Murder and Mayhem (6 page)

“They’re nice. You’ve got a really good ass.” Charlene barely blinked when he shot her a dirty look. Waving away his disgust, she pouted. “Besides, you can’t run. You’ve got to fight this. You can’t let them take away everything you’ve done. It’s just not fair.”

“Done? What have I done?” The knife was elusive, but he did find a few vintage Chinese finger puzzles from a mail-in-box-top campaign from the fifties. “Shouldn’t you be packing shit up instead of talking to me here? Wonder if the cops found the damned knife and took it to match up to Dani’s wounds. That would be fucked-up.”

“Are you really going to let them take away your normal?”

Charlene’s words chilled his spine, and he stopped pulling out drawers to look at her. This time there were no tears in her big baby blues, just pity and sadness.

“Think about it, Rook honey. Here… this place… downstairs, it’s the first place you could call home. It’s your home, and I know you haven’t gotten around to accepting that because, I mean, look around you. It’s not like you’ve put down roots, but you could. If you tried. If you wanted to.”

“I—”

“Are you going to let Dani take
this
from you too?” she asked in her whispery, sugarcoated voice. “Don’t you want to have someplace where you live and everyone knows you? Like the coffee shop guy who flirts with you while he makes your order? Or the Chinese food delivery guy who knows you like wooden chopsticks instead of a plastic fork? Aren’t you sick of running, Rook? Of living out of trailers and suitcases because that’s all you think you’re worth? Because that’s what she’s taking from you, baby.
Your
normal.”

He wanted to protest, wanted to say something witty or even to tell Char to fuck off, but Rook found his throat closing in on his words, muffling his fear and anger. The loft was bare, boasting only a bed and a few plastic lawn chairs he’d gotten at a drug store down the street. His dishes were mostly Melmac pieces he’d found in estate lots he’d blind purchased at auctions. Hell, even his coffee machine had been one of those free-when-you-order deals online.

It was all disposable.

Just like he was.

Like he’d been.

Rook stood in front of what felt like a hundred open drawers and laid bare by Charlene’s words. His stomach did a final turn before settling into a lump in his guts. Honesty was never something he’d believed in. It got in the way of too many things he needed to do, grew too many morals and ethics if allowed to nest in his life, and the last thing Rook Stevens ever wanted in the past was to be burdened by an overabundance of right and wrong.

Except now when he
hadn’t
done the unthinkable—when he
hadn’t
crossed the one line he’d stood firm on in the past—taking another person’s life.

And he’d be damned if he was going to run for something he
hadn’t
done.

Not and lose everything he’d gained by turning his back on the life he’d had before. He’d worked past the itchy feeling of owning a building, of creating a life that wasn’t made out of smoke and mirrors, and even choked down the sick coming up from his stomach when he’d filled out paperwork to start a legitimate business and paid an aging starlet a decent wage so she could audition for parts she had no chance at.

Charlene was right. He’d earned his fucking
normal
, and neither Dani Anderson nor Los Angeles’s finest were going to take it from him.

He closed the drawers one by one, setting them back into place, then turned around to lean against the cabinet, nodding slowly at the woman on his bed.

“Yeah, you’re right. Screw running.” Even saying it out loud made his nerves tingle and curl up into themselves. “I’m going to fight this out. I’m worth that much, right?”

“And more, baby.” Charlene clapped, her voice hitting a high note sharp enough to pierce his eardrums. “Um, just one thing—hope you don’t mind if I take the cards and the costume anyway. I mean, I love you and everything, Rook, but I ain’t
that
stupid.”

The taxi cab driver pulled up in front of the looming castle the Martins called home, and Rook silently bore the hushed whistle from the driver when he caught sight of the brick monstrosity his great-great-grandfather paid to lug over from the British Isles. The place was a Pick-Up Stix game of brick and windows, laced with creeping ivy and set in a polished setting of formal gardens, house-sized fountains, and barricaded behind bristling wrought-iron fences.

Rook liked to think of it as
Barad-dûr
because if any place deserved to be called The Dark Tower, it was his grandfather’s looming mansion.

