Tequila Mockingbird (Sinners #3) by Rhys Ford
Prologue
You cracked me open
Sucked out my filthy core
Held my heart in your hands
And gave in when I begged for more
—Begging Again
“FUCKING HELL,” Forest spat as he fell back into the garbage again. The damned Dumpster’s sides were too tall. Or he was too short. Either way, he couldn’t get the hell out of the thing, and his arms were now shaking from the numerous times he’d tried.
The last thing he wanted was to be there in the morning. Someone would find him, and that someone would bring down the cops on his head. Cops meant social services, and that meant he’d be spending a good amount of time fighting to get out of plastered walls and plastic suburbia.
He’d rather die in the Dumpster.
He just didn’t know if he could try to get out again.
He hurt so damned much.
Mostly—this time—it was his face. It definitely was his jaw. Or maybe his cheek. Whichever. He just knew he hurt. He tried to remember who told him to always trust guys in a minivan, but Forest couldn’t recall where he’d gotten that information. Whoever it’d been, he’d kick the guy’s ass whenever he found him again.
Because apparently guys in minivans with those happy little sticker children on the back glass really didn’t want to pay for their hand jobs ahead of time.
Now Forest was in a Dumpster because minivan guy thought it would be fun to toss him in there when he was done beating the shit out of him, and he still didn’t have more than fifty cents on him.
Fifty cents did not go a long way when someone needed food. Even dog-food tacos cost two for a dollar, and tax ate up a nice piece of the money pie all on its own.
“Yeah, Mrs. Whatever-the-fuck-your-name-is, tell the principal I’m stupid,” Forest muttered as he glared at the Dumpster’s too-high edge. “Go hungry for a bit, bitch, and you learn math real fucking quick.”
He heard a door slamming—a heavy thick-sounding door—and he froze, hating himself for holding his breath because it was stupid, and doing so made his chest hurt. There were bruises there too, Forest was sure of it, and his back wasn’t doing too good either. From the familiar throbbing along his spine, he was going to be pissing blood as soon as he had to take a pee.
Something slippery under him gave, and Forest went down, biting his tongue when he hit the hard floor. He tasted blood—for the third or fourth time that night—and the light from the streetlamps spun, leaving trails of stars on his eyes.
Swallowing at the salty taste in his mouth, he sighed, “Fuck me.”
A SCRATCHING sound caught Franklin Marshall’s attention. It shouldn’t have. Not in the middle of San Francisco’s Chinatown where the rats grew fat and happy on some of the best cuisine from the other side of the Pacific. No, this sounded different than a rat or any other kind of vermin he normally found in the middle of the night when he was dumping out the empties from his recording studio.
This sounded oddly human. Not so much the scratching but the murmuring noises accompanying them.
And it was coming from the open Dumpster at the end of the alley.
The Sound was a legacy of a hippie co-op he’d once been a part of. As his former lovers shaved their beards, or armpits as the case may be, and drifted off to respectability, he’d remained behind, mixing records for young artists with more talent than money and certainly with less sense than most. A decade ago, he’d finally gotten sick of the restaurant next door changing hands more often than a five-year-old girl changed her clothes, and he’d bought the place out, called it Marshall’s Amps, and turned it into a lounging coffee shop where he could get a good cup of Big Island coffee whenever he wanted.
With the bad restaurant-roulette gone, the vermin population dropped dramatically, but every once in a while, something—or someone—came creeping around, and Frank was forced to move whatever or whomever it was along.
He was too tired to care. All Frank wanted was to toss the trash out and go pack a bowl.