hire painters to replace the name, but what was I going to replace it with? Was I really gonna go from Spencer & Falconer,
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 6 Private Detectives to Falconer, Private Detective? I had no choice, I‟d hafta, or I‟d hafta find a new partner. Yeah, right. Maybe I‟d just hafta retire, find a real job, one that didn‟t cut your life span in half and leave you with more trouble than a nun with a grudge in hell‟s half acre. The problem was I couldn‟t do much else, and frankly I didn‟t want to. As much as I hated it sometimes, I was born to be a private dick. I couldn‟t change that any more than a zebra could change its stripes. Sloane had left me his brother‟s e-mail and the header of the threatening mail, so I got out my laptop and had a look for myself. Phone calls might taper off, but spam was eternal, sure to continue on long after the world had imploded and was a scarred, barren shell. The e-mail was a dead end. There was no name, and the e-mail address was one of those that hid your IP address and was just a random series of letters and numbers that ended with a domain name that seemed to indicate the e-mail was sent from somewhere in Eastern Europe, from one of those former Soviet countries that ended in -ia. There was no way I could track that, and while I was sure I could eventually find someone to ask about tracing the e-mail, I‟d be an old man with a prostate the size of a grapefruit by the time they got back to me. That wasn‟t worth pursuing. I looked through Sander‟s e-mail, though, but that was the funny thing. There was nothing in any of the files save the inbox and the junk mail folder. Even the trash had been emptied. Not that that meant anything—some people just never bothered to save e-mails—but it made me wonder if Sloane had gone through it, sweeping away anything that his brother might have gotten into that was the least bit hinkey.
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 7 It was something to chew on. I drained my flask and then realized there was only one thing left to do. Well, two things: the first was refill my flask. The second was go to Heat, see if I could retrace Sander‟s steps the night he disappeared. I downloaded a hot picture of Sander from his Facebook page, although it could have been Sloane instead, since they were both hot in the same way. I didn‟t do the gay club scene, or any club scene, mainly because I wasn‟t the type. Even if it wasn‟t a cliché, I don‟t care for people much. It seems like all they do is betray you, either in the form of a venereal disease or in the form of a sexy guy who lets you take him home and then comes back later and fills your business partner full of lead. Even a misanthrope like me can think with his dick, but I paid for it. Or should I say Spencer paid for it—I lived to fuck again. Except I haven‟t gotten laid since then. If you‟re thinking it‟s guilt, you‟re giving me too much credit. It‟s having to find a way to pay all the bills that‟s been keeping me from seeing anything besides my own surly mug in the morning. As it was, the city‟s club scene, gay and straight, was dying. Everything in this city was dying, some of it slower than others, but in the end it was all bones and ashes. The gay clubs were doing slightly better, but only because some of the guys needed the scene—they hadn‟t quite mastered Manhunt or Craigslist or didn‟t want to—or were younger guys tired of Internet trolls. But I had the vague conception that they were sad places if you were over twenty-five, and at thirty-four I was entering “circling the drain” territory. Maybe I should have changed clothes, looked less like me, but I wasn‟t fishing for a trick, I had a job to do. So I stayed in my slightly baggy black suit and blue shirt, with
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 8 my black duster on top of it all, and my tie so thin and black it looked like someone had erased a vertical line into my chest. I liked dressing black and blue, ‟cause most of the time I was matching my bruises. Heat was just what I expected: noisy, hot, filled with wannabes and never-weres, posers who thought all they needed were designer jeans and too-tight shirts to make up for their fatal lack of personality. I should have asked if it worked, ‟cause I could use all the help I could get. The bartender was a hot guy in that frat-boy sort of way, with a mop of curly blond hair and a shaved and gym-carved chest, on display because the bartenders at Heat rarely wore shirts. Although he wasn‟t my type, I could appreciate his aesthetic appeal. I showed him Sander‟s picture and said I was looking for him, which elicited a small laugh, and the admission he was looking for a guy that hot as well. The other bartender, a Latino twink, was no help either, so I figured I‟d start my search with Nick. On my way out, only one guy hit on me. Made me feel really pathetic. I‟m not hideous, but I‟m probably not gonna win any beauty contests either. My nose has a small bump, the visible remnant of a break, and there is a pale scar on my chin from the Spencer shooting, but otherwise I have two functioning eyes, a mouth that occasionally doesn‟t cuss, and all features arranged in their general correct order. My hair is a brownish black and not thinning yet, although it‟s not cut fashionably, mainly because I have no idea what a fashionable cut is. I‟d never had a gift for spotting trends, and I was too old to start now. The guy who hit on me was forty-trying-to-be-twenty, a sad combination of overtanned gym bunny and someone‟s
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 9 dad, so it was easy to brush him off. But I found myself thinking about that Latino bartender, even though I didn‟t usually go for twinks. Traffic kind of sucked, but traffic always kind of sucked, except at two in the morning. According to what I got from Sloane, Nick was Nick Giardi, and he lived up in the hills. Not that he was wealthy; he just rented one half of a duplex that a friend also lived in, so they could turn it into a “party house.” Nothing sounded sadder to me than something like that. As I drove up into the hills, I had time to wonder if a case as open-ended and potentially unsolvable as this one would pay even a month of bills. The problem with missing persons cases is they‟re often left open. People sometimes just disappeared, and if you really wanted not to be found, you could sink without a trace. But on the plus side, if you could keep stringing the client out on hope, you could make a good chunk of change. Maybe it would be worth it after all. Nick‟s duplex was a yellow-painted house down at the end of a road so cracked it might as well have been dirt instead of asphalt. The yard was a patch of burned grass and a few sad plants that looked like they may have committed suicide. There was no car in the oil-stained driveway and no lights on in the squat little house. But for some reason, I wasn‟t completely convinced the place was empty. I knew why when I approached the front porch. The door of Nick‟s place was ajar. Not wide open, but I was close enough I could see that the door wasn‟t precisely shut. “Hello?” I asked, reaching for my gun. I had a Glock G19 pistol that I had only used once,
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 10 too late to do much good since Spencer was already dead by that point, his blood splattered on my face and trickling into my eyes. Since then I‟d added a shotgun to the office. Not as many shots, but much more stopping power. 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.
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 11
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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 goodlooking 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
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 12 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
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 13 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
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 14 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
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 15 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
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 16 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
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 17 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.
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 18 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.
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 19 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 twentythree. 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.” That probably should have been the motto of this city: People are always up to shit somewhere. It was the only reason I still had a job. I gave him twenty bucks for his “research” (which would most likely go into his arm through a needle), but only because I knew he‟d deliver. He had yet to fail me in that regard. After Red left, I drank until oblivion folded me in its big black wings and carried me away. Sometimes, I wish they‟d never let me go.
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 20
3
I WOKE up as the sun was stabbing me in the face, trying to cut through my eyeballs and get into the back of my brain. With a groan I stumbled to the bathroom, had my morning vomit, and rinsed out my mouth with some mouthwash before taking a couple of aspirin with a shot of whiskey. That seemed to calm my head enough that I could get a shower and wash the stink off me. Across the street from my place was a café called Mia‟s. Not a greasy spoon, as I‟m pretty sure they were an endangered species, but not one of those fancy coffee shops that littered the landscape like so many overpriced paper cups. So as soon as I was dressed (in clothes that looked an awful lot like the ones crumpled in a heap on my floor), I went there for breakfast. I was such a fixture there that I didn‟t even need to order. As soon as I slipped into a window booth, Ami, a Japanese waitress who looked twenty but was forty, walked past and asked, “The usual, Jake?” “Please.” Within fifteen minutes, I had a plate of scrambled eggs, bacon, and hash browns in front of me, a cup of coffee steaming on one side, and a saucer of golden brown toast on the other side. Heaven. As soon as the taste of buttered bread hit my tongue, my stomach stopped roiling. Toast seemed to have amazing magical properties that soothed me unlike anything else. The rest of the breakfast was also good. The eggs were
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 21 hot and fluffy, the bacon crisp, the hash browns fried in bacon grease. The coffee was shit, but who cared? I had wolfed down most of my food before I bothered to crack the folded-up newspaper sitting beside the napkin container. It was thin, because the newspaper biz was dying even faster in this town than most, mainly because our journalists had always been shit anyway. Giardi‟s death was, of course, front page news. You‟d think they‟d have gone with the typical “homicidal violence,” which was a way of saying “murdered” without identifying the cause before the coroner could, but oh no, this reporter was a rebel. He went ahead and said stabbed. I thought about the amount of blood I saw on the carpet, and wondered if bleeding out was a possibility. The human body contained much more blood than you‟d ever guess, and a bleed-out was a tidal wave of blood. Unless he did most of his bleeding elsewhere, it wasn‟t blood loss that killed him. He bled a bit—gravity probably caused some of the loss—but wherever he was stabbed killed him quick enough that there was no arterial spray. The heart has to be pumping for blood to spurt. I put down the paper in time to see someone slide into the orange vinyl bench seat across from me. It was Kyle, now in civilian clothes. It was probably his day off. His raven hair was a bit scruffier than usual, but still neat, just cuter than your average cop cut. It softened his face, made him look younger and more innocent than he actually was. Although he did have the soul of a Boy Scout, which made everyone wonder how he ever ended up with me. It was one of those inexplicable things that just happened sometimes, like meteor strikes or gay Republicans. “Please tell me you‟re
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 22 sober,” he said. I just glared at him. My drinking was ostensibly why we broke up, but really I think Kyle just got embarrassed by me. A private detective seemed to be just one step below mime among cops, and he had a hard enough time being gay and looking like a barely legal teenager. “Whatever I say is irrelevant, because you‟ve already made up your mind. So just say what you‟re gonna say so I can finish my breakfast in peace.” “You are aware it‟s noon, right?” “It‟s still breakfast time for me.” He shook his head and gave me a look he‟d given me throughout our relationship, which is to say he glared at me in disgust. “Maybe you don‟t care about yourself anymore, but I thought I‟d give you fair warning anyways. They found your phone number in Giardi‟s cell, and it looked like he called your office about fifteen minutes before he was killed. His call to you was the last call he made.” Was he making this up? It wasn‟t like him. Yeah, he could be an asshole sometimes, but this seemed weirdly petty of him. “Bullshit. I didn‟t know Giardi from any chump on the street until Sloane hired me. He never called me.” “Where were you at eleven thirty-five last night?” I couldn‟t believe he was asking me this. I let my fork fall on my plate with a clang and snapped, “I was driving to Giardi‟s place. Christ, you think I stabbed the guy?” Kyle raised his eyebrows at me. “How—” I tossed the folded paper toward him. “It‟s in the goddamn paper, asshole. Do you really think I killed that guy?” Kyle glanced at the paper and scowled as he read the
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 23 offending line. Apparently the reporter never should have spilled the beans. “I know you didn‟t, but that‟s not the point, and you know it.” “You‟re telling me what I know now?” “Don‟t be this way. For some reason, the guys in homicide want to wrap this case up really fast, and you‟d make one hell of a convenient scapegoat. Can anyone verify your whereabouts?” “I was alone in the car.” Although I was getting angry, I took a moment to realize what he‟d said. “Wait, what? Why are they anxious to wrap this case up? Was he someone important?” “Giardi?” Kyle scoffed at my idiocy. “No. He was just some low-level dealer, as far as I could tell.” “So why the hurry to put the case to bed?” He shook his head, and this time the disgust on his face was not for me but for the boys in homicide. “I dunno. I asked, but I was only told there was a push to close cases, as there were too many open ones on the docket, but that doesn‟t make sense either.” This was weird. And by that I mean weirder than normal. Why were the cops pushing to close the case of a small-time dealer? Why did he have my phone number? I mean, it was possible he called my office if he did have my number, because I wasn‟t at my office. Did he leave a message? I hadn‟t been in today, so I didn‟t know. “Kyle, I didn‟t know the guy. The first time I saw him, he was dead on the floor. I don‟t know how he got my number or why he would call me. You have to believe me.” Kyle sighed heavily. “Damn me, I do. But you need an alibi.”
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 24 I had no idea how I was supposed to get one, but then I remembered that Giardi‟s place wasn‟t my first stop of the evening. “I went to Heat; then I went to Giardi‟s place. There‟s no way in hell I would have had time to go there, return to my office, and then go to Giardi‟s place. The time frame doesn‟t work.” “You could have called your office voice mail box from your cell.” I frowned at him. “With my tech savvy?” He grimaced knowingly. “Okay, no, but in theory….” “Okay, even if I could manage that, would I have had enough time to drive from Heat to Giardi‟s place and then kill him in that time frame?” Kyle considered it for a moment, then shook his head. “You‟re right. It only works if you have a rocket car.” I picked up my fork and scraped up the remains of my eggs and potatoes. “Damn it! You got me, copper. I give up.” Kyle sagged back against his seat with a relieved sigh. He was genuinely worried about me? Wow. But I don‟t know why I was surprised; he was always a soft touch. Cops were supposed to be hard and jaded, but Kyle was a dough boy, soft and squishy, full of marshmallow fluff. He‟d been on the job for three years, but he still believed in people. I had no idea how he did that. After a moment, he asked, “Why did you go to Heat?” “Tryin‟ to trace Sander‟s last steps.” “How‟d that go?” I heard something in his voice, a sort of flat tone, and I studied him, unable to keep from smirking. “You jealous?” “No. Why the hell would I be jealous?” he snapped.
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 25 I‟d be lying if I didn‟t admit his jealousy made me happy. So he still cared, even though he dumped me. “I might hafta go back. I came up goose eggs last night, but maybe I wasn‟t talking to the right people.” He crossed his arms tightly over his chest and made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a “harrumph.” I had no idea anyone in real life ever made that noise. “It‟s a place full of poseurs. I wouldn‟t think it was your kind of scene.” “Have you seen the guys there? They‟re fucking hot.” Kyle was giving me a look so sour and pissed off it was hard not to laugh. “And probably higher than kites.” I shrugged. “Suits me. They probably won‟t remember I didn‟t call ‟em the next day.” Kyle left not long after, boiling with jealousy. It was a hell of an ego boost. I checked in at my office to see if I did get a call from Nick Giardi. It turned out to be a yes-and-no answer: I got a call around the time Kyle said, but it was a hang-up call. So he called, but didn‟t say anything. What the hell was that about? I took a belt from my refilled flask before doing a little more Internet searching. I kept trying to avoid looking at those shirtless pics of Sander and Sloane, but goddamn, what hot guys. Yeah, I wished they didn‟t shave their chests, but you couldn‟t have everything. If you did, where would you put it? A search turned up some info on the Granger boys‟ parents, which they had oddly omitted on their Facebook page. Their dad was the much-married media mogul Sullivan Granger, who divorced their model mother when the boys were five. It was a very contentious divorce, so I could see
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 26 why Sloane might not mention it, but their mother died of an overdose when they were fifteen. It was considered an accident more than a suicide, but rumors persisted. They moved in with their dad, his new wife, and some assorted half and step siblings, but Sloane and Sander moved out at seventeen, amid tabloid reports of serious partying and minor run-ins with the law. Apparently they were minor-league male celebutantes (at least within Los Angeles), but they dropped out a little over three years ago, after they were involved in a hit-and-run that left a man severely injured. Both twins, along with a dirtbag friend of theirs named Alex Rostov, were suspected as the driver of the vehicle, but cops could never determine who was responsible. They were all fined and assigned community service, which seemed like the least that could be done, and there was a minor stink about it. Shortly after that, the Granger twins dropped out for good and ended up here. That was the thing about Echo City. Lots of detritus washed up on these shores, people running away from or running to something, almost always involving trouble in either case. This was a city of ash and regrets, its people dust and sorrow, mixing together to alleviate their burdens by forcing them on someone else. If you had good sense, you‟d leave this place and never look back, but if you wound up in Echo City, clearly you had no sense, so you were stuck here. Did this tell me anything about the case? Possibly. First, it established the twins as hard partiers from way back, and there was a slight but potential possibility that someone could want revenge. Far-fetched, but not outside the realm of possibility. You could never discount revenge as a prime motivator.
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 27 The phone rang, and since I figured it was a debt collector, I almost let it go to call messaging. Then I figured it was Red and picked up the receiver. “Jake?” a tear-soaked voice asked. It took me a minute to place the voice. “Sloane? What‟s wrong?” “They sent me…” He paused, swallowing a sob. “Please come over. They sent me Sander‟s earring… and a piece of his ear.” Yeah, revenge was looking more and more likely. Too bad for Sander.
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SLOANE lived in a condo at the edge of town, just over the dividing line between the good part of the city and the other part, where they‟d rip your gold teeth out of your mouth and sell them back to you at twice the price. He was in the good part, which I expected. His condo was relatively small but fairly neat, although he seemed to have more money than taste. There was too much velvet and brocade on the furniture, too many bullshit pseudoabstract paintings on the wall. The carpet was shaggy and an odd amber color, partially brown and partially orange. Ugly as fuck. It was a good thing Sloane was so hot, even teary eyed, so I had something nice to look at. He and Sander had inherited quite a bit from their mother but presumably blew through most of it in their hard-partying days. This condo and its questionable furnishings were probably all that was left. Sloane was wearing nothing but a white tank top tight enough to be a second skin, and lose gray yoga pants that still showed off how round and tight his ass was. Had to be on purpose, because no one looked that good in yoga pants unless they tried. He showed me what had come for him. He said he found it in his mailbox downstairs, a manila envelope with a small ring box inside. Within the box was a small gold earring of a tiny bird sitting inside a hoop, and it was stained with blood.
