Quinn reached up and rattled the guide chains to the bay door over the dog’s head. The terrier ignored him to chew on a stray bread crust. “Mom wants to see your ugly face at the dinner table on Sunday. She’s a bit pissed off it’s been missing of late.”
“With you around, I’m surprised she can see past your ugly to miss mine.”
“Keep it up, brother mine, and I can take care of what little pretty you have left.”
“Yeah, I’d like to see you try,” Kane growled. “Sunday. Got it.”
Quinn studied the dog again. “Doesn’t have a tag. Want me to call Animal Control and ticket the owner?”
“Really?” Kane stopped cleaning the tips of his chisels and looked up at his younger brother. “I’m a cop. You think I need a history teacher to call in a stray dog?”
“Just saying, if the dog’s bugging you….”
“Yeah, I don’t need my baby brother to take care of it for me.” He put away the tools in a work cabinet and locked the doors. “You want some dinner or something? Or are you heading back to the college?”
“Let me check on something, and we can meet up at Leong’s later,” Quinn said. He retrieved his phone and tapped the screen. “Unless that welding glove the mutt just took isn’t all that important.”
Kane turned in time to see the terrier trotting off with a long white glove he used while stacking rough woods. Taking a deep breath, he tilted his head back and exhaled slowly. “God, I hate that dog.”
“Leong’s then?” Quinn asked. “Half an hour?”
“I’ll either see you there or I’ll call you for bail,” Kane muttered. A quick twist of a key opened the gun safe where he kept his badge and Glock. After snapping the holstered gun onto his belt, Kane shrugged on his leather jacket, covering the weapon. “That guy’s got to do something about his mutt.”
“Offer to run it in still stands,” Quinn said. “Or I could shoot it. I’ll have to borrow your gun, though. I don’t have one.”
The younger Morgan chuckled at the poisonous look Kane shot at him. Shrugging, Quinn returned to his phone and stepped aside as his older brother closed and locked the rolling door.
AS HE expected, the dog was gone before Kane circled the building, but unlike the last time, the warehouse’s garage bay was open, and a throaty rumbling seduced him into coming closer.
A door that probably led to the warehouse space was closed, but the partially raised dog door cut into it gave Kane some idea of where the mutt went. He barely noticed the small pile of odd items stacked next to the rolled-up bay door or the open half-full trash bag sitting next to it. Kane stepped over his missing welding glove and stood in awe in front of the beauty stretched out before him, a custom cover pooled on the concrete by its grill.
Even in the fading light of a San Francisco twilight, the backed-in 1968 GTO gleamed black and sleek under the garage’s single overhead light. Its classic lines were clean, without a hint of a ripple on the metal. Curiously, the car sat up on risers, its wheels a few inches up off the cement floor, but the rims gleamed, and the area beneath the engine was spotless. The driver’s side door was slightly open, and the engine rumbled, a low, growling purr that filled the garage.
Kane forgot all about the welding glove and the plans he’d made with his brother to grab Chinese food. He only had eyes for the sleek, gleaming black car.
“Hello, baby,” Kane purred back.
He hesitated to touch its gleaming paint but compromised his reluctance with the promise to wipe off any fingerprints he might leave behind. The black sheen was smooth under his hand, obviously done in a high-end paint shop. From what Kane could see, the interior was as pitch black as the exterior, but the dark tint on the side and rear windows made seeing inside the car difficult, especially with the garage light on.
“How come the dome light isn’t on?” Kane patted the car. “Your daddy fixing that?”
He walked around to the driver’s side door and stopped dead in his tracks. A step forward, then a longer peek into the interior told him all he needed to know, and Kane pulled his gun and moved closer, slowly approaching the car.
“Damn it, I’m supposed to be off today.” Kane swore a hot Gaelic curse he learned from his grandmother. “I don’t need this kind of shit.”
Even in the GTO’s glossy black leather interior, Kane knew the wetness on the seats was blood, probably coming from the punctured remains of the naked, elderly Asian man sprawled across the front seat. Years of living already ravaged the man’s face, but a knife had helped deepen the thick, wrinkled grooves in his skin. A sluggish glut of yellowish trickle eased from a gaping wound along his abdomen, joining the other drying trails of fluids crisscrossing his flaccid gray skin. One eye stared up at the car’s black headliner, but the other was only an empty socket partially filled with black dried blood. The man’s mouth was torn open, a mocking echo of the ragged slashes on his torso.