Back in Black

by Rhys Ford

  I was worried less about the dog now. Still kind of worried about the guy with the gun, but I had an intense hope that the neighbors kept their lawn clipped and I would be able to sprint up to the back of their house while screaming my head off for help.

  It wasn’t much of a plan.

  But it was a plan.

  I took the wall with ease, but the scar tissue along my ribs and chest chose that moment to seize up. Healed-over bullet wounds are the worst. They leave a guy with a tangle of keloids wrapped around nerves and muscles that sometimes fire off conflicting messages. In my case it was like being struck with a handful of charley horses knitted through my ribs and down toward my spine.

  Getting up onto the wall was easy. Going over the wall was less than ideal. Seized up by spasms and pain, I went down hard, rolled up like an armadillo trying to avoid being roadkill stew. I landed with a grunt loud enough to wake the dead.

  Or at least I thought I was loud enough to wake the dead.

  Unfortunately, the dead woman I landed on didn’t seem to share that opinion.

  I was having a hard time breathing. Some of it was from my twisting scar tissue, but a lot of it was from shock. I knew this woman. Surprised breathless, I scrambled from her lifeless body and planted my ass in the middle of a stretch of wet lawn.

  The irony of finding her dead on this job didn’t escape me.

  Lying on her back, her arms and legs flung brokenly away from her torso, Mrs. Adele Brinkerhoff was dressed much like she’d been when I was first hired to catch her cheating on her husband. When I’d taken that job, I couldn’t imagine the grandmotherly woman whose photo I’d been given was into leather corsets, braided whips, and a lesbian love affair with a woman much younger than herself. But as I found out then, looks can be deceiving.

  She chased me that night, much like Lamb Chop did just a few moments ago, but she’d been armed with a shotgun and had a hell of a lot better aim than the guy in the sheep costume. I dodged her through a topiary sprinkled with bushes shaped like animals. She nearly took my head off with a powerful blast but took out a leafy elephant instead.

  Judging by the hole in her chest and her bloodless, sagging face, Mrs. Brinkerhoff wasn’t going to be cheating on her husband any longer.

  She was a doughy-soft woman, but she’d tucked those curves and fleshy thighs into a black leather jumpsuit. Her feet were bare, and the expression on her face was one of deep surprise. I tried fumbling for my phone, my fingers cold and unresponsive as I reached into my back pocket. The gore of her chest wound was immense, and even in the faint light, I could nearly see through her to the lawn… or at least my imagination could.

  That’s when I spotted the handful of sparkling gems in her partially closed right hand.

  It wasn’t like I’d kept up with her and her husband. They’d reconciled or at least come to some sort of agreement after I caught her, because both of them showed up in my office, paid the bill, and thanked me for my time. In a lot of ways, she had actually been the beginning point of my new life. I came home to find my older brother, Mike, sitting in my living room with a job that would eventually lead me to cross paths with Jae-Min Kim, the love of my life and the man who was stupid enough to agree to marry me.

  In a lot of ways, Adele Brinkerhoff was the leather-wearing BDSM godmother who’d made our lives possible. Sort of. And now she lay dead at my feet, holding a handful of diamonds that looked expensive even to my uneducated eye.

  “Oh, Adele,” I whispered, finally getting my phone out of my pocket. “What the fuck have you gotten yourself into?”

  I had just hit the last number for LAPD’s emergency dispatch when the second damned Doberman came over the wall and took me down.

  Two

  ODDLY ENOUGH, the Doberman who tackled me kept me company. His attack consisted of a fierce bathing with a damp tongue and then trying to climb up the front of my body to be held when the man in the sheep costume flung himself over the wall. I’m not sure if the costume’s hooves did him in or if he just wasn’t that athletic, but even from ten feet away, I heard both of his legs snap as he landed. He dropped down into the lawn face-first, and the Eagle went flying, discharging a bullet when it bounced on the ground. The shot hit the wall, and the Doberman probably decided it had located the spider monkey part of its genetic thread and scrambled up my body to quiver on my shoulder.

