"Ford is always capable of injecting her stories with intimacy, passion and suspense."
Reviewed by Annie Tegelan
Posted September 1, 2013
Mystery
WHISKEY AND WRY is the sequel to Sinner's Gin. In the last
book, Rhys Ford reveals a secret that sets up this book
perfectly. As a result, I think it's imperative that the
series be read in order. Ford enjoys mentioning other
characters and those names will only fly by your head if
you're not familiar with them from the first book. Because
there is not a lot of recap of previous events, it's
possible that a new reader stepping into this place will
feel confusion.
That being said, WHISKEY AND WRY is Damien Mitchell's book.
After a car accident that kills his band mates, Damien
wakes up in a mental institution with no memory of who he
is. He is called by another name, yet Damien knows within
himself that he has another identity. When the mental
facility he is in becomes engulfed in flames, he runs for
his life, unknowingly putting himself into more danger.
In order to survive, Damien plays music at Finnegan's, a
pub in San Francisco that Sionn Murphy works at. This is
where a romance slowly blooms between the two. While I
enjoyed the romance quite a bit and felt the chemistry
between the two characters, the problems really lie in the
plausibility of some avenues that Ford chose to endeavor.
I realized I much preferred Sionn's POV than Damien's.
Whenever I was in Damien's mind, it always felt a little
off, a little more "watery" and more liberal with
unnecessary words and descriptions. As a result, I think
the writing was what slowed down the pacing of this book.
There is a handful amount of suspense and even some insight
into the villain's head, but it really felt stalled with
all the extra words that I think could have been cut out to
make the story tighter.
All in all, WHISKEY AND WRY has a great romance. Ford is
always capable of injecting her stories with intimacy,
passion and suspense. With the little teasing hint at the
end of this book, I am eager to see what she has planned
next for the series!
SUMMARY
He was dead. And it was murder most foul. If erasing a man’s
existence could even be called murder. When Damien Mitchell wakes, he finds himself without a life
or a name. The Montana asylum’s doctors tell him he’s
delusional and his memories are all lies: he’s really
Stephen Thompson, and he’d gone over the edge, obsessing
about a rock star who died in a fiery crash. His chance to
escape back to his own life comes when his prison burns, but
a gunman is waiting for him, determined that neither Stephen
Thompson nor Damien Mitchell will escape. With the assassin on his tail, Damien flees to the City by
the Bay, but keeping a low profile is the only way he’ll
survive as he searches San Francisco for his best friend,
Miki St. John. Falling back on what kept him fed before he
made it big, Damien sings for his supper outside Finnegan’s,
an Irish pub on the pier, and he soon falls in with the
owner, Sionn Murphy. Damien doesn’t need a complication like
Sionn, and to make matters worse, the gunman—who doesn’t
mind going through Sionn or anyone else if that’s what it
takes to kill Damien—shows up to finish what he started.
ExcerptPrologue SOMEONE was trying to kill him. If the fire at Skywood wasn’t evidence enough, the bullets
flying past his head were a pretty good clue. When the fire alarms went off, he’d finally seen his chance
to get loose of the honey-brick prison he’d been trapped in.
The place was like tar. If he struggled too hard or fast, it
closed in, sucking him down into its oily depths. When he
moved slowly and carefully—pretending to be some guy named
Stephen Thompson—Skywood relaxed its hold on him. He’d been
in the main entertainment room when black smoke billowed out
of the air vents. When the first fire alarm went off, he and his current bald
Sasquatch attendant, Jerome, ignored it. The staff was
forever losing control over one guest or another, and
oftentimes, the sight of a red lever set behind glass was
too much temptation for many of Skywood’s clients. Hardly a
fortnight went by without at least one false alarm going off
in its halls. The smoke was only the beginning. The panic really began
when the facility-wide intercom system kicked in with a call
to evacuate the clients to the outermost grounds. Damien choked on the ash swirling around the corridors,
stumbling when he hit furniture obscured by the smoke. The
rising black clouds made it hard to see, and running through
the greasy ash made his lungs ache. The zipper scar down his
chest ached and pulled, hooking its claws into his muscles
with a sadistic twist, forcing him to hunch over to ease its
ache. Stopping wasn’t an option. Jerome kept shoving at his back,
hurrying him forward to safety, but they soon got turned
around in the cavernous building’s labyrinth of halls. The
fire moved quickly, seemingly eating through the plaster
walls with an almost demonic appetite, and Damien finally
lost his patience, grabbed one of the heavy chairs next to a
nurses’ alcove, and flung it at a nearby window. The thick wooden chair bounced off the reinforced glass and
hit him in the leg, and all Damien had to show for his
efforts was a tearing streak of pain along his shoulders and
a thick lump on his thigh. “Get a fucking move on, Thompson,” Jerome muttered into his
ear, reinforcing his order with a hard shove between
Damien’s shoulder blades. “Quit shoving me, fucking asshole.” There were times when
the fake Stephen couldn’t hold back the Damien inside.
