Sinner's Gin (31 page)

“I’d kill him if he did,” Miki snorted. “He’s got to sleep sometime.”

“Good for ye.” Donal beamed. “Just remember that snarl when my bride comes at ye with her succotash. Love her to death, but that shite’s nasty. Don’t let her feed it to ye. Once it passes yer lips, she’ll be shoving it down ye for the rest of yer life.”

“Got it. I didn’t even know it was real,” Miki conceded, passing over the unwrapped cheese slices. The sizzle of meat hitting the hot frying pan was followed by the heavenly aroma of burgers cooking, and Miki’s mouth watered. “Can I ask you something?”

“About Kane?” Donal glanced at him, and Miki nodded. “About him being gay or a cop like his da?”

“Gay,” Miki murmured. “I can’t see him being anything
but
a cop.”

“True,” the man replied as he added rings of onions to the pans to grill. “Even as much as he loves making things, he’d rather wear a badge if he had to make a choice. Go ahead. Nothing ye can ask that someone else hasn’t already.”

“How’d he know he was gay? I mean, for sure?”

“Okay, I was wrong, that
is
something I haven’t been asked before.” Donal grinned. “How’d he know he was gay? Simple, Miki boy. He likes men. Easy as that. A man’s body makes him sit up and look. Kane’s the easy one. He knows himself and what he likes… what he wants. He brought ye here, or at least didn’t butt heads with his mum about it. He’d have taken ye out before my bride could take a breath if he didn’t. Kane wants ye here, in the place he learned to live and love. That’s how I know that yer someone special to him. Quinn, now… that one’s got a bit of trouble in his heart, but he’ll find his way soon enough.”

“And you’re okay with that? With them liking guys?” Donal was an aberration. Even as free-spirited and open as the city was, Miki never really knew any parents okay with their sons loving men. Damien’s parents treated his sexuality like it was a mole on his nose, something to be ignored and not mentioned in public.

“Miki, I can tell ye one thing for sure,” Donal said, waving the spatula in the air to make his point. “I taught my sons to be men. I don’t care who they love. I care about how they act. The moment they stop having manners or treat someone poorly, then we’ll have words. Other than that, I only want them to be happy, and if you make Kane happy, then all I have to say to ye is welcome to the family. Now pass the salt, boy. I’ve got to season the meat, or it’ll be like eating a stale cracker.”

Chapter 19

Her tears are long gone, stained with ice and despair,

And no one knows why. ’Cause they sure don’t care.

A rose on her stone gave me grace from above.

The dirt on my hands is as cold as her love.

—Dirt and Stone

T
HE
trip out to Zhang’s apartment building was a bust. Doug Zhang’s life was a bleak trail of blood and sorrow through the San Francisco foster system. Removed and returned to his parents more than a dozen times, he was in and out of temporary homes, a typical statistic made more depressing by the abuses he suffered under Carl Vega’s hands. According to his file, Doug was a simple but quiet child, unperturbed at living with strangers and obedient to a fault. The perfect gift for a man like Carl Vega.

Before his death, Zhang lived in a run-down cinder block former motel. Scraggly clumps of weeds filled most of the thin scrap of landscaping in front of the structure, and the building’s white walls were grayed from dust and peeling at the foundation. It was a depressing, lackluster place to live.

And surrounded by an elementary school and two day cares.

After nearly two hours of pounding the sidewalks, they found no one who’d cared enough about Zhang to pay attention to who visited him. Kane thought it was a sad commentary about the man’s life. Sanchez grunted in sympathy, then complained his stomach was empty.

Inching the unmarked sedan into a parking space in front of a taco shop, they both sighed with relief that the car made it back to the City. They’d secured the black Crown Vic from Motor Pool with a stern admonishment from the administrator to return the car in pristine shape. Kel grumbled they’d have to get someone to do body work on the Ford before they came back, and Kane resigned himself to a lifetime of motor pool rejects following the sour look they got.