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 29 There was a small flap of skin with it, presumably torn from his earlobe. When he said part on the phone, I was actually expecting a sizable chunk, maybe enough to clone a triplet from; this was little more than a torn cuticle. The cotton beneath the jewelry was bloodstained, but that didn‟t impress me. I sat down beside him on his royal velvet sofa and took a look at the envelope the box came in. His name was printed on it, but that was it—no address, no postal marks. So it was just shoved in his mailbox. “You got locking mailboxes down in the lobby?” “Yeah.” “Huh.” The locks weren‟t super secure, though; they were easy to jimmy open if you knew what you were doing. Even if you didn‟t know, you were in with a shot. Hell, just get a crowbar from the Home Depot, and all the mail was yours. “It‟s never closed right, not since I‟ve lived here.” Convenient. I didn‟t say that, but I found myself thinking it. Now that I had bothered to investigate, was relatively sober, and Nick had turned up dead, I was starting to realize things weren‟t making sense. “Have you heard about Nick?” Sloane blinked at me with his big doe eyes, all dewy with moisture. He even cried in a hot manner. “Nick? Do you mean Sander‟s friend?” No, he didn‟t know. Why did I think he read the paper? Nobody read the paper anymore, and if someone bothered to watch the news, it was usually one of those twenty-four-hour channels that passed off opinions as news. “Yeah, he‟s dead.” Sloane gasped and recoiled. It was almost too dramatic
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 30 to be a natural reaction. “Overdose?” At least that meant he knew he was a dealer. “Murder.” He gasped again and this time raised a hand to his mouth. “What? No! What—why would someone kill him?” “Drug dealing isn‟t conducive to a long life.” I sighed and tried not to notice how hot he was as I stared at him and asked, “Why didn‟t you tell me about the hit-and-run?” He looked innocent and confused, and I almost hit him. I didn‟t like being played. “What? I don‟t—” “Los Angeles,” I interrupted. “And if you start lying to me, I‟m out of here. So do you want to try again?” He looked down, chastened and done with his decorous crying. He ran a tissue across his eyes and nose before saying, “Alex was driving the car. But he said he‟d blame Sander if we told, so we lied.” “Why Sander and not you?” He scoffed, but in a breathless sort of way. “I was completely wasted and passed out in the backseat. I only knew what happened when they told me.” “Your brother and Alex?” “Yeah.” “And you assumed they were telling you the truth?” Sloane just gave me a deer-in-the-headlights stare. It had really never occurred to him? “Why would they lie?” “Why does anyone lie?” It was rhetorical, but it looked like he was thinking about answering it, so I hastily moved on. “Has it occurred to you that this might be a revenge thing?” “What? You mean for the accident? How? No one knows where we are.”
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 31 “Oh, so you moved from LA and never told any of your friends where you were going?” He frowned. I‟d gotten him there. “But they wouldn‟t tell anyone where we are.” I rubbed my eyes, wondering if he was born this stupid or just did enough drugs to kill all his brain cells. I then picked the envelope up off the coffee table and asked, “What was the point of this? There‟s no ransom note, no demands, so why was this given to you?” “I don‟t know.” “A warning? Or is this supposed to mean something to you?” “Beyond them having Sander, I have no idea.” I believed him, mainly because he didn‟t seem to be the smart twin, if indeed there was a smart twin. Sloane stood, needlessly hiking up his yoga pants, and walked across the room. “Wanna drink?” I thought he‟d never ask. “Whiskey.” He went to his tiny kitchen alcove and started opening cabinet doors. “We don‟t have any. How ‟bout vodka?” I shrugged. Not my favorite, but it could get you nicely wasted. “Whatever.” He took two glasses down from the overhead cabinet and poured very generous amounts of vodka into each. I watched him do all of this, enjoying the view. I had more questions, but I didn‟t know if he‟d be honest with me. I still had to ask. “Do you have any enemies? Did Sander?” He came back and handed me a glass before sitting down again. “No. I mean… not everybody liked us, but that‟s true of everyone.”
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 32 “What about ex-boyfriends?” I gulped the whole glass of vodka in one go. It was cranberry flavored, which was only slightly better than the lemon variety. I hated flavored vodkas, but it was too late now. Sloane sipped his drink delicately, like he wasn‟t much of a drinker. Odd, since he just said he was wasted the night of the accident. But that didn‟t just mean booze; his vice of choice could have been in powder or pill form. “We aren‟t really the type for relationships. That‟s more like an old-guy thing.” Great. Now I felt even more decrepit. “Were all your fuck buddies aware of this? Any get upset over you guys tossing them aside?” “We didn‟t toss anyone aside.” Sloane gave me a curious look, his smoky brown eyes sizing me up like a piece of meat at the butcher‟s shop. “What about you, Mr. Falconer? Are you in a relationship?” I snorted, as it was such a clumsy segue. But what the hell, right? “No. Good thing this isn‟t about me, huh? Who was Sander‟s last boy toy?” He sank back into the sofa and slumped down in a casually sexy manner. “If you don‟t count that silver fox he left the party with, a bartender at Heat. I don‟t know his name.” “Would you know him if you saw him again?” Sloane nodded. “Blond muscle god? Yeah, I‟m pretty sure I‟ll recognize him.” I put my empty glass down and stood up. “Good. I‟ll come back and pick you up once Heat opens.” He grabbed my wrist, sending an electric shock through my system. His skin was surprisingly soft. “Please don‟t go. I
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 33 don‟t want to be alone right now.” He was looking up at me with limpid eyes, his pouty lips glistening, and I knew damn well I was being manipulated by a master cock tease. Did that stop me? Hell no. I let him pull me back down to the couch, and then I kissed him, waiting to see if he‟d commit to this or push me away. I‟ll give him credit—he committed. Yeah, it was stupid; I know he was manipulating me, but of course I fucked him. Who wouldn‟t, given the chance? Under those clothes his body was as taut and hard as it seemed, his skin tight and dry as it rubbed against mine. His dick wasn‟t nearly as big as I expected, but his ass was a piece of art, just as advertised. Afterward we showered, I had another slug from the vodka bottle, and we took off for Heat, which by then was open for business. It probably wasn‟t my biggest mistake, but it was a doozy.
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5
HEAT was even busier than it had been the night before, the trance music throbbing and pounding like a hangover, the gel lights lighting up like tracer fire in the night. While almost no one gave me a second look, Sloane got a lot of stares, and by the time we‟d made our way up to the clear acrylic horseshoe of a bar, the guys had lined up four deep for the privilege of buying Sloane a drink. He ate up the attention, preening and becoming prettier under the concentrated lust. One of the bartenders came over, a sleek Asian twink wearing a leather vest with no shirt—seemingly the actual bar uniform of Heat—and he said, “Sander, how‟s it going?” Sloane almost corrected him, but I caught his eye, and he simply said, “Good, man. How you doin‟?” “Not bad. The usual?” “Sure,” Sloane agreed. The bartender mixed something up and eyed me with a combination of suspicion and distaste. “Who‟s the suit?” Sloane glanced at me speculatively before saying, “This is Steve, a friend of mine.” Steve? Did I look like a fucking Steve? Sloane rested his arms on the translucent plastic bar and did his best to seem casual. “So… it‟s kind of a funny thing, but I can‟t remember anything I did last week.” The bartender snorted a humorous laugh as he put a violently neon blue drink up on the bar. It looked like
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 35 Windex with a lime wedge in it. “I bet. You got pretty smashed.” “I guess so. You know where I went?” The bartender eyed Sloane warily. “Not really. You ask Dennis?” “Dennis? Which Dennis?” The bartender pointed toward the back of the club. Heavy shadows cloaked that one corner, and I wondered if there was a door there I just couldn‟t see right now. “He‟s back there if you wanna ask.” “Great, thanks.” Sloane headed that way, and I intended to follow, but first I grabbed the glass of bright blue liquor and chugged it. It tasted like citrus hairspray mixed with an undefined berry flavor. I spit out the lime wedge and put the glass back down. The bartender just stared at me like I was an alien. Once I caught up to Sloane, I shouted in his ear, “Who‟s Dennis?” “Dennis Weiss,” he replied, also shouting at me. Since we were walking into the midpoint of the music, we could barely hear each other. “Co-owner of the club.” “You know the club owners?” He both shrugged and nodded, the definition of mixed signals. “Kinda. Sander made lots of friends.” I was starting to get the impression that the Granger twins were everyone‟s friends. There was a door in that shadowy area, but more than that, there was a big guy in black standing there, whose sole job was to keep people from going in. As we approached, he moved in front of the door, but then he squinted at Sloane.
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 36 “Sander, hey, who‟s the square?” Square? Goddamn it, why was I constantly being insulted? So I was the only person in a two-mile radius wearing a suit—that didn‟t make me a freak. It just made me overdressed, even if the suit was kind of on the cheap side. “Friend. Can we see Dennis?” “Sure.” He stood aside and knocked three times on the door before letting us pass. I was kind of curious why everyone thought Sloane was Sander, but the math was pretty simple: Sander was more of a party animal than his twin. Just because they looked alike didn‟t mean they were a perfect match across the board. Stepping into Dennis‟s office was like falling into a time machine. It was pure ‟70s, from the orange shag throw rug to the purple sofa to the little kidney-shaped side table with the red and orange lava lamp, to the red bean bag slumped in the corner like a sleeping blob. I expected him to be wearing a polyester leisure suit, but if Dennis was the guy splayed on the couch, he was wearing relatively contemporary jeans and a T-shirt advertising the strip club Fox‟s. He glanced up at us, and his eyes were glazed and sleepy. How stoned was he? Dennis was flying so high he probably thought it was the ‟70s. “Sander! Hey man, what‟re you doing here?” Sloane smiled in slow, silky way, and I realized he was good at manipulating men with his sexuality. Sure, he‟d manipulated me in the exact same way, but I wasn‟t angry. How could I be? Have you seen his ass? “Lookin‟ for you, big guy. I was wondering if you knew what happened last week.” Big guy was a nice way to put it. Dennis was on the
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 37 wrong side of at least two hundred and fifty pounds, with a potato-shaped body and thinning dung brown hair that was spread out like thatch on his egg-shaped head. He looked like he was pregnant with a bowling ball. He scratched his chest and licked his lips as his porcine blue-gray eyes wandered over Sloane, then me, and across the room. If they could have fallen out and rolled across the floor, they probably would have. What was he on? “I wish I knew. I don‟t know Tom anymore. I wish I did.” Tom? I just guessed the other club owner, but I figured I could ask Sloane later. “You two have a falling-out?” Sloane asked. He shrugged and almost threw himself off the sofa. “Nah, I jus‟… I wouldn‟t. Tom is just… he‟s out there.” “In the bar?” Sloane asked, confused. I‟d already realized we weren‟t going to get anything useful out of Dennis; his brains were so pureed I was surprised they weren‟t oozing out of his ears and dripping on the sofa. “No, in….” His gaze fell toward an empty corner for a moment, and he just stared. Drool started leaking from a corner of his mouth before he glanced back at Sloane. “What was I sayin‟?” Sloane made a noise of disgust, and I leaned in and whispered, “He‟s a dead end until sober. Let‟s get out of here.” He didn‟t seem to like the idea, but he had nothing better, so we left ‟70s Dennis in his office. Sloane almost made for the exit, but then I reminded him he was supposed to ID Sander‟s last blond trick for me. So we took a table near the back that still had a decent view of the bar, and waited.
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 38 Three beers later, he turned up. Luckily I was the one who‟d had the three beers and was perfectly sober, and had gotten Sloane to stick to his one appletini. The guy he pointed out as Sander‟s former butt buddy was a skinny bottle blond with a gym-sculpted hairless chest and fairly impressive arms. Although his body was okay, in a sort of plastic way, his face was kind of bland. He‟d probably rank as hot in some guys‟ books, but not mine. We went up to the bar, me in the lead. “Hey, I was wondering if you had time to talk,” I asked him. He looked up with pale blue eyes and tried on what he probably thought was a flirtatious smile. “I don‟t get off until two, but—” His eyes widened, and he paled beneath his spray-on tan as he looked over my shoulder, spotting Sloane. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. For a second he gaped like a fish tossed on the shore, then turned on his heel and darted back into a door marked Employees Only. I tried to follow but was intercepted by a dark-clothed bouncer/bodyguard who resembled nothing so much as a fat ninja. I couldn‟t power past him or bullshit past him, and Sloane and I ended up getting escorted out of Heat. My ears rang for a bit, but even in the hollow hum, I heard Sloane say, “I know where the employee exit is.” He ran off before I could say “So?” so I was forced to follow him. He ran around Heat, cutting down a side alley between it and a closed Chinese takeout. I followed, but more warily, as it seemed like the perfect setting for a mugging or a gang rape or a mugging during a gang rape. But I had my gun, so at least it was unlikely to happen to me. There was a door, but from the way Sloane pulled on it uselessly, I could tell it was locked from the inside. “I
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 39 wouldn‟t knock,” I told him, as he looked like he might. “That‟s the best way to get a security guard out here.” He gave me a frown. “Then what do we do?” I grabbed his arm and pulled him into a really nice pocket of shadows. “We lie in wait like a good stalker.” But I wasn‟t sure about this. Blondie had looked terrified, why I don‟t know, but that seemed to be an odd response. As it was, he eventually came out with a bouncer, who discussed some sort of reality show with Blondie as he walked him to his car. “Damn it,” Sloane whispered, once they were out of earshot. “Let it go. We‟ll get him another time.” Although honestly I didn‟t know if I wanted to come back with Sloane. If everyone reacted to him this way, my investigations would be over before they began. Although Sloane was a bit agitated, he remembered to be seductive and invited me back to his place. I declined, saying I had to go home and feed my cat. No, I don‟t have a cat. I went back to my office to do more research. The owners of Heat were indeed Dennis Weiss and Thomas Erskine, but more unremarkable people you‟d be hardpressed to find. Erskine also partly owned a club in another city, but otherwise they seemed like private people who didn‟t get mentioned a lot anywhere. Which was weird, as this wasn‟t the age of the private person. Everything you did was noted somewhere, posted on Facebook or Twitter or somewhere, even if you didn‟t want it noted. So how were these guys so good at ducking notice? Red called me, and I almost didn‟t answer the phone, but there was no way that debt collectors would be calling so
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 40 late. He said it had taken a lot of digging, but as far as he could tell, the Serpent Club was an exclusive, private sex club that was hard to get into. So hard, Red couldn‟t tell me where it was or how you got into it, because he didn‟t know. No one had been able to tell him. He was still looking, but from the bits and pieces he‟d put together, it was for very rich guys who wanted to hook up with very young guys. So, skeeves. If Sander did join this sex club, why? He was certainly psyched about it, if you could believe his Twitter feed. Then again, what would be in it for any young guy who entered that club? Presumably they were looking for sugar daddies. You‟d think that a place where rich, presumably older guys looking for lots of more or less anonymous sex wouldn‟t get emotionally invested in any one guy, but weirder things have happened. Something wasn‟t adding up, but I was damned if I knew what it was. I had a swig of some whiskey, hoping it would spark something, but all it did was make me hungry. After hitting way too many dead ends, I decided to call it a night. It was night, right? I have to admit, having a second floor office above a Laundromat doesn‟t afford you too many great views, and I keep the blinds closed most of the time. It could be three AM or three PM and I probably wouldn‟t know. It should have mattered, but it didn‟t. Ever since Spencer‟s murder and Kyle‟s abandonment, time had become a relative thing. Meaning I really didn‟t give a fuck. Echo City was pretty much a twenty-four-hour city anyway, so it never really mattered. I had just exited the building, taking the side door into the alley beside the dry cleaners, which was always nice and
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 41 quiet. Except I saw movement in the dark, and I would have said it was just one of the homeless who occasionally staked out the neighborhood, except most of the homeless weren‟t carrying baseball bats. I saw him take a swing at my head and ducked it before he could make contact, coming up to grab the bat before he could go for strike two. Problem was, while he was keeping me occupied, someone sneaked up behind me and cracked something hard across the back of my skull. Stars exploded across my vision, and I hit the asphalt like a twenty-pound sack of shit. I was conscious enough to see the leather boot coming right for my face before it kicked me straight into darkness.
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I CAME to, seeing a sickly green haze in front of my eyes, and I had a moment to wonder if I had been tossed into a toxic waste pit before I realized I was looking at the pale green walls of Mercy Hospital. I hurt all over, like I‟d been shoved into a car crusher and spit out a cube, but they‟d given me enough drugs to give it all a hazy overlay, meaning I could still feel the pain but didn‟t much care about it. I tried to get off the gurney I was on, but it took more of an effort than I anticipated. “Stop that,” a familiar voice said. I let my head loll to the side so I could see the dark figure coming up to my bedside. It was Kyle, still in his patrolman blues, although his black hair had the wild, messy look of a night off. Concern made his dark brown eyes look bigger and sadder, which was something, ‟cause Kyle often reminded me of an anime character brought to life, only with less pointy hair. “You‟re not getting out of bed.” “Yeah I am,” I protested, even as I continued to struggle to sit up. I soon became aware that I wasn‟t going to be doing that right away, but I wasn‟t about to concede that either. Kyle put his hand on my chest, pinning me down with little effort. He kept giving me those puppy dog eyes, like he used to give me to win an argument when he didn‟t want to fight. “No, you‟re not. You‟re going to lay there and tell me what happened.”
