Dirty Kiss by Rhys Ford

name.”
     

Chapter 6
     

     

     
    “ Yeah , how do you spell that, again?”
     
    The detective had taken my name three times now. I wasn’t sure if he was singularly stupid or just giving me a hard time. Spelling it again, I enunciated each letter until I was certain he’d gotten it right. The sun had set, but there was enough glare from the parking lot lights that his forehead bounced a sheen back at me.
     
    Jin-Sang’s body was still upstairs, people walking about his apartment and wondering at his lifestyle. Our hands and clothes had been tested for gunpowder residue before Jae was hauled into the back of a waiting ambulance. So far, from the heated mumbling I could hear coming from the paramedic working on him, things weren’t going well. I wanted to commiserate. Things generally didn’t seem to go well when Jae-Min Kim was involved.
     
    “McGinnis, Cole.” He stopped writing, looking up at me, realization dawning on him. “You’re the one that got shot. You worked a house up from here, didn’t you?”
     
    “I’m working here, too,” I replied. My attention drifted to where the medics were working on Jae. They’d moved us downstairs, closing the apartment off to wait for forensics and whoever else wanted to stomp over Jin-Sang’s cooling body. “I do private investigations.”
     
    “Didn’t the city pay you enough money that you could sit on your ass?” His partner, Branson, joined us. I knew him from work. We’d crossed paths a few times, and never for the better. He was one of those muscle bunnies who swaggered through the locker room, his ebony skin oiled up to emphasize every bulge along his arms and thighs.
     
    “Maybe his ass is just too sore to sit down on.” Now that his troll of a partner had arrived, the detective found some backbone and sniggered, snorting a whistle of air through his mustache and into his nose.
     
    “Great. Good to see cops are still attending those sensitivity sessions.” I was tired of answering questions and didn’t want to start playing games. Jae-Min was too far for me to hear him clearly, but I could tell from the displeased look on the medic’s face that he was getting a ration of shit about something from Jae. “We done here?”
     
    “Your boyfriend can wait a little bit, McGinnis.” Detective Branson noticed my attention drift. His face soured, wrinkles forming over his shaved head. “I’ve got a few questions for you myself.”
     
    It’d been a few years since I’d last seen Branson, but he hadn’t changed much. Maybe got a bit wider in the gut, and the small fuzz of hair he’d been nursing along had receded far enough back that it left a shadowy line under the lobe of his skull. He’d been curt in his past dealings with me, but there’d always been a simmering, hateful veil on his words. Branson didn’t have to be careful anymore.
     
    “You hard of hearing? I’m talking to you, McGinnis.” I jerked my eyes back to him, pulling away from what was going on by the ambulance.
     
    “Sure, why not?” I’d already gone over everything a few times with Thurman, but I understood the process. “Shoot.”
     
    “Did you?”
     
    Oh, clever. I wasn’t going to be impressed by his wit. He was going to have to work for anything he got from me. I hadn’t seen anything other than Jae on the floor. “Did I what?”
     
    “Shoot the victim. So what really happened, faggot?” If Branson got any more ticked off, he was going to end up looking like a Shar-Pei. “You walk in on them fucking each other and shot them both? Maybe felt bad about it, so you and your lover make it look like a home invasion?”
     
    “A home invasion from inside the bedroom on the second floor?” I asked sarcastically. Like Branson, I had nothing to gain by being nice. I’d had enough of his kind of crap when I’d worked for the force. “Or do you think they let me in to use the bathroom so I was all fresh before I killed them? I already told you. I never