  He weighed a lot less than Jae and smelled a hell of a lot worse, but I would take the claw marks over his teeth into my jugular any day.

  I coaxed the Doberman down and left Lamb Chop where he landed after I kicked the gun as far away from him as possible. I ignored his screaming while I limped up toward the house, dialing 9-1-1 as I went. No one was home at the estate, but the cops assured me they would be there in a few seconds, drawn by the barrage of calls from outraged residents at the sounds of shots being fired in their safe, elite neighborhood. The dog fell into step behind me, and I trudged out to discover Central Dispatch hadn’t been wrong. A few minutes later, two cop cars screeched to a halt after I’d made it out the side gate.

  The enormous black-and-tan Doberman promptly pissed on the sidewalk, then rolled over on his back when the cops began shouting for me to put my hands up. All in all, it was the shitty beginning of what was probably going to be a long night, and I still hadn’t done any recon on the estate I’d been sent to scope out.

  An aurora borealis of red-and-blue swirls churned above the formerly dim street, courtesy of the phalanx of cop cars crowding the tree-lined sidewalk. Their bright, saturated lights pushed away the milky orange-yellow coming from the streetlamps that sparsely dotted the side of the road. This part of Brentwood was very much old-school Los Angeles, clinging to the outdated opinion that their intimate, cloistered neighborhood was kept safer by darkened streets and heightened security. Because of the area’s proximity to the observatory, the local lighting was subdued to prevent the ambient glow from bleeding into the already not-so-dark night sky that hugged the city. But I could have used a little bit of light. Until the cops arrived, I could barely see my hand while standing in front of the estate where I’d found Mrs. Brinkerhoff’s body.

  “Now, let me get this straight, you were hired to check out a property for a security firm owned by Montoya’s boyfriend, when you were pursued and shot at by Ralph Branigan.” Lieutenant Dell O’Byrne stood silhouetted against the floodlights, her pen furiously dancing across the page in the notebook she was using to document the scene.

  “Is Ralph Branigan the guy in the sheep costume?” I asked. “I’ve just been calling him Lamb Chop and other names in my head. He had a gun. And was shooting at me. I didn’t stop and ask him his name.”

  “Yes, the man you’re calling Lamb Chop is Mister Branigan.” O’Byrne’s dark eyes flicked up the page, their depths filled with an annoyance that I could see through the shadows clinging to her strong face. “Help me out, McGinnis. Just give me the facts first. Then you can give me all the commentary you like. What were you doing that prompted Branigan to come after you with a gun?”

  “I don’t know. Could have been me looking through the window and getting a good look at him schtupping that blond lady.” I shrugged as nonchalantly as I could, but my brain was still having a hard time wrapping around the details of what happened. “You know, the former nun. Mother Mary Stigmata or whatever her name is.”

  “I’m trying to be serious here, McGinnis.” Another glance up, but this time there was a hint of a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

  “O’Byrne, I just spent the last half hour of my life running away from a gun-toting crazy man in a sheep costume with his dick waggling around through a flap in the front because I caught him having kinky sex with a former nun who is now a powerful California lobbyist for faith-based charities. He was trying to kill me. Sicced the ex-nun’s dogs on me, who thankfully thought it was all just a game of tag, apparently, but the damned bullets were real.” I held my hand up, pinching at the air with my thumb and index f
inger. “He missed me by this much. And just when I thought I’d gotten away from him, I stumble across a former client’s dead wife. If I can’t laugh at any of this, I’m going to lose my mind.”

  O’Byrne was a whipcord-lean Latinx with a beautiful face, a serious demeanor, and a scowl fierce enough to stop a herd of rampaging toddlers dead in their tracks. We hadn’t seen eye to eye when she first rolled into her position with the LAPD as a senior detective, but over the years, I must’ve done something right, because she eventually retained me as a consultant with the department. I’d been a detective with the LAPD when I was shot by my partner and best friend, Ben, who’d somehow gotten into his head he was in love with my boyfriend, Rick. Rick didn’t survive the shooting, and I wasn’t so sure I had.