Choking to death from smoke filling his strained lungs
seemed to be one of those times. Damien pushed back, shoving
Jerome back a step. Not bad, he thought as another wave of
spasms wiped him out, especially since Jerome was built like
a Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robot. His satisfaction seemed as fleeting as his breath when
Jerome’s meaty fingers wrapped around the loose material of
Damien’s cotton shirt and yanked him back with a flex of his
arm. Somehow, through the smoke and Damien’s coughing, Jerome
located one of the outer doors. Keeping a tight hold on
Damien with one hand, he fumbled with the key card he had
hanging from a Skywood lanyard around his neck. After three
tries, the display went green, and the door unlocked with a
loud click. “When we get outside, you stick right next to
me. Got it, you fucking nutjob?” Jerome let go, and Damien stumbled forward, shoved off with
a push from the attendant’s hand. Damien hit the door hard,
and it swung open slowly, its pneumatic regulator refusing
to go any faster. Cutting the man a look over his shoulder,
Damien shook off the wrinkles in the back of his shirt,
pretending Jerome’s words didn’t hit home. Truth was, he had
no fucking idea if he was crazy or if everything they’d told
him since he’d woken up was a lie. Somewhere in the back of
Damie’s brain, a lingering doubt whispered hot maybes into
his thoughts. Suppose I am really fucking crazy? the mocking voice hissed.
That I’m really Stephen Thompson and I just don’t want to be? The cold air cut through the thin cotton shirt and
elastic-band scrub pants he’d been given to wear. It chewed
up the length of the thick purple-pink scar running from his
chest to his belly button, a souvenir of a brutal heart
surgery he wasn’t conscious for. The zippered mass of slick
skin wasn’t the only sign he’d been battered about. His hair
had been taken down to the skin and was just beginning to
grow out to a length where the staple keloids were hidden
under a dull black brush. It was still a surprise to see his
short hair in the mirror, and his hands always seem to jerk
out when he ran them over his skull, missing the foot-long
shocking-pink-streaked mane he remembered sporting to an
awards show. If the awards show wasn’t just another lie his fucked-up
brain told him. There was too much evidence of an accident of some kind. His
ribs ached, especially now that he was standing in the
almost frigid outside air, and his left hand had a starburst
of scars along the back that pulled when he made a fist. The
headaches were a constant reminder of his brain’s misfiring,
but it was the fleeting glimpses of a past he couldn’t quite
grab at that were driving him nuts. It had gotten so he really wasn’t sure if what he was
remembering was real. Not the purring, husky laugh of a best
friend as they shared a large coffee on a San Francisco pier
or the screams of thousands of voices under a wall of lights
he couldn’t see past. Amid all the confusion, fractured bits
of music wove in and out of his shaky memories, pieces of a
life he might not have ever lived. Of everything Damien almost didn’t remember, it was the
thought that the music wasn’t real that scared him the most. After stumbling outside, he and Jerome fumbled through the
bushes, trying to fight their way to clear air, when a man
dressed all in black stepped out of the tree line. For a
moment, Damien thought the shadowy form was a dark cast of
one of the nearby firs. The moon was dripping full, and its
light turned Skywood’s gardens and surrounding forest into a
silvery-tinted landscape. That was when Damien learned bright red blood looked like
spilled ink under a full moon’s light. Damien never heard the shot that killed Jerome. He only saw
the aftermath of the man’s head suddenly cracking open and
his face crumbling inward under the force of the bullet’s
strike. He only knew he smelled blood in the air, and in a
heartbeat, his mind flashed back to the feel of his body
hitting cold steel and the stink of his bandmates’ deaths in
his nose. The sound of a bullet hitting a short stone wall by his knee
got Damien moving. Another shot rang out, burrowing through
a hedgerow he’d ducked behind. From his scant cover, Damien
spotted the man moving out of the trees, only stopping long
enough to check Jerome’s body spread-eagled over the grass. Not looking back, Damien began to run. THE sirens were loud, echoing through the valley. Damien
could follow the whoop-whoop of sound if he tried hard
enough, but he was too busy running for his life. Evergreen boughs snapped at his face and bare arms, stinging
welts into his pale skin. Pounding through the underbrush
around the compound, Damien ducked and wove as best he
could, but the nearly freezing night air pulled at his lungs
and tightened the muscles around the scar zippering up his
chest. The thin cotton T-shirt and elastic-waistband pants
Skywood had issued him were little protection against the
elements, and he’d torn out the sole of his left loafer
trying to leapfrog through a bank of craggy boulders set
into a grassy hill. Still, it was a damned sight better than having his brains
sucked out from all the syringes they’d shoved into his head. Panting, he forced himself to stop moving when a thick beam
of light swept over the forest, the chop of a helicopter’s
blades cutting through the air above him. His heavy breaths
created ghostly blossoms of mist in the air, their spectral
shapes glistening in the full moonlight before whispering
