Sin and Tonic Read online

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Sinner's Lyrics

  More from Rhys Ford

  Readers love the Sinners Series by Rhys Ford

  About the Author

  By Rhys Ford

  Visit Dreamspinner Press

  Copyright

  Sin and Tonic

  By Rhys Ford

  Sequel to Absinthe of Malice

  Sinners Series: Book Six

  Miki St. John believed happy endings only existed in fairy tales until his life took a few unexpected turns… and now he’s found his own.

  His best friend, Damien, is back from the dead, and their new band, Crossroads Gin, is soaring up the charts. Miki’s got a solid, loving partner named Kane Morgan—an Inspector with SFPD whose enormous Irish family has embraced him as one of their own—and his dog, Dude, at his side.

  It’s a pity someone’s trying to kill him.

  Old loyalties and even older grudges emerge from Chinatown’s murky, mysterious past, and Miki struggles to deal with his dead mother’s abandonment, her secrets, and her brutal murder while he’s hunted by an enigmatic murderer who may have ties to her.

  The case lands in Kane’s lap, and he and Miki are caught in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse. When Miki is forced to face his personal demons and the horrors of his childhood, only one thing is certain: the rock star and his cop are determined to fight for their future and survive the evils lurking in Miki’s past.

  This book is dedicated to every band I’ve ever listened to. From Hyde to Metallica, from Big Bang to Stevie Ray Vaughan, from Aerosmith to the Four Horsemen to Testament to Ministry to AC/DC and Dong Bang Shin Ki… you all have kept me company throughout this series and will continue to keep me grounded as I go forward. Please know every crappy gig was worth it because you’ve brought joy—and some tears—to countless lives.

  Lisa — Connor is now yours. Please keep him safe.

  Mary — Dude, you’ve already got Cole and Jae. You’ve gotta share.

  E — I could really use that bobbing pool. This one killed me.

  And for everyone who’s picked up a Sinners book and continued on their journey with me, thank you. Seriously, thank you. You, like the bands I love, bring me so much damned joy. And in the immortal words of a band from Down Under, I salute you.

  Acknowledgments

  THIS IS my… God, I don’t know what number I’m on… book, but as always, there is the Five. There will always be the Five. Smooches and love to Tamm, Lea, Jenn, and Penny. Because you know, the Five.

  A special hug and thanks to my other sisters, Ree, Ren, Lisa, and Mary. And I also want to shout out to the San Diego Crewe of Steve, Maite, Andy, and Felix. God, it’s been a long ride.

  Miki and Kane and the rest of the Sinners cast wouldn’t be here without Dreamspinner, so much love and gratitude to Elizabeth, Lynn, Grace and her editing crew, Naomi, Jaime, and everyone else who delves into my sticky messes of novels. Thank you.

  To everyone else, I encourage you to try new bands… listen to them… stretch yourself out and revel in the voices and sounds we have around us. You never know where you might find your own brand of Gin.

  Chapter One

  Locking down my heart

  After I’m done with you

  I’ve run the course of our love

  There’s nothing left to do

  Can’t listen to your lies

  Won’t let you into my life

  Gave you everything I had

  Your love’s like a knife

  —Lock and Stab

  DEATH SLIPPED in over life in many ways, from stealing the breath from a slumbering child with a feathery touch to a shockwave of anguish of a man striking the Bay’s hard, cold water from a fall off the bridge. Miki St. John always believed Death was the most insidious, volatile, and unpredictable thief a man ever had to face in his life, an unyielding brutal force even nature could not cow or hold back.

  That is, up until a few seconds ago when Miki discovered, to his amazement, pain was a greater monster than any death ever could be.

  Today, pain came in the form of a forty-year-old Vietnamese woman with long, silver-streaked black hair and a face life gouged out with a hard awl. The lines on her face so deeply etched into her skin, a heavy rain would pour rivers from her jowls. Her pallor was stark, the slate gray of the sky over an icy Bay, but her cheeks ran florid with angry lesions, red constellations of flaking skin and puckering scabs. Her tongue darted across her lips, a gecko-quick daub over cracked fissures. One corner of her mouth was puffed up, or at least it appeared to be. It was difficult to tell from where Miki and Kane were standing, their view filtered through a curtain of palm fronds and mist from a nearby sprinkler. The green-yellow fans couldn’t obscure her bright clothing, a too tight, too short wrap of spandex and large eye-bleeding flowers on a sea of pink.

  Miki knew Kane well enough to know that his cop was assessing the woman, judging her appearance, and every once in a while, sneaking a glance in Miki’s direction as if to check to see if he was holding up. His cop was a massive block of Celtic warrior, a slab of granite carved from a mountain who taught Kane how to be a man. He didn’t know how the woman could miss the blue-eyed, black haired Celtic warrior barely hidden behind a row of ornamental foliage, but then, Miki supposed, it could’ve just been him. His eyes always searched the shadows for Kane—hell, he searched the light for him too—there was something about his Irish cop that both calmed him down and fired him up.

  Miki ached for Kane like he ached for music.

  Unfortunately, he’d stopped aching for music, but his desire for Kane stayed steady and strong.

