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Authors: Rhys Ford

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BOOK: Dirty Secret
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That’s when the gunfire started.

A quick shove from behind, and I was tasting the pebbles and oil on the street. Mike’s heavy weight landed on my back, and what little air I had left in my lungs rushed out, leaving me gasping. I was more than mildly insulted when Mike pushed me down onto the asphalt and covered me with his body. I didn’t need my older brother to protect me. Besides, he was a lot shorter and smaller than I was, so he wasn’t really much use as a body shield.

“Get the fuck off of me.” I shoved Mike away. The walkie-talkie in my jacket pocket screeched with Trey’s screams. I was up as soon as Mike’s weight lifted, yelling at my brother as I headed to the back of the store. “Go after the guy. I’ll check on Trey.”

Throwing himself to the ground apparently made my brother deaf, because he ran behind me, as fast as his stumpy little legs could carry him. I was still spitting grit out of my mouth, and the road rash on my hands was beginning to sting. I wasn’t in the mood to be generous.

I was even less generous when I came around the corner of the building to find Trey sitting next to a battered green dumpster with his pants and underwear down around his ankles. Trey twisted slightly to look at us coming toward him, and what I could see of his skinny, bony ass wasn’t a pretty sight. I had no idea what the hell Bobby saw in the man’s stick-figure body and hooked-nose face. Trey’s cousin and resident twink seemed more like Bobby’s style.

The twink, Rocket, stood between Trey and the car, twitching nervously next to the remains of a shot-out headlight. His T-shirt had disappeared sometime after they’d moved to the back of the store, and his mouth looked suspiciously swollen. If anything, he was skinnier than Trey, nearly cadaverous, and pale. I could count the bones of his spine, and I was half-afraid the weights on his nipple rings would topple him off balance, pitching him forward. He held a brick in his hand, clutching it like it was a Bible.

Freddy, the store’s clerk, stood in front of him, looking surprised to see us. His mouth gaped, mimicking the blow-up dolls’ orifices. Unlike Rocket, he wasn’t clutching a brick. He had a wicked looking .357 pointed straight at Trey.

I skidded to a stop, and Mike slammed into my back. Freddy screamed, flailed, and the huge gun in his hand went off.

Several things happen to people when a gun goes off around them. Some scream. Others dive for cover. I, for some reason, did something my brother just did to me. I grabbed Rocket and covered him with my body to protect him.

This time, my brother chose instead to raise his hand—a hand with fingers clenched around a mean-looking Glock, which Mike dropped to aim at the sex shop’s round-faced, pimply clerk.

Rocket squeaked and tried to squeeze out from under me. The cloying scent of a bad grade of pot, and grimy boy sweat clung to him as tightly as he held onto his pet brick. His squirming turned to near seizures, and he swung his arms, smacking me across the cheek. Of course it was the hand with the brick. I saw stars and rolled over. If Rocket got shot at, maybe he could deflect it with his brick, like Wonder Woman.

“Drop it.” You’d think Mike was the former cop instead of me. He had the voice down. He probably practiced it while standing in front of a mirror.

It was enough to make Freddy drop the gun. It clattered when it hit the cement walkway, and I flinched, half expecting it to go off. Standing up, I brushed flecks of cement and boy debris off my jeans.

“What the fuck do you have a gun for?” I went to pick up the weapon. It was heavy, and the powder reek coming off it smelled dirty. Trey uncurled from the fetal position he’d taken on the ground. His skinny frosting-white ass disappeared from view as he sat up, and he gave me a sheepish smile when he saw me frown at his nakedness. “Pull your pants up, Trey.”

That’s when I noticed he had a glass juice bottle hanging from his dick.

“He’s stuck,” Rocket mumbled, scratching at a mosquito bite on his skinny arm. “His cock’s stuck.”

“Yeah, thanks. I kind of noticed that, Rocket.” I motioned for Freddy to step back, and he shuffled quickly, his eyes pinned on my older brother. The container was an iced tea bottle, a wider mouthed opening compared to a soda bottle, and Trey’s considerable girth was lodged firmly down its long neck. “Well, I guess that’s what Bobby saw in him.”

