Chapter 20
When you said you loved me, I believed you.
Then when you needed to be free, I deceived you.
—Junie’s Lies
“YOU like sucking on my things, bitch?” The gun jammed further down Miki’s throat and he gagged on it, its crust and oil filling his mouth. “Here. Suck on this. Just like you sucked on him!”
He didn’t recognize the guy shoving a gun into his mouth, but Miki knew what he was intimating. The gesture was obscene, a vulgar rape of his mouth with a piece of dirty steel. The knit beanie pulled down low on the man’s face was meant to intimidate, but it only emphasized his greasy shank of hair and flushed, pocked skin. The man spat as he screamed at Miki, his words a string of nonsensical profanities. From the way the young man held the weapon, he believed he had the upper hand.
If Miki had learned one thing in his life, it was to even the odds. And when the odds were evened, cheat.
He grabbed a handful of dirt and flung it up into the man’s face, spraying rocks and fertilizer into the gunman’s wide, crazed eyes. The gun slipped out of Miki’s mouth, its muzzle slick with Miki’s spit. His knee buckled when he turned over, but Miki kept going, reaching for the cane Donal had pushed into his hands before he left the Morgans’ home. Staggering to his feet, he spit out the taste of the gun and got a good grip on the shillelagh’s shaft.
Right then, he couldn’t care less if the man was a saint and it was all a horrible mistake or if he was some crazy person who knew him and came in from San Francisco’s streets. Miki would ask questions later. Better to apologize for kicking someone’s ass than to end up dead because some asshat got something wrong in his head.
Feeling the weight of the wooden cane in his hands, Miki smiled when the familiar tingle of adrenaline hit his nerves. Donal’s shillelagh would go a long way in evening the stacked odds.
The first swing connected with the man’s jaw, and the crack of the wood knob against bone seemed to echo in the small yard. Staggering back, the man tried to bring the gun up, his finger squeezing down on the trigger, as Miki rounded back and struck again, slamming the end of the shillelagh across his knuckles.
A loud boom burst from the gun, and its bullet whirred past Miki’s arm. He felt the bite of something on his shoulder, and then a creeping burn spread down his arm. A numbing shockwave hit his hand, and his fingers convulsed around the shaft. Shaking, Miki shifted his grip and held on harder, flinging the cane up again, knocking the gun out of the man’s hand.
He didn’t know where it landed, but from the crazy, wild-eyed stare on the man’s face, Miki guessed his assailant knew. The man leaped toward the thick weeds by the garage’s open door, and Miki jumped after him. His knee screamed in agony as he tackled the guy to the ground, and his shoulder set up its own refrain, throbbing and oozing a wet trail inside the arm of his jacket.
“He was fucking mine!” The man’s breath was foul and he spat as he spoke. “You shouldn’t have come back. I could have had him back! I wanted him. You didn’t, and he still fucking chose you.”
“Fucking hell.” Miki’s breath caught as a terrifying realization spread through him. “You’re one of Carl’s.”
It was like staring up into the face of his own personal nightmarish mirror. The man twisting around underneath him was a brother of sorts, bound to him in the sticky, emotional strands of Vega’s sickness. They’d had their blood spilled and their bodies torn apart by the same man. It should have bound them closer. Instead, it was driving the other man to kill.
Miki wasn’t going to argue with a crazy man. Especially not one with a gun in arms’ reach. Doubling over, he twisted his legs around the man’s torso and pinned him to the ground. He brought the cane up and slammed its knob into the man’s head, splitting open the skin by his eye.
An enraged insanity seemed to fill Miki’s attacker. A gleam burned feverishly in his unfocused gaze, a nearly evangelical fervor strengthening him as he threw Miki off.
Miki landed hard, losing his hold on the shillelagh. It bounced out of reach, and he lay on the ground for a brief second, forcing the air back into his lungs. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the man scrambling on his hands and knees toward a clump of weeds.
He came up with the gun as Miki got to his feet with Donal’s shillelagh held out in front of him.
“I don’t know you, dude.” Miki shuffled to the side, testing his knee. He didn’t need to. As he moved, his jeans’ leg tightened around the swollen joint. There was very little give to the fabric, and fire was shooting up his thighs and roasting his balls in pain. His arm hurt like hell, with blood dripping down his hand and onto the wooden shaft. “You can walk away from this. We both can.”
“I don’t want to walk away from this… from you. Uncle Carl was mine.” The gun shook in the man’s hand, the muzzle drifting back and forth off of Miki’s chest. “Until you came along.”