off into the darkness. The sky turned a molten red above a
sea of rising flames, and voluminous black clouds rose up
from the spreading fire, the wind carrying their heavy,
ash-laden forms over the nearby countryside. “Better get your ass moving there, Damie.” He blew on his
fingers, trying to get his hands warm. The helicopter
whirred past, circling around to point its beam down on
another part of the valley floor, and Damien took off,
slogging through the damp tall grasses in the hopes of
finding a way out of the hell he’d been trapped in. Ever since he’d woken up and found himself the proud owner
of a torso-long scar down the front of his body and his
shorn hair growing up around staple holes along his skull,
Damien had wondered where the fucking hole was that he’d
fallen through and how the hell he could find his way back
without his own personal White Rabbit. The doctors kept
insisting he’d gotten injured while stoned out of his mind
and snowboarding in Aspen, but people who said he was their
son once told him he was in a car accident. Their
conflicting stories were shaky at best and became
transparently false when they’d begun to elaborate on the
missing chunks of his memory. Especially since Damien hated being cold, and the chance of
him being caught on a piece of steel-edged polyethylene and
hurling himself down a frozen mountain was about as good as
a Norwegian Blue waking up from its nap. Despite the intense physical therapy he’d been given after
he woke up from his Sleeping Beauty phase, he was winded.
All the muscle mass in the world meant nothing if his lungs
weren’t cooperating. Worse still, his chest was beginning to
hurt, his repaired heart pounding hard to keep up with the
demands he was putting on it. His stamina was shit, and his
body was in pain because of it. The alternative was to turn around and give himself back
over to his wardens, kissing off any chance of having a
normal life ever again. “Fuck that,” Damien huffed, then yelped, sliding across a
patch of damp grasses. “I’m going to fucking break my neck
out here. Then that fucker won’t need to shoot me.” The thought of dying out in the middle of the snow-dusted
boonies forced Damien to his feet. He couldn’t do that. Not
when he had too many damned questions needing answers. “Sinjun. Go find Sinjun, you stupid fuck. Everything will be
okay once you find him.” He remembered his best friend. He
knew they’d lost the other two members of their band in the
accident. There’d been a hazy moment when he’d surfaced out
of the darkness he’d been plunged into and heard someone say
Dave and Johnny died. He ran until he couldn’t breathe anymore, and finally,
Damien had to stop. Finding a thick pine tree to lean
against, he let himself breathe. Damien could only remember their existence and some
fragments of things they’d done together. Everything else
had been wiped out under the steel frame of the limo popping
his skull open. There were gaps in his mind, long expanses
of nothingness Damien couldn’t fill with any whisper of a
memory. He knew Miki St. John liked to eat the insides out
of a char siu bao before nibbling on the white bread
exterior and what a twelve-bar blues progression was—he
could even finger one out on a broom handle, since they’d
not allowed him access to a guitar—but couldn’t tell anyone
what he’d been for any Halloween. Damien didn’t know when
his birthday was, but he’d been able to instantly recognize
the opening bars of “Rude Mood” playing on a radio at the
nurses’ station. Everything made him cry. The loss of who he’d been was
nothing compared to the sudden disappearance of the friends
he’d come to call his brothers. At least Miki was still
alive. He knew in his gut Miki was still alive. The
oh-so-brief glance at an unattended computer console proved
it. He’d paid for it with a two-week stint in solitary, but
it gave Damien enough to focus on. Even if the article
didn’t have any pictures and he couldn’t fully remember what
Miki looked like. Stamping some feeling back into his legs, he began heading
down a long hill, half sliding along on the slick
meadowland. His knees were beginning to hurt from slamming
into large rocks when he’d fall, and his palms throbbed,
making him suspect he’d scraped them raw in places. “Sure, don’t take care of your hands,” he snorted. “You’re
only a guitarist.” Hands could heal, Damien consoled himself. Running harder
was more important. Especially since it sounded like a pack
of howling dogs were now competing with the fire engines and
ambulances. He tried not to think of anything else—Miki,
Jerome’s shot-split skull—nothing but putting one foot in
front of the other was more important. Getting warm again
definitely was on the agenda as well. The road was a surprise, and Damien blinked when he hit the
stretch of black ribbon curving through the hills. He’d been
concentrating on climbing a deep ditch when his fingers
touched the rough asphalt. Nearly crying in relief, Damien
almost kissed the oily tarred surface in glee, but a flash
of red lights coming up over the hill made him duck back
down again. A fire truck screamed past him, a whir of lights, noise, and
exhaust stink flying by fast enough to ruffle the hair lying
across his forehead. He waited until the dust settled back
onto the road before standing up, and if his breath wasn’t
already suffering, it would have been taken away by the
sight of Skywood’s long halls buried under a wall of flames. From what Damien could see, the retreat was engulfed, its
brick walls crumbling down from its perch on the high hills.
