“Where to then?”
“Let’s go beat down some SORs (Sex Offenders Registrants).”
“I thought uniform was on that?”
“They are,” Luis said. “And so are we. Let’s go.”
Peter
By Friday Luis and I had visited forty-two registered kiddy offenders in Denver and its suburbs. By late evening we had four left on our list. The DA had already cut the deal with Alvarado hours earlier. Nineteen minors were rescued from various places, but those were only the most recent of Alvarado’s victims. They were the ones Alvarado gave up. Luis and I were hearing reports of more from the dregs we’d been interviewing.
My cell rang a few minutes from the end of our sweep. Luis and I were parked outside a halfway house, where we had interviewed yet another sex offender. My partner lit up a cigarette while I picked up the phone. “Glass,” I answered with a cough.
“The Manhole,” Peter said. “Talk to Darryl Boerner. He’ll be there until three a.m. He knows you’re coming.” He hung up before I could say a word.
“Peter came through. The Manhole?” I refused to peek at Luis as my lips pressed together and my chest and shoulders shook.
Luis groaned, “Shit.” He dragged the gears into drive and hung a U-turn taking us into the depths of downtown.
My Job Sucked Sometimes
The Manhole was one of Denver’s oldest gay bars. It was notorious for leather, biker types. Rumors were that a stairwell and basement existed where men had sex and, during the summer, ‘watersports’ were played on the patio. The heat of the day reminded me what time of year it was.
“This you can handle on your own,” Luis announced as he parked out front.
The bar wasn’t dark and dingy like I had expected it to be. Sunlight filtered in through a doorway which led out to the patio, and hanging fluorescent lights kept most of the area well-lit. The only dark spot was four steps from the entrance, where the infamous stairwell coughed up moans from two leather clad men humping against the wall. My partner steadfastly ignored them. I craned my neck to investigate and grimaced. I was definitely not gay enough for that, I decided. Luis wore the most put upon grimace in the history of man. “I’ll wait here,” he said, leaning near the door.
For early evening it was almost empty, only a smattering of men nursing their beers, hovering at tables or playing pool and darts. A few of the patrons walked by. They wore chaps. Just that—chaps, with nothing else. Their hairy asses waved around in the breeze. I grinned, checking my partner. Luis passed a hand over his eyes and curdled to cracker white.
Walking over to the bar, I leaned across the scuffed wood and flashed my badge, smiling with what I hoped was my charming smile. “Here to see Darryl,” I said to the biggest, hairiest man I’d ever laid eyes upon. I dubbed him Grizzly Adams.
“Darryl! Visitor,” Griz called out over his shoulder and poured cherries from a large jar into a little container. A skinny boy about Peter’s age danced around the corner, lowering a set of headphones and looping them around his neck.
Darryl Boerner was on the feminine side of cute, with bright green eyes and wispy thin blond hair. He wore leather chaps, the hot pink variety, with matching pink short-shorts underneath. His arms and chest were bared around a vest that appeared to be a matching set with the pants. Old scars from track marks littered his inner elbows and arms.
“Why, hello there.” He leaned right across the bar so, should either of us move an inch, our noses would touch. His lip gloss smelled fruity. “You rang, handsome?”
I flashed my badge again. He glanced at it with distaste and then back up to me, smiling in a manner I assumed was supposed to be seductive. There wasn’t enough gay in the world to make me hit that. “Peter said you’d have something for me,” I said placidly.
“So you’re the gorgeous little detective,” he mused. Tilting his head and twirling a bleached strand of shoulder length hair, he eyed me like I was a glazed donut. “Peter always did like ‘em manly and pretty.” He propped up his elbows on the wood and placed his chin delicately on the back of his hands. “I have something for you. Now what are you giving me, hmm?”
I slid a hundred bucks across the bar. He dropped a hand to cover it, and then tucked it somewhere. I refused to check, or even imagine, where. “Well?” I asked, doing my best to be devastatingly handsome.
“My, my, so impatient. For a hundred more you can to join me downstairs for about an hour.”