“Um, did you kill him and Shing? That was you, right?” Miki reminded him, then blanched when the gun steadied to point at his head. Not for the first time, he cursed his own mouth. “Just saying.”
“He didn’t want me anymore.” He began shaking again, tears tracking through the dirt marbling his face. “I was too old, too ugly. He didn’t want to see me anymore.”
“Carl wasn’t….” Miki took another step closer, gritting his teeth against the pain. “Dude, he wasn’t worth this. What he did was wrong. You know that, right?”
“It wasn’t wrong!” Spit flew in long strands from the man’s mouth, splattering Miki’s face. “You were the wrong one. You should have stayed away.”
“Trust me, man, this was the last place I wanted to be.” The grass crackled under his feet, and Miki inched closer.
“How can you say that? He wanted you so much! What’s wrong with you? He would have given you everything!”
“Look, being here wasn’t what I wanted. Shit, you shouldn’t have wanted it either,” Miki said. “It fucks with your head, you know? The shit that he did gets into your brain and chops up all of your mind.”
Miki left off that by killing Vega, the man pretty much doomed himself to never gaining Vega’s attention.
“He used to tell me I was his special boy. Special!” The gun wavered again, its muzzle drifting toward the ground. “You know what he told me when he woke up from the drugs? When I had him in the room?”
“Can’t even fucking guess,” Miki said, shrugging, then wondered if he shouldn’t have, but the other man seemed not to care.
“He didn’t recognize me!” The spit began flying again, joined by a run of snot as he began to sob. Clutching the gun tightly in his hand, he lifted it up and waved it at the clouds, his outrage filling him. “When I told him I loved him, you know what he told me? He said I was stupid, and he couldn’t have ever wanted someone as ugly as me. Even tied up and on the ground, all he could think about was you. So, fine, he fucking wants you. He can fucking have you.”
“Pretty sure I wasn’t what thing he was thinking about there, dude.” Miki shuffled again. He needed to get the guy distracted. Anything to give himself enough time. “Did you tell him your name or just say, hey, I was one of the little kids you fucked up?”
The man spun quickly and stepped closer, bringing himself nearly to Miki’s nose. “I told him my name. I leaned over and whispered it into his ear when I started cutting him. He started crying. Then the begging started. ‘Andrew Coons, I remember you now.’ Now? That’s all he could say before I took his lips off. I didn’t want to be remembered. I wanted him to need me.”
“Seriously?” Miki took a breath and hefted the shillelagh into a tight grip. “You are more fucked up than he was.”
It wasn’t a fair fight, not with the years Miki spent on the street and singing at backwater bars where his pretty face drew more animosity than compliments. The shillelagh’s weighted end was something he’d never have used in a bar fight, but Miki wasn’t going to split hairs. He was more interested in splitting open Andrew’s head.
He swung, a fierce upswing that would have done any homerun hitter proud. Connecting with Andrew square in the teeth, Miki grunted when he stepped forward to follow through. He tried keeping his eyes on the gun, but it slid around too much for Miki to watch, and then, when he cocked his stance for another hit, Andrew wavered and squeezed the trigger.
The shot went wide, but Miki’s swing connected hard, and Andrew went flying backward, landing in the dried grass, speckled with his blood and spit.
“Drop the fucking gun!” Miki screamed at him.
Andrew’s answer was to bring it up and fire again.
Miki felt the bullet hit his jacket shoulder, but other than the burn of leather in his nose, he was pretty certain Andrew missed. The second shot didn’t. It pinged off the shillelagh and shattered the bulbous knob at the end of the shaft. The lead weight drilled down into the wood and scattered splinters into Miki’s hands and cheek.
It was enough for Miki, and holding on to the wooden shaft with one hand, he flung the shillelagh at Andrew’s head, bashing him across the nose with the truncated shaft, then balled up his other fist to deliver another blow. His fingers took the shock of striking bone with a jolt, and Miki’s stomach turned at the crunching sounds Andrew’s face made when hit. He tangled his legs into Andrew’s and they both went down, fists flailing wildly. The shillelagh was lost somewhere in the grass near Miki’s feet, but he didn’t care. Not when the other man still held the gun in his hand.
Andrew’s knee came up and caught Miki’s balls. The sharp impact squeezed his sac into his thigh, his jeans forming an unforgiving brace of pain when Andrew jabbed at him again. Roiling nausea struck Miki’s stomach, then the curling sensation of his dick being peeled apart hit and Miki gacked, choking on the back of his tongue.
