by Rhys Ford
“What part of ‘don’t move’ didn’t you hear?” Moving my arm underneath him, I held Jae close when he reached for me again. Resting his head on my jeans, he lay still enough for me to check for where he’d been hit.
Dried blood closed up the tear in his scalp where a bullet had torn past his head. Hidden under his hair, a large lump had formed on his temple, probably from hitting his head either on the heavy wood table I’d found him near or the kitchen counter. Either way, I was guessing he’d been knocked out and now was suffering from a concussion.
Someone answered the phone, and I went into automatic, dumping out information. Jae shivered, his shock setting in. I’d have to find something to wrap him in if they were too far out. I didn’t want to risk him falling unconscious as we waited.
“Baby, stay still.” I froze, hearing that word come from my mouth. Whatever my brain was cooking up, it was going to have to stop. Jae-Min Kim was the last person I’d want to get involved with. “I need you to stay still until someone comes to look at you.”
I was firm on that resolution until his lashes fluttered open and his dark-honey eyes found my face. He didn’t smile, not really, but a ghost of something tugged at the corners of his full mouth, and Jae relaxed against me, letting me hold him up.
“Cole, Jin-Sang… is he okay?” Jae-Min shifted, trying to turn around. His back was to Jin-Sang’s corpse, and I wanted to keep it that way. I should have backed out of the apartment as soon as I’d seen them lying there, but I hadn’t. There was going to be hell to pay, but I was willing to take it. The warmth on my leg was enough to make me feel good about that decision.
“Don’t look, Jae. You don’t need to look.” If he was going to talk to me, I should keep him focused on what had happened while it was fresh. “Did you see who did this?”
“Someone came out from the bedroom. I didn’t know they were there.” He flinched, and his hands grabbed at my thighs. Pain jerked at his mouth, peeling back another layer of his carefully controlled emotions. He was afraid and hurt, biting at his lips to not cry out. It was the face of a man who had no one around him to console him, beating back any sign of vulnerability. I knew that face. I’d worn that face too many times to count.
“It’s okay, honey.” His shoulder blades dug into my arm when I cradled him. “Try to keep awake.”
“Jin-Sang’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Don’t think about that right now, Jae,” I said. Something hit me, hard between the eyes. Looking down at him, I searched for any flinch across his features when I asked, “Do you love him?”
If he answered yes, it would break me. His maybe-lover was splattered across the apartment walls and floor, and I knew how that felt. Life would be filled with guilt and what-ifs. Nothing good ever came from what-ifs.
And if he said no, then I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but I had a feeling that it would untangle the sour knot resting in my chest.
“No.” His voice was soft and rough. “Not Jin-Sang. Never him. I came here to get him to talk to you.”
“Talk to me?” That was more of a shock than finding Jin-Sang dead.
“I wanted him to tell you about Hyun-Shik.” The sound of sirens bounced around outside, coming through the open door. “I needed to talk to you again.”
“Yeah?” It seemed disrespectful to feel elation hearing Jae say that, especially as we sat in blood and with Jin-Sang’s dead body nearby. Voices echoed in the stairwell, and I called out to the paramedics coming up to the apartment.
“Yeah.” He touched me, running his fingers along the inside of my thigh. A medic headed straight over to Jae, and I moved away, sliding him onto the flat carrying board they’d brought up with them. He grabbed at my hand, snagging my fingers and holding on tight. “Don’t go anywhere, Cole.”
“No problem,” I said. Even with the medic glaring at me with his disapproving eyes, I wasn’t going to go anywhere. “Won’t let you go. Promise.”
“Cole?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t mind baby. It’s nice.” Yelping, he jerked when the medic stuck him with a needle. Pain shot up my wrist, his fingers digging into my forearm. “But don’t call me honey. That’s my mom’s dog’s name.”
Chapter 6
“YEAH, how do you spell that, again?”
The detective had taken my name three times now. I wasn’t sure if he was singularly stupid or just giving me a hard time. Spelling it again, I enunciated each letter until I was certain he’d gotten it right. The sun had set, but there was enough glare from the parking lot lights that his forehead bounced a sheen back at me.
