Weekender cottages, most likely. “More weekenders,” Libby had said, “than full time residents.”

  He looked up and down to get his bearings and decided Hannah’s house was only a short distance that direction. And where was Carl’s trailer? He’d be willing to bet, not far. All of them, lined up in a row along the lake’s shore. Oddly regimented for what was, really, a very dysfunctional family.

  The moon’s reflection lay on the lake, a pewter platter.

  Stanley looked up at the original, white and round, just clearing the treetops. For a moment, he couldn’t think what was funny about the sky. It dawned on him that there was none of that electric glow that always hung over the city. He’d never seen the moon so enormous, so luminous, nor so many stars, the blackness above teeming with them, like giant asters.

  DEADLY WRONG 79

  As he watched, the moon got tangled in the branches of the trees. Stanley thought of Selene, the moon goddess of the old-time Greeks. On a night like this, surrounded by the beauty of nature, it was easy to see how the ancients had come to believe in her.

  Out of nowhere, Tom Danzel popped into his mind again.

  He stared across the gleaming surface of the water, remembering what it had been like to feel Tom’s arms about him, the taste of Tom’s lips on his own… the romantic setting only intensified the ache he felt inside himself.

  A faint cough made him turn his head, and he saw that Carl’s bedroom opened onto the deck. Its sliding door stood open. More conscious now of his immediate surroundings, Stanley caught a faint whiff of marijuana. Apparently Carl was awake, lying in the dark, smoking a joint.

  Does he know I’m out here?

  For a brief moment, he thought about going to the open door, stepping through it. He felt pretty sure Carl would welcome him. He could have arms about him this night. Warm flesh next to his own. He needn’t feel so utterly alone.

  Something hinted past him in the darkness, not quite brushing his cheek. A bat? Or the breath of some divine voice?

  What did it whisper? Life was a teaching, wasn’t it? In which case, what did he need to learn? Because he had a feeling he was flunking the course.

  He gave his head a shake and turned to go back inside.

  Whatever might happen in the dark warmth of Carl’s bedroom, it wouldn’t do anything for that ache in his chest. He would still be alone. If it wasn’t the right one, the right arms, you never escaped the aloneness.

  It only got worse.

  He paused to look over his shoulder. The moon had struggled free again of the branches and sailed triumphantly into the nighttime sky, smiling down at him and making the surface of the lake ripple with silver undulations, like water nymphs cavorting in the darkness. A star winked at him. The moonlight was so pure and white he almost felt as if he could cup it in his 80 Victor Banis

  hands and drink it. Le feu de Dieu, the French called it: the fire of God.

  He didn’t exactly believe in miracles. Still, he mouthed a silent prayer to the moon goddess, and went in.

  CHAPTER TEN

  For San Francisco Homicide Inspector Tom Danzel, it had been the worst couple of months of his life. He was sure he had never felt so miserable—or understood it so little.

  Stanley Korski, that was for sure. Whatever was going on in his life, little Stanley Korski was at the very center of it. But, what exactly “it” was, he had no clue.

  If he had been a different kind of man, he might have gone so far—though it would have been a major stretch in any case—as to think he had fallen in love. But that was impossible, totally beyond any stretch of the imagination. Stanley was queer.

  He wasn’t. That was the black and white of it, despite anything that had gone on between them, all of which could easily be explained away.

  It felt, though, a lot like he had felt once or twice in the past, when he thought he had fallen in love with one female or another. On the other hand, his assessment of his feelings had proven to be pretty unreliable in those instances, too. He had long since concluded that he didn’t have any idea either what exactly “falling in love” meant.

  There were people he loved, in a manner of speaking.

  Women people. He thought so, anyway. And things he loved, for sure. Fucking said women people, especially. He’d gotten his first piece of ass when he was thirteen. She was fifteen. An older woman.

  He hadn’t look back since, had gone through his life industriously collecting all the trophies he could, convinced that his was a special gift he was meant to share with all the hungry, horny women of the world—and in all fairness to himself, many of them had seemed to share his opinion. If he got a goodly share of the pleasure out of the encounters too, well, who was to say that wasn’t his due?

