Sinner's Gin (32 page)

“Good man, then.” He flipped off the meter. “You, I give you the ride for free. Then you call me when you’re done there. I’ll come get you.”

“Deal,” Miki said, taking the man’s card when the driver handed it to him.

After directing the Russian to drop him off at the corner, Miki gave the driver a hefty tip and another promise to call him back. Giving the man a friendly wave, he gripped the walking stick he borrowed from Donal, easing the weight off of his injured knee.

They’d tussled a bit about Miki heading to Vega’s house but in the end, Miki’s desire to put his ghosts to bed outweighed Donal’s apprehension. As a concession to Donal’s suspicious nature, he took the ancient walking stick Donal pulled from an umbrella stand.

The shillelagh was a gnarled piece of blackthorn Donal’s grandfather used while tramping through the wilds of Ireland, and Miki’d been reluctant to take it with him, but the older man scoffed at his reservations.

“That shillelagh there’s been through greater battles than you’ll find here in San Francisco, boy.” Donal’s lilting scold was light, a cheerful reassurance for Miki to take what seemed to be a Morgan heirloom with him as he climbed the hills of Vega’s neighborhood. “It’ll be good to have a piece of the family with you as you chase your boojums. If you want to do this alone, then at least have us with you in spirit. Now take the damned thing and go. Before the driver starts charging you for sitting there at the curb.”

“I feel like a goddamn leprechaun,” he groused. His knee gave him a little trouble, sending off a twinge or two as he walked up the hill toward Vega’s house, and the blackened, stout piece of wood made it easier to walk. “Or one of those hipster douches at the coffee shop. I could start a new trend. McPimp Mac Daddy fashions.”

It was too damned easy to reach the middle of the street. Miki suddenly found himself staring at his own personal hell. His fingers ached until he realized he was gripping the cane’s knob too tightly. He forced his hand to relax and the tension flowed out into his arms and shoulders, locking his legs with a rigid purpose.

Coming up to the house seemed like a good idea when he’d been cradled in the relatively insane warmth of the Morgan home. Surrounded by echoes of laughing children and steady adults, Miki found a longing inside of him, something whispering a promise that he could find a place at the table during the holidays or even a comforting word from a battered veteran of the fathering wars when he got too lost to find his way out of his head.

Donal asked him if he was ready to say good-bye to the past and step toward a better future. Miki couldn’t answer the man. There’d been too many shadows lurking behind him, and in that moment, Miki knew he had to make a clean break with his demons. He owed that much to Kane.

A tiny, frail voice in the back of his head whispered he owed that much to himself.

The house looked… smaller than he remembered, more worn down and tired around its edges. A bright orange paper was taped over the doorframe, warning people off the property. Fragments of yellow tape flapped their ragged edges from the hedge near the front stoop, more remnant of a tragedy than a warning against entry.

Time slipped away from Miki when he finally took a step forward and his foot hit the concrete walk. Within a blink of an eye, he was a child again, edging past the house in a slink. The boards fencing off the backyard were still loose, and he used the shillelagh’s heft to hold them to the side so he could slip past the splintery wood. Familiar scents assaulted him: a drift of pine from the trees bristling between the houses, a whiff of mildew from the partially open basement windows, and the odd pungency of the cheap paint Vega used to coat the house in its weary colors.

The ground beneath his sneakers was damp, and he nearly slipped when his foot hit a patch of lichen spreading outward in a black ripple. Miki slammed his hand against the house’s outer wall and hissed at the pain of his palm being scraped open on the rough paint. Shaking off the weeping sting, he picked his way through the weeds and recycle bins filled with empty aluminum cans to reach the ramshackle shed sitting at the back of the property.

At one point in the shed’s past, it served as a place to park a car. Adjacent to the alley running behind the houses, its single open wall had been boarded up, rendering it useless as a garage. Past owners made the space their own, either as a workroom or a space to tinker on mysterious projects, but the Vegas used the space for storage.

Miki had used it as a place to hide and dream.

He’d spent several afternoons moving boxes around until he carved out a good amount of space along the far wall. Now confronted by a wall of cardboard, Miki wondered if his hidey-hole was gone, but the flap of a washing-machine box remained in place. Slender windows cut along the eaves of the old garage let in enough light to see, and dust motes clotted the air, spiraling away in great waves as Miki moved about.

“Shit, I was a skinny kid,” he grumbled when he whacked his elbow against the wall trying to squeeze through the space. The shillelagh tucked under his arm rattled against the wood frame with each crab-walk step he took. A few seconds of dimness, and he was free of the tunnel and standing in what he’d always thought of as his lair.

