Sinner's Gin

by Rhys Ford

  A quick eternity passed before Sanchez leaned in again and touched Miki’s shoulder. Somehow, a bottle of water appeared under Miki’s face, and he blinked, startled by the sudden intrusion of blue plastic and white lettering.

  “Here, drink some water, okay?” Sanchez said as the room’s door closed with a whispering click. “I need you to talk to me, Miki. I need you to tell me something. Anything at all that will help.”

  “I don’t know if I can do this.” A strangled sob escaped with his words, and Miki choked it back, refusing to let loose the nightmares he kept inside of him. Everything he ever gained lay in ash around him, burnt up by the fiery disgust he held inside. “I just wanted to forget it happened. I just wanted to be normal, you know? Fuckers made me… not normal. I’m not sorry he’s dead. Fucking hell, I’m not, but I didn’t kill him.”

  “I know,” Sanchez assured him. “But I need you to do this for me. I don’t have anywhere else to go with this. I wouldn’t ask you if I had a choice, okay? I’ve cropped in as much as I could so there’s only faces. There’s a few of you only because there’s someone else in the picture, a couple of boys that I’m hoping you know something about, but that’s all. Nothing else, okay?”

  “Why?” The word broke into pieces as Miki spoke, scattering out like the glass from his front window.

  “Because we think Shing’s death is somehow related to what he did in that storeroom… to you,” Sanchez replied, his voice low and quiet. “And because I don’t want the next person Kane calls in dead to be you, because that’s what I’m afraid’s going to happen if you’re connected to this in any way.”

  Kane.

  Miki hissed between his teeth. The cop had gotten to him. He couldn’t shake the man loose from his brain, and worse, he wanted to feel Kane on his skin.

  “Fucking Kane,” Miki spat. He felt again. The numbness somehow leeched off, and the feelings he’d bricked up behind it were now exposed and raw. He didn’t like it. It felt too much… way too much for Miki’s liking, but he didn’t know how to put everything back away, especially since it looked like Kane had dismantled all of the walls he built up.

  “Yeah, I say that a lot too,” Sanchez said with a chuckle. “Probably for different reasons, though.”

  “I can do this,” Miki muttered to himself. “Just faces, right?”

  “As much of their faces as I could get in,” the cop reassured him. “And if it gets to be too much, we can take a break. Okay?”

  “Okay.” He took a breath and steadied himself. “Okay, let me see.”

  The faces were shadows at best, only a glimmer of recognition striking Miki as he shuffled through them. More surprising was to see his own tearstained and terrified face, a much younger and innocent version, staring back at him. The boys arranged with him were unfamiliar to him, a distant nothingness submerged in his childhood fugue.

  “You doing all right there, Miki?” Sanchez finally asked.

  “I don’t know any of them,” Miki whispered. “I don’t remember anyone’s names. I don’t know if I ever knew them.”

  “It’s okay. Just take your time.”

  Miki pulled out a page and slid it across the table to the cop next to him. “I think he was one of the kids who used to live with Carl.”

  “Carl Vega, your foster father?”

  “Yeah,” Miki said, nodding. “I don’t remember the kid’s name. He wasn’t there long. Just a couple of months, maybe?”

  “How old were you then? In this picture. Do you know?” Sanchez’s whisper was soft, a pleading tone meant to soothe, but it rankled Miki’s skin.

  Shoving down his irrational distaste, Miki stared at the photo of himself and another boy. Their eyes were glazed, nearly bleached out from the flash, and their faces were ghostly pale, floating against a brown-patterned background. “These here, they’re not from Shing’s place. They’re from Carl’s house. I remember that bedspread. I got really sick on it, so Carl threw it out. So, maybe I was twelve? Thirteen? I don’t remember exactly when.”

  “How did Carl know Shing?” Again, the softness irritated Miki, but he focused instead on trying to parse out his memories.

  “I don’t know. I ran once, but Carl came home early and caught me. After that, he made sure I wasn’t alone,” Miki said, turning the pages over. He couldn’t stare at the faces anymore. There were too many things coming to the surface in the reflections of their eyes, and Miki’s mind crawled with the horrors he’d left behind. “If Carl had to work at night, Shing’d take me with him to the restaurant. During the day, he’d make sure I was at school.”