  It had always seemed to him as if this was a perfectly sensible, agreeable way to proceed. Truth was, he had never 82 Victor Banis

  needed much from life: a roof over his head, some food, a reasonable amount of booze, the occasional joint—and lots of pussy. That had always been enough to keep him happy.

  Until Stanley had entered his life—and turned it upside down, in ways he simply could not understand. As a for instance, he’d always enjoyed having his dick sucked, without getting overly excited about it. It was just another kind of foreplay, a build up to the real things—until Stanley. Then, he had experienced a whole new level of sexual excitement, a “real thing” in itself and not just some prelude.

  Try though he might, he couldn’t explain the difference to himself. It was just a mouth, wasn’t it: two lips, a tongue, a throat? You put the knob of your dick between the lips, somebody sucked on it, tongued it a bit, took it down the throat. He’d had scores of women perform this on him. It had been nice, and nothing to write home about.

  With Stanley, he’d found himself flying to the moon. But he couldn’t think of any reason why it should have been so different from everything in the past.

  Even the simplest things were different, too—even kissing had suddenly turned into something entirely unlike what he had experienced with that long list of female partners.

  Kissing, for Christ’s sake. That had always just been a way of getting started, a warm up exercise. Like, how excited could a guy get over just locking lips with someone? It wasn’t, in his opinion, a manly thing to get excited about. Kissing was for women. Men did it to make women happy. Okay, if you wanted to put it exactly, they did it to get women turned on, which made the man happy, in return for which, it was then up to him to make the woman really happy. Which required something more than kissing.

  Only, kissing Stanley had been, again, like nothing he’d ever experienced before. Like, that first time, it had caught him so completely by surprise. It wasn’t just that it felt good, it had felt, well, so utterly right, when by all logic it ought to have felt wrong, shouldn’t it? Not as if it had been his very first kiss.

  That mouth, those lips, that tongue… sweet, like nectar, soft as DEADLY WRONG 83

  velvet. Most surprisingly, kissing Stanley had made him—he didn’t know how else to put it—had made him happy.

  Other stuff… okay, he’d never actually had anybody rim him before, so that didn’t really count. Probably, if a chick had done that to him, he’d have enjoyed it just as much as with Stanley. Probably, way more.

  But the weirdest thing of all, the totally weird thing, had been when he took Stanley’s dick up his ass. That had only happened once, and he’d done it then just as a favor, a special gift, and not out of any desire to try it out. Something that had never occurred to him to try with anyone else, let alone desired.

  What it had been, really, was not so much a sexual activity as a goodbye gift, because he had made up his mind on his way to see Stanley that night that it would be their final get together, that whatever they had going between them, it had to end.

  That was where it had ended, too, and he had been glad he’d made the sacrifice and given Stanley his cherry, to soften the blow of saying goodbye, because he genuinely liked Stanley, and he knew Stanley was going to take it hard, having everything come to an abrupt end the way Tom had decided.

  And, yes, the experience had been every bit as painful as he’d suspected it would be, an ordeal, really—except, ever since, whenever he thought about it, it didn’t seem as terrible in retrospect as it had at the time. Like something he could possibly do again, in the right situation. Not for pleasure, not for his own pleasure certainly, more like an accommodation, with the right individual. Only, it was impossible to think of doing it with anybody other than Stanley.

  Plus, and this had really come to aggravate him, every time he thought of that, of Stanley fucking him, it occurred to him that he had never gotten around to nailing Stanley in return.

  Who, let it be said, had a really cute little ass on him. He had noticed that a lot while they had been working on their case together. Cute little buns, all round and firm and pouty looking, you couldn’t help thinking how they would feel riding them to town.

  So, shouldn’t he have gotten himself a piece of that, once at least, before he had called everything off? Even knowing it 84 Victor Banis

  wouldn’t be like pussy. Couldn’t be. Still, it was a cute little butt, and it looked, kind of, like a woman’s. It looked like it would be great to fuck.

