The Little Death Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Again? It’s all I do, isn’t it?”

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

  “And do what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I don’t think so, no.”

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

  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.

  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 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 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 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.”

  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.

  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.”