Quinn Novak is a Honolulu Police Department detective working an unusual case. A string of robberies have taken place in homes tented for termites in the economically depressed town of Makaha Beach. A gang of thieves appears to be trailing pest control units, then breaking in…so Quinn is assigned watching over a particularly important dignitary’s home late one night. Quinn has a problem, however. He’s afraid of the dark.
He’s never told a soul and seems to be coping with his phobia until he spies two men breaking in and follows them, despite of the dangers of the pesticide—and the dark.
Once inside the house, he appears to enter another realm…one filled with hot men who want…him. Quinn has the most incredible threesome of his life, but then must leave the house. How the heck does he get back in? And can he? Now, suddenly, he wants to get back to black…back to the dark and the two men he left inside the house…can he ever find them again?
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Back to Black
Copyright © 2011 A.J. Llewellyn
ISBN: 978-1-55487-994-6
Cover art by Martine Jardin
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.
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Smashwords Edition
Back to Black
By
A.J. Llewellyn
To the memory of Vera Plevnik, my beloved friend and incredible actress, whose untimely passing still haunts me.
Chapter One
“I don’t think there’s a single clean cup here,” I told my partner as I rifled through a motley collection in the makeshift kitchen of the Waianae Police stationhouse. “They’re all pretty disgusting. I wouldn’t put my lips on those. You might catch something.”
Jackie gave me a withering look. “You know…I really don’t give a fuck, Quinn,” she said.
That shocked me. Jackie Howe was usually the sunniest person I knew. She poured herself a cup. To be honest, the coffee smelled pretty good. I was about to change my mind and gamble with my gastrointestinal health when she nudged me.
“Grab us a couple of seats. I’ll see if I can scare us up a donut or two.”
I did as I was told. The briefing room was filling up and I was lucky to put my hands on a pair of comfy-looking swivel chairs. Almost everybody else had plastic lawn chairs. I nodded at a few of the faces I knew and stifled a yawn. We’d come off the night shift on our usual beat, District One in Honolulu. I’d caught a few hours’ sleep. I wasn’t sure about Jackie. She seemed miserable. She joined me a few moments later. It was hard to tell if her mournful expression was due to the lack of carbohydrates or something more serious. I had a feeling it was the latter and I felt bad for not noticing sooner than this morning.
“You okay?” I asked her, touching her elbow. She dipped her head, turning her face from me.
“Attention, ladies!” The loo’s voice boomed over our chatter. All conversation stopped. He sure knew how to get a roomful of cops, half-asleep, mostly macho guys at that, to shut the fuck up.
We were all curious, all wondering why we’d received emergency text messages at five a.m. demanding our presence at Waianae Police Station at seven.
I leaned forward in my seat and caught a whiff of hazelnut-flavored coffee as Jackie took a long slug of the hot liquid steaming up from a mug bearing the words, I’d Rather be Kayaking.
I knew I would.
Dang. I’d passed on the opportunity for coffee and now I needed a java fix. To cap off my grumpiness, Jackie seemed to be symptom-free and enjoying her brew. Maybe disease would hit later. I felt bad for even thinking that way. Poor Jackie was having a rough time of things lately. She’d been sullen and uncommunicative. Actually, I realized in that moment that something really was wrong. Normally, she drove me barking mad with her non-stop monologues.
Lieutenant Kalika flicked a switch and the room went dark. It was a damned good thing, because it hid all the filth. This was the dirtiest stationhouse I’d ever walked into. In fact, the whole building had looked grungy when Jackie and I had rolled up a few minutes before seven, as directed. Trash overflowed from a garbage bin out front. The building was a long, flat dun-colored thing that could have used a fresh coat of paint.
It hadn’t escaped my attention that a crumpled banner for a community pride event lay, tossed aside, outside the front door. It was now seven-fifteen and I noticed we were crowded into the briefing room with a cross-section of cops who, like us, didn’t belong on the leeward side of the island.
I tried to focus on what the loo was saying, but my gaze had fixed itself out of the window on the exterior of the police station. Waianae was a tough neighborhood. I watched a kid getting beat up by two others right outside the station with another kid recording it all on his cell phone.
“Am I boring you, Novak?” the loo asked.
Yes. “No, sir. I was just wondering if we shouldn’t intervene in the beat-down going on out front.”
All eyes turned and the lieutenant muttered something before marching out of the room. We all sat in the near-dark and I felt grateful for all the bodies around me. I have a pathological fear of the dark I have never confessed to anybody.
Breathe in, breathe out.
A couple of uniformed officers rushed outside and like I said, Waianae is one tough place, because even in police presence, the two bigger kids kept unloading on the smaller one. He fought back, surprisingly. The kid recording it all suddenly took off. The cops reached under the pile of legs and arms and retrieved the smaller guy who’d done a pretty good job of defending himself in the melee.