  “How good are you at reading lips?” Miki strained to see around the cement planter, disliking the hitch in his hip when he shifted his weight from one foot to another. “I can’t… I can see her talking but I can’t figure out what she’s saying. We should have had Edie open her phone line or something so I could listen in.”

  Kane’s midnight gaze flicked over Miki’s face, an amused grin teasing at the corner of his mouth. As he turned his attention back to the women standing near one of the garden’s tall cement signs, his sexy, whiskey-amber voice purred with hints of rolling emerald hills and ancient myths, “And here you say you don’t think like a cop. That was a very cop thing to say, Mick. If it weren’t against the law.”

  “Well, if I’ve picked up anything cop-like, I got it from your father.” Miki sneered. “Considering he’s the only real cop I know.”

  “I’ll be reminding you of those very words later on tonight when I have you in bed and I’ve got a pair of handcuffs nearby.”

  “Is that supposed to scare me?” Miki jabbed Kane in the ribs. “For some of us, we just call it Tuesday.”

  The words were out of his mouth before Miki could stop them—before he could actually hear them—and the stab of pain in Kane’s expression dug out what little guil
t he had in his soul. Joking about sex was something the band did on the road, something the group fell into, a sideshow banter about the hard life they lived slogging music and their equipment across the blacktop and the stage. It said something about how far he’d come—the teasing of Kane—and how little he picked at the scabs in his psyche or contemplated the scars on his soul.

  “I didn’t mean—” Kane started to say but closed his mouth when Miki shook his head. “I didn’t think. I just—”

  Everyone close to Miki knew his body had been a plaything for men with little regard for him other than to be their toy. But Kane—his righteous, slightly off-white knight—had seen Miki at his lowest, at his least human. Kane had not only seen Miki’s nightmares captured by a flash of the camera and a spot of film, but still dealt with the aftermath of those memories.

  “You don’t have to watch your words with me, K,” Miki reassured his lover. “Damie says shit all the time and I don’t jump down his throat. It’s just words. And if ever you actually wanted to use a pair of handcuffs, you’d tell me so I’d have a chance to tell you fuck off and die or sure, just don’t lose the key. Because if there’s one thing that I am not ever going to live through, it’s calling up one of your sibs to unlock my wrist from our bed.”

  “The siblings I can handle,” Kane growled. “It’s the parents—Brigid—that I’m scared of. She’d skin me alive.”

  And just because he knew Kane would shudder at the thought, Miki said softly, “Dude, you don’t think your dad’s used his cuffs on your mom? She’s got eight kids. Probably wants to change things up every once in a while, you know?”

  “Thank you for that. There isn’t enough bleach in San Francisco to get that thought out of my head.” Kane made a noise that sounded like Miki’s dog swallowing a fly, and Miki smirked with satisfaction when Kane’s shoulders actually shook. “Now, if ever I do lose a handcuff key and you’re involved, I’m just going to leave you there. And no, I can’t tell what they’re saying. Next time we do something like this, I want to make Edie wear a wire. As illegal as it is, I’m wishing we’d done something.”

  Miki snorted. “How the fuck many women do you think are going to come out of the gutter and say they knew my mother? Only reason I’m giving this one the time of day is because Edie said she sounded legit.”

  If Crossroads Gin was Miki’s salvation, then Edie, their manager, was the mother of all things. She was a sharp-faced woman with a cutting manner only softened by her affection for the young men she herded and cared for. He’d not liked her when he first met Edie across a long conference table in a room at their record studio’s main building. She’d been aggressive, brash, and stood toe-to-toe with Damien, arguing about percentages and copyrights until the lead guitarist’s British accent was so thick with fury, Miki expected the fog to roll in and the coffee in his mug to turn to tea. Just as Damien was about to walk out of the door, Edie’s manner gentled and her tone shifted.

  “Now do you understand why you need me?” she’d said to the shocked band members. “You just lost an argument with the person who is willing to go to the mat for you. Imagine how far you’ll get when you go head-to-head with somebody who wants to bleed you dry? Now, sit your ass down on the chair, Mitchell, and we can get down to making sure you hold on to every penny the four of you earn, and I am only going to charge you five percent to do it.”

  Through Sinner’s Gin’s rise and then death, Edie was Miki’s rock. She’d been with him as he struggled to walk and battled every lawyer Damien’s family threw at him, bloodsucking leeches hoping to turn a quick buck on Damien’s corpse. When Damien returned, alive despite a lie his family concocted to bilk his estate, Edie donned her armor once again, ensuring their assets—and lives—were secure. It had been a no-brainer to ask her to manage the new band, but when she came to the final show of its Resurrection Tour, she’d brought with her a revelation—news of a ghost Miki never knew haunted him—and a woman who said she knew Miki’s mother.

  When they agreed to meet the woman at the Yerba Buena Gardens, Edie cautioned him to remain at home. Her arguments were sound, but Miki needed to see the face of the one person who’d come forward about the woman who’d carried him but hadn’t kept him.

  “Hey, look.” His cop jerked his chin toward the women. “She’s handing Edie something.”

