Ten
“Dios, Stevens, you look like shit.” Montoya sighed, hooking his hands under Rook’s arms, then lifting him back up onto the bed. The floor was wet and smelled. While the damp was probably Rook’s fault, the smell probably came with the room. “Well, at least you’re alive.”
“Hello, my name is Montoya. You killed my suspect. Prepare to die.” Stevens wiggled his fingers as if he expected Dante to know what he was talking about. “Come on. Really? You really don’t know that movie? Best movie ever. Maybe. God, so many movies. If my last name was Montoya, I’d totally want Inigo as a nickname or something.”
“You’re not a suspect any more, and I have no idea what you’re talking about, but if you get up on the bed, I’ll watch the damned thing.” Moving Rook was like handling a greasy wet noodle. Six feet of bendable, bruised, and sensual body, a naked Rook Stevens was proving difficult to maneuver. “Help me out here, Stevens. Get up on the damned bed so I can take a look at you.”
“Dude, I’m not wearing any clothes. How much more of a look do you need?” Rook slurred.
Dante didn’t like the heat coming off the man’s skin or the pale tinge of green on Stevens’s face. In the time it took him to find the hotel Rook mumbled over the phone line, he’d given himself an ulcer wondering what the hell his former suspect had gotten himself into.
The hotel’s location hadn’t done Dante’s already tortured nerves any favors. Sitting like a misplaced mole on skid row’s temple, the brick building did its best to hide its flophouse origins but to no avail. The cramped, musty room reeked of old skin and bleached-out mold, and Dante was less worried about Rook’s gunshot wound than he was about the bacteria Rook smeared over his body when he hit the carpet.
Rook gave a halfhearted roll with his hips, brushing Dante’s thighs, then oozed onto the mattress. Throwing his arms up, he shot Dante a silly grin. “Ta-da!”
Despite the splatter of bruises, dried blood, and stitches, Rook Stevens was adorable, and Dante hated himself for noticing.
“Are you drunk?” He was trying not to look at Rook’s thickening cock as it lengthened down Rook’s thigh. “I thought the hospital said you didn’t have a concussion.”
“Probably not when I left. I probably smacked my head again when that car hit me.” Rook’s gleeful expression was quickly replaced with panic. “Gonna throw up again, Montoya.”
Dante got the trash can to the side of the bed in time, just as Rook rolled over onto his stomach. If the bruises on Rook’s hips and shoulder were startling, the massive tracts of purples and blues on his back were horrifying. He rubbed at Rook’s shoulders as the jerking retches took over, stopping only to offer a bottle of water when Rook gasped for breath.
“I’m going to have to get you to a doctor. What car hit you? Where? Did you see the driver?” Dante peppered Rook with questions, throwing a blanket over Rook’s hips. Dante angled the bedside lamp’s shade up to get a better look at the man’s pupils and was relieved to see they were relatively normal. “Talk to me, Stevens. What happened? Why’d you leave the hospital?”
“You want car or hospital?” Rook sipped at the water bottle, his hand shaking so much Dante helped him tip it up.
“Both. Someone tried to kill you today. Where did this happen?”
“No one I knew. She ran the red light and screamed up Third. Or at least I think it was a she. I didn’t get a good look. I don’t think she was trying to kill me. Just kind of almost happened. I ended up on the curb.” Rook shrugged, and pain poured into his eyes. “Shit, okay, I might have hit the street kind of hard, but dude, I needed to… get out of that place. So I left.”
“Checking out against medical advice—”
“Yeah. I didn’t wait for that either. I just walked out when no one was looking,” Rook confessed softly.
“God, you are the—” Dante didn’t hold on to his English and slid into a round of curses his mother would have been ashamed to hear him say. “I’m getting clothes on you and taking you to the ER. No bitching or complaining. Understand?”
“Fine.” There was a bit of muttered grumbling, but Rook appeared resigned to the trip. “Just one thing. I kind of don’t have anything to wear.”
