The Little Death Page 3

  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 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 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.

  4

  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. 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 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.”

  “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.”

  “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 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.

  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 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. “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 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.

  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.