The sedan wasn’t going to win any prizes. The backseat’s vinyl was cracked and smelled, strangely enough, of lavender and burnt chicken feathers, but the radio worked, and up until Sanchez took a bump in the road too fast, the onboard computer linking them to the SFPD database responded smoothly. After their reenactment of an old
Starsky and Hutch
car jump shot, the Crown Vic rattled back onto its tires and the computer screen turned blue, leaving a few lines of squiggling white code behind. It also hesitated a second when Sanchez hit the gas, as if it needed to contemplate going another foot forward.

“Odd place for someone like Zhang to live.” Kel slid a tray of chips and salsa onto a bright orange picnic table. Passing a carnitas burrito over to his partner, he opened up his Styrofoam container and inhaled the aroma coming from his carne asada fries. “Single guy. Place is crawling with kids. It was creepy.”

There’d been piles of toys in front of many of the apartments’ doors, and Zhang’s old place on the first floor faced the street. Anyone sitting in the living room would have a clear view of the schools’ playgrounds and the children who frolicked there.

“Just because he was molested doesn’t mean he passed it on down the line.” They both knew the stats and the high likelihood of Zhang reaching out to normalize his shattered world in the only way he knew how, but Kane wasn’t ready to hang Vega’s crimes on one of his victims. “Maybe he liked listening to kids laugh. Doesn’t sound like he had much of it when he was young. Neighbors said he was nice. Didn’t bug anyone.”

“Makes me want to shoot every single asshole who’s ever touched a kid, you know?” Sanchez’s voice was soft but hot with emotion. “Someone pull that kind of shit with my sisters, I’d kill him. I know it’s the job, man, and if this asshole wasn’t fucking with St. John, it’d be hard to hate this guy.”

“That asshole gutted a man just for smoking outside. Get some food in you so we can find Beanie Boy.” Kane bit into his burrito, sucking at the juices filling the wrapped tortilla before the liquid dripped down his hand. “Maybe we’ll be lucky and get someone who recognizes him from Vega’s neighborhood. We just need a damned name. Shit, anything. I just want Miki safe.”

“Have you thought about what you and him are going to do when this is all over?” Kel sprinkled spicy red sauce on his fries, not meeting his partner’s quizzical glance. “You know, when you go back to being a cop and he goes back to being a rock star.”

“We never stopped being those things,” Kane replied. “I figure we’ll eat together, have sex, and argue about him getting some physical therapy for that leg of his.”

“So you really think this….” The man waved his hand around in the air. “This thing between the two of you is going to last after this?”

“Yeah, Kel. I do.” Kane put down his food and leaned his elbows on the table. “See, I get it now. For a long time, I couldn’t figure out how my dad and mom stayed together. They’re too different. They like different things. Hell, they can’t even agree on what kind of Christmas tree to get, so it never made sense that they were… inseparable.”

“And now you do? Because of St. John?”

“Yeah, I do,” he replied softly. “People like my mom and Miki are like kites. They need the sky. They
need
the wind. Me and my dad? We’re the people holding the string. We’re their anchors to the earth. Miki and I can feel each other through the connection.”

“Huh, how does that work out? You’re… wait, you’re not the string. You’re holding the string.”

“Yeah, dude. I’m holding the string.” Kane laughed at Kel’s confused look. “I can feel the power of the wind catching Miki, lifting him up and dropping him down. He can feel the world beneath me, and he knows… he trusts me not to let go… not to let him drift off into the sky. And when he gets too tired of flying, he knows I’ll reel him in and take care of him. Just like my dad does with my mom.”

“And what do you get out of that? Huh?” Kel asked pointedly. “What the fuck happens to you when he flies off?”

“I have to trust him not to.” Kane smiled at his skeptical partner. “Trust has to go both ways. I love him, Kel. I love his singing to himself as he scribbles in the damned notebooks he leaves everywhere. I love kissing the ink stains on his fingers and the flush he gets when he’s had half a beer. I
know
him, Kel.”

“He’s fucked up, Kane.” Sanchez shook his head, worry creasing his forehead. “You’ve gotta see that. Hell, I was in that room with him for what? An hour? Hour and a half? And I could tell he’s messed in the head.”