  From what Miki could see, it was one of those padded envelopes he often got ordering things online, its oddly unique but familiar brown-yellow surface wrinkled and grimy. It looked old, beat-up around the edges, and torn at the top instead of cut open, but Edie handled it as if it were treasure, carefully taking it from the woman’s hands and glancing into its depths.

  Kane was moving before Miki realized his cop was no longer next to him. His lover’s hands were on him, moving him. Miki’s shoulders were turned then the sky tilted, slivers of blue dotted with clouds turning into a kaleidoscope through the leaves above them. The pops were loud, echoing booms Miki knew all too well. The screaming began nearly the moment Miki’s knee gave and he struck the ground, Kane’s heavy body stretched out over him.

  It was a hellish agony when Miki struggled to get out from under his lover’s prostrate body. Kane’s forearms were up, covering Miki’s face, smearing dirt and debris into his mouth, but Miki couldn’t see, couldn’t tell if Kane had been hit. His world became a single moment, turning only when he felt Kane’s chest rise against his belly, and then the voice that murmured sweet, filthy things into his ears during sex told him to stay down.

  Everything happened so fast—the gunfire, the shouting, and then the squeal of brakes coming from the road. Miki heard sobbing, but he was too concerned about running his hands over Kane’s sides, feeling for any bit of wetness or, worse, injury he couldn’t heal with a kiss. His panic must have shown on his face because Kane brushed his mouth over Miki’s lips, then rolled off him.

  “Are you hit?” Kane barked, startling the shock from Miki’s belly. “Tell me you’re okay.”

  “I’m fine. Edie—” But Kane stood before Miki could say another word.

  “Stay here,” Kane ordered as he scrambled toward where the women met. “Call 911.”

  And then he was gone, taking his warmth and comfort with him.

  Kane’s long legs easily ate up the distance between the planter and where Edie lay on the ground. Her pristine, sunflower-bright power suit now bore bloodied poppies across her side and arms. A few feet away, the woman he’d watched through the palms was sprawled against the cement monolith with its maps and directions splattered with her blood. Her eyes were open, her jaw slack, and the bullet wounds on her stomach made a polka-dot mess of her clothing, but it was the shattered remains of her forehead that shocked Miki into moving.

  Kane was two hundred pounds of muscle and bone, but he moved like a shark through still water, cutting through the stream of people running away from the road and into the surrounding buildings.

  “Edie!” Miki wasn’t as fast as Kane, but he was going to be damned if he didn’t get to Edie’s side.

  There were already sirens in the air, drowning out the crowd’s murmuring shock and startled cries. Miki caught his foot on the pylon or maybe one of the stones used to decorate the mulch surrounding the trees and the palms, but he ignored the hit of pain in his hip, scaling the wide staircase to do what he could.

  It was hard to kneel, but it was even harder to hold Edie’s hand as her life poured out of her. Something dug into his knee, finding the one too-tender spot he never seemed to be able to heal. He shoved the envelope aside, jerking his head up when Kane hissed at him.

  “Don’t touch that. It’s evidence.” His lover’s eyes were hard, stony bits of blue marbled with an arrogant authority with no tolerance for argument. “If you’re going to be here, press down on her wounds. Ambulances are going to be here soon. Stay with her. I’ve got to see if anybody else was hurt. There’s a couple people down by the sidewalk.”

  “This is Edie,” Miki spat. He didn’t kn
ow where the rage came from or, rather, maybe he did. She was a connection to his past, a life he built with her and then cobbled back together when it fell apart. “Don’t you fucking walk away from her. I need you. She needs you.”

  The smile he got from Kane was resigned and bittersweet, and Miki had to blink away his tears to see it. Kane’s fingers brushed Miki’s jaw, then ran through his wind-tangled hair, pulling away before Miki could lean into his lover’s touch.

  “I know you’ll take care of her, babe.” Kane’s whisper dug down deep into Miki’s love for him, hooking into every thread of every moment they’d shared. “She’ll be all right, but I have to go. This is what I do. I’m a cop, Mick, I have to go.”

  IT WAS never a good thing when Captain Book called one of his inspectors into his office. Even worse when Casey, their lieutenant, was waiting with him. Book was a congenial man, someone who worked to be approachable, the kind of captain a police officer felt comfortable talking to, even when washing their hands and standing side by side in the bathroom. Kane liked and respected the man nearly as much as he respected his own father, so when his partner, Kel, tapped Kane on the shoulder and jerked his head toward the captain’s office, Kane would never have thought in a million years he would be standing in the middle of the greatest ass chewing in his life as soon as he walked through the door.

  “What were you thinking, Morgan?” The beefy man’s snarl was ferocious, years of riding a desk hardly putting a dent in the street-tough cop who’d been dragged up from one of the worst neighborhoods in Los Angeles. “The DA tells me he thinks you were there for a sting of some kind and that rock star you sleep with is ass-deep in it. Tell me you weren’t there doing something sketchy.”

  “No hard feelings, Morgan,” Casey assured him, patting him on the shoulder. “Internal Affairs isn’t looking at you, and I sure as hell don’t want you at a desk, but the DA is pushing it. I might not have a choice if they go up the chain of command.”