  “Did you talk to someone there? Tell anyone what Carl was doing? Carl’s wife, maybe? The school?”

  “The school?” Miki snorted, a sharp cut of derision on Sanchez’s soft words. “Nobody there gave a shit. I’d come to school with a black eye or a bloody lip, and they wouldn’t say a damned thing. Why would they? Carl’s like a big shot with them. No one’s going to touch him. Same reason the CPS lady told me I was full of shit when I tried talking to her. Told me I was making shit up to get him into trouble. After that, I figured if I just survived it, it would be okay.”

  “Someone should have helped you, Miki.” Sanchez sounded angry, and Miki pulled back a bit. Sanchez softened his voice and touched Miki’s chilled fingers. “You were a kid. It wasn’t even ten damned years ago. They should have known better. Someone should have listened to you.”

  “Who the hell’s going to listen to some kid they found on the street, Sanchez?” His mouth twisted into a sour pout. “Like people even give a shit about their own kids? You think they’re going to care about me? It doesn’t matter anymore. I got out of it. It’s done.”

  “What about the kids fostered after you?” he asked. “What about them? Do you know if any of them said something?”

  “I don’t know.” Miki turned his head, struggling to breathe again when Sanchez hissed with frustration. “So it’s on me? That shit’s my fault now? Don’t put that on me. Don’t you fucking—”

  “No, it’s not on you. That’s not what I meant,” Sanchez replied. He gripped Miki’s shoulder and turned him until the cop could see Miki’s face. “It’s on me. I’m a cop. Kane’s a cop. It’s on us. Your foster father’s a monster, and he fed on you. It’s our job to take him down. Our job to stop him, okay? Look at me, man. Okay?”

  Miki opened his eyes and stared into Sanchez’s steady brown gaze. Nodding, he mumbled, “Okay.”

  KANE pressed his hand against the glass. It was cold, nearly freezing on his palm, but it did nothing to numb the anguish building inside of him. If he could have, Kane would have crawled through the glass and held Miki close. Even if the cold turned his soul to ice, he’d risk it to take the terror away from Miki’s expressive face.

  The door to the room opened, and Kane shut his eyes, forbidding the tears on his lashes from falling. He dropped his hand, clenching his fingers against his palm until his knuckles ached. A thick-fingered hand gripped his shoulder, and Kane turned his head to look up at his Lieutenant standing next to him.

  “He’ll be okay, Morgan.” Casey’s reflection in the glass was stern, but his voice was gentle. “You okay listening to this?”

  “Yeah, ’cause no one listened to him before,” Kane replied. “Because the someone listening to him now is me… and Sanchez. This is fucked up. This kind of shit happens to him, and we’re putting it out in front of him like it’s nothing.”

  “This isn’t nothing, Morgan,” Casey snapped back. “Sanchez is damned good at what he does. He knows how this goes down. He’s doing well with the kid. You said it yourself. There’s no way you can sit across of St. John and ask him these questions. Where does that leave me when I’ve got a cop that can’t do what needs to be done because he’s got a thing for a suspect?”

  “He didn’t do this,” Kane said, shaking his head. “He didn’t kill Shing. I don’t know who did, but it wasn’t Miki St. John.”

  “Willing to risk your badg
e over that? Because from where I’m standing, that’s what you’re doing.” The man stabbed his finger at Kane’s chest. “You’re letting your dick lead you around, Morgan. I don’t like it.”

  “It’s not my dick, Loo.” He tightened his mouth and stared at the men sitting behind the one-way glass. Miki was trembling but holding his own, almost robotically going through the pictures, but there was a gleam of something insane lurking at the edges of his eyes. “This is fucking killing him. Whoever murdered Shing was angry. You saw the body. St. John doesn’t have that kind of rage inside of him. And there’s no fucking way he could have lifted up Shing’s body and dumped it in his own car.”

  “People do strange things,” Casey said, shrugging. “Maybe Shing came over to his house to shake him down for money. ‘Give me a million dollars or I’ll tell the tabloids you were a whore?’”

