Darke Accused: Darke and Flare, #1

By Parker Avrile

An FBI agent goes undercover to catch a thief who turns out to be too hot to handle.

 

Darke Davis destroyed evidence to give his partner-in-crime time to flee with thirty-nine million dollars— and Special Agent Flare Greene is determined to get that money back. Hooking up with Darke at a popular gay roadhouse seems like a brilliant way to insinuate his way into Darke's life. He didn't plan on the two of them stumbling over a body and finding themselves on the run from charges of first-degree murder.

 

It's the perfect opportunity to bond with Darke, but if they can't work together to solve these crimes, they may find themselves locked up together for longer than just one night.

 

The three novels in the Darke & Flare trilogy include:

*Darke Accused

*The Double

*Where Missing Boys Go

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paris April Press
• Release date: Dec 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781386829683

Parker Avrile

Like Kyle, I ran away to Vegas. Now I'm running from it. 

Book preview

Prologue

Darke

O oh, detective, sir , I've detected something very interesting. Outside the noisy blare of the bar, the stranger's flirty voice rang with the clarity of a bell.

A tenor, I thought. I like tenors.

The alley, by contrast, was just another dirty alley. Empty for the moment but rarely for long. Sure, I'd been here before. Plenty of times. Brick walls on either side, with a tumble of blooming jessamine cascading from the top. April in New Orleans in Faubourg Marigny, the neighborhood right next door to the over-touristed French Quarter. Cool at two in the morning. Well. Coolish anyway.

People say you can smell jessamine, but I can't. Maybe you have to have a certain kind of nose.

Tonight, my nose kept me following too close behind the flirt. Him, I could smell. He wore an expensive scent with bergamot in it and the whisper of male pheromones just underneath. When he stopped on his toes with a ballerina's grace, I knocked into his slender backside with anything but. Much too close, but neither of us gave a damn.

His weight shifted easily from toes to heels. The muscles in his tight ass flexed under the fitted denim of overpriced jeans. A deliberate tease.

There were a lot of tight asses inside Club Asterisk. I liked to think it wasn't just the ass that brought me here to this alley. It was something I'd seen in his intelligent brown eyes, something about the intuitive golden flashes within them. From the first glance, those eyes told me they could see right through me.

Young/old eyes. Young in years, old in knowledge. Until tonight, I hadn't understood the magnetic pull of eyes like that.

The golden-olive skin at the corners of those eyes, smooth as the petals of a yellow rose, told me he couldn't be much more than twenty-one or twenty-two. A matched pair of Louisiana bouncers guarded the fabled iron door into Asterisk, and those guys were utterly humorless about the fact they'd seen every possible variety of fake ID in production. If not for that, I might have been willing to believe the guy was as young as eighteen or nineteen.

A black-and-white rolled slowly down the street outside the alley. No lights, no siren. For a moment, we both stood still and very silent. The patrol car broke the mood a little. It's almost a certainty one of my buddies was driving it. They knew I was gay— thirty-one and never been caught dead on a date with a woman is a pretty good tell in a town where available women are falling out of every tree— but they didn't need the details.

For a moment, the flirt didn't breathe, and neither did I. Then the black-and-white was gone, and his tight ass bumped back against me with fresh insistence. My dick shifted in my jeans.

Encouraged, he demonstrated a technique for rolling his round ass over the front of my pants in just the right spot. My toes curled inside my polished black boots.

You said you had something to show me.

Mmmm.

Show me. My voice got thicker. Show me what you've got to show me.

Yes, detective. His ass rotated even more firmly, to the point where I wondered if he could feel the swollen veins in my shaft through our jeans.

He was a dancer, he'd said. Between jobs at the moment, but he didn't leave that dancer's flexibility behind when he was off duty. I wondered all kinds of things, all in the space of a heartbeat. Wondered if he could clap those muscular buttocks hard enough to trap a man's hand. Wondered how he'd look spinning upside-down on a pole.

When I pushed my weight forward, the thick bulge in my jeans notched between his cheeks.

My goodness, detective!

I wished he'd quit calling me that, but it was my own fault. I don't normally inform bar hookups that I'm NOPD and for good reason. The badge doesn't make me the most popular guy in the Marigny, except for the horny minority with a cop-fucking fantasy. Most guys who patronized Asterisk didn't know me or at least wouldn't recognize me out of uniform, and I was usually happy to leave it that way.

Telling him I was a detective was a mistake I didn't have to make. The music was too loud. You couldn't converse. And yet, somehow, he made himself understood, his sultry voice a tickle in my ear. I don't believe you're a cop. That's what they're saying, but I don't believe it.