We were all silent, watching the pitiful scene outside.
“You okay?” one of the officers asked the victim whose mouth and nose bled. I could hear his voice faintly. The kid said, “Yes,” but he seemed devastated. He walked off. Only when his back was turned on the others but facing us in the briefing room did we see his face collapse in grief.
Poor little guy.
The uniformed officers kept a hold on the two thugs and brought them into the building.
Lieutenant Kalika returned and I did my best, bang-up job of looking interested as he pointed to a map of the island of Oahu now illuminated on an old-fashioned roll-down white screen. The entire police department for the island was divided into eight divisions and within these divisions, there were sectors. Each sector covered two or three different suburbs. Waianae Police Station’s first sector covered Waianae, Makaha Beach, Maili and Makua. Lieutenant Kalika pressed the little gizmo in his hand and we were treated to an overlay of the crime map for sector one for the last four weeks.
I saw the jumbled icons and noticed the surprised sounds racing around the room. Apart from a lot of car accidents, there seemed to be an unusual number of burglaries, identified by icons of black masks.
“We have a huge spike in residential robberies,” the loo said. “These are unusual cases because in almost every incident, the break-in has occurred in homes tented for termite control.”
It surprised me that so many people in Waianae could apparently afford such expensive measures for pest removal. This was the most economically-depressed area in all of the Hawaiian Islands. With the recent closure of the major source of income—the pineapple and sugar industries—times were really hard.
“We didn’t notice a pattern at first,” the loo went on. “The first break-in occurred three months ago. A month later, there was a second one, followed by one a week later. The last four weeks, there have been seventeen robberies.”
A few hands shot into the air, but he waved them off. “I know what you’re going to ask me, but the truth is this. We know the termite vans are being followed and the houses are being staked out. We can’t point fingers at any one company since several have been followed.”
He pointed to a cluster of break-ins in the nicest area of the sector, Makaha Beach, and said, “We’ve had a robbery every single day here and this is our tourist-heavy neighborhood. You can imagine the governor’s none too pleased.”
Tourist-heavy. That was a laugh. There were three hotels, one of which was a resort that always seemed to be in the midst of a massive overhaul.
The loo switched on the light again. “Each of these houses has security guards sitting out front. These robberies are brazen. Mostly at night, sometimes during the day, but we have reason to believe it’s the same crew because their MO is always the same. They enter through an open window unseen by the security guards.”
He looked disturbed. “They’re taking a huge risk with their health since they are entering homes riddled with active, poisonous gas, so look to the idea that these are well-organized, very prepared thieves.”
Gas masks. God. What next?
“All of you have been brought here since you work robbery-homicide in your sectors and have been recommended by your commanding officers. At this point, we have created a task force and have asked pest control companies to cooperate with us by telling us where and when they’re tenting.”
I shot up my hand and asked a question before he could shout me down. “Sir? Are the security guards in-house for each termite company or are they privately hired?”
It was a good question and one he hadn’t addressed. I looked around me. Everybody was staring at him expectantly.
Lieutenant Kalika flicked a gaze over at a muscular guy who’d just entered the room.
He had a buzz haircut and wore a tight, white T-shirt and jeans. He had a grumpy look and I recognized him as a DEA agent who often went undercover in the islands.
I knew him, because we’d had a fling once. He had introduced himself as J.D. but by our second day in bed together, I learned his name was John David Justus. He went by J.D. Last time I’d seen him, he’d left my bed promising he’d call. That was two years ago. Guess he lost my number. I felt strangely hurt watching him. He cast a glance around the room but didn’t seem to notice me. That did wonders for my ego.
I didn’t know whether to thank my boss for sending me here to be close to Justus again or whether to kick his ass when I got back to my side of the island.
Justus moved beside the loo, who introduced him.
“Senior Sergeant J.D. Justus is visiting here from California. He’ll be heading up this task force.”
When J.D. spoke, he still had the same gruff voice I’d found such a turn-on when we met at Angles, one of the three gay bars in Waikiki. We’d danced together during a wet T-shirt contest neither of us bothered entering. We went home and fucked like bunnies for two days.
Justus eyed the crowd. “I won’t keep you long, but we have reason to believe this is the same working crew that blew into Los Angeles six months ago and targeted depressed communities there. They went after Inglewood, Gardena and Compton, not Beverly Hills.
“Why they’re targeting people who are struggling to survive is anybody’s guess, but so far, they’ve conducted a pretty tight operation. They break in with no muss, no fuss, spend a good amount of time in the houses since they appear to ransack every room, then they take off. We believe they have access to gas masks and…” he gave a significant pause and I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. He still looked fucking fabulous. Unbidden images kept popping into my brain. He’d been hard and sexy and sweaty and man…he’d begged me to fuck him.
“The Hawaii Gun Club had a robbery four weeks ago,” he said.