Larry Boots, Exterminator Read online

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Epilogue

  More from John Inman

  Readers love John Inman

  About the Author

  By John Inman

  Visit Dreamspinner Press

  Copyright

  Larry Boots, Exterminator

  By John Inman

  Kenny Long is living a new life. Blinded in an accident, he has taken control of his unexpected reality the best way he can, and it’s working out better than he hoped.

  Of course Larry Boots doesn’t know any of that. All he sees is a beautiful man sitting on a park bench. Larry has a few problems of his own: His mother. His job. The lack of romance in his life.

  His job.

  In the course of that job, Larry strikes up a friendship with Kenny. The next thing he knows, he’s so head over heels in love, even his mother doesn’t seem so bad. Of course his career is still a problem, but he’s working on that. Hopefully he’ll have the problem resolved before the man he’s being paid to murder succeeds in murdering him first.

  And before the man he loves finds out he’s a cold-blooded killer.

  For my readers, whom I can never thank enough.

  Chapter One

  CALL ME Ishmael.

  Nah, just kidding. Call me Larry. Larry Boots.

  I’m pushing thirty and growing a beard that, at the moment, looks kind of scruffy. Also I shaved my head last week out of sheer boredom, so now I look like a cue ball with algae growing on the bottom of it. When I have hair on my head, it’s brown and drab. So are my eyes. Brown and drab. I stand about six feet tall, and I have a little patch of freckles that scatter across the bridge of my nose, which I spent two months in high school trying to eliminate with fading cream. Didn’t work, of course. My mother told me it wouldn’t. She also told me my freckles were cute, and I should leave them alone.

  So now I leave them alone.

  My mother also once told me I’d grow out of this gay phase I was going through. As you can imagine, that didn’t work out so well. I’m still as gay as a maypole. Well, perhaps a little butcher than a maypole. At least I hope I am. Not that being swishy is a character fault. I have a couple of friends who couldn’t walk a straight line without flipping something if their lives depended on it.

  I’m between boyfriends at the moment, but I still have my mother. I mean, I don’t live with her or anything, but she’s still around. We reside in San Diego. She’s on one side of town; I’m on the other. Happily, it’s a pretty big town. A lot of acreage. Praise Allah. She tells all her friends I’m a software developer. I love that. One day out of the blue I told her, “Yeah, Mom, I’m a software developer,” and she believed me. I’ve never been to college or business school in my life, so I don’t know how she thought I learned the trade. Osmosis?

  My mom still goes by her married name. Mrs. Bootchinski. Gladys Bootchinski. After about twenty years, that Bootchinski tag started to irk me, so I shortened it. Now I’m plain old Larry Boots. Much nicer. Of course, every time my mom has to use my new-and-improved last name, she gets this look on her face like I’ve just launched another invasion on her beloved Poland. By the way, she has never set foot in Poland and probably never will, since prying her more than ten feet away from her TV set and her beloved soaps is like pulling teeth.

  Anyhoo…

  The reason I lied to my mother about what I do for a living is pretty simple. I didn’t want her to know the truth. If I did tell her what I do to earn a buck, she would probably pull one of those aghast faces she’s so proficient at. She’s been using those faces on me since I was old enough to walk, and frankly, they’ve grown annoying. Not that I don’t love my mom. I do. It’s just that as the years accrue, it gets harder and harder to work up a good dose of sonly adoration, not to mention gathering the wherewithal to lay it on her out of the blue. I need time to get in the mood. And if you knew my mom, you’d know she doesn’t give anybody a lot of time to adjust. Interactions with my mother are like the rear-end collisions you don’t see coming. One big bam, and there you are, lying in a ditch with a spare tire up your butt.

  Well, maybe she’s not quite that bad. Oh wait. Yes, she is.

  I adjusted the right lens of my binoculars a smidgeon since things were getting a bit blurry on that side. Also, the tree I was sitting in had been digging into my backside for the last thirty minutes, and I wondered if it was doing irreparable damage to my perky little butt. Not that my butt is really that perky anymore. Or maybe it is. Heaven knows I work out religiously trying to keep myself fit. In my line of work, my real line of work, you sort of need to.

  But enough about me.

  With the binoculars properly adjusted I could see the man sitting in the battered old Econoline van more clearly now. He was probably pushing fifty, way overweight, with scraggly gray hair and a paunchy jawline bristling with what looked like a week’s worth of patchy, untrimmed facial hair. Even a fashionista like me (that was a joke) could look at the guy and see he wasn’t trying to grow a beard. He was simply too lazy to shave. Actually, he didn’t look like he was too diligent about taking the occasional bath either. And his van didn’t appear to have been run through a car wash since it rolled off the assembly line sometime back in the eighties. Jeez. Let’s face it, the guy was a slob.

  What I really detested about the man I was watching was the arm casually dangling out the driver’s-side window. There was a trail of smoke dribbling up from the lit cigarette he held in his hand, but that wasn’t what bothered me. What bothered me was the tattoo he sported on his forearm of two naked cherubs. They were innocently frolicking in a patch of arm hair.

