Tequila Mockingbird (5 page)

“If I had the gum, I’d give it to you so you had something to keep that smart mouth of yours busy.” Connor chuckled.

“I’d need more than gum to do that.”

Forest winced, hearing the innuendo in his words, especially when Connor’s deep blue eyes narrowed and his sharp focus shifted from Forest’s hands to his face. It was a glare sharpened on life’s whetstone, giving Forest an idea of what the man might look like as he came through a door behind a black battering ram.

Or even on his knees between Forest’s legs and working up a sweat tearing apart his ass with a thick, long Irish cock.

“Are you warm?” One of Connor’s ice-chilled hands drifted up to test Forest’s forehead. “You’re turning red. Do you have a fever? Getting chills, maybe?”

“Maybe it’s the ice,” Forest lied. “I’m okay. Really. Jules will have your ass for being back here.”

“Really? Because she’s the one who told me to come check on you when we saw you foaming up your hand with milk.” Connor’s fingers were warm on Forest’s wrist, and Forest wondered if the man knew he was stroking at Forest’s pulse point. “Can I trust you to hold the ice pack there while I go see if there’s burn ointment in that first-aid kit on the wall?”

The man was way too close. He filled every inch of Forest’s awareness, stretching out to touch even the darkest corners of his soul. Connor was too much—too vibrant—too fucking male for Forest to wrap his mind around. The only thing he wanted to do was fall into the sweet promise of Connor’s brogue and forget everything pressing in on him. He needed the cop to be away from him—anywhere away—away from lingering over his skin or so near Forest could feel Connor’s breath on his face. It was just too much and made Forest feel guilty for forgetting about Frank’s death—even if it was only for a moment.

“Look, I’m fine. I’ll do it,” Forest insisted, edging away from Connor and responding with the only thing he knew he could use to drive someone off, his sharp tongue. “You want to help me out? Go find out who put a fucking bullet into Frank’s head.”

The cop jerked his head back, and from the shocked expression on his face, Forest could have punched him straight in the mouth and gotten the same reaction. He wanted to apologize. The words were at the edge of his tongue, but something insane seemed to be nesting in his brain, and instead of
I’m sorry for being an asshole
, something much meaner came out.

“You guys have been about as useful as tits on a fish, dude.” Forest tried to yank his hand away from Connor’s grip. “Fucking hell. Let go, dude. I can do it myself.”

The man held on. Even through the violence of Forest’s harangue, the cop held him in, keeping his fingers wrapped tight around Forest’s arm. It was a brief, unsuccessful struggle, and short of screaming for help, Forest should have felt trapped.

He hated being trapped. It reminded him of different times. Back before the apartment over the studio, before Frank lured him in and called him son. The clench of Lt. Connor Morgan’s hand around his wrist should have thrown dark memories into his face—of being slammed up against walls, the pain of his empty stomach folding in on itself, or having his jaw ache from being used. That was how trapped usually felt—staked through his body with a metal pin as he fought to get free. Even when he’d known it was useless, he still fought.

This time—this man—didn’t serve all that up on a silver platter to him. Instead, the damned hand around his wrist made him feel—cared for—tended to. It made Forest want more than that simple touch, and he kind of maybe hated Connor Morgan for making him feel that way. Fighting the man off should have been like breathing—something he did automatically—but with Connor, he couldn’t quite make that break.

And throughout it all, Connor Morgan’s deep-ocean gaze never left his face.

Sighing, Forest gave up and wilted against the counter. “Really, man. What the fuck do you want from me? You come in here every other day, and it screws with my brain. I don’t know what to do with you. It’s not like you say anything about… my dad, and the inspector they assigned to the case hasn’t even called me back. I left a fuckton of messages, but nothing. I just want to know what the hell they’re doing—”

“What’s his name?” Connor asked softly, still holding onto Forest’s wrist. “The inspector. What’s his name?”

