Tracked Down

I boozed and cruised in the Cormorant Beach Club bar in St. Croix’s Pelican Cove for four nights before he showed up. I didn’t mind all that much. I was on an expense account, and two of the nights when it got close to bar lights out and he hadn’t shown, I took the best-looking of the guys who were still hitting on me back to my room at the club, which also was a hotel, and let them hump me. Those paying my bills knew I went under men—that’s why they’d sent me down here to the U.S. Virgin Islands. There was no reason they needed to know how often I would do so down here waiting and hoping on Sheffield.

We’d gotten the tip from more than one that he’d been seen hiding out here down in the Caribbean, seen at a gay bar both times. Coming down here and flashing his photo around produced the suggestion that the Cormorant Beach Club was the most likely place he’d show, although I’d been told he’d been seen at Freddie’s Cave over in Frederiksted, on the island’s west coast, where most of the gay life congregated, as well. So, I’d been moving back and forth between these two bars. I was surprised that he was still using the Sheffield name and just changing his given name from Kevin to Ken.

On the fifth evening, I was sitting with two guys, a blond bodybuilder from Boston and real honey of a black island native, when I saw him come in at last. I recognized him right off. He was bulked up in the chest and trimmed own in the waist a bit from his Chicago photos, well tanned, and his hair—auburn shot with gray, somewhat prematurely for his late forties age—was long, so he was going native down here to fit in. But he hadn’t done all that much to change his look.

He looked as good as the two guys I was sitting at a table with and who were putting the make on me.

“I don’t know, guys,” I said. “Let me think about it.” I fished a couple of twenties out of my wallet and dropped them on the table so they wouldn’t think I’d just been stringing them along for free drinks and gave them a small smile with a “let me think about it” look and left them at the table. They’d been talking a double, and although I’d done that before, I didn’t admit that to them. I didn’t say “no,” though, so, on another night, when I wasn’t working, then maybe. As soon as Sheffield came into the place and leaned into the bar, I was on the clock.

I went to the bar and stood near him, but not right on top of him, leaving some space between us, hoping that the space wouldn’t be filled until he’d noticed me, and I was in luck. I didn’t have any fear that he’d be interested if and when he noticed me—I’d been briefed on what had been his favorite guys in Chicago—short and trim, dark haired and hazel eyed, with a ready smile—a dancer. I’d danced the pole while going through college, so I knew I was his type—flexible, limber, yielding.

I took a cigarette out and felt around for a match. He took the bait and had his lighter out and flaming before I found a light. “Thanks,” I said and leaned into him and held his hand in mine while I took the flame. I looked up and gave him a “Yes, you can lay me” smile, and he closed the distance between us.

“What are you drinking?” he asked.

“Whatever the best beer that’s going down here in the islands,” I said.

“Ah, so you are just visiting,” he said as he signaled for the bartender. When he appeared, Sheffield said, “My friend here wants the island’s best beer. What say we start him with a Leatherback Reef Life?”

“Definitely a contender,” the bartender said and turned to pour one from the tap behind him.

“So, you must not be just visiting,” I said.

“Nope. I live here now. My name’s Ken Sheffield. And I’m hoping you know what kind of bar this is.”

“Tom Burnett,” I said, accepting the beer put in front of me. “Yes, that’s a good one,” I said, after taking a swig. “Thanks for the referral. And, yes, I know what there is to find—and to get hooked up with—in this kind of bar.”

“Bottom or top?” Sheffield asked, not wasting any time.

“I like the view from the bottom,” I answered, knowing already that he was a top.

“Perfect. Do you dance, Tom? You move like a dancer. You look like a movie star. Did you arrive in St. Croix by taking a wrong turn from somewhere?”

I laughed. “Lots of questions. I’m looking for someplace to write. I’m a writer. Guess I’ll have to move on, though, because prices are steep here for accommodations. Yes, I dance, and I’m no movie star, although I’ve done a turn in modeling.”

“I would have guessed that. Pity about not being able to stay longer for your writing, but we’ll have to see what we can get done while you’re here. Writing’s out of my league. I was a businessman. Wrapped it up in favor of the island life. Now I like to dance, drink, do a little cruising, and just be one with the island.”

“So, you must have done well in business to have been able to wrap it up and go native so young,” I said. It went with the mission for him to think I was a gold digger and did it for the money.”

“I cleaned up, yes,” he answered.

