In Another Country
In Another Country
Kellum Jeffries
In Another Country
Copyright © 2019, Kellum Jeffries
Published by Painted Hearts Publishing
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In Another Country
Copyright © 2019 Kellum Jeffries
ISBN 13: 978-1-946379-51-1
ISBN 10: 1-946379-51-4
Author: Kellum Jeffries
Editor: Lili Booth
Publication Date: February 2019
All cover art and logo copyright © 2019 by Painted Hearts Publishing
Cover design by E Keith
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
For Carrie—for the spark and so much else.
Fayetteville, NC
1997
If Dec had gotten called into Carter’s office six months ago, he’d have been pretty sure he was about to get fired. But lately he’d been a great cop again—gotten past the drinking, sorta gotten past the divorce.
Still, it always threw him a little, getting called in by the chief. You wouldn’t think a guy who was maybe five foot four could be scary, but Carter managed it. So Dec was relieved to hear it was just an undercover assignment. Until—
“Wait, what?” he said. And tried to figure out his play here, should he try to pretend he didn’t know Hotshot was a gay bar? Or would that be, what’s the phrase, protesting too much?
He shot for somewhere in between knowing and not knowing. “Um, wasn’t that…I’ve heard maybe…”
“Yes, it is an establishment that caters to tastes not entirely within the mainstream,” Carter said, and Dec blinked. He’d never quite gotten used to the weird mix of cop-speak, how Carter might say something totally elegant like that and then his next sentence would be “You wanna stop fucking slouching, you asshole?”
But this time Carter stayed with the formal. “Do you have any objections to the assignment, Detective?” And he gave Dec a long look, one that just went on and on, but it was kind of sympathetic, and Dec had been wondering but that look sealed it. Carter knew. Knew there was more to the breakup with Christine than just some kind of ten-year itch.
And for just a second there Dec wanted to invite Carter out for a beer and just fucking vent for hours, because that look opened the floodgates, that look made him want to go but it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right, I would never have cheated on her, I would never have done anything about it.
But no, he was over it. He stopped fucking slouching and snapped out, “No problem, sir.”
He headed back out to his desk and took a stab at his paperwork for a while; he was always behind on that because, while he dug the talking to people and driving around parts of the job, he’d never been great at concentrating on the written word. Also, his handwriting sucked a lot. He managed to finish off and file a couple of reports but put off the rest after finding one where, as near as he could tell, someone called in a tip that a neighbor was starting a convent for chickens.
Hell, maybe that wasn’t a handwriting problem—Fayetteville was a weird town. Maybe somebody actually was trying to nun up North Carolina hens.
He sighed, checked the court docket to make double sure he didn’t have an appearance today, and made the mistake of making eye contact with Rollie at the next desk over. Apparently, word of the Hotshots assignment had spread pretty fast—copshops were more gossipy than junior high locker rooms—and Dec got treated to a long tirade about how they shouldn’t be wasting their time trying to protect faggots.
“You ask me, whoever’s beating them up is doing the rest of us a favor,” Rollie wrapped up.
Dec made himself breathe slowly and calmly because he freaked out a little whenever any subject like that came up, but fuck if he was going to let Rollie know it—that might actually tell Rollie there was something there.
So he had his most casual snarl on when he said, “Yeah, well, nobody did ask you.” Which worked because Rollie responded with a couple of suggestions, complete with hand gestures, about how maybe Dec was into this assignment, but you could tell it was just general assholery and he didn’t know he was onto something.
Ceci gave him a sympathetic eye roll from her desk in the corner, and he seized the opportunity to get out of there by asking her to go along on witness interviews for a smash-and-grab—the store was in a section of town where the witnesses were way more likely to open up to a black cop than to Dec, so it was a good idea anyway.
That night he dressed like he hadn’t in a while: tightest of jeans, tightest of t-shirts, Doc Martens. He gelled the fuck out of his hair and after a moment of indecision, even used his dwindling supply of expensive gift-from-Christine cologne, Calvin Klein Z-14. That used to make him depressed, but lately the fact that he smelled fantastic was beating out the sad, which...was progress, right?
He didn’t even bother trying to carry his service weapon; it would be hard to hide with these clothes, and would mean he’d have to make arrangements with club security to pretend not to notice it on his entry frisk. It was better if as few people knew about the undercover gig as possible; there was always a chance someone working at the club was in on the crimes.
Hotshots was in an especially shitty area of a mostly shitty town, so Dec got a taxi over, because hell if he was parking his car there. He gave the taxi driver an address that ought to be a few doors down from the bar, though, because he didn’t want to spend half an hour in a car with a guy who knew he was headed for a gay club.
The address he gave turned out to be an empty lot, though, so he stammered, “Uh, musta got the address wrong, I’ll figure it out, thanks,” but the driver looked down the block at the line of all-guys waiting to get into Hotshots and said, “Riiiiiight,” and sped off.
