Tequila Mockingbird (3 page)

They worked silently—a small team of six black-clad officers stealing through a dimly lit parking lot. Hours of training and practice helped with their synchronicity, but nothing beat working a raid. Connor stepped in time with Roberts, keeping his weapon aimed up over the man’s head as the smaller man swung a black battering ram into the RV’s door.

It burst in, a scatter of old plastic, wood chips, and metal. The team poured in, and Con’s heart began to skip its curious, familiar beat, a pounding of excitement in his chest. There was nothing to compare to the feeling of that first whiff of danger or the sound of boots on the floor when they came in. The press of his team around him, then the explosion of their bodies separating to break down a house’s interior, working back to back to secure the area.

The motor home was no different. The shatter hit, and they were through, deep murmurs of voices and then the hush of their breathing amid the periodic orders Con barked out to his team. He’d handpicked each one, culling through the applicants until he was satisfied he’d go into a dangerous situation with his ass and back covered.

Adrenaline hit his bloodstream hard and fast, amping up his senses as he ducked away from the splinters coming at him from the remains of the door. While the RV was a long straight space, there were nooks and crannies within its enormous rectangular shape. A bathroom took up a bit of the side, and a quick glance at the back showed a thick curtain of beads—both areas potentially dangerous for their raid, especially since the space was tight, and there wouldn’t be a lot of room to maneuver.

Con broke off Evers and Moffatt to the back, keeping Roberts with him for the front. At some point in the RV’s lifetime, probably soon after its weary carcass was dumped in the parking lot, someone’d converted the driving cab to another lounging or sleeping place, but a partially drawn tie-dyed curtain blocked off a clear view of the area.

The rest of the RV was empty, and if there was a shit ton of meth in the vehicle, they’d probably find it hidden under platforms or in walls. It was going to be a long and tedious hunt, and Con wanted to secure the RV before they dragged it off to the yard to be broken down—because nothing said surprise like finding a drug dealer hiding in the bathroom of an impounded motor home.

“Clark, Davis—bathroom’s yours.” Connor waved them off. “Mind your Qs.”

He kept his own quadrant clear, pressing back to back with Roberts as they moved to the front of the RV. Their boots clunked on the faux-wood floor. It was strangely spongy beneath Con’s feet, and he pondered if the drugs were in caches beneath the floor, because as they inched forward, the RV rocked and swayed under them.

That supposition would have to wait until they got the RV dragged away. For right now, his sole focus was on finding the man who’d parked the RV so many years ago, then decided it would be a good place to stash poison—a poison Connor Morgan had no intention of ever letting onto his city’s streets. They’d hit the building next. The RV was too small to cook meth in, but Marshall owned the brick building beyond the parking lot.

Lots of space there to cook up a chemical stew strong enough to rip a man’s brain apart.

Something was off about the raid. The niggle of off nipped at Connor’s mind, and he scanned the interior, looking for something—anything—to tell him what he was bothered by. The RV wasn’t clean by any stretch, not a sparkling eat-off-the-floor kind of environment, but neither was it packed to the gills with papers or rotting garbage. If anything, it looked like an aging hippie’s sanctuary, complete with a cardboard poster of a topless Janis Joplin at an old Haight-Ashbury event. Several lit candles lined the kitchenette’s counters, flickered erratically from the wind coming through the now extinct front door.

There was an odd scent Connor couldn’t quite place lingering in the air, and for a second, he passed it off as some type of incense, but it
bothered
him. There was a heavy raspberry or floral odor, but something wafted underneath that—a curious odd tickle of a scent Con
knew
. Only when he spotted a man’s bare foot peeking out from under a corner of the rainbow-swirled curtain did he realize it wasn’t patchouli scenting the air.

Con saw the man’s foot poking out from behind the curtain just as his brain clicked on what he was smelling, and someone’s footsteps jostled the RV enough to send the candles toppling over, igniting the propane in the built-up space.

“Evac!” Con yelled into his headset. “Get out!”

He didn’t have time to give his team visual cues to hit the open door. A fireball erupted from the kitchen’s gas stove top, and the cop part of his brain kicked in the RV’s details. From their initial recon, the team was sitting on at least two long propane tanks, and if either one was full, the RV would blow sky-high once the flames ate through the lines and exposed the whole fucking mess to the open air.