Who they were saying this was never explained. At the time, I didn't think it mattered. After he tickled me (not nearly) enough, I took out my badge, and he examined it, a smile twitching around the corners of his mouth. That's when he started calling me detective.

Those knowing eyes of his. I felt like he knew me before I ever said a word.

And now here I stood, with a talented dancer shifting right up against me as he scanned the alley. Looking around as if we didn't both know perfectly well the place was empty, he showed off his ability to shrug not just his shoulders but his entire backside. He wore a white album T-shirt, Sonic Youth's Goo, threadbare either because it was vintage or deliberately manufactured to appear so. From a distance, it looked decent. Up close, you could see through the tissue-thin cotton to a sleek back worthy of a black-and-white men's fragrance video. The kind where the model doesn't know about wearing shirts.

Now where is it? he asked in a playful tone. I know I saw it right around here.

Evidently, this could-be fragrance model liked playing games. Fine. Where is what? My voice was less playful and more growl of raw lust, but at least I was trying.

Oh, I don't know. The mysterious body under a pile of newspaper. The old-fashioned leather briefcase stuffed full of cash.

I grasped him at right shoulder and left hip to spin him around, then slammed him back against the nearest wall. Hard but not too hard. Enough to cater to his cop role-play fantasy but nothing more. He was almost my height— six foot nothing to my six two— but he had that flirt's way of looking up at me through his eyelashes. Those striking eyes were framed by good cheekbones and dark, slightly shaggy hair. They caught a reflection from something neon somewhere or maybe from the stars above.

He didn't resist. Didn't even pretend to resist. Those eyes dared me. His lower lip trembled in a studied way. He might be a dancer, but he'd taken a few theater classes.

I pushed up against him harder. The squirm in the front of his pants told me I was getting to him the way he was getting to me. That was a moment. The need in the two of us. How many times would I think about that moment? If only for a heartbeat, Tyler Acosta felt something of what I was feeling. If I couldn't believe that, I couldn't believe anything.

Gulping, not yet knowing his name or what he would mean to me, I kept spooling out the random lines of role-play. You targeted me, and you led me out here for something. Words from a television script.

Nothing television about those eyes, though. Nothing television about the dick grinding urgently into my belly.

I'm afraid you're right about that, detective. His hips rotated a slow tease, but they were starting to speed up. My zipper was already coming down from the inside. Who needs hands when you're being humped like that? I had an ulterior motive. And now you've fallen into my clever trap.

He swallowed in a heavy, obvious way that fixed my gaze on the rise and fall of his Adam's apple.

I was already lost before he slid down the wall. Already lost before he settled on his knees to show me what his mouth could do.

Chapter One

Darke

Twenty-Eight Months Later

It's a rarity for an ex-con to be given permission to change his name. Most judges would have denied the request sight unseen, but Landry and I went way back. Not far enough back for him to want to grant a big deal public hearing, but enough to call me into his private chambers where we could talk off the record.

Back here, he wore jeans and steel-toed boots. White T-shirt under a flannel shirt. Brown hair going silver in a frame around the face. The black robe hung on a hook ready to be tossed on over his hunting camp drag before he went out in public. Despite the informal clothes, he looked older than when I'd last seen him some fifteen months ago.

I wondered if I looked older. Only thirty-three. It would be considered young if I was Jesus. Trouble is I'm not. I tried not to look at myself too hard in the mirror when I shaved in the morning. Better to wonder than to know. The philosophy of denial.

Don't knock it till you try it.

Are you here to make problems for me, Gauthier? Because you know I'm not a big fan of problems. By problems, he meant publicity. Judges are elected officials in the great state of Louisiana. By Gauthier, my last name— the name I hoped to leave behind— he meant he was still waffling on whether he was going to grant my request.

Your Honor... My lawyer tried to register some objection. He wasn't a bad lawyer. It's just that I hadn't given him much of anything to lawyer with.

I'll let you know when I want to hear from you, Tommy.

This was between me and Landry. Away from the voters, he didn't expect the formalities.

Judges like it when you look at your feet all remorseful, but I could only carry the charade so far. I went with the salesman's gaze, the kind of thing where you project sincerity direct from your eyeballs to his. Landry must be over fifty now. When I gazed into the whites of those gray eyes, I noticed tiny red veins.

I'm not here to make problems. My voice needed to project sincerity too. I'm here for a simple name change. Under Louisiana law, I have a right to change my name to anything I want as long as it isn't for the purposes of deception.