A businessman, right, I thought bitterly. When he was Kevin Sheffield, he as a conman shyster. Owned a business all right. Pharmaceuticals. Made a fortune on diabetic medicine at jacked-up prices and after a while wanted to increase his profit margin and so he adulterated the drug. People died. After he had absconded, he was found to have been making narcotics for the street as well. People died taking those, as well. In having disappeared ahead of the jailer, he’d become a story. I was an L.A. Times reporter, down here to do a “Where is he hiding?” story on him before somebody came to pick him up and drag him back to Chicago.

It was a pity, because he was a real good looker and had a great body and smile. He was a smooth talker too—just what I liked. But I guess that would be what a successful conman would be like—even one who was cold blooded about pushing shit that would kill people and making them pay their life savings to get what killed them rather than being what they thought would keep them alive.

“The band is back. I feel like dancing,” Sheffield said. He already had a hand on my butt and I’d left it there. “You gonna dance with me, Tom?”

“Sure,” I said. And he led me out onto the floor. He was a good dancer and I showed him that I was a great dancer, which pleased him greatly.

Later, as we were coming off the floor, he leaned into me, snuffling at the hair behind my ear and kissing me on the ear. “You gonna come home with me tonight, Tom?” he whispered in my ear.

“Sure, why not?” I answered.

A successful liftoff to my mission. I just had to be careful not to fall for this coldhearted bastard.

* * * *

God, he was good—and in a lover way. He held me securely in his embrace, my back nestled into his front, a strong arm embracing my chest, his other hand stroking me off, my right leg bent up to my stomach, giving him deep access as he fucked me slow and deep from behind. His lips were buried in the hollow of my neck, kissing me there and whispering how nice I was, what a good fuck I was giving him.

I could hardly believe this was the same Keith Sheffield, calling himself Ken now, who had passed killing drugs off on the unsuspecting sick in the States and waltzed off with these people’s life savings.

We weren’t just limp-wristed loverboys. We fucked. As we both got closer, Sheffield turned me on my belly. I reached up and grabbed a rung of his headboard with one hand, pushed my pelvis up with my knees, and reached under me with the other hand, grasping myself and stroking. Sheffield mounted me from on top, leaning over me, pressing his palms on my shoulder blades to hold me down, thrust inside me, and rode me high, with a deep bounce, to his ejaculation while I brought myself off almost simultaneously with my hand. Later, after we’d rested a bit and congratulated each other on athleticism and arousal worthiness, I turned him on his back and rode him in a cowboy, turning from facing him and palming his nubs to reversing and clutching his knees while showing him I, indeed, was athletic. I was also more than fifteen years his junior and a lot more flexible and slimmer.

He, on the other hand, was big cocked and as vigorous and virile as I could wish for. I was already regretting that I was here to expose the scumbag in the media.

It wasn’t until morning, while he was fixing our breakfast in just an open robe showing his arousing muscularity and humming his pleasure of a job well done, that I had a chance to look around his bungalow. It had been dark when he’d driven me up here in an old Jeep Wrangler, saying he’d return me to the Pelican Cove resort the next day and all I got the impression of was a string of well-distanced low bungalows with tin roofs strung out along a ridge road overlooking some sort of narrow bay cut into the coast not more than a twenty-five-minutes’ drive from Pelican Cove. Of course, on St. Croix island, no where was far from anywhere else.

Sheffield was said to have absconded with as much of $100 million in ill-gotten gains, but, if so, he hadn’t had time to spend it on his ride or his digs. The Jeep was serviceable and useful on the ridge road in front of the bungalow, and the bungalow, although neatly kept and comfortable, was nothing luxurious. The view from the front screened porch down into what Sheffield had told me was the lush-foliage fjord-like Salt Bay on the northern central coast of St. Croix to the west of Christiansted was the major draw here.

The house was a low-slung concrete-and-shell composition building with a red tin roof. The building was entered from a full-width, deep screened front porch looking down the slope of the ridge, set above the parking pad off the road, into the bay into a full-width room that served as the living and dining room. Beyond that, to the left was a kitchen, open to the living area, with a kitchen island divider. Opposite that to the left was a study. Further back down a center hall were bedrooms on either side with a single bathroom at the end of the center hall. Serviceable and more than adequate for one and fine for two if they were compatible. I highly suspected that the other bungalows along the same ridgetop road were no more substantial than this but had families of seven or eight in them.