The towering evergreens surrounding the grounds were
crackling and popping from the heat, spirals of sparks
rising up from their burning branches. He debated keeping to the ditch, but the going was too hard,
especially when he’d put his foot down and the flapping sole
on his loafer let stagnant puddle water seep in. Damien
clambered up onto the road and broke into a trot, keeping an
ear out for any vehicles coming up the road. The bright
white cotton T-shirt and scrubs were now muddied and dark
with pine tar and leaf stains, and his teeth were beginning
to chatter from the cold. If anything, Damien was glad for the filth, hoping it would
make him blend into the road more. The slap of his feet on
the asphalt kept an odd time with the pound-pound of his
overworked heart, and Damien smiled, finding a tune in the
offbeat rhythm. “Sinjun, if I ever make it out of here, I’m going to have
you write a song about this.” Damien forced himself to laugh
at the absurdity of running away from an asylum. “I just
need to fucking find you first.” He had no clue what state Skywood was in or even what
direction he had to go. San Francisco was his best bet. It
was where he and Miki were from, and he could remember his
best friend buying a warehouse to live in before they’d gone
on tour. “Shit.” The memory of warm brick walls and high ceilings
came back to him. They’d bought two warehouses, side-by-side
buildings so they could live next to one another. Damien’s
head throbbed at the images surfacing out of his shadowed
brain, but they were clear. He’d laid out enough money to
have someplace to live next to his best friend after they
were done doing a world circuit. He chased the memory before it slipped away, turning
nebulous when he concentrated harder. They’d teased one
another, each claiming the other would move into their space
instead of living in the place they’d bought. Miki longed
for a studio, someplace he could wander into and throw out
small pieces of brilliance while Damien fought to find the
chords to match his best friend’s words. “We were going to build a walkway between the two roofs. I
was going to turn most of the bottom floor of mine into a
garage for the cars I was going to buy—” Damien trawled
through his memories as he slogged over the rough ground.
Too caught up in his thoughts, he didn’t see the headlights
coming over the rise. Or the old Chevy truck that appeared around the bend and
slammed into him. Chapter One Standing in a river of stones Drowning in sorrow Water knee deep but cold Even though my mouth is clear I just can’t breathe anymore —River of Stones “HEY, boss, your cowboy’s back.” Sionn refused to poke his head up from under the bar to
look, but he didn’t need to. He knew who his manager, Leigh,
was talking about. The rest of the staff at Finnegan’s Pub
were too scared of him to tease, but the pub’s blue-haired,
nose-ringed cliché of a bartender had no such qualms. Having
worked for his gran first, then stayed on when he’d taken
over, Leigh was as much of a legacy at Finnegan’s as the
four-foot wooden leprechaun someone gave his gran at the
pub’s grand opening. Both were impossible to ignore, mostly
annoying and in the way, but without them, Finnegan’s would
be missing some of its color. Of course, Sionn thought when Leigh pinched his ass as he
changed the keg out from behind the bar, the pub could
sometimes do with a lot less color. When his gran had been alive, she had a special hatred for
street entertainers, tourists, and the English. She loathed
them all with equal fervor, although if Sionn had to lay
money down, he’d have said her dislike for Londoners
outweighed them all. Tourists she had to tolerate. They paid
the bills at Finnegan’s, coming in to spend their money to
eat pub food right on the pier and watching the bay traffic
float by the wide picture windows she’d reluctantly agreed
to. San Francisco’s street entertainers were vermin too big
for her to sic a ferret on, and if Sionn stood up, he knew
he’d have a clear view of the very pretty guitarist Leigh
liked to call his cowboy. She hated the windows most of all. “No proper pub has windows, ye fecking git,” she’d muttered
at his back, loud enough for him—and everyone else in the
place—to hear. Maggie Finnegan was never one to let her
opinion get in the way of good business, but she was going
to make damned certain her grandson heard about it for as
long as she had breath in her tiny Irish body. The place lost most of its color when Gran passed, but Sionn
could still hear her complaining about the light coming in
off the bay and how it diluted the proper dark atmosphere a
serious drinking man needed in his pub. Whitewashed walls
and diffused sconces brightened the place up too much for
