Unfiltered & Uncensored

by Payge Galvin

  The two of them kept laughing, and then, abruptly, Hippie Chick grabbed Joe IV by his tie and planted her lips firmly against his. She kissed him, hot and fast, blond dreads flowing behind her, and then they both pulled away, gasping, while an unmistakable bulge grew in the senator’s son’s pants.

  “What the fuck was that?” Joe asked.

  “Oh, come now, surely your dad isn’t so repressive you don’t know the answer to that question.” The girl was grinning. “I’m Whitney, by the way.”

  “Whitney, you are certifiably insane,” Joe told her, but the heat in the look he gave her belied his words. “And I assure you, I have not left my sex education in the hands of my father.”

  Whitney glanced down at the bulge and raised her eyebrows. “That your way of proving it?”

  “Oh, I have all sorts of ways of proving it,” Joe assured her.

  They stared at each other, and the air between them grew thick with a heat that had nothing to do with the Arizona summer. They looked like they were ready to jump each other right there, right now.

  Max turned back to listen to the senator, or did his best to look like he was. His heart began to pound. Catching oh-so-pure Senator Cunningham’s son with a total-stranger in his pants—a clearly not-at-all-conservative-total-stranger—would be nearly as good a story as catching the chastity-obsessed senator himself.

  Even though neither of them was moving, somehow Whitney and Joe’s fingers had gotten tangled together. As if they’d had the same thought at the same time, they turned away from the pontificating senator.

  “What, not going to miss your chance to hear the esteemed senator speak, are you?” Joe teased.

  “Oh, I’ve heard it all before,” Whitney said.

  “Yeah, me too,” Joe said, sounding a bit weary.

  The two of them walked away together.

  Sweet, Max thought, and followed them, visions of the repressed senator’s brat screwing with a hippie chick who stood against all he believed in dancing in his head. If he could get pics of that, those photos could make the front page, with Max’s rocking byline and photo credit beneath them.

  Max wasn’t stupid about it. He kept his distance, looking casual and keeping out of the cold glow of the streetlamps, imagining himself disappearing into the background of a scene in a play. It wasn’t hard. Most people thought Max was pretty harmless at first glance. At second and third glance, too. A nice guy, with a nice smile. And mostly, that worked for him. People said no one liked good boys, but that wasn’t actually true. You could get away with a lot if people thought you were harmless. He’d known that ever since the night in high school when the mom of the girl he’d just lost his virginity to had thanked him for taking care of her little girl, with no clue what had just gone down in the back of her SUV. Being a nice guy was like having a get-out-of-jail-free card in your back pocket.

  Only Claire had never really fallen for it. The moment they’d met, at some frat party off campus, she’d flashed him a wicked smile and he’d returned it, and he’d known that she’d known—known without asking—that deep down he was no more a good boy than she was a good girl.

  Max forced away thoughts of just how well they knew each other now and focused on snapping more pictures with his cell as he walked, carefully keeping his flash off and doing his best to look like he was just texting as he walked. Pictures of Joe and Whitney walking together wouldn’t be worth anything alone, of course. He needed to catch them doing more.

  Judging by the way Joe was openly admiring Whitney’s body and Whitney’s hand kept straying toward the waistband of his pants, they were totally going to be doing more.

  Max spent the next several hours following them; first into an all-organic burger joint that Whitney chose, then a not-at-all-organic seedy bar that Joe chose. As Max watched them from the shadows over a beer, they moved closer and closer, until Whitney was practically in Joe’s lap—Max got pics of that too—and they ... talked.

  Seriously, they talked and talked and fucking talked, until the bartender finally told them to buy something else or get out.

  Max followed them down the street as they kept talking, somehow tangling arms and legs all around one another as they did. By this time Max could have waved his hand right in their faces and they wouldn’t have noticed. By the time they reached the doorway of a place called The Coffee Cave, Whitney’s tongue was down Joe’s throat and Joe’s hand was up Whitney’s skirt, and the two of them had shut up at last. They stumbled into the place together.