Rook’d been surprised when the taxi was waved through the fortified community gates once the security guard got his name, and he caught an even bigger surprise when the guard carded the driver’s till, paying for Rook’s ride with a flash of black plastic.

He was too tired to argue with the driver over a tip, pressing a twenty into the man’s hand and waving him off. Rook barely heard the cab pull away, and, suddenly confronted by the enormity of what he was doing, he wondered bleakly if it was too late to simply throw himself into the gigantic pool of geysers and statues someone’d thoughtfully left in the middle of the castle’s driveway.

But he wasn’t so tired that it didn’t shock the shit out of him when his grandfather opened the front door a second after he rang the bell.

Archibald Martin was everything Rook was not. A chiseled-from-stone despotic patriarch of a wealthy family, Archibald grew up with privilege, money, and a firm philosophy the world owed him its obedience and worship. Sporting a shock of thick white hair and a beaked nose built to intimidate, the man probably once would have towered over Rook, but time crimped his shoulders downward, and he used a cane to support an iffy back and hip. Still, Rook’s mismatched eyes looked back at him from under Archie’s wooly caterpillar eyebrows, hardened by resolve and age without a hint of tenderness for the young man standing on his doorstep.

“So you’ve come home, then?” Archibald barked, stepping slightly aside to let Rook in, a black velvet dressing gown swishing around his pajama-clad legs. “Not taking off to the wilds like your mother.”

“Nah, thought I’d spit in their fucking eye for once,” he commented softly, hefting a duffel of clothes and toiletries onto his shoulder. Rook still hadn’t crossed the threshold, held back by the pressing finality of it all. It was one thing to let a pack of lawyers chew him out of jail, but to tuck himself up under Archibald’s wing stuck something hard and sharp in his throat. Instead he stood still, silently weighing his actions.

“In or out, boy. Worse than a goddamned cat, you are,” Archibald grumbled. “I don’t have all night to stand here. I’m old. I need my sleep. You probably do too since those damned cops kept you for so damned long. Ought to fire those fucking lawyers if they couldn’t get you out before midnight. What’s the use of paying those vultures if they take that long to pick a corpse clean to the bone. Get in before I change my mind and shut the door in your face.”

That brought Rook up, and he cocked his head, staring at his grandfather. Something in Rook’s expression must have tickled the last remaining shred of decency in the old man’s soul, because his hard face softened, and Archibald shook his head with regret.

“I shouldn’t have said that. You don’t deserve that kind of shit from me. Bad enough you got it from your mother. I’m just—”

“A fucking asshole?” Rook supplied smoothly, shifting the pack’s strap until it lay more comfortably across his shoulder.

“I was going to say old, but fucking asshole works too,” his grandfather huffed. “Come in. We’ll find a place for you. You stay here and fight. I’ll have your back, boy.”

“Name’s Rook, old man,” he muttered, finally stepping across the threshold, and his grandfather sighed while closing the door.

“Yeah, I know, kid. It’s already bad enough you look and sound like me,” the old man muttered. “But did she have to name you after me too?”

“Fucker.” Rook ran his hand under the ice-water spigot set into the fridge, cooling off the scald he’d gotten from the complicated torture device masquerading as a coffee machine at the end of the counter.

So far that morning he’d lost a fight with the shower door, burned toast, and failed spectacularly at making a simple cup of java. A press of a button—the wrong button—and the squat metallic demon shot out a stiff tentacle and steamed his hand as if it were wrinkled cotton.

It wasn’t just the coffee machine that made him nervous. The whole damned castle was a trapdoor spider waiting to pounce on him every time he turned around. The Martins called it a house. Anything with three turret towers and too many fireplaces to count was a fucking castle in his book.

Once his mother threw her family into his face, he’d studiously avoided the place every time the carnie crew hit Hollywood, despite the riches lurking in the house’s depths. The edifice had been renovated numerous times, mostly patchwork rooms here and there, and apparently whomever had a hair up their ass changed the paint on only some of the walls in a failed attempt at interior design.

As a result, the place was like walking through time portals every time he moved from one room to the next. Thankfully, one of his aunts favored clean lines and strong furniture, because he’d found a bedroom he could sleep in, one without deer heads or rococo embellishments heavy enough to kill him if something toppled over. It was weird. Sleeping in the middle of things museums would beggar themselves to own. Even weirder was him not stuffing a lot of it into rolling suitcases and making a break for it.

