This Gun's For Hire: Chapter 2
By the time I'd retrieved my coat and caught up with him, St. John was almost out the door. "What about the check?"
"I have an account," he said, and grinned at my raised eyebrow. "This is L. A. If a potential client's uncomfortable, and doesn't want to be spotted going into a PI's office, I meet them here. After a drink or two, in any event, and they're more likely to relax and tell me what's really going on."
"Oh." It made sense.
I'd come in from the street entrance, but St. John knew a back hallway lined with autographed photos of movie stars all the way back to the 40's, and that let us into the lobby near the elevator banks.
You could tell what a grand old lady the building had been in its day. The lobby was red and gold marble columns, and the polished brass dials over the elevator doors looked like the top of the Chrysler Building. While we were zipping up and up and up, St. John asked me if I disapproved so much, how I'd wound up working for Five-0.
I told him it wasn't that I disproved as much I resented that the governor tended to act as if we were her private police force. Not to mention I'd been shanghaied.
Then the elevator doors opened. Sometimes, with these old buildings, it's a mess where it doesn't show. This one, someone had dropped the bomb to fix up. There were new walls, recessed lights and frosted glass doors. It all went with what I'd seen downstairs. Everything was retro except the paintings hanging on the walls. Those looked ironic, where ironic is another word for expensive.
I knew we were up high, possibly under the building's spire, from the short length of the hall and that there were only four doors. 'Mick St. John, Private Investigations' was etched into the glass of the one at the end but St. John surprised me by using his clicker on the one on the right. Soft lights came on as we entered, but I couldn't see much until St. John said, "Hang on," and draped his jacket over the back of a chair. He went around raising the window shades, and I this was his home. I went and looked out the windows to see how high up we were. I could see the ocean to the west, with a band of dark orange spreading across the horizon. Above us, the sky was velvet black. Lights were coming on in the skyscrapers all around.
I whistled. "Talk about living over the shop."
St. John's smile lit up. That was when I noticed the little silver chain he wore around his neck. It flowed over his collarbone and disappeared beneath the neck of the cream colored Henley he was wearing. I also noticed how nicely the Henley fit across his shoulders.
"Ready to try the Glenmorangie?" he said.
"Please," I said. "If it's as good as the Mccallan; maybe…" …maybe, I thought, this could get interesting.
"I hope so," St. John said. "Take your coat off and make yourself comfortable."
He was cracking open the bottle, so I took a quick look around. It was a large apartment, even with the old walls taken down but it was one of the coolest places I've ever seen.
Back in the day, it was probably utility space for the penthouses. (I was right about being under the spire; you could tell from the skylights and the angled ceiling.) The kitchen took up one whole corner. It was all stainless steel and glass, with the oven and sink standing in an island. Efficient, even if it didn't look like he cooked much. The dining table was in the center, conveniently adjacent to a conversation area that was defined by a leather sofa and two comfy chairs surrounding a coffee table. Most of the wall space opposite was filled with diagonal bookshelves. The highlight of the whole thing was an open fireplace, between the conversation area and the bookshelves. The original wall beams had been left in place and two of them framed a firebox tiled in deep red. A drift of tempered glass nuggets covered the fire bar, so that when St. John turned it on, and he did, it looked like flames dancing over a snow bank. Throw in some expensive looking art and the geometric frieze that ran around the top of the walls…all I can say is that private investigating pays better than police work.
"Here you go." He brought the drinks over and put them down on the coffee table. "Don't be put off by the initial astringent orange taste. I'm told it has a fabulously unctuous length at the finish."
"Uh…yeah," I said. I mean, I thought we were talking about whiskey, but I wasn't entirely sure. Thank God he was screwing himself into the corner of the sofa and wasn't looking at my face. I made a point of taking one of the chairs.
"So," St. John saluted me with his glass. "What did you mean when you said you were shanghaied into Five-0?"
I'll give the guy one thing, he never lost track of a thread. The trouble was that answering that particular question required explaining about McGarrett and me drawing down on each other at the scene of his father's murder.
Some ways it's funny but, other ways…not so much. That led to talking about things we'd found out about Jack McGarrett's career. Nothing pertinent to the ongoing investigation, of course, but stuff that Jack had done in the course of his career before joining HPD. That led to talking about the Navy, which led to talking about Steve being a SEAL, which led to Steve's grandfather's death on the Arizona.