  Max followed them in. The Coffee Cave was not a button-up shirt sort of place, but by then he’d untucked the shirt, undone the top few buttons, and lost the suit jacket. Which still left him way too dressy for this place, but it would have to do.

  As the door swung shut behind Max he saw Joe and Whitney disappear into the restroom in the back.

  The restroom? Really? Max snapped another pic as the door swung shut behind them. Way to keep it classy, Joseph Cunningham, IV. He heard the lock on the door click shut as he reached it. He leaned against the wall outside, like he was just out there waiting to take a piss. He kept his phone out, pretending to be texting again. When the door opened and those two stumbled out, clothes askew, Max would get his picture—and get out of there before anyone knew.

  From the front room, a singer way too good for this place was belting out tunes while strumming on his guitar. On the other side of the door Max heard gasping. “Fucking belt!” Whitney screamed, and then they slammed against the door. More slamming followed, with a side of moaning loud enough to hear halfway across the city. Max ignored the rising pressure in his own pants, or the fact that dirty bathroom sex or not, what was going on in there was damn hot. He focused on fiddling with his phone, switching it to record. Clearly after a week alone he was already a little desperate.

  Two girls reeking of alcohol came running back toward the bathroom, a short brunette in tottery heels and a taller blonde wearing a Birthday Girl tiara. The brunette tried the doorknob, then pounded on the door. “Get out of the bathroom! Puke trumps pee!”

  “Stop saying puke,” the blonde moaned, slumping back against the wall.

  Thump. The brunette gasped and yanked her hand back as the bathroom door rattled. Thump. A breathless giggle filtered through the cheap plywood. Thump.

  “Are you humping against the door?” the brunette yelled. “Are you kidding me? Vomit definitely trumps sex!”

  The blonde suddenly straightened and, looking very green around the gills, delivered several impressively accurate kicks to the door handle with her high-heeled boots. She shouted, “There are people out here who need the bathroom!”

  One last kick knocked the door latch loose and the door came flying open. Joe and Whitney tumbled out, Joe’s pants around his legs, Whitney’s skirt hiked up to her armpits.

  Max didn’t hesitate. He snapped his picture.

  The flash went off.

  Fuck! He must have flipped the switch when he’d turned on the recorder. Joe looked up and his eyes met Max’s. Joe’s gaze narrowed and he gave Max a look so dirty it could have melted paint. Max made his way quickly out of there as Joe and Whitney straightened their clothes and the drunk girls bolted into the restroom. Behind him he heard the sound of puking.

  Ahead of him, he heard a commotion. It was followed by a short, sharp shot.

  A gunshot. Max froze.

  He looked toward the front of the shop, still not moving. A man in black motorcycle boots lay on the ground, bleeding freely from a stomach wound. A studious-looking woman in a short skirt and heeled boots slumped in a chair as another woman took a gun from her hands. On the counter beside them, a cup of steaming espresso cooled.

  What the fuck? Max wasn’t about to die here, not right after getting his career-making photo. He backed warily toward the counter, watching the other customers in the room, who were quietly and not-so-quietly freaking out.

  “I killed him,” the studious girl whispered. Why had she had a gun if s
he hadn’t meant to kill him?

  How had the words I killed him ever become part of this crazy night? Max glanced down at the body. Blood slicked the floor all around, and its metallic scent filled the room, mixing with the scent of coffee grounds. Max looked away, telling himself he did so out of respect, not squeamishness. He felt a strange detached numbness kicking in as he took in the scene around him, like his mind and body weren’t quite connected to one another.

  He saw Joe—clothes more or less on again—slamming the door shut. “Whoever is in this room, is in the room,” the senator’s son said. The body on the floor didn’t seem to disturb him. “And we’re not leaving until we sort this shit out.” Who the hell had put him in charge, anyway?

