by Rhys Ford
“No. Who was she to you?” he asked, finally putting down the comic book and sliding it onto the low table in front of him. “To be honest, I also don’t know the people who were having sex in the guesthouse either. The place was supposed to be empty.”
“Her husband hired me in the past for a case,” I replied, leaving out any mention of her confirmed infidelity and fondness for bondage and leather. “He also contacted me to look into her murder because he doesn’t have a lot of faith in the cops. Doesn’t think the LAPD can bring her killer to justice.”
“That is the understatement of the century.” Stevens chuckled, reaching for his own cup of coffee. “The LAPD misses more than it hits.”
“You’re hooked up with a cop,” I reminded him. “A pretty good cop.”
“Whose dead partner tried to plant evidence on me to frame me,” he shot back. “Montoya is a good cop—a great one—but they’re few and far between, and even he can get tunnel vision sometimes. Let’s not fuck around with this. Someone told you I was on the wrong side of the law at one point, and you’re here to poke at me to see if I knew about any potential heist that could explain the diamonds you saw. Right?”
“I’m also looking at whoever pulled a home invasion on her husband this morning. When I got there to meet with him, I was greeted by a bunch of gunfire, and after the shooter bolted out of the house, I found him beat up and clearly out of it.” I risked another sip of the coffee, bracing myself for the moment when the stuff would make me see time slip away around me. It hadn’t happened yet, but I was certain it wouldn’t be too long before I started to see pink elephants dancing by. “O’Byrne said nobody reported any thefts, so either no one’s missing those diamonds yet or—”
“Whoever had them shouldn’t have had them,” Stevens finished for me. He flowed back into the couch with a fluidity so smooth it made me wonder if he had any bones at all. “What did O’Byrne tell you I allegedly did?”
“O’Byrne told me nothing,” I corrected. “Somebody else told me you used to be a thief. Now I don’t think there’s a coffee shop where criminals meet to chat about what they’ve pulled off, but if you operated at the monetary level those diamonds live on, then there’s hope you would at least know who Adele could have been working with. If it was a burglary.”
“Montoya told me you’d been a detective on the force. I can tell. You think like one,” he muttered, raking a hand through his long caramel-streaked hair. “I’m not going to point you toward someone who can give you information, because that’s how people end up in jail. I didn’t know about the beating the old man took, but that doesn’t change anything. I’m sorry about the lady you found, but I really don’t know how she got there and I sure as hell don’t know who she was working with.”
“I’m not asking for anything other than a place to start,” I replied, leaning forward. “I don’t care about the diamonds. What I do care about is Adele Brinkerhoff’s death. If she was caught up in something illegal, that’s one thing. But someone busted a hole through her chest and left her literally holding the bag.”
“If I had to come up with a theory,” Stevens began, scratching at the bit of scruff along his chin. “She was set up. Probably by her partner or partners.”
“She was kind of old. That’s what doesn’t make sense to me. You’re talking about a woman who looked more like Granny from those Tweety Bird cartoons than a cat burglar.”
Stevens laughed at me, to the point of a tear forming in his green eye. Wiping it away, he said, “Burglars come in all shapes and sizes. Some guy dressed in black in that neighborhood is going to get a lot of people to notice him, but put an old woman in Chanel or a sweater set, and people are going to give her directions to their silverware drawer. The best thieves look harmless. The fantastic thieves look helpless. She sounds like the perfect setup to get a gang to slip into a house with nobody inside of it.”
If I hadn’t seen Adele Brinkerhoff in action, I would’ve scoffed at Stevens’s theory, but she’d been more than competent in hunting me through a topiary while wielding a shotgun. The woman who came by with her husband a few days later had been somebody totally different, still strong-willed but meeker, a staunch, law-abiding citizen who wouldn’t ever be caught dead in bondage gear. I realized I still clung to the idea of Adele Brinkerhoff being the grandmotherly woman who’d perhaps once in a while walked on the wild side. Maybe I had it wrong. Maybe she was in fact a wild, lawless woman who every once in a while faked being a grandmother.
Her husband’s anguish was real, though. Arthur Brinkerhoff mourned his wife. I’d heard it in his voice, felt it down in my bones. She may have led him on a merry dance through their lives, but he was devoted to her and wanted to know who killed her.
“Then why leave the diamonds?” I had my own suspicions, but I wanted Stevens to confirm them. “They were loose and in her hand. She was found on the lawn of a house that was mothballed by its owners while they trotted around Europe. O’Byrne said there were housekeepers that came in every once in a while and a son that periodically dropped in to stay in an apartment over the garage. But there wasn’t any sign of a break-in there.”
“I don’t know the answer to that,” Stevens admitted. “The bigger question is why did somebody beat up her husband? Maybe they weren’t pulling off a job that night. Maybe those diamonds were part of a heist she already pulled and they were meeting there because they knew those properties were supposed to be empty.”
“There’s a lot of maybes floating around. It would also mean that whoever killed her knows that neighborhood.” The leather jumpsuit was perplexing, but it would’ve given her cover, blending her into the shadows of the overgrown garden bordering the house’s back lawn. “Still, why leave them?”