Dec shook it off, and walked down to the club. There was no sign outside, no neon; they were probably trying to avoid getting firebombed. The all-male line paying to get in was gonna tip off anybody who thought about it for even a second, though. Dec didn’t recall any times when the cops got called for drive-by bottle throwers or shit like that, but he was two hundred percent sure it had happened on occasion. Just...these guys weren’t really usually inclined to call the cops. Which, maybe if he caught the dude they did get worried enough to call the cops on, might change.
He took his place in line and eyed the guys ahead of him for any possible tall, dark and perpetrator, but nobody looked likely. It was a quick sideways scan because that was one of the unwritten rules of places like this: you didn’t look anybody in the face until you were inside where it was half-dark and everyone was at least half-drunk. No admitting to any onlookers, or yourself, what was going on while everybody was well-lit and sober.
By the time he got to the front of the line the whole protocol had depressed
him a little bit, because he was remembering how different it was waiting to get into a club with Christine. Wrapping his arms around her and starting the evening’s swaying early; chatting with other people in line about the club’s DJ lineup. Some of the guys in this line had probably never gotten to do that kind of thing in their lives. Sucked.
He bit his tongue during the entry frisk, because the bouncer was terrible at it—if Dec had had an ankle holster the guy would have missed it entirely. But improving the club’s security was not on Dec’s to-do list tonight.
Once he made it past the door guy Dec headed straight for the bar. He leaned in close to the bartender, very quietly ordered a club soda, added, “And make it look like a real drink, yeah?” and slid a five over—a great tip for places like this. The bartender smiled at him, said “Sure thing,” and fancied his drink up with a lime slice.
Dec sipped slowly and looked around. He’d never actually been to this particular bar before, because for a cop it was safer not to play in your own backyard. But it looked pretty much like the ones in Durham and Wilmington, except here the average haircut was a lot shorter. Dec sighed; he’d like to tell the little baby Fort Bragg soldiers that they should be going farther afield too, because “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was not their friend, but that wasn't what he was here for either.
What he was here for was looking for some shitheel who had picked up three guys in this club over the last six weeks and then robbed them and beat them up. Realistically, he’d probably done it a lot more than that, because odds were good there were several vics who didn’t feel like telling the police that they’d gotten robbed by a gay pickup.
The vic’s descriptions of the perp were not great on specifics. In fact, they were vague enough that when Dec was first reading over them in Carter’s office, he’d looked up at Carter and said, “These guys get roofied?
“Unclear,” Carter said. “They all say they didn’t meet the perpetrator in question until they were already too hammered to remember much about him. So either he was very slick and doctored their drinks before he even started talking to them, or he just waited around the bar to see who was getting extremely drunk and moved in on them then.”
The best description they could come up with from the three different confused stories was “white, handsome, dark hair, tall.” The three vics hadn’t looked much like each other, so Dec figured he had as much of a chance of being the perp’s “type” as anybody else. Probably the type was just “drunk and robbable.” So while he was scanning the crowd for tall, dark and felon, he was also trying to keep an eye on his own damn drink—the last thing he needed was to end up getting bashed himself. He’d rather not lose his wallet, plus the guys at the station would never let him hear the end of it.
He finished off one drink and hit the dance floor. It had been a long time since he’d gotten to dance and it was hard not to lose the thread of what he was supposed to be here for, hard not to just lose himself in the beat and the movement. One guy pushed up close but Dec stepped back a little, gave the guy a “flattered, but no thanks” face—he was short and as red-headed as Dec himself, which would be fine by Dec if he were just cruising, but he was definitely not the perp.
Dec went back and got another “drink.” He was chatted up by a couple guys, which was great for his ego, but neither of them looked like a possibility, and neither made any attempt to mess with his glass.
He was starting to get a little twitchy—patience was never his long suit—and decided to go with the “perp was picking out marks who were already hammered” theory. He pounded down drinks three through six quickly—club sodas every one, but they looked like gin and tonics—and headed for the men’s room, making sure to put a little stagger in his step.
When he came back out, he was staggering even more, putting a hand to the wall now and then, shaking his head like he was trying to shake his brain sober. The first few months after Christine left were hell, but hey, at least they gave him some material to use when he needed to look drunk off his ass.
And apparently he was doing it pretty well, because—ding ding! Someone took the bait. There was a guy gently taking hold of his elbow, and Dec slowly, loopily raised his head and took a look, and holy shit. He had a sort of collision in his brain, because the part of his brain that was all cop went, “Hello, tall black-haired brown-eyed handsome probable perpetrator,” and the part of his brain that had a direct line to his dick went, “Good god, HOT.”
“Fnuh?” Dec said. Which was a direct result of the brain collision but it worked for the drunk guy persona, so okay.
“Are you all right, sir?” said the gorgeous probably-a-criminal.
“Shhhhuuuure,” Dec said, and gave him a big smile. “M’fiiiine. You’re fine. Heh. You wanna,” he stumbled a little, and the guy tightened his grip on Dec’s arm. “You wanna head somewhere more um. Private?”