  Max must not have been the only one thinking that, because everyone started talking at once, while Whitney patted the arm of a woman with a bible. Max kept his distance as he watched them. Something was wrong.

  Max laughed bitterly to himself. What could be more wrong than a dead man on the floor?

  He forced himself to turn back to the body, trying to figure out the answer to that not-quite-rhetorical question as his numbness grew. Shock, Max thought, giving the numbness a name. People went into shock when they saw dead bodies, because people were sensible that way.

  But there was something more wrong here than a dead body, and Max needed to figure out what. He needed to do it now, shock or no shock, because once he left this room there would be no second chances.

  Max’s hands were shaking. When had that started? He steadied them and steadied his breath as well. Later, he promised himself. You can freak out about all of this later.

  He looked back to the dead man. The floor was slick with blood, but the man’s wound had stopped bleeding. Max kept looking. There was a lot of blood there, but was it really enough to kill someone?

  Did that matter? It wasn’t like the amount of blood on the floor changed the fact that the man most definitely was dead.

  Max’s hands were shaking again. Focus, he told himself firmly. The dead man’s wound was a gut wound. Abdominal wounds killed, but they didn’t kill quickly—that was what made them so ugly. Max knew that from his forensics classes, just like he knew the wound was nowhere near any number of arteries that could give such a fast death.

  Mr. Motorcycle Boots shouldn’t be dead. Not yet.

  So why was he? Max kept looking at the body. Boots’ skin had an unnaturally bright red tint to it that also made no sense. If anything, the man’s skin should have been deathly pale, if blood loss or internal gunshot-related injuries had killed him.

  Which meant they hadn’t. The poor trembling woman slumped in the chair had shot the man, there was no denying that, but she hadn’t killed him. Something else had.

  It wasn’t only shock that made Max’s hands shake now. He could only think of a few other ways Boots might have died so fast. One was a random heart attack, but a heart attack should have made his skin paler, too—not redder, as if extra oxygen had gotten trapped in his blood. Heart attacks didn’t do that, but poisons—some poisons—did.

  Max’s hands went suddenly still. Sex was one story, but Death was another. And there was a story here. There was one hell of a story here, and it made Joe’s antics seem tame by comparison.

  An unnatural sense of calm took over, shoving Max’s numbness into an I’ll-deal-with-you-later corner. He’d come here looking for a story, and he’d found one, and no way was he going to lose it.

  He drew a deep breath and looked around the room for possible sources of poison. A cup sat steaming on the counter, hotter than any smoking gun. No one was looking at that coffee cup. Which was probably the dead man’s coffee cup.

  Max reached out and grabbed the cup in a single casual motion, as if it had been his all along.

  The man could have been poisoned some other way. But Max knew a lead when he saw one, and damned if he wasn’t going to follow it. He remained apart from the others, looking casual as if his life depended on it. It just might. Because if the girl with the gun hadn’t killed Boots, someone else in the room had.

  From across the room the shorter of the drunk girls shouted, “Violet’s family burns bodies!” as if to prove to Max that he was surrounded by a group of crazy people. They all began talking about how to burn Boots’ body, as if that actually made sense. Which it did, if someone in this room wanted to hide the evidence. Max tightened his hold on Boots’ coffee cup as Whitney offered to get rid of the car—talk about screwing and taking off—and then they were all exchanging names.

  When they asked Max’s name he gave them his best don’t-look-at-me shrug. He tossed in an innocent nice-boy smile for good measure as he muttered his name under his breath, hopefully too low for anyone to hear.

  He made sure he caught all of their names, though, all but the studious shooter, who didn’t give one. He did a double-take when he realized the jock by the body was Blake Malone, Rio Verde’s star quarterback. A quarterback, a senator’s brat—all sorts of unexpected people were hanging out in The Coffee Cave tonight, doing all sorts of unexpected things.

  Blake headed outside with the barista named Sugar, while another barista, Cass, helped Joe wrap the body in trash bags.