Connor grabbed at the man’s foot and yanked, pulling him clear of the bed and into the open.

Unresponsive, the man was a dead weight in his arms, but Connor couldn’t risk checking the man over. The fire spread, the gases thankfully thinned from the team’s break-in, but the tanks were still a worry. Hefting the barefooted man up over his shoulder, Connor was the last to peel through the door—then the concussion blast of the RV’s demise hit his back, and he went flying.

Connor and his rescue hit the pavement hard, and Con rolled, wrapping his arms around the unconscious man’s limp body. Debris flew over them, and Connor’s head echoed from the rocking pings of things hitting his helmet. The heat of the blast covered them, scorching the air around them, and Connor felt gravel bite into his cheek as they tumbled. His limbs would ache from the uncontrollable cartwheels of their blast-propelled bodies, and he vaguely heard himself grunt when they bounced on the pavement, only to bounce down hard again.

His elbow went tingly when they struck and rolled to a stop. He lay there, smelling the acrid scent of his gear cooking on his body and sucking in as much non-fire-filled air as he could. Training for a fire kicked his brain into automatic pilot, and he’d expelled as much of his breath as he could when he’d jumped out of the RV. Without oxygen or propane in his lungs, it was as large of a fuck-you to the fire’s touch as he could give it at the time.

It did, however, leave his chest screaming for air, and his ribs shuddered painfully when he drew his first full breath. Stars clouded his vision, and Connor forced himself to roll off the man’s body, feebly calling for a med team to find him in the parking lot. His head still sang its song of sixpence from where he struck the parking lot, but other than his aching muscles and possibly singed eyebrows, Con was relatively sure he’d emerged unscathed.

It was just going to take him a moment before he could stand up long enough to take a full inventory.

“You okay there, Morgan?” Davis crouched over him, her hands busy at the fastenings of his vest. She sounded far away—almost as if underwater—and Connor frowned, wondering if he’d somehow gotten his headset shoved down into his ear or if his hearing was blown out by the blast. “Can you hear me, Lieutenant? How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Yeah, just… not a lot of hearing yet.” Connor slapped Davis’s hand away from his face. “And you pick
now
to flip me off?”

“Seemed like as good a time as any, sir.” She grinned at him from under her helmet. “Need some help up?”

“No, I’ve got it.” He rolled over, wincing at the pricks of pain along his back, but for the most part, all of his parts seemed functional. There was blood on his hands and a trickle of it winding down his face from where he’d scraped it. “Get to Marshall. See how he’s doing.”

“Yeah, about that, sir.” Evers popped his head over Davis’s shoulder. “You need to take a look at this.”

The medic crouching next to Connor’s rescue wasn’t working on Marshall—and it was definitely Marshall lying there in the pool of melon-hued light cast from one of Chinatown’s streetlamps. Connor recognized the man from his driver’s license photo even with the gray streaking his heavy, long beard. He’d been younger in the photo.

And considerably much more alive.

His arms were slack, lacking even the tension of muscles drawn against the pain of overextension. Flung out like an insect smashed against a wall with a fly swatter, Marshall’s body lay still and quiet, his slight potbelly hanging flaccid above worn gray sweatpants, and his chest, thick with a salt-and-pepper pelt, sported numerous holes. Deep holes Connor suspected punched right through the man’s chest and out his back, giving him the appearance of being riddled with numerous grotesque nipples.

The EMT brushed off his hands and began walking to his rig, not even stopping as he patted Connor on the shoulder and said, “Congrats, Lieutenant. You’ve rescued a dead man.”

F
OREST
HEARD
the
wrong
in the air. He liked leaving the windows open a bit, even after Frank chastised him about burglars and lung damp from whatever came in off the bay’s waters. The sounds felt wrong—abnormal for the area. The neighborhood had a certain rhythm in it, one Forest knew as much as he did the sound of his own breathing.

