Back in Black (McGinnis Investigations Book 1)

by Rhys Ford

  “It did.” Jae sat up a little bit, angling so he could see my face. “You stopped going out with him to clubs, and a lot of your afternoons were spent with me instead of with him, going to ball games or doing things that you both like to do. It’s hard because both of you were alone for a very long time and used to just having each other. Then I came along, and he had to split his time, leaving him alone again. Then when Ichi came, you spent more time with him, learning how to be his brother, slicing Bobby’s time even more.”

  “Then they hooked up, so….” I sighed, too caught up in my own selfish needs to have everyone sit in the box I’d put them in. “I realized I felt like I was being shoved out between them. I thought it was because I knew how Bobby was with guys and I didn’t want Ichi to get hurt, but it was more about me not wanting to share them, not wanting to lose what time I had with them. And that’s so fucking stupid, but I thought I was doing okay. Then today happened.”

  “Today happened,” Jae agreed. “Ichi is a contradiction, because he is rebellious in his own culture but traditional in yours. I think it’s why he and I get along so well—because we both feel like we’re telling our world to fuck off but not really. We’re just fighting for space to exist in. Because what we were given was too small, and your spaces are so big—too big—so we cling to traditional things because they’re familiar.

  “Tokugawa Ichiro was raised in Japan, by a very conservative father who is the head of a very conservative family. His path was laid out before him from the moment he was born, written down in the registry, along with the thousands of names that came before him. And he fought to crawl off of that page and become more,” he continued. “But Ichi was raised in a Japan that doesn’t have guns or the violence you and Bobby swore to shield people from. The guns both of you are familiar with are monstrous horrors, symbols of death and loss. We tell ourselves we are sophisticated and worldly because we’ve been through so much. But not like the two of you, and the violence you go through so easily scares us, unmans us. Bobby is the first person not of Ichiro’s blood that he’s put into his own personal registry, and he’s frightened to lose him.”

  “I get that. I’d be scared as hell to find out I’d almost lost you. Shit, a building fell on you and I thought I was going to die, and that was before we were even together.” I snorted, chuckling at the memory of digging through the rubble for his damned cat. “I understand what he’s feeling.”

  “I don’t think you do,” Jae argued with a sweet smile I suspected hid a verbal knife as sharp as the one that sliced Bobby open that afternoon. “You’ve already lost two people you loved deeply. It tore through you as much as those bullets did, the ones Ben put into you. You woke up in that hospital alone—or at least alone in your head—because your father had thrown you out and Mike wasn’t a good brother to you then. And you pushed through it. I don’t think Ichi feels he’s strong enough inside to survive losing Bobby. Or losing you. I’m not sure I am, but I know you love me and I know you will always fight to come home to me. But no one’s ever fought for Ichi. Maybe he’s scared Bobby won’t. I don’t know, but that’s something he’s got to work out with Bobby, not you. They have to talk about it, and Bobby has to make those decisions. I’ve learned that from you. Sometimes you have to accept the nature of the man you’ve fallen in love with, because those are the very reasons you fell in love with him.”

  “I fell in love with you because you wouldn’t give me a straight answer,” I teased. “You were like unwrapping a very complicated, tightly wound present who tasted like heaven after I walked through hell to get there.”

  “You were the most frightening, addictive temptation I’d ever seen,” he confessed, laughing brightly. The stars shimmered through the night sky just for a moment, or maybe it was just me seeing the joy in his eyes. “I hated you for making me want you, for making me dream about waking up next to you. I wanted you so much I used to cry sometimes at night because it hurt. I couldn’t find a way out of where I’d been put in my life, and I couldn’t risk losing what little love my family gave me on the maybe of you.”

  “Well, your sisters love you, as evidenced by their frequent flights back here whenever there’s a break in classes.” I kissed his temple, inhaling the scent of the vanilla shampoo we shared. “And you have me and Scarlet and Claudia and everybody else in my crazy family, including Mad Dog Junior. I just want Ichi to understand that he’s got all of that too. We’re not going to go away. No matter what happens.”