“He’s not breathing.” There’d been no mistaking the blond bombshell in the hospital lobby for anyone but Charlene Canada. Built like she should have been painted on the side of a World War II bomber, Charlene was a teetering tower of bright yellow hair, red lipstick, and curves. “Do you breathe when you throw up? He was throwing up when they took him. Isn’t that how people suffocate? Because I don’t think you can breathe if you’re throwing up.”
“He’ll be fine. Did you bring clothes with you?” Dante wasn’t going to question how Rook’s assistant got to the Urgent Care before he did, but she’d already set up camp with two comfortable chairs, a table, and cups of steaming coffee.
“Oh, yes. Let me give it to them.” She pursed her lips. “I’ll be right back.”
Somehow she’d also managed to talk someone into giving her actual plates to put a stack of homemade cookies on, and from the appreciative look on the male clerk’s face as they walked past the front desk, Charlene Canada definitely made an impression. She tottered about, her generous hips swaying as she walked over with cookies and a duffel bag to the nurses’ station. Smiling benevolently, she leaned forward to give the duffel to one of the male nurses.
“It’s for my boss, Rook. He’s back there.” A few seconds and a cookie later, the duffel was on its way to where Rook was being examined and Charlene was heading back toward Dante. She settled into a chair, then picked up one of the coffee cups from the table. “They’re going to make sure he has it. I even bought him some underwear, but he’ll probably hate it. He only likes boxers. I keep telling him those do nothing for his ass. Don’t you think?”
What Dante’d seen of Rook’s ass, it didn’t need much help from a pair of underwear. Pushing aside the image of a naked Rook spread out over a cheap hotel bed, he shook off the stream of confusion Charlene seemed to weave around him as she spoke.
The Urgent Care intake area ebbed and flowed with activity. There were long minutes of solid noise. Then a whispering silence crept in once people were moved back to the examining rooms. Double glass doors swished open periodically to let new patients into the beige and powder-blue cocoon, most wearing the dazed expression of someone caught in things they weren’t quite ready for.
Dante knew that look. He had it on his face when he’d found Rook lying naked and crumpled into a ball in his grubby hotel room. Now with Stevens in the hands of doctors who could possibly talk some sense into him, he turned his attention back to his case and the blonde actress Rook seemed fond of.
“How about if we talk about the Betties?” He’d hoped by bringing Charlene to the hospital, he could leverage some information out of her. “That was the deal, right? I find Rook, and you tell me what you know?”
“He’s still… you know, hurt. Suppose he needs something and I—” Charlene’s lashes fluttered hard enough to ghost a breeze across the small table. It was either her lashes or the breathy whispering she affected, but the look on his face must have told her she wasn’t going to get very far, because she sighed hard, and her shoulders slumped. “I don’t know what I can tell you. Not really. I mean, there’s—you’re a cop, you know?”
“That’s what my paycheck from the city says,” Dante agreed. “I also know Rook’s in a bad place because someone is trying to frame him, kill him, or both. You can either help me catch that person, or you can stay quiet and help them kill Rook. Your choice, Charlene.”
He’d hit the right note because Charlene nearly crumbled in on herself. Picking at her cup’s zarf, she began to peel away a layer of cardboard as she kept her gaze pinned to the floor. “Pigeon will know I talked to you. It’s just not… you don’t talk to cops.”
“Will this Pigeon person do something to you if you talk to me?” He pressed in, leaning forward to reassure Charlene. “Rook said something about Pigeon working with the Betties. If you tell me about the Betties, is Pigeon going to hurt you?”
“Hurt me? Pigeon wouldn’t hurt a fly. It’ll just screw up anything the Betties have going. Well, she’s not running them anymore. She went clean too. Do you know how hard it is to run a long con?” Charlene’s remorse was gone in flash, replaced by an incredulous smirk. “It’s not that I don’t want to talk to you. Well, I don’t. I mean, no offense, but it’s just not… we don’t talk about stuff like this. It’s just not right. You don’t know—”
“I know that they’re dead, Charlene. Someone killed Dani Anderson. And maybe the same someone killed your friends. It’s not just about Rook. Three people are dead, and I need to catch their killers.”
“Because it’s your job?” She looked up at him through her lashes. “Now that Pigeon’s out, the Betties work too—”
“It’s more than a job, Charlene. I owe these people the peace they deserve. It’s my… I can’t explain it to you better, but it’s what I have to do. It’s a part of me. They need justice for what’s been done to them.”