I wandered a bit as Sheffield worked on the breakfast. The previous night we’d gone directly from the front porch to his bedroom at the back without turning on any of the lights other than the hall light that already was on when we got there. I went first into the study, admittedly to see if he’d left any incriminating material out on his desk, but he hadn’t. There was a family photo there, though—his family from his youth, I was sure. There was a husband and wife, an older son, which I took to be Sheffield, and two younger boys the same age and of identical description. I presumed they were twins. They were a handsome bunch, and I could tell they were Sheffield’s family because of the resemblance of him and of his father in the photo.

Coming back into the front room, I looked more closely at what stood out in the bungalow. There were several floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in the room, as well as in the study. On display were detailed scale models of ships and airplanes. It was quite an impressive collection.

Sheffield called me over to the kitchen island and I settled on a barstool there in front of a hearty meal of scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, and coffee. There must have been four eggs on the plate and I remarked on how big the meal was.

“I figured you’d want to build up your energy,” he said, with a grin. He was standing on the other side of the island, in the kitchen area, and he had a plate in front of him heaped as high as mine was.

“So, you weren’t disappointed last night?” I asked. “You want to go again.”

“You betcha,” he answered. “Best lay I’ve had this week.”

“This is quite a place you have here,” I said, moving on but glad that I’d made a favorable impression. I needed to. “Quite the view from here. Is it a rental?”

“No, it’s mine. It suits me and it suffices.”

“Had it long?” I asked. Kevin Sheffield had escaped Chicago not more than five weeks before and his scheme had collapsed suddenly. I wouldn’t have thought he’d have had much time to create an escape plan and establish a hideout, but apparently I was wrong. He seems to have been planning his grab-and-go escape for some time. From the news clippings I’d assembled while tracking him down, he appeared to have been leashed to Chicago or Los Angeles or New York for years.

“I’m had it for eleven years now. I retired early and moved down here to hide out from the world.”

I just bet you came here to hide out, I thought. What have you done with all the money you bilked out of the sick and dying? “Retired from what?” I asked, interested in what sort of lie he would come up with.

“Look around. Maybe you can guess.”

“An interior decorator?” I asked, just to be snotty. There wasn’t really anything wrong or tacky about how the place was decorated. It just wasn’t done the budget he could afford.

“So, you saw them.”

I gave him a quizzical look.

“The models of ships and airplanes. That’s what I did—not personally. I owned a company that made these models for high-end collectors.”

Well, at least he was very inventive in his answer to that question. Before I could pin him down further, though, he turned the topic of conversation to me.

“So, you say you’re a writer,” he asked. “What do you write?”

Now it was my turn to prevaricate. If I told him I was a newspaper reporter tracking down a nasty criminal on the lamb I was likely to be buried under the luxurious covering of vines and ferns in his bungalow yard. “I’ve written a few pen name novels,” I answered, “ones that have sold well enough that I have an advance to work on another one. It’s set on a Caribbean island like this one, so I’m here for the atmospherics. It’s more expensive here than I thought, though. I’m afraid I can only afford to get it started here. I’ll have to go back and do other work before I can get the book finished.”

“What sort of novels? Mysteries? Thrillers?”

Can’t get him spooked, I thought. “I write erotica—male porn. Gay novels.”

“Ah, and last night? That will be a chapter in one of your books?”

“Last night could be several chapters,” I said. “This breakfast is delicious. You could be a chef.” That, I hoped, would end this direction in the discussion, but it did no more than bend it.

This was the delicate part. I needed to be around him more to get the necessary flavoring for my exposé on him. I somehow needed him to invite me to stay here with him for a while. That’s why I tried so hard on the sex. I would have come here with him anyway—he was a real hunk—but I needed him to want me to be here for a couple of weeks.

“What sort of work would you have to go back to—and where?”

Here we go, I thought. I looked him straight in the eye. “I live in Los Angeles.” That much was true. “I get freelance work editing movie scripts. But I also pick up work as a movie extra and I do some modeling, and . . .”

“And what?” he asked.

“I do some work for an escort agency.” It had all been true except for the script editing, but I needed to have something connected with writing to tell him.

He laughed. “For mostly male clients, I’ll bet. So, you do more than just write about it.” Just as I had meant for him to do, Sheffield had gone right to the rent-boy mention.

“Yes,” I answered. He was smiling. It had worked.

“I did wonder. You seem to have all of the moves down.”

“I really want to make it as a novelist, though,” I said. “That’s why I was hoping the advance I got would cover the time I wanted to spend down here.”

“A couple of weeks? A month?” he asked.