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 43 “Ooh, I just had a flashback to our third date.” Kyle stared at me, refusing to even crack a smile. “What the hell happened, Jake? I dropped by your office to make sure you weren‟t drinking yourself to death, and found you a bloodied heap in the alley.” That struck me as odd. “Why do you care if I drink myself to death?” Then there was the other point. “No one was there?” “No. You were just laying there, looking like the victim of a kicking contest. You couldn‟t have been mugged, though, ‟cause your wallet and gun were still on you. Did you get in a fight?” “In a manner of speaking. I was jumped by a couple of guys with baseball bats.” “What? Why?” “Hell if I know. They needed to practice their swing?” Kyle scowled down at me, refusing to be amused. At least I thought I was funny. Kyle used to think I was kind of funny too. Although we met under less than auspicious circumstances—he‟d arrested me in what was a genuine misunderstanding between me and a bastard blackmailer who was harassing a client (the charges were dropped, as the blackmailer in question didn‟t want any of this to go to court)—we hit it off and started seeing each other. Maybe we moved too fast. We‟d been dating two weeks when I found myself living at his apartment, but that was due to necessity since my apartment house was burned down. (Seems the downstairs neighbor didn‟t realize making meth was a slightly flammable prospect.) Maybe I drank a little too much, fine, but sometimes it was the only thing that made the
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 44 headaches and the memories go away. He nagged a bit, but I was a functional drunk, so it wasn‟t that bad. After Spencer died, though, I may have hit the bottle harder, so much that it filed a restraining order against me, and Kyle‟s nagging kicked into hyperdrive. Eventually I found a place to stay, just in time for him to kick me out. In a manner of speaking. I never liked ultimatums, and his “get help or I‟m leaving you” bullshit was emotional blackmail. I don‟t handle shit like that well. I should have known it wasn‟t going to work, though. Not only is Kyle kind of uptight most of the time, and, of course, a big slab of police-issue bacon, but he was eight years younger than me, just the right age to never quite get all my references and make me feel as old as sin. He was sexy as hell, though, and sometimes just looking at him made my heart hurt, although I wasn‟t gonna tell him that. As for what the guys who were late for batting practice were doing, I figure they were sending me a message. If they didn‟t want my twenty bucks and glow-in-the-dark condom, then they were just trying to get a point across. What point, beyond the fact that they thought my looks would be improved with some amateur bat-based plastic surgery, was unclear. Had to do with the Granger case, though. Of that I was sure. Someone didn‟t like me poking my nose in, but who and why? Curious. Why was an amateur—but very hot—gold digger like Sloane Granger attracting so much negative attention? It made me wonder. Well, when my head wasn‟t ringing like a gong. Kyle decided to write up a report for me, even though he was off duty, and I told him I really wanted to spend the
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 45 night at my place, because I couldn‟t sleep in hospitals, and also I couldn‟t afford it. Eventually I got through to him, and he went to talk to the doctor, a harried woman who looked like she needed a three-week vacation somewhere hot and languid. She told him I should be watched for the next twelve hours or so, to make sure I didn‟t have a head injury that would kill me, but otherwise there was no need for me to stay overnight. I might have had some broken ribs, they weren‟t sure, but that wasn‟t something that needed me taking up precious hospital bed space. Kyle said he‟d take me home, but only if I went to his place so he could keep an eye on me. I had no choice but to agree. Kyle took me home, and I was so doped up on pain medication that nothing hurt, but I also didn‟t have much of a memory either. I vaguely remember him helping me into his apartment, walls white as snow and rooms as neat as a Martha Stewart layout, but beyond being gently placed on his bed, everything else dimmed. He could have put me on his couch, but he didn‟t. Was he really that worried about me? I could still taste blood, and sometimes it seemed like I could feel my whole face throbbing in time with my heartbeat, but I kind of hoped I wasn‟t beaten that badly. I slept deep, dreamlessly, the peaceful sleep of the incredibly drugged. I did awake at some point, having to piss, and only then did I feel the warmth of him. Looking, I saw that Kyle was asleep beside me, his back to me, which was probably for the best. When I stumbled back to the mattress, still in the haze of the drugs but starting to feel certain aches, I was careful not to wake him before getting back into bed. I snuggled next to him, though, enjoying the
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 46 warmth of him, the smell of his skin. Yeah, we couldn‟t make it as a couple, but I did like Kyle. Not always, but he was the one who got away. I supposed I would always love him and always regret what may have been, but there was nothing I could do about it. Life moved on, whether I wanted it to or not. I woke up again later, this time feeling hands on my body, Kyle caressing my chest. It took me a moment to realize he was searching my rib cage for breaks, but when I opened my eyes, sleepy, feeling the aches for real this time, I met his clear brown eyes, now the color of whiskey. He was kneeling beside me, and he stopped feeling for breaks as he saw I was awake. He was going to say something, his lips parted, but he paused as I wondered if I could mentally will him to do something. I wanted him to kiss me. I was half awake and half aroused, the drugs making my skin feel almost unbearably warm. Somehow it worked. Suddenly his mouth met mine hungrily, our tongues wrestling, and it was like we had never been apart. It was funny, but it was almost like our bodies were on autopilot, that we needed each other like oxygen, like water, something necessary to survival. It was passionate yet comfortable, his skin rubbing against mine, the scrape of his stubble against my chin, the way he sighed my name like it was the most beautiful thing in the world. The weight of him was solid and familiar, and it felt like home. Usually I topped, but I let him this time, content to let him take the lead, to fuck me. I wanted to feel him, see if my muscle memory of him was still the same. I don‟t know why it felt so good to have him inside me, to breathe in his breath
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 47 as he kissed me, to dig my fingers into his skin until he groaned, but it was almost better than the drugs. I couldn‟t even feel the bruises anymore; pleasure overwhelmed any lingering pain. In retrospect, I hated my neediness, which surprised me. I just wanted him like I wanted a good slug of whiskey, and he seemed to have the same effect on me. I won‟t lie— the sex was incredible, and afterward he kissed the sweat off my face and whispered, “I‟ve missed you so much, Jake.” I stroked his sweaty hair and almost told him I missed him too. I did, but I didn‟t want to admit it. We slept tangled together until the pain returned and woke me up. It was difficult to slip out of his embrace without waking him, but I managed. I decided to go back to my place to shower, but before I left, I couldn‟t help but lean over and kiss Kyle on the forehead. I studied his sleeping face for a moment, just in case I never saw it again. I‟ll admit it, my heart hurt as I left. I didn‟t know if I would ever stop loving him, which made me feel like a complete pussy. I really needed a drink. I also needed to think, so after a quick stop home for a shower and a slug, I went to Sully‟s for some advice. It was technically before opening hours, but Lau always made an exception for me. But because it was still morning, he wouldn‟t give me a whiskey; he would give me a screwdriver, though (orange juice made it full of vitamins, or at least more like a breakfast food). After telling him about the bartender at Heat, he went behind the bar and made a call to someone he called “White,” asking him about the blond at the club. He listened for a couple moments, then wrote something down on a
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 48 notepad. As soon as he hung up, he slid the piece of paper across to me. “His name‟s Tyler Cross. His address is there.” I looked down at it. According to this, Tyler lived on Fountain Street, which wasn‟t the best neighborhood, but made sense for a bartender who couldn‟t have made much money. “How the hell did you manage this?” Lau shrugged one massive shoulder, and it looked like a boulder rolling downhill. “All us bartenders know each other. Or at least they know me.” “Damn. I shoulda come to you in the first place.” “You shoulda. Would‟ve saved you some time.” Lau studied me closely for a minute, the moon of his face blocking out the sun of the Budweiser sign, and finally said, “I really need to get you an ice pack. And maybe some base. You an ivory, or more like a summer beige?” “I ain‟t wearing makeup. And this isn‟t the first time I‟ve been beaten up, and, knowin‟ my luck, probably not the last.” Lau frowned at me, like I was being the difficult one. “You should leave ‟em to the cops, you know.” “Yeah, ‟cause they‟re so wildly competent.” Well, Kyle was, but I wasn‟t sure about the rest of ‟em. Echo City wasn‟t known for its crack crime fighters. They weren‟t my priority, though. I decided to start with Tyler and see where he took me. At least it would get my mind off Kyle.
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TYLER looked a bit like a sex doll come to life, something he emphasized by answering his door shirtless and wet, wearing nothing but a blue towel wrapped around his narrow waist. His abs were so ripped you could‟ve grated cheese on them. Believe me, I was tempted, but I hadn‟t brought my lucky wheel of Gouda with me. He didn‟t look happy to see me at all. “You‟re the guy from the bar.” “Name‟s Jake,” I said, flashing him my detective badge. No, there‟s no such thing as a detective badge unless you‟re a cop, and that was what this was. A badge that belonged to a cop named Stewart Hickey. He‟s probably replaced it by now, but no civilian‟s gonna know this was his mysteriously missing badge, nor were they gonna know it didn‟t really belong to me. I never let any of them examine it too closely. “I was wondering why you ran out so fast.” He exhaled and slumped against the door frame, in that way that everyone did when suddenly confronted by a cop. “I thought you were with my ex-boyfriend.” “We all hate our exes, but that‟s a bit much. Can I come in?” Tyler didn‟t want to let me in, you could see the doubt in his eyes, but it was doubled by the fact that if he refused, he‟d look suspicious. That‟s the thing with cops—you were damned if you did, and damned if you didn‟t. He glanced
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 50 back behind himself, like he was making sure he hadn‟t left out anything that could get him arrested, and then stood back, opening the door wider. “Yeah, okay.” I stepped inside, giving him a polite nod while simultaneously checking him out. Not bad, but again too plastic for my tastes, too phony, but I suppose I went for darker guys anyway. His place was modern gay bachelor: tastefully matched furniture surely beyond his pay grade, lots of matching colors and patterns, clean enough that you could eat off any surface if the opportunity presented itself. There was also some kind of men‟s magazine on the glass-topped coffee table, showing a half-naked guy presenting his chiseled chest to the world. Yeah, that‟s a magazine for straight men, wink wink, nudge nudge. The three-room apartment smelled of coffee and expensive hair conditioner. Without waiting to be asked, I slumped down on his sandalwood-colored sofa and sat with an open, comfortable posture, legs apart and arms at my side, looking like I was settling in for the night. I wanted to make him nervous, and it looked like my simple body language fake had already started working. “What is this about, detective?” He stood there dripping on his sky blue carpet, shivering slightly in the air-conditioned cool but trying not to show it even as his nipples became as pointy and hard as crow‟s beaks. “Why don‟t you tell me about this ex-boyfriend? Who is he?” I could tell Tyler wanted to continue asking me what this was about, but like most sensible people, he was afraid if he pressed the issue too much, I‟d consider him “belligerent” and make him pay for it. Save for Kyle and a few
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 51 of his ilk, the Echo City cops weren‟t known for their reasonableness. “S-Sander Granger. You weren‟t with him?” “No, I was with his twin brother, Sloane.” “Twin brother?” His surprise was both obvious and strange. “You didn‟t know he had a brother?” “I did, but… he never told me he was his twin.” Wasn‟t that curious? Perhaps he didn‟t want to spawn the same ménage à trois thoughts I had when I first met Sloane. “You‟ve never seen his Facebook page?” His pale blue orbs gave me a thirty-yard stare. “I‟m not on Facebook.” “Huh.” Well, that was becoming the new hipster thing, to shun social networks. Tyler‟s shivering was plainly visible now, so he pointed toward his bathroom door and asked, “Can I go get dressed?” Like he needed my permission? That showed how cowed he was by the cops. I nodded and waved my hand like a benevolent king, and he went to the bathroom to put some clothes on. I caught a glimpse of skin before he closed the door, but it was probably his back. “Why were you so afraid of Sander showing up? He get violent on you?” I asked, raising my voice to be heard through the door. I probably didn‟t need to, but better safe than sorry. “No, it‟s not that, it‟s just… it wasn‟t a good breakup.” I grunted a half-interested acknowledgment and got up, looking around for his computer. It was just a desktop model, a couple of years out of date, but it was on. The monitor was powered down, but that was easy enough to turn on again. “That doesn‟t explain why you were terrified.”
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 52 “I wasn‟t terrified. I was just… surprised.” A search through his browser history revealed a site called echocityboyz.com, and I figured it for porn. I was close, as it was a rent-boy site, and the browser address went right to Tyler‟s page, where he was depicted shirtless and in skintight white boxer briefs. Here his name was “Chase,” though, and he was a versatile who would give a massage for an extra charge. I‟d been wondering how he made the money for the furniture—now I knew. I shut the monitor off and returned to my position on the couch. “Is that why you hightailed it out of there, Chase?” “No, it wasn‟t that, it—” He stopped suddenly as he realized I called him his hooker name. Tyler opened the bathroom door and peered out cautiously, now dressed in tight designer jeans and a sleeveless skin tight muscle shirt, both black to emphasize his slimness. “Are you here to arrest me?” “No, son, I just want you to be honest with me about Sander Granger and the Serpent Club. No more of this bullshit, or I will arrest you. Someone‟s gonna hafta pay for these bruises on my face, and it might as well be you. Clear?” He nodded, completely bereft, interesting tale. Very interesting.
and
told
me
an
If it was true, I was a fucking idiot.
ONCE out of Tyler‟s overpriced apartment, I headed straight for Sloane‟s place. I almost didn‟t expect to find him at his
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 53 pimptastic condo, but he answered the door shirtless, in contour-hugging black briefs, showing off the kind of body Tyler probably wanted in more ways than one. Seeing me, he pasted on a big grin and leaned alluringly against his door. “I was just thinking about you—holy hell, did you get in a fight?” “Yeah, I really hurt their fists with my face.” I came in without waiting for an invitation, passing through a mildly fragrant cloud of aftershave and hair gel. “So when were you gonna tell me, Sloane?” He closed the door and did half of a model‟s turn, giving me a good look at him. Since I‟d already fucked him, I didn‟t see what the point of this was. All this brought on a flash of guilt, as I thought about Kyle, and I was disgusted with myself. I could fuck a thousand Sloanes and still want Kyle. How pathetic was I? As funny-looking as I am, or at least think I am, I‟ve never had trouble getting men. Maybe it‟s the job, the romantic notion of private eye as knight in tarnished armor, when in reality it‟s a shitty desk job that never pays enough to be worth the trouble it inevitably lands me in. Or maybe it‟s like Kyle says—I‟m not as funny-looking as I seem to think I am. “Tell you what, Jake?” “That Sander was a hustler.” That caught him like an unexpected uppercut. His smile faltered and fell, like an ice skater who lost an edge and couldn‟t catch themselves before they landed face-first on the permafrost. “What?” “I talked to someone in the know. I also saw his page on Echo City Boyz. It was him, wasn‟t it?”
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 54 Sloane opened his mouth, closed it, and repeated this action before sinking down onto the edge of a rococo armchair. He placed his hands on his knees and sat stiff and stock-still, staring at a nothing point on the floor before gathering his thoughts and attempting speech. “He wasn‟t… he didn‟t do it a lot. Just sometimes, to help cover the rent.” “And you neglected to mention this why?” “‟Cause I was ashamed. Besides, it had nothing to do with—” “The Serpent Club is a sex club,” I snapped, losing patience with his lost-little-boy act. It was too professional, too well rehearsed to be true. “That‟s what was in it for him, wasn‟t it? A paycheck. He wasn‟t into silver foxes; he was into their wallets.” “Okay, I‟m sorry,” Sloane said, now looking at me with wounded puppy dog eyes. He was starting to tear up for good measure. “But I didn‟t think his… part-time job had anything to do with this. He‟s still missing, Mr. Falconer.” “Yeah, but now someone‟s picked up the game board and tossed it over. The guy harassing him, was he a former client? A pimp?” “A pimp? What? No! He didn‟t have a pimp.” “What about a former client? Was he being stalked?” A long pause, where he seemed to have to mentally search for words. “If he was, he didn‟t say. I mean, he was bothered by the e-mails, but I don‟t think he ever took them seriously.” “What about you?” He looked up at me from under a fringe of casually messy ebony hair, in a way he probably thought was sexy.
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 55 “What do you mean?” “You‟re a hustler too, aren‟t you? You split the duty. That‟s why you both said you had brothers but never identified them as a twin. You didn‟t want to tip off your customers that sometimes you weren‟t the same guy at all.” He tried on that shocked, innocent look. “No, Jake, I—” “Cut the bullshit, angel face, or I walk.” He pouted, but as soon as he realized it wasn‟t working, cut the act. “I haven‟t…. I did once or twice, but it‟s not… I‟m not…. I just filled in for him. I have no intention of ever doing it again.” That probably explained why he slept with me, which was an ego blow, but I probably deserved it. “I need you to be honest with me, Sloane. If you‟ve been lying about anything else, now‟s the time to come clean. I can‟t do a proper investigation if I don‟t have all the facts.” He hung his head, seemingly contrite. “I‟ve been honest about everything else, I swear.” “What about the Serpent Club? Have you been?” “No! I know nothing about it at all. Sander heard rumors about it, though, thought Nick could get him an invite.” “And he did, obviously. Who did Nick have him meet?” “I don‟t know.” “Don‟t lie to me.” “I don‟t know!” he protested. “He didn‟t tell me Nick had even gotten him an invite. I don‟t know that he even knew until he arrived at the party.” It seemed likely he was telling the truth this time, but I knew now I couldn‟t completely trust him. “Why didn‟t you
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 56 tell me Sander‟s ex was a hustler too?” He stared at me blankly. “He was?” So he didn‟t know that. He must have genuinely been Sander‟s acquaintance alone. “He never mentioned that, huh?” “Sander? No, he didn‟t.” Sloane stood and went to his bedroom, where the door was ajar, and I could see him do a clumsy but still oddly alluring dance as he stepped into his jeans, which were, by some apparent fiat given only to hustlers, tight. “But he always thought we should do things differently, distinguish ourselves from each other—” There was a knock on the door, and Sloane and I stared at each other for a moment. “Expecting company?” I whispered. He shook his head. “Are you?” It was my turn to shake my head. The knock came again, slightly more urgent, and I gestured for him to go to the door as I stood up, my hand unconsciously going to my Glock. Maybe getting jumped by the bat boys for the Echo City Angels made me more paranoid than usual, but considering my face still ached from batting practice, I couldn‟t see it as a bad thing. Sloane approached the door warily, perhaps picking up on my wariness, and asked nervously, “Who is it?” For a long moment, there was only silence, and we continued exchanging questioning glances. My suspicions grew by the millisecond, and I moved to intercept Sloane before he could reach the door. I didn‟t want to see who was on the other side of it. That was when the shooting started.