“You should probably be heading home.”
“Home, yeah. Let’s do that. Just lemme…I gotta…settle up.”
Dec fumbled another five out of his wallet for the bartender, making sure to flash the wad of cash in there so the maybe-suspect could see it. The bartender gave Dec a wink; God only knows what he thought was going on here, maybe that Dec was a recovering alcoholic who got off on picking guys up while pretending to be drunk. What the hell, he was a bartender, whatever he thought was going on he’d certainly seen weirder.
They walked out to the parking lot, Dec swaying and stumbling, and he was waiting for the guy to steer them toward the dark alley beside the club. He was high on adrenaline, waiting for that moment when the guy grabbed for his wallet or got rough and Dec could twist his arm, flash a badge and watch the perp’s face fall when he realized he was fucked.
Dec wasn’t worried about being unarmed—this guy was clearly depending on his victims to be drunk and horny, not braced for a fight. It would be fun to surprise him.
But the guy surprised Dec instead—steering them not toward the alley at all, but toward the couple of taxis lurking out front of the club. Okay, okay, the vics had been pretty fuzzy on where or when during their evenings they got whaled on; maybe the guy actually took them home first.
Dec would rather go ahead and deal with this here and now, though, rather not let a suspect know where he lived.
“Hey, c'mon,” he said, grabbing a handful of Handsome’s shirt and staggering them both toward the alley. “Whatsyername?” he slurred.
“Tupper,” the guy said.
There was no fucking way that was a real name.
“I'm Dec. C'mon, Tupper, I'll do you right here,” Dec said, tugging some more. “Just 'round the corner.”
“As attractive as you and that offer both are, Dec,” and how ridiculous was it that that made Dec happy, “I am going to have to pass; it would not be fair to take advantage of your extreme inebriation.”
“What?” Dec said, but Tupper was gently pushing him back toward the taxis, and then into one, and then climbing in himself.
“Your address?” he said, and Dec was so befuddled he gave it.
He couldn’t figure out what the hell to do. If Tupper was the perp then they were going to end up having their confrontation at Dec’s apartment building, and Dec wasn’t really excited about bringing his work home like that. (His neighbors probably weren’t going to love it either.) If Tupper wasn’t the perp then Dec was just wasting his own time and Tupper’s, but Dec couldn’t just ‘fess up here because what if this was the bad guy, and...ah, fuck it. He let his head roll back drunkenly against the seat and took advantage of the ride to watch the city lights playing across Tupper’s face. It was the nicest view he’d seen in Fayetteville in a while, that was for damn sure.
When they got to his apartment building Tupper paid the driver and tipped nicely; probably another check mark in the “not the bad guy” column, but Dec stayed cautious while he climbed out of the taxi with exaggerated clumsiness.
The taxi rolled off, and Dec started wobbling toward t
he stairs. He was thinking he should force the issue before they got there—tell Tupper to head home and see what his reaction was; he didn’t really want to introduce the possibility of either of them getting thrown down a flight of stairs during a fight. That could get seriously ugly.
He opened his mouth, but Tupper leaned and grabbed his upper arm helpfully at the same moment, holding him up, and for a second there their faces were really close together and Dec couldn’t remember what he was going to say because Tupper’s hand was warm, really warm, and he smelled good, and then suddenly Tupper was abruptly backing away.
“You don’t,” he said. “I don’t smell any alcohol on your breath, at all. What is going on here?” He glanced around, as if to see if Dec had any accomplices, and then added, “If you tricked me here for some nefarious purpose, I must warn you that I am a combat trained law officer, and it will not go well for you.”
Dec cracked up. Because he believed the guy—a mugger making shit up would blurt something like, “I’m a cop and I’ll kick your ass,” so, yeah, guy really was a cop, and, Jesus, way to pick up the opposite of a criminal, there, Dec, and also because “nefarious?” Really?
When he started laughing Tupper actually looked kind of huffy. “I’m assure you I’m not lying about the combat training,” he said.
Dec took pity on him and took out his wallet, flipped it open to show his badge. “Declan Kelly, Fayetteville P.D., not about to jump you for your cash, I promise,” he said, dropping the drunken slur and standing up straight.
“Oh,” Tupper said, and blushed a little.
“C’mon up,” Dec said, waved Tupper toward the stairs. He figured after the taxi fare he owed the guy a cup of coffee.
Dec opened the door to his apartment and winced a little. He’d given Christine most of the nice furniture in the split—she wasn’t even asking for it, but he’d felt like the stuff had too many memories for him. He didn’t want to sit alone in a familiar armchair remembering how she used to sit on his lap in it. And he still figured that was the right call, but it meant that his couch was a hideous orange-and-green plaid thrift shop special and the coffee table was a board on top of a couple milk crates. He’d never really cared because in the year since the divorce he’d hardly brought anyone home, but now absurdly handsome guy next to him made the furniture look even shittier.