MATCHSTICK MEN: a Hunter Dane investigation Read online

  Matchstick Men

  written by

  Adira August

  Featuring characters from

  the short story On His Knees.

  Copyright © 2017 Adira August

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, places and incidents

  are either wholly sprung from the author’s

  imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Fiction - Police Procedural - Mystery - Erotica

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  THE PUZZLES: My very sincere thanks to Dawie van Heerden, Cape Town, South Africa, who so generously allowed me to use the matchstick puzzle images from Matchstick Puzzles, where 100s of puzzles and solutions can be found.

  THE SONG: "Pictures of Matchstick Men" was released as a single by the British band The Status Quo in January of 1968.* It rose to number 7 on the British charts and 12 on the American Billboard Hot 100. It's been covered by many artists over the years.

  *Labels: Pye (UK), Cadet Concept (North America), Songwriter: Francis Rossi, Producer: John Schroeder

  (author's note: LYRICS IN THIS TEXT ARE FICTITIOUS. The original lyrics can be found in an appendix at the end of this book.)

  NIKKY KAYE: Writing can be a surprisingly lonely business. Everything is created by the writer, every word and action and turn of story, a decision only the writer makes. It's an enormous gift to have another writer, especially one as erudite, talented and insightful as Nikky Kaye, to share that journey with - to advise and listen and tell me, tactfully, how full of crap I am, sometimes. FIND HER HERE for her wonderful collection of funny, sexy, stories.

  INSIDE:

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Prologue

  WEDNESDAY

  2:03pm Assumption

  4:45pm On the Deck

  5:30pm The Booth

  6:45pm The Layout

  THE SECRET ROOM

  8:17pm Dinner With a Friend

  9:45pm Benefits

  THURSDAY

  4:26am The Call

  5:15am Unknown Dead

  8:15am In Chambers

  THE FIXER

  9:40am The Sister

  Hunter

  1:10pm Offices

  2:00pm SANH

  2:50pm Name that Tune

  THURSDAY con't

  4:10pm Cam Again

  5:30pm Suspect List

  Hunter

  6:00 SANH

  9:08pm Timing is Everything

  The Killer …

  9:33pm The Last Verse

  9:44pm Two Minutes

  Friday

  11:19am Homicide

  Hunter

  Epilogue

  APPENDIX

  "Pictures of Matchstick Men"

  PAINTINGS OF MATCHSTICK MEN

  ANSWER TO THE FOOTBALL IN THE UPRIGHTS PUZZLE:

  Prologue

  In lower downtown Denver, a block off the once-trendy remnants of urban renewal, sits a red brick, two-story, apartments-over-businesses building.

  Behind the building, dumpsters line the alley, bastions between private parking and public thruway. A wide wooden staircase leads to an upper deck stretching the length of the structure.

  At night, lights glowed from the upper windows, behind crooked blinds, drawn curtains or a pulled shade.

  But what passers-by actually see, are shadowboxes with timer-controlled lights. And the people talking and drinking at the tables scattered along the deck, are not residents.

  They are members of Scene and Not Heard, the most discreet BDSM club between New Orleans and Las Vegas.

  Cheswick "Chez" Cannon created the club after discovering local clubs were rare, and prone to outbreaks of disease and influxes of law enforcement.

  Sherrilynne, his Domme and a real estate dealer, found the building. Chez gutted it and "Scene and Not Heard" was born. He'd delighted himself with the name. Sherrilynne rolled her eyes and told him he deserved a good caning. He told her Shakespeare was a great punster. She told him the operative word there was "great."

  The unique security was also her idea: Cops were free at S&H. And EMTs and firefighters. When the occasional emergency arose, and the resources of the city would otherwise respond, these members paid their dues.

  PART ONE

  WEDNESDAY

  2:03pm Assumption

  There was blood everywhere.

  Detective Sergeant Hunter Dane squatted at the head of the corpse, in the center of the small apartment's livingroom, turning slowly on his toes.