It was difficult explaining what was a fundamental truth, something so ingrained in him Dante couldn’t imagine not being a cop. The only time he’d not stood up for what he believed in was the day his father beat him out of the family, throwing him away from the only home and life he’d known. If anything, those final moments of blood and pain cemented his resolve. He was going to love another man, spend his life with someone who had a dick, balls, and probably as many issues as he did. He was going to wear a badge and fight for anyone who couldn’t fight for themselves. With each shuddering, painful breath, Dante knew he’d die without any reservations about who he was or what he wanted to be.
Justice, no matter what the victim had been or did. Murder was murder, and if Dante had anything to say about it, no one with bloodied hands would walk away without paying the price for someone’s life.
“If someone murdered you, Charlene, wouldn’t you want someone like me to catch them?” He took the cup from her hands, setting it down on the table. “I don’t know which Betties were left behind Potter’s Field. No one does. Not really. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to find out who killed them. Because no one deserves to be forgotten and thrown away. No one deserves to die unnoticed.”
Charlene sat so still Dante wondered if he’d gone too far, shared too much with the woman. Then she gasped, pulling in a body-shivering breath. Nodding once, she finally raised her head enough to meet Dante’s gaze, then said, “Okay, Mr. Montoya. I’ll tell you about the Betties.”
“First thing you should know is, the Betties you found? They’re not the ones I know, because I called Jane and Madge and they’re still alive,” Charlene confessed over her coffee. “So those two? I think they’re new or something. You’ll have to ask Pigeon, but I don’t know if she knows them either. They might have just riffed off of what she did. You know, making it their own. People do that all the time.”
“Does Pigeon have a real name?” Dante looked from the notepad he was using to jot down Charlene’s information. “Or is she like Rook and named after a bird?”
“Rook? I don’t get it.” Confusion muddied Charlene’s blue eyes. “I thought he was named after a chess piece. The little castle one, you know? Anyway, Pigeon’s real name is Deb. We all call her Pigeon because her last name sounds kind of like it but—” She paused. “You probably don’t want to hear all of that.”
“How about if we stick to the Betties? What did you mean those weren’t the ones you know?” Dante began to diagram out the relationships, starting a box with Deb/Pigeon and working downward to his two murder victims. He called up the close-cropped photos of the latter two victims’ faces on his phone and showed the images to Charlene. “Are you sure you don’t know them? Stevens said you might.”
She studied the image, then shook her head. “I mean, they all try to look alike. It’s part of the scam, right? But you totally can tell which one is which if you know them. Those two look like Betties, though. So either they’re Pigeon’s, or someone’s running the same con.”
“What kind of con?” Dante sighed as Charlene shook her head. “Okay, so say if a con was going to be run. How would someone do that?”
“Oh, like explain how it all happens without saying for sure Pigeon’s doing it? Rook talks like that sometimes. All pretend. Okay, sure.” Charlene’s smile glittered. “So say someone like Pigeon runs a bait and switch. She finds a really rich mark. Then one of the… B-women gets up a relationship with him or her… ’cause we’re all about equality these days. After they’ve been together a bit, they figure out what’s good to take, and then one day when the first one is out with the guy, the second B-woman comes in like she’s been there a thousand times and takes what they agreed on. Then it’s a split because the P worked out who to get close to.”
“So if there’s a doorman or security, they’re used to seeing this woman coming and going.” Dante sat back in his chair. “What about the fingerprint erasing? Do they all do that?”
“Like what? Like the whole sandpaper thing?” Charlene wrinkled her nose. “Why? People just wear gloves. Rook used to do gloves or superglue, but the Betties don’t run jobs like he used to. Fingerprints aren’t going to… shit, I just spilled the beans on Rook. He’s going to kill me.”
“I spent three years trying to get him into a jail cell. You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.” It was a shameful truth but a truth just the same. “Let’s just say I’m happier in Homicide. I’m leaving chasing after cat burglars to someone else now.”