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BULLETS punched through the door, making Sloane yelp in fear as I tackled him. I covered him with my body as wood splinters and hot lead flew around the room, and pulled out my Glock and pumped a few bullets toward the door. It was random, nothing approximating aim, but I heard a noise in the hall of something heavy hitting the floor. Although I was half-deaf from shots, I thought I heard a muffled curse coming from the same direction. I scrambled behind one of Sloane‟s ornate chairs and dragged him along with me. I couldn‟t hear him precisely, but it seemed like he was gibbering a bit, terror giving way to full on hysteria. “Made any enemies?” I shouted at him, keeping an aim on the door. It now had enough holes in it you could have strained spaghetti with it. “Not armed ones!” he shouted back, arms wrapped around himself as if he could somehow make himself smaller. Through the door I could see a shift of light and shadow, so I took more careful aim and fired a couple of shots. Whoever was outside the door jumped out of the way fast, but maybe not fast enough. I waited, still keeping a fixed aim on the door, but there was nothing but stillness and shell-shocked silence beyond. Sloane had a hold of my arm, a grip so tight it was cutting off blood circulation. “Should I call 9-1-1?” he whispered in my ear. Well, maybe he shouted it, but it sounded like
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 58 whispering to me. “If you want.” But I bet his neighbors had already. Somehow I didn‟t think the condo board would approve of someone shooting in the hallway. It could have been a trap, but it had been quiet for a while, and I‟d seen no movement through the door. I started to crawl around the chair, and he almost yanked me to a stop. “What are you doing?” “I‟m checking to make sure the coast is clear,” I snapped, yanking my arm out of his grip. “Wait here and be quiet.” I crawled around the ornate furniture and got up to my feet beside the door, with my back against the wall that had a few extraneous holes in it as well. I took a closer look out in the hall before undoing the lock. I heard voices out there, questioning and querulous, so I guessed the gunmen (there had to be more than one) had already gone. I opened the door, gun down at my side, and had a peek. Some of the bullets had gone into the wall across the hall, and I guessed those to be my shots. There was blood on the beige carpet, and a trail of it seemed to lead down the corridor toward the elevator. So I had hit somebody, which may have triggered the full retreat. For now. But I imagined once the cops had been and gone, they might come back with more guys. One of the neighbors out in the hall, near the elevator, looked at me and asked, “What the hell happened?” “Got me, bud,” I replied, and ducked back inside Sloane‟s place. “They‟re gone,” I told him, tucking my hot gun into my coat pocket and pulling out my cell phone instead. Sloane looked up at me, still on the floor and still hiding
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 59 behind the chair. He looked seriously traumatized, and oddly enough, that made him appear about thirteen. “What the hell were they trying to kill me for?” “Damn good question,” I admitted. “Wish I had an answer for ya.” I had Kyle on my speed dial, so all I had to do was press a single button to ring him. There were only two rings before he picked up the phone. “Jake? Jesus, I was wondering if you were ever gonna call me,” Kyle said. I guess saying hello was passé. “Look, I need you to get over to the Armory Court Condos now. Somebody just tried to perforate my client.” “What? Are you okay?” “I‟m fine. I nailed one of the bastards, but I‟m gonna need you to run some police interference for me.” Kyle sighed into the phone. “We need to talk, you know.” “I know. Get me outta this, and we can talk all night.” Only after I hung up did I realize that could be taken euphemistically. I hadn‟t had enough to drink to see that right away. The boys in blue showed up before Sloane had found the courage to stand up. Although Hickey wasn‟t one of the responders, neither cop was a fan of mine. Thankfully they‟d just started the bullshit when Kyle arrived, looking messyhaired and adorable. He was the senior officer on site too (hard to believe, especially since I was sure he was younger than one of the officers), so they demurred to his authority. As soon as he could, he pulled me into Sloane‟s bedroom and shut the door. “What have you gotten yourself into?” he asked, scowling.
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 60 “Trouble, from what I can tell.” “Cut the smart-ass remarks and tell me what I need to know. Exactly who are these people trying to kill—you or the sexy guy?” “What, I‟m not sexy?” The glare he gave me pretty much said „not now‟. “I‟m thinkin‟ they‟re after him. The bat boys coulda killed me the other night, but they didn‟t. They were just sendin‟ me a message.” Kyle raised an eyebrow at that. “And what message was that?” “Stop. I think someone doesn‟t want me to find Sander.” Kyle rubbed his eyes and was trying unsuccessfully to hide his frustration. “Why? And why decide to kill Sloane?” “I don‟t know, but I‟m starting to think maybe Sander was party to something he shouldn‟t have been. And they‟re trying to kill Sloane because he‟s his twin, and they don‟t know which one of ‟em stuck their hand in the metaphorical cookie jar.” “Which you‟re basing on what?” “Absolutely nothing. You gotta better explanation?” He shook his head at me. “How much have you had to drink?” “Not nearly enough. I need you to believe me, Kyle. I didn‟t fake this shootout, and you know it.” “Of course I do! It‟s just….” He petered off, making a vague hand gesture that could have meant anything. “I don‟t like any of this.” “You‟re not alone. But I‟ll be okay as soon as I figure this out.” Kyle eyed me in a way that morphed from skepticism to
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 61 empathy. “You weren‟t supposed to leave. I was supposed to keep an eye on you for twenty-four hours.” “I‟m fine. You know what a thick skull I have. Couldn‟t give me brain damage with a wrecking ball and a power drill.” Kyle touched my face, gently stroking my cheek with his thumb. “You need to be careful. I‟d hate if something happened to you.” I put my hand over his and took it off, mainly because my face still kind of hurt. “Look, Kyle….” “I tried to get past you, you know,” he said, going on regardless of what I was trying and failing to say. “You‟re self-destructive and determined to take yourself down and anyone within range. But for some reason I still love you, you stupid piece of shit.” “That why you dumped me?” That made him wince. “You won‟t believe it, but it hurt me as much as it hurt you.” “You‟re right, I don‟t believe you.” Actually, I did, but I wanted him to swing in the wind a bit. No sense in letting him off the hook that easily. “I‟m sorry, Jake. If we‟re gonna make this work, you have to get help. Promise me.” “Help? Like what, rehab?” That made me smirk. I could imagine me in rehab. I could also image me getting kicked out of rehab. I don‟t think I‟m the type for it. “Would that be so bad?” I didn‟t know what to say. He seemed so serious about it, and I hated to disappoint him. So rather than break his heart now, I kissed him instead. For a moment I felt
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 62 resistance; then he melted into my arms, kissing me with equal ferocity. I pinned him against the wall, just because I could, although that made some bruises I had forgotten about suddenly ache. Damn, being tenderized by a bat really was a pisser. He sensed my sudden reticence, because he pulled away and asked, “Are you all right?” “I keep forgetting I‟m black and white and red all over.” I caressed his face, feeling his stubble under my fingers. He hadn‟t had time to shave before coming over here. Why was I having such a hard time getting over a damn cop? Of all people, how did I fall in love with him? It was like the universe set out to have me fall for the most inappropriate person I possibly could. He was completely squaresville and completely sweet, while I was a drunk loser more at home with scumbags and weasels. It was an accident it happened in the first place; it was a pure comedy that we couldn‟t seem to shake off each other. There was a knock at the door, and one of the cops said, “Detective, the sergeant wants to talk to you.” “Be right there,” Kyle said and then gave me a quick but promising kiss on the mouth. He still tasted like coffee. “I need you to go somewhere safe ‟til this blows over. Something about this case stinks to high heaven.” “Tell me about it.” I stepped back so Kyle had a clear shot at the door, but he grabbed my arm and said, “No, Jake, I mean it. The Giardi case is being tabled.” “What?” “It‟s already been nudged over to the cold-case pile, and I don‟t know why. All I know is someone high up in the
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 63 department suggested our priorities laid elsewhere.” That made no sense at all. I know a small-time club drug dealer wasn‟t going to attract a lot of police resources, but brushing him under the carpet? That was nonsensical. I knew I distrusted police. Now I knew why.
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AS
SOON as I could, I sidled up to Sloane and whispered to
him, “Did Sander have a black book? A client list?” He glanced at me with his curious wide-eyed stare, made all the worse by his lingering horror. But he was still completely fuckable. “On his phone.” “No backups?” He started shaking his head but then paused, getting a slightly dreamy look in his eye. “Maybe….” “Where?” Sloane was still a bit stunned, but he eventually snapped out of his daze and headed for the bedroom Kyle and I had ducked into previously. What I hadn‟t noticed, mainly because I had my tongue down Kyle‟s throat, was that the bedroom had two single beds, separated by a rather large bedside table. It was like something out of those ‟50s sitcom, where they were trying to convince us straight married people never slept together. Probably true for the very closeted, but I doubt that was the message they wanted to send. Considering these were twin brothers, it was a little creepy, yet they probably couldn‟t have afforded this condo separately. Sloane sifted through an assortment of crap in the table‟s single drawer, including condoms, Chinese food menus, and a spare set of keys, but finally Sloane pulled out a tiny black figurine in the shape of a bird, maybe a hawk or
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 65 an eagle. When he held it out to me, for a second I didn‟t understand. “Sometimes he backed stuff up. I don‟t know if he‟s done so lately.” It wasn‟t a figurine, it was a flash drive, just a comically shaped one. I slipped it into my pocket when one of the cops appeared in the doorway, asking for my gun. I didn‟t like it, didn‟t want to hand it over, but I knew they confiscated weapons used in shootings. I‟d get it back, probably too late to do any good. Luckily, that wasn‟t my only gun. As soon as we could possibly do it, I got Sloane out of there. On the drive downtown, he was curled up in the passenger seat like he was cold, now wearing an oversized jacket over a sweatshirt he‟d hastily pulled on before we left. It made him look like a little boy wearing his father‟s clothes. “I don‟t understand…. Why is someone trying to kill me?” “‟Cause you look like your brother.” “Huh?” “Look, I don‟t know the details, but I think Sander got involved in something bad, and someone wants to shut him up for good. Either he escaped and they‟re after you ‟cause they think you‟re him, or they killed him and then realized he had an identical twin who could have substituted for his brother at any point.” Sloane wrapped his arms around his knees and had the thousand-yard stare of an accident victim. “You think he‟s dead?” I held back a sigh. I wanted to slap him, tell him shit like this happened all the time and there was simply no point in acting like it was some shocking thing, because it wasn‟t. Then I remembered he was a more or less normal
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 66 guy, with a more or less normal life. This was a shocking thing to him. It may even have been the first time someone had tried to kill him. I envied his naiveté. “I dunno. He could have just left town. Would he?” “Leave town without telling me?” Sloane thought about that for a very long time, long enough that the possibility was clearly edging toward fair to decent territory. “He wouldn‟t…. I mean, why would he…?” “He‟s never left you to twist in the wind for something he‟s done?” “No!” He paused, the hesitation obvious. “Well, never for something major.” “There‟s a first time for everything.” He looked away, lips working into a genuine pout this time. I almost felt bad for him, but then I remembered he‟d probably slept with me as a way of manipulating me, so then I felt irritated with him. He‟d have to decide if he preferred a dead brother or a traitorous one. We went to my office, because it had a computer that hadn‟t been eviscerated by gunfire, and was closer than my apartment. For some reason, I kinda didn‟t want him to see my place, but whether it was due to the fact that trouble seemed to be following him or the fact that it was just a fucking mess was up for debate. My overhead light bulb blew out as soon as I flipped the switch, and the flash of light made Sloane jump and let out a frightened yelp. I turned on the light in the foyer outside my office and then turned on my desk lamp, so there was some light in the room before I shut the door. The light in the foyer came through the opaque glass that used to say Spencer & Falconer. “Don‟t worry. If anyone was shootin‟ at us, we‟d
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 67 never see the muzzle flash, just feel the shot.” “Was that supposed to be comforting?” “No, realistic.” The blinds were all closed, so it was unlikely any of the dim light in here was getting outside, but I was just gambling on the fact that at least one of the gunmen having a new hole in him was going to slow them down. I plugged the bird-shaped flash drive into my computer, and we lucked out, as it wasn‟t encrypted. There were lots of files on it, though, a hodgepodge of images, text files, and video files. The file names were random letters and numbers that may have meant something to Sander but seemed like gibberish to me. I started randomly clicking things, just to see what I could turn up. First thing that turned up was naked pictures. Since I was looking at a dick and balls without context, I had to ask, “This ain‟t your brother, is it?” Sloane, who was pacing with his arms wrapped around him, came over to my relic of a computer screen to look. As soon as he did, he reared back, as if I‟d offended his delicate sensibilities. “Fuck no. Sander manscaped, for one, and for another, he didn‟t bend to the left like that.” “Thought not, but I wanted to make sure.” Despite his earlier offense, Sloane leaned down, looking over my shoulder, suddenly interested. “That‟s what‟s on the flash drive?” “Porn seems so pedestrian now, doesn‟t it?” A random sampling was revealing that the photo files were indeed naked men, sometimes with no identifying features besides the general idiosyncrasies of male genitalia. The first video clip I opened had a poorly lit clip of men
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 68 having sex from an oblique angle, although Sloane managed to identify Sander as one of the men in the scene. The other guy was pudgy and un-manscaped, so it was an odd match. This was a client, certainly. But all the film clips were similar. Somewhat out-ofshape men with Sander in poorly lit rooms, filmed at inconvenient angles, with spotty sound. Sometimes you could see little more than a fleeting glimpse of faces. “I didn‟t know he was into filming himself,” Sloane commented. Except that wasn‟t it, was it? That wasn‟t why all the film clips or the pictures. To me, this looked like a smorgasbord of blackmail, or perhaps even a stockpile of ammunition. It would explain why someone wanted Sander dead, if they got word that he had it. I had a feeling some of the naked, unremarkable men were very rich men, perhaps even powerful men. I looked up at Sloane, who was now standing back and biting his fingernails. “You said you filled in for him from time to time. Who were your clients?” He shrugged, uncomfortable with the topic. “Just guys.” “No, not just guys. You weren‟t giving out twenty-dollar blowjobs in back alleys. These were guys who could afford you, and somehow I don‟t think you were paid minimum wage. So who were they?” He looked at me with frightened eyes. He‟d gone from sex pot to scared kid in about an hour. “I don‟t know their names, not their real names. I mean, yeah, they were obviously not poor—one had a pinky ring the size of a Chihuahua‟s head—but they were just guys to me. White and kinda flabby and sometimes kinda smug.” “You never took a look in their wallet, maybe while they
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 69 were in the shower?” “No! I‟m not like that.” Oh good, I found myself saddled with the only hooker with integrity. Most of the text files were gibberish, perhaps encrypted in a way I was unfamiliar with, but one was unencrypted and was simply a list of surnames: Nelson, Reilly, Johnson, Clarke, Gibbons, Wuhl. There were numbers assigned to their names, although not in sequence. I played another video clip and asked, “Do you recognize any of these places?” Sloane snorted derisively. “It‟s a little dark.” “Not that dark.” Sloane looked down at me skeptically. “What does this mean? Why are you asking me about clients?” “Because I think your brother may have been up to his pretty neck in blackmail.” “What? Who would blackmail him?” I scowled up at him. Was anyone really that stupid? “He‟s the blackmailer.” That made him do a slight double take, eyes wide and mouth opening in shock. “Sander would never do that!” “Of course not, ‟cause he was always honest with you.” I disconnected the flash drive and wondered where I should keep it. My first thought was the office safe, but that was too obvious. It was the first place someone would look. I had an idea of a safe place, but how was I going to get there with Sloane shadowing me? I didn‟t want him to know where I was dropping this, for his own safety if nothing else. I pocketed it for now and shut down my ancient computer. I
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 70 may or may not have copied some documents to my hard drive—I have to admit the throbbing of my face was distracting me a little. There‟s nothing like your head feeling like an infected wound to turn your thought processes into jelly. “Did you recognize any of the places or not?” “It was too dark. I couldn‟t tell.” “Make a guess.” He glared at me like I was the asshole. “I dunno! Maybe… one of those lamps looked like the kind they have in the Roosevelt.” “The Roosevelt?” An old-world luxury-style hotel, baroque in its elegant decay, expensive and very much the property and playground of the rich. When it was open. It was closed now and had been for the last few months. Initially it was closed for renovations, including a big new conference room, but rumor had it the owners of the hotel had run into financial issues, hence the renovations slowing to a crawl. Now no one was sure if or when the hotel would reopen again. Had Sander entertained a client there before it was closed? I was trying to remember when it closed down. There were a few upload dates on the flash drive—did they correspond? I was trying to remember when I saw a shadow out in the foyer. A person, turned into a shadow by the light behind them, moving slowly toward my door. Sloane saw it finally and gasped, and I whispered to him to be quiet as I grabbed my shotgun from its hiding place. “Get behind the desk,” I told him, standing between it and the door. The shotgun was ready to go, because there was no point in having an emergency weapon that I‟d have to pause
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 71 to load. There were spare shells in my top desk drawer, but unless my aim was complete shit or there were a dozen guys behind this one, I shouldn‟t need them. The one good thing about a shotgun is you usually don‟t engage in epic shootouts with them. Either they get the job done right away, or you end up too dead to care. The doorknob rattled ominously before the man got it open, and I leveled the shotgun at waist height, which would guarantee a lethal hit on a short or average-sized guy, or would take the legs out of a taller guy. I had a sudden flashback to the day Spencer died in a hail of bullets, which made me grasp the shotgun that much harder. The door swung open slowly, and I had my finger resting lightly on the trigger, ready to twitch. But I could see that the man‟s hands were empty and hung loose at his sides. The halo of light behind him set off the highlights in his hair, and that with his muscular figure let me know this was Tyler, even before my eyes adjusted to the light/dark contrast. “Tyler?” His mouth opened and closed wordlessly, and I heard liquid pattering the floor in a regular rhythm. Blood was dripping from his right hand and had made a gory trail from the foyer. He found his voice finally and said, “I didn‟t know—” His pale eyes rolled up inside his head, and Tyler fell like a marionette whose strings had just been cut. I tried to catch him with one arm, still holding the shotgun in case the men who did this to him weren‟t long behind him. But as he lolled in my arms, his warm blood soaking into my shirt, I had a feeling the thugs were long gone. They‟d just wanted to drop off their present.