Jin-Sang’s body was still upstairs, people walking about his apartment and wondering at his lifestyle. Our hands and clothes had been tested for gunpowder residue before Jae was hauled into the back of a waiting ambulance. So far, from the heated mumbling I could hear coming from the paramedic working on him, things weren’t going well. I wanted to commiserate. Things generally didn’t seem to go well when Jae-Min Kim was involved.
“McGinnis, Cole.” He stopped writing, looking up at me, realization dawning on him. “You’re the one that got shot. You worked a house up from here, didn’t you?”
“I’m working here, too,” I replied. My attention drifted to where the medics were working on Jae. They’d moved us downstairs, closing the apartment off to wait for forensics and whoever else wanted to stomp over Jin-Sang’s cooling body. “I do private investigations.”
“Didn’t the city pay you enough money that you could sit on your ass?” His partner, Branson, joined us. I knew him from work. We’d crossed paths a few times, and never for the better. He was one of those muscle bunnies who swaggered through the locker room, his ebony skin oiled up to emphasize every bulge along his arms and thighs.
“Maybe his ass is just too sore to sit down on.” Now that his troll of a partner had arrived, the detective found some backbone and sniggered, snorting a whistle of air through his mustache and into his nose.
“Great. Good to see cops are still attending those sensitivity sessions.” I was tired of answering questions and didn’t want to start playing games. Jae-Min was too far for me to hear him clearly, but I could tell from the displeased look on the medic’s face that he was getting a ration of shit about something from Jae. “We done here?”
“Your boyfriend can wait a little bit, McGinnis.” Detective Branson noticed my attention drift. His face soured, wrinkles forming over his shaved head. “I’ve got a few questions for you myself.”
It’d been a few years since I’d last seen Branson, but he hadn’t changed much. Maybe got a bit wider in the gut, and the small fuzz of hair he’d been nursing along had receded far enough back that it left a shadowy line under the lobe of his skull. He’d been curt in his past dealings with me, but there’d always been a simmering, hateful veil on his words. Branson didn’t have to be careful anymore.
“You hard of hearing? I’m talking to you, McGinnis.” I jerked my eyes back to him, pulling away from what was going on by the ambulance.
“Sure, why not?” I’d already gone over everything a few times with Thurman, but I understood the process. “Shoot.”
“Did you?”
Oh, clever. I wasn’t going to be impressed by his wit. He was going to have to work for anything he got from me. I hadn’t seen anything other than Jae on the floor. “Did I what?”
“Shoot the victim. So what really happened, faggot?” If Branson got any more ticked off, he was going to end up looking like a Shar-Pei. “You walk in on them fucking each other and shot them both? Maybe felt bad about it, so you and your lover make it look like a home invasion?”
“A home invasion from inside the bedroom on the second floor?” I asked sarcastically. Like Branson, I had nothing to gain by being nice. I’d had enough of his kind of crap when I’d worked for the force. “Or do you think they let me in to use the bathroom so I was all fresh before I killed them? I already told you. I never met Yi Jin-Sang. I was here
to ask him a few questions about an investigation I was hired for.”
“Mr. McGinnis, we’re just looking for some clarity,” Thurman said. He was switching over to the conciliatory tone Bobby used when he wanted to coax something out of someone. Anyone who had to prod a suspect used it or the rough, harsh, I-don’t-give-a-shit-about-you voice. “Usually the person who calls in something like Yi’s murder is connected to the scene. We have to ask questions to determine that you had nothing to do with his death.”
“What were you going to ask him about?” Branson interrupted. “Yi. You came here to talk to him about what?”
“I’m investigating a suicide,” I said. “He was a friend of the deceased.”
“Friend as in boyfriend or just someone the suicide fucked?” The large cop folded a piece of gum into his wide mouth. He made smacking noises as he chewed, wetting the stick until it was soft enough to mangle against his teeth.
“I didn’t get a chance to ask,” I said with a smile. “He was dead before I got here.”