  I did. And I’d grown a lot since then. Fell in love. Got married. And now stood over the corpse of a case I’d left behind me a long time ago.

  O’Byrne took shots of her own a few years ago while working on a case with me, and she’d pulled out of the wreckage of her body a lot better than I had. She went back to wearing a badge, while I was rolled out, too devastated and scarred up to be any good. I didn’t know a lot about Dell or her personal life. We weren’t the kind of “get together on a Sunday and have a beer while watching a football game” friends, but it was safe to say we respected each other. Or at least I was willing to admit I respected the hell out of her.

  I just hadn’t planned on having one of the craziest evenings of my life when I kissed Jae goodbye that afternoon and walked out our front door.

  “Tell me what you know about Adele Brinkerhoff,” O’Byrne said, nodding to a passing uniform who’d wrangled the Dobermans into the back of his police car to wait for the ex-nun’s husband to arrive and take them home. “You say her husband hired you a few years back to catch her cheating?”

  “They came to an understanding, paid off my bill, and thanked me for my time,” I replied. “I haven’t really had much contact with either one of them since then. It seemed like they were going through a rough patch and worked it out. Or he just decided he could live with a bisexual, leather-wearing dominatrix who had torrid love affairs on the side. I didn’t really ask, because it was none of my business. The check cleared. That was the only thing that counted.”

  “She was wearing leather when she was killed. Was it like what you saw her in the last time?” She cast a quick glance around the neighborhood, probably scanning the high walls and tall hedges blocking any commoners from peering at the sprawling estates tucked in above Koreatown. “If we start knocking on a few of these doors, do you think we’ll find she had a thing going with someone around here?”

  I hadn’t spent a lot of time staring at Adele. There’d been other concerns, like the dog and then the guy with the gun, not to mention dealing with the shock of seeing her grandmotherly face slack with death. Thinking back on what I could remember of that moment, I shook my head.

  “This is going to sound crazy, but it seemed to me like what she was wearing wasn’t sexual in nature. I mean, the first time I saw her, there wasn’t any question that she was dressed for a good time and to deliver a firm spanking. She looked more like… I don’t know, like she was going to a party?” I realized at the bite of a breeze against my arm that I was still wearing my tattered jacket. I shrugged it off and left it on the hood of the police car, assuming someone would come gather it as evidence for the dog attack at some point. “The woman kind of led two lives. When she and her husband showed up at my office, she was bordering on frumpy. I really can’t tell you much about her.”

  “What about the diamonds she had in her hand? Know anything about those?”

  That question rocked me back. My brain had decided they were gems the first time I spotted them, but the idea didn’t fit into the narrative I’d conjured up to have the evening make some kind of sense. It was already crazy enough without discovering Adele Brinkerhoff dead, and tossing a handful of diamonds into the mix only tipped things over into the land of grinning cats and talking playing cards.

  “So they’re real? I wasn’t sure.”

  “I’m going to assume they’re real, because I don’t have any explanation for why I have a little old lady shoehorned into a black leather jumpsuit and found dead in the middle of a neighborhood where it costs five dollars just to take a whiff of fresh air,” O’Byrne drawled, a faint sneer on her face.

  “I’m feeling attacked,” I shot back. “I live in this neighborhood. Okay, not on the huge-mansion side of things but still in this neighborhood.”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen where you live. So it only costs four bucks.” The sneer grew, but the humor in her face did as well. Jollity looked good on her. I didn’t see it very often. Usually my presence brought annoyance or slight ridicule to her expressions. “I’d like to see your case notes from back then if you still got them.”

  “It’s been five or six years, but all of my case notes are kept digitally, so I’ll be able to send over everything I’ve got. I’ve got a contact number for her husband, but it’s been a while, and he seemed a lot older than she was. I don’t even know if he’s still alive.” I was beginning to regret taking off my jacket, because the wind began to carry a bit of ice in it. “Did you consider that Branigan might have killed her? I mean, it would be kind of cold-blooded of him to blow a hole through her and then go back to the ex-nun for a bit more fun, but that Desert Eagle of his would sure as hell explain the crater in her chest.”