  “Shing couldn’t have done that without implicating himself,” Kane pointed out. “Miki was underage. Hell, he was barely into puberty. What Shing did was wrong, and someone he did it to probably killed him for it, but that someone wasn’t Miki.”

  “You’re going to have to shake out the foster father,” the lieutenant rumbled. “Tried to have the uniforms pick him up, but he went to ground.”

  “I’ve got people looking for him.” He shifted on his feet and leaned against the glass again. “I’m wondering if Vega didn’t do Shing and leave him in Miki’s car as a warning. That could be the money angle. ‘This could be you if I don’t get my cash.’”

  “Any sign of a blackmail threat?”

  “No, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” Kane replied. “He’s good at keeping secrets. He might have kept that one. I’ll work on him.”

  “You do that,” Casey agreed. “In the meantime, get your arms around Vega. He might become a victim in this like Shing did. He might not be the murderer. We have to work that angle too.”

  “Last thing that guy is now is a victim,” Kane growled. “We hunt down Carl Vega and do what? Protect him from whoever’s doing this shit? I’ve got to put Miki in front of him and say what? ‘Yeah, sorry about your screwed up childhood, but we need to take care of the man who hurt you because someone might kill him too?’ If whoever got Shing came for Vega, if I wasn’t a cop, I’d say we let the guy finish the job.”

  “You’re better than that, Morgan. You know that.” The Lieutenant nudged Kane around until the man faced him. “You’re too close to St. John. I’m tempted to yank you from this case.”

  “It’s not like that—”

  “Damned if it’s not,” Casey cut him off. “You start something with St. John and it compromises this case, I’ll have your ass. Do you understand me, Morgan?”

  The lieutenant didn’t wait for him to answer. Casey grunted and quit the room, leaving the door open behind him. Kane rocked back on his heels, his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans, and watched Sanchez gather up the printouts he’d shown Miki. The singer remained seated, his arms tense from gripping the chair’s sides.

  He looked shell-shocked, his hazel eyes open wide enough to dominate the rest of his face. The lips Kane lusted for were now bleeding from Miki’s teeth worrying at them, and his tongue dabbed at the chap, playing at the raw spots. His damp hair had dried to a tousle around his face, falling down in a straight line to his jaw, and Miki tucked a length behind his ear to get it out of his eyes.

  Sanchez whispered something to the young man that Kane couldn’t hear, but Miki nodded and stood, nearly stumbling back down to the ground when his weight shifted to his right leg. Sanchez reached for him, but Miki yanked his arm away, holding up a hand to ward off the cop while using the other to brace himself against the table.

  Kane was waiting for him by the interview room’s door when Miki came out. Sanchez spotted his partner first and glanced back behind him, a worried expression drawing his dark eyebrows together into a point. The singer emerged slowly, and he turned slightly when he saw Kane, glancing at the open door nearby.

  They stood staring at one another. Kane held himself as still as he could, trying to read the complicated mix of emotions playing across the other man’s face. Miki splayed his hand against the wall for support, keeping his knee bent to ease the pain Kane could see resonating in Miki’s taut mouth. Canted forward, the singer said nothing, only breathing as he stared up at the cop who was pushing his way into his life.

  Then Miki took a step toward him, and Kane closed the distance between them in a single stride.

  Chapter 6

  I can feel you breaking my skin.

  My bones shatter when you walk by.

  The blood I taste is from my tongue.

  You say you love me but I know it’s a lie.

  —Shattered Lies

  Kane caught the man up in his arms, sliding his hands around Miki’s slender waist to support his back. Miki fought him, pushing him away, but Kane held him tighter.

  “You’re a damned cop, for Christ’s sake,” Miki grumbled. “You can’t just grab people in the middle of the place. They think I killed Shing.”

  “We don’t. Well, Sanchez and I don’t,” Kane said. “Right now, how about if I’m just the guy who took you out for dinner and let you ramble on about music. I’ll be a cop again when I let you go, but right now, I’m a guy who’s worried about you. No one will see. Sanchez will keep people out of the hallway.”

  “You don’t even know me,” he whispered.