her liking, but she soldiered on, willing to bow to change
if it meant an extra dollar in the till. She definitely had no complaints about the money that came
in once tourists discovered Finnegan’s, and they’d certainly
come. Jugglers had their place, as did the man who scared
the crap out of people by hiding behind a bush, then
screaming at them when they passed him. Musicians, however, were a different story. Unlike the
tourists and a brighter pub, she’d take great delight in
running them off from in front of the pub, sometimes a bit
too enthusiastically, hurrying them along with a swat of a
broom or a bucket of ice water. Musicians, in her mind, were
as much of a nuisance as pigeons. Except you can’t put them
into a pie, the damned bastards, she’d grumble to Sionn
during one of his after-school shifts. Damned if he didn’t miss her. He’d slunk home after the shooting, limping only slightly
from the scarring in his thigh. Odd that he’d come to
Finnegan’s for solace, something he’d not done even after
Gran’s passing. But now, there he was, changing out kegs,
slinging drinks, and calling out orders to the waitstaff
like he’d never gone off into the world to protect the innocent. Except he’d lost an innocent, and now the busker outside was
his problem and his alone. Many of the street musicians were familiar to him, but the
guitarist they’d taken to calling the Cowboy was a new
addition to the pier crowd. No one at Finnegan’s remembered
seeing him before he showed up three weeks ago, but even
Sionn had to admit the man was pretty to look at. At least
as much as they could see past the rolled-brim cowboy hat he
wore canted forward on his forehead. “You going to run him off?” Leigh’s bony elbow dug a divot
into his shoulder, and she leaned her weight into him,
watching as he clicked the last connection together. “It’s
kind of nice, you know. The stuff he plays. Classic.” “But not Irish,” Sionn grunted, shoving the heavy tank into
place. “We’re an Irish pub. He’s out there playing whatever
the fuck he’s playing. He can go do that in front of
Sciloni’s or something.” “People like it, and just because you’re Irish, doesn’t mean
it’s not music.” She straightened up, shaking out the
ribbons she’d used to tie her Smurf-hued hair into
ponytails. “I like it, and technically, I’m the manager.
You’re just pitching in, remember?” Sionn didn’t need that reminder that he was drifting along.
He wasn’t needed at the pub. It ran fine without him.
Probably better even, but he had nowhere else to go, nothing
else to do. Damn, he needed to get his shit together and
figure out what he was going to do now that he’d walked away
from being a body shield for rich people. “Finnegan’s doesn’t do music, remember? No buskers, no
darts, and no telly, other than during the futbol finals.
That’s the rules, Leigh girl.” He wiped his hands on one of
the bar towels, then tossed it into the laundry bin to be
washed. “I’ll go roust him. Don’t fuss at it. I’ll take care
of it.” “I’m not fussing at it, Sionn,” she sniped at his back as he
went around the bar to the front of the pub. “I’m just
wondering when the hell you got so old.” The afternoon had started off clear, but the mists were
rolling in, bringing the promise of rain with them. A light
drizzle dusted over the crowd, driving the less dedicated
inside. The busker was wedged sideways under Finnegan’s
awning, his ass resting on the top railing of the wrought
iron fencing surrounding the pub’s slender outside patio. With his back to the pub, all Sionn could see of the man was
his long black hair and the rolled-brim leather cowboy hat
he wore low over his face. The past few times the busker had
set up in front of Finnegan’s, he’d moved on before Sionn
could send someone out to dislodge him. Sionn stopped at the
entrance and stood under the awning, moving to the side to
let an older couple in matching neon shirts and cargo pants
amble their way into the pub. In that moment, the musician looked up from his playing,
stilling the strings on his acoustic guitar with the flat of
his hand. The soft sunlight touched his face and brought the
man’s sensitive mouth sharply into Sionn’s focus. His long
fingers played at the frets on the guitar’s neck, and Sionn
stole a glance at the man’s partially hidden face. A faint scruff darkened his angular jaw, shadowing a cleft
in his squared off chin. The man’s eyes were hooded, a clear
Mediterranean blue shining out from behind his long black
lashes. Leaning forward, he reached for the cash lining his
case’s belly and plucked the bills out. Despite the chill,
his slender arms were bare, and his graceful, slim fingers
shoved the paper wad into the pocket of his worn-out jeans.