  “You, me, and Ichi were all thrown out by the people who should’ve loved us the most. The difference is, you and I had people who taught us how to love, like Rick and Claudia and Scarlet. I think Ichi reaching out to you and Mike was him taking that first chance, hoping to find love from brothers he never knew. Then Bobby came along,” Jae whispered, returning my kiss with a brush of his lips across mine. “And now his heart is full, and he doesn’t want it broken again. I told him he had to talk to Bobby. He called right as you came outside, but I told him to give you a little bit of time.”

  “I would’ve talked to him,” I protested with a sniff. “I’m just a little pissed off and mostly confused about this fucking case.”

  “You would’ve done two things—one, got into a fight with him again because neither one of you can apologize, or two, tell him it’s okay and then nurse your grudge like you were breastfeeding a dragon.” He shook his head, probably to cut me off before I could defend myself. Because that’s exactly what I was about to do. “Don’t deny it. I know you. I love you, but I know you. Now, it’s getting cold, and I want to go back inside where it’s warm. Grab the dog, and I will grab the bucket.”

  “I’ve got a very good way to warm you up,” I said, waggling my eyebrows at him. “I don’t even have to grab the dog to do it. That actually sounded a lot better in my head.”

  “You can warm me up all you like.” Jae grabbed the bucket’s handle, stashing his open bottle in the half-melted ice. “You and I are getting too old to be doing those kinds of things outside on the lawn furniture where the neighbors can see us. We have a bed—one we haven’t broken yet—and a shower with hot water. Let’s go use those, and in the morning, you can call your brother, and the two of you can figure out a way to apologize to each other without actually saying ‘I’m sorry.’”

  MORNING SLID around us, pulling the sleep from our eyes and wending a lust for coffee into the base of our brains. A splash of cold water on my face was enough to drive away the cobwebs, but it took the first hit of smoky, chocolatey brew for my mind to finally stop its wandering. I had a lot to do. Claudia was out for the day, something about the girls’ trip down to Disneyland, an annual gathering of the Dubois women, the wives and children of Claudia’s many sons. I forked over all of the tickets as a quarterly bonus for her, and each year it hurt more and more. But she enjoyed it, and I got to live vicariously through their family antics—stories told to me over the following weeks and usually accompanied by a souvenir they all picked out together.

  As a retired bus driver for the LA school system, I imagined Claudia’s pension didn’t go very far and that’s why she’d sought out work after they rolled her out. She’d been an anchor point in my life for so long I couldn’t imagine waking up in the morning without having her tear a strip off of my ego, shake off any sugarcoating, and promptly feed it to me for breakfast. I loved the hell out of her, but sometimes it was good to have a morning by myself.

  Especially since I had to wait for O’Byrne to get back to me about the ex-cop who lived next to the Brinkerhoffs and whether or not she had a chance to go through their apartment. The death of the fake Marlena was confusing. Someone hadn’t wanted her to talk, but really, what was she going to say? And what did she have to gain by passing herself off as Arthur’s granddaughter? I still also had no idea about who sent that guy after us in the alleyway, and more importantly, who the hell killed Adele Brinkerhoff.

  My phone rang as I strolled down the front walk toward my office, th
e two front rooms I’d closed off from the rest of the house to separate my business from my home life. It was a good theory, but in practice, I missed having the large front stoop and the broad covered porch with its grand entrance and heavy wooden door. While I’d done a lot of work in turning a former side entrance into the house’s front door, the cement slab and portico marked the visual punch of the grand old lady’s original façade.

  “But do I want to rent the place just to have a front door I’d like?” I muttered to myself, unlocking my phone with a swipe of my thumb. “McGinnis.”

  “Mac, it’s O’Byrne.” She sounded strained, but who didn’t at this point in an investigation? The sun hadn’t even made a full break from the mountains to the east, and I couldn’t imagine she’d taken in enough coffee to shake off the crap she’d been wading through over the last week. “Where are you?”

