L. A. Heat (25 page)

“Easy, baby,” David gasped. “We got all night.”

Chris wanted to tell him no, they didn’t, because
he was going to die soon if David didn't finish what he had started.

David responded to his need, shaking as he levered
himself above Chris and stared down at his lover, eyes glazed and lips parted.
He shuddered when Chris twisted his hips and started thrusting with wild
abandon.

They slammed together, the only sound in the room
the slap of moist flesh and their harsh breathing and soft moans.

David’s movements grew erratic, his self-control
gone in a wave of lust that swept them toward an incandescent explosion.

Chris came, spewing cum all over his stomach and
David’s. Back bowed, David thrust one more time, burying himself deep inside
Chris, his hands gripping Chris’s hips so tight he left bruises. They collapsed
together amid the tangled sheets, convulsing in release.

Chris struggled to get his breath back.

“Wow.” He gently touched the side of David’s face
which was still flush with passion. His swarthy, pockmarked skin felt hot and
rough under his fingertips. “You haven’t done this for a while, have you?”

David kissed the tips of his fingers. “Is it that
obvious?”

“Oh, yeah. So...” Chris sobered. “What happens
now?”

“We wait,” David said. “Wait for Des to tell us
what happened.”

“Are you going to get into trouble?”

David sighed and pressed his lips together. “It’s
a little late to worry about that, don’t you think?”

Chris drifted off to sleep with the feel of
David’s arms around him. His weight felt good.

Chris wanted to reach for him, but couldn’t find
the energy.

Then sleep claimed him in a dreamless land.

Friday,
5:40 am, Cove Avenue, Silver Lake, Los Angeles

THE PHONE RANG. When Chris
didn’t answer it, David reached for it over his body. Maybe it was the hospital
again with more information about Des.

“You shouldn’t have done that.” The soft, whispery
voice spoke so low David had to strain to hear the words. “He doesn’t belong to
you. He’s mine.”

“What? Who is this—”

The phone went dead.

David swung upright on the king-sized bed, his
gaze shooting around the room as though he expected the owner of the voice to
materialize in front of him. The darkened window, overlooking an even darker
backyard that was pitched down into wooded blackness, drew his wandering eye.
They were two stories up, perched on the edge of a hill overlooking the Silver
Lake Reservoir; there were no curtains on the broad windows.

Strips of light leaked into the bedroom from a
room down the hall. David lunged off the bed into a half crouch and slammed the
bedroom door shut, plunging them into total darkness.

His fingers closed over the leather case of the
police-issue Glock he had hung on the door hook earlier. The familiar weight of
the weapon felt good in his hands. He quickly put on his linen pants.

The phone shattered the silence again. Chris
rolled over into the space David had just vacated, one hand groping sleepily
for something that wasn’t there. He sat up, the thin sheet falling into his
lap.

“David?”

“Get down, Chris!”

“What the hell—” Chris leaned sideways and snapped
on the bedside lamp.

David swung the semiautomatic up at the ceiling at
the same time he dove across the room and shoved Chris off the bed, sending the
phone and the bedside light crashing to the hardwood floor.

“Get down and stay down.”

“What the hell are you doing?” Chris tried to
crab-crawl out of the tangled sheets wrapped around his legs. “What’s wrong
with you—”

“He’s out there.”

Chris froze and David took advantage of his
stillness to swing over the bed and creep up the wall beside the window.

“Shut that light off!”

The room was plunged back into darkness.

David peered out through the thin pane of glass,
all too aware of his vulnerability. He couldn’t see anything in the tangled,
tree-filled yard beyond the sweep of spidery branches. Somewhere close by a dog
barked. A coyote answered it.

He couldn’t see any lights from any of the nearby
houses. He could barely make out a distant brightening on the horizon. Day
would be coming soon, relieving the night to its secrets.

The dog’s barking became frenzied. On the other
side of the bed he heard the phone’s dial tone change to the
blatt-blatt
sound.

“Hang it up,” David said. “If it rings, don’t
answer it. Does that phone have call display?”