“Well, they won’t be chasing him,” she sniffed. “He’s gone straight. Okay, not like sexually straight, because you know, he’s kind of a waste for us girls, but he doesn’t do B and Es anymore. He wants to be a businessman. And he’s a good one. People call him all the time to get them some of that weird sci-fi stuff, and he knows how to get his hands on it. Kind of like a con but totally legit. You know?”
“Yeah, I know.” Dante finished up his diagram, then drew a box to the side. “So what about Pigeon and Dani? Any way they’re connected? Bad blood? Good friends?”
“Oh, Pigeon wouldn’t give Dani the time of day. Dani was in it for herself, but Pigeon isn’t like that, so they fought a lot. I don’t know if they even really talked anymore. But if Dani needed something, Pigeon would be there for her. I know it.” Charlene glanced over her shoulder when an orderly came out of the back. “Do you think Rook’s almost done? How come no one’s come out yet?”
“They needed to see if he broke his head open.” Dante grimaced. “I’m pretty sure he didn’t. It’d take a nuclear bomb to get anything through that thick skull of his. Charlene, I need you to focus for a second. Why would Pigeon help Dani out if they didn’t like each other?”
“Because they’re sisters.” The look Charlene gave him left Dante with no doubt she thought him dim. “And even if you hate your sister’s guts, if she needs you, you have to be there for her. It’s kind of what family is all about.”
“Don’t see what was wrong with the last hotel. It had walls and a bed,” Rook grumbled at Dante as the cop led him out of the elevator and onto his room’s floor.
“And roaches to hold the door for you when you came in. Maybe I just wanted you in one with less vermin.” The sarcasm in the cop’s voice barely stung, but Rook felt it just the same. He pulled a plastic key out of his jeans pocket, then paced off the room numbers, dragging Rook behind him. “Ten fourteen. Here you go.”
Unlike his previous room, this room was large enough to swing a cat in. Not that Rook would swing a cat, but the saying could only be stretched so far without seeming silly. He actually could have given a shit about the amount of space he had, cat-swinging or otherwise. The only length and width that mattered was the king-sized bed up against the suite’s bedroom area and how soon he could get to lying on it.
He ignored the view out over Los Angeles’s bustling streets and even the single-cut expensive coffeemaker on the kitchenette counter, focusing on the bed nearby, then contemplating the soft-looking couch set in the middle of the loft-style suite to break the area up into two rooms. Sure it was nice but definitely more expensive, and he felt… accessible, traceable even. One thing Rook did have to admit—to himself—the place definitely smelled better, but he’d be damned if he gave Montoya that much to hang his smug grin on.
And man, that cop’s grin was smug.
Rook ignored that too.
He was tired down past his marrow, but Montoya lingering nearby made Rook’s skin itch, chasing away any stray cobwebs he might have had in his brain. At the hospital, he’d been reluctant to hand over the cop’s leather jacket, half convincing himself it was for the warmth, but the rational part of his brain quietly informed him he was a fat liar that lied, because the moment Rook went to shuck the garment off, his heart began to pound furiously.
Because tossing the jacket aside seemed like he was peeling Dante Montoya off him. And Rook Stevens, thief and heartless con, did not want a damned husky-voiced, hot cop to let him go.
“Fucking pansy.” The room swayed, and he reached for anything to hold onto, narrowly missing a solid grab on the room’s love seat. He tumbled forward only to find himself slamming into Montoya’s back. “Shit, sorry. Fuck.”
“When was the last time you ate, Stevens?” Montoya’s hands were hot on his waist, sliding under the oversized leather jacket and over the stupidly expensive T-shirt Charlene’d brought for him to wear out of the Urgent Care clinic. “I can call up room service. The front desk said it’s staffed around the clock.”
“Nah, coffee’s fine.” He wanted to step back. Step away. Step anywhere away from the cop who’d shoved himself into Rook’s life like he belonged there, but there wasn’t a single muscle in Rook’s body agreeing with the rational part of his brain. “I don’t know if I can keep anything down yet.”