He rolled, trying to separate himself from Andrew, but the man held on tight, jabbing his knee up again. This time, the hard stab caught Miki on his injured knee and he screamed, his world turning a bright pinkish red. Miki hadn’t felt as heavy a pain since he’d been in Carl’s hands. It wasn’t a pleasant memory, and the angry uselessness he felt back then resurrected itself, sinking its venomous teeth into his will.
“Yeah, fucker,” Miki panted. Spitting out the pain-thickened saliva pooling in his mouth, he shoved himself past the wall of ache to grab Andrew by the throat. “I’m not taking any of your shit.”
The roughness of the grass under his other hand reminded Miki he wasn’t gripping pilled cotton sheets to keep from shoving at Carl’s heavy body. It was worse when he fought back then. Now it was retribution. He’d come too far, endured too much to let Andrew Coons take his freedom away from him.
Especially when, somewhere out in the city, Kane was waiting for him.
His fists were enough. They were going to have to be. Shoving Andrew back with all of his might, Miki straddled the man’s knees, pinning him to the ground, and began to whale away.
Miki’s knuckles bit into Andrew’s face, pummeling the meat beneath his skin until it glowed red from the sharp impacts. He didn’t care if he could hold onto the man long enough to make him see reason. Reason was a lost cause. The only thing Miki wanted from the other man was blood.
And even then, he might want more.
It was too much to take in. The pain in his legs mingling with the burning fire coming up from his hands and ripping through his shoulders. Andrew’s hands shoved at his chest, trying to get Miki off of him, but the singer hooked his ankles under the man’s knees, anchoring himself in place. Retaliating, Andrew balled up his hands and struck Miki where he could reach, slamming his fists into Miki’s shoulders and knees.
Andrew got a few good licks in. Miki’s head snapped back when his chin took a hit, and there was a taste of blood on Miki’s lip from another errant blow, but it wasn’t enough to make Miki stop. He couldn’t risk it. He finally had too much to lose.
Miki’s vision remained red, this time the color of Andrew’s blood mottling his hands and running over the man’s face. Andrew flailed, catching Miki’s throat with his fingers. He felt the trapped man rake at him, then the bite of air when his skin peeled up under Andrew’s dirty fingernails. The wound wept, trails of watery pink running down Miki’s neck
The exchanged blows were furious. Then Miki hit something in Andrew’s face that gave way. A nasty crunch reverberated through Miki’s skin, and his knuckles bloomed their own spikes of pain. Miki’s eyes watered, and the middle finger on his right hand quickly swelled, curling his fist into a rigid claw.
Then he noticed Andrew’s unnatural stillness.
Miki rolled off the other man’s legs to rest on his hip and hand, leaning to the side. His right knee refused to uncurl, and he cradled his hand to his chest, panting from the exertion of nearly beating a man to death.
Andrew’s face was a mess, barely recognizable under the blood and swelling. Turned slightly to the side, his chest stuttered as his lungs struggled to breathe. A chattering sound rattled from somewhere below his collarbone, and bubbles of snot and blood clogged his left nostril. Miki’s fists had pounded at the bridge of bone until only one passage worked. Andrew’s mouth didn’t look much better, and somewhere under the tangled clot of hair, spit and more blood were Andrew’s eyes, his lashes barely visible beneath the crimson swirls.
Miki’s knuckles were raw, and the dried weeds were pricking into the scraped skin. Blowing on the spots only made matters worse, and Miki shook his hands to rid himself of the sting. His own breath was as jagged as the skin on his palms, and Miki forced himself to stay upright. Despite the scratchy burrs around him, he wanted to fall over and close his eyes. Every inch of his body ached where it wasn’t on fire from pain, and he doubted he had the strength to do more than just breathe.
The shakes hit him fast and hard, and his fingers barely had enough strength in them to pull his jacket forward so he could check its inside pocket. The worn plush was secure in its nest, its bobble-black eyes staring up at Miki from its stained white round head. Twisting one of the bear-dog’s ears between his trembling fingers, Miki let go of a shuddering breath and let the shock take him. Overwhelmed, he retched up a watery cocktail of stale coffee and mostly digested burger. Staring down at the weeds, Miki couldn’t help but think his contribution could only help the disastrous lawn.
“I have thrown up more in the last couple of weeks then I have all the time I was on tour.” Miki spat his mouth clean. “This is fucking insane.”