“And what was your boyfriend doing in there?”
“Again, not my boyfriend. And when I walked in, he was busy bleeding.” Jae-Min’s voice got louder and very Korean with not a spit of English in it. From the looks of things, he was tired of being poked and prodded. I sympathized. I was feeling the exact same way about Branson and his pet sycophant.
A bruise was forming on Jae’s cheekbone, a purple splotch spreading under his pale skin. He’d pushed away the medic, wobbling on his unsure legs. The man swore at him, a spate of Spanish to go along with the languages that had been thrown at him already. They went at one another again, the man insisting on something that Jae wasn’t going to agree with. The paramedic threw his hands up and began packing his equipment, grabbing a piece of paper and shoving it at Jae-Min.
“You’ve got my contact info. Call me if you need anything else. We’re done here.” It wasn’t a question this time. I was finished with them and headed over to rescue the paramedic. Branson swore after me, but I kept walking.
In hindsight, I could pin down the moment when my life went to hell. It was when I walked over to Jae-Min and said, “Wait here. I’m going to take you home.”
WHY the hell was I driving Jae-Min home in evening rush-hour traffic? Because the idiot refused to go to the hospital. The medic spat at me in disgust even after I said I wouldn’t let him behind a steering wheel. Not that he was going to drive anytime soon. The cops had cordoned off his Explorer as a part of the crime scene. I think the paramedic was hoping he could tail Jae and wait for him to pass out, then drag his unconscious body to the hospital.
From the way Jae was leaning on me as I dragged him out of the car, I would have said the medic’s plan wasn’t a bad one.
He smelled of blood and citrus. And trouble, if I was going to be honest with myself. Jae-Min Kim reeked of trouble, and it was rubbing its stink on me.
After trying to push me away, Jae jerked his arm free of my hand and nearly tumbled to the cement sidewalk. We weren’t in a nice part of town, and even if he was tough enough to laugh off a concussion, scraping open his skin on the sidewalk guck would kill him. I caught him before he hit the ground.
“You fight me even when you don’t have to. Come on,” I said softly. There were shapes moving along the dark alleyways around us, ominous human shapes lurking outside of the bright pools coming down from the two working streetlights. “Where’s your place?”
“We’re in front of it.”
The building had seen better days. I couldn’t make heads or tails out of what it had been before, maybe a long strip mall or a warehouse that someone bought and converted to apartments. Either way, the place was now a tall, whitewashed, brick block with stacks of glass jalousies running along under the eaves. Someone had tried to make the exterior more attractive, adding a decorative cinderblock enclosure around each doorway. Dried ivy strands clung to some of the scalloped stone. It didn’t do much to provide privacy. The dead plants only made the place look sadder.
“It looks like a prison.” I was being nice. The place looked like bird shit on a hot windshield.
“It’s cheap.” He struggled to get his keys out of his pocket. I snuck my fingers past his, struck by how cold they were. “The one on the end.”
“Let’s get you inside.”
Jae shivered against me and glanced up at me from under his lashes. My body growled in response, a primal goad into taking what was in front of me. I wanted him. Covered with his own blood and chilled from probable shock, I still wanted him underneath me. Every ounce of common sense in my brain told me I was an idiot, but guys are often idiots. “Tell me there’s hot water in your shower. You need one.”
“Yeah.” The color was gone from his face, turning his already pale skin to porcelain. “I’ve even got a toilet in there.”
“Good, because you’re probably going to want to throw up in it.” I opened the heavy metal door and grabbed at his waist before he slid down the wall. “You’ve got a concussion. You should be flat on your ass in a hospital bed.”
Light came through stacks of windows along the back of the wall, illuminating the wide space. If I hadn’t been so concerned about carrying him over the threshold, I would have dropped Jae when I saw the enormous black and white photos leaning against the wall. He pulled away from me, staggering off toward a door in the side wall, waving off my half-mumbled offers to help. I didn’t offer out of kindness. I, like most men, was a pig. The thought of seeing him naked under a stream of hot water would go a long way in paying me back for the anger I was still nursing against him.