  “Yeah, I think I kind of do,” Kane replied and pulled Miki in. “Let’s face it. You need a friend right now. I’ll be that friend, Miki. Let me.”

  “I’ve never wanted to fuck a friend before.” Miki’s whisper was almost lost in Kane’s shirt. The singer’s hands came up, slowly finding purchase around Kane’s chest, then around his neck when the cop buried his face into Miki’s soft, long hair. “God, this fucking sucks.”

  Kane’s insides churned, as if he’d truly gone through the glass to put his arms around the trembling man. He tightened his embrace and sighed in relief when Miki let himself go. Catching up Miki’s slack weight, Kane held the man up, stroking the small of his back. Kane heard a sob catch in Miki’s throat, but the sound was muffled when he buried his face into Kane’s chest.

  They became the eye in the center of a wicked storm. Kane rested his chin on Miki’s shoulder and simply listened to the man breathe, stroking his fingertips up and down Miki’s spine. The singer dug his hands into Kane’s shirt, tightly fisting the fabric as if afraid to let go… afraid he’d fall into something he couldn’t crawl out of if he didn’t have Kane to hold on to.

  Kane couldn’t count the minutes they stood together, but eventually Miki looked up from the safety of Kane’s embrace. His face was bare of tears, but the specks of skin on his lips were nearly chewed through to blood. Taking a deep breath, Miki took a small step away from Kane, only enough so he could meet Kane’s gaze.

  “I can’t believe I’m fucking crying in the middle of a police station,” Miki whispered. “Did you hear… all of it? Behind that damned glass? God, I want to throw something through it. Creeps me the fuck out.”

  “You’re not the first person to cry in a cop house.” Kane kissed his forehead, then leaned back to cup Miki’s chin in his palm. “I don’t think you know how fucking strong you are. I couldn’t have done that. There’s no way in hell I could have stayed through that.”

  Miki’s scoffing snort brought a smile to Kane’s lips. He hugged the singer tightly, then gently released him, keeping one arm around his waist to support Miki’s damaged leg.

  “I don’t feel strong,” he complained under his breath. “I feel like a whiny bitch.”

  “Yeah, well, trust me,” Kane said. “Not a lot of guys could have dealt with that shit. Makes me want to kill someone.”

  “Like I had a choice,” Miki muttered. “Can I go home? Or am I stuck here for a bit?”

  “Nah, I’ll take you home,” Kane replied. “Just promise me that hellhound you’ve got isn’t goi
ng to eat me alive when I get you there.”

  “No promises. Dude usually likes everyone. I don’t know why that guy pissed him off. And why the fuck did I leave that damned cane behind?” Miki took a few tentative steps, using Kane’s arm to lean on. “God, I’m an idiot. Aren’t they going to kick you off the case for hitting on a suspect… or whatever the hell I am?”

  “Only if you really killed Shing. Then, I’m up to my neck in shit,” Kane teased. “We’ll stop someplace, and I’ll grab you some ice cream. My mom always says ice cream can solve everything. Well, that and a cup of tea, but I’m going to disagree with her on that one.”

  “Thanks,” Miki murmured. “For everything. For this. For the ice cream.”

  “Not a problem,” he replied, gently squeezing Miki’s waist. “Let’s get you home. Sanchez and I will figure it out. He’s a good guy… a good cop. Almost as good as me.”

  “Yeah, you guys better be,” Miki grumbled with a soft purr. “I want this shit to go away.”

  “Do I have to go away when the shit goes too?” Kane prodded as they walked.

  “No,” Miki mumbled, ducking his head. “Maybe you can stay. Even if you’re a cop, you’re okay. Especially if you’re buying me ice cream.”

  SANCHEZ was waiting for him in an unmarked when Kane got back to the station an hour later. He slid into the sedan and passed Sanchez one of the two Mexican mochas he’d grabbed on the way. The smell of the coffee did little to mask the sour smell of vomit coming from the backseat, and Kel hit the button to raise the bullet-proof partition, hoping it would help.

  It didn’t.

  “Don’t look at me,” Kel warned Kane off before he could say something. “This was all they had.”

  “God, I hate the motor pool,” Kane muttered. “Why do they have to punish me because they can’t stand you?”