“A month maybe. I think I can hold out at the resort hotel for ten more days. But maybe I can get some paying action here to extend that.”

“For action, I’d be happy to host you here for the month. I have a second bedroom, although maybe you wouldn’t be using it much.”

Bingo.

“It sounds like a deal,” I said. “You’re a real stud—probably a whole lot better than business I could drum up down at the resort.”

He gave me a dazzling smile. “After we’ve polished off breakfast, we could drive down to Pelican Cove and get you checked out.”

“Right after breakfast, or would you be interested in having an advance on my bed and board bill before we drive down?” I surmised that the way to keep this good thing going was to keep his tongue hanging out and him panting.

“I like the way you think,” Sheffield said.

* * * *

He was in deep, taking long, slow strokes. I was close. From his tensing I could feel that he was too. The best way of waking up in the morning. He was covering me close from above, me on my back, legs spread and bent, my heels rubbing against the meat of his calves. His weight was fully on me from on top, between my legs, his arms stretched over my head, his fists grasping the brass rungs of his headboard, and leverage on his knees as he pushed deep inside me, withdrew, and pushed again. I was clutching him with my hands, one on one of his bare buttocks to aid the push and the other at his waist. My cheek was pressed into a circular tattoo on his left breast—the only tattoo I had seen on his body.

“This is it. I’m coming,” Ken Sheffield growled. He tensed and held.

“Now, now,” I whimpered. I’d already come, between us, lathering our bellies. “Shit!” I cried out as he came, deep inside me but in the bulb of his condom. Then, “Fuck!” as he held me tight and came again. “Fucckkk,” at his third spasm.

He ran a hand into my sunny blond curls, arching my head back, and kissed me in the hollow of my throat. His lips moved up to mine and we kissed deeply. Then he laughed and rolled off to the side of me.

“Damn, that was a good one,” he groaned.

“Yes, yes, it was,” I answered, holding still, wanting to savor it, my left hand going to my cock, grasping it, and my right hand going across my body to touch him on his left nipple centering in the circular tattoo. I sensed him rolling the spent condom off and heard it hit the trash can next to the bed. We held there for half a minute, getting our breathing under control, before he half turned from me, opened the nightstand drawer, and fumbled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

“Fuck that was good,” he repeated. “You are one nice piece of ass.”

I took that as a compliment.

He lit up a cigarette, pulled himself up to a half recline against the headboard, and said, “You too? A cig?”

“No, thanks,” I answered. “I don’t smoke.” I had known he was at least a casual smoker. I could smell it on him, although, combined with some sort of musky aftershave he wore, it gave him a masculine, “come on” scent.

I reached over and took his cock in my hand. I was surprised; he was still half hard. We could go again, if he wanted to. He was a virile man for his age. But he was in tip-top shape for his age too—more an outdoor work and exercise man than one who had been juggling corporate boardrooms. But then, I guess they had good bodybuilder gyms in Chicago for the corporate crowd.

I was about to ask him if he’d like to go on his back and have me ride his cock when we heard the shout and the banging on his door from inside the front porch. It was a boy’s voice and it sounded frantic.

“Mr. Sheffield. Ken. You home? Come quick if you can. Papa’s fallen off the roof and I think he’s hurt bad.”

“Shit!” Sheffield exclaimed, rolling out of the bed and stubbing his cigarette out in a tin ashtray on the nightstand while he reached for his shorts. “That’s Sebastian Williams. I tried to tell his father not to work alone in patching his roof. He should have waited for me.”

He padded down the hall but was only gone for a half minute before coming back, punching buttons into his cellphone and saying, “Could you put some coffee on and maybe throw together a breakfast sandwich. I need fuel, and I think this will take a while. And bring it up the road—to the left, two houses. Thanks, bud.” And then he was gone.

I cleaned myself up, dressed, and threw together something to keep us from starving and was up the road not long after an ambulance had arrived. The house was a bungalow much as Sheffield’s, shell walls held together with concrete and a rusty tin roof, but it wasn’t in nearly the good condition that Sheffield’s was and, from the number of children standing around, it housed a large family. A small section of the roof had peeled away and a ladder lay on the ground. Medics were putting a middle-aged black man in the ambulance, and Sheffield was holding one of the men’s hands as they wheeled the gurney to the back of the bus.

I stood there, holding two cups of coffee and dangling a sack of food, and looking, I’m sure, totally out of place, which I was.

“Are you Ken’s young man?” a black woman probably in her forties and in a colorful muumuu asked, saddling up beside me.