Specks of white powder dappled the side of his Becky Bones
T-shirt, the victim of an overfilled machine at a crappy
Laundromat. Torn Levi’s and a cheap cotton T-shirt had never looked so
damned good as they did on the man’s lean body. His eyes met Sionn’s gaze as he came around the railing. A
flicker of something burned in their depths, an interest hot
enough to stoke the long-dormant fires of arousal in Sionn’s
belly. The guitarist shrugged and bent over again, scooping
the coins he’d earned into a faded Crown Royal bag. The man’s ass was as incredible up close as it was when
Sionn had seen it through the pub’s front windows. “Let me guess. The old lady wants me gone.” The man’s voice
was a shock, a taint of Britain roughing up his California
drawl. “So you knew my gran, then?” There was a surprise. The woman
had left San Francisco to its peace more than a year ago,
and before then, Leigh’d managed Finnegan’s, freeing his
grandmother up from the day-to-day business. For the
guitarist to actually have known Maggie Finnegan, he’d have
needed to be around before she’d handed the keys over to
Leigh. “Sorry to tell you this, but she passed a bit ago. I
own the place now.” The cowboy hat cocked slightly, and the man stared off into
the distance before replying curiously, “That’s too bad. I
think I liked her.” It was an odd way to put it… thinking he liked her. People
were never on the fence with Gran. A person either was
engulfed by her gruff nonaffection or feared her wrath, but
hardly anyone straight out thought about liking her. A rolling grumble of thunder was the only warning they had
before the granite-dark cloud bank turned black and let
loose its rain with a pounding fury. Panicked for his
instrument, the musician hopped over the railing and put the
acoustic down on one of Finnegan’s café tables. Sionn
grabbed the hard-shell case and handed it over, a few
remaining quarters rattling back and forth on its red velvet
lining. They stood under the awning, both drenched to the bone, and
watched the storm whip through the pier, driving away the
late afternoon crowd. Slender waterfalls formed along the
overhang, curling through the dips in its scalloped edge.
The cold settled in behind the rain, and the man beside him
shivered in the icy breeze, an avalanche of goose bumps
covering his pale skin. “Hang on. I’ll get you a towel,” Sionn murmured. “Nah, I’m good.” The man removed his hat and shook off as
much of the water from the brim as he could. His thick black
hair was damp at the ends, curving down the length of his
neck. “Just going to get wet again trying to get home.” Empty piercings lined his left ear, and Sionn counted at
least five before the hat was back on his head, the brim
pulled down low again. Emptying the remaining coins from the
case, he checked the velvet and obviously found it dry
enough to put the guitar into the shell and latch it closed. He didn’t know what came over him, but Sionn couldn’t have
been more surprised when he said, “You can stay until it
stops, boyo. Maybe get a cup of coffee inside.” It sounded like an invitation to sit and talk, and Sionn
wondered what alien bug had crawled into his brain and taken
control. Other men were for sex and company while watching a
game. If he wanted more, he had a pack of male cousins
nearby he could do things with… if he actually wanted to do
something other than work and be a hermit at home. Offering
the musician a cup of Finnegan’s dark-roasted brew was as
foreign a thought to him as wearing a pair of pink frilly
panties. Yet here he was, eyeing up a long drink of a musician and
thinking about adding a dose of cream to his darkness. “That shit is not going to be stopping anytime soon.” The
smile Sionn was given nearly blinded him, and a hint of a
dimple peeked out from under the man’s unshaven face. “No
worries. I’ll head out.” He edged past Sionn, their damp shoulders brushing as he
went by. The touch was enough to send Sionn’s cock into a
simmering thrum, and he gritted his teeth, sucking in a
mouthful of cold air to quench the unexpected want of the
man walking by him. “You can play here. Set up on the far table if you want.
We’re never so busy we need all the tables out here, and
it’s going to be raining on and off for the next couple of
months. It’s a good place to get tips.” After the coffee
offer, Sionn was beginning to wonder if he was somehow
stroking out and his mind was dancing off down a yellow
brick road of its own making. He fumbled, trying to get some
control of the situation, but all his tongue seemed able to
offer was weak at best. “Just… try to play something other
than classical. That shit puts me to sleep.” “Duly noted. Thanks.” He tipped his fingers to the hat’s
brim. “I’ll bring something else to the table tomorrow if I
come by.” “You got a name?” Sionn called out to the musician before he
dashed off into the downpour. “The girls inside will want to
know or they’ll just keep calling you Cowboy.” “Shit no, blues and Southern rock yeah, but not country.
Okay, maybe a few of Cash’s and Parton’s, but that’s about
it.” Once again, the man’s blue eyes raked over Sionn’s
face, searching for something he obviously didn’t find when
he shrugged helplessly. “Dee. You can call me Dee.” “Good to meet you, Dee.” Crossing his arms, Sionn watched
the musician duck under the awning and sprint across the
wide walkway toward the city streets beyond the pier.