Mostly he felt like a piece of dog shit hiding among chocolate cakes, but damned if Rook was going to tell anyone that.

Luckily, the kitchen was modern, a gleaming triumph of impractical appliances that did everything but what they were supposed to do. Rook was pretty certain the refrigerator was large enough to hold a mammoth, and he couldn’t really see the need for two walk-in freezers, but someone apparently disagreed with that assessment. The first time he’d wandered into the kitchen to get something to eat, it took him nearly fifteen minutes before he found where the food was kept.

Silverware shouldn’t have its own cabinet, he’d grumbled, and then scolded his fingers when they itched to open up the locked hutch just to see what was stashed inside. The temptation was still there—especially now that he was up for a murder he didn’t even commit.

Not that he hadn’t wanted to kill Dani Anderson, but if he was going to be pinned for it, Rook would’ve wanted to earn her blood on his hands.

But not as much as he longed for coffee at that moment.

Eyeing the door to the pantry room, Rook pondered, “Wonder if they have instant in this crypt?”

“The day instant coffee is served in this house will be on the day of my funeral,” a rough old voice boomed from the kitchen threshold. “And that’s because someone snuck it in.”

Rook could see traces of himself in the old man. Mostly it was in the face, but sometimes, when the man spoke, Rook could swear he heard himself in his cranky grandfather’s words. Archibald Martin’s blue and green eyes were like Rook’s, and they were about the same height—or had been before age stooped the man over. Their hair parted in the same way, straight down and into their faces, but the Martin patriarch’s full head of silver was ruthlessly cut back away from his forehead and slicked down with what smelled like VO5. Today he wielded an ebony cane for support, but from what Rook could see, the only thing weak about his aging grandfather were his outdated opinions.

His grandfather hated Rook’s homosexuality. Two gays in the family—Rook and his cousin Alex—was two too much for Archibald Martin, and hardly a day went by without his opinions being expressed loudly and clearly. Rook, on the other hand, loathed Archibald’s closed-mindedness with more passion than he probably should have given the old man, but while he didn’t mind being looked down on for being trash, Rook drew the line at being damned for who he fucked. They’d fought often and hard, usually resulting in one or the other throwing their hands up in disgust and quitting the field.

So while they’d reached a détente of sorts between them, Rook still had been shocked as shit to discover a team of expensively dressed lawyers popping into the interview room nearly as soon as he’d opted for legal counsel. For once, the old man’s manipulative and intrusive puppet mastering did Rook some good.

He was just left wondering what it was going to cost him.

Because Archibald Rook Martin did
nothing
without exacting payment of one kind or another.

“Hey, Archie.” Rook nodded at his grandfather, then turned around to the coffee machine again. “Don’t suppose you know how to work this stupid thing.”

“Considering this is the first damned time I’ve stepped foot in this kitchen in my entire life, I should say not.” The old man sniffed imperiously as he ambled over to Rook’s side. Eyeing the appliance, he grumbled. “Where’s Rosa? She’ll make your coffee for you. That’s what we pay her for.”

“Who’s Rosa?” Rook opened a small hatch he’d not noticed before and found a tiny white booklet inside. “Ah-hah, instructions. Or a warranty. And it’s in French. Fuck me sideways. Anyway, Rosa? Who’s that? Wait, let me guess, you’ve got your own household troubleshooter who comes in to wipe your butts when you need it.”

“Don’t be an ass, boy. Rosa’s our… cook. She should be making you coffee.” Archibald snatched the booklet from Rook’s fingers. “Here, let me see that. I want to throttle your mother every time I discover your ignorance in the most basic of things. Who doesn’t know French?”

“Probably Rosa. Whoever she is.” Rook crossed his arms over his chest, moving aside when his grandfather shoved him away from the machine. “Your cook’s name isn’t Rosa. She’s not even a she.”

“What? No, you’re wrong. All right, maybe not the cook but….” A thick, furry eyebrow popped up over Archibald’s green eye. “
Someone’s
named Rosa.”