  “I’m about to open the front door of my office,” I said, rattling my keys near the phone’s speaker so she could hear them chime. “Why?”

  “I found out they let our guy go yesterday morning,” O’Byrne growled. “Some lawyer showed up, and I don’t know what judge he blew, but I come rolling in this morning to question him and they tell me he was cut loose. The bastards are still trying to run his prints for identification, and I’ve got no idea about where this guy is. He could be in the wind or circling back toward you.”

  “That is not what I need to hear this morning,” I muttered back. Wedging my shoulder against the screen door to hold it open, I went to fit my key into the knob when the heavy wooden door swung open an inch.

  “I’m going to send a uniform over,” she informed me through a crackle on the phone. “I really don’t know what the fuck is going on, but the first thing I need to do is find this guy.”

  “Yeah, about that….”

  I pushed into the main room, not bothering to turn on the lights. There was enough sun to wash through the filmy curtains Claudia put up a few weeks ago, pouring a bit of heavy cream into the light brown shadows pouring over the walls and furniture. Sitting at my desk was the man whose face I’d beaten in, his head shaved down to a gleaming dome and his generously bruised nose sporting a wide X bandage across his bridge. Stitches ran across his right cheek, and I took a small delight in seeing another row of stitches running from his jaw up nearly to his ear. He was dressed in an expensive suit, or at least it looked expensive in the semidark, much like an old whore who plied her trade under a flickering streetlamp so her Johns didn’t know she was old enough to be their grandmother.

  There was no sign of his expensive Italian loafers, but I did get a very good look at the gun in his hand—a gun he was pointing straight at me.

  “Hello, Mister McGinnis,” the man said with a clipped preciseness I’d only heard from fabric scissors Scarlet used while constructing one of her evening gowns. “Come in and close the door.”

  There were a lot of things I admired about Scarlet, performing when the need struck her and living her life as a kathoey whose powerful Korean lover kept her happy and safe. At that moment, what I most admired about her was the constant presence of squat, serious-faced Korean men whose jackets often bulged with guns and whose only job was to make sure she was safe.

  I really could have used one of those men at that moment, but all I’d brought with me was my phone and a little bit of anger I had at finding a killer sitting not far from where my husband worked at the back of our house.

  “Seems I found your guy, O’Byrne,” I said, not breaking eye contact with the asshole in my chair. “He’s here with me in my office, and for some reason, he seems to think I’m not going to kick his ass like I did the last time, just because he’s got a damned gun on me.”

  Fifteen

  JAE WAS right. I hold grudges. I’ve never seen a need not to, since the times I did get pissed off at someone, it was usually for a good reason. I think a guy coming down an alleyway intending to kill me would be a pretty good reason to hold a grudge, but some people might not see it that way.

  Those people would be wrong, but who am I to judge on their lack of common sense? God knows, I’ve made some pretty shitty decisions in my life, but getting shot in the middle of my office wasn’t going to be one of them, not if I had anything to say about it.

  “Close the door behind you, McGinnis,” the beaten-up asshole ordered me. “I don’t want any witnesses. Especially since you’ve been hard to kill. I’ve already missed you several times, and well, now game time is over. Because of you, my girlfriend is dead and my reputation has taken a bit of a hit. The girlfriend? I can get another one. Women are easily led into doing all kinds of things if you give them a little affection, but a reputation as good as mine isn’t so easily brought back to life.”

  “Got it, so the woman passing herself off as Marlena was your girlfriend, then? Her death isn’t on me, buddy. I didn’t kill her. And if you want the door closed, you’re going to have to do it yourself,” I replied, walking toward him. He lifted the gun another inch, following my central mass as it drew nearer to him. There wasn’t any mistaking his intent. There was no way I was going to get out of the room alive if he had anything to say about it. Luckily, he was only one part of the conversation. “LAPD is looking for you. It seems Detective O’Byrne has a couple of questions she’d like you to answer.”