“Did anybody check to see if they were real?” He grinned at me, Cheshire-wicked and cunning. “Did the cops get an expert to look at them, or someone with a jeweler’s loupe and a little bit of knowledge about stones glanced at them a couple of times and called them good?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I can ask. Why?”
“Because that’s one of the most basic scams between thieves, especially ones that don’t trust each other,” Stevens replied. “They might have killed her because she was passing off bad merchandise, or maybe discussions just went sideways. Either way, there’s probably a bigger haul out there and her former partners are looking for it. If I were you, I would start with the old man. Find out who she was working with, and if he’s clueless, then buckle yourself down someplace safe, because if they were willing to kill her because she double-crossed them, they’re going to be more than happy to kill you because you’re getting in their way.”
Six
“DO YOU lead with your face into things?” Jae carefully plucked off one of the bandages, its ends soaked through after my shower. “When the shooting starts, do you say to yourself, ‘I am too pretty. Let me put my face right into where it can take the most damage’?”
The Band-Aid removal wasn’t painful, and I could have done it myself, but Jae liked playing nursemaid. It also gave him a chance to scold me. He’d already sighed when I informed him I lost yet another jacket to the case, and I’d given Ichi my shut-the-hell-up glare when he chimed in on Jae’s argument that I should drop the whole thing. Our predinner visit was mostly spent cataloging my injuries and me refilling my glass with Hibiki, wondering when I was going to get some food instead of the shit they were piling up on me.
In the end I had no idea what I’d eaten other than I thought it was some kind of fish battered in miso, and the buzz I’d gotten from the whiskey was light enough to be burned off by a hot shower. Jae wasn’t so easily shaken off.
“I went to ask a few questions, not end up in a shoot-out.” My defense was weak—even I could see that. I should have expected something to happen. Something always happens. “I called the hospital to see how Mr. Brinkerhoff was doing, and the nurse said I can drop by during visitors’ hours tomorrow morning
to talk to him.”
“You’re probably going to have to take a number behind the police,” Jae reminded me. He had a sultry purr to his voice, a velvety thrum I adored, and despite him working stuck adhesive from my skin, my body was heating up under his touch. Since all I was wearing was a towel around my hips and he was practically straddling me as I sat on the edge of our bed, he couldn’t help but notice. “Tell me you’re not getting turned on because this hurts. I don’t think I’m ready for that kind of adventure with you. With your luck, I’d end up tied to the bed with you passed out on top of me wearing only a Batman mask because you thought it would be sexy to leap across the room and you hit your head on the dresser or something.”
“It sounds like you’ve thought that through,” I mumbled, shifting the towel so it sat more comfortably across my lap. “Batman? Really?”
“The way you’re going, it’s going to be Deadpool,” he remarked sarcastically. “I’m surprised you didn’t come home with more toys from that shop. You like those kinds of things.”
“I like the shows and books, but I don’t want a lot of stuff cluttering up my life.” It was a habit mostly, years spent being yanked out of military housing and shuffled around to the next stop on my father’s Tour of American Bases. Moving often was easier if you didn’t have a lot to pack, and my stepmom, Barbara, was strict about Mike and me fitting our things into only two boxes with a suitcase for our clothes. “I got that Godzilla for you the last time I was there.”
“You have five Chicago Cubs jerseys and four signed baseballs.” Jae snorted, smearing something on one of the deeper cuts. It stung, but I held off any sign of pain by biting my lip.
“That’s different.” I winced when he smoothed the lotion into the crevices of the cut, mostly because the sting prickled and grew when he moved it around. “It’s the Cubs.”
“Remember that when you’re throwing things at the TV.” He studied my face, turning me with a firm hold on my chin. “Some of these really didn’t need bandages. Was the EMT gay?”
“I don’t think so.” Maybe that was the wrong answer, because the butterfly bandage he put on stung nearly as much as whatever it was he’d smeared on me. “I didn’t notice. Married to you, remember?”
I went for romantic, snagging his hand, and kissed the ring I’d put on his finger during a ceremony that seemed to go on longer than a double-header. All I got in return was a withering look and a disgusted snort, followed by another smear of pain gel across my forehead.
“Sit still,” he ordered sternly, but there was a twinkle in his gold-flecked brown eyes. “You’re moving around too much.”
“There’s ways of making me stay still.” I wiggled my eyebrows at him, pulling a sweet smile out of his mock frown.
Laughing softly, Jae straddled my lap, pinning my thighs to the bed and sliding the V of his legs across my groin. The towel was trying very hard to contain me, but it was a lost cause. A low growl thrumming through Jae’s throat cautioned me to keep my hands planted on the mattress when I tried to slide them up his hips, but it was difficult to concentrate on staying still, especially since the wet towel was bunched up against my abdomen and his heat spread across my damp skin.
“This is not helping me stay still,” I cautioned, steeling myself not to groan when Jae shifted on my lap, allegedly to reach a small slice on the other side of my forehead. “Babe, a man can only be so strong.”
“You’ve had worse,” he murmured, kissing the cut briefly. “I have faith you’re man enough to hold on while I finish taking care of you.”
