Sloe Ride (34 page)

“Kel.” Kane shot his friend a disgusted look. “It’s six in the morning, and I’m sitting outside of some teacher’s house, holding a cup of coffee Miki made—which could go from soup to oil—and hoping the guy inside of said house doesn’t have a hard-on for my baby brother and is killing people out from under Quinn. What part of this face says ‘Sure, let’s turn around and go have pancakes at IHOP instead’?”

“Just saying.” Sanchez sighed in return. “Something tells me we’re either going to need riot gear going in or get laughed out of the force coming down on a guy with petunias in his front yard.”

An access alleyway was going to be as good as they got for a parking space, especially in the tight streets of Merris’s old-tree neighborhood. The houses were on single lots, long rectangles taken up mostly by old wooden structures built with a longing for a frillier time. Kane counted five turrets among the three houses near Merris and about as many bay windows as there were cars. It was a few blocks of nostalgia, dew-kissed streets where children chased after ice cream trucks in the afternoon and people sat out on Adirondack loungers to drink iced tea in the early evening.

He’d grown up in a neighborhood much like the one Graham Merris called home, and while Kane couldn’t imagine the earth-tone shingled walls concealed a murderer, he knew better. His gut told him ugly lived just under the skin of most people, and sometimes all it took was one ill-timed word to let go of the killing beast seething beneath the surface.

Although—taking another sip of Miki’s dinosaur-remains coffee—it wasn’t that far of a leap to go from placid to rage if he drank much more of the sludge he’d tried to offset with sugar and cream.

“Can’t anybody in my damned family make coffee right?” Kane got out of the sedan, glancing at the blooms lining the short cement walk up to a pristine, prissy bungalow draped with enough gingerbread to attract packs of out-of-work Christmas elves. “And those are impatiens, Sanchez.”

“Gotta admire a man who knows his flowers,” Kel muttered at Kane’s back. “Want to put on a couple of vests, or do you think we’re going to be safe from the mad professor?”

“Shit. Go in vested, he’ll know we’ve popped him.” He chewed on the inside of his cheek, thinking. The alley gave them a bit of cover, as did a high, thick hedge wrapping around the property next to Merris’s. They’d thrown their gear into the unmarked’s trunk, mostly as a precaution, but Kel’d called out a good point. They just didn’t have enough on Merris to know how he’d react to a pair of cops coming down on him. “But I don’t want to go in stupid. We got any info on guns for him?”

“Nothing that says stone-cold killer.” Kel tapped his phone’s screen, scrolling through his transcribed notes. “Just what you’ve got on him and the twelve hundred activist groups he belongs to.”

“Yeah he’s big into saving the show-tune singing naked mole whales covered in gluten, but nothing with a gun.” More chewing, and Kane forced himself to stop before he drew blood. “Vests on. Jackets over. Let’s not be stupid.”

It took them a few minutes—minutes Kane felt were worth the time—and other than a little old woman wearing a pink floral housecoat toddling out to get her morning paper, they saw no one else on the street. The eye fuck he got from the purple-haired woman was enough to bring a smile to Kane’s lips, and he winked at her before she headed back into the house.

“Quit flirting with the natives,” Sanchez growled.

“Hey, she started it.” He adjusted his harness, then slid on his leather jacket, checking his radio clip. “You ready?”

“Yeah, let’s do this.” Kel peered down the alley. “Want to do a walk-around? There’s a pass-through back there. We can check to see if his car’s in the back garage.”

“Sounds good. Didn’t see what he’s got registered to him out front.” Kane scanned the street again for Merris’s import. “Let’s go knocking on Merris’s door.”

They didn’t go in hot. Nothing in Merris’s background said he’d come out to introduce the cops to his little friends. Instead, Kel kept watch as Kane checked out the single-car wood-slat garage behind Merris’s tidy little house. He had a sense of déjà vu skulking around the structure. It’d been almost a year ago he’d come around Vega’s broken-down house with its rattle-boarded shed in the back to find Miki lying on the ground, hands bloody and teeth bared.