“Fucking hell.” Mike spat on the ground. “I’m going to go see if I can find the skinny guy with the fake chicks. You deal with this shit.”

“That asshole had a gun,” Freddy stammered, after Mike stalked off. “He was going to shoot me! He had a fucking gun!”

“To be fair, so did you,” I said, holding up the weapon I’d picked up. Shouldering Rocket aside, I approached Trey and looked down at his captured dick. “Trey, what the fuck happened?”

“I needed to pee.” Trey shrugged. He also smelled of pot, sweat, and the added bonus of sex. “Freddy locked up and came outside to get high with us. Then, I needed to pee.”

“There’s a bathroom inside of the store,” I pointed out. “Your store. The one you own.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think about that,” he admitted. “I had the empty bottle, and then Rocket started doing some things, so I got stuck. Freddy was going to try to shoot it off, but he missed.”

“He could have shot your dick off, stupid.” I looked away as Trey was still sitting bare assed on the filthy cement without pulling up his pants. Considering we were in back of a place where people bought lube and dildos, I’d have kept my naked butt as far away from the ground as possible, but it didn’t look like Trey was all that worried.

“He was going to hit it against the dumpster, but Freddy said it wasn’t a good idea,” Rocket mumbled. “We thought we’d try the gun first.”

Rocket’s tongue kept wandering through the piercing on the side of his lower lip, turning the skin red. I wondered if I’d ever been that young and stupid. Looking at Trey sitting on the ground with his legs spread wide open and with a glass sarcophagus around his dick, I didn’t think I’d been born that young and stupid.

“And the brick?” I was afraid to ask. “What were you going to do with that?”

“Oh, yeah. Right,” Rocket looked down at the brick, surprised to find it in his hand. “Trey told me to do this before Freddy said he could shoot it off.”

For a skinny, twitchy stoner, Rocket had great aim. The brick flew tight, hitting its target cleanly: right onto Trey’s glass-encased dick.

Chapter Two

 


L
OOKS
like you’ve got company,” Mike said as we pulled up to the old building I’d restored following the shooting.

Such a small phrase—the shooting—for such a fucking implosion of my life.

The sky was turning to a light dusky blue by the time we reached the massive Craftsman-style building that held both my home and my business, McGinnis Investigations. I’d given over the front bottom half to the office, and I’d turned the rest into a place to live. The landscaping had taken a beating from an incendiary device left by a former client’s daughter, so the front was a bit barren. A cement drive on the right side of the building led to my front door, and the dual-car port where I parked my Rover. The other side of the open air garage held Jae’s white Explorer, so Mike’d left his squat Porsche at the curb.

Sucking up the rest of the concrete curb was a long black town car with its customary accessories, a pair of square-jawed, thick-bodied Korean men dressed in black suits. The car was parked so they could clearly see the side of the building and where the front door to my home was. From what I could tell, the Koreans only had two purposes: chauffeuring and protection. They answered to a staunch Seoul-born man with shady connections to the Korean embassy. Since the businessman commanding their allegiance never visited me, they could only be here for one reason, to protect his lover.

Scarlet.

I’d met Scarlet years ago while working a vice sting at Dorthi Ki Seu, an elegant gentlemen’s club that catered to gay Asians, mostly Korean. She performed a torch song act there, slinking across the stage while singing smoky classics. Tall for a Filipino, her slender body seemed made for little blood-red dresses and sips of whiskey. Her beauty was timeless, with gorgeous features, a lush mouth, and skin the color of fresh milk with a dash of Kahlua to make things interesting. Without a doubt, Scarlet was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.

And she was also a man.

I’d probably met one, or maybe even both of the Korean men hovering near my house. Sadly, they all seemed to be hired not only for their deadly aim and hard fists, but also for their stony faces. I couldn’t tell any of them apart. It was even worse in the daytime when they wore sunglasses. I’d been worried about it until Mike told me he couldn’t tell them apart either, and he dealt with them a lot more than I did.