“Yes.” The phone clanked against the wooden floor
as Chris fumbled to find it, then there was an abrupt click and the annoying
sound died, as he put the receiver down. Almost immediately the phone rang
again.

“Don’t answer it! What does the call display say?”

“Unknown number. What the hell is going on,
David—”

“Probably a cell.” It occurred to David that Chris
might recognize the voice. He left the window and eased around to the foot of
the bed.

“Answer it.”

“
What
?”

“Answer it. Tell me if you know who it is.”

He picked up the receiver, cutting off the ring in
midtone. “H-hello?”

The oppressive silence that filled the room
thickened. After a century of failing nerves, Chris set the phone back down.

“He hung up.” Chris’s voice grew stronger. “Who
was it, David? Will you please tell me what is going on?” His voice changed
again, grew scared. “That was him, wasn’t it? Kyle’s killer?”

“That was him.” David eased around to Chris’s side
of the bed. He crouched down on the floor and almost immediately Chris was in
his arms. He hugged him with one arm, keeping his gun arm free. “He seems to
have developed a bit of a fixation on you.”

“You think?”

Outside the dog went ballistic. The sun’s early
light was beginning to fill the room.

David stood up. “Get dressed.”

Chris grabbed the clothes he had hastily discarded
the night before and struggled into them. He rubbed the sleeve of his shirt
over the blond stubble on his face. His red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes met David’s
over the curve of his arm.

“You think he’s out there
now
?” Chris
asked.

“He was close enough to know we spent the night
together.” David set the Glock down on the rumpled bed long enough to slide his
shirt on over his linen pants and do up the first three buttons. He scooped the
gun up again. “He wasn’t very happy about it.”

“He’s watching us?”

“’Fraid so.”

“And you think I know this guy?”

Friday,
5:55 am, Cove Avenue, Silver Lake, Los Angeles

David’s face changed, seemed to
grow colder, flatter. His cop face. Chris hated the change.

“He’s targeting you. That much is clear.”

Up the hill, the Templetons’ terminally stupid
yellow Lab was giving itself a voice hernia. Chris’s eyes tracked to the
window, now streaked with shadows from the leafy branches beyond.

The dog abruptly went silent. Someone next door
had finally woken up and dragged him inside.

“You don’t think he’s still out there, do you?”

“I don’t know.” David pulled his shoes on, lacing
them up quickly. He pulled out his cell and flipped it open. “I'm going to call
Martinez. If he’s out there, maybe they can pick him up. I’ll wait for him
downstairs. Stay here. Don’t go near the windows.”

Chris didn’t bother with shoes. In bare feet he
followed David to the door, only stopping when David threw him a stern look. He
stood at the top of the stairs, watching David vanish into the shadows pooled
at the bottom. He danced from foot to foot, nerves taut, everything around him,
except his heart, moving in slow motion. Sound was magnified, the light scuff
of David’s shoes on the tile floor, the whisper of tree branches against each
other outside, the distant sound of a car alarm.

Finally he heard a car door slam outside and David
opened the front door. He bolted down the stairs, nearly tripping on the bottom
step, only keeping himself from pitching out the door onto his face by catching
the atrium wall. Light spilled over the transom, and the walls of the atrium glowed
pink in the morning light.

Chris crowded in behind David who tried to get him
to go back into the house. Chris ignored him. Together they stepped into the
stone courtyard. From the nearest crape myrtle a pair of mockingbirds
complained of the intrusion.

Shadows still gripped most of the hillside. Chris
stared at the grille of his SUV. He blinked. There was something wrong with it.

“Get back inside,” David said. “Now.”

Chris ignored him. Against the gold wrap-around
grill of the SUV something red was just visible in the growing light. Chris
stepped out of the courtyard. A sharp, familiar smell invaded his nostrils.

“Chris—”

David tried to grab him, but he slipped past the
outstretched hand. He knew that smell all too well.

The SUV was spray-painted bumper to bumper with
blood-red foot-high letters, words that screamed FAGGOT and COP FUCKER and
DAVID FUCKS BOYS. Too late, David’s fingers closed over his arm and jerked him
back into the enclosed courtyard.