When sirens began to close in on the Vega house, Miki’s insides clenched. Then he heard a very familiar Irish-tinted voice announcing he was a member of the San Francisco Police Department and that whoever was around should come out with their hands up.
“Oh, fuck me,” Miki sighed, rubbing at his sweaty temple with the back of his hand. “Fuck me to hell.”
“Hands in the air! Let me see them!” Kane came around the side of the house and leveled his gun at Miki. Miki obliged his lover, raising his battered hands so Kane could see his palms. Swearing, Kane jerked his weapon up when he recognized his lover, then dropped it again to cover the man lying facedown in the dirt a few feet away. “Miki?”
“Hey, how you doing?” Miki gave Kane a negligent wave. “If you want to point that thing at someone, keep it on that guy. He tried to kill me. I think. Don’t try to finish off what he started.”
“Sanchez! Back here!” Kane shouted toward the street and squatted next to Miki. Dropping his voice to a whisper, he studied his lover’s tear-streaked face. “Dear God, what did you do to yourself, Mick boy?”
Glancing at the prone man a few feet away, Kane holstered his weapon and ran his hands over Miki’s body. Kane plucked at the bullet holes in his jacket, and then he cupped Miki’s face. His fingers made a mess of the blood and spit on Miki’s face, smearing trails over his skin.
“It’s not my blood. It’s Andrew’s. Dude, you’re going to get that all over you,” he protested weakly at being touched. “I’m okay.”
Miki found himself being kissed soundly. He gave in to Kane’s assault, his lips parting to let the other man’s tongue in. It was short but intense, enough to steal the rest of the air from Miki’s lungs.
Even through the pain, Miki was left panting and wanting more.
“I am seriously fucked in the head,” He muttered under his breath. “Kane, stop trying to rearrange my face. It hurts.”
“Are you sure you’re okay, Mick?” The Irish was strong, bleeding into his words. His thumbs brushed over Miki’s lips, and he stiffened slightly when the wind rustled the weeds around them.
Reaching for his gun, Kane visibly relaxed with relief when he saw his partner emerging from the brittle, dry brush at the other end of the house. Kel’s face was bright red from exertion, with a sweaty sheen covering his cheeks. Panting, he bent over to grip his knees as he caught his breath.
Sanchez glanced at Andrew’s still form, then motioned at the man with his gun. “That Beanie Boy?”
“Looks like it,” Kane assented. Then his eyes narrowed, and his hand dropped to the swell of Miki’s knee. “What happened? Are you okay?”
“He kicked me.” Miki shrugged. The touch of Kane’s fingers on the joint nearly made him crawl out of his skin. “Kind of pissed me off. Beanie Boy?”
“It’s what we’ve been calling him. He’s the guy I chased down the alley.” Kane stood and pressed a hand on Miki’s shoulder, preventing him from getting up. “You stay right there, Slugger. I’m calling for a couple of ambulances. One for each of you. Talk to me, love. How’d you get here? Did he bring you here?”
“Russian guy brought me.” Miki waved Kane off when the cop frowned with worry. “Cab driver. I asked him to bring me here. Guess Andrew either followed me here or I walked into his spiderweb.”
“You know him?” Sanchez carefully rolled Miki’s assailant over onto his side to cuff his hands. Kane walked through the weeds, hunting for Andrew’s gun.
“His name’s Andrew Coons.” Miki shifted the weight off of his hip and tried to get his leg underneath him. “He used to be one of Carl’s… boys.” Kane turned, fixing a steely blue eye onto his lover. Miki gave him a light shrug. “He’s a bit off in the head, Kane. He liked what Carl… did. Or at least the attention. I don’t know. I don’t speak that kind of crazy.”
“Why’d he kill them, then?” Sanchez frowned, pointing Kane over to a clump of weeds. “Over there, man.”
It happened too quickly for Miki to see. One moment Kane was reaching for the discarded gun then Andrew Coons was up on his feet, wrestling with Sanchez for control of his weapon. The handcuffs jangled from one of Andrew’s wrists, and Kel began shouting at Kane to draw his gun.
Despite the pain eating through him, Miki got to his feet when Kane pulled his Glock free from his holster and drew down on Andrew and Kel. Taking a step toward the cops and Andrew was a big mistake, probably one Miki would regret for the rest of his life.
He took that single step. Then an ear-splitting boom fractured the neighborhood’s eerie silence, and Miki’s world went black.