He was good at testing my limits. He should be. Jae’s been testing them for years now, and I’m not too proud to admit I buckled every time.
I’d fallen for him practically from the moment I first saw him. It wasn’t love then—maybe fascination with a heavy dose of lust—but he’d intrigued me. That day he’d been another grieving relative in a house full of pain and sorrow, but then something happened between us in the kitchen as he chopped up vegetables. In the middle of all of that death and a tangled weave of lies I’d been caught in, Jae teased me about spaghetti.
It’d been unexpected and pretty much laid the path of our relationship from that moment on. He was complicated in ways I couldn’t begin to understand and possessed a simple philosophy on things I could only envy. I counted each day with him as a blessing and was pretty sure he counted each day as a mild curse. We’d come through so much together—his family pretty much declaring him dead and my father making sure I understood every insult from him was simply another handful of dirt on my grave.
There were also times when it felt like he could read my mind, so I wasn’t completely surprised when Jae whispered softly, “Do you know the exact moment when I knew I couldn’t live without you?”
“Pretty sure it was when you stopped me from eating the raw bitter melon,” I teased with a playful boast. Considering that happened within the first half hour of us meeting, it was a very far stretch.
“No, that was the moment you were trying to figure out how you could get into my pants,” he lobbed back at me. He moved again, and the towel finally gave up its battle and slid to the floor. It was getting harder to think with my dick coming up with all sorts of much more interesting things to do besides me sitting on the edge of the bed getting plasters put on my face. “It was after. When you dug Neko out of my building after it exploded and then you came to tell me she was okay. I hated you so much because I didn’t want to be in love, especially not with a man. And really not with a man who knew everything about me.”
“Everything I found out about you just showed me how fucking strong you are, agi.” The endearment was wrong. One of the many things I’d fucked up in my pursuit of the beautiful, rangy Korean man straddling my lap, but it’d become a thing between us. A stupid, silly misspeak we’d built up into something special, although whenever I slipped up and said it in public in the middle of Koreatown, I got some pretty funky looks. “Are you about done with my face? Because I would really love to move you down my body.”
We’d made love a thousand times before, and with any luck, we would have many more times together before one of us slipped away to join the stars. I treasured the feel of Jae’s mouth on my skin, hissing at the painful pleasure of his teeth nipping at my nipple, then returning the favor, making him gasp. We knew each other’s bodies, explored the familiar landscapes, but it felt new every time.
He had a faint brown mottling on his right hip, more like a cluster of freckles the length and width of my thumb—scarring from when he fell on a briquette fire when he was nine. I liked kissing it, making him squirm. He was ticklish in places, and where my lips made him writhe and buck beneath me, my tongue and teeth made him moan.
And the noises I drew out of him with my fingers were both heaven and hell to my ears.
I longed to bury myself into his heat, lose myself in the clench of his body around mine, but I knew better. Sex is like whiskey, always better sipped and savored, especially when it’s aged, mellowed with affection, and shared with someone you love.
“Cole-ah,” Jae ground out between his clenched teeth, arching in response to my touch. “Now.”
I gave in to my husband’s demands, but on my terms. I was bruised and smarting in some areas, but the stretch of his lean form beneath mine more than made up for any aches and pains. Jae dug his fingers into my shoulders, probably adding to the welts and marks already on my abused skin. We rode each other gently at first, but then the heat we’d built up between us consumed our patience. The tug and twist of Jae’s body around my shaft was exquisite, pulling the tender threads of my climax out from my very core.
There were so many small moments I wanted to hold on to, bits and pieces of sensations I needed to engrave in my memory—the chiming of our wedding rings when our fingers touched, the bite of gold into the webbing of my hand echoing Jae’s tight hold on me, and the familiar sting of being stretched. I knew he was feeling every one of my thrusts.
When we both lay panting and wrung out, I realized I was half off the bed, and at some point, the dog had not only brought her wet tennis ball into the room, I’d apparently ground it into the floor with my foot. I wasn’t sure what was more damp—my toes from dog spit or the rest of my body from making love to Jae.
“I stepped on your dog’s swamp ball,” I gasped into Jae’s ear. “It feels disgusting.”
“That’s exactly what someone wants to hear after having sex,” Jae muttered, not so gently pushing me off of his torso. “Kick the ball downstairs and we can go take a shower.”
“Last time I took a shower, we ended up here on this bed getting sweaty again.” I rolled over, trying to get more of my body on the bed. “How about if we just skip the shower and go right back to what happens after it? Minus the tennis ball.”
He propped himself up on his elbow, studying me. I knew what I looked like. As hard as I worked to keep my body prime and in shape, I’d taken a lot of damage over the years. The keloids along my ribs stretched around like kelp tendrils over my skin, twisting down into my muscles in the most inconvenient places, often going into spasms when I moved the wrong way or firing off the wrong signals for shits and giggles. I had starbursts along the ridge of my shoulder, souvenirs from the night I lost both my best friend and my lover. Jae had a matching scar on his opposite side, a battle wound taken during one of my cases. It was smoother than my healed-over wounds, leaving me to wonder if bullets soaked in betrayal and hatred scarred the flesh.