Immortality Is the Suck by A. M. Riley Page B

the DEA doing coming in and starting something?”
    Peter shook his head. “Like I told you. We were looking into a homicide
    tip. Nobody expected to see Armante there. And we were as surprised as you
    were when those guys showed up.”
    “Nobody was as surprised as I was,” I told him. “What guys?”
    “The ones that killed you.” He winced. “Now you've got me doing it.”
    “Who were they?”
    He drank his orange juice. “A known dealer named Richie Ortiz. Mexican
    Mafia. He's dead. We haven't ID'd the other guy. He got away.”
    So Ortiz was the stiff I'd battled in the morgue. “What'd the other guy look
    like?”
    He sighed. “Stan saw him. I was distracted.” A bleak expression passed
    over his face, which made me think of him crying over me in that warehouse.

    Immortality is the Suck

    47

    “I've got the file back at the office. The chief thought, under the circumstances,
    it'd be best if I went home for a few days and let someone else handle things.”
    “Huh,” was all I could think of to say.
    “How'd you do it, Adam?”
    “I didn't.” I shrugged. “I just…”
    “Why me , you asshole? Did you even think, for a minute, how I'd feel ?”
    “I swear, Peter, I was just as surprised as you were.”
    “ Surprised? Is that the word for it? Surprised ?” Peter smacked the counter
    with the palm of his hand, rose, and exited down the hallway to the bathroom,
    angry heels thunking.
    Pretty soon I heard the shower running. By this time the smell and sight
    of him had got me thinking about things in no way related to the current
    weirdness, so I just tippy-toed into the bathroom where I was going to slide into
    the shower with him, but then I saw myself. Or rather, did not see myself, in
    the bathroom mirror, again.
    “Peter, check this out.”
    His wet head poked out and he glared at me. Long black eyelashes like
    stars above his dark blue eyes. But then he looked where I was pointing and
    then he almost slipped and fell in the shower. “What the fuck?”
    “See, this is what I've been talking about.” I made him stand in front of me
    and I wrapped my arms around him and I could see the impression of my arm
    in his wet chest hair, but I couldn't see me . While I was back there I did a little
    bump and grind against his ass.
    But Peter just shoved me away and, with his serious face on, snatched up
    a towel, and rubbed himself dry. “Brush your teeth, why don't you, Adam,” he
    said. “Your breath stinks.”
    Nice.
    When I came back out, Peter was picking up his living room. He'd pulled
    on a “Kings Hockey” T-shirt over the boxers.

    48
    A. M. Riley

    “Some of your clothes are in the closet,” he said. “I tossed them on the
    bed.”
    Over the years, you know, stuff gets left. A pair of jeans with a hole in one
    knee and an old sweatshirt with paint on it. But it felt good to get into my own
    clothes.
    When I came back into the kitchen he was sitting at the dinette table,
    scooping the photographs back into the box. I saw some newspaper articles in
    the mess too. That picture of me with the mayor. An older one I didn't even
    know he'd seen, of me in my Marine uniform.
    “What the hell were you doing with those?” I asked. Damn, had I ever been
    that young?
    He clapped the cover on the box, and walked across the room to shove it
    onto a shelf in the closet. “I'm calling this in right now.”
    “Sure.”
    I watched him call the station on his cell phone. I wasn't sure what to
    expect.
    “Stan,” he said. Stan was Peter's partner. But before Peter could get a
    word in, it appeared that Stan had something to tell Peter, and I figured from
    the way Peter listened, and then the way he looked at me, that Stan was telling
    him that a certain corpse was missing and that another corpse was a bloody
    mess.
    “I'm coming in,” said Peter. It appeared that Stan argued with him about
    this. “You're crazy if you think I'm going to sit at home,” Peter told him. And
    hung up. He looked at