*****

Twenty minutes later, Chris
could see the other cops’, who had answered David's call, thoughts tracking
fast and furiously over what they knew and what they guessed. He could see a
lot of them reaching conclusions that now seemed so obvious.

“It would explain a lot,” he heard one cop mutter
to another, who nodded sagely.

“It explains everything.”

“Jesus, you think you know a guy...”

“Always thought he was kind of funny.”

And so on and so on, round and round the fucking
mulberry bush. The air crackled with the mechanical voices of radio calls being
broadcast over the morning airwaves. Car doors opened and closed and Chris
caught the flash of a camera lens as it captured David’s ruin.

Three black-and-whites already crowded the narrow,
dusty street when an unmarked car approached. Light from the newly risen sun
streamed from behind the ghostly trunks of the native Sycamores and the Italian
cypress trees and reflected off the untinted windshield as the car halted
behind David’s unmarked.

David’s partner stood beside the SUV, shading his
unreadable eyes behind a pair of cheap Ray-Bans.

David’s face closed up. He approached Martinez
stiffly, nodding coolly at him as both men took in the defaced truck.

David said something Chris couldn’t catch. But he
had no problem seeing the way Martinez’s gaze lingered over the nasty words or
the way he kept glancing at David, taking in his partner’s unshaven face and
half-buttoned shirt.

At one point he threw a narrow-eyed, speculative
look at Chris, staring so hard at his bare feet that Chris felt like tucking
them up behind his ankles. He glared back, daring Martinez to say something.

David ignored all the inquisitive looks he got
from his colleagues. Only when Martinez pointed to the edge of the house did
David react. With a terse nod he drifted over to stand under the larger of the
two crape myrtles, which Chris’s grandmother had planted forty years before.

Ignored by everyone, Chris drifted with him. He
stopped near a spray of lavender blooms, his toes sinking into the prickly
Manzanita ground cover underfoot, wondering what the hell he was doing. Did he
want to hear what this nasty piece of work was going to say?

Martinez’s voice carried far in the still morning
air. “You want to tell me what’s going on, partner?” he said. “You call in this
squeal, and I’m thinking we got a line on this doer, then I show up and...
what?”

“What do you want me to tell you, Martinez?”

“Tell me to fuck off. Bop me in the nose for
thinking what I’m thinking. Anything. Just don’t tell me this looks like what I
think it looks like.”

“And what’s that?”

“
Dios
, Davey, don’t make me say it. We’ll
find who did this; I’ll personally rearrange his face for him. Just tell me it
ain’t true.”

Friday,
7:35 am, Cove Avenue, Silver Lake, Los Angeles

David stared at his partner of
six years and thought about lying. Martinez was giving him an easy out. Pretend
like it hadn’t happened, that he was a victim of a sick prank pulled off by
deviant freaks. That he was at Chris’s place on police business.

He could lie and Martinez would pretend to believe
him. Safety in fiction. Then he glanced over at Chris, hovering on the edge of
his own house, trying so hard to be invisible. The worry on his beautiful face
twisted David’s gut. Chris was already blaming himself for this mess. For
ruining David’s life.

A lie would only seal the grave of any
relationship he might have forged with the younger man. Some things couldn’t
survive that level of betrayal.

He faced Martinez, folding his arms over the thick
barrel of his chest. The weight of his service weapon pressed into his ribs.

“I’m gay, Martinez. And I think it’s time I
stopped pretending otherwise.”

“Come on, man. That’s crazy—”

David froze him with a look. Martinez pressed his
lips into a thin line and muttered something in Spanish. David only caught the
word “
loco
.” Crazy, again.

David glanced at Chris.

“Crazy or not, it’s what I am.”

And he turned and walked back to Chris.

Without a word he took Chris’s arm and led him up
the step to the front door. Only when he closed the door behind them did he
drop Chris’s arm and march through the atrium into the living room. Chris
hurried after him.

“Why did you do that?”

Silently David yanked shut the vertical blinds on
the picture window. The room was plunged into shadow.

“David—”

He took the stairs two at a time. Chris followed.