Left on St. Truth-Be-Well (4 page)

“Uhm, Carson?” Florida said, sounding as shaken as Carson felt, which was a blessing.

“Yeah?”

“Tell me that’s not your broom closet guy.”

“Stassy wouldn’t be caught dead in neon green.”

“Well, good.” Carson kept staring at the book, like somehow it would make the guy with his head caved in less real, and Florida kept talking. “Any idea who that is?”

“Not a clue. But I gotta say, it’s more proof that room service sucks.” The corpse was old, old enough to be covered in bugs, both alive and dead, as well as, strangely enough, big dusty coats of lye on the carpet and the bed, which was probably why the room smelled but the entire surrounding area did not.

Carson remembered the fumigation smell in his room, the choking billows of chemicals that had rolled past him when he opened his door, and thought maybe some of it had been the lye, and some of it had been used to cover this up, and that was when he hit his limit.

“Florida?” he said weakly. “You better get outta my way!”

“Hear ya,” came the clogged reply, and in about two seconds, Carson was suddenly doing something he’d never done with another man. Was there a special bond that came of standing side by side with someone and blowing chunks?

Once the romance had passed, Carson gathered his wits. First thing he did was take off the leather jacket and set it carefully aside. Then he took off his T-shirt, wiped his face, and threw it to Florida, who did the same, and when Carson thought he could talk without screaming or anything else undignified, he pulled his cell out of his back pocket and started to do the obvious.

Florida stopped him with a casual hand. “Man, let me call. I know the local cops. They’ll keep you out of it.”

Carson raised his eyebrows. He’d never really thought of himself as
in
it, but then he thought about the fact that he’d just walked into a hotel room, looking for someone he knew, and found a dead guy.

“Aw, hell.” He hit End on his phone, took six steps left of the barf-o-rama, and sat down on the clean grass. For a couple of seconds, he let himself stare into space and contemplate the ocean. It was nice—the Atlantic Ocean was not as raging as, say, the Pacific or the Caribbean. The waves were full but not huge, and the view was almost as flat as Lake Michigan on a windy day. The sun was off to his right a little, which meant he could squint without his sunglasses and watch as surfers, still in their wetsuits this time of year, rode their bodyboards into the wake. He saw some hot women out there, but Carson wasn’t feeling the least bit libidinous, nope, no way, nosirree.

“Glen, could you not give me shit for calling you at work? I’m calling you at work because this is work-related.”

Carson looked over his shoulder to see Florida ambling up to him from wherever he’d gone. He had two bottles of water in his hand, and he gave one to Carson, so he must have visited the vending machines while he called his “contact” in the police department.

Carson cracked the seal and took a swig, and it was on the tip of his tongue to say he’d given blowjobs for less when something stopped him. He
had
given blowjobs for less, for one thing. For another, it seemed to trivialize the simple gesture of kindness, and right now, he was shaken enough to admit he just didn’t want to do that.

Besides, Florida was having himself a “conversation.”

“Look, I’m saying we went to see this guy’s friend, and there was a body in the place. No, not his friend’s body. He doesn’t know who it is. Yeah, the Bates Parrot Hotel! Anywhere else and they would have found it sooner!”

He met Carson’s eyes and grimaced, then kept talking. “I don’t know. I’m not an expert on dead people—that would be you. A couple of days, I guess.” He paused and then rolled his eyes. “Because there was lye all over it, that’s why. It sort of absorbed the smell. How do I know that? Because I’ve got a television, asshole! Now are you sending a coroner or what? Yes, I’m sure it’s dead!” He held the phone away from his mouth for a moment, and Carson was relieved to see Florida’s unshakeable calm was actually shaken, stirred, and ventilated. “Because if I have to tell you how I know, I’m going to throw up again. Yes. Throw up. Yes, me. Yes, again.” Florida took a big breath and then spoke reasonably into the telephone. “Glen, disapprove of me some other time. Right now, we’ve got a dead body and a missing buddy. I really think they take top priority, don’t you?”

There was a terse, stunned reply. “Thank you,” Florida said shortly. “That’s almost civilized.” He hit End Call and then flopped down next to Carson, not close enough to touch but close enough Carson could feel some of his body heat in the morning chill.

“Your nipples are hard,” Florida said, and Carson’s eyes went wide. And then he checked, because sure enough, without a shirt, he had himself a couple of miniheadlights.

