After the Horses by Jeffrey Round

Author:Jeffrey Round
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2015-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

Under the Eaves

Dan left the coffee shop thinking about Yuri Malevski’s “wild boys.” He knew some gay men liked to get close to younger guys who appeared threatening on the surface — tattoos, muscles, rough talk. It was one way of making peace with the demons who’d terrorized them in high school, but few of them expected to be murdered in the process. Malevski, it seemed, had wanted a wild boy to domesticate. Apparently he thought he’d found that in Santiago Suárez, the missing Cuban. Ziggy, on the other hand, seemed to be more of a dark horse. He was a moving target waiting for an expert marksman to hunt him down. Whatever there was to be learned about him was still inside Lockie House.

Dan parked across the street. From the front stoop, everything looked the same. He punched in the numbers. Red turned to green. Definitely something to be said for all that accounting consistency.

It was still daylight, making the false twilight inside seem eerie. Dan’s MagLite swept a beam along the floor. No need to announce his presence to the world outside. Had Fred MacGregor still lived here — Dan dispensed with formalities, feeling he knew the man well enough by now — had Freddie still lived here, this might be one of his at-home days when he received callers, but Dan wasn’t in a receiving mood.

He made his way to the third floor and looked around. All was calm. He pressed the panel and watched it swing open, just the way things did in the movies. And why not? Movies had to take their inspiration from somewhere.

Ziggy’s diary lay beneath the window where he’d left it, the baggie of dope still in place. He skimmed the pages, moving backward in time to when Ziggy first came to stay with Yuri. My family, he’d called Yuri’s collection of friends and misfits. Still, he had his perspective right: All families are weird, he wrote, so this one isn’t that different from any other. At least I feel at home somewhere.

Dan could relate.

Yuri didn’t seem to have asked for anything from Ziggy for his room and board. In fact, if the diary was to be believed, Yuri’s interest lay more in rehabilitating the boy: Need to get clean. Yuri told me that a month ago. I have to stop doing drugs and get my life in order. A little grass now and again is cool, he said, but he won’t tolerate hard drugs in the house. He said my days of drug use are over if I want to live with him.

That, Dan thought, was a different Yuri from the one everyone else seemed to think they knew. Ziggy expressed admiration for Yuri several times in the passages he read. The only note of dissent lay with his feelings about Santiago, who appeared as the villain in the pages. Santiago has another lover! I saw them together and now he hates me. He cheats on Yuri with everyone. Should I

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