Murder and Mayhem by Rhys Ford Page B

breath before taking those final few steps. Beside him, a knockoff 1960s robot standing at the end of the corridor slowly flashed away the seconds, and Rook braced himself for the damage, then stepped out onto the main floor.
    It was worse than he could ever imagine.
    The first time he’d snuck in, there’d been no time to take a good hard look at what the cops and their ilk had done to Potter’s Field. Even before hitting the switch to the storefront’s floodlights, Rook could make out the devastation to his shop’s interior.
    Turning the lights on made him want to weep.
    Dani’s blood streaked black and flaky swaths near a smashed-in display case, smeared out from a curved negative space where her body had been. Speckled with glass from the window, the floor sparkled with tiny diamond-like shards, the tempered scales throwing back the white and blue beams caught on their edges. Nearly every case bore some sign of distress, and at least two were total write-offs, bullet holes shattering their frames and glass. The small ticket items he’d used to chum casual browsers were ruined, dusted with the same residual fingerprint powder that coated nearly every surface in the shop.
    They’d also shot the shit out of his Wookie.
    Rook ached inside. He’d poured every bit of his life into the shop, nearly every second of his time, working to bring Potter’s Field to a point where he could say he’d made it. On his own. With no help from anyone else and not a con taken.
    Now it lay in ruins at his feet, and he was suspected of killing people he might have actually wanted dead in his not-so-recent past.
    “Why Dani? And why the Betties?” He skirted the blood smears, his Converses squeaking as he made a quick turn. “Dani, sure. We’ve got some history, but the Betties? I don’t even know if the dead ones are the ones I know.”
    The large case he’d set up as a wall between the front and the back of the store was broken as well, but from what he could see, the movie props he’d placed there were intact, although he couldn’t say the same for the enormous papier-mâché griffin he’d found at a Harryhausen tribute auction. Peppered with bullet holes, its body and head were marred with crumbling white holes, a scatter pattern large enough to make Rook’s stomach turn.
    “Shit, they were trying to kill me.” He leaned back, trying to do a visual count on how many bullets pierced through the window and into the shop while he’d been plastered to the floor to avoid being shot.
    “Go in but do not touch.” Rook echoed what his grandfather’s lawyers told him, trying to absorb the destruction. “I can’t even move without touching something. And how the hell am I going to document the damage? What isn’t damaged? Fricking lawyers.”
    “Are these the same lawyers that told you to return to the scene of the crime and screw up any residuals that might be here?” Montoya’s deep voice rumbled out of the darkened doorway leading from the storefront to the elevator up to Rook’s apartment. “If they wanted you to be thrown into jail, they could have just left you there instead of this catch-and-release program we’ve got going.”
    Montoya looked… good. Again. Too good. Too ruffled, too scruffy hot, with broad shoulders and his burned-honey eyes fringed with thick, long lashes. A hint of a dimple threatened to spread when his mouth quirked to the side, and Rook had to swallow around a lump in his throat when Montoya shoved his hands into his jeans pockets, sliding his black leather jacket back with his elbows to expose his gun harness.
    Even from a few feet away, the man was a tall, dangerous complication in Rook’s life. One he wanted as badly as he didn’t want him around. Rook wasn’t sure what was worse—being accused of murder or being tailed by a man he’d gladly bend over for but who wanted him in handcuffs instead.
    “What are you doing here, Stevens?” Montoya’s rumble tickled Rook’s belly,