“I’m his houseguest, yes. Are you the man’s wife?”

“Oh, my no. Maria is over there with her children. I live in the house between Ken’s and here. Maria will want to go to the hospital, if she can find a way to get there, and I’ll watch the children. I don’t know what we would have done if Mr. Sheffield hadn’t been here. He’s done everything to help his neighbors out since he arrived.”

“Did he come here very recently?”

She gave me a strange look and said, “Oh, my no. I think it must be ten years or more now. He’s one of us on St. Croix.”

I had to step off the road then, because the ambulance was moving out, in our direction. The woman went back to where the other woman—Maria, apparently—was standing in a crowd of children of various ages, and Sheffield came over to me and relieved me of a coffee cup and the sack of food.

“Thanks for bringing these, Tom. I won’t have a chance to eat for a while, I think. I’m taking Maria down to the hospital and wait with her while they get Luis settled and his leg set—I think that’s the only thing broken—and then I’ll work on the roof when I get back.”

“You’ll fix his roof?” I asked, somewhat incredulously.

“Someone has to and Luis isn’t going to be able to do it for a long time. The rains will drown the Williamses out if that doesn’t get patched.”

“Let me know when you’re back and I’ll come help.”

“No. You have writing that needs to be done. There are a few guys further down the ridge I can pick up on my way back. They’d feel beholden to you and not be able to repay if you work on the house, and we have the neighbors organized to help each other out with these projects.”

From what that woman had told me, I thought, it was Ken Sheffield who had the neighborhood organized, and he wasn’t a recent arrival, or at least a neighbor said. But was she covering for him?

It probably was just as well that I’d be alone in his bungalow for a while. I could do some snooping, and it would give me time to go through all of the material that the researchers at the L.A. Times had e-mail attached to me over the past couple of days. This was getting curiouser and curiouser. The Sheffield I was sent to track down and the one I found seemed liked two entirely different men. This guy was real good at disappearing into the woodwork.

* * * *

Sheffield didn’t return to his bungalow until late that afternoon, which gave me plenty of time to nose around before getting set up with my laptop in his study and going through the background material on the name he went under in Chicago, Kevin Sheffield. He didn’t hide his financial papers. They were all there in the desk and in a filing cabinet within reach from the desk chair. The guy really was good. He’d established a completely separate life between here and Chicago, with his Virgin Islands residency going back more than a decade. He’d gone to great lengths to establish this retreat. I couldn’t imagine how he had managed it until I read through the media coverage The Times collected and sent to me.

He vacillated back and forth in the States from being a well-covered philanthropist and playboy and, for extended times, a recluse. He had the money to run back and forth between Chicago, L.A., New York, and the Virgin Islands. The most important find in the study was an envelope in the bottom drawer of the desk, which include a false Canadian passport, with Sheffield’s photo, but in the name of a Kerry Foucet, residing in Montreal. There was a bankbook from a Barcelona, Spain, bank in that name with more than $2 million in euros deposited in it. So, he had yet another retreat set up if this one didn’t work. The only real question was why he’d kept his surname for the elaborate Virgin Islands setup.

But at least I knew of where $2 million of the some $100 million he was said to have absconded with could be found. There wasn’t any evidence it was here in the Virgin Islands. I found a couple of local bank account books, covering another million and a bit more, but nothing like he was said to have gotten out of the States.

I turned to the news clippings I’d been sent of his last twenty years. He had spurts of being very social. He went to building, art, and theater openings. He was photographed in venues stretching from nights at the ballet to crouching in front a lion he had shot on safari. He often had a beautiful young woman on his arm. Sometime, though, there was a good-looking young man in the background, and, from what I’d learned about Sheffield, the man had been active with other men and just managed to keep it out of the public eye. He’d also managed to fool the media and public on some other vices. There was an article emphasizing that he didn’t smoke or drink, but I’d seen him do both. Maybe he did it now to throw pursuers off—but again I went back to why keep the surname?

He looked good in or out of a tuxedo over the years. There were a few photos of him bare-chested on a yacht, and he had great musculature—and the tattoo on his left breast that I knew he had but hadn’t closely examined yet. At some point a dozen years earlier he’d broken his left arm, but there were photos of him in a cast and sling, both when casually and formally dressed.