“Oh Jesus,” Carson muttered. “Nothing like facing the cops with poky little nipples. And by the way, that Glen guy sounds like a real prick. How do you know him?”

“We share the same parents.”

Carson stared at him. “Wouldn’t that make him your brother?”

Florida shrugged. “I remain skeptical. He’s going to be somewhat of an asshole. That guy’s been dead about four days. Where were you four days ago?”

Carson grunted sourly. “I was in Chicago, closing out my shift, when my stupid boss asked me if I wanted to track down Stassy for three weeks’ lousy pay.”

“Alrighty, then! Can’t argue with that! How’d you get here?”

“I drove my boss’s car.”

Florida’s grin was pretty damned awesome. “Even better. You’re off the suspect list!” Then his face fell. “But your friend, Stassy—”

“Didn’t do it,” Carson snapped. “It’s not in him.”

“Are you sure?” Florida’s voice was unexpectedly gentle, and Carson turned his head sideways to find himself drowning in those heavy-lidded blue eyes.

“Look, Florida—”

“Dale,” he supplied softly.

“Dale. That’s sort of a wussy name, you know. We beat up kids named Dale in my school, and I grew up in the suburbs.”

Dale laughed softly. “Well, I hope you grew out of it. That’s not really one of my kinks.”

“Yeah, mostly. Glen is actually a wussier name. Maybe I’ll beat the fuck out of Glen.”

“Well, yes. That may make us both feel better. What were you going to say about why your friend didn’t do it?”

Carson sighed and then wrapped his arms around his knees so he could keep warm. “He’s a good kid. His only crime is sexual confusion. I don’t know what that guy was doing in his room, but I’ve never seen him before, and unless that’s the guy you said Stassy was hanging out with, I’m betting Stassy hasn’t either.”

Dale grunted. “Naw. The guy Stassy was hanging out with was a local boy. Toby Pederson. Used to be a troublemaker in school—”

“Like you?”

A soft shoulder bump. “Behave. I was actually very well liked. I’m a major disappointment now, but teachers used to love me. Anyway, Toby got in trouble, got out, came out, and is now sort of second banana to the surfing guru in the local youth center.”

Carson regarded his new friend suspiciously. “And first banana would be….”

“Oh yeah. That would be me.”

Carson started to scramble to his feet, but a hard, warm hand on his arm stopped him.

“You knew? You knew who Stassy was and you—”

“Now, for starters, I didn’t know shit. Toby and I put in our time together and not much else. Surfing’s our religion, not our social club. I just know that Toby and your guy started coming in together in the mornings, and it looked pretty serious. I didn’t even know your guy’s name until you asked for him, which is good, because talk about names that would get your ass kicked, that one would do it right there.”

Carson blew out a breath and went back to hugging his legs. Dale’s warm hand remained on his arm, though, the heat burning through like sun through fog.

“Okay, yeah. Fine. So what are we going to tell the cops?”

Dale rubbed his bicep gently with long, tanned fingers, and Carson barely suppressed a shiver—and this one not from the cold. “We’ll tell them you came to find your cousin. You got driven out of this dump like all the sane tourists, and we met up today, started talking, and I came with you to find him.”

“That’s the truth,” Carson said, mildly surprised.

“Yeah, but it doesn’t mention Toby, who doesn’t like cops, and it doesn’t bring in your guy, who seems to be made of run, and it pretty much just makes us the discoverees instead of the guys who are going to try to find a major witness.”

Carson gave him a relieved smile. “Yeah? You’d help me do that? Why?”

Dale’s smile was as slow and sweet as it had been when he’d ordered Carson breakfast, but now it held some heat. “Let’s just say I’d like to get to know Chicago just a little bit better.”

Carson’s face grew warm, and he took a drink of water to mask it. By the time he was done with his bottle, that hand on his bicep had moved to the back of his neck, and Dale’s brother and his partner had arrived in a squad car with St. Aubrey’s County on the side.

Let the games begin.

J
ESUS
, what a mess.

Glen Arden was just as handsome as his brother but a couple of inches taller. He’d also buzz-cut his hair, so no curls, and his blue eyes were the same shape, but there was nothing easygoing or laid-back about them.

“So, this Stassy. You say he just disappeared. Like, the same time this guy became a corpse?”

