And I do.
I have her from every side, every angle, every direction, all night long. I never knew what sex could be—how huge. How intense. But somehow, I knew with Lucky it would be different than with anyone else, and I wasn’t wrong.
We finally doze as the sun’s rays begin to streak my wall, and as I drift off, I decide to take Kate’s advice for real. When Lucky wakes up, I’m going to tell her I’m falling so fucking hard for her I can’t see straight.
#
But what happens instead is this—
A pound on the door wakes me from an intense dream about that very conversation, and I jerk upright in bed.
Lucky rubs her eyes and looks up at me, her naked body twisted into my white sheets like cream swirling into coffee.
The knock comes again, and this time, there’s a voice. “Trotte Gunnison, this is the police. We have a warrant to search the premises.”
My stomach launches itself into my throat. “Fuck,” I say, scrambling out of bed. In that second, I realize I don’t give a shit what they do to me, but I don’t want them dragging Lucky through the mud.
I grab my jeans from the floor and tug them on. “Get dressed and round up all your stuff.” I go to the window and yank it open. “Go down the fire escape one floor and knock on the next window down. It’s Kate’s.”
Her eyes are wide with fear and confusion, but she starts grabbing her things from the floor. “What’s the age of consent in Texas?” she asks, and I know we’re thinking the same thing.
But it doesn’t matter.
“You’re a California resident, where it’s eighteen, and you’re over state lines with me.”
Her face pales as I speak. “Oh God.”
She moves faster when another knock comes at the door. “This is your last opportunity to open this door voluntarily, Mr. Gunnison,” the cop says through the door.
I give her one last look, then turn for the family room. I take a deep breath and pull open the door, standing squarely in the opening to keep them from coming in until Lucky’s had time to get out. Three large cops stand outside my door, two on the landing and one a few stairs down.
“Sorry, just got back from Europe so my clock’s all fucked up.” I rub my eyes to make it clear I was sleeping. “What time is it?”
Instead of answering, the two cops closest to me hem me in. “Trotte Gunnison? AKA Trotte Michael Tanner?”
Nobody’s called me that in six years and hearing it now freezes my blood.
“What’s this about?”
The biggest of the two cops, who outweighs me by at least thirty pounds, gets up in my face. “We need you to come with us to the station.”
“Why?”
The older guy in plain clothes on the stairs behind the two uniforms speaks up for the first time. “Because we have some questions to ask you about the murder of Michael Henry Tanner.” He steps up onto the landing and the uniform in my face backs off. “He was your father, correct?”
There’s suddenly no air. I can’t answer.
“I have a warrant to search this property,” he says, pulling a folded paper from the breast pocket of his white button-down. He flicks his wrist and opens it in front of me. “Sergeant Garcia will be happy to escort you to the department, if you’d like to wait there.”
“He’s dead,” I say, processing what he said.
The last time I saw him was almost three years ago, right in this apartment, after he tracked me down. We did our best to kill each other, and when I woke up, he was gone and Kate had hauled me into my bedroom and had me mostly cleaned up and bandaged.
“Dead,” the plain clothes guy confirms.
“How do you know?” I ask, but I know he’s right. I’ve known it for a long time.
He quirks his head at me, assessing, and in that gaze, I see it. They think I did it. “Because we found his body strapped into the passenger seat of his ’99 Chevy pickup at the bottom of Lake Travis two weeks ago.”
I close my eyes and rub them. So, just about the time Grim and I were beating the living shit out of each other in Zurich, my old man was fucking with my life one last time.
“Can’t say I’m sorry the cocksucker’s dead,” I say, “but I didn’t kill him.”
The guy steps closer and his uniforms back off. “You’re not under arrest, son, but I do have some questions for you. Anything you want to tell us about how your father died?”
“No fucking clue,” I lie.
“Why don’t you take a ride with Sergeant Garcia,” he says. “We can talk in more detail at the station after I’ve had a quick look around.”
The uniform on my right grabs my arm and he and the other start herding me down the stairs as the older guy steps into my apartment.
And I hope three years is long enough that whatever he finds in there is useless.
Chapter 32