  He did a full one-eighty scan: ceiling to floor. And repeated it in the other direction. The blood started by the recliner, great gouts and gobs--on the arm, the carpet to the right, catching the edge of the footrest. More blood, in wide swaths across a coffeetable, low against the wall.

  Rising, Hunt motioned his partner of the night to join him. The rookie detective stepped in from the doorway, avoiding the blood, to join Hunt at the corpse's head.

  "What do you think, Detective?" he asked her. She considered the room and the remains of what had gushed from the corpse's mouth and over his chin and chest.

  "Poison?"

  "Start at the start, Cushman," he told her patiently. "First, do you see evidence of homicide?"

  Her cocked eyebrow and smirk suggested she thought it was a trick question. But Hunt’s objective professionalism didn't waver, his expression serious and expectant.

  She frowned and reconsidered the room. "There's a lot of blood. You see this much when somebody has an arterial bleed. But" -- she squatted and Hunt joined her -- "the pattern's wrong and it looks like it all came out his mouth."

  He waited while she considered.

  "I don't know," she admitted. "I might be seeing evidence of homicide, but, until I know why he bled out, I can't be sure."

  "Good job," he said, rising. She tilted her head back to look up at him, surprised.

  "Sir?"

  Fuck my life. Hunter's cock stirred at the word coming from her pouty rose colored lips while she crouched at his feet -- waiting for an order.

  Newly-minted homicide detective Derola Cushman was a slender young woman with honey-colored skin and startling green-blue eyes. Her dark cloud of loosely frizzed hair caught back in a large clip. Easily removed.

  No touching the rookie, Dane.

  “A guess is an assumption with different punctuation,” he said. “You were willing to stop assuming and be uncertain. A lot aren't. They're the ones who devise theories to support their assumptions. They'd rather look right, than be right.”

  She nodded, her unwavering gaze on his face, listening as if his every word glowed with divine light.

  Shit.

  "I was off at noon and it's two," he told her. "I'll do the prelim report. Pay attention. You'll write the final."

  She fished out her notebook.

  "I'm ready, Sir," she said, her voice breathy.

  He wondered for a moment if she was doing it on purpose. Possible. It didn't matter. Whatever his physical response, Hunter Dane only went one place to find a sex partner, and it was not on the job.

  4:45pm On the Deck

  "No personal questions!" Ad Symonds growled into his pint of dark ale. "Wanted to know what I do for a living."

  "I had a sub ask me that once." Hunter Dane relaxed back in the deck chair, eyes closed, enjoying the late afternoon sun.

  Music from inside piped a pleasant background to the deck: Purcell, Palestrina, Pla. Chez sometimes added Puccini for spice. One April Fool's someone had managed to slip a Sousa march CD into the player behind the bar. Chez was frantic as the members got between him and the bar. Sherrilynne took pi
ty on him and returned his personal mix to the player.

  "Did you tell them?"

  "Hmmm?" Hunt was on the edge of sleep.

  "Did you tell them what you do for a living?" Ad Symonds asked.

  "I said I sit around waiting for people to die."

  "So you said you were, what? A funeral home director? Coroner?"

  "Professional necrophiliac," Hunt answered, taking a long pull from a fat brown bottle of Negra Modelo.

  Symonds's shout of laughter brought a few mildly curious looks from the surrounding tables. Wednesday was informally known as 'munch day.' It was low key and generally uncostumed. In good weather, the BDSM club saw a parade of pizza deliveries to the deck.

  Chez surrendered and laid in a large supply of napkins. Millionaires and celebrities tended to make their own rules.

  There was sex, of course. There was always sex. But there were also games and conversation groups. A few members had started a book club.

  "Did she safeword and scramble for higher ground?"

  "He," Hunt corrected. "Said he'd like to watch, some time."

  "You had a male submissive?" Symonds sounded like he'd stumbled on a legless octopus.

  Ad was a longtime fixture at SANH. He was an imposing figure of a man coming into the craggy handsomeness that follows pretty youths into into middle age. He knew Hunt and his proclivities well.