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10
THE ambulance lights painted the buildings in lurid shadows of crimson and black, and if there had actually been people on this block, they‟d probably have come out to look. But this part of town was as dead Spencer was. I called Kyle right after the ambulance, but he arrived ten minutes after it, still not believing I could be in so much trouble in such a short span of time. When he saw me standing there with blood on my shirt, he came up to me with a gasp. “My God, are you all right?” “Yeah, it‟s not my blood,” I told him, pulling him into the lobby of my building for some privacy. Most of the guys out there were just beat cops who had no idea I‟d already been at another crime scene, but they would find out soon enough, and I‟d be lucky not to end up cuffed and shoved in the back of a black-and-white. “What the hell is going on?” Kyle asked, brown eyes almost popping out of his skull. When he got exasperated, his eyes became wild things, and his dusky skin seemed to flush darker. “What have you gotten yourself into, Jake?” “I‟m not sure, but I intend to find out. Do me a favor, and take Sloane into protective custody. Not officially, though.” “What the hell do you mean not officially?” “Take him to your place, and don‟t tell anybody, not even your partner, okay? It‟s imperative you don‟t tell
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 73 another cop. Right now you‟re the only one I trust.” “This is crazy! You know that, right?” “Yeah, I know. But I think I know what I‟m doing now.” His look was so deeply suspicious it was honestly wounding. “I think enough people have been hurt tonight. You should come with me, and we‟ll work this out.” That almost made me laugh. What was there to work out exactly? But I knew he was just trying to help, save me from myself. He was good at that. I was touched that anyone beside my bartender cared. “I need you to trust me, Kyle.” His exasperated look came back. “Trust you to get yourself killed? I think it‟s high time you get some help here.” I could tell he wasn‟t going to let this go. One of the most endearing—and irritating—things about him was his stubbornness. I moved in closer, close enough that I could feel his body heat and smell the coffee he must have been chugging by the gallon. He took a tentative step back but then leaned forward slightly, as if to smell me. I bet I smelled like cordite and blood. I cupped the side of his face and asked, “Do you love me?” I‟d caught him off guard with that. I saw the confusion in his eyes, and he looked for a moment like he might deny it, but of course he relented. “I wish I didn‟t.” I stroked his cheek with my thumb and tried to look as innocent as I possibly could. This was very difficult, as I‟m not sure I‟ve ever been innocent in my life. “Then trust me. If I need help, I will call you, and I‟ll expect you to drop everything and come running.” He rolled his eyes. “Jake—”
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 74 Whatever he was going to say, I silenced him with a kiss, passionate enough to distract him as I dropped the flash drive into his coat pocket. There was no one it would be safer with, especially if Kyle didn‟t know about it. I have to admit, it was still nice to kiss him. He must have felt the same way, because he grabbed me tight enough that my ribs creaked, and while the bruises sang sick little songs, I remembered how it had been last night, how he‟d made the pain go away. I knew I had to keep him sweet, but I kept forgetting I was supposed to be a heartless bastard about all this. It used to be so easy. I broke away before we both got a little too into it, and said, “I‟ll be all right. Just keep Sloane safe, okay?” Although it took Kyle a moment to shake off, he did, the lust in his eyes being replaced by his natural wariness. “You have to call me in one hour. If you don‟t, I‟m coming after you.” “Kyle—” “Don‟t argue with me! And once you get back, I expect a full explanation, none of this trust me bullshit. Understand?” “Got it.” He may have been a Goody Two-shoes, but I could only push him so far before his dark side came out. And since he was a cop, you know he had a real ugly one. Still not as ugly as mine, but I knew better than to push it. We came out as the ambulance was pulling away. Tyler had been stabbed a couple of times, and according to the paramedics, he had some pretty ugly bruises on his stomach and back, suggesting a beating—a beating where they‟d been careful to avoid hitting his pretty face. Maybe it was a halfhearted attempt to kill him; maybe it was just a vicious warning. I just wasn‟t sure if it was solely for him or split
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 75 between me and him. I guess I‟d find out. Before the other cops noticed I was there, I slunk off into the shadows, and I was down the alley before I heard one of the beat cops ask Kyle where I was. I hated to leave him in such a hard spot, but I knew he could get out of it with no problem. The good thing—possibly the only good thing—about being such a square was people always trusted you, even if they were corrupt themselves. Hell, especially if they were corrupt. They could never see even a tiny bit of themselves in Kyle; therefore, he must have been the most trustworthy guy in the world. Must be nice. Would‟ve been nicer if Kyle could appreciate that “get out of jail free” card. I had only one potential lead: the Roosevelt. Yeah, the place was supposedly closed, but how had Sander been able to film there so close to closing? Maybe it was closed at the time, which begged the question how it happened. So I was going to find out. That‟s what detectives are supposed to do, or at least that‟s what those Murder, She Wrote reruns taught me. A couple blocks from the scene, I flagged down a cab and had it take me to Victoria Avenue, where the Roosevelt was located. I figured if the cabbie didn‟t know exactly where I was headed, he couldn‟t tell anyone trying to trace me exactly where I‟d gone. I wasn‟t sure who I was trying to evade exactly, but it seemed like a good idea. The Roosevelt looked dark and abandoned, looming over the end of the street like a drunk who had somehow passed out while sitting up at the end of the bar. It was closed up and dark, looking like a perfect place to film a low-budget horror movie on the cheap. There were a few upscale shops in the neighborhood, as well as a few empty suites where
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 76 businesses used to be, but all were closed now, as it was pure night here, save for the light from some needlessly ornate streetlamps. The rich are different—even their streetlights are pretentious. I stood in front of the locked, tinted glass doors of the hotel and looked for any sign of a break-in or recent occupation. I tried peering through the window as best I could, but there just wasn‟t enough light. I was going to walk around the hotel, see if I could find an entrance or exit that wasn‟t locked as well as the others, when I heard music in the distance. I figured it for the bass thud of one of those obnoxious car stereos everyone seemed to have nowadays, but the music wasn‟t growing louder or fading; it stayed at one single level. A parked car? I pressed my ear to the window and strained to listen. I wasn‟t one hundred percent sure, but it almost sounded like it was coming from somewhere deep inside the hotel. Was that even possible? I looked up, toward the higher stories, but they seemed as blacked out and dark as the lower levels. But wasn‟t that what blackout curtains were for? I walked around the building, finally discovering a rear exit door that wasn‟t locked as well as it should have been, and after loosening the lock with my handy picks, I was inside. After a moment, where I let my eyes adjust to the dark, I realized the music was indeed coming from somewhere far above me, although it remained faint. Mainly what I could pick up was a repetitive pulsing bass beat, dance music. The hotel had squatters, but ones more careful than your average homeless person.
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 77 The door had brought me into the kitchen, where it smelled like dust and abandonment. So whoever had been using the hotel, they hadn‟t been bothering with the kitchen. I moved carefully so I didn‟t kill myself or knock over something noisy, and I managed to make my way out into the empty dining room. I could barely see—it was dark and gloomy enough that I felt like I was at the bottom of a algae choked pond—but I could make out enough of the empty tables and snowy tablecloths to feel like a ghost haunting this dead hotel. I wondered if this would happen when I was actually dead, then decided, even if I did believe in this shit, I‟d haunt a better place. Maybe Lau‟s, or a casino. I could fuck with the slots, make them pay out all the time. The hotel lobby was even eerier, which I hadn‟t thought was possible. But that music, taunting, a faraway oddity that demanded explanation, was no louder here. Suddenly there was a hum, mechanical and seemingly from everywhere and nowhere at once, and I realized it was the elevator. Someone was headed down to me. There was nowhere for me to go except behind the front desk, so I did, jumping over the polished but dusty thing and ducking down behind it, grabbing the weapon in my pocket. I didn‟t bring my shotgun, because it wasn‟t the most inconspicuous of weapons, so I was forced to lift Kyle‟s Taser. Oh sure, as soon as he realized I‟d taken it, he‟d be so pissed off at me we‟d probably go from on again to off again, but at least I didn‟t take his service revolver. Strangely enough, I didn‟t think that would win me any good will. Kyle could be so fussy. The elevator came to a stop, and after a tense moment,
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 78 the doors opened with a slight hiss. “Yeah, I got it,” a man said, and I kept a finger on the Taser‟s trigger, ready to jump up and use it. “I didn‟t fuck this up. This is your fuck-up.” There was a pause, and the man said, “I don‟t wanna hear this shit. Fix it.” Clearly he was on the phone. His steps seemed to echo as he walked across the lobby, and I was able to hear him coming toward me before pausing to snap, “Stop with the fucking excuses, Carl. I‟m not your fucking wife. Get it done and stop bullshitting me.” I heard the click of his phone as he shut it with force, and he kept walking, while I wondered if a sweaty palm would affect the Taser‟s performance. He walked on by, and I heard him hit the dining room door hard with his palm, swinging it wide and disappearing inside it as it slapped shut in his wake, communicating his anger. I wondered idly if he had been talking about Sloane. I waited a moment; then I was out from behind the desk. Now that I knew where the elevator was, I searched the gloom and finally found the door to the emergency stairs, which I opened and ducked inside. I was just assuming there‟d be no one camped out in the stairwell. And there wasn‟t, but the tiniest noises seemed to echo, so I knew I‟d have to be as quiet as possible. There were miniscule emergency strip lights embedded in every fifth step, so if the hotel was smoke clogged, you still had some ability to find the way out. It was probably a good thing it never occurred to anyone that if there was that much smoke in the stairwell, you‟d probably die of smoke inhalation long before you reached the bottom. I was at the third level, going up the fourth, when I heard voices.
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 79 They had that faint, faraway sound, like people above me, so I froze and listened. After a minute, it became obvious they weren‟t getting any closer, and you‟d think their footsteps would make some noise. I finally figured out they were near one of the fire exits in an upstairs hall. I couldn‟t tell what they were talking about, as they were too far removed from me. But it sounded like things weren‟t happy at the Roosevelt. It felt like an Escher stairwell, like I was going up a strangely endless set of stairs, and the dim light added to the disorientation. I could have been a ghost, damned to haunt this overpriced hotel forever, until I could finally get a hold of room service. I took to pressing my ear to the exit door, listening for voices, and what I figured out was there was security personnel on hand, or whatever their low-budget equivalent was. I had probably been lucky to duck ‟em on my way in. I couldn‟t count on my luck, such as it was, to continue. Somewhere around the seventh floor—or could have been the hundredth; I felt like I‟d been climbing these stairs forever—the music began to become clearer, and I felt the distant tremors of a heavy bass kicking in. The music was high upstairs. Top floor? I sort of hoped not, because I wasn‟t in as good a shape as I thought. I was huffing to get up the stairs now, sweating like a fat guy under heat lamps, and I really wanted to blame it on having been beaten up not too long ago, but since my sweat smelled a little of rotgut, I figured that was a partial excuse at best. By the time I hauled my ass up to the tenth floor, I could feel the bass in the safety railings, and listening at the exit door gave me nothing but music and an occasional
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 80 voice, but it seemed to be my best bet for sneaking into the party. Assuming it was a party. Was I dressed for one? No, of course not. I had never dressed for any, because the only ones I had ever attended had no dress codes and grotesque quantities of booze. Who wants to go to a party where you have to make an effort? I pushed open the door carefully, taking a peek before easing into the hallway. It was lit by faint yellow bulbs, sort of like bug lights, and the music was indeed that monotonous kind of dance music that could be made by a computer. It was so rote and repetitive it was possible it was the same song playing over and over again on a loop. I followed the noise—not just music, but voices—and I began to smell things. The expected cigarette smoke and booze, but also pot, sex, and the acrid scent of poppers. Had I just walked into an orgy? The hall ended in what seemed to be suites, huge hotel rooms that were bigger than most people‟s apartments and just as expensive, and while one of the doors was ajar, I couldn‟t see in it from here. I could tell it was lit from within by strange blue lighting, like maybe there was something even weirder going on. I was within a hundred feet of the door when a huge man emerged, something like a cross between a stalactite and a yeti, and as he folded his humongous arms across his beefy chest, he asked, “What‟s the password?” Oh shit. Somehow I bet it wasn‟t Please don’t kill me, but it would have been nice. I had no choice but to bluff. “The agency sent me.” Even I had to suppress a scoff at that. Yeah, I could see me posing for beefcake shots beside Tyler and Sander, sure.
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 81 The behemoth looked down at me skeptically, and it was a frightening sight. His eyes were small and dark and had all the native intelligence of a doorknob. “The agency sent you? Ain‟t you a little… old?” “Some guys like a more mature fellow.” He wasn‟t buying this, so I was wondering if I could tase him as he moved in to grab me when I heard a noise behind me. With this music it was hard to hear anything, but sometimes you get the sense someone is sneaking up on you. I turned, just in time to meet a fist face-first. Well, that could‟ve gone better.
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11
I
WOKE up tied to a chair, my arms bound to my sides by
something constricting, my wrists held together by plastic ties. My head pounded like a snare drum being beaten by a psychotic three-year-old, and I tasted blood in my mouth. I used my tongue and carefully searched my gums, trying to feel if I was missing a tooth. Goddamn it, dentists were expensive as well as annoying. Still, maybe I could get some decent painkillers out of the deal. My bottom lip felt like it was swollen to the size of the average bratwurst. I kept playing dead, chin on my chest, trying hard to listen and judge my surroundings that way. Wasn‟t working too well. I knew I was still in the hotel from the repetitive thud of music, but it was far above me. I was back on the lower floors, a long way from people, which didn‟t seem good. When they put you in a room where people can‟t be disturbed by your screams, you‟re looking at a rough night. “You know, I saw your jaw move,” a man‟s voice said. “I know you‟re awake, Jake.” Didn‟t he sound familiar? As soon as I placed the voice, shock made me raise my head and open my eyes. “What the hell are you doing here?” I asked. I saw for myself I was dealing with Cutter Malloy, the right-hand thug of Echo City‟s resident crime boss, Richard “Tricky Dick” Blunt. Malloy was roughly the size and shape of a file cabinet and just about as smart, with square everything: square shoulders, square jaw, square head,
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 83 square-cut hair…. Hell, he probably had a square dick. He was like the love child of Frankenstein and a trash compactor. The problem was, he hit like that too. His body seemed to be sinew to the bone, and he could take twice as much punishment as he could give out, and that was pretty substantial. Never mind that he seemed to have too much forehead, a nose permanently out of joint from having been broken so many times, or piggy little eyes the exact color of slate—he was a nasty piece of business, which was why Blunt kept him around in spite of his obvious instability. Sure, he‟d kill Blunt as soon as the next guy, except Blunt gave him big fat checks and seemed to have enough pull to keep him from going back to the slammer. Malloy sneered, although it could have been an attempt at a smile. With a face as ugly as his, it was hard to tell. “Shouldn‟t I ask you the same thing, fag-o-tron?” He was wearing awful brown pants with a matching brown jacket, over a black turtleneck. He had a thing for turtlenecks, which I figured meant he was actually hiding neck bolts. “Was that some attempt at humor, or are you mispronouncing something? You should really try one of those English as a first language night classes.” “English is my first language, you dumb shit,” he replied with no irony at all. You just can‟t teach sarcasm to some people, can you? Cutter was pacing almost nervously, taking short, violent drags off his stub of a cigarette. I had upset something, or my presence here was unwelcome for more than the obvious reasons. I was bound to a wooden chair in the middle of a hotel room that looked familiar, mainly because I recognized it
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 84 from Sander‟s tape. Only the nightstand‟s lamp was on, but it was enough to tell this place had a strange gold wallpaper that I had only seen before in the sex films. Well, at least the latest ones. This one hadn‟t been used in a while, though, as not only was the room‟s single bed made to hotel crispness, but under the heavy cigarette scent was a whiff of dust. “So what does Dick have to do with this?” I asked, deciding fishing might be my best tactic right now. I didn‟t have many options. His eyes narrowed to evil little slits as smoke curled from his lips. “You don‟t call Mr. Blunt that, faggot.” Among Cutter‟s many winning charms was rampant homophobia. I had it on good authority he was racist too, and sexist went without saying. His mother must have been so proud. “C‟mon, since when have sex parties been his thing? I thought he preferred more personal entertainment.” Complicating matters for my muddled head was the fact that Tricky Dick was known to be straight. He had an official wife, an unofficial wife across town, and a mistress du jour, who generally changed every three months, although they were usually young bottle blondes who could have passed for clones. If he was going to swap them out for newer models, why not ones with different looks as well? Straight men— sometimes there was no understanding them. Cutter glared at me before flicking his cigarette butt. It bounced off my forehead and landed on the sandy beige carpet. “Where‟s the files, butt monkey?” “What files?” Were they hunting Sloane for the sex films? That didn‟t make a whole lot of sense, simply because I didn‟t see Tricky Dick or any of his people that I knew with Sander. “Don‟t play dumb with me,” he said, slipping on his
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 85 rings. Cutter‟s actual name was Bennett Malloy, which was about as threatening a name as Sir Patsy Winterbottom the Fourth. But he got his name Cutter from his choice of accessory, which was a set of silver metal rings with small protrusions welded to the center of each band. Those protrusions were scalpel blades that had been cut and welded to each ring, so he cut people to ribbons while punching them, crushing bones and ripping skin often at the very same time. He was a sadist with a clever streak, the very worst kind of thug, which was why Tricky Dick leaned on him so heavily. He had eight rings, one set of four for each hand, so you had time to contemplate how much damage he was about to do to you before he did it. “I don‟t know what you‟re talking about. What files? I haven‟t seen any files.” Playing dumb was my only choice. While my arms were held to my side with what seemed to be bungee cord, they hadn‟t tied or secured my legs in any way. That wasn‟t smart. Of course, I didn‟t see how I could get out of straps with my legs, or kill someone with my feet, so maybe they were smarter than they seemed. His slate eyes were cold and suspicious. “The files on the computer at the Granger place. Or were you just there to fuck the pretty boy?” “On the computer? Oh, you mean the thing your brilliant gunmen turned into slag? I can‟t read rubble, so try again.” He had on all his rings and took a step toward me but stopped. Doubt made him look suddenly constipated. “You didn‟t see the files?” I
sighed,
and
feigning
annoyance
wasn‟t
hard.