I started to write a feature article on finding him, and it was easy going on what his sins in the States had been, why he was of interest in tracking down, and having gotten the assignment and tracking him down to St. Croix. I, of course, didn’t mention that I hooked up with him at a gay club or that I’d been invited to stay at his house—or, certainly, how I had wrangled the invitation. But at that point, my writing bogged down. The Ken Sheffield I had tracked down was not the Kevin Sheffield that I had been searching for. What he’d done to people in the States just didn’t match what I knew he was doing for the Williams family up the road right now.

At some point I put the feature article aside and started working on what my real interest in writing was—a parallel story novel in which I could make the protagonist’s actions match up coherently.

It was getting close to dark when he got back to the bungalow. He’d gone down to the seafront on the bay and brought back a seafood dinner for us. We broke out the beer, sat on the front porch, watching the lights along the coast of the bay light up, and feasted on seafood.

“It’s just the broken leg, but Luis will be laid up for a long while. We’ve shared out support for them along the ridge road neighbors for the next couple of months.”

“Do you do a lot of this for the neighbors?” I asked.

“We take care of each other up here,” he said. “It’s a simple life, but a good one. It was a good reward for being able to cash in and retire early,” he answered.

It certainly was very different from what everyone thought cashing in would be for you, I thought. It just wasn’t adding up. And it wasn’t making writing this exposé article and telling the world where they could find Kevin Sheffield any easier. There had been many death threats from those who had lost loved ones to his financially ruining adulterated drugs. I knew that as soon as what I wrote was published, this man would have to use that Canadian passport to get to Spain under an assumed identity that I’d found in the bottom drawer of his desk.

After dinner, we went into the bedroom and I made good on my offer from that morning to saddle on his pelvis as he lay on his back and ride his cock in a wild cowboy ride.

It wouldn’t be easy to give this man up.

* * * *

“Tell me about the tattoo,” I said. “It’s elaborate, but what is it?”

Another morning and another sex session. He was reclining against the pillows at the headboard, on his back, smoking a cigarette, and I was stretched out beside him, letting my hand roam over his body, knowing from his responses that we’d fuck again before starting our day—me to my writing, increasing more drawn to the novel I was working on than to the feature article on the lowlife worm who had fleeced sick people in their time of not wanting to believe in reality. I just could not accept this man now calling himself Ken as the Kevin I’d been sent to track down and expose. I was tracing the circular pattern of his tattoo, causing him to flinch and groan as I occasional went to the nipple in the center of the design and gave it a pinch. When I did, I felt the reaction in my other hand grasping his cock.

“It’s a sign of the Zodiac. Gemini. The twins, for late May into June. We were born in early June.”

“We?”

“Yes. My brother and I. We are twins. The Zodiac sign we were born under is Gemini, the twins. We both got this tattoo in our early twenties, as a lark, when we were both doing a spring break beach week from college.”

“Twins? You’re a twin?” I sat up in the bed. The photograph I’d seen in the study. Ken wasn’t the older son in that photograph. He was one of the twins.

“Yes, but I don’t like to talk about Kevin. I don’t like the direction he went in. Retiring here was partly to escape being his brother—looking exactly like him and being attacked mistakenly on the street for being him.”

I was about to pursue that when we both heard a car stop outside the bungalow, the sound of the porch screen door slamming, and then, causing Sheffield to launch himself from the bed, pull on his shorts, and race down the hallway, someone opening the front door with a key rather than knocking on it. I followed a little slower.

What I first heard was a gruff and bass voice exclaiming in obvious surprise. “Ken. Shit, man, I thought you were dead. We got a stiff down in the coroner’s office in Frederiksted who I was sure was you.”

“What do you mean? Do I look dead, Michael?”

By then I’d made it out to the living room, where the biggest, most muscular and handsome black man I’d seen for some time was standing just inside the entrance door. Beyond him, in the road, I could see a Virgin Island cop car and the man Ken had called Michael was poured into a police uniform that showed his bodybuilder body off to perfection. His face took on a big grin when we saw me emerge from the bedroom hallway. Like Ken, I’d done no more than pull on a pair of shorts.

“Ken, you stud, who is this honey you’ve gotten hidden in your bedroom?”

“Tom, this is a cop friend of mine, Michael Clarke. He seems to have thought I was dead and he came up here to loot my house. This is Tom Burnett, Mike, down from L.A. He’s a writer, and yes, he’s a great lay.”

Clarke whistled. “Cool. Can I lay him too?”

“If he’s good with that, yes. He says he’s been a rent-boy in L.A., and he has the moves to prove it.”