  Hunt shook his head. "Nah. Just a hopeful twink."

  "He musta been new."

  "Somebody's guest," Hunt said, taking another swallow. The kid had actually been a new member and still showed up. But layers of disinformation were quite effective at maintaining privacy.

  He stretched out his legs and slipped down further in the chair, enjoying the mild air, unusual for early November. Not that unusual, he thought, recalling a Christmas when he was a kid. It hit seventy and his family picnicked on the small beach at Cherry Creek Reservoir. That was his mom's idea. The memory made him smile.

  He felt good. Today's dead guy probably bled out from a ruptured ulcer or some kind of blown aneurism. He'd been taking blood thinners. He'd stop by and check Cushman’s report in the morning.

  His child serial killer from last Friday wouldn't be coming up for trial for months, if at all. The reports were off his desk, forwarded on to the DA's office.

  Hunt had a sweet three-day that started when he drove out of headquarters underground parking at four. He was in his chair on the club deck, beer in hand, by four-thirty. The sun had almost disappeared behind the Front Range and darkness would bring the evening's players.

  After a week fraught with dead children and sexual experiences with the most extreme Dom in the club that left his mind and body reeling, Hunter Dane wanted simple.

  He didn't want to tie anyone to anything or peel off resistance layer by layer. He wanted his feelings confined to his balls and his dick, not reverberating through the walls from a flogger wielded by a half naked Dom with sweat running in rivulets down his torso from the effort of breaking Hunter's resistance.

  Tonight, Hunt wanted soft hot lips around his cock under a table or in a playroom. A sub he could deepthroat with his fists in her hair. He wanted slow and steady, not ramming balls deep until her mouth bruised. If she was good, if she didn't complain and choked satisfyingly when he came and demanded nothing, he'd reward her with an orgasm after a suitable amount of begging.

  Yeah. After, he'd hang out. Listen to football talk. Watch the matchstick game. Home early for a decent night's sleep, finally.

  It had been a hell of a week. Maybe K-girl or Lillibeth would show up and -

  "Listen, speaking of questions ..." Symonds said.

  Hunter alerted to the new tension in the other man's voice.

  "... I wanted to ask you something. About last Friday."

  Here it comes.

  Hunt's eyes opened. "Did you, Dom?" Smooth, with a hint of steel.

  Symonds held both hands out, palms up. "Namaste. I'm really asking about myself."

  Hunt nodded a cautious go ahead.

  "Everyone, at least all the Doms, we know Cam's deal and we know yours," he started.

  He didn't have to explain. Camden Snow, Norse God of a winter Olympic champion, practiced what he called "extreme Domism." Hunter learned what that meant last Friday, on his knees.

  "There are no limits. You have no safeword. You do nothing I do not order. I don't stop until I'm done. ... You have one chance to walk away. Once I restrain you, nothing and no one can or will rescue you. I am all there is."

  "You have a rep. You comply perfectly, but you never submit," Symonds said, bringing Hunt's thoughts back to the present.

  Hunt closed his eyes again. "I know what I want and what I don't and I'm clear up front. Whether a Dom or a sub accepts is on them."

  Hunter made no claim of sexual preference; he wouldn't even say he was bi. He took no one home. He followed no one out. He formed no attachments. He simply was not able to. He was here when he was here. Until he wasn't. Hunter Dane was a man who refused to explain his life.

  But Friday night, Camden Snow had made a public display of the intensely private detective. He’d exposed Hunt’s raging hard-on to the crowd before leading him to a private playroom. And he'd done that even before fixing Hunt's wrists to the yoke.

  Cam had demanded Hunter submit without the benefit of restraint. Without a game or a scene. And he had.

  Ultra-discreet BDSM clubs catered to a select group of the wealthy and notable. They were entitled. Demanding. Everyone knew everyone, even if they didn't use their names. Of course they were curious when Hunter had submitted in a such an unprecedented way.

  But the motive for his needs wasn't on display for anyone. That's why God gave people skin.