  I stared a long time at those two cherubs on the forearm of the man in the van. And the longer I stared, the angrier I became.

  The tree I sat in was a tall eucalyptus, situated alongside the Blind Community Center just off Park Boulevard in the North Park section of the city. I was perched about twenty feet up, Reeboks swinging. Since there was a cluster of other eucalyptus trees surrounding me, I was pretty well hidden. The van I sat eyeballing was parked 400 yards away, across the boulevard. It was nestled up to the curb beside Roosevelt Middle School, right where you’d expect a pervert like Jackson Boils to be parked. The students had been set free for the day, and through my trusty binoculars, I could see Jackson Boils leering at every prepubescent child who pranced past, be they male or female. Obviously Boils was an equal opportunity pervert, which in my book made him doubly despicable.

  I glanced at my watch. It would be dark in a couple of hours. The pervert wasn’t doing anything overtly malicious, so I let my attention wander. Training my binoculars off to the south, I could see the tourists beginning to straggle out of the San Diego Zoo’s front gates and head toward their cars, each and every one of them looking tired and happy and sunburned. One young boy was still gnawing on a ball of cotton candy, while another was admiring the stuffed python he wore wrapped around his neck, making faces and going all googly-eyed like it was strangling him. I snorted. Kids.

  Down below, the sound of footsteps caught my ear.

  At the base of my tree, a young man with a white cane and a sweet smile on his face tippy-tapped hi
s way across the grass toward a park bench situated along a ravine about ten yards away. That sweet smile he wore mesmerized me. On the bench, after taking a minute to wiggle around and get comfortable, he pulled a book from the backpack draped across his shoulder and commenced trailing his fingers over the page he had previously marked with a slip of paper. Clearly, the book was in braille, and as he read, the sweet smile never once left his face, even when his eyes narrowed once in concentration at whatever it was he was reading. A thriller. Maybe. Yeah, I decided. Definitely a thriller.

  When I shifted around on my tree limb because my butt was hurting again, he turned his head in my direction and looked up. He couldn’t see me, of course, but he knew I was there. I could tell by the way he kept peering up toward the treetops.

  Head-on, he was so handsome I almost fell out of the tree. Honest to God, in his little sweater-vest and bow tie, he almost took my breath away. I draped my binoculars around my neck so I wouldn’t drop them and started climbing down. Along the way, I took a last glance toward the school and saw that the van had vanished. Good. Jackson Boils had gone home. If things went according to plan, I would see him there later.

  For the moment, I hopped the last few feet to the ground, brushed off my clothes, and turned my attention to the young man on the bench.

  Clearing my throat to let him know my intent, I cautiously approached. When I did, he looked surprised.

  “Oh! You’re a grown-up. I thought you were a kid.”

  “Why’d you think that?” I asked.

  “Well, you were sitting in a tree. How many adults do you see doing that?”

  “Not many, I guess.”

  He smiled at that. “No. Not many at all.”

  By this time, I was within three feet of him. I stopped and shuffled my feet, wondering what to say next.

  “Sit,” he said, patting the bench beside him.

  “Thanks,” I muttered and plopped myself down mere inches away. He moved his backpack and his white cane to his other side to give me room. That wee task accomplished, he turned and pointed another one of those monumental smiles directly at me. “So what were you doing in that tree?”

  “I was watching someone.”

  “Me?”

  I chuckled. “No. Someone across the street by the school.”

  “Are they close enough to see?”

  “I have binoculars.”

  “Why were you watching them? Are you a private detective?”

  I blinked. “Well, yeah. Sort of, I guess.” About as much as I’m a software developer. I made it a point to ignore the why part of his question, and I was happy when he let it go.

  “How can you be ‘sort of’ a private detective?”

  “Someday I’ll explain it to you,” I said.

  “That implies we’re beginning a friendship.”

  I blinked again. “Golly, I guess it does.” After a pause, I asked, “Would that be okay with you? Starting a friendship, I mean?”

  His smile widened, displaying a row of beautiful white teeth. Toothpaste commercials have won Clio Awards for showing teeth like that. He gave a teeny shrug. “You can never have too many friends, they say.”

  Somewhere over our heads in one of the other trees, a mockingbird started riffing. No other creature riffs like a mockingbird. In fact, once they start, they almost never shut up. And they do it in twelve different languages. That’s the amazing thing about mockingbirds.

  “Pretty,” I said before I could stop myself. I was still staring at the young man’s smile.

  He misunderstood and said, “It is. I love hearing the birds sing.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Me too.”

  After a beat of silence, he lowered his unseeing eyes from the treetops and focused his attention on me. The way he found me in those sightless green eyes made me wonder if perhaps he wasn’t completely blind.

  “You have the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen,” I said. “Did you know they were green?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I remember.”

  “So you weren’t always…?”

  “No,” he said, cutting me off. Kindly, but effectively. “No, I wasn’t always.”

  “Can you see me at all? I mean, your eyes are dead center on my face.”

  “I can hear you breathing. I know precisely where you are.”

  “What else do you know?” I asked.