Glancing up at the furious heavens, Sionn sighed heavily and
crossed himself, slipping into the thick Gaelic he’d spoken
with his grandmother. “Forgive me, Gran, but I promise, he
can play here only as long as it rains. Then he’s out on his
own again. I’ll give you that, Gran, if you just let me
stare at that ass for a few hours a week. That’s all I’m
asking.” THERE was enough in the guitar case’s belly to carry him
over for another week, something Damien was fucking happy
about since his fingers were practically bleeding from the
acoustic’s thick strings. He’d expected something to happen
when he’d played outside the pub. Every time he set up, his
shoulders tightened and a flicker of a memory washed through
him. When the broad-shouldered, gray-eyed man strolled out, he’d
gotten a clear flash of a small crook-nosed woman with wild
silver hair and her thick Irish-scented shouts for him and
Miki to find someplace else to beg for money. Something
clicked in his head, bringing with it a throbbing ache, but
he was grateful for the pain, welcoming it alongside the
idea of a cat-and-mouse game they’d once played with the
curmudgeonly pub owner. It all came back to him… too easily, he thought. The days
spent shuffling through the touristy parts of San Francisco,
setting up his case and playing whatever the crowd seemed to
fancy. He ran the gamut from classic rock to pure classical,
all the while peering at passing faces, hoping to see the
one man he’d come to the Bay City to find. Miki St. John. The wind picked up as he walked, carrying the scent of salt
water and fish with it. He was cold and soaked through, and
his guitar case banged against his thigh when he took the
steps up to the flophouse he’d scored a room at. Stepping
over the legs of a drunk sprawled across the narrow walk-up
landing, Damien grunted a hello at the old Chinese woman who
seemed to live in a chair next to her room door. She grinned
back at him, a slender crooked pipe clenched between her
nicotine-tarred teeth. It was four flights up before he reached the tiny attic
space he rented for a hundred a week. Cramped, the ceiling
was almost too low, and he had to duck around the bare bulb
hanging by a fabric-wrapped cord from the room’s crossbeam.
He’d left the thin window open, hoping a fresh breeze would
suck out the heat, but despite the coolness outside, the air
still felt sticky. The room was Spartan, but Damien was fine with its bareness.
A few apple boxes held the clothes he’d foraged from charity
bins, and the full box spring that came with the room rested
on the floor next to the window. He’d freeze in the winter,
but for now, under the cool night air blowing through the
patched window screen was the only way he could sleep. Wind meant he was someplace where the windows could be
opened. Something the hyped-up sanitarium denied its patients. He put the acoustic down, leaning the case lengthwise
against the wall. The electric guitar and piggyback amp he’d
scraped up money for called to him, but Damien held off,
resisting the urge to drown himself in the sharp buzz of
music. Instead, he opened the case’s string compartment and
dug out the pieces of paper he’d printed out at the library. He sat down on the bed and took the time to smooth out the
creases in the paper before studying the printouts, trying
to glean anything he could from the articles. From all accounts, Miki St. John had withdrawn from life,
barricading himself behind the brick walls of his warehouse
fortress. A photographer captured a shot of Miki near his
front door, an elaborate mix of fluid metal, polished wood,
and glass. The door tickled at Damien’s memories, and they
darted through his mind, elusive silvery fish emerging out
of unplumbed depths only to skitter back down when he tried
to catch them. He consumed the articles, reading through the account of
Miki’s stalker and his murdering spree. Miki came out the
survivor, but Damien knew his brother would be shaken down
to the bone at having to revisit the dark places Miki had
left buried in his past. “Stupid how I remember that shit, isn’t it, Sinjun?” He
traced the edges of the photo, wishing he was there to hold
Miki as he fought off his demons. From the looks of things,
the singer might have hooked up with someone, a steely-eyed
muscular man with a fierce scowl and strong profile. “Is he
helping you out there, Miki? You finally decided to find
someone to love? Good for you.” He was surprised to find there wasn’t a whisper of jealousy
inside of him—he was actually fucking happy about it. For so
long, Miki was his and his alone. Sure, he’d shared the
lithe street rat with Johnny and Dave, but when push came to
shove, it had always been the two of them. Knowing someone
else could make Miki smile made him feel pretty good inside. “’Course, we’ll see how I feel when I finally find you,
yeah?” Damien snorted. “For all I know, I’m going to get mad
pissed and try to punch him out.” He studied the slightly
out of focus photo. “He looks damned huge. Hope he’s taking
care of you. Shit, maybe even get you to talk….” He’d wasted so many hours trying to convince Miki to talk to
someone about the horrors he’d lived through, but the man he
called brother wasn’t having any of it. He wasn’t ready…
didn’t want to… couldn’t look at it… all excuses to fend off
Damien’s attempts to heal over Miki’s cracked psyche. For
everything he couldn’t remember about himself, he knew twice
as much shit in his waterlogged brain about Miki’s life
before he became Damien’s brother. “You ever think that maybe having all this crap in my head
makes me who I am?” Miki shot back once when Damien pushed a
little too hard. “Leave me the fuck alone. We can deal with