“Hey, guys, I’m standing right here, you know.” The cop hadn’t asked me directly, but, yes, he could lay me if he wanted to. He was one black bull god of a man. I was already estimating how many inches he had in that bulging crotch he was displaying.

The two of them ignored me, though.

“What’s this all about, Mike? Who’s this dead guy?”

“Maybe you can tell me. He’s a spitting image of you. He’s even got the same Zodiac tattoo you’ve got on your chest.”

So, the cop knew about the tattoo, I thought. These two are quite chummy. I guess I didn’t need them to tell me that they cruised together. I could only hope that the black bull was a top, like Ken was.

Clarke was taking out a photo, which he flashed in front of Sheffield. Ken grimaced. “We found him down in Frederiksted, in the gay bar area on the seafront. Stuffed into a barrel. He looks like you and he’s got your ID in his wallet. There was a note on him saying this—meaning his death we took it—was for all the people he killed in the States. Tell me this isn’t you, Ken.”

“I think that’s my twin brother, Kevin,” Sheffield said in a low voice. “Somehow I knew it would come to this.”

“What do you mean by that?” the cop asked. “I think you need to come down to the station and the coroner’s office in Frederiksted, Ken. He has your ID on him. Did you know he was here in St. Croix?”

“Yes, I knew he’d come to St. Croix, but I thought he’d be gone by now. Let me get dressed better and I’ll follow you down in my Jeep.”

“I’ll come with you,” I said. They both looked at me like it was the first time they knew I was there.

“No, don’t,” Sheffield said. “Stay here and work on your novel. I’ll be back soon . . . won’t I, Michael?”

“Sure, if we can straighten this out, man,” Clarke said. “I’m mighty glad it isn’t you who’s dead, Ken.”

“A piece of me is, if it’s Kevin,” Sheffield said. “But it’s been coming for some time.” With that, he left the room to get dressed, leaving the cop and me, standing a good eight feet away from each other, looking at each other, speculatively, waiting for one of us to say something while Sheffield was off getting dressed. We didn’t have much time.

“Ken said you were a rent-boy from L.A. Was he just shitting me?” Clarke was the first one to speak.

“I’ve done that, yes. It’s not my main job. It and other things I did got me through college.”

“But you went with men for money.”

“Yes.”

“You go with men just because you like the looks of them? You’re up here with Ken, in his bed? He fucks you?”

“Yes to all.”

“You exclusive with him?”

“No. You saying you want to fuck me too?”

“You’d let me?”

“Sure. You’ve got the body of a god.”

“A black god. I’m a black boy.”

“Why, yes, yes you are,” I said, letting him know that color meant nothing to me.

There no longer was a distance of eight feet between us. He’d come up close, put one hand behind my head to bring our lips together. I had to go on tip toe to reach him. His other hand took one of mine and put it on his basket. I gasped for him, as he knew I would.

“You think you can take this?”

“I can try,” I answered.

“Later, I hope. When we get this situation cleaned up.”

Before I could answer, we heard Sheffield coming back down the hall in his combat boots, and Clarke pulled away from me.

When they’d gone, I returned to the study and sat at the desk. The first thing I did was pull out the bottom drawer and take out that false documentation with Ken’s photo on it. So, how did this fit in, I wondered. And what was the dead guy, even if it was Ken’s twin, doing with Ken’s ID on him? Which twin was which . . . really?

I had much of the rest of the day to contemplate that, and when the door to the bungalow opened that evening as the sun was going down, it was the cop, Michael Clarke, who came in, not Ken.

Before he said anything to me at all about Ken and the dead guy in Frederiksted, Clarke put me against the wall by the door, stripping off my shorts and jock as we went into a lip lock. He unzipped and pulled himself off. He already was hard as a rock—and bull thick and long.

“Been thinking of you all the way back,” he growled. He pushed my back into the wall, lifted me up, grabbed my legs under my knees and split them. I cried out as he stuffed himself inside me, splitting me, and began to rub my back up and down the rough shell-incased concrete wall with the power of his thrusts.

Holding on for dear life, I hooked my knees on his hips, threw my arms around his neck, arched my head back, and cried out “Yes, yes, YESS!”

He fucked me good—no, he fucked me great—before taking me back to the second bedroom, getting us both stripped completely down, and fucking me totally.

* * * *

“So, did you get it all straightened out. They’re twins.”

