There's This Guy

by Rhys Ford

  “I remember you. Good to see you.” Jake did a quick introduction. “Are you looking for Dallas?”

  “Actually, probably both of you,” she said softly. “It’s about the man you found in the storeroom upstairs. We know who he is, and it’s definitely something I want to talk to the two of you about.”

  BOMBSHELLS’ OFFICE served mostly as a storeroom since his mom’d been stabbed. They’d needed someplace to stash all the sound system equipment and the first few shipments of glasses that appeared on the doorstep about a month too early. So as a meeting room, it left a lot to be desired, but O’Byrne didn’t look like the kind of woman who cared about the niceties of matching chairs and plush carpets. She actually didn’t seem to care about chairs at all, preferring to pace about the room as if readying for a duel come the next foggy dawn.

  “Your dad and Evancho are going to grab some coffee. Said they’d bring some back for us later.” Jake edged in around O’Byrne. “Are you sure you don’t want some, ma’am?”

  “Ma’am.” She shot Dallas a look, one weighted with a touch of disbelief.

  “He’s not mocking you.” He tried giving her a small smile, hoping to draw one out to lessen the tension in her shoulders, but the woman wasn’t having any of it. Jake, however, dimpled, warming Dallas’s belly. “He just has better manners. Jake, sit.”

  The chairs were uncomfortable, mismatched metal pieces pocked with bits of rust and padded in an awful green tweed Dallas hated with a passion. The pieces he’d gotten for the office were pushed up against one wall and draped with heavy sheets to protect their wood finishes while the workmen finished up the outer areas. Once the rest of his office furniture arrived and he got the office the way he wanted, he planned to hold a bonfire on the back parking lot and sacrifice the damned chairs to whatever god took bad life decisions as tribute. For the time being, he was going to have to be happy with shifting about on the unforgiving foam and hope he didn’t put his hip out.

  “You know if this is about my mom, my father should be here.” The thought of O’Byrne or the other detective catching who’d stabbed his mother finally occurred to him, and Dallas frowned, wondering if he could get ahold of his mother and get her to Bombshells before O’Byrne had to leave.

  “No, I actually came by to talk to you about the man you found upstairs. We know who he is.” She finally sat, and by the sudden grimace she gave when her butt hit the seat, she’d found the worst chair in the bunch. “Okay, Yates, get new furniture.”

  “I’ve got new stuff. We’re just doing more work in here.” He leaned forward, impatient. “The guy from upstairs?”

  The unknown man weighed on him, echoing around his thoughts at random bursts. After they’d found the man, through Jake’s trials and the murmuring confessions he’d heard from his lover in the middle of the night when they’d fallen onto the bed and spoke of the everythings and nothings of the world, Dallas feared for the man they’d found. The thought of dying alone, forgotten, and buried under the debris of someone else’s life grew into Dallas’s greatest horror, especially after Jake spent hours sitting beside the toxic waste he had for a father, determined not to let the man slide off into death unremarked and unseen. He reached for Jake’s hand, held on tight, and waited for O’Byrne to speak.

  “Come to find out the people you bought this place from, lovely people, very caring, knew exactly who he was.” The detective’s sarcasm was thick and unyielding. “They knew since the moment I asked about him and didn’t fess up until one of them had an epiphany.”

  “Then why didn’t they say something?” Jake asked, echoing the surprised tumble of words caught in Dallas’s mind. “Who could do that to a man? Just leave him without a name?”

  “They didn’t want to be involved, but one of them, the youngest daughter, had an attack of conscience. She came in yesterday morning, against the wishes of the rest of the family to ID him. Once she gave us a name, everything fell into place,” O’Byrne answered. “He was Mike Dontano, and he used to work here back when the place was a bar, probably around thirty years ago.”

  “But they knew him? Mike, I mean.” Dallas worked out the timeline in his head. The people he’d met over signed papers were in their midforties. “I mean, they couldn’t have been old enough to drink back then. Or just barely.”