“I’m spoken for,” I lied, trying not to grit my teeth. “Just the info.”
“Lovely, isn’t he? Our little Peter Rabbit.” He reached out to trace the top of my hand. “And so sweet. Had a face like an altar boy when he was just twelve. They loooved him to pieces. That delightful red hair, blue eyes so innocent, those darling little freckles. Made him call them daddy. He used to tell me they liked him to cry. Don’t, daddy. Please don’t, daddy,” Darryl parodied in a soft high voice. The way Darryl said ‘loved’ made me want to get descriptions and kick off a pedophile-murdering rampage. “Does he call you daddy?”
“The info,” I reminded him, this time there was a distinct bark in my voice. Nausea had welled up in my throat. Acid reflux of the emotional kind.
You know what was sick? What my selfish fucking brain was thinking? If Peter had been checked for HIV. That was my first thought when I heard he’d been raped at the age of twelve. I disgusted myself.
“Don’t get your panties in a twist, sexy,” Darryl said airily and picked up a napkin. He wrote an address down and slid it over to me. “Iss’s stepbrother’s house. Took me there once. Told me I was his special little boy.” He batted his lashes, and I resolved to never do that again to Luis. “My phone number’s down at the bottom. If you ever want me to call you Daddy.” I didn’t even want to think about that. “Detective…?”
‘Yeah?” I looked up from the napkin.
“You hurt my Rabbit, and they’ll write horror films on what I’ll do to you.” The way he said it was so casual, I could almost feel my skin crawling away.
“And what if he hurts me?”
“Chance you take with boys like us, ain’t it?” He waved a few fingers at me, “Buh bye now,” before putting his headphones on and dancing his way back from where he came.
I headed for the entrance. Luis hadn’t moved. His gaze was fixed on the disco ball above his head until I approached. “Get it?” he asked.
“Got an address.” I held up the napkin and had to restrain myself from running out the door to vomit. I needed those terrible images of Peter with sick old men out of my head.
Three hours later, the crime scene techs had cleared out of the stepbrother’s house. We had two more victims, both adult women, safely being handled by victim services. But best of all was the brand new evidence on Alvarado, his step-brother, birth father and two cousins. And I had the added bonus of knowing Peter had been partially vindicated before I actually dated him.
I went home and showered until my skin felt relatively clean. It took a lot of scrubbing—until my skin was as pink as Peter’s.
In a rare physical manifestation of human compassion, I ended up vomiting into the toilet until every wretch ended up dry.
My job sucked sometimes.
You
I dreamed of Peter in bursts. Things that made me wake up in a sweat and, at least once, near tears. I didn’t cry. Ever. Not because I found it particularly unmanly or weak, but because, despite my naiveté with Peter, I was jaded as hell. With a little introspection I could have figured out that what I felt for Peter was compassion, but that would have required delving into the emotional shithole that was my black soul.
After the third heart-pounding awakening, I gave up the quest for sleep at about 2:00 a.m. Padding downstairs in my boxers, I heated milk in the kitchen and added bourbon to it, then plopped on the sofa. The television illuminated the room in weird hues as I flipped through channels. I wasn’t even watching the thing. I kept picturing those animals touching Peter, hurti
ng him, transforming those bright blue eyes into the lifeless expression that glazed over them every so often.
Across the room my cell phone lay at ease on the table. I eyed it for about two minutes before I went over, picked it up and tapped it against my thigh. I returned to the couch, shivering at least partly from the air conditioner. Lack of sleep had the same effect. Plus, I was terrified of this sudden need to protect this probably beyond-broken boy. Man. At twenty he was definitely a man.
And something else eye opening, I didn’t want a boy. To deny being gay, at this point, was pointless. That battle was done. At least for now. What that meant, I didn’t know. But I knew what I wanted; and what I didn’t. I didn’t want to be one of those men who touched him and thought about taking his innocence away. I wanted fully grown-up Peter; and he was no boy. Thank God.
I dialed and lifted the phone to my ear, stretching out on the sofa and throwing an arm over my eyes, blocking out the TV light.