  “I’d considered it, but from the looks of things, it seems like Adele Brinkerhoff’s been lying there for more than a couple of days. Branigan and his associate were in Sacramento until early this afternoon. She lives down the street and knew the place was empty and on the market.” O’Byrne closed her notebook, tucking her pen away into her jacket pocket. “She told her husband she was going to take the dogs for a walk, then scooted down here to hook up with Branigan.”

  “Well that explains the dogs but not the sheep.” Whenever I closed my eyes, I still could see Branigan’s pale fleshy bits swinging back and forth as he ran, framed by tufts of woolly white fur. “I mean, I guess when she was a nun, her old job was pretty much tending to her flock, but that’s just going way too far.”

  There wasn’t enough bleach in the universe for me to get that out of my memory. With any luck I would get bashed on the head on the way home somehow, giving me a bit of amnesia. At the very worst, I would totally lose every memory of my past, but I had a lot of faith that I would fall back in love with Jae as soon as I saw him. He would understand. He’d understood much worse.

  “He connected to the lobbying she does in Sacramento?” I was curious, because somehow coming after me with a gun powerful enough to take down a giraffe seemed like a bit of an overreaction to being discovered having sex as a sheep. “Because I’ve got to tell you, he seems like the kind of guy who would gun down an old lady.”

  “See, that’s where this gets very sticky,” O’Byrne said, making a sour face. “She’s been punching at the government to get more religious programs into California’s prisons, and two days ago, Branigan became the deputy director for one of the Corrections and Rehabilitation departments. So, once news of all of this spreads around, something tells me he’s going to be losing that corner office and she’s going to be out a connection to the state’s purse strings.”

  I contemplated what O’Byrne laid out. Then I turned to her, crossed my arms over my chest, and said, “I get all that, but it still doesn’t explain the fucking sheep suit.”

  IT WAS three in the morning by the time I fit my key into the front-door lock. I’d sent Jae a text telling him I was okay but some shit had hit the fan so he might as well go to bed without me. I was surprised to find the living room lights were on and my husband curled up in the middle of one of our couches, our black cat, Neko, stretched out alongside his thigh, her tiny body extended as far as she could and taking up as much of the cushion as she could, mostly to prevent Honey, our poof of a dog, from taking up re
sidence.

  I’d bought the Craftsman following Rick’s death. Without him and Ben in my life, I’d been left adrift, riddled with scars and brain groggy from a coma. Back then, I didn’t know which keloids hurt more, the ones on my body or the ones in my heart. Weak, exhausted, and soul sick, I attacked the decrepit sprawling two-story house with an intense fervor, working to resurrect it as if somehow bringing it back to its former glory would also fix me.

  A couple of years later, the house was restored to its showcase prime, and I’d opened up my private investigation business after converting the formal dining room and front parlor into an office and conference room. Along the way I picked up Claudia, a sharp-tongued, Southern-born black woman who’d retired from driving a school bus and decided to not only manage my office but also my life. She’d become my mother of sorts and was the first person who realized I’d fallen in love.

  Way before I did.

  Kim Jae-Min was everything I wasn’t looking for in a man but really needed. A photographer by trade and a former dancer at a gay Korean gentlemen’s club called Dorthi Ki Seu, he’d been at the center of a murder case I stumbled into, then wormed his way into the center of my heart. We’d been through a lot—fights, broken hearts, hurt feelings, and cultural conflicts—but those were in our past, and now I wore his ring on my finger.

  Or at least I thought it was on my finger. There were some days I was pretty sure it was actually threaded through my nose. On those days, I just kept my mouth shut and answered yes to anything I was asked.

  Who said I didn’t know how to be married?

  “You didn’t have to wait up,” I said, padding barefoot into our living room. Carefully I moved the six pounds of fury and black chinchilla fur we laughingly called our cat and sat down next to him, sighing contentedly when Jae leaned against me. “Not that I’m complaining, because you are exactly who I need to see at the end of this day.”