  “So I heard.” His smile glittered, nearly as white as the bandage across his face, and I almost asked him who his dentist was. Although I imagine assassins probably live as healthy as they can, avoiding coffee, red meat, and cameras. “I imagine the boys and girls in blue will be showing up shortly, so we’re going to have to make this quick. Which makes me kind of sad, because I would like to spend a lot of time with that pretty little husband of yours. I’m not into men, but how do they say? Any port in a storm?”

  The arrogant often posed themselves in ways they learned from television or perhaps from studying despots. I’d seen it on the street when carrying a badge—young children fronting with an attitude far bigger than their bodies. And as I moved through the upper reaches of society on cases, the poses changed, but the bravado remained the same. There was very little difference between a thug snarling at me with a glittering gold grill, swearing he’d collect my eyeballs as some twisted participation trophy, and a powerful graying-at-the-temples CEO with a corner office overlooking Downtown Los Angeles and a phalanx of shark-toothed lawyers standing behind him. They all affected a loose-shouldered posture, draping limbs over chairs, desks, and sometimes the occasional mailbox or car if the situation called for it.

  Apparently they taught the exact same course of attempted intimidation at assassin school, because the bruised son of a bitch affected a nonchalant air, one leg flung over the arm of my executive chair, his elbow resting on his thigh to aim his gun at me while his other hand lay on my desk, a monstrously carved, elegant stretch of tiger oak I’d restored to its original glory. The openness of their limbs was meant to convey their lack of fear, almost as if goading their prey to attack them, secure in the knowledge they could respond with deadly force before the other person could get near.

  I was already near enough.

  Bobby might have taught me the elegant brutality and finesse of boxing, but I’d learned how to fight in Chicago. More importantly, I attended a school where my partially Asian features made me a target and my naïve, not-so-hidden speculative glances at other boys hadn’t gone unnoticed. I often wondered how my father didn’t know I was gay until I told him and my stepmom that horrible, never-ending day. Trips to the principal’s office were a weekly thing, and sometimes I was even joined by Mike, my squat powerhouse of an older brother, who looked even more Japanese than I did. I’d been called faggot and homo nearly as soon as I picked up my first pencil in kindergarten, so either my father was a master of denial—not something I could discount—or little kids were a lot more astute than the adults around them.

  I was hoping this asshole was one of those stupid adults, and it seemed like he was, bec
ause in the middle of his need to psychologically dominate me and threaten Jae, he left himself way too open.

  “That’s far enough,” he said, his curled-up smile tightening the skin across his face, and I knew that had to hurt, having broken my own nose more than a few times. “Time to say goodbye, McGinnis.”

  What a fucking cliché.

  I wished I had a snappy rejoinder on deck, but truth was, I really didn’t have time to banter in the style of action heroes and film-noir detectives. What I did have was the massive square avocado-green rotary phone Claudia insisted on keeping at her desk. I’d tried to talk her out of it, explaining I was going to have to angle her desk against the wall in order to feed the phone line to her sickly green beast, but when I’d unearthed it from the bowels of the Craftsman’s storage shed, where I’d put all of the old things I found when refurbishing the house, her eyes lit up. Tasked with cleaning out the shed, there were quite a few things I ended up tossing, but the green monstrosity was a throwback to Claudia’s childhood, and she insisted on having it.

  I was very thankful my office manager slash adopted mom had fallen in love with that damned phone.

  Especially when the asshole shot at me. Point blank. Aimed straight for my head. A single bullet.

  If I’d still been standing in front of him, he would have blown a hole the size of New Jersey through my skull. But since I had other plans, the piece of lead with my name on it screamed past my shoulder when I lunged for Claudia’s desk.

  Once again, the woman had my back and didn’t even know it, because her damned phone was as heavy as fuck and easily broke loose from its tether after I hooked my fingers into the space below the headset rest and yanked hard. Armed with a piece of nostalgia with the heft of a refrigerator, I clobbered him across the face.