Six rings later, Peter answered. “Do you know what time it is?” His voice was sexily sleepy.
I closed my eyes and breathed, just taking in his voice for a minute. “Tell me something good, Peter.”
Silence, and then I heard a sigh, coupled with a yawn. I imagined him curled up in bed, hair poking out all over, eyes closed with those long copper lashes resting against his cheeks. “Cai finished painting our living room yesterday with a mural depicting Darryl as president.” That was a disquieting and frightening image even without including Cai.
I didn’t mean tell me about your boyfriend. Lifting the phone from my ear, I glared at it silently. “Tell me something not about your boyfriend,” I growled, phone at my cheek again.
Peter laughed, a throaty sound that had all the dregs of sleep in it. I could hear, from the noises he made, that he was stretching while he yawned again. My imagination did wicked things with that information. “Cai’s my brother, Detective.” The way he said ‘detective’ made my boxers tent.
Mentally I was doing the prize fighter just-won dance. Until I realized he hadn’t said anything about Darryl not being his boyfriend. “Darryl was interesting. I could take him in a fight.”
“Huh uh.”
“He weighs like fifty pounds less than I do.”
“Darryl ’s scrappy and goes straight for the balls, Detective.”
I smiled. “I like that much better than Alex or idiot.”
“I need to get back to sleep. I have to be at the diner early.”
“You work there too much.”
“It’s just till it sells.”
“Then what?”
“Detective, can we not have this conversation at three a.m.?”
“One last question?” I took the silence as acquiescence. “Why vouch for Prisc?”
“Whatever you think you know about him, you don’t know everything. To you, he’s just a criminal. But to me he’s the guy that drove me and Cai to school every morning and picked me up every afternoon. He found Joe the diner, helped him balance the books, took shifts when people were sick, got me my first intern—”
“I get it,” I sighed.
“He got Cai a home. Everything else was just a bonus. But I’ll owe him forever for that.”
Jesus. “Tell me something good about your life,” I whispered, needing to hear that he wasn’t as broken as I thought him to be.
Peter breathed into the handset for about two minutes. I began wondering if he was about to hang up, or had fallen asleep, when he answered. “You.” It was so quiet I almost didn’t hear it. He hung up before I could ask him to repeat himself.
I fell asleep, grinning, with the phone still clutched in my hand and my milk souring on the coffee table.
I Am Now Fully Embracing The Gay
You
Jesus God when he said that word I swear my whole world pinholed to one person. I considered canceling the date. Because I was a cowardly asshole who couldn’t handle the emotional turmoil. But my dick was way ahead of my brain—thank you, Jesus. It kept a stern navigation toward the right place.
You
An hour and half on the treadmill, thirty minutes on the rowing machine, another hour with free weights—and I still was anxious. One word repeating over and over in my head, creating a second layer of anxiety.
It wasn’t just that it was my first date with a guy. It was the fact that I knew nothing about being gay. How did a homosexual go twenty-six years without knowing about gay sex, or gay kissing. (Did gays kiss? Oh wait, yeah, I’d seen pictures of gay men kissing.) Or dating guys?
The Internet was somewhat helpful—in that it gave me a hard on and made my eyes bulge at the same time. Rimming, felching, anal, frotting. Frotting? What? Oh.
Backroom sex, glory holes, oral. Enemas, HIV, BDSM, bottom, top, pitcher, catcher—I was getting a headache from information overload. And it appeared that most gay men fucked on the first date. Or before their first date.
You
That one word. Maybe nothing else mattered but that. Maybe all that mattered was that I wanted to hear his snarky comments about my tie and make him laugh in spite of his best attempt not to.
Maybe all that mattered was I was mostly accepting the gay.
You.
I narrowly missed crashing the car several times on the way over to Peter’s home. And, like I’d imagined, I was nervous as hell. My fingers drummed on the steering wheel. I kept accidentally pushing ‘seek’ on the stereo instead of ‘play’. My stomach decided I was fourteen or was riding a rollercoaster. And I had to turn the air conditioning on full blast so I didn’t sweat through my chinos and plaster my plaid shirt to my body. Yes, that was what I wore. I also wore a tie. Not because ties were particularly comfortable. But because I fantasized Peter pulling me into a kiss by my tie, and that had my dick so hard, even cotton chinos were too heavy. I parked at the end of his block, hands like cling wrap on the steering wheel.