  “They didn’t know him personally but were aware he was connected to their father, who owned this place before. Guy by the name of Charles Johnson. Ran cheap liquor through here, and according to some of the older police reports, provided a bit of company for lonely guys looking for a good time,” she explained. “There’s four kids total. Their old man—Charles—divorced their mom, and they were raised by their stepfather. Apparently their parents got divorced because he couldn’t keep his pants on and really liked to drop them for pretty boys. His children didn’t even know he was in the state, much less running a bar in the city.”

  “Back then, even over here, that would be a good way to get the shit kicked out of you,” Dallas mused. “So what does this have to do with… Mike?”

  “That upstairs room was used by men to hook up with other men. Cash-only business. According to what they found out from their aunt, Dontano used to be really popular, especially with Charles. One day they got into it, it went ugly, and Mike walked away. A couple of weeks later, Charles is missing and Mike is nowhere to be found. The uncle—Charles’s brother, Barry—wanted to have Mike charged with murder, but he slipped away. After a few years, they had Charles declared dead, and Barry turned this place over for commercial use.” She stood up, bending slightly to stretch her legs. “They found Charles a few months ago. His car went off a cliff and was lost in some heavy brush in a ravine. Some hikers found the car and, well, what was left of him. They buried him, shared some stories, and that’s how Charles’s kids heard about Dontano.”

  “Can’t even imagine being accused of murder. Shit.” Dallas glanced up to the ceiling, figuring out they were just under the upstairs room. A man’d died above where they sat, alone but cleared of murdering a lover. “Did he know everyone found out he was innocent? Did the family tell him?”

  “Family wasn’t going to go near Dontano, not after he was cleared for lack of evidence. Barry went after Dontano as he was coming out of a bathhouse and beat him almost to death. Dontano refused to press charges, and well, the cops back then weren’t exactly sympathetic. But Barry practically crippled him. Dontano spent a lot of time in and out of hospitals after that and on a hell of a lot of painkillers.” She pursed her mouth and nodded when Jake hissed in displeasure. “When we came around asking questions, the aunt recognized Dontano. That’s when she told the kids about everything that happened. The family was afraid he’d succumbed to those old injuries, and since Barry was already dead, they figured it didn’t matter.”

  “Didn’t matter?” Dallas pressed. “Jesus, we found a dead man, one they recognized, and they just let him be… no one? Who the hell does that? Do we even know what he died from?”

  “Coroner suspects he probably died of natural causes, but we don’t know for sure yet. Might never know. From what we found out after asking around, he couldn’t find work after the beating. I got hooked into one of his caseworkers before I came over to see you. He’d been told Charles’s body was found, and according to the woman I spoke to, he was pretty broken up about it. Man didn’t have a family, or if he did, they’d tossed him out because he was gay.” This time O’Byrne let a bit of sorrow bleed into her expression. “I can’t find anyone he’s related to, and I know you wanted to do right by him. It doesn’t sit right with me Charles’s family didn’t do jack to help us. They’ll have a bit of time in front of a judge if I have anything to say about it, but before I kicked that off, I wanted to let you know about him. We can arrange to have him turned over to you for burial if you want.”

  “Yeah, he’s ours. We’ll take care of him.” Dallas glanced over at Jake. His lover’s knuckles were white, tense from the bone-breaking grip he had on
Dallas’s hand, but he was staring off into the distance, lost in some thought. Patting Jake’s arm startled him out of where he’d gone, and he relaxed his grip, murmuring an apology. “We owe him that.”

  “Someone should have been there for him,” Jake agreed. “It should be us. We found him. We should give him peace.”

  “It’ll be a couple of weeks, but we’ll make it happen.” O’Byrne’s phone chirped, and she dug it out to glance at the screen. “Okay. I’ll have someone get ahold of you, but let me know when you’re going to do the service. I’d like to be there.”

  They said a round of quick good-byes, walking her out to the front of the building. O’Byrne asked about the grate work Jake’d done, and he lost both of them to a discussion on art styles and architecture. Jake warmed as he spoke, his gestures opening wide, and a dimple appeared next to a flash of white teeth, and he ducked his head a bit when O’Byrne complimented him on something. He’d grown so much, healed so much since the day they’d gone up to the room above the bar, and Dallas basked in the light sparkling in Jake’s soul.

