The Little Death Page 8

  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.”

  “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 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.

  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 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?”

  “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.

  12

  WHILE I was sitting on an emergency roo
m 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.”

  “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 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 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 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.

  13

  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 half-filled 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 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, alcohol-addled 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.