I'm pleased to announce that the very-cool
Gay/Lesbian Fiction Excerpts blog has just posted the first chapter from my new gay thriller/erotic novel,
Fingers Breadth.
Here's a taste - for the rest just click here.
Looking from the window of the coffee shop. Watching from the windshield
of a parked car. Staring from the glass of a very rare unbroken bus
kiosk. Glaring from the side of a passing bus.
A brief summer
rain had painted the city that night in reflections. Fanning saw himself
everywhere, and everywhere he saw himself his expression said the same
thing—
Why haven’t you caught him yet?In his ear, a
Bluetooth bud whispered the Officer Wertz inquiry’s soundtrack; in his
pocket, the video was playing on his phone. He didn’t need to hear or
see it. No one would, but if asked he could probably rattle off every
verb, every noun, every linguistic bit from when Knorr started it to
when he stopped it. Knorr was good at what he did, just like the lab
mice who studied crime scenes and picked up tiny bits of DNA with their
finely honed tweezers.
Welcome to the decentralized world of the
new San Francisco Police Department, where your specialty was all you
did and generality was extinct.
Fanning was a freelancer but was
supposed to be good at what he did, too. Sneering at himself reflected
in the coffee shop window, he gripped the phone in his pocket. If he’d
been stronger, or the plastic less durable, it would have cracked.
Glowering
for an instant at his reflection in the windshield of the parked car,
he pulled the phone out and flipped through a few key digital pages. As
with the inquiry, he didn’t need to look at it again, but he did anyway.
Better than sharing the street with his scowling mirror images.
It
hadn’t changed—Wertz’s home address and where he worked were still the
same. The first was across town, in the Mission. The second was just
down the street, at a Gap Store.
Ten a.m. to six p.m. His shift hadn’t changed, either. But it was 6:17, and there was no sign of Wertz.
Fanning
paced the wet sidewalk, searching up and down the street but mostly the
blue-and-white bright- ness of the Gap store. In his ears, Wertz’s
voice clicked into silence; then, as it was set on “loop,” it began
again.
Just like the others. Same MO, same kind of pick-up place,
same amount of Eurodin in Wertz’s system, the lab mice doing their
usual fine and precise work, and the same mutilation—right hand little
finger amputated at the first joint.
Again, his phone threatened
to break in his hand, but again, he wasn’t strong or determined enough
to do it. The beat cops who’d found Wertz sound asleep on the J Church
train; the lab mice who’d analyzed the drug in his system; Knorr, who’d
asked his carefully prepared and expert questions...
But then
there was Fanning, who was supposed to assemble piece after piece after
piece after piece until they made a picture of someone’s face.
Cutter’s face.
Looking
up from where he’d been looking down, he saw a silhouette come between
the blue-and-white of the Gap store. A dark shape that was about the
right height, about the right build, about the right age, to be whom he
was looking for. Fanning carefully released his tight grip on his phone
and stepped back into a nearby alley, one carefully chosen for its heavy
solitude.
Heavy solitude was just what Fanning wanted.
[
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