“How about less coffee and more tea? You need to get some of those pills they gave you down, don’t you?” The heat was gone, stolen away when Montoya slid him onto the couch, then left to investigate the kitchen area. “Might help you sleep. The doc said if you’ve got a concussion, it’s so mild they really can’t tell, but your blood sugar was low. Probably that, lack of sleep and adrenaline fatigue made you loopy.”
“Yeah, they gave me some juice after they were done zapping me.” Rook watched Montoya intently when the man leaned over to poke around in a minifridge hidden behind a cabinet door, and he wondered how the hell his life got so fucked-up that he was wondering what a cop would taste like in his throat. “I feel better.”
“Hah. Found something for you.” Montoya came up with a bottle of pomegranate juice from the wet bar, and Rook winced, not wanting to guess how much the hotel would charge him for it. “Don’t give me that look. I’ll expense everything out to the department if you want. They’ll pay to feed you while I ask you a couple more questions.”
He couldn’t take it anymore. Not for long. Rook’d been rolled over by life and shaken down to his core. Between the battles with his grandfather—fights he no longer even knew what he’d been fighting about—and the delectable rub of Montoya’s body near his own, Rook was tired of fighting. He was sick of running, and most of all, he just wanted a bit of normal in his life. It’d been the dream he’d been chasing. A chance to wake up in the morning, get some coffee, and then maybe go back to bed and have sex with someone he liked, someone whose name he remembered.
Hell, he’d even been ready to get a dog or a cat, just to make the whole domestic thing real, but the thundering arrival of police, bullets, and then a sloe-eyed man who’d been a wet dream of his for years put an end to all of that. Now Rook just wanted… he wasn’t even sure anymore.
Except for the wet dream.
His tall, bulked-up Hispanic cop he’d seduced in a club once as a self dare, only to discover the man’s kiss whispered too many promises for Rook to ignore. He’d known who he was hooking up with that evening. When the cop stalked out of the darkness surrounding the dance floor, Rook’s stomach clenched as his ass practically begged to be spread apart. Shit, he’d wanted Montoya to fuck him against the wall until he couldn’t breathe, but something broke in him then. He wanted more than a single night. More than a con or a grift. He wanted to fucking wake up next to someone and have them be glad to see him instead of showing him the door.
That night, Rook realized he’d never have the white picket fence and calico-curtained bungalow. Not if he continued on the path he’d been walking. That was the night he’d gone clean. It was also the night he’d seen himself reflected in Montoya’s eyes, and he hadn’t liked the disgust he’d found there.
“Answer me something.” Rook tried to work his sneakers off but gave up.
“Sure, what?” Montoya put the juice bottle on the table in front of the sofa, looming over Rook. The man was too close, too tight in for Rook to do anything but inhale him. A second later, Montoya shoved the bottle of juice aside and sat down, his legs straddling Rook’s. “What do you need, Stevens? You thinking of taking another run?”
“Truthfully, I can barely walk as it is,” Rook replied derisively. “Besides, if I took a run, you’d just chase me down again. That’s what you do. You’re a cop.”
“And you’ve broke more laws than a body has bones,” Montoya replied.
“Broke, yes, but once again, caught, no.” Rook tried to tease, but it went flat, stopped short by the unreadable expression on Montoya’s face. “I haven’t had sleep in about three or four days, little food, and there’s this fucking hot cop chasing my ass but for all the wrong reasons. Now someone’s tried to kill me, some asshole accidentally ran me over, and I still don’t know who dropped Dani’s body on my front porch, but all I can think about is how I think we should either fuck or kill each other, preferably fucking, because I just can’t get rid of you.”
“So you want to get rid of me?” Montoya’s smile was a saturnine blend of pleasure and sensuality, a wicked combination hot enough to tickle Rook’s tired dick awake. “After all I’ve done for you today.”
“It would be the worst thing that either one of us should do because, well… reasons. So many reasons. Like… the whole you’re a cop thing, and I am… so not a cop. So yeah, I want something, Montoya. But it’s not like you’re going to give it. So maybe you should go, you know?”
“Huh.”
Montoya was quiet, that still silence Rook’d seen in him before. When Rook was finally about to burst apart, Montoya spoke, shattering everything built up between them with a rumbling sigh.
“What makes you think I don’t want to fuck you, cuervo?”