  “Shit, I love you.” His words were unheard, falling into the golden-edged shadows of the main room, but something must have resonated through Jake because he looked up as O’Byrne chattered, meeting Dallas’s gaze.

  The smile Jake gave him touched every nerve in Dallas’s body, filling his soul, and his heart sang in his chest, a stupid, silly reaction to a man he’d only met a few months before. O’Byrne said something, drawing Jake’s attention back to her, but the swell of emotion in Dallas remained, lingering in the edges of his sadness over the man they’d found, a soul beaten down, then abandoned by the world around him.

  “That’s never going to be you, babe. I promise.” Dallas leaned on the bar, drinking in the sight of his lover laughing with a stern-faced cop. “I’ve got to make things right between us too. I’m just going to need a little bit of time to do it.”

  Nineteen

  DALLAS KNEW it was officially fall when the coffee shop across the street put up a sign announcing the arrival of pumpkin spice everything. It didn’t need to be in everything he ate and drank, but it seemed to contaminate even the starkest of coffee orders, a lingering presence of nutmeg and burnt cinnamon in every sip he took. His afternoon latte reeked of spices, probably simply from being around the syrup or possibly a figment of his overworked mind, but there it was, stinging the tip of his tongue and clogging his senses.

  “Hell, for all I know, Jake loves these damned things and I’m going to be smelling pumpkin spice crap every fall for the rest of my….” His thoughts trailed off, flaking beneath the weight of possibilities. “Shit, don’t get ahead of yourself, Yates. It could all go to shit before you know it.”

  There was a thread of grumpy in his mood. Dallas knew it. He could feel its bitter, sharp strop whetting the edge of his anxieties. The time he’d shared with Jake thinned out over the past couple of weeks as the renovation took up more of his time. Then the staffing and talent calls for Bombshells’ grand opening sucked up the rest of it. Jake’d been busy working on the club’s foyer piece, and it was maddening to know while they worked into the night, only four lanes of busy, sticky asphalt separated them.

  It might as well have been an impassable sea of black tar for all he saw Jake.

  Being fully immersed in the construction ground Dallas down, but everywhere he looked, there was a bit of Jake to keep him going. His lover’d left a discernible imprint on the nearly finished building, every piece of metalwork bent, polished, and laid into place crafted by his hands and artistry. The effect was subtle but rich, bouquets of stylized tulips and ivy welded into fields of waves and sunbursts. With the grates covering the exterior windows, Jake suggested a pebbled clear glass instead of the opaque yellow they’d removed from the frames. The new windows sparkled, allowing the light to shine in or out without compromising security or privacy, and Dallas had to admit, they made the place look damned good.

  Bombshells gleamed. In the two months since the attack on his mother, the building went from bare bones to a golden oasis of metal, wood, and stained glass. Salvaged wood panels and tables were cleaned up and stained a rich cherry, then installed around the interior walls. With hanging pendant lights and the oak bar with its elaborate back piece in place, stepping into the club was more of a journey back to clandestine dances under star-drenched skies.

  Liquor bottles gleamed from their spots behind the bar, the shelves lined with amber and pale gold, with spots of neon green and electric blue. The stage was ready to go, a half circle low platform with a shallow backstage, its space more for dressing the set than hiding the performers, but a newly built short hall to the left led to the performers’ waiting room, its vanity lights blocked out by a sea of blackout curtains and a sliding bamboo screen. There was only a bit of wiring left to do, and the sound system’s remaining speakers sat in boxes near the wall the main floor shared with the office, but nearly everything was already in place.

  Except for a large empty wide riser installed next to the reception pedestal, a squat cherrywood square lacquered to a high sheen and waiting for the piece Jake’d been working on since he’d finished the building’s grates.

  Or the formerly naked dais, because there was definitely something enormous and metallic throwing up a bright sheen under the afternoon sun.

  It was a life-sized woman, or rather the shape of a woman flowing around a bronze-hued circle set at an angle off the pedestal’s flat surface. And she took Dallas’s breath away.