  Max fought the growing queasiness in his own gut aside. Throwing up was another sign of shock, one that was way harder to hide than shaky hands. Max glanced around the room. No one was paying much attention to him, so he made sure his flash was off and took a few stealth pictures of the body before they took it away. When the door opened and Blake and Sugar went out to the car, Max watched, committing the license plate number to memory, too.

  The jock and the barista came back in and dumped some bags on the floor.

  And then the shit got even realer. Because there was money in those bags. A whole boatload of money. That sort of money didn’t come out of nowhere, any more than the willingness to kill a man did. Drug money. There was no other explanation, especially when the drugs themselves—two kilos of coke—showed up moments later.

  Cass and another student, Lauren, began insisting they should all take a share of the money and run.

  Taking that money would be stupid. A nice boy would never take more than a hundred thousand in dirty cash, story or no story. But not taking the money would mean letting the killer know Max was opting out from the start, which would be even stupider—not to mention destroy any chance he had of finding out who had done this. If Max looked like he knew what was really going on here, he might not just lose a story. He might lose his life and his chance to bring the bastard who’d done this to justice.

  Claire would like seeing bastards brought to justice. You didn’t work for a police department, even at a desk job, if you didn’t like that sort of thing,

  Max was going to get this story and get the killer behind bars, no matter the risks. When the others looked at him to see if he’d take his share of the cash, he just shrugged. “I like money,” he said. He waited while they counted out the bills, his smile still plastered in place.

  And then Max was out of there. Money, coffee, story, score.

  Chapter 3

  Claire

  Claire was an idiot.

  She’d known it the moment she’d left Max’s bed. She’d known it as she walked out the door.

  But she didn’t look back. She couldn’t.

  She glanced at Max’s latest text, but she didn’t answer that, either. But she wanted to. Oh, she wanted to.

  Sure, his inability to settle on a major—let alone a life plan—was irritating, and the fact that he hadn’t told her about his most recent career change sooner was even more so. They would have had a fight about that regardless. But if that were all that were going on, she’d answer his damn texts. There were an awful lot of them. They’d meet over lunch, and they’d work it out, just like always.

  Then they’d make up. Claire smiled as she pictured Max’s sweaty limbs tangled up with hers. Max did amazing makeup sex.

  But now she sighed instead, shu
t the phone, and stared out the window of her car into the empty parking lot as she waited for her target. Streetlamps cut through the 2 a.m. dark at the edges of the lot but didn’t reach its center. Oddly enough, not all drug dealers did business beneath the bright desert sun. Made them easy targets.

  Claire was good at hitting targets. She was good at lots of things.

  There was a lot Max didn’t know about her life. The truth was, she was hiding a hell of a lot more than a simple change of major from him.

  It had all made sense at the time. When she’d met Max, she was coming off her second breakup in less than a year, with a guy who’d thought “undercover cop” was an awesome career choice right up until he realized it meant Claire didn’t need him to protect her. That at the time she’d still wanted him for any manner of reasons didn’t matter. Too many men were looking for a fragile toy they could take care of. Claire never had been, never would be, that girl. She could take care of herself just fine.

  When her eyes met Max’s at a crowded party just a few nights later, she felt the heat between them like a physical thing, before they even touched. Never mind his innocent exterior—she knew the moment she saw him that he wanted her as much as she wanted him. So she made a quick, desperate judgment call: when he asked what she did in the small talk that followed, she told him she had a desk job down at the station.

  A desk job! What was she thinking? It wasn’t that desk work wasn’t important, but that wasn’t who Claire was. There was so much more that she could do. She’d more than proven that, starting in the department before she’d even graduated, convincing them time and time again to bend their age requirements as she proved just how much she was capable of. She loved her work, and she loved being able to make a difference out in the field.

  And, it turned out, she loved being with Max, and what she expected to be a harmless rebound fling turned into much more, in bed and out of it, until she was ready to get down on her knees and thank the asshole who’d broken up with her so it could happen. She’d never used the “L” word before and meant it like she did now.