He disappeared, closing the door behind him as I found the switch to the lights. The space was larger than it looked from the outside, cleaner than I’d expected too. The furnishings were Spartan, a pair of futons around a low, flat-topped wooden chest pocked with water rings. An enormous unmade bed against one wall, a nest of pillows imprinted with the shape of a long, lean body.
Most of the floor space was taken up by mismatched tables, a few groaning under the weight of electronics and digital cameras. Long lenses sat sentinel on cheap shelves, accompanied by other equipment. I couldn’t even begin to guess at what it was used for.
The photos still held me. I saw Scarlet’s face in one, stripped of makeup and pretense. This was the man under the makeup and smiles. A sadness clouded her dark eyes. Not loss, I decided. No, this was the face of a ladyboy who loved deeply and wanted the world to know that kind of love. She was still beautiful. Even naked of any pretense, there was a beauty there that I couldn’t deny.
There were other images, starkly beautiful and sweepingly tragic. Flipping through them, I was walking into Jae-Min’s world, seeing private moments caught between his hands like short-lived fireflies. It hurt something inside of me. I couldn’t understand the nearly manic laughter captured in the back room of Dorthi Ki Seu, black and white portraits of men turning themselves into another man’s fantasy.
He’d taken other pictures, pieces of urban life seen through unforgiving eyes. Jae-Min imprisoned his life in flat images. I wondered if he was trying to make sense of things or just showing the world what he saw. Either way, looking through the mounted photos made me ache and feel slightly ashamed, as if I was prying into his secret diary.
A furry demon exploded into a hissing fit above my head. I fell back, almost knocking over a few cameras from the table behind me. I fought to catch them before they hit the ground, shoving the equipment back as the cat spat at me again.
She jumped down, giving me a twitch of her tail as if she was dismissing me as a threat. Barely bigger than a small bag of chips, she bounced along the edge of the table, a black poof of chinchilla fur edged with fangs and claws.
“That’s Neko.”
I’d not heard the shower turn off. Jae stood with his hands clenched over the edge of the couch’s back. Dark circles were forming under his eyes, and he seemed to be straining to stay on his feet, weaving back and forth as he fought to s
tay upright.
“Neko?”
“It’s Japanese for ‘cat’. Her full name is Koneko-chan, but mostly I just call her Neko.”
“You named your cat, Cat?”
“She came that way,” he said, shrugging. The white T-shirt he’d put on hung on his body, too big for his slender torso, and the pair of loose, thin sweats he’d tied around his hips weren’t much better. I wondered if they were something left by a former lover. Crossing over to where he stood, I grabbed at him before he toppled over. “Wasn’t like I was expecting her to come when I call her.”
“You’re bleeding.” I sighed, easing him back into the bed. He fought me, a brief tussle, before I shoved him down onto the pillows. “Stop it. Fuck, for once in your life, do what you’re told.”
“That’s all I do.” I didn’t understand the bitterness in his laugh, short and cutting, but it was there. In spades.
“Do you have bandages? Anything?” The cat jumped onto the bed and glared at me as if I’d been the one to peel apart Jae’s temple. Her opinion didn’t matter to me, but she had obviously put me on her short list of people to flay as soon as she grew thumbs.
“In the bathroom.” He reached for the furry demon, cradling her petite body against his chest. A light purr started up in her chest, but there was no warmth for me in her cold, orange-yellow eyes. His tawny gaze didn’t hold much hope for me either, but I had questions for Mr. Kim, and I wasn’t going to leave until I got a few answers.
Coming back with a handful of gauze and medical tape, I sat on the edge of the bed, keeping out of paw-strike distance in case his guard-cat decided to take me down. Peeling off the plaster he’d gotten from the paramedic, I winced at the blotches of blood seeping through the bandage.
“You should have gone to the hospital.” Opening one of the sterilized gauze packages, I folded the bandage over and placed it on the crease along his head. “Hold this while I cut some tape. It’s not too late to take you to the emergency room, you know.”