  Or, maybe it was better he hadn’t done that. Because calling things off had been necessary, and that might have made it tougher. What if fucking Stanley had turned out to be good, really good? If he’d fucked Stanley, and it had turned out to be sensational, he’d have wanted some more of it, wouldn’t he? He would never have wanted their relationship to end.

  And it had to end, had ended, that part of it was one hundred percent definite. They were both on the homicide detail. They had solved a tricky case together, and Tom was honest enough to admit that he probably couldn’t have done it, or at least, not so quickly, without Stanley’s help. He’d have been totally at sea in the ocean of gay bars and cross dressers they’d had to navigate to find their killer, a world Stanley had taken to like some brightly plumed sea bird. One of those pink ones. Flamingoes, he thought they were.

  Afterward, though, just with that one case, the others in homicide were giving Tom smirks and doubtful glances, as if they knew, or guessed, anyway, that he and Stanley had graduated from partners to partners. To have continued to work with Stanley would have cemented everyone’s suspicions. They would be looking at him with the same undisguised scorn with which they looked at Stanley. They would have written him off as queer, too.

  So, he’d done the right thing. Broken it off completely, insisted on a change of partners, had gone out of his way to avoid Stanley, no chance of finding himself in a weak moment doing things he knew he would only regret later.

  He couldn’t quite grasp, though, why he should want to do any of those things, even with Stanley. He wasn’t attracted to men. And it wasn’t love, he was pretty sure of that. He had come to the conclusion that love was a talent that other people had and that he just simply lacked.

  Still, Stanley was there, wouldn’t go away. Like the amputee’s missing foot, Stanley continued to itch at him. And DEADLY WRONG 85

  how was he supposed to go about scratching something that wasn’t there?

  Which was as close as he could come to an explanation for why was he coming up the walk now to Stanley’s apartment, at almost one o’clock in the morning, with no idea what he wanted to say, or what he was expecting to happen—just that he had this urge, it had overwhelmed him, to see Stanley again.

  The itching foot.

  § § § § §

  Only, after a long wait and a second, loud knocking at the door, the kind of cop-knock nobody could ignore, it wasn’t Stanley who opened the door. It was… he had to think…

  “Chris, right?”

  Chris, pillow-haired, sleepy-eyed, wrapped in a pink silk bathrobe that Tom recognized at once as Stanley’s ( a pink bathrobe, wouldn’t you fucking know it? Definitely a flamingo), blinked at him through the open crack of the door.

  “Um hum,” he mumbled, looking blank for a moment as his eyes went up and down Tom’s stocky frame. After a few seconds, his eyes widened. “Oh, wait. You’re the…” He started to say “The Neanderthal,” which was the nickname Stanley had originally given his homicide partner, and corrected it to,

  “Stanley’s partner. On the murder case.”

  “Right. Tom.” Tom took a stick of gum from his pocket, opened it one handed, and popped it into his mouth, chewing vigorously. “Is, uh, Stanley here?” He craned to look past Chris’s shoulder, as if he expected to see Stanley hiding behind him in the dark hallway.

  Chris gave his head a shake. “No. He’s out of town. He went down to Bear Mountain.”

  “Bear Mountain? Like, in Southern California?”

  “That’s the one. He got a call. A murder case. He flew down there to solve it.”

  Tom felt something do a flip-flop in his gut. Stanley, off solving a murder case, on his own? Stanley, who couldn’t draw his gun without catching it on his bra strap? Stanley, whose ass he’d had to save over and over on their previous case.

  86 Victor Banis

  “Bear Mountain,” he said again, because he couldn’t think what to say.

  Chris nodded. “An old friend. Somebody named Libby. He left her address, I think, and her number. I’ll get it for you.” He started to move away from the door and turned back to look Tom over more thoroughly. “Unless, you know, you’d like to come in…?”

  It didn’t even register. Tom was busy thinking about Stanley, who was almost certainly, at this very moment, getting himself into some kind of trouble. Because Stanley was a magnet for trouble. Probably major trouble, too. Without Tom there to get him out of it.