this shit when we’re old and bloated.” “Dude, you’re too skinny to ever be bloated.” Damien smirked
at his friend’s photo, then sobered. “I just want you to be
happy, Sinjun. You fucking deserve it.” He was too tired to go out warehouse hunting. The days were
packed with roaming through the tourists’ spots, setting up
his case, playing for half an hour, then moving along before
one of the boys in blue pushed him out, and getting around
San Francisco at night was a pain in the ass. “It would help if I remembered where the fucking place was,”
Damien grumbled as he dug out a roll of masking tape. He
tore a strip off and plastered the article up next to the
others he’d found during his time at the public library. Mostly, everything he found was related to the accident, but
a rare few articles talked about Miki’s life following the
tragedy, concentrating mostly on the deaths of Miki’s former
tormentors. He’d winced at the thought of the GTO’s interior
after a dead body had been dumped into it, but there was
nothing he could do about that either. “Tell me you at least learned how to fucking drive, you
piece of shit.” He stripped off his street clothes, needing
to leave the day behind him. A pair of thin cotton pants was
all he could stand to have on his skin, especially since it
felt too tight and stretched across his bones. Sighing, he
padded over to the window and leaned against its frame,
looking out at the piers down the hill. He was no closer to finding Sinjun than he’d been when he’d
finally rolled into San Francisco a month earlier. It had
taken him more than three months to get to California,
hitchhiking and working his way west from Montana. A few
days on the street told Damien he wasn’t cut out for
dumpster diving anymore, and the flophouse’s vacancy seemed
like a godsend. Even if he had ID, he knew he couldn’t use it. Whoever had
been shooting at him back at the nuthouse probably would
also be able to hunt him down. Damien debated going to the
cops or the paper nearly every day when he woke up, but he
stalled. He had nothing to put in front of anyone to say he
was Damien Mitchell, and the truth was, he no longer trusted
anyone to help him out. Walking into a cop house could mean
either his freedom or a one-way ticket to the man who wanted
to put a bullet into his already fucked-up head. “Fucking ties me to working the sidewalk.” He ground his
teeth. “Worse than when we were touring.” His stomach mumbled a bit in discomfort, and Damien reached
for the package of Nutter Butters he’d spent a buck on at
the Quiki-Mart. He unhooked the window screen and slipped
out onto the narrow fire escape, then reached behind him to
grab a sheet to protect his bare back from the building’s
brick exterior. The building’s jutting overhang kept most of
the rain from pouring down the fire escape, but a few thick
drops hit his toes when he tried to stretch out. Tucking his
legs up, Damien stared out at the city beyond. Somewhere out in the lights lay Miki, unaware that his best
friend was still alive and kicking. “Kicking,” Damien snorted to himself. “Guess you can say I’m
kicking.” He’d remembered nothing when he’d woken up, groggy and
restrained to a metal bed. The story he’d been spun about a
life lived as Stephen Thompson echoed as a lie in some
recess in his head, and even now, he had doubts about his
sanity, especially on those days when he could recall
nothing of his previous life other than the sound of his
best friend’s laugh and the music they’d made together. If anything… that music could not be a lie. If it was,
Damien knew he’d climb to the tallest building in the city
and kiss the sky good-bye. It was the only thing that kept
him sane, knowing he had that kind of life inside of him…
that need to create sound out of nothing more than his heart
and soul. The band surfaced once in a while, fragments of time spent
in cramped vans, then buses. A hatchet-nosed woman named
Edie often swam in and out of his consciousness, nagging
most of the time but sometimes cajoling him along. His body
remembered things instinctively, from the feel of strings
beneath his fingers and, sadly, the plumping up of his mouth
when he bit into a peach. Playing Russian roulette with food
made him nervous, so he’d stuck with as much packaged shit
as he could find, grateful to discover he and peanut butter
were good friends. And in all of it, there was music… both his own and haunting
symphonies he’d practiced over and over, sometimes to the
point of his fingers bleeding and crippled in his worst
nightmares. If only he could more clearly remember the
people screaming at him to practice. He snorted, amused at the irony of his life. “Fucking
hilarious some of that damned classical shit is paying my
bills now.” His head began to hurt, the scars along his skull throbbing
from the residual heat of the day. Threading his fingers
over the crinkled skin, Damien tried to ease the nerves
beneath his shaggy black mane. He’d let it grow, hiding the
scars under his thick hair and a black leather cowboy hat
he’d gotten off of a trucker back in Iowa. The keloid down his chest seemed to be shrinking, its angry
purple color fading slightly to a disgruntled violet. Pink
starbursts puckered its edges, marking the lines of staples
or stitches the doctors had used to hold his insides
together. It was an ugly gash down his sternum, but Damien
found himself rather fond of it. If anything, it was a
battle wound. Saluting the stars with a half gnawed-on
cookie, he leaned back and rubbed at his naked chest,
soothing the ache growing there. “Just give me some time, Sinjun,” Damien whispered up into
the fog-veiled, dusky sky. “Give me some time to find you so
I can find myself again.”
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