Carson wasn’t stupid. “Well, yeah. But he didn’t make him a corpse, if that’s what you’re saying.”

Glen proceeded to direct a laser scalpel into Carson’s soul with his eyes alone. “And you know that how?”

Shit.
“Well, because for one thing, Stassy is a sweet kid, but he’s got the body tone of rice pudding. If he’d lifted something heavy enough to do that to a guy’s skull, he woulda dropped it on his own pointy head.”

Glen looked unimpressed. “And for another?”

Shit.
“Well, for another, Stassy is rice pudding, but his uncle is, well, connected.” Understatement. Ivan wasn’t so much “connected” as a major “connection.” No violence on Ivan O’Leary’s watch—certainly not in his clubs, which he cosseted like the children he’d never had—but Carson had seen the goons Ivan hired. Those guys wouldn’t object to a little violence, oh no they would not.

“Connected how?”

Oh Jesus.
Really?
“I gotta spell this out for you, genius?” Carson snapped.

“And you work for him?”

“I work in his restaurant. You don’t know a guy’s mob when you turn in a job application. You look to see if they got health and dental!” It was true. And it hadn’t been until Stassy had said something about “Uncle Ivan’s other businesses” that Carson had put the whole thing together. “O’Leary’s is his legitimate business. All the people in his legitimate business are completely in the dark to his other businesses, you feel me? I got no idea what they are, I got no idea who runs them. I just wait tables at his bar.”

Finally, the guy blinked. “And this is supposed to make me believe in young Anastacio’s innocence because….”

Damn.
He may look sharper, but this guy had nothing on kid brother the surf guru. “Because if he did off somebody, do you think Ivan would have sent me down to find him? No, Ivan would have sent two of his best goons to feed this guy to the alligators and bail Stassy out of trouble. Ivan thought the kid forgot to pay a bill or smashed his car. This was above Stassy’s pay grade, trust me.”

Glen cocked his head and squinted at Carson like he was a new kind of bug. “You are a mouthy little shit, aren’t you?”

“I’ve got my moments,” Carson muttered. “Can I fucking go? I need to tell Ivan his nephew is in deep kimchi, okay?”

“Not just yet,” Glen said thoughtfully. “Let’s go over this timeline again….”

Carson sighed and let his gaze wander. A deputy, blond and just as void-looking as Glen, was wandering around the gathered crowd and asking them lazy questions. Carson seriously doubted he was going to discover anything that way, but, hey, watching Carson get grilled like a shrimp skewer couldn’t have been much fun either.

By the end of it, Carson really was homicidal. But as he turned away to go, that didn’t stop Dale’s voice, with that even Florida keel, from washing over him and tumbling some of the bad mood away. “Carson, which room you in?”

Carson had to think for a second. “Jesus, I don’t know. Your brother wrote it down when I knew my ass from my elbow. C’mon, Glen, cough up. Which room am I in?”

“Uh… wait… oh, here. Twenty-three. Why do you want to know?” Glen eyed his brother suspiciously, and Dale smiled slowly, all white even teeth.

“’Cause I’m hoping before he leaves, me and Carson might get in a little bit of sex. You want details on that too? You have spent the last hour up his ass, haven’t you?”

Glen’s eyes bugged out, and Carson erupted into a full-blown cackle. “Jesus, and he says I’m mouthy!”

“You are mouthy!” Glen scowled. “Now get the hell out of here before I bring you in for questioning!”

“Yeah, that’ll be entertaining. You can ask me how I breathe through my nose!”

“Carson, goddammit, go back to your room!” Dale snapped, and Carson shot him a dirty look. But he went. By God, he went, leaving Dale on the hotel green, arguing with his brother about whether he was obligated to remember the name of the last guy he’d seen Stassy with.

So now Carson was in the shower, trying to wash the stench and the dead body away, and focusing on what he could do for Stassy, who apparently had leapt into the deep end with the sharks, wearing lead weights on his feet and no body armor anywhere else.

He stepped out of the shower, toweling his hair, and ran straight into Anastacio Malinowski, Ivan’s favorite sister’s kid.

“Stassy?” Oh Jesus, the kid had seen better days. His blond hair was unwashed, and it hung lankly over his eyes, his Armani T-shirt was filthy, and his high-end jeans had real holes. “Jesus, Stassy, what the fuck are you doing here? The cops are fucking looking everywhere for you!”