  Chris sighed. “I’ll get the address,” he said.

  § § § § §

  Stanley’s cell phone rang during the night, a cacophony of notes that, if you listened carefully enough, could just be recognized as Can-Can. Half asleep, he picked it up and looked at the number on display, one he didn’t recognize. Probably some telemarketer, he thought. He put it back on the nightstand, and went back to sleep.

  Carl was nowhere to be seen when Stanley got up in the morning. The door to his bedroom was still closed. Sleeping in, Stanley decided.

  He made coffee, found some bread in the refrigerator and a toaster on the counter and made himself some toast. In the absence of anything to spread on it, he dipped it in his coffee.

  Coffee soup, they’d called it when he had been a kid. You broke the bread up in a bowl, poured the coffee over it, lots of sugar, lots of milk. A delicious repast with which to begin a winter morning, as he recalled it. On a whim, he got a bowl out of the cupboard, broke the toast into it, added the other ingredients, briefly flashing back on his childhood.

  It tasted far less glorious than he remembered. Maybe it was a kid thing, like snow ice cream. He’d tried that too, years later, and wondered why he had enjoyed it so much in the past.

  Memory could play tricks. He emptied the bowl into the garbage can and poured himself a fresh cup of coffee.

  DEADLY WRONG 87

  It occurred to him that maybe one day in the distant future, he’d look back and wonder why he had cared so much about Tom, too. You’re just coffee soup, he would tell him to his face. Just snow ice cream. Let him figure that out. He was a detective, wasn’t he?

  He was finishing his coffee when Carl appeared in a pair of badly rumpled pajamas, his hair tousled, his face puffy with sleep, eyes red-rimmed.

  “Coffee’s made,” Stanley told him. Carl went by with nothing but a grunt, poured himself a cup, and headed for the bathroom.

  “Yes,” Stanley said to his retreating back, “‘the lark’s on the wing, the morning’s dew-pearled.’” The closing of the bathroom door was the only reply.

  Later, though, dressed in the same clothes from yesterday, showing no evidence of a shower or any grooming, Carl had recovered his manners enough at least to say, “Good morning,”

  and added, which might have been meant for an apology, “I’m not used to having anyone around when I get up.”

  “It will only be for a couple of days,” Stanley said. “I guess we can survive one another that long.”

  Breakfast more or less taken care of, Stanley asked how to find Donnie’s mother, thinking he would start there. As he was leaving, he thought to ask, “By the way, you said you have a trailer of your own. Where is that?”

  “About half a mile that way, on the lake front,” Carl said, indicating the direction opposite of Hannah’s.

  “The three of you living so close, all lined up along the shore of the lake,” Stanley said, “seems funny, some how.”

  “It was Mom’s idea. She’s always had this image of us, one big happy family. As if. Myself, I’d have picked some place way out in the woods. As far as I could get.”

  “Speaking of her, where did she live, your mother?” Stanley asked. “Before she moved into Hannah’s?”

  “About a half a mile the other side of Hannah’s.” He smiled sardonically. “Like ducks in a row, she used to say.”

  Queer ducks, Stanley thought, but didn’t say.

  88 Victor Banis

  “Where will I find this biker hangout you mentioned?”

  “The Handle Bar?” Carl gave him the directions, which consisted mostly of follow the main drag out the other end of town, watch for it on the left. “You’re going there?”

  “I think I’ll have to,” Stanley said, without enthusiasm.

  “What was that guy’s name?”

  “Rack. But I don’t think…”

  “I don’t either, much of the time.” Or I probably wouldn’t be here.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  At first glance, Amanda McIntosh’s cabin might better have been described as a shanty. Parked in front of it, staring at it from the car, Stanley realized that probably at one time it hadn’t looked so bad. It must have been two decades, though, since it had been painted, and the weather had taken its toll. Siding, most of its paint long since flaked away, showed signs here and there of rot, and bare patches on the roof must surely let rain and snow in. A window to one side had been broken, cardboard fastened from inside over the gaping hole.