“It’s what I was dealt, dude.” He shrugged. “It’s what he was dealt. We’ve got to deal with it. Vega and Shing? They’re the least of it. He’s missing part of his soul, Kel. When Damien died, Miki’s music died too. He writes lyrics and leaves the other side of the page blank because that’s where Damien used to score their music. Miki
knows
how to love and, damn, he knows how it feels when he’s lost it.”

“He and Damien Mitchell were together, then?” Kel made a face. “Shit, man. You’re screwed.”

“They weren’t lovers, Sanchez. You aren’t listening, man. They were… brothers. Hell, closer than brothers,” Kane said. “They got one another. I can respect that. Hell, I wish I could take that kind of pain away from him, but that’s going to haunt Miki for the rest of his life. But I’ve got his heart and soul, even the shredded pieces where his best friend used to be.”

“You, my friend,” his partner pronounced. “You are stupid in love.”

“Yeah.” Kane knew the grin on his face was silly, and it hurt to stretch his cheeks out that much, but he liked how he felt, even as Kel shook his head in mock disgust. “Kel, I’m lucky he lets me love him, and I’m going to take care of what he’s given me. I have to, Kel. Or I’ll be as dead inside as Miki used to be.”

“Sounds like you’re getting the raw end of the deal there, man,” Kel sighed, picking at his fries with a fork.

“Not if you never thought you could fly,” Kane murmured. “With Miki, I can feel the wind. He lets me have a taste of the sky every time I kiss him. That’s not something I even thought of before, and now I can’t imagine my life without it.”

“
Y
OU
’
RE
doing what?” Edie’s voice screeched out of Miki’s phone, and he pulled it away from his ear, shooting the taxi driver an apologetic glance. “Are you insane? Turn the cab around!”

“No.” Keeping the phone angled away from his face, he spoke quietly into the headset. “I kind of have to do this, Edie. It just feels right to do.”

“Right to do? You thought it would be okay to have chickens on the tour bus because you wanted scrambled eggs! You think
this
is the right thing to do, and I can’t get you to see a therapist to talk about your messed up head?” She ranted for a moment, and Miki spent the time tracing the snippets of a song in his mind. After he circled round to the chorus for the third time, he took advantage of Edie’s need to breathe.

He loved Edie. In a very real way, she’d been the only family he had left after the accident, but as she inhaled quickly and continued to disparage his decision to see the Vega house one last time, Miki remembered why it’d been so important to come back home to San Francisco instead of living in Los Angeles where she could watch him.

“Hanging up on her would be bad, right?” Miki leaned forward to whisper into the driver’s ear. “I mean, really bad, right?”

“Is she your wife?” the older Russian man asked. “Because if she is your wife, yes. If she is your girlfriend, maybe a little bad, but you can make that better. If a wife, then no. You listen and shut up.”

“No, she’s my manager,” Miki said, wincing as another round of berating began. “Kind of like an aunt.”

“Oh, then,
no
.” The gray-haired man adjusted his cap. “If your mother or aunt, worse than your wife. For them, you say yes and do what you need to do as a man behind their back. Then hope they do not find out.”

Sitting back, Miki slid his remark in between Edie’s admonishments. “Okay, I’m heading back to the Morgans. I’ll have the cab guy turn around.”

The Russian met Miki’s eyes in the rearview mirror, lifting his eyebrows in question. Shaking his head no, Miki made a face when the cabbie grinned widely at him, showing the large gap between his two front teeth. Edie wound down her tirade with a dark promise to descend upon San Francisco as soon as she finished filing lawsuits on his behalf. Ending the call, Miki turned off the phone and sank into the vinyl seat, tired out from the battle.

“Good! Well done!” The cab driver grunted. “You have no father, yes? Or he would have taught you these things.”

“Nope, but I know one now I can ask.” Miki’s mouth lifted at the corners as he thought of what Donal Morgan would have to say about Edie. “I think he’d have told me the same thing. Well, I hope so. He’s kind of the reason I’m heading up here. Just need to say… good-bye. To everything.”