HELLO BEAUTIFUL

Rating: NC17  for violence, murder, gunplay, adult themes. For safety’s sake, this will apply to ALL chapters. There will be no smut in this fic. There will be references, but references only, to rape, murder, mutilation in places throughout the story. There will be no detailed scenes. (I don’t do non-consensual)

Copyright © November 2006 xxxevilgrinxxx

Ch2

Warily I eyed the stain on Danno’s couch and declined to sit down. I just had this suit dry cleaned and I had no idea what that stain was but it looked faintly biological to me. Given what I had seen so far of my partners’ tastes I thought it would be safer to just stand.

I took in the rest of his apartment; it’s never really changed much in the six months or so that we’ve shared a desk. Sometimes it was messier and sometimes it was cleaner. The quintessential bachelor. He keeps his desk the same way, a mess of papers and files that I couldn’t begin to make sense of. It works for him somehow.

The sound of running water comes from the small bathroom and I don’t have to be in there to know that it’s ice cold, to help clear his head. “Did you bring joe with you today? My head’s going to explode.” A moan follows it, as though it hurt to speak. It probably did.

I stepped over a lone woman’s shoe, wondering for a moment what she went home in, and what kind of state she was in that she would forget a shoe. Probably the same state my partner was in. I made my way back down the hall, past the open door of his bedroom. I swore to myself that I wouldn’t look, but it’s like a car wreck, a raging house fire in the middle of the night and I look anyway. Bedding thrown all over the floor, a woman still asleep spread eagle in his bed, completely nude. Snoring loudly and looking like my partner sounded. Both her shoes were there, she wore one and I guessed that she fell asleep in it. Three shoes, which means at least two women, not counting however many managed to make it home with both of their shoes. I jam my eyes shut at the mess of used condoms on the floor; it’s too early in the morning to see that shit. I hand him his cup of coffee around the bathroom door; his hand shakes a little before he takes it.

I take a sip of my own before I put it down and lean in towards the mirror on the door and adjust my tie, picking a piece of something unidentifiable off it. Daniel Jamieson, to be forever known to me as Danno, peeks around the door, resplendent in a black Hawaiian shirt with bright orange parrots, and shakes his head at me. “When are you going to ditch those penguin suits Daddy-o, wear something with a little style?”

He drags out the last syllable and breaks into a boyish grin. A little style. At least the shirt he’s wearing today is black, mostly, so it’s a little easier to focus. “Doesn’t that shirt hurt your eyes, Danno?” He grins at me, his black Irish face crinkled at the corners and full of a mad inner glee I can’t understand. Reaching back into the bathroom he pulls his shades off the counter and slips them on. Even this he does with flair, a flourish I couldn’t see any other man pulling off, but it works for him. Elvis shades.

I look for a moment at our two reflections caught in the mirror, side by side. We couldn’t look more like polar opposites. Danno in his Hawaiian shirt and Elvis shades, low slung cargo pants that leave part of his belly out just at the top of his pants, and high top sneakers. I don’t know when he last combed his hair, maybe last night before however many women he had in here messed it up for him. For all I know he styles it to look like that.

And me, Ramon Alvarez. Black suit, black tie, white shirt. Short neat hair. He calls me a square, says I should lighten up, live a little. That I’m hiding all my style and grace. He bought me a shirt once but I’ve never worn it, I didn’t even take it out of its wrapper. I thought that would offend him but he laughs every time he brings it up. A private joke for him. He does that a lot I’ve noticed; he’ll find the one thing that will drive you insane, and then he will pick up a trinket here and there and just give it to you. That same glint of madness in his eyes as he does it.

He found out when we were first partnered together at the DEA’s EPIC, the El Paso Intelligence Centre, that his tikis creeped me out. I grew up in a very religious Catholic family. Maybe not all of the religion took hold in me when I grew up, but I guess enough did. Enough that sitting down to drink my coffee in the morning and seeing a black tiki sitting beside my files made me jump. Now I have five of them. He lines them up along the edge of my desk; they stay on there with double sided tape after I knocked them all off one day. He doesn’t tell me he’s getting them for me; they just show up there. I haven’t told him and I don’t intend to, but they’re starting to grow on me, those tikis.

Danno throws back the rest of his cup of coffee and shakes his head until he makes a sound like the one dogs make when they do that; the spark is back in his eyes again. “Are we going to the morgue this morning Ramon?”

“Alvarez. And yes, we’re going this morning. Peters said he’s got something interesting.” Peters and I go way back, even before I was with the DEA. It was a grade nine career day thing, when people from all sorts of different professions would set up these tables in the school gym and all the students would wander around. Most of the time you didn’t say anything, you kept your hands in your pockets and tried not to touch anything. I was just a kid but I knew to look at these people that they weren’t the type to hire Latino kids from some poor Catholic school in the poorest section of El Paso.

I had walked by his table once and then circled around for another look. Peters didn’t give me that move along wetback look, the man looked on. Like he was waiting for someone to ask him questions. I’ve been asking him questions ever since. He’s the head coroner now. I used to go to ask him questions, and then he would ask me questions. Sometimes it was DEA related but it wasn’t always. Sometimes he would get a string of cases that nobody else was looking at and ask me if I was seeing the same things he was seeing.

As I moved on in the DEA and established more contacts with people in other departments, with informants and the like, I started to find different ways to pass some of those things on to people that should know about them. It felt good to do the right thing sometimes, even if no one ever got to know about it. Maybe especially because no one else would ever know about it. It wasn’t about my career, it wasn’t the job. It felt right to do that, to help when I could, even if it was a small thing.

I waited a full month before I took Danno to the morgue with me; it’s a hard thing to explain to a guy, to pick up your danish and go to the morgue. Maybe watch an autopsy. Danno had just given me the first tiki for my desk and I think I wanted a little revenge. He handled it better than I thought he would; a little green around the gills when we got out and he didn’t eat anything until way after lunch but I saw the lights go on. He even impressed Peters, and that doesn’t happen everyday. Now we both go, when Peters gives me a call.

“Did he say what it was this morning? A floater, fuck Ra…Alvarez, I hate the floaters.” It happens more often than you’d think. Maybe it’s weird to live in a desert and have people drown. There’s a river that runs along the border of the US and Mexico, between El Paso and Cuidad Juarez. When rainy season hits, the floaters would start to show up. Finally made it into the US to end up on a slab.

“They found another woman.” I didn’t need to say anymore. Six women had been found so far, all brutally raped. The latest had been mutilated. All of the joviality went out of Danno in a heartbeat. He was all Danny Jamieson now; the Elvis shades came off, the topic too serious for the King.

He opened his mouth as though he needed to say something and couldn’t. Danno had very liberal tastes with women, he was a hedonist, but he loved all of them. He just loved too many women at once to be a good man to just one of them at a time. I watched him take every one of those killings very personally. I had wanted to stop going back to the morgue and had even told myself that I would but we were both what we were, and when Peters called we went. It wasn’t just our morbid fascinations that kept us going back to Peters, we had established something more. There were times when we were the only ones that got information where it needed to go. So we went.

I glanced back at the snoring girl sprawled on his bed and the smile came back to his face. He grinned, a soft wistful smile. “Let her sleep it off, Alvarez, she’s a tired, very tired, happy girl.” He looked back at the door and his face hardened again. “Let’s do this.”