“Her. Um…. Devorsky? Something like that. I wrote it down from what the uniformed cop told me, but I probably spelled it wrong.”

“I don’t know her.” The cop frowned, his dark eyebrows closing in over his strong nose. Those fingers began anew, stroking away the cold. “But I’ll see what I can find. She should have called you. At least to take your statement. I’m sorry—”

“Look, I’m sorry. I was a dick,” Forest rubbed at his face with his free hand. “I just don’t know—”

The window behind them blew in, an explosion of glass and sound. Forest’s heart pounded once, a scared, fluttering tight beat. Then he found himself on the floor, the blue-eyed cop’s body stretched over him. Connor’s weight pinned him down, and his fight-or-flight response kicked in. Forest squirmed, unable to see what was going on.

A rat-tat of gunfire sprayed the air, and there were screams—so many screams—too blended and horrifying for Forest to pick out individual voices. The panic burbling in his stomach flowed up his throat and hit his face before spreading out to his spine. People were dying out there, lying in their own blood, and he lay safe behind a bank of short refrigerator units with a man he’d just lusted for pressing his crotch into the curve of Forest’s ass.

“Jules!” Forest twisted around under Connor. “I’ve got to find Jules.”

“Lay there,” the cop ordered as he got up into a crouch. Forest wondered numbly where the gun Connor had in his hand came from and when the lazy Irish burr had suddenly hardened into a rough-edged bark of authority. “Don’t move.”

The buzz of bullets seemed to have ended, but the burn of sound continued to echo in Forest’s ears. For a short moment, he debated getting up, but the heat of Connor’s hand on the small of his back remained, a searing reminder of the order he’d been given.

“God, scared shitless and I’m fucking hard,” Forest whimpered, resting his forehead on the floor.

With his head down and close to the floorboards, Forest got a good look at the underside of the Amp’s bakery case. Sniffing, he inhaled a sting of pine-scented cleaner and sent a mental thank-you to his night crew for mopping thoroughly. Then he turned his head, saw the carnage of the Amp’s dining room, and threw up all over a pool of blood.

The Devil’s waiting for me behind that door.

She’s got my heart, lay waste to my soul.

Nothing I do can make her let me go.

Hard to touch a heart as black as coal.

—
Devil’s Waiting

T
HERE
WAS
so much blood. Forest could taste it in the air.

But what was more frightening was the silence—a still, weighty silence where he could hear every little shiver of the dying.

Outside of the Amp, the world somehow stopped turning. No wind-blown leaves, and the flicker of the sun through the trees produced nothing but cold shadows. Forest heard
everything
in that sickly quiet. A few feet from him, a man struggled to breathe, his lungs gurgling and bubbling as he sucked in air through newly pierced holes. There was no telling where all the blood came from—or who it came from. All Forest knew was it made its own special noise, a squicking wet pop when he pulled his hands up from the floor.

“Forest.” Connor’s voice shattered the quiet, and the world took a breath. The noise—all of the ugly, glorious noise—flooded back into it and it began to turn, once more ignoring the death splattered all over its face. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he gulped, and a new fear stroked his spine. “God, how—Oh God, Jules.”

Because he didn’t know where to start or who to reach for first. The man’s chest stilled, and he crawled quickly over, ignoring the new squicks his hands made or the slide of his knee through a puddle of vomit and blood. He didn’t know who to help, the man whose chest lay splayed open like an eighth-grade frog experiment or the gray-haired woman lying slumped against the bakery case, her temple turned crimson with blood.

“Check that guy there. Check his breathing.” Connor’s bark broke the ice of Forest’s fear. “See if you can press your hands over his wounds. Stop the bleeding.”

“He’s not breathing.” Forest didn’t know where to put his hands or whether or not the sluggish flow of blood cooling along the man’s side was something he should be worried about. “I don’t think he’s—”

“Switch with me. Jules is over there. You go help her. Just keep her company.” The cop was next to him in a second, an enormous mountain of calm amid the chaos. “She’s going to be fine.”