It was as if time stopped and he was a kid again, trembling in fear at hearing Vega’s car rumble down the alleyway to park behind the house.

The painful-to-the-eye orange beanbag he’d rescued from a trash pile was still there, covered with a thin layer of dust. Strips of duct tape stitched together its torn sides, keeping its guts from spilling out. The edges of the tape were lifted up from age, and while he wouldn’t trust it to sit on, Miki grinned at the idea of it lying in wait like a vampiric tangerine blob. Shelves above the beanbag held what he came looking for, treasures he’d hidden away from grasping adult hands and judgmental eyes.

Pulling out a large box marked “roofing nails,” Miki eyed the beanbag suspiciously, deciding the decrepit vinyl probably wouldn’t hold its guts in if he sat on it. Squatting was another option, but an upside-down milk crate served readily enough as a stool. Miki opened the box flaps and stared down into his remains of his childhood.

A curled-up Playgirl held a prominent spot against a cardboard wall, and Miki laughed when he pulled it out and leafed through the pages. He couldn’t remember spending a lot of time on the images of the heavily endowed men between the covers, recalling only reading the sexual encounter stories, but the stickiness between the middle pages told him otherwise.

“Huh,” Miki murmured, turning the book so he could stare at the sculpted, muscular form of the blue-eyed centerfold model. “Guess this means I’m really gay. Kane’ll be happy.”

Emptying out the box took very little time. A few CDs he ripped off from the music store at the top level of the Japantown mall rattled when he drew them out. He set the L’arc disc aside, promising himself to go back and pay for them now he had money. A few papers boasting test scores low enough to qualify as Death Valley residents reminded Miki he’d hated school and an insect got to the string of gold stars he pasted together during a nearly funerary art class he had to take in the seventh grade. The art teacher showed up drunker than one of the unwashed men loitering down at the pier, and he’d taken great care to rub his leg against Miki’s thighs when he went around the class to look at their art projects.

“Maybe I can get Kane to shoot him too,” Miki sniffed. He reached down to stroke at a furry ear that wasn’t there and then sighed, suddenly missing his dog terribly. “Come on, it’s got to be here.”

It was under the papers. He’d not been careful with it, not as careful as it probably deserved because, like the beanbag, it showed the wear of time and the grimy effects of belonging to a little boy. Still, Miki drew it out with a special reverence, a tiny flicker of warmth flushing his cheeks as he uncovered his first friend.

Like the house, the plushie was smaller than he remembered, a little bit longer than his hand but squishable. With a black body constructed more like a flattened X than any similarity to an animal, its white head was topped with floppy round ears. Two black button eyes were set above its squished, dirty pink embroidered nose.

He’d been eight and at a street carnival, scrounging about between the booths for dropped money or game tickets. Fifteen tickets meant a small popcorn. Thirty gained him a hot dog with the works. Miki couldn’t remember how many he had when a woman shoved a handful of tickets at him but all of it been enough for cotton candy, two hot dogs, and the oddly shaped black and white plush dog-panda he spotted at the prize booth.

It wasn’t pretty, but it hung alongside the other toys as if proud of its cobbled-together appearance. The guy at the booth thought he was crazy for wanting it. Miki couldn’t imagine taking anything else home.

“Hey, Dude,” Miki whispered into the stuffed animal’s ear. “How about if I take you home now? There’s a guy I want you to meet. Oh, and I’ve got a dog, but I don’t think that’ll be a problem. He’s mostly into tennis balls.”

After stuffing the toy into the inside pocket of his jacket, Miki made his way out again, banging his elbow on the garage’s framing. He stumbled out of the shed and into the full daylight, blinking away the tears stinging his eyes at the bright sun. Patting his chest, Miki gripped the head of the shillelagh and dug its tip into the backyard’s scrabbling weeds. He took one step forward then the back of his head exploded in pain. The world spun around him, a battalion of stars swimming through the blackness edging around his vision.

He hit the ground face first, his stomach aching where the shillelagh dug into his side. The pain across the back of his head was nothing compared to the agony of his twisted knee, and Miki nearly threw up when he flipped over to face his attacker.

And saw nothing but the black muzzle of a gun as it was shoved into his open mouth.

Chapter 20

When you said you loved me, I believed you.

Then when you needed to be free, I deceived you.

—Junie’s Lies

“
Y
OU
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.”