“Sure,” Forest said, taking the sticks from Miki’s grip. “Anything you’ve written, I can play.”
“Good.” Miki reached down to pick up a bass guitar from a stand by the drums and slung it over his neck. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
CONNOR PARKED his Hummer on the curb, turning the vehicle off before swinging out of it and locking the door behind him. In the early-afternoon light, Marshall’s Amp coffee shop and its nearly windowless partner, the Sound, looked abandoned. To be fair, the entire block looked like it’d taken a beating. The older Chinese woman’s flower stall had been broken down and stood empty, shuttered tight with locking steel doors. A black ribbon taped to the stall’s wall flapped in the faint breeze working down the street, its painted gold hanzi cracked and faded from San Francisco’s brutal weather.
Someone’d set up a small altar of burned-down candles and rain-soaked notes against the plywood and beam patches across the Amp’s front. Rotting flowers scattered throughout the tribute kicked up a stink, mimicking the decay of the dead. If anything, the collection was more funereal than Connor was ready to deal with, especially since he still had flashes of digging through heavy bricks to find a seemingly lifeless Forest beneath the stone and grit.
He’d come by to get his own idea of how damaged the building was and if the Sound was affected structurally. Forest’s nerves were beyond razor thin, and they’d built up some tension between them when Connor forbade the man from going into the building.
“There’s too much risk,” Connor’d argued. “Someone’s trying to kill you, Forest, so no.”
Forest’s chin came up, but he didn’t argue. Thank God Brigid stepped in with an alternative plan, because Con was pretty certain Forest was about to draw a line in the sand and come out swinging. Verbally. Although from their time spent under the covers, Connor’d gained a deep respect for Forest’s sinewy strength.
The Amp was still cordoned off with crime-scene tape, but someone’d been at it, taking a chunk off the plywood. Shaking his head, Connor went to undo the padlock on the Amp’s remaining intact front door and muttered, “Fucking ghouls.”
Problem was, the padlock was already open, and Connor pushed open the door—only to find he’d stepped into another nightmare.
Death’d come again to the Amp and left evidence of its sharp scythe.
A middle-aged, slightly portly man was flung over the shop’s shot-up counter. Even from the door, Connor could see he was gone. There was no mistaking that. Even more alarming, he appeared to be freshly slaughtered, blood still seeping from his torn-apart belly to form a pool beneath him. His arms were sticky and red, causeways for his blood to travel down, and his fingers looked like talons from the long, heavy drags of red dripping from them.
Intestines trailed out of his belly wound, and his face was slack, a gray mass of skin and wrinkles. His work boots were gone, and one of his socks had a hole in it, his big toe sticking out of the gap. A wedding ring cut deep into his now swollen finger, the burnished gold nearly lost under the gore of its owner’s death.
Drawing his weapon, Connor stepped up against the wall, ducking behind the semisafety of a bank of espresso machines. His gaze flicked over the graffiti spray-painted on the back of the plywood patches, taking in the violent neon-green letters. He swore to ignore the gurgle of nerves coming up in his belly. He was used to fear. He dealt with it every day in his line of work.
Whoever was doing this needed to be stopped. For Connor, it’d become long past personal—someone was moving against his own.
It took him a second, but he then recognized the man, the main contractor Forest’d hired to fix the store. The man shouldn’t have been in there. Not dead—not like a piece of garbage left for someone to pick up. He’d obviously come to do some work, because a briefcase lay on the floor at Connor’s feet, and there were rolls of blueprints bound with rubber bands a few feet away. Someone’d followed the man in, surprised him, and killed him.
The problem was, Connor and the rest of SFPD were no closer to finding out who was murdering the people in Forest’s life, and if he wasn’t stopped soon, there was a good chance he’d be moving on to someone in the Morgan clan itself.
Connor stopped short, catching a hint of a sound coming from inside the Amp. Turning his head, he heard the whimpering cry of a woman. Stepping carefully around the counter so as not to disturb the body, he hefted his weapon up and entered the kitchen, waiting to hear it again. Another mewl, loud and coming from under a counter in the kitchen, drew him farther into the room. His foot came down on a piece of Styrofoam and it snapped, a loud cracking sound, and the cry came again, louder and fraught with terror.
“Jules?” he called out. “It’s me, Connor. Is that you? Come out, honey. It’s okay. I’m here.”