  The truth was, Hunt had put Friday night into a compartment to do his job. Just as he put his job into it's compartment when he was off. He hated the things of one part of his life, the feelings and frustrations, encroaching on another.

  But some crime scenes and actions would not be contained. The knowledge, memory, leaked into his gut. And it would claw at his insides until his stomach bled, his heart stuttered or his mind imploded.

  That was when Hunter Dane allowed his job and his club life to intersect. When he came to Scene and Not Heard looking for a Dom. A man with the strength and will to drive pain into his body with every fall of a flogger or tail of a whip. To beat him until his screams echoed the anguish of a victim's suffering. Shattered the images in his mind.

  And in return he gave them obedience and their own release. It was S&M. It was B&D. It was D/s. But it wasn't sex, regardless of how many cocks he'd had in his mouth. It had always been that way.

  Until it had been more. Friday. The case the most horrifying. The Dom, the most extreme. And when it was over, Cam did what no one here would imagine of the merciless sadist. He took the semi-conscious Hunter to bed and fell asleep, holding him.

  Cam was snuggled down under the blanket, not ready to relinquish sleep. His breathing was deep and even, his fingers against the pillow edge relaxed. His long gold lashes painted distinct shadows on his smooth skin. It was the untroubled sleep of an innocent child. One he resembled at this moment.

  "Cam?" Hunt called to him quietly, not wanting to startle him. He hated waking that way.

  Cam’s eyes popped open. He squinted against the strong sunlight.

  "Here you go. Sherrilynn dropped it off."

  Cam took the proffered Starbucks cup, sleepily confused and sat up. Hunt perched at the end of the bed and turfed the contents of the bag out onto the cover. Bagels and packets of things to put on them.

  Cam sipped his coffee. "Did she order-in the sunshine, too?"

  Hunt grinned and swung the box window back and forth on it's hinges. "It’s a firecode deal."

  Cam's eyes slid over Hunter’s bare chest. "You showered."

  "I did.” Hunt looked down at his bare torso. Cam had shredded his t-shirt with an exacto knife getting it off him the night before.
"There’s a jacket in my car."

  It reminded me of a question. "I never saw that many towels in that bathroom, before. Do you have Chez stock them when you show up?"

  "I’ve had the stuff here for a while," he said around a mouthful of bagel. "Chez kept it for me in the office. Just in case."

  "In case, what?" I asked.

  "You ever went to your knees," Cam replied simply. "You off today?" He carefully kept any hint of hope from his voice. But it was there, in the sudden tension around his eyes.

  "No, there’s a mountain of evidence to go through. It all has to be written up. Completed inventories and reports need to be on the ADA’s desk by Sunday night," Hunt told him.

  "So, you have to go soon? Chez kicking us out?"

  "I’m on my own schedule. Right now, homicide is crawling with media types. Lot of brass strutting around as if they actually do police work. It’ll slow down after noon and I’ll go in."

  Hunt took a long pull of coffee. "Chez hinted around about needing to clean the room. I gave him a Dom look and he simpered off."

  Cam laughed and got out of bed. "Good. I’ll be right back. Stay here."

  Hunt wondered if this was an extension of last night. "You’re not done?"

  "A couple more things, before you go," he said and waited. Hunt nodded.

  Cam left the room with a huge grin. The powerhouse Dom of the night before replaced by a sweet, excited kid.

  Hunter had to admit Camden Snow in the nude, moving, was a beautiful sight. A continuous flow of muscle and shadow. The light blond waves on his head - a necessity for any Norse god - became deep copper curls down below and faded to translucence on his legs.

  Cam was back by the time Hunt finished a bagel, fully dressed, hair wet-combed, carrying his gym bag.

  "Let me see your back," he said, fishing in one of the outside pockets.

  He examined the damage from the flogging he'd administered and spread some cool, fresh-smelling cream over the worst of the damage.

  "That should do it." He gently opened Hunt’s cheeks. "Did you bleed?"