Another thing I'll give St. John is he didn't interrupt or ask irrelevant questions. He sat there and listened while I talked. I knew he was paying attention but the most I'd catch was a darkening of his eyes or a slight flare of his nostrils. At one point, he was topping off my drink, he said that McGarrett sounded gung-ho. I said if that meant he was a human pit-bull; damn straight! But that's what makes him good at the job! I said grenades were still inappropriate in police work. St. John agreed with me. Then, of course, I had to explain how McGarrett's just a little shaky on due process, but we're working on it. (St. John was polite. He pretended to be coughing.) Don't ask me how I got started on the cargo pants. Don't get me wrong, McGarrett cleans up nicely; seeing him in uniform is to know that the gods still walk among us. I don't see how I could have helped it. Out of uniform, Steve's strictly for comfort. (That's me being polite about the collection of cleaning rags he calls t-shirts.) St.
John sat tucked into his corner across from me, and listened. And that cream colored Henley I mentioned, earlier was only a little paler than his skin. At one point he pushed the sleeves up, and leaned back with his hands locked behind his head, and stretched like a cat. I realized I'd just done that! He was mirroring me! I smiled. He smiled. No wonder I was talking my head off. Remember what I said about the measles? There was no doubt in my mind that St. John had caught them, too, and I didn't mind in the slightest. In fact, I was trying to work out how to negotiate the distance between us, when the phone rang.
At least, St. John cocked his head, and said, "I have to take this."
I swear I didn't hear it ring. He must have turned the ringer off, and heard the answering machine pick up.
He got up and walked through the painting on the wall.
I stared at where he'd disappeared, and got up and followed. No, he hadn't walked through the painting. It was actually a divider between his apartment and his office, and he;d simply slipped around it. Duh! I just hadn't noticed. There was another painting hanging on the other side. More irony.
St. John was reassuring someone. "Then it was an accident, Guillermo, call a doctor… Oh… Then tell him to call the cleaner… No? Okay. Okay, calm down…"He rolled his eyes at whatever the guy was saying, covered the mouth piece and, to me, said, "Get yourself another drink. This is going to take a minute."
I can take a hint; client confidentiality. Would the Enquirer headline he was scotching have read, Tinsel Town Scandal! He didn't particularly lower his voice, though. I heard him say, "Oh, yeah, and how am I your go-to guy, all of a sudden? If you want a favor, ask!"
Now that I'd been alerted to how sneaky things where in that place, I took a closer look around, and caught on that there was a loft. I should have guessed from the angle of the skylights but the staircase was cantilevered steps attached to the wall. That made it almost invisible, like the office door. I took a few steps up. The doors up there were closed so I came down. You never stop being a cop and, I admit, I was wondering where the bedroom was.
St. John had gotten rid of his client, but I could hear him leaving a message for someone named Josef. I went to have a closer look the the other wall. It was fitted with diagonal cubby holes. It was neat the way his books and stuff fitted. It occured to me that I could adapt the concept for my chicken coop back in Honolulu.
The books were mostly technical stuff, art, philosophy and 20th century novels: everything from Henry Miller to Joseph Heller to Salman Rushdie. I'd already spotted an iPod dock, but he collected music on vinyl as well as disks. He was heavily into old Jazz and Swing and there wasn't a serious guitarist in the last sixty years that he didn't listen to: Johnson, Epps, Reinhardt, Durham, Vaughn, Page, Cooder, Hendrix, Grisman and Garcia, of course. Movies, though… If it gives you an idea, he still had movies on Betamax. (That was my folk's first machine.) There was Gunga Din, All Quiet on the Western Front, Day at the Races, Night at the Opera, Red Headed Woman, China Doll, Casablanca… Nothing but old classics. I heard the printer going. Over the sound of it, I said, "It looks like you're supporting TCM singlehanded?"
"What?"
"You like old moves," I said, as I flipped through them. Titles were moving up the decades, slowly.
"Yes, I do. My first crush was on Jean Harlow."
"Mine was on Julia Roberts." Speaking of which, he had Ocean's Eleven. Don't get excited, it was the original Ocean's Eleven.
"Too skinny."
"At least she's alive."
"You prejudiced against the vitally challenged?"
"No. I just don't see myself picking up my dates at the morgue."
"Don't knock it 'til you've tried it."