“Hey.” Mike paused before he got out of the Rover. “You going to bring Jae to the dinner with Mom and Dad?”

“I haven’t asked him yet.” I was tired, and there was a burning hole in my stomach from all of the bad coffee I’d inhaled over the past few hours. “It’s not like Dad wants me there, Mike. We haven’t talked in years.”

My father and Barbara, the woman he’d married after my mother died, put off their initial visit after I’d been shot by Jae’s crazy cousin, Grace. It wasn’t so I’d have time to heal before they visited me. It was because Barbara tore the ligaments in her ankle and needed a month before she could travel. I’d called Barbara “Mom” once. That was before she stood silent while my father railed on about me being a faggot and then did nothing when he tossed me out of the family.

“Cole.” Mike would be a good father one day. Not only had he mastered
cop
, but he also mastered
dad taken to the line
voice. “Tasha wants you there. Maddy wants you there.”

One thing about my brother, he never failed to pull out the big guns: the half sister I knew and his wife, two women I didn’t want to disappoint. I’d never met my other two sisters. This was the first time I’d been invited to see them.

Sighing, I rested my head against the steering wheel. “Fine, I’ll be there. I’ll ask Jae if he wants to come with me. Just tell Mad Dog not to count on him being there. He’s got his own family shit to deal with. He might not want to deal with mine too.”

“It’s in a couple of days, so don’t forget.” Mike got out and slammed the car door behind him. I got out and nodded to the Korean guys. Not surprisingly, they didn’t wave or smile back. “I’ll call you.”

I stood there in the rising sun as my brother got into his little sports car and headed back to his corner of suburbia. My neighborhood was just beginning to wake up. The coffee shop across the street already had its lights on, and someone was moving around behind the counter, filling up the pastry display cases for the morning rush. There were other old buildings near mine, many of them turned into boutiques or their insides chopped up into tiny apartments. A bottle-blonde woman jogged past, her breasts bouncing with every stride, but the Koreans didn’t so much as glance her way, their attention fully pinned to my building.

“Well, good night, guys.” They said nothing, watching me head to my front door. “Try not to burst into flames when the sun comes up.”

My front door was locked. It was a habit Jae had, locking the world out. Fitting my key into the knob, I opened the door to my home, and stepped in to be greeted by a tiny black demon screaming at me from the top of the stairs. She was a small cat, barely five pounds of black chinchilla fur and fangs, but Pearl Harbor envied her air-raid vocalizations. Jae didn’t need to lock the door to keep intruders out. The cat’s banshee screams did the job just fine.

“Morning, oh evil one.” Neko ignored my greeting and dashed off, a furious ebony streak bent on hell and the destruction of the upstairs bedrooms.

Most of the downstairs was wainscoted, with cherrywood paneling
and cream plastered walls. I’d stripped the wood, sanded it smooth, and restained it. She couldn’t do much damage there, other than the occasional eyeing of the massive comfortable couches spread about the living room that took up much of the first floor.

Upstairs was a different matter.

I’d papered the smaller bedroom with a silk damask print the cat loved to strip off the walls. I’d bought her a gigantic scratching post with enough holes and levels to house most of the city’s homeless. The wallpaper continued to suffer until Jae fitted her claws with something he called nail caps. They worked, so she couldn’t claw out anything, and looked pretty against her thick black fur. They also pissed her off something fierce.

Now I had a small black furry pissed off cat with glittering gold claws staying with me four days out of the week when Jae slept over. I feared she’d move on from clawing up my wallpaper to chewing off my testicles as I slept.

“Hello,
hyung
.” The locker of doors and owner of demonic black cats padded into the foyer from the living room, and my heart skipped. I didn’t blame it. My brain seemed to have taken its own vacation, because words failed me.

My dick, however, knew exactly what it wanted to say, and was as pissed off as Jae’s cat that we had company.

BOOK: Dirty Secret
12.24Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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