  This time it was his turn to blink. The tip of a pink tongue came out to moisten his upper lip. It was a hot day. Maybe he was licking away the sweat.

  “You mean about you?” he asked.

  “Yes. What else do you know about me?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Yeah, I do.” I attempted to insert a bit of joviality into my voice. I had never tried to intentionally do that before, but it seemed a helpful thing to do when dealing with someone who couldn’t see. “Lay it on me, O Perceptive One.”

  He shifted around on the bench and draped an arm across the backrest, then leaned in a little closer. His smile had returned, and it really was a knockout.

  “You’re around thirty. You’re not heavy. You’re well-built. You don’t smoke. You don’t wear aftershave, but you do splash your face with Sea Breeze after you shave. The scent is almost gone now, so you must have shaved early this morning.”

  “I trimmed my beard and shaved my neck, yeah.”

  “Close enough. Let’s see. What else? You’re wearing blue jeans, and you stepped in dog doo sometime in the not too distant past. Oh! And you had onions for lunch.”

  I barked out a laugh. “Whoa! That’s a little too perceptive.”

  He laughed with me. Our laughter dwindled down to silence; then we let that silence linger for a long moment because it seemed sort of comforting to let it simmer there between us. At least it did to me. Finally, he said, “You came over to speak with me. I’m wondering why.”

  I thought about that. “Leaving out the onions and the dog doo, tell me how you know all those things you said. If you tell me that, then I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

  A dimple bored a hole in his cheek as he flashed those pearly whites at me again. Little crinkly laugh lines appeared at the corners of his eyes. I tapped his age at about twenty-eight. Close to mine.

  “Deal,” he said. Leaning his head back, he let the dappled shade from the tree play games across his face. His hair stirred in the wind. It was reddish blond and worn fairly short, barely a couple of inches long. I found myself wishing I could dig my fingers through it.

  “The timbre of a voice can pinpoint a person’s age, if one listens closely enough. At least it works for me. Sometimes.” He grinned to let me know this wasn’t an exact science. “I know you aren’t heavy by the sound you made when you dropped out of the tree. I know you are well-built by the fact that you climbed the tree to begin with. I know you don’t smoke because you don’t reek of tobacco. I know you’re wearing blue jeans because denim makes a very distinctive sound when the legs rub together. So you see, my dear Watson, it’s quite elementary. The Sea Breeze, of course, is self-explanatory.”

  I laughed. “As were the onions.”

  “And the dog doo. Indubitably.”

  I laughed again. Turning, I surveyed the Blind Community Center behind us. A caretaker was sweeping the front walk. When he finished, he leaned through the front door and tossed the broom inside. That chore finished, he fished a ring of keys from his pocket and locked the door behind him. He tested the knob, dropped the keys back in his pocket, and walked away whistling. Workday over.

  I turned back to my companion on the bench.

  Before I could ask, he said, “That’s Tommy, the janitor.”

  “So you work at the blind center,” I said.

  “I volunteer.”

  “Volunteer doing what?”

  He gazed down at his lap, as if he’d heard this question more than once. “I volunteer teaching the recently blinded how to survive in a world they can no longer see.”

  I lowered m
y voice, lost yet again in those wondrous green eyes that took nothing at all in but gave everything back. “It must be hard.”

  He nodded. Businesslike, without nonsense. Yet kind. Always kind. “It is indeed hard. For some it proves impossible.”

  “Can I ask your name?”

  He offered up a soft chuckle. “I wondered when you would. I’m Ken.”

  “Like the doll,” I said.

  He laughed. “Yes. Like the doll.”

  “I’m Larry.”

  “Larry,” he repeated softly, as if tasting the word on his tongue.

  “Shake my hand?” I asked.

  He almost jumped, as if he had forgotten the proper way to go about meeting people. He stuck his hand out in my general direction, and I immediately slipped my own around it. His skin was warm and soft in my grip. I felt my heart give a tiny lunge inside my chest at the first physical contact between the two of us. His thumb slid over the hair on the back of my hand, and I shuddered at the touch. When his thumb lingered there, I shuddered again.

  “So are you married?” I asked, easing my hand away, although I certainly didn’t want to.

  “No,” he said. “I’m not married.”

  Joking, I asked, “Never found the right woman?”

  He didn’t crack a smile. “Never found the right man. I’m gay.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  After a beat of silence that wasn’t entirely uncomfortable, he asked, “Are you married?”

  I reached over and, without touching him, deftly brushed a ladybug from his shoulder. When it flew away, I found myself wishing Ken could have seen the tiny creature’s red-and-black wings. I also wondered if he knew they were named for the Virgin Mary.

  Somehow he knew what I had done. “Thank you,” he muttered, still waiting for my response. “What was it?”

  “Ladybug.”

  “Ah. The holiest of ladies.”

  “Yes,” I said. He knew.

  Finally, I answered his question. “No. I’m not married.” And with a grin, I added, “I never found the right man either.”

  He nodded, as if he’d expected as much. I realized he had known, or at least suspected, since the moment I sat down that I was gay. Apparently gaydar is even stronger in those without sight. And why wouldn’t it be? I silently asked myself.