"Aha!" I said, uncovering a very revealing group of titles. "I knew it!"
St. John peered around the edge of the door frame. "What?"
"You like vampire movies," I said. "Dracula, Fright Night, From Dusk Till Dawn, and…" I waved the box at him, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer!"
He rolled his eyes, and said, "If that's an example of your detective skills, detect some music. I'm almost done here."
Yeah. Right. The phone rang, again (I heard it this time.) and I heard him say, "Hey, thanks for calling back…yeah, Guillermo's got a situation, and I need you to look up some information in a hurry…" Then he lowered his voice. Not that that would have stopped me eavesdropping, but I'd turned on the iPod. It was what you'd expect, guitar chords; then a high tenor whining, Are you goin' to Scarborough Fair… Seriously, Simon and Garfunkle.
It wouldn't have been my personal choice, but I didn't have time to look for another track. There was a photo album on the shelf next to the speakers and, despite St. John as good as having given me permission to snoop, he was going to be done with that call eventually and I didn't want him catching me flipping through his family album. Which is what it had to be. It went back quiet a ways, too. Some of the photos were sepia toned, and there was a wedding portrait that looked like it had been colored by hand with pastels. Great-grandparents, maybe. You could tell another was them as a middle-aged couple standing on an unpainted porch. There was also a little kid sitting on a wheeled horse. The blue ink said Mick's 4th birthday. And I'd have put money on it being the same little kid, all grown up, in a World War 2 Army uniform.
It had to be St. John's grandfather. He was right about the genes. Even that young, and with that underfed '40s look, you could see the family resemblance. I flipped to the back, looking for pictures of St. John, but most of the recent ones were a little blonde chickie with a case of terminal cuteness.
"But you'll do it for me, won't you…?" I could still hear St. John on the phone, massaging someone's ego "Tonight. Yes, please. Thank you, Josef. Thank you…I know; you'll send me the bill."
The only photo I found of St. John, he was with some guy, and each of them had an arm around the other. They were grinning like loons at the lens. Both of them were had hold of the camera, like it was their very first one, and they'd been squabbling over it.
That was it, and was nothing to do but fix myself another drink, except I was starting to wish I'd taken him up on dinner. I put the album back and went to check out the fridge. Beer, wine, seltzer, capers, olives cocktail onions and a couple of blood samples. In other words a typical bachelor PI's refrigerator.
St. John finally came wandering back. "Sorry that took so long," he said, pulling the Henley off over his head.
"Is there anything to eat around here?" As I said, I was starting to think about dinner.
"I was thinking about you," he said, dropping the Henley on the floor and toeing his shoes off. "But we could send out for a pizza."
I managed to hoist my jaw off the floor by the time he was shucking his shorts. (He wasn't circumcised, by the way.)
"Mick St. John," I said, "you're trying to seduce me…" All right, Paul Simon was going Koo-koo-ka-choo in the background and I was never going to get an opportunity like that again in this life.
"Yes," he said, "I am. What are you going to do about it?"
He stretched out on the sofa and If he'd been a cat, there would have been a little yellow feather sticking out of the corner of his mouth.
The smug bastard as much as forced me to go over there and kiss him.
It was good.
Not, thank heaven, You've pissed me off for the last time! Pow! Bam! Suddenly we're sucking the breath out of each other's lungs! Not that kind of good. (That was McGarrett's and my first kiss and, excuse me, in addition to everything else, I had bruises from where my shoulder impacted the Mercury's door frame for days.) It was good enough, though. I was surprised at how cool his mouth was.
While I was preoccupied with the way his tongue was teasing mine, not to mention the sensations fizzing through my personal anatomy, he took hold of my tie and wound it around his fist. He took me down to his level, and I didn't fight.
That was the difference. Neither of us fought.
That first time with McGarrett had been building up for months, waiting for the spark. When it exploded, I gave him what he needed. And that's the way it's going to be; he needs to be on top, he'll be on top; he wants to me to suck him off, I'll give it to him hard and fast. We both know, deep down, that one of these days he's going to hand it back to me in a box with a bow on. You think my baby's got trust issues? I think he's got the five volume hard-bound edition. But it's okay.
