Authors: Andrea Speed
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 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 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.”
“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, and told me an interesting tale. Very interesting.
If it was true, I was a fucking idiot.
O
NCE
out of Tyler’s overpriced apartment, I headed straight for Sloane’s place. I almost didn’t expect to find him at his 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?”
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. “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 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.
8
B
ULLETS
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 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?”