It was as if the coffee shop suddenly came alive, now that its predator was clear of the area. The more ambulatory began to stir, and Connor directed anyone who could walk or function. A couple of men—regulars if Forest remembered right—moved from person to person to help Connor assess the injured. Shakily getting to his feet, Forest lurched off balance, and Connor’s hands came up to catch him.

“I’ve got you, Forest,” Connor promised. “I won’t let you fall.”

There was that hug again—the same one—the same kind of never-ending safety he’d felt when Connor’d held him after Franklin’s death. In the middle of the horror, Forest hugged back, then let go, taking some of Connor’s strength with him.

“Thanks.” The cold set in when he broke from Connor, but his heart settled, catching only a riff of excitement when he spotted Jules lying on the ground under a table. “Jules. Oh shit—”

“Hey, boss.” Her eyes wandered to where Connor crouched. “My arm hurts like fucking shit, and I’m checking your boyfriend’s ass out. It’s a really fucking incredible ass. If that’s the last thing I see, I’m totally good with it.”

“Not my boyfriend,” he replied automatically. Her arm looked bad, dangling uselessly from her shoulder. Anything he might have learned from the safety videos Frank forced them to watch each year flew out of his mind, and a cold settled into Forest’s chest. His gums tightened over his teeth from the fear burbling up inside of him, but Forest swallowed the sensation down, forcing himself to focus on the one person he’d come to count on just as much as he’d trusted Frank. “Don’t die on me, Jules. What the fuck am I supposed to do without you? Who’s going to keep me company while I’m waiting for some stupid band to get their shit together to play?”

“Pretty sure your cop counts as company,” Jules snorted, then winced. “I’m not going anywhere. Might pass out, though. It really hurts, Forest. And I can’t die. Who the hell is going to make that man donuts?”

He missed anything else Jules might have said under the scream of emergency vehicles pouring into Chinatown. The thick morning traffic would mean a sluggish response, even if there were somewhere for drivers to pull over in the district’s tiny streets. He tried to remember if the parking lot was empty when he’d come down for his own coffee, but for the life of him, Forest couldn’t recall anything other than Connor’s long, hot body on his back as the cop protected him from the gunfire and the whimpering screech of constant pain coming from the injured around him.

Forest hadn’t really thought about his life until he’d first seen her lying slumped against the café table. Jules—the manager of the Amp—was the only person he really could call friend, and even then, they’d never done anything together other than walk to the street fair every other Saturday to gorge on street food. They sometimes held hands, mostly because she needed help stomping over the uneven cobblestones while wearing high-heeled boots, but he’d welcomed the touch. So few people touched him—other than casual lovers he’d picked up while playing in the studio or subbing in for a live show when someone’s drummer went missing. No, Forest couldn’t remember the last time someone’d just touched him for the sake of it—for the pleasure of feeling their skin glide together.

Other than Connor Morgan. He still burned in the places where
that
man touched him, and he felt a pang of guilt for having naughty thoughts when he should be focusing on Jules and her pain.

“Hold on, Jules.” He held her hand and squeezed—just like when they held hands and picked at the mounds of exotic fruits, looking for tarantulas or a new flavor to bring into the shop. She’d always returned the light pressure, her nose wrinkling when he reminded her he was gay and couldn’t ever really be in love with her.

Except this time, she didn’t squeeze back.

“Y
OU
HAVE
a gun,” Forest mumbled, his words nearly lost in the swaddle of Connor’s leather jacket.

Shock turned the young man’s lips nearly white, his brown eyes burned dark in his pale face. Connor’s thick black leather hung from Forest’s shoulders, making the lean, muscular man seem boyish. When he’d forced his jacket on Forest, Connor’d been taken aback by the power in the man’s arms and chest. Too used to the sheer bulk of his siblings and the other members of his team, Forest’s sinewy musculature proved as much of a shock as the gunfire storm hitting the Amp.