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 86 Pretending I wasn‟t scared was the hard part. “What have I been telling you? What files? What I wanna know is, what the fuck does Tricky Dick hafta do with all of this?” “You don‟t ask questions.” Cutter continued to look confused, like a dog who didn‟t know where the thrown ball had gone, but he walked toward me anyway. “Where is the other one?” “What other one?” “The twin. Sloane. Where‟ve you stashed him?” “The cops took him into custody.” Cutter smirked at me, now within punching distance. I had a sinking feeling I was in big trouble. “No, they didn‟t. So where is he?” I shrugged a single shoulder, wondering what I could do. I could kick him away, but he‟d just return even madder than before. “Probably a motel.” I knew it was coming and braced for it, but it didn‟t help. He punched me almost casually, without much force, but I felt the skin tear, and I tasted blood and felt air suddenly coming in through my torn cheek. He‟d sliced all the way through my cheek to my mouth. That was impossibly deep, so I guess I wasn‟t surprised by the blood now pouring down my face, sluicing over my chin and trailing down my neck, while the rest of it pattered on my pants like warm rain. At least the scalpel blades were relatively sharp; they didn‟t hurt so much cutting in. It was the afterward that hurt. “Try again, faggot.” It was disconcerting to have blood filling my mouth while at the same time it was running down my face. I knew from experience that the human body had more blood in it than you‟d ever expect, but still it was unnerving when it
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 87 was happening to me. I was wondering if lying had any chance of working. I was willing to lie; I had a motel all picked out—the Alley Cat, a no-tell motel where all of the cheap and sleazy ended up sooner or later. They‟d be forced to check it out before discovering Sloane wasn‟t there. But Cutter wasn‟t that stupid; he‟d expect me to lie if I gave it up so easily. But the Alley Cat was about the only place in town that wasn‟t in Tricky Dick‟s pocket; the other places, one phone call would be enough to confirm whether Sloane was there or not. So, in summary, I was fucked, and not in a good way. Not that that was new. I spit blood on the carpet, aiming for his shoes but mostly missing, and said, “Go fuck yourself and die, dickbag.” If I was going to get beaten to a bloody pulp, I was going to earn it. He had just pulled back his fist to punch me again when the door opened, and one of his lieutenants, a stocky fireplug of a guy, came in, announcing, “We got trouble.” Cutter threw him an annoyed glance. “What?” “Cops on their way.” “What?” “We saw one outside, but we figured it was a drive-by, y‟know, to check up on the place? Then we heard over the scanner that the cop had called in a B&E and possibly burglary in progress here.” Cutter dropped his hand to his side and gaped at him in shock. “What the fuck ..? Why the fuck didn‟t our guy intercept this?” “I dunno! We can‟t get a hold of him; he‟s probably at a crime scene.”
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 88 “Motherfucker,” Cutter spat in disgust. He turned away from me, no longer interested, mainly because he had bigger problems to deal with. From the sound of it, Tricky Dick‟s many men on the payroll in the police department couldn‟t stop them from getting fucked. What a shame. “Call the boss. We need to defuse this. Get Henry out there. We can‟t have fucking pigs in here.” “I know, but Henry‟s still cleaning up.” Cutter made a noise of disgust and motioned fireplug out of the room, following him and slamming the door shut. So, I guess beating the shit out of me was on hold. I tried working my hands out of the plastic cuffs, but no dice. What could I do? Again, my options were pretty limited. That might be one of the shittiest things about being a prisoner. I was trying to determine if I could stand up when the door opened, and a guy came in. He was an average-sized but underweight bottle blond with a long torso, dressed in nothing but tight red boxer briefs. His shaved chest was smoother than silk, glistening with sweat and a light dusting of body glitter, and his pupils were so wide and glassy it looked like he had no irises at all. “Forget the safe word?” the boy asked. He looked about sixteen but was probably older. A silver ring gleamed from his left nipple. There was no way he was a thug. He was a hustler from the sex party upstairs, and he looked as high as hell. “Something like that. Think you can get me out of this?” The boy half grinned, a sort of stoned smile. “You wanna get out of it? We could have some fun.” “I‟m bleeding from the face.” He
almost
laughed.
“I‟ve
done
it
under
worse
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 89 circumstances.” I didn‟t doubt that. He came over and caressed the uninjured side of my face before looking at the bungee cords. He was able to undo those, and they fell to the carpet. “So what‟s your name?” I asked, wondering if he‟d tell me. He smelled like sweat and sex and something else, probably a drug I wasn‟t familiar with. “They call me Chance,” he said. So not his name, just what they called him. “How long have you been in the Serpent Club?” “Couple weeks. It‟s a trip. I might actually make enough money to go back to college.” “You didn‟t happen to ever encounter a hot black-haired guy named Sander?” Chance looked down at me in a glazed way, like he was so far away he could barely see him. “No, I don‟t think so. Why? You lookin‟ for him?” “I was hoping to see him again.” “That good, huh?” He leaned over to look at the plastic tie binding my wrist, and shoved his chest in my face. I couldn‟t tell if it was deliberate or drug-based clumsiness. “I‟m never gonna get those things off ya. You got scissors?” “Not on me.” I would have asked if Chance had any on him, but his underwear left nothing to the imagination. If there was something other than his dick and balls in there, it‟d be pretty obvious. So, still fucked. But if the cops were out there, I needed them to come into the hotel; it was probably the only thing that was going to keep me alive.
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 90 Chance straddled my lap and gave me a lascivious smile. “Guess we‟ll have to kill some time.” He was surprisingly warm, like he was running a fever, but it was probably the drugs. “How do you get into the Serpent Club? Seems like it‟s hard to find.” He shrugged a single shoulder and leaned in to nibble at the uninjured side of my face. “They contacted my agency, and me and a couple other guys tried out for it.” “Tried out for it? How do you do that?” “You do the trial.” He bit my ear, and I could feel his erection pressing against my stomach. I‟d be lying if I didn‟t admit that this was kind of a turn-on, but the fact that I was still bleeding from my face and my head hurt pretty much put the kibosh on any romance. “What‟s the trial?” “Five guys.” Now he was nibbling my neck. “If you can keep ‟em all happy, you‟re in.” “Five guys at once?” I suppose that was some people‟s idea of a good time, but that sounded like too much work to me. Also, chafing had to be an issue. “No, five guys in one night. If you can handle it, you‟re in.” I briefly wondered if Sander had filmed all of his “trial.” It might explain why a few of the sex tapes were shot at the Roosevelt. As soon as Chance slipped his hands under my shirt, I had what seemed to be a good idea. “Hey, you wanna do something for me, Chance?” He smiled lazily, and I must admit he was attractive, in an elegantly wasted sort of way. “What do you want me to do?” “Throw the nightstand through the window.” That made him raise his thin, pale eyebrows. Surely he
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 91 was expecting a sex act. “What?” “C‟mon, it‟s totally rock star. We trash the room and fuck in the rubble. It‟d be hot.” A slow smile crept across his face, and his glassy eyes seemed to glow. “That‟s kinky.” “You have to trash the room solo, ‟cause I‟m a little tied up at the moment.” He chuckled at the horrible pun and slid off my lap, which was kind of a shame. I watched him reel across the room, taking the lamp off the end table and putting it on the bed before looking at me dubiously. “Toss it through the window, really? Won‟t they be mad?” “Who cares?” He considered that for a moment. “Good point.” Chance picked up the nightstand and threw it at the window. As the glass shattered and the furniture sailed out into the night, he laughed giddily, like a three-year-old on a sugar high. He then started throwing furniture around the room, laughing the whole time. “This is fun!” he proclaimed, tipping the bed over. If the cops were out there, they just saw a nightstand fly through a window. They‟d have to come in and check it out now, no matter what bullshit Cutter and his men spun. Over the noise of Chance trashing the room, I thought I heard running footsteps, outside in the hall and maybe above me. It was a minor panic sound, meaning the cops probably were coming in. “Chance!” I shouted. I had to shout it a couple of times before he heard me and stopped. “You oughta go. I think there‟s a raid.” He looked cute when he was puzzled. “Huh?”
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 92 “Cops. You better get going.” It seemed to take a moment for that to sink in. “Really?” He staggered toward the door and glanced out, still unsure. When Chance looked back at me, he was frowning. “What about you?” “I‟ll be okay. Go.” Chance gave me that adorably stony little smile and said, “Rain check.” He then left, and I watched his cute little ass go. It wouldn‟t be so bad to collect that rain check. There was a small chance Cutter would have his men come and get me ahead of the cops, but I wasn‟t sure they‟d have time or anywhere to take me. As it turned out, I was left tied to a chair, bleeding and wondering why it was so fucking cold outside (and why I had to be sitting directly in the path of the breeze from the broken window), when a surprisingly familiar figure appeared in the doorway. “Jake, my God, what happened to you?” I should have known, as soon as that guy said there were cops outside, that one of them was Kyle.
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WHILE I was sitting on an emergency room gurney, getting the cuts on my face pasted together with surgical glue (the doctor seemed to think stitches would most likely tear, and I agreed), Kyle told me he came after me once he realized I‟d stolen his Taser. It didn‟t matter that I‟d taken pains to avoid being followed; he was able to find me pretty quick. He had no idea why I‟d be poking around the Roosevelt, but he had a bad feeling about it and called it in as a B&E, figuring I could talk my way out of it if I was the only one inside. As soon as Kyle saw Cutter, though, he knew something terrible was going on. The nightstand flying through the window was just another sign. As soon as the doctor was done and moved off to attend another patient, Kyle asked, “What does Blunt have to do with any of this?” “I don‟t know,” I said, although now I thought I had some idea of what was going on. Yeah, it was a surprise to me too, but some things seemed obvious now. Maybe getting beaten had shaken something loose in my brain. “He doesn‟t own the Roosevelt, does he?” “Yeah, he does.” Kyle‟s look was questioning, so I told him, “He owns it through a shell corporation called Colson Holdings Limited. I tried to look up who owned Colson and where they were based, but I couldn‟t find anything except a link to First Liberty Bank.”
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 94 “Blunt‟s bank.” “Uh-huh. That‟s why I figured it was a dummy corp.” He scratched his head, not even moving his short black hair. It wasn‟t that he used a lot of product; it was just the result of hat hair. “I don‟t get it. He‟s straighter than a ruler. Why is he fronting for a secret gay sex club?” “Good question.” Actually, an answer immediately popped to mind. But if that were true, there‟d be evidence. “You going back to the Roosevelt?” Kyle nodded, weariness etched on his face. “Have to. There‟s one hell of a scene there. I‟m sure Blunt has his lawyers on it and it‟ll be dismissed, but until then we do have some evidence to gather. Why?” “You might want to keep your eye out for something.” I then told him my theory, which made him raise his eyebrows even more. But he didn‟t disagree. Kyle insisted on taking me back to his place; he didn‟t think it was a good idea if I was at my apartment alone, and I had to agree. I didn‟t want to get beaten up anymore. Sloane had taken over Kyle‟s bedroom, mainly because Kyle was too polite to have a guest sleep on the couch, and I felt a brief stab of jealousy. But why? I had slept with Sloane, so why shouldn‟t Kyle get the chance? But the thing was, Kyle wasn‟t like that. No open relationships for him; he was pure fuddy-duddy, all the way down to his bones. Opposites attract, right? Kyle was as pure as the driven snow, and I was as muddy as a swamp. It was what brought us together and broke us apart, although love didn‟t stop quite that easily. I almost wish it did. I could‟ve looked in on Sloane, but I didn‟t, mainly because I was having a heavy case of the shakes. I needed a
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 95 drink so bad I could hardly think. Kyle didn‟t really drink, which was a bummer, but I wasn‟t out of luck, as he had bottles of wine, most often brought by dinner guests and family members who had no idea he had little time for even the most benign alcohol. Because he‟d never throw out a gift, they sat in the back of his lowest kitchen cupboard, behind his pots and pans. If he hadn‟t re-gifted about half of them, there‟d have been no room for the pans. I don‟t know anything about wine—I don‟t like it very much—but I grabbed the first bottle I found, and I was lucky to find it was a screw-top. I twisted the cap off and drank the room-temperature stuff, which basically tasted like sour grape juice and made me want to gag. But having been a dedicated drinker for so long, I had no problem suppressing my natural gag reflex, and once I‟d gulped down about half the bottle, I began to feel a nice warm glow in my belly. The shakes had finally stopped, and I could think more or less clearly again. That didn‟t happen often, so I knew I‟d have to enjoy it while it lasted. I took a couple more swallows of the stuff before putting the cap back on and stowing it back beneath the counter. I figured Kyle would get angrier if he found an empty bottle, but who cared about a half-empty one? I tried connecting the threads together, but I had to admit this was an ugly tangle of knots. If I was right about Tricky Dick‟s connection, this case had gotten way too complicated. The reason Tricky Dick was Echo City‟s crime boss was because he had connections in high places, some so high I risked getting a nosebleed from the elevation alone. Could Nick Giardi have been one of Tricky Dick‟s slingers? Of course Dick was in the drug trade, but he kept
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 96 his hands clean and left the dirtier work to his underlings. Was that the answer? Were his underlings doing business of their own? Dick wouldn‟t look kindly on such a thing, but it was possible. That might explain why people were turning up dead, if only because they wouldn‟t want their boss getting wind of any of this. But why was Sloane such a danger to them? It didn‟t make sense. Being tortured had taken the wind out of my sails, so I decided to think about it with my eyes closed, stretching out on the couch for just a second. It was too hard, too much of a Kyle thing for me to ever sleep on. So of course I fell asleep, and woke up when I fell off the sofa and thudded onto the floor. It took me a minute to remember where I was, which was helpful, as I had to find the bathroom pretty quickly. As I barfed into the toilet, it reminded me yet again why I didn‟t like wine. It tasted even worse coming back up. Once I rinsed the bad taste out of my mouth and dunked my whole head in a sink full of cold water until I felt vaguely human, I began to think about what had happened. Even in the relatively sober light of day, it didn‟t make a hell of a lot of sense. I wasn‟t just missing pieces of the puzzle, I had no puzzle at all, just big gaping holes where something should be. I had to talk to Sloane. He was leaving something out, something huge, and I was fucking tired of him lying to me. He might have been a hot piece of ass, but that didn‟t mean I was letting him get away with bullshitting me anymore. I just came out of the bathroom when I heard the apartment door close and saw a very tired, mussed-looking Kyle standing there, a little bit of dark stubble staining his
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 97 face. “You okay, Jake?” he asked. “You look like hell.” “Takes one to know one,” I replied, idly scratching the fresh scabs on my face. They were still numb from the cold water, so they hardly hurt at all, but I knew that would change. “How‟s the investigation going?” Kyle sighed explosively, as if I‟d touched him in a sore spot. “Jesus Christ, it‟s all kinds of messed up. Whatever you‟ve gotten yourself into, Jake, it‟s bigger than I can fathom.” “I‟m just starting to realize that.” I didn‟t even bother to knock before opening Kyle‟s bedroom door. Even if Sloane was naked, it wasn‟t anything I hadn‟t seen before. “Sloane, we need to—” I stopped as my gaze swept the room. The covers were rumpled, but the bed was still made, as if someone had slept on top of the blankets for a while, then got up and left. Kyle came up behind me and looked over my shoulder, touching my arm and pressing up against my back. A little pang of desire rode my nerves, although it was faint. I probably would have had more of a reaction if I still wasn‟t kind of numb and hungover and shocked by what I was seeing. “Where is he?” Kyle asked. “He‟s gone,” I said. A stupid, obvious thing to say, but I was too busy wondering what was worse—if Sloane had done a runner because he was afraid, or because he had totally fucked me over. That little bitch.
