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

Copyright © November 2006 xxxevilgrinxxx

Ch 4

We were partners, and we shared some things. You can’t help that when you spend so much time with another person. The key to his apartment was neatly labeled amidst my other keys; it was the first time I had ever used it. It felt strange to stand out in the hall of his apartment building. I felt like a trespasser.

His apartment felt colder without him there, and I checked to see if he was there. Out on the balcony, the bedroom. I even checked the bathroom, but he wasn’t there. I didn’t want to admit to myself what I was doing there, that I didn’t come here expecting to find him at all. That I came here to go through his things and find out where he would go.

I walked through his apartment again before I started snooping. His place really looked no different than it did when we left it this morning. The girl had gone home at some point. Any other day, any other circumstance, I would say that maybe Danno had gone back to the girls’ place with her but I don’t think that’s the case today. Women couldn’t help him with this.

I looked through his cupboards and his drawers, the fridge. There were a few take out menus, Chinese food mostly, and lots of girl’s numbers on the fridge. Stuck on with bits of tape. Some of them looked old, and it made me sad somehow to look at them. All of them were local numbers, with the same prefix. That probably didn’t mean too much either.

I moved into the living room, and took note of the mess that was there from this morning. From last night. Chinese food leftovers, alcohol, and strangely, half of a pineapple. Why that got to me I don’t know, maybe just because it was so much like him. I didn’t want to think that I may have to clean this up soon, in case Danno didn’t show up, that it would start to stink. It had only been an hour or so after all, I still had hope.

Bar coasters on the table, all from a place called the South Pacific Lounge. They were blue and had some crazy Hawaiian theme on them. The address was listed at the bottom, and I had to go through a few of them to find one with a complete address, the rest were so badly stained that I couldn’t read them. It sounded like a place that Danno would go to. I had never been.

I looked around the room and realized that despite the fact that we were partners, we didn’t really know a lot about each other. I had never taken him home; he had never met my wife and my kids. We had talked about so much except for what really mattered to us both. It made me think of the girl at the morgue. He had known her, and she had mattered to him. And I didn’t really know. I guessed at it, his clean apartment. But I never asked, and now I would give anything to ask those questions.

I got up off the couch and went to check the bedroom; I knew that’s where he would have left anything that really mattered. Anything about the girl he would have kept private, if she mattered to him. I kicked a sheet over the litter of used condoms on the floor and looked over his bedroom. Bed, dresser, nightstand, lamp, closet. It was a small room and there weren’t a lot of places to look. Tee shirts, socks, chinos. He had a couple of suits in his closet that looked as though they hadn’t been worn for a very long time. Lots of Hawaiian shirts, more of those than anything else.

I pulled down the boxes in the top of the closet. I didn’t really expect to find anything recent in there; they were covered in dust, but I set them on the bed anyway. Photo albums, paperwork and old tax receipts. All the things that we box up and carry with us wherever we go, never really thinking too much about them. About what people will think of them when they take them down and open them up. I would go through them later. There would be a later; I knew it even then, even if I didn’t want to accept it.

I dreaded checking out his nightstand, I didn’t really want to see what he kept in there. Then I looked down and saw that Danno kept his supplies in a container he kept under his bed and it made it easier, and harder, to open the nightstand drawer and pull out its contents.

It was a small stack of papers, and some photos, and a few pieces of jewellery. Stuff women would buy for him. I spread everything out across a clean spot on the bed, and saw her photo first. It was hard to look at her, alive, vibrant, laughing. She sat on Danno’s lap, and I guess someone was there to take the picture. A Polaroid shot, one of those deals where you pay someone to take your picture.

She wore a revealing outfit and there was part of a drink tray in the picture. I assumed she was a waitress. Sexist of me maybe, but that didn’t make me wrong. I looked a little closer at the picture, up to the light, and found the same square shape, the same blue color of the coasters Danno had out front. I couldn’t see much else in the picture, but I’d have to guess that the photo was taken at the South Pacific Lounge. I made a note to check that out.

There were a few more photos of the girl, but no more that had her and Danno together. In one she stood in front of a scrollwork screen door, that same smile as she grinned out of the photo at me. She was a cute girl. A regular photo this time, I turned it over, and recognized Danno’s neat block letters. ‘Anna Maria Velasquez’, with ‘Amy’ written above it. I guessed Amy was a pet name for her, from the letters of her first two names.

The woman was listed as a Jane Doe at the morgue. She would have to stay one a little longer, until I found out how all of this tied together. She wrote him letters in broken English, but I couldn’t read them. It was still too close, and I couldn’t do it, not just yet. I scanned it quickly for an address but there was nothing.

She had meant enough for him to change, even for a little while, to make him happy. To make him run. It seemed like so little to be left, it fit in the pocket of my suit. There wasn’t much else here; Danno hadn’t really lived here that long, a little over six months. All he had were these few things.

I had the girls’ name, and the name of a bar. A list of women’s phone numbers with the same prefix. A picture of a screen door. Not a hell of a lot for me to go on.

I wanted to check out that club, do a run on Velasquez. What I dreaded was going down to the office. I didn’t think Danno would show up there, but if he wasn’t going to show up, someone had to know about it.

I locked the door carefully behind me, and stood out in the hallway for a few minutes. I didn’t want to tell myself that I was waiting for him to come home right then, so I didn’t say it. It was hard to walk back to my car and drive to the office.

It was harder coming back three days later, when he turned up dead.