  Her beaten matte-silver shape dominated the space, tucked into a corner they’d designed for the piece. He’d worried the brushed nickel sculpture would be lost against the rich wood and ornate lighting, but there was no missing her fluid form against the cherry-stained panels. Naked to the waist, she was caught in middance, her face turned up toward the lights and her stylized hair tumbling down to her shoulders. A long skirt hung low from her hips, its pattern mimicking the tulips and lotus flowers in the grates Jake restored, a delicate bronze fabric cascading down and between her graceful bent legs. Her arms wove into the copper circle she held up, a fringe of bronze spangles strung up across its front, and her features were a beatific hint across her heart-shaped face, her lips parted in a swell of ecstasy.

  She was beautiful, stunning Dallas into silence, and it took him a moment before he recognized the tightness in his chest as his lungs screaming for air.

  “Don’t touch her yet,” Jake cautioned as he came out of the back rooms. “I’ve got to get her settled in properly. Evancho and I got her locked in, but I’ve got to go underneath and tighten the rest of her anchors so she won’t move.” There was a skip of a heartbeat, and then he said in a very quiet voice, “I hope you like her.”

  “She’s damned gorgeous.” He caught himself whispering, grinning around the silly happiness pouring up out of his soul. “So different from what I’ve seen you do. It’s… wow.”

  “Evancho helped a lot. We poured a few pieces, then hammered them into place. She’s fitted around a frame so she can take a beating if she has to.”

  “No one’s going near her,” Dallas argued, shaking his head. “I’ll kill anyone who even breathes on her wrong.”

  “Well, once the other part of the wraparound is put in front of her and the underlights are in place, it’ll be hard to get in around her. I came in from behind by taking the panel off. Right now it’s just leaning there, but I’ll screw it back into place once I’m finished bolting her down.”

  Jake stood in the light, bathed in the golden stream coming through the pebbled-glass jalousies he’d helped choose. His rich brown hair was a bit of a mess around his sweetly handsome face. The tiny spare freckles on his nose were being kept company by a smear of black dust, a streak of dark over his right cheekbone. Dallas knew that face, loved that face, and wanted to see it age, softening a bit or deepening his dimples with a bit of weight. He longed to see Jake’s hazel eyes sparkle from every sunrise-painted sky or grow heavy an
d hooded after sex on a warm summer night. He wanted to feel Jake’s spark-scarred hands on his body, their roughness an erotic burr on the tender skin of his thighs and back. He needed to taste Jake’s kiss with his coffee, sweetening his mornings before the day stretched out long and hard in front of them.

  “I’m glad you bought the club, Dal.” Jake slung his arm around Dallas’s hips. Pressing his mouth to Dallas’s jaw, he murmured, “Love this place. It turned out great.”

  The club was a blend of their lives, their laughter, and their love. The walls held their conversations and tiny quibbles over types of panes for the windows and the horror they shared over finding a man’s life ended in the loft’s cold, dark silence. Dallas heard the echoes of their relationship whenever he walked through the doors and felt a bit of sadness knowing other voices would soon overwhelm the time they’d spent there, building the bridge between their hearts.

  Jake warmed him. Warmed him in places Dallas hadn’t even known were cold or neglected. The sadness in his amber-flecked eyes faded, leaving only a flicker or two of melancholy when the world got a little too tight around him. Jake fit into him, into his life, a quiet, sweet, and creative soul he hadn’t been looking for but was damned glad he’d found.

  “You’re looking at me funny.” Jake’s eyebrow lifted, and he studied Dallas carefully. He was still sometimes unsure of how to read people, but he was getting better, and the trust in Jake’s face when he looked at Dallas humbled him.

  “I was thinking we should head home. Well, to your place.” Dallas gave his lover a smile. “I’ve got a little surprise for you.”

  THE BRICK-WALLED studio was a brighter place now, and Dallas was the sun he’d brought into the dark to lighten it. There were odds and bits of their time together scattered about the long space: a framed poster and ticket stubs of a concert they’d gone to, the tiny pink plush elephant they’d won at a farmers’ market raffle, a muted rainbow quilt Dallas bought at a swap meet and flung over their bed.