St. John didn't bring his issues to bed—pardon me—he didn't bring his issues to the sofa, but he brought an unholy amount of skill. Look, I admit I'm a little challenged height-wise but, compared to most men, I'm strong, and I know it. St. John tugged on my tie. I lost my balance. He caught me, and rolled me over on the couch. He undid my tie, my shirt and the buttons on my pants and, now, I think I get what women are fantasizing about when they're drooling on the cover of a bodice-buster; it's about power. The control with which he did that, the whole time he was getting me naked, the only thing I was aware of was what he was doing with his mouth and tongue. by the time he was done, my nerves were zinging from my brain to my balls to the soles of my feet. I was a roman candle with a lit fuse. I was a rocket and the countdown was on. I begged him to suck me. He wouldn't do it.
He hooked an arm under me, lifted me and slipped cushions under my ass, forcing my legs apart. My cock was nosing the air and he worked his way down to it, slowly. Too slowly. He was kissing me everywhere but there. I could hear him growling and moaning. Bastard was gnawing on the insides of my thighs. I tried to push his head. Like trying to sift a boulder.
The only thing I could do was take hold of myself but he took hold of my hands, muttering something about dessert, and held them down. I could have kicked him. I think I did kick him, and wound up knocking the cushions on the floor. Then he bumped my ass on his knees and spread my legs, which gave him everything on a platter, so to speak. And which I'm still trying to figure out how he did because, as I said, he had hold of my hands. I wasn't particularly worried about it at that moment, though, because he was nibbling, nuzzling and sucking everything—and, I mean, everywhere. I stopped struggling; that level of intimacy was a whole new magnitude of new and different. I felt his teeth prick the thinnest, most tender skin. A hot dribble of something ran down my ass, but it didn't matter because, suddenly, I had the rhythm and time stopped. He sucked and every pull of his mouth drew me with it, higher and higher. The sound of blood rushing in my ears grew louder and louder, until I was on the verge of coming. He knew the moment. His mouth closed over my cock, hot and wet, bringing sweet release in a magnificent slow eruption. He rocked with me through it, and cradled me until it was over.
There's a fragile moment, when it's over, that the merest whisper of breath on your balls can be painful. St. John didn't move; didn't even breathe. When I was capable of coherent thought again, and the weight on my thighs was getting heavy, I thought of stroking his hair. He lifted his head at the touch. "Getting a cramp?" I swear he was beautiful, with his cheeks and lips red with passion.
"No. Just sleepy."
St. John got up and pulled me up, then sat down, put his arms around me and held me against his chest. "So to sleep," he said, and buried his face in my hair. I could feel his breath. It was cool. "You smelled so good," he whispered. "I'm so, so sorry." I was drifting out on a dark velvet tide, but I made an effort to reach up and pat his cheek. Been there. God knows, I've been there...
Next thing I remember, St. John's trying to get me to wake up. "C'mon, Danno. Jeepers creepers let me see those peepers."
Danno?
I pried my eyes open to ask who the rat was. Then I smelled the garlic and the onions and figured we must have decided to order out.
"Pizza?" I sat up.
"Drink this." Mick wrapped my hand around a bottle.
I was thirsty. It smelled like beer. Then I realized what it tasted like. "Yuk." I tried to hand it back to him.
"Finish it."
"Who died and left you in charge?"
"Finish it!" I finished it. "I'll get you another."
"No. 'S okay…" I slid back down and closed my eyes. Given a choice between drinking emulsified sweatsocks and going back to sleep, sleep's going to win, every time. "I'm good."
"I don't think he likes the porter, Mick. Maybe he could used a little of the hair of the dog that bit him."
"Josef, go away. I'm not in the mood, and I'm not going to argue.
I opened my eyes and there was this delicious blond guy sitting in one of the chairs at the dining table. He had his elbows on the table, and his chin on his fist, and he was enjoying himself. I figured he was the pizza guy. "You need a tip?" I was pretty fuzzy, and started feeling around for my pockets.
That's when I realized I didn't have any pants on, among other things.
Pizza guy stands up, laughing, and says, "It's been taken care of, freshie. Believe me; this has almost been worth every minute of the massive amount of incredible inconvenience I have been put to tonight. Almost." He pulled a heavy envelope out of his breast pocket, dropped it on the table. "Mick, I'm happy for you. Maybe even a little jealous, but that would be admitting something I don't want to think about. Next time, either share, or call Papa John's."
I could hear him whistling Strangers in the Night until the door slammed.