Dirty Secret Read Free

while working a vice sting at Dorthi Ki Seu, an elegant gentlemen’s club that catered to gay Asians, mostly Korean. She performed a torch song act there, slinking across the stage while singing smoky classics. Tall for a Filipino, her slender body seemed made for little blood-red dresses and sips of whiskey. Her beauty was timeless, with gorgeous features, a lush mouth, and skin the color of fresh milk with a dash of Kahlua to make things interesting. Without a doubt, Scarlet was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
    And she was also a man.
    I’d probably met one, or maybe even both of the Korean men hovering near my house. Sadly, they all seemed to be hired not only for their deadly aim and hard fists, but also for their stony faces. I couldn’t tell any of them apart. It was even worse in the daytime when they wore sunglasses. I’d been worried about it until Mike told me he couldn’t tell them apart either, and he dealt with them a lot more than I did.
    “Hey.” Mike paused before he got out of the Rover. “You going to bring Jae to the dinner with Mom and Dad?”
    “I haven’t asked him yet.” I was tired, and there was a burning hole in my stomach from all of the bad coffee I’d inhaled over the past few hours. “It’s not like Dad wants me there, Mike. We haven’t talked in years.”
    My father and Barbara, the woman he’d married after my mother died, put off their initial visit after I’d been shot by Jae’s crazy cousin, Grace. It wasn’t so I’d have time to heal before they visited me. It was because Barbara tore the ligaments in her ankle and needed a month before she could travel. I’d called Barbara “Mom” once. That was before she stood silent while my father railed on about me being a faggot and then did nothing when he tossed me out of the family.
    “Cole.” Mike would be a good father one day. Not only had he mastered cop , but he also mastered dad taken to the line voice. “Tasha wants you there. Maddy wants you there.”
    One thing about my brother, he never failed to pull out the big guns: the half sister I knew and his wife, two women I didn’t want to disappoint. I’d never met my other two sisters. This was the first time I’d been invited to see them.
    Sighing, I rested my head against the steering wheel. “Fine, I’ll be there. I’ll ask Jae if he wants to come with me. Just tell Mad Dog not to count on him being there. He’s got his own family shit to deal with. He might not want to deal with mine too.”
    “It’s in a couple of days, so don’t forget.” Mike got out and slammed the car door behind him. I got out and nodded to the Korean guys. Not surprisingly, they didn’t wave or smile back. “I’ll call you.”
    I stood there in the rising sun as my brother got into his little sports car and headed back to his corner of suburbia. My neighborhood was just beginning to wake up. The coffee shop across the street already had its lights on, and someone was moving around behind the counter, filling up the pastry display cases for the morning rush. There were other old buildings near mine, many of them turned into boutiques or their insides chopped up into tiny apartments. A bottle-blonde woman jogged past, her breasts bouncing with every stride, but the Koreans didn’t so much as glance her way, their attention fully pinned to my building.
    “Well, good night, guys.” They said nothing, watching me head to my front door. “Try not to burst into flames when the sun comes up.”
    My front door was locked. It was a habit Jae had, locking the world out. Fitting my key into the knob, I opened the door to my home, and stepped in to be greeted by a tiny black demon screaming at me from the top of the stairs. She was a small cat, barely five pounds of black chinchilla fur and fangs, but Pearl Harbor envied her air-raid vocalizations. Jae didn’t need to lock the door to keep intruders out. The cat’s banshee screams did the job just fine.
    “Morning, oh evil