“Yes, that,” Mike said as I crawled off him and he reached down and rolled the condom off his cock. I leaned over from where I’d landed sitting on the side of the bed and lifted the trashcan to make his contribution. There already were an embarrassing number of rubbers at the bottom of the can. “Ken’s brother was on the lam from the States, where he’d had a drug scam going to killed a lot of people and he came here to change places with Ken but someone he victimized got to him first. Ken’s in town making arrangements to get the body back to the States.”

“I hope it’s that simple,” I said.

“What do you mean? You’re wondering why the twin had Ken’s ID on him?”

“That’s part of it.”

“Ken explained that. He said he knew his brother had been here—and why he had to leave the States. He came up here to see Ken with a scheme to take Ken’s ID and hole up here until the pursuit calmed down and he could move on. He brought another ID for Ken to take. Ken turned him down, though, sent him away, and assumed that was the end of it.”

“I know about the other identity for Ken,” I said. “And I know about Kevin Sheffield and what he did in the States.”

“You do?”

“Yes, and the problem is still there, I think, of who is who with these twins. Is it Kevin, the criminal, who is dead or is it Ken?”

“What do you mean?”

“Come with me. Let me show you something.” I took him by the hand, both of us naked, and led him into the study. “I hope you don’t have to tell him—whoever he is—where I got this, but I think you need to know more of the background here. First, on the identity. Did the twin who is still alive tell you that he still has the fake ID here? Would Kevin have left that here? Maybe, if the guy we are treating as Ken was still considering the deal.” I opened the bottom drawer of the desk and brought out the fake ID and the Spanish bank account and gave it Clarke. “And look through this background material on Kevin Sheffield.”

The cop looked at what I had. “I don’t understand. Why do you have all of this stuff?”

“He told you I was a writer—a novelist. And I am working on a novel here but I also write for the L.A. Times, and I came here thinking the man living in this bungalow is Kevin Sheffield—that we’d tracked him down—and I’m writing a feature article on him. He doesn’t know that—whoever actually lives here doesn’t know that.”

“So, you’re not really a rent-boy?” He sounded disappointed.

“I have been, yes. And, for you, I’m happy to be. But back to the Sheffield twins. There’s more from the background I’ve compiled here you should know. This article here, for instance, saying Kevin Sheffield doesn’t smoke or drink. The man living in this bungalow does—I’ve seen him doing it and naturally so. Of course, the articles on Kevin Sheffield could be lies, so that’s just something to consider. But, look at this photo. This is something you could have looked into in addition to checking fingerprints and such, to the extent you can reliably do so on twins who might have covered for each other all their lives. What do you see in this photo?”

“The guy’s got a cast on his arm. He’s broken his left arm.”

“Bingo,” I said. “If the other brother—Ken—has broken his left arm just like that you can have X-rays done and identify who is who.”

“Yeah, that will work. So, you’re convinced the guy you know is—”

“No, I can’t say I’m fully convinced,” I answered. “I want to believe this one is the good brother—he’s certainly been good to me and I’ve seen him be good to others. But I just don’t know for sure.” And I didn’t. I was still wondering why he’d kept the fake passport and the bankbook for the Spanish bank. But that he had been living here and using the Sheffield name all along seemed to bear out that he wasn’t trying to hide here.

“So, before he gets back, would you like me to take you someplace? You don’t want to stay around until we pin down which twin is alive and which one dead?”

I paused, but on the whole . . .

“No, I think I’ll give this one the benefit of the doubt for now. I’ve seen him in action—and been in action with him. I just feel like believing him.”

Clarke gave me a grin. “I gotta tell you that this guy pans out for me. He just seems like the Ken Sheffield I know.”

“Unless the two of them have been trading off for years in preparation for something like this,” I said.

“I guess,” Clarke said. “But this one and I talked while we were down in Frederiksted. We talked about you, and how good you are in the clutch. I was going to stick around here until Ken got back, and we were sort of wondering . . . well . . .”

“Whether the three of us could party?” I said. And then when he didn’t answer right off. “That sounds good to me.”

“Well, Ken and I cruise together sometimes, and one of the things we like—”

“You two want to double me, don’t you?” I laughed.

He looked sheepish.

“Sure. That sounds fine to me. You’re both hunks.”

He grinned and pulled out his cellphone. “Let me track him down on where he is now and how long he thinks it’ll be before he’s here.”

As he was making the call, I picked up the photograph of the Sheffield family. The more I looked at it the more it seemed that the photos I’d seen of the Kevin Sheffield matched that of the older Sheffield boy in this photo than they did the twins. Could it be, I wondered. Had anyone checked on where the older brother was and what he’d done in life? Were we all being played for fools?