Kel cleared his throat. “Kind of weird. Garage kind of looks like—”

“Yeah, that crossed my mind too.” Thankfully, they ran into nothing more menacing than a beady-eyed crow perched on a weathered wrought-iron chair. Peering through a small diamond-shaped window built into the end wall, Kane spotted a squat silver import inside. “License plate matches to Merris. So unless someone grabbed him for a pancake buffet, he should be inside.”

“You’ve got pancake buffets in your neighborhood?” Sanchez added something in petulant Spanish. “Seriously, it’s like you guys have hot and cold running maple syrup in your toilets up on that hill.”

“Sanchez, I’m four blocks from Chinatown and living with a boyfriend that on his good days can be called feral.” Kane gave his partner a nudge in the ribs with his elbow. “All we’ve got in that house are packets of shoyu and Sriracha.”

“Still, hot boyfriend.”

“Yeah, best thing about the whole deal.” Kane grinned, knowing he probably looked foolish. “Stupid crazy about him. Enough to give up maple syrup.”

“That’s just crazy talk, Morgan. Fucking crazy talk.” Sanchez stopped in his tracks, carefully sidestepping a concrete squirrel perched on a herringbone-tile patio spanning the back of the house. “Hey, check out the back door.”

Kane spanned his fingers over the hilt of his gun, easing carefully around an urn of strawberry plants, their tiny white buds just beginning to push through. The back door was open a crack, a filmy curtain hem fluttering through the space. He cocked his head, drawing close enough to listen through the slightly open door. Kane held his breath, concentrating on any noises coming from inside the house.

The crow shot out a caw, startling Sanchez. Kane fought back a chuckle, then nodded to the door. “Cover me. Let’s go in live and see if Merris just forgot to close up the place after tossing the bird there his morning liver.”

“Damned thing looks like it eats livers too,” Kel groused. He drew his weapon, keeping its muzzle down. “Let’s go in, Morgan.”

The back door swung open with the barest of touches, a testament to Merris’s attention to detail. Kane waited until Sanchez seated his feet into place, poised to go in on Kane’s lead, then called out, hoping to draw Merris out. “Professor Merris! This is the police. Your back door is open. We are going to come in. For your safety, please position yourself in the middle of a room with your hands up.”

The house echoed with Kane’s forceful voice, but no one answered. The crow bitched its displeasure, rattling off a long caw before taking wing. Somewhere in the neighborhood, a pair of dogs began to exchange a flurry of barks, trailing off after an old man’s weedy voice told someone to come in.

Kane craned his neck slightly, keeping an eye on the door as he reached for his call button. Clicking on the mouthpiece, he cleared a channel. “Dispatch, Morgan and Sanchez, 10-35. 910 at current address. Request possible assistance.”

He rattled off their unit codes, listening through the traffic as Dispatch gave them clearance to go in. A nearby unit caught the call, responding to their request for backup and Dispatch rattled back an acknowledgment. “Clear to go in, 5A17. Responding unit inbound to location. ETA two minutes.”

“Acknowledged, Dispatch.” Nodding once at Kel, Kane jerked his head toward the door “Let’s go, Sanchez.”

Merris’s house was cool, drenched in shadows and chill from the morning air and shrouded sun. The back door opened up into a mudroom, a matching pair of old Whirlpools dominating one long wall. A black metal shelving unit held cleaning supplies as well as several pairs of bright yellow Wellingtons, their rubber sides and soles scrubbed clean of dirt.

“Kind of a neat freak,” Sanchez noted softly. “Not the kind of guy who’d leave his back door open. Let’s push it in.”

The mudroom became a square kitchen, an avocado, black-and-white throwback from the 1950s. The appliances were vintage, gleaming a soft buttery green despite the lack of direct light. The air tasted of lemon, wax, and air freshener. There was no sign of a dog or cat, no bags of kibble or a stray hair caught up on the metal-and-Formica table set into a breakfast nook off of the kitchen.

They got five feet in when Kane spotted a glistening trail of blood speckling a tied-rag rug near an arch leading to the main part of the house. The rug bunched up against a shoe, a white sneaker with a coin-sized crimson dot soaked into its canvas top.