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KYLE wouldn‟t let me go alone, no matter how tired he was, so he drove me over to Sloane‟s condo. It was unlikely he was there, but it was the first place he would have gone. I doubted he left a trail to follow, but I had to try. His door wasn‟t open, but it wasn‟t difficult to pop the lock since the door still resembled Swiss cheese. His place was the gaudy crapsterpiece it had been the first time I was here, with little of the bullet-ridden mess from the last time I was here cleaned up, and while it was kind of hard to tell, it didn‟t look like much was missing. He‟d taken off in a hurry… or he never had much here to begin with. Could this place have been part of the setup? I was feeling more and more like an idiot. I looked in his fridge for some booze and found a halffilled bottle of vodka in the freezer. I took a few swallows, the coolness of the liquid going down my throat making me shiver. Because vodka didn‟t have much in the way of taste, I could have kept drinking it forever, but I was afraid of brain freeze and capped it up and put it back. A good thing, because by the time I shut the freezer door, Kyle was lurking at the doorway. “His door was just open, huh?” “If you don‟t want to know the answer, you shouldn‟t ask the question.” He fixed me with one of his dozen scolding looks, and I wondered what he would do if he couldn‟t correct me like a naughty schoolboy. Ooh, if I was naughty enough, would he
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 99 spank me? I was definitely going to have to find out. “I‟m still a cop, you know. I could bust your ass anytime.” I gave him my best smile. “You could do much nicer things to my ass.” He grimaced and looked away, making a dismissive gesture with his hand. “Get your mind out of the gutter.” “You brought it up.” “Not in that way, and you know it.” After a pause to swallow a smile—I just knew it; his face was flushing dark, a blush he‟d been doing his best to hide—he went back to the safe topic. “We can check out the bus station and the train station.” “Not the airport?” “New security regulations and budget cuts have pretty much guaranteed there‟s no such thing as a quick flight out anymore. If he‟s there, it‟ll be hours before he‟s headed anywhere.” “Unless he‟s got a private plane stashed somewhere.” That was when something clicked inside my thick, alcoholaddled brain. “Oh fuck, we gotta get to Sheppard‟s Field, now.” Sheppard‟s Field was an airstrip for smaller and private planes. You could even hire a plane to take you on an aerial tour of Echo City, although why anyone would want to see this shithole from above was a mystery to me. Did it look like less of an ashtray from overhead? Somehow I found that hard to believe, unless you were allowed to drop acid before the flight. The whole time I was hoping I was wrong, mainly so Kyle didn‟t discover I was as stupid as I obviously was. No such luck. Sheppard‟s Field was sprawling, with separate runways for the local flights and the puddle
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 100 jumpers coming in from other cities, but it really wasn‟t as big as it seemed to be. It was an optical illusion, fostered by its proximity to a swamp and a landfill downwind of them. It was the only bit of paved civilization in this abandoned pocket of nothingness. Any plane funded by Tricky Dick, no matter how small, would have to be nice; therefore it would stand out like a tarted-up stripper in a dead cornfield. I spied it almost immediately upon entering the small, drafty hangar that passed as a terminal. But since I had a view of the window and Kyle didn‟t, I was able to successfully suggest we split up to cover more of the area. I sent him in the opposite direction, so I was able to approach Tricky Dick‟s plane on my own. Sloane was waiting in the shadow of one wing, hands buried in the pockets of his coat, hunched up against the cold. “Your pilot running late?” I asked. “Or are you catching a bus?” He stiffened, as if I just tased him in the nuts, and his head whipped around toward me so violently I thought it might sail off into the propeller of a nearby plane. “Jake! What—how did you find me?” “I finally put two and two together, sweetheart,” I admitted. I was an idiot. I wanted to blame the booze, but that wasn‟t all of it, not this time. “So tell me, doll face, what was the plan?” For a moment, he looked haunted, his expression naked and genuine. But then a shadow seemed to pass over his face, and he gave me his sexy off-kilter smile. “I‟m sorry, Jake. I got scared. After everything that‟s happened, I thought maybe it really was time for me to go. I couldn‟t tell you; I feel enough like a coward as it is.” He put a hand on
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 101 my arm, sliding it up toward my shoulder. “But now that you‟re here—” I yanked my arm away, giving him the evilest look I could muster. “Can the balloon juice, Sloane. What was the scam, huh? Why did Tricky Dick put you up to this? What‟s in it for you?” He widened his eyes and thrust out his lower lip ever so slightly, trying on an oh so innocent look that didn‟t quite work on a smoking hot guy like him. “I don‟t know what you‟re talking about.” “Kyle‟s with me. I‟ll have him arrest you for prostitution. Now be honest with me. Why the hell did you hire me? What does Tricky Dick have planned, huh?” As soon as he realized I was serious, his pout morphed from sexy to sullen. “I just wanted you to find my brother.” “No you didn‟t. Cut the bullshit.” “Look, I was paying off his debt, okay?” he snapped, suddenly angry. “Sander couldn‟t completely afford his habit. He got in over his head…. This was the only way to get him released.” “Released?” Sloane nervously fussed with his hair. It made it messy but still attractive. “Sander‟s at Dick‟s cabin. He can‟t leave until I pay off the debt. It‟s paid off now. I‟m going to get him.” This didn‟t sound right at all. “So Dick has been holding him hostage?” “No, it‟s just… it‟s complicated.” “Really?” Was Sloane this stupid? Maybe. He was pretty as hell, and he didn‟t rely on his smarts to get him through
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 102 life. “How do you know he‟s still alive?” That seemed to startle him. “What? Of course he‟s still alive.” “You‟ve talked to him.” “Yeah.” He paused briefly. “We‟ve exchanged e-mails and texts. I just texted him that I‟m on my way.” I couldn‟t help but chuckle. Yeah, Sloane really was that stupid. “All shit that can be easily faked. What about the earring? What was that?” “It was his earring but not his ear. It was from someone else.” “Who?” He shrugged, unconcerned. “Some guy. I dunno. Didn‟t ask.” “What the fuck is the point, Sloane? Why me?” He clicked his tongue in exasperation. “I dunno, all right? Ask Dick. All I know is, he wanted me to hire you to look into my brother‟s supposed disappearance, and I was supposed to drop Nick‟s name. Dick said you had to pay.” “Pay for what?” He both shrugged and shook his head this time, trying to add a little variety to his stupid menu. “He didn‟t say. He just said you should have been taken out a while ago, but no one can get you. You‟re a bad penny who keeps turning up.” “What the hell‟s that supposed to mean?” “I think it‟s an old saying—” “That was rhetorical,” I told Sloane with a frown. Why would Tricky Dick be after me? It didn‟t make sense. “What were you supposed to do? Frame me? Lead me into a trap?”
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 103 He shook his head and shrugged again. “I don‟t know. Something went wrong with the Nick thing, so I was supposed to get you poking around based on the earring, but… I don‟t know where he thought it would go. I didn‟t know Tyler was gonna get hurt or that gunmen were gonna shoot at me.” “But you didn‟t care,” Kyle said, suddenly coming around the far side of the plane. I wondered how long he‟d been there listening. He looked pissed off, and damn, he was hot when he was angry. “You knew this asshole was trying to kill Jake, and you strung him along.” “My brother—” “Is either working with Blunt or dead! You can‟t be this stupid.” “You‟re a dead man as soon as you get off this plane,” I told Sloane. “Or Dick‟s gonna make you wish you were. You‟re a liability now.” Sloane‟s pouty look returned, but now it was bratty and annoying, nowhere near as sexy as it used to be. How had it ever seemed sexy? “I‟m gonna go get my brother. He said you‟d lie.” Sloane made to move around me, but Kyle grabbed his arms and pulled them behind his back, taking out his handcuffs with practiced ease. Yes, he was in plain clothes right now, but he still had his police gear with him. “You‟re not going anywhere. You‟re under arrest.” “For what?” Sloane protested. “For conspiracy to commit murder, and whatever else I can think up and make stick.” Sloane scoffed in disbelief. “Murder? Who the hell did I try and murder?”
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 104 “Jake Falconer,” Kyle told him, and stared at me over Sloane‟s shoulder. His eyes seemed to say, What the fuck have you gotten us into now? A fair question. At least I was finally beginning to see the light.
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SPENCER‟S murder was partially unsolved. I say partially because I‟d managed to shoot the shooter, a piece of professional muscle named Jess “Mauler” Poulin. But he was for hire—anyone with an extra thousand and a grudge could‟ve hired him—and the dead aren‟t particularly chatty, no matter what the psychic hucksters down on Canal Street claim. His dealings were all cash, and he left no clue as to who hired him, so the cops never arrested his employer. I had no good ideas either, because who hated Spencer? No one, as far as I knew. But people hated me. I had an enemies list almost longer than a friends list, and mainly due to my sparkling personality. If I had gained Tricky Dick as an enemy, I was well and truly fucked. It also might explain who hired Poulin. I was supposed to wait for Kyle in the hangar as he waited for the uniforms to show up and cart Sloane off, but of course I headed straight for the car and started off. I wasn‟t stranding Kyle here; he could get a lift from one of his cop buddies. I needed to get going on this now, since if I thought about it and tried to be sensible, I‟d probably lose my nerve. I wasn‟t a complete idiot—I put in a call while I was driving, just so I had a backup plan if everything went monstrously wrong, which it probably would. This wasn‟t smart on any level, and my lack of preparation pretty much guaranteed a clusterfuck, but I was so angry I didn‟t care. I did stop by the office, to pick up my flask and the
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 106 shotgun as well as some spare bullets. I was preparing to go out in a blaze of glory, but really I would have settled for not being killed within three seconds of arrival. You wanna be macho, but you also have to be realistic. I left, although not before swilling down half the flask. I needed liquid courage, but rage often made up for it. Right now I needed to calm the rage, because it could blind me as much as fuel me. It wasn‟t an exaggeration to say Tricky Dick owned half the city, because he did. Politically, he just about owned it all, and if he owned people within the police force, it wouldn‟t surprise me. In fact, it would explain everything. Why Giardi‟s death was brushed under the rug, why Spencer‟s murder investigation dead ended right away, why shit had been so weird lately. It all made sense. Maybe if I was a better detective, I‟d have figured that out long before now, but you can‟t have everything. In spite of owning just about everything, he had a favorite hangout. It was the tallest and newest skyscraper downtown, informally known as the Tower, formally known as Blunt Tower. I have no fucking idea what he does in there, and I‟m pretty sure no one does. If forced to give a name to what he does for a living, he says he‟s an import/export man. What imports and exports exactly? As far as I can tell, drugs and sex slaves. But I bet those don‟t fit on the business cards. He was probably there, though. It was daytime, and he made a show of pretending he worked like any regular schmo. I can‟t believe anyone bought it, but presumably some did. Before leaving, I found myself going through Spencer‟s
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 107 old wreck of a desk, until I found one of his glossy girly magazines. I still wasn‟t sure what I was doing until I rolled the magazine up into as tight a cylinder as physically possible. It was a trick Lau taught me once, on a slow night at the bar. If I could prevent Dick‟s goon bots from shooting at me as long as possible, I might actually get somewhere. I used my belt to make a kind of sling for the shotgun, so I could hide it under the coat and behind my back. Traffic was fairly light, which meant I might have believed in destiny if I was into superstitious bullshit. I took another slug from my flask for courage and then parked around the back of the Tower. I didn‟t want anyone identifying my car before I got in, although that was a slim possibility. I slipped the tightly rolled-up magazine inside the sleeve of my trench coat, glad I remembered to use a rubber band to keep it as tightly rolled as possible. That was the most important part. I was able to get in through the front glass doors before being approached by two thick-necked goons in matching off-the-rack black sports coats, looking like twin mercenary golems. “Hey, is this the Mutual Insurance building?” I asked, in as cheerful a voice as I could muster. One of them reached into his coat pocket, clearly going for his gun, while the other sneered and said, “Who do you think you‟re fooling, Falconer?” Goon number one grabbed my arm, and I let him, as there was no avoiding it. But I let the magazine drop into my hand and jabbed its blunt tip right into his thick throat. A tightly rolled magazine was the equivalent of a baton, at least as far as sensitive areas of the body were concerned. In the throat, it was as good as a lead pipe.
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 108 He let me go as he grabbed his neck and started choking for breath, leaving me free to turn and face goon number two. He had his gun out, but it wasn‟t yet leveled at me, giving me just enough time to kick him square in the nuts. He doubled over reflexively, and as he did, I gave him a sharp uppercut that caught him right under his tiny inbred chin. It should have been enough to knock him out, but all it did was make him stagger, so I was forced to throw a right cross that connected with his head just under the ear, a notorious soft spot if you could hit it just right. I must have, because he went down like a sack of hammers, even though a shock of pain zigzagged from my hand, up my arm, getting jammed up somewhere near my shoulder blade. I didn‟t know if I dislocated a knuckle or broke it, but I was too high on adrenaline and booze to care. It would catch up with me later, but by then I might be dead, so who cared? The magazine was broken, useless now, and so was the guy who got it in the throat. He was still conscious and choking, but probably not for long. I took the unconscious goon‟s gun and key card and took off for the elevator. I wasn‟t going to have a lot of time, and I was going to have to get to the top of the building before they could take me down, which would take some doing. Of course Tricky Dick would be in the penthouse, and of course there were going to be dozens of goons between me and him. My only hope was they wouldn‟t know I was here until it was too late. The elevator could only be unlocked with a key card, which I now had, and inside it was all mirror-finished stainless steel with a bit of industrial gray carpeting on the bottom. I had never been in a fancier elevator, and I could see why it was members only. It wouldn‟t be this nice if it
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 109 was open to the general public. What I could tell from blueprints and the little information I could cobble together, almost no one occupied this building, just Tricky Dick and his various minions, lackeys, and friends. It was curious, such a big building almost permanently empty, but it made sense if you thought of it as a symbol, as Dick‟s “fuck you” to everyone. He owned so much of the city, he could even have an empty business tower all to himself. Tricky Dick‟s dick, rising out of the heart of the city. That shows you what an asshole he is. I rode the elevator up to the eighteenth level and stopped it just as it passed. I used the emergency release button to get the doors open and saw that I‟d hit it more or less right, as I could drop down two and a half feet to the floor below. I didn‟t know if anyone was keeping track of the elevators, but if they were, I had to keep them guessing. I jumped down onto the brown-carpeted floor, feeling a small jolt in my knee, but nothing tore or broke, so I put that in the win column. There wasn‟t anyone on this floor either, so I got lucky more than I should have. From there it was a brief run up the fire stairs, although I paced myself so as not to get winded. How embarrassing would it be to finally face off with Tricky Dick, only to need to take a time-out because I was wheezing? There was only so much a man‟s ego could take. I expected trouble as soon as I came out onto the penthouse floor, and for a second I thought maybe I‟d gotten lucky. It seemed abandoned, an empty office with dirt brown carpet and whiter than white walls. There was a faint scent of cigarettes and coffee, a suggestion someone had been here recently, which was good, because otherwise it seemed
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 110 totally abandoned. Just another empty office on an empty floor in an empty building. Then I heard the slight squeak of a hinge, and I drew my gun, but instantly I had a choice to make. There were two side doors opening up into the empty lobby, with a thug emerging from each one. If I shot one, I‟d have to shoot the other, but then I‟d open up the shooting war. I‟d win the initial battle, but I‟d lose the war, ‟cause thugs would come pouring out of Tricky Dick‟s office like cockroaches disturbed by the light. I had no choice but to charge the thug closest to me, throwing a modified football tackle, going shoulder-first into his gut. He let out an explosive sigh before momentum flung him backward, and I turned and leveled my gun at the other thug. “Lose the heater, or I‟ll splatter your brains all over these fucking walls.” With reluctance, he tossed his piece aside, far from my reach, and said, “You ain‟t leavin‟ here alive.” “I know.” I was actually hoping my backup would arrive soon, but I knew it was an iffy proposition from the start. If it was suicide, so be it. I kept an eye on both thugs as I backed up toward the main office door, sure that I was in for the fight of a lifetime. I turned at the last minute and burst through the needlessly elaborate doors of Tricky Dick‟s office, expecting hell. Good thing, as I got it. Their technique of dog piling me seemed a little desperate to me, but it was effective. I was almost buried under the weight of men as they grabbed me and pummeled me with meaty fists the size of ham hocks. They smelled of cigarettes, gun oil, wet wool, and flop sweat. I just started throwing elbows, kicking where I could,
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 111 almost literally fighting blind as I‟d already taken a punch to the eye that left me seeing stars and feeling the sickening throb of swelling to come. But somehow I‟d managed to clear a little space, and I was able to throw more proper punches, not caring too much what I hit as long as I hit something. Of course, I was being hit back, but more room allowed me to duck and weave a bit. With the brawlers thinning out, some asshole was finally able to pull his gun, but he was still so close to me that I was able to grab his arm just as the gun went off, a deafening blast in tight quarters that managed to hit someone else. I socked him right in the jaw and ripped the still-warm gun out of his hand, but then someone ripped it out of mine as another asshole gave me a sucker punch in the kidneys. I got a few wild hits in, but eventually I was crushed under the weight of the bodies, my brain reeling from head shots as I was divested of my shotgun and handguns. Never even got off a shot. How sad was that? I thought maybe they were just gonna crush me to death, but once I was unarmed and tenderized, they dragged my carcass to a chair and threw me in it, like a sack of dirty laundry. Apparently, this whole time, Tricky Dick was sitting behind his desk, watching the beat-down, like a bored CEO waiting for a business meeting to conclude. It was probably a good thing I hated him before, because I would have really hated him now. He was sucking on a phallic little stub of a cigar that smelled like my old jockstrap, and he looked much the same as always, except he‟d added a chin since I last saw him in person.