Mostly asleep, he labored in the depth of his slumber, his mind sorting through the sounds around him. Voices were deeper, not like the chatter of club-goers cutting through the parking lot to get to the BART, and certainly not the Asian food workers starting their day in the curve of an early morning to prep for a long, busy day feeding tourists and locals alike. These voices were serious, hammering at his quiet. Then a boom shook the air.

And Forest smelled the taint of fire licking at the edges of his world.

It smelled close—too close for his liking—and he fought the long threads of sleep wrapping over him. The coffee shop was a possibility, but none of the alarms had gone off, and the studio’s wiring was new, revamped in the last renovation bug Frank had up his ass.

Then the screaming panic of sirens shot through his open window, and Forest finally opened his eyes to see hell had come to visit.

He stumbled over his drum kit, barking his toes on the set of Rotodrums he’d been tuning earlier. Trying to pull on a pair of jeans as he made it to the back wall of his studio apartment, Forest banged his elbow on a counter and nearly slammed into one of the barstools he used to sit at the kitchen counter and eat. Frustrated and smarting, he yanked away the curtain from the slender back wall window and stared down into the parking lot where Frank Marshall first found him.

Frank’s RV was on fire, and from what he could see, the cops standing around it were doing jack shit to help the man inside. It definitely was a slice of hell served up on a knife, because his heart imploded under a thrust of pain cutting through it.

“No no no.” Fear did silly things to a person, Forest knew that. He’d thought fear was something he’d left behind in that Dumpster years ago, but it lingered there, waiting to reach out with its cold, slithery fingers to yank at his teeth until their roots ran cold in his gums.

He couldn’t lose Frank. He never even imagined that being a possibility in his life. In Forest’s mind, the scruffy old hippie would always lurk nearby, marinated in pot and glory days when San Francisco was about love not pixels, and always with a word or two about how he played Perdie’s Filmore rendition of Memphis Soul Stew.

“Fucking cops. Goddamn it!” Forest couldn’t see the second-story landing when he pulled open his front door. His eyes burned from a mingle of smoke and tears, but he went down the back stairs without even thinking about putting on shoes. He didn’t even feel the small pebbles under his bare feet or how cold the night turned since he’d fallen asleep after drumming a session for a has-been rock band.

Because the world was trying to yank away the only family he’d ever found to love him, and suddenly the past decade slipped away, and Forest was once more that scared, skinny twelve-year-old kid Frank found trying to get out of a Dumpster.

Forest hit a wall before he could reach the engulfed motor home. Some part of him realized the wall was a man. His cock certainly knew it was, and his mind registered an enormous amount of muscle, large encompassing hands, and flashing bright blue eyes. Dressed in body-hugging black and wearing a thick vest with SWAT written across his chest, the wall smelled of embers and cop.

Even as his heart lay in the ashes fluttering about on the parking lot under his torn-up bare feet.

“You’ve got to let me go!” he yelled at the cop. The man held him, immovable and steady. Forest tried shoving at the man’s chest, but all he got for his trouble was a jarring rattle in his teeth and spine. He stared into the man’s hard, handsome face and pleaded. “Dude, please. That’s my dad in there. My
dad’s
in there. Please. If it were your dad—”

“I’d want in there so verra bad,” the cop replied softly, and some small part of Forest’s brain registered other things about him—the small block letters on his chest spelling out his name as Morgan, the Irish strung through his rumbling, deep voice, and how good the man’s hands felt rubbing at Forest’s shoulders and back to soothe him. “But he’s already gone. I pulled him out before the whole thing went up. He’s gone.”

Forest went frigid—as if he’d turned into the cold, hard ground Franklin Marshall would eventually be buried in. The roar of the fire masked the sound of a gurney being wheeled toward a waiting ambulance, its lights and sirens dark and muted. No one lit up the skies for a dead man, the streets wouldn’t shriek with the hope of getting Franklin to the hospital in time, and Forest crumbled, his legs unable to hold up the heavy weight of his breaking soul.

The cop caught him. The Irish rock who’d kept Forest back from the flames wrapped his bulky arms around Forest’s body and held him, murmuring softly through the smoke smothering them so only Forest could hear. “I’ve got you now. I’ve got both of you now. We’ll find out who did this to your da. I promise you that. I promise.”