“Fucking hell.” Sanchez took a step back, requesting Dispatch for a lockdown on the street. His gun stayed pointed down, his shoulders stiff and ready should someone or something burst out from the front of the house. “Dispatch, acknowledging response.”

The rest of the house was empty, lacking even the shoe’s twin. Merris’s clothes were there, no obvious spaces in his closet or dresser. The living room bore signs of a struggle, a turned-over magazine rack, its accordion sides shattered into pieces and tossed about the opening foyer. The morning’s paper littered the few feet of hallway connecting the front door to the living room, its pages crumpled. A few more drops of blood soaked through the Sports section, mottling an article about a badminton league in Russian Hill.

“Blood looks pretty new. Not quite brown in the middle,” Kane noted, lifting his voice loud enough for Sanchez to hear. “Merris definitely isn’t here, but he was. And just about an hour ago.”

“I’ve got some blues coming in. We’ll start canvassing the area. Someone had to have seen something.” Kel exhaled hard, an irritated scowl etched into his forehead. “God damn it, Morgan. We were so fucking close.”

“We’ve got even bigger problems than Merris missing.” Throaty engine sounds shook the front windows, thick-bodied cop cars pulling up to the curb. “Without Merris, we’re back to fricking square one—and I sure as shit don’t want to be telling my baby brother he might have lost one of his friends.”

Sliding around in my dreams

Your inky black kiss

Staining my life

With something I’ll never miss

You pushed yourself into me

Down deep into my soul

Wish I could dig you out

Burn you till I’m whole

—Ink Black Kiss

R
AFE
WOKE
to an empty bed. Empty except for a wrinkled, barely furred cat sprawled out on Quinn’s pillow like a runny pancake. Harley sniffed once at his face, then began to nibble on Rafe’s eyelashes, huffing heavily when he jerked his head out of the way.

“Okay, time to get up when the cat starts chewing on you.” A quick piss and toothpaste across his teeth, and Rafe was ready to start the day. Or at least the midmorning, he confirmed with a glance at the oversized clock in the hallway. Tossing on a pair of sweats, shirt, and Vans, he winked at Harley as she watched him from her perch on the pillows. Dressed, he gave the cat a scritch across her pink belly and intended to go looking for his lover.

Lover.

It was hard to wrap his head around. Quinn snuck up on him. One second he was there, in the background where Rafe’d needed him to be. Then the next, Quinn was in his face… in Rafe’s heart… and had no intention of fading back to the nebulous shelf he’d been put on back when they were barely men.

Rafe’s knees gave out from under him, folding him onto the edge of the bed. Harley slithered around on her adopted perch, angling herself beneath his fingers, and Rafe absently rubbed a spot he knew would make her drool with pleasure.

“I’m fucking stupid in love with your daddy. You know that, Harley?” If the cat knew her name, she made no sign of acknowledging its use. To be fair to the cat, she appeared more interested in getting the velvet on her stomach ruffled than actual conversation, but Rafe didn’t care. In some ways, talking to Harley was a hell of a lot easier than having a discussion with practically everyone else he knew.

Except Quinn.

“You know a lot of people say your dad’s off his head, gargoyle.” The drool started, a slow well of saliva on the edge of her curled-up lip. “He’s not, you know. Just kind of looks at the world through a stained-glass brain. And see, cat, he
shares
that shit with me. Me. Some fuckup who had the damned fucking good luck of hooking up with some badass Irish kid named Connor who didn’t give a shit I was going to school with too-short pants and worn-out shoes.”

Harley mewled her displeasure as Rafe patted her stomach, butting his arm for him to continue.

“Sure, hard life you’ve got here, cat.” He gave Harley a quick ruffle, running his nails over her body, and she stretched, working her toes out. “You’re just like him, you know? Kinda odd at first, but then you slid right under my skin. Okay, Harley, time for some food and maybe talking your dad into doing nasty things on the living room couch.”

There was a hint of coffee in the air, acrid and bitter as if brewed too strong and too long ago. Curious, he headed first to the kitchen, cutting off at the V in the hall and found… no Quinn and a definitely scorched coffeemaker.