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 112 You‟d think a guy with all his money could have afforded better hair plugs. It was always thin, a brittle brown constantly puffed up unnaturally with product, and at the best of times it was like a ratty marmoset had died on top of his scalp. His face was round, matching the roundness of his body, and no thousand-dollar suit could make him look any better. He appeared to be Santa‟s evil, clean-shaven brother. “I always knew you were stupid,” he finally said, tapping his cigar in a marble ashtray that probably cost more than my first car. “But this stupid? How do you not drown when it rains, boy?” I spit blood on his carpet, and I‟m pretty sure I saw a tooth go with it. “I want answers, and I knew your peons weren‟t gonna tell me shit.” Dick shifted his bulk forward, making his chair creak like it was quietly screaming. “Answers to what? Why you‟re such a pathetic fag? I think you hafta blame your parents for that.” I glared at him through rapidly swelling eyes. If I lived through this, I was gonna look uglier than a bonobo‟s butt. “Why have you singled us out?” He smirked. “Who‟s we? You and your toy boys?” “Me and Spencer. Why did you have him killed?” He sat back in his chair, chewing on his cigar like a phallic piece of gum. “Wow, you really are that dumb, huh? Karina.” Oh great, he was going to talk in riddles. Before I could ask if that was his drag name, I suddenly remembered: Karina Swenson. She was one of our last clients before Spencer got killed. She was a hot blonde who wanted us to help her escape from her boyfriend, the very married and
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 113 very dangerous Mike “Big Mike” O‟Malley, head of the Irish crime syndicate that used to run the docks. (Before he died mysteriously and Tricky Dick took over the seaport.) She wanted to leave him, but he was a psycho who wasn‟t going to let her simply leave him. So she paid us a good sum to help her fake her death by dumping her car in the river, and since bodies had a tendency to be washed away, no one thought much of it when her body wasn‟t found. Yeah, it wasn‟t legal, but Spencer had kind of a hard-on for her, and I just felt bad for Karina. Besides, anything I could do to piss off O‟Malley was a-okay with me. “What about her? She‟s dead.” “Please. I know that little bitch is far from dead, and I know you and that piece of shit partner of yours helped her escape. How big of a cut did she give you?” “Cut?” I had the sudden, sick feeling that Karina had sold us a bill of goods. “That little twist stole twenty-five G‟s from me. How much did you and your idiot sidekick get out of it? Five, ten?” “She stole money from you? How?” “How do you think? She stole my checkbook, wrote herself a check, and cashed it before running to you twits. Were you in on it from the beginning?” I shook my head, even though it made the pain worse. “What about Big Mike?” He snorted derisively. A single drop of saliva dripped from his cigar. “What about that stupid mick?” Maybe it was the beating, but I suddenly realized what had happened. Karina had played us as suckers. She wasn‟t Big Mike‟s mistress—she was his. And she took a buttload of
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 114 money on her way out the door. This begged the question why she didn‟t tell us the truth, but wasn‟t it obvious? No one in their right mind would willfully screw over Tricky Dick. She played us for chumps all right, and now Spencer was dead because of it. I was next on the list. “He had her too, you know.” I just said that to annoy him, and it worked. He sat forward, scowling. “No he didn‟t.” “Yeah, he did. She told me all about it. Apparently he was better endowed.” This caused one of his thugs to snigger, and he gave him a scathing glance that made him instantly shut up. “All she could do was lie. Where is she?” “Answer my question, and maybe I‟ll answer yours,” I said, wondering how much worse the pain would be if I hadn‟t had some rotgut beforehand. As it was, I felt like I was a head-to-toe bruise, with some pureed flesh thrown in. My bones had been ironed, folded, and thrown under a bulldozer for good measure. “Why kill Spencer like that, and why such elaborate setups for me?” He snorted and finally took that cock of a cigar out of his mouth, propping it in his hubcap-sized ashtray. “We didn‟t single out Spencer. You were both supposed to die. That fuckin‟ douche bag couldn‟t get anything right. We hoped you‟d take the hint and blow, so we could follow you to wherever you‟d stashed Karina. But you stayed, and in the meantime, we had to pay a lot of scratch to make the whole mess go away. See if I hire outside contractors again. By that time, I had that damn pretty boy faggot snorting his body weight in coke and attempting to run his own scam, and I had to do something with him. Figured I‟d take care of you
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 115 both.” “What? That doesn‟t make sense. You had Sander kidnapped.” He sneered at me, like I was the stupidest thing he‟d ever wiped off the bottom of his shoe. “Sander cast his own lot. It was that fucking Sloane I had to get rid of, nosy piece of shit. Now where‟s the bitch?” Just his sneer alone told me Sander was dead, just like I suspected. “If I tell you, you‟ll kill me.” “I‟m gonna kill you anyways. Tell me, and I‟ll make it quick. Don‟t, and I‟ll make it as slow as possible.” Dick made a gesture, and one of his thugs pulled out a pair of tin snips from underneath his coat. I wondered if they‟d cut through bone, then realized I didn‟t want to find out. A radio crackled loudly, and another of Dick‟s goons pulled out his handset and barked, “What?” A voice broken with static replied, “We got trouble. There‟s a whole bunch of—” What sounded like gunfire cut him off, and the radio died. Looks were shared around the room, and Dick sat forward, fixing me with a caustic glare. “What the hell is this?” “I meant to come alone, but some of my friends thought different.” Lau had quite a few disreputable friends, but Red had even more questionable contacts, so I didn‟t know if there were shady but surprisingly well-trained weekend warriors storming the building, or a grungy biker gang that smelled almost as bad as they looked. I didn‟t know how Red knew the biker gang, but I didn‟t ask, because I felt it was one of those things that would inadvertently scar me for life. There was a distant but audible boom that was either a
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 116 massive gunshot or a small explosion. It was enough to make the goons scramble for the door, pulling out their guns, while Dick shouted after them, “Kill every motherfucking one of them!” The fat bastard stood, pulling a big Smith & Wesson out of a drawer. “This changes nothing, dickwad. Where‟s Karina?” “We sent her where you‟ll never find her. The bottom of the ocean.” “Don‟t even. You didn‟t kill her. Now tell me where she is, or I shoot your kneecap.” I looked up at him as he came around the desk, barrel leveled at me. “Lemme get this straight. The first plan to kill me and Spencer fucked up, so your next brilliant plan was to get Sloane to frame me for Nick‟s murder. But that didn‟t work either, so you got Sloane to seduce me for the purposes of… what? Why did those idiots play baseball with my skull?” He cocked the gun, aiming it down at my left leg, and I said, “Fine, Los Angeles, where everybody goes to get lost in a crowd. Jesus, how did you not figure that out?” I had no idea where Karina was. Spencer and I bought her a train ticket going as far from Echo City as it would go, but we told her to feel free to get off wherever. Considering all the money she had on her, she may have gotten off at the first stop and rented a hovercraft. Tricky Dick tried to eye-fuck me, but I was too achy and pissed off to care. He must have decided I was telling the truth, because he made a dismissive noise and said, “Was she goin‟ on about bein‟ a model again? I always told her she didn‟t have the tits for it, but she never believed me. Dames,
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 117 huh? Well, not that you would know….” “The guys who attacked me. Why?” “We found nothing about Karina in your office, so we figured maybe you had somethin‟ on you that said where she was. I‟ll give you credit—you were good about keepin‟ your secret. Which makes me think you wouldn‟t give it up so easily.” The gun, which had been sagging, suddenly straightened up, aimed right for my face. “This isn‟t making sense,” I said, hoping I could distract him from shooting me. “Why shoot at Sloane and me? Why expose me to your Roosevelt blackmail factory?” He shook his head at me, giving me the type of sad, patronizing look that made me want to kick him in the junk. “You‟re just a stupid drunk, ain‟t cha?” His smirk faltered as the noise of gunfire, presumably on a lower floor, got closer. It also sounded like there was a motorcycle nearby, revving its engine. Did they ride their bikes into the building? How did they get them in the elevators? I shrugged. “I‟m smart enough to hide Karina from you.” I knew he was going to fire an instant before he did, but I couldn‟t do anything about it. The noise was loud enough to make my ears ring almost instantaneously, a whiplash of sound, and I felt the hot wind of the bullet buzz past my face like an angry wasp as I lunged from my chair. I tackled Tricky Dick in his doughy midsection, sending us both falling backward. He hit the desk with a thud, the breath leaving him in a tremendous wheeze, and his attempt to hit me with the gun was cut short because of it. It was barely a love tap on my spine before he dropped the Smith & Wesson with an audible thud. I punched him square in the jaw, hard enough that I felt
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 118 one of my knuckles pop, but I didn‟t care and hit him again. I hurt so much that a little more pain didn‟t matter. “You know why I‟m still alive and you failed, Dick? ‟Cause you‟re a fuck-up, and I‟m one fucking lucky son of a bitch.” For good measure I kneed him in his pillowy groin and shoved him off the desk, where he hit the floor with all the grace of a beached whale. I found his gun and aimed it at him, ignoring the throbbing pain in my hand. My fingers were already starting to swell, and I could barely fit one on the trigger. Dick scrambled behind the desk, reaching for a drawer, and I met him there, throwing his chair aside. It slammed into the window of his office, but didn‟t break it, just left a spider web of a crack in its pristine surface. I kicked him in the face as he reached for a drawer, and stamped on his hand as he collapsed to the carpet. “No way. You don‟t get out of this that easy.” I had managed to put some things together. Tricky Dick, narcissistic asshole that he was, thought Spencer and I had helped Karina to piss him off, and he couldn‟t let a personal slam like that go unpunished. But after Spencer‟s quick death, he realized a simple dirt nap might not be punishment enough, so he decided to make mine slow and convoluted. Then there was Sander, up to neck in debt and trying to run his own blackmail angle on his Roosevelt Hotel clients, essentially double-dipping on Tricky Dick‟s scam, and there was no way in hell he was going to stand for that. But he didn‟t know about Sloane, so when Sander disappeared, he had another problem, and got the bright idea to kill two birds with one stone. When the attempt to frame me for murder fucked up and Sloane seemed clueless
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 119 about Sander‟s blackmail material, he started getting desperate, and having to juggle the deeply annoying yet deeply stupid Sloane all the while was just too complicated for him and his horde of mouth-breathing morons. This was a colossal fuck-up from day one, one that could have been avoided if he‟d decided just to kill me and not make me suffer first. I kicked him in the face just for the hell of it and heard what sounded like a massive barrage of gunfire about a floor below us. “It‟s over, Dick. You‟re done.” He spit blood on his pale carpet and made a noise that I first thought was a sob. But it soon became clear he was laughing, blood making his leering smile red. “You stupid piece of shit. I own this town. You‟re gonna die in jail, and I‟m gonna watch.” “Oh, so we‟re gonna be cellmates? I call top bunk.” The door to his office burst open, and I turned quickly, aiming the gun in that general direction. Imagine my surprise when I saw that it was Kyle. “Holy shit, Jake, do you have any idea what‟s going on down there?” “From a legal standpoint, no.” He scowled, apparently not appreciating my attempt at levity. “What the hell happened to you?” That was when I realized how I must have looked to him. Beaten, messed up, and wild-eyed, holding a gun that was more or less stuck in my hand. I was probably lucky he recognized me. “Dick had his goons rough me up. What are you doing here?” “Oh, right, like I was just gonna let you slink away. As soon as I heard there was some kind of apocalypse occurring downtown, I knew I‟d find you there.”
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 120 “You know me well.” Kyle approached me warily, like he was afraid bits would fall off of me if he got too close too fast. “C‟mon, you need a doctor—” I should have known. I didn‟t think a fat man could move that fast, but somehow Dick did. He must have found what he wanted in his desk drawer, as he stood up with a triumphant yell, leveling his newly found pistol at me. I spun, ready to fire, but I knew I was moving slow due to my injuries, and I was probably screwed. I‟d braced for impact before the sound of the shots filled the room, but it was Dick who suddenly lurched back, blood blooming across his broad chest as he stumbled back and hit the window. Dick got off a random shot that missed before Kyle shot him again, and this time the window behind him, now splattered with blood, shattered, and his arms pinwheeled comically, sending his gun flying, before he fell backward and out the now open window. You could hear him scream all the way down to the asphalt below, but we were too high up to hear the thud. I stared at Kyle, who had his grim cop face on, smoke still curling from the end of his service revolver. “Do you know what you‟ve just done?” I exclaimed, slightly disbelieving. “You killed Tricky Dick!” “It was him or us,” he replied, as if it was no big deal. Of course it was huge—monumental. Tricky Dick did own this town, and now… whose town was it? I didn‟t care. I‟d never loved Kyle more than I did at this moment.
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THE fallout took weeks to settle, and even after that, there was still some doubt. Before Kyle got me out of Tricky Dick‟s office, I searched it for anything incriminating, and I found it. Not all of it, but enough to tell me who Tricky Dick had bought on the city council and the police department so he could own Echo City. It seemed they‟d all been victims of the blackmail factory at the Roosevelt Hotel, and it wasn‟t just them— almost every guy in any kind of authority position anywhere in this city had participated in some kind of sex party there, gay and straight and some in between. It was apparently the best-kept worst-kept secret in the entire city. I was actually offended I had never been invited, but then again, I never had any actual power. I‟d have been a waste of a blackmail. As for Sloane, he cut a deal with the DA and sang like a canary, naming all sorts of people whom he‟d encountered while working the Roosevelt sex factory. This led to a bit more chaos and panic in certain circles. He was going to still do some time, but not as much as he would have done had he not finally spilled his pretty little guts. The police chief who‟d been Dick‟s bitch resigned, and one of the councilmen who‟d been under his thumb was arrested for both bribing and graft, which seemed like a contradiction. The Lieutenant Governor fled the state and hasn‟t been seen since. On the bad side, organized crime
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 122 shot up, because the gangs were now fighting for the turf. Tricky Dick left a power vacuum almost as big as his ass, and everybody wanted a piece. Not of his ass—that would be gross. Kyle almost got fired, but then once the police chief resigned, he got a promotion. In the chaos of gun battle, fights, and bodies in the “raid” on Tricky Dick‟s tower, there were some arrest warrants issued, but not much ever came of it. It was chaos, between the biker gang Red had recruited and Lau‟s weekend warrior friends. There were dead bodies, but not all of them were even officially identified, for a variety of reasons. Tyler survived his stabbing, but he needed physical therapy and couldn‟t remember much about his assault. Perhaps that was for the best. Kyle leaked me some details on Tricky Dick‟s hatefueled vendetta against me and Spencer over Karina, which I couldn‟t believe I never twigged to. In retrospect, I was lucky his goons were so incompetent. I wish Spencer could say the same. It took me weeks to recover from my injuries, but Kyle found the time to take care of me. I guess we were back together, although we never actually talked about it. He was just suddenly sleeping in my bed and dumping my whiskey down the sink. At least he didn‟t know about Sully‟s. Still, getting laid regularly did wonders for my disposition. As soon as I got the cast off my hand, I returned to my office, which was the same as I had left it, right down to the bloodstains on the floor. I supposed I was going to have to break down and hire a cleaning lady one of these days. As it was, I‟d put out a want ad for a receptionist, which was why I was here. I got a lot of publicity for my role in the takedown
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 123 of Tricky Dick, and not all of it was bad. I suddenly had more work than I could handle. Well, cared to handle, at any rate. I had just topped off my flask and used my sleeve to dust off my desk when there was a knock on my door. “Yeah?” The door popped open, and a man stuck his head inside. “You know, I thought it was you.” Although I almost didn‟t recognize him with his clothes on, I realized he was Chance, the guy I‟d encountered at the Roosevelt. “Hey kid. Give up the go-go dancing?” “Yeah. I got tired of the Speedos. Gold lame is hard to clean.” “I bet. What can I do for you?” Chance put the folded-up newspaper on my desk. It was open to the ad I placed. “I‟m applying for the receptionist job. I can answer phones and take messages with the best of them.” And here I was expecting a woman to reply first. But he was almost as pretty as one, so I supposed that was close enough. “Can you type?” “One-handed even,” he replied with a sly half smile. Having him around might be a dangerous temptation, and on top of that, could I trust him? He was a part of the Serpent Club, after all. But I did owe him, I suppose. He threw that nightstand through the window, and he had to know it was weird while he was doing it. I probably owed him my life. “How‟re your coffee-making skills?” He shrugged. “Not as good as my dancing.” “Make me a pot, and you got the job.”
The Little Death | Andrea Speed 124 He sighed wearily and turned away, but not before I saw a ghost of a smile on his face. “Should I wear a Speedo?” “Save it for casual Fridays.” Yep, things were indeed looking up.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ANDREA SPEED writes way too much. She is the Editor In Chief of CxPulp.com, where she reviews comics as well as movies and occasionally interviews comic creators. She also has a serial fiction blog where she writes even more, and she occasionally reviews books for Joe Bob Briggs‟s site. She might be willing to review you, if you ask nicely enough, but really she should knock it off while she's ahead. Visit her web site at http://www.andreaspeed.com and her Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id= 100001496290042. She tweets at http://twitter.com/ aspeed.
ALSO FROM ANDREA SPEED
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COPYRIGHT
The Little Death ©Copyright Andrea Speed, 2011 Published by Dreamspinner Press 4760 Preston Road Suite 244-149 Frisco, TX 75034 http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/ This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Cover Art by Dan Skinner/Cerberus Inc. Cover Design by Anne Cain
[email protected] This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of International Copyright Law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. This eBook cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this eBook can be shared or reproduced without the express permission of the Publisher. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press at: 4760 Preston Road, Suite 244-149, Frisco, TX 75034 http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/ Released in the United States of America October 2011 eBook Edition eBook ISBN: 978-1-61372-166-7