You.
My worst fear was that I’d end up like Jesse, alone and miserable, hanging from a tree. Coming out wasn’t what was going to make me suddenly suicidal. I didn’t have to worry about that. I wasn’t a teenager, afraid of the loss of my parents or friends and no way to take care of myself. That loss was scary, sure, but I’d get past it. I had options. What I knew, beyond a doubt, was that if I continued to deny who I was, I’d end up with my service revolver in my mouth.
“Better cock than steel,” I said wryly, checking my reflection one last time before I exited the car.
Chapter Eight
Holy Fucking Christ, Dear Sweet Mother of God
“Holy fucking Christ,” I moaned. “Are you trying to kill me?” Peter had a new piercing, in his lip; or it was an old one he’d decided to actually wear. Either way it was there, in his perfect, kissable bottom lip. Well, if I thought I’d need something to keep me focused during the night, that was now covered.
“What’s that?” He nodded toward the package I had tucked under my arm. It was just something to make him laugh—or, you know, question my sanity.
“A corsage,” I replied, and handed it to him with my kiss-me-now grin. He said nothing and tossed it over his shoulder where it landed somewhere in the depths of his living room. I used the opportunity of following its path in order to peek inside. My jaw dropped. Almost every wall was covered in incredible murals.
The farthest wall was so realistic, at first glance I thought it actually was a patio door leading out onto grass and a wooden deck. Beyond the deck, and this was the only reason I quickly figured out it was a painting, was the summer rain. The real world was rain-free.
What I could see of the other walls were different and unrelated scenes: an aquarium with sharks, and starfish sucking against the glass. A baseball game with a field that reminded me of the one from my old high school. Darryl in a pink suit surrounded by Secret Service. I couldn’t stop gaping at it all.
Peter was watching me, seemingly judging my response. “Wow. When you said Cai finished painting the living room,
I had a whole different idea in my head.” He quirked up a careful smile.
I cleared my throat, waiting for Peter to invite me in, but Cai emerged from the depths of the house to do it for him.
“Hi,” Cai greeted me brightly. He had a rainbow of paint in his hair, on his jaw, nose, cheeks and neck, and sprinkled along his jean overalls; as well as what was once a pure white t-shirt. He carried a jar with a paintbrush swirling in a clear liquid. Another brush was tucked behind his ear, dripping yellow paint on his shoulder. I thought he may have been cleaning the wrong brush.
Cai was the kind of boy who made you automatically grin from his sheer guilelessness. The kind who attracted people through personality rather than appearance. Where Peter was ethereal in beauty, Cai was just plain goddamn capital C “Cute”. His nose was a bit long and a little crooked— but a good fit for his face. Like Peter, his strongest asset was his eyes—not grey, not blue, but a mixture of both. But where Peter was ice, Cai was the sun. I thought his optimism might piss me off, but if I was in high school, I would have had a crazy crush on him.
It wasn’t until I looked deeper that I noticed the network of scars running from his wrists to his neck, like an ice skater had practiced figure eights on his skin. There had been a futile attempt at hiding them under Celtic vine tattoos, but the damage was so extensive, it was impossible to hide.
“Hey, yourself,” I replied, tipping my chin in greeting and resting a shoulder against the door frame.
He extended a surprisingly paint-free hand. I shook it, noticing the other hand was layered in paint. Though he was taller than I, by at least an inch, there was something almost delicate about him. “I’m Cai. Which you probably already knew, but still, I’m Cai. Some people call me Nikki because my name is Nicholas, but most people call me Cai. I don’t really like Nikki, but I haven’t told that to many people. I think Rabbit likes you though, so maybe you’ll be around a lot, and I don’t want to be stuck with Nikki when you could be calling me Cai. So…it’s just Cai.”
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