Red veins or not, Landry's eyes held steady. He looked into me, an unfamiliar sensation after months of being side-eyed by prisoners and guards alike. Most people seem to feel it's dangerous to meet a felon's gaze, but Landry had a judge's confidence in his ability to read into a man's soul. Seems like you lost that right when you were convicted of criminal conspiracy.

I shrugged. I've been rehabilitated. Early release. No parole conditions.

Give me credit for reading the paperwork, Darke.

Ah. I had my first name back. It was a start. I'm supposed to keep away from my previous associations. A new name will help me do that.

He peered down at the piece of paper in front of him. Even in the twenty-first century, the judicial system in Louisiana runs on paper. I'm sure you understand this is most unusual. Especially after a conviction for a federal offense.

There was some battle over jurisdiction behind the scenes, but ultimately my criminal case was heard in federal court. The state would have let it go. Too hard to persuade a jury I'd benefited in any material way from my crime, or so my lawyer had argued and so Judge Landry agreed. The judge was one of the good guys. He gave me the benefit of the doubt when he didn't have to.

Still, like any judge, he had an irritating love for the sound of his own voice. At the time, I was given to understand that federal truth-in-sentencing laws, blah blah blah...

The words were blurring in my ears. More of that denial process I've come to be so fond of. But I got the gist. Landry was still bitter about the fact the feds rushed in where the state feared to tread. Probably thought they'd impugned his honor or something. His ability to remain impartial.

Bottom line: Me going to federal prison after he'd set me free on the state charges made him look bad.

How did he think I felt about it? For ten minutes there, I thought I wouldn't be prosecuted for the crime I'd supposedly covered up. Talk about a rug pull.

And yet. And yet. It wasn't entirely unjust, was it? I hadn't supposedly covered up Tyler's crime. I hadn't allegedly destroyed the evidence. We're not talking about some John Grisham about a poor, poor pitiful innocent man.

I did what they said I did, and it was nobody's fault but my own I ended up in La Tuna.

I covered up for Tyler. I destroyed key evidence pointing his way. The more fool me, I didn't even do it for the money. Not for any material benefit, as the law would describe it, but for love. For stupid-ass head-over-heels sloppy, slobbering love. Because I believed in those beautiful eyes and that clever mouth.

Pity irritated me— more than that, the pity of my old friends and colleagues was salt in the wound— but I knew many guys like Judge Landry did pity me. As far as they were concerned, losing my badge, my job, and my reputation was enough. I ruined my life for the love of somebody who ran like a rabbit to leave me standing far behind with my dick in my hand.

My mistake. Wouldn't happen again.

It was the pitiless FBI that built the federal case against me. And there was a not-so-funny fact about federal offenses. Ever since the eighties, there's been truth in sentencing— which means all that crap you hear about early releases doesn't really happen except on TV.

Landry had to be wondering how I was even standing here only eight months after they shipped me out to Texas. I kind of wondered that myself. Hell, even Tommy wasn't sure. Not that my lawyer and I were going to look too hard at a gift horse. It was enough for us to know somebody somewhere upstairs had found some obscure exception to the rules, and here I was, kicked back out into the free world a couple years early.

Blue privilege, I thought. The last instance of blue privilege I'd ever enjoy.

No cop likes to see another cop in prison over a stupid mistake. Everybody makes mistakes, and there's still a blue brotherhood. Well, sort of a brotherhood. The kind of brotherhood where you wish your brother would ship out with the Merchant Marines.

Somebody had pulled strings to let me go, and they doubtless hoped I would take the hint to go very fucking far away indeed.

I don't want to see you in front of me ever again. Landry's voice snapped back into focus. Strike that. I don't want to see you again anywhere ever. At all.

You won't. New name, new life. I'm done with... I gestured my hands to the ceiling and, by implication, to the heavens beyond. I was done with anything and everything Judge Landry could think of. He couldn't tell me flat-out to leave the parish, much less the state, but I knew what he wanted and I was happy to give it to him. I'm a changed man.

You better be. If this crap blows back on me, Darke...

He didn't finish the sentence. Didn't have to.

It was done.

No more Darke Gauthier, ex-cop, ex-con. Ex obsessed boyfriend of a beautiful con artist.

Landry slammed the gavel down, an unnecessary flourish in his private chambers. Tommy started to shake my hand, then threw his arms around me to give me a big hug instead.

I was now and forevermore Darke Davis.

Chapter Two

Flare

I f I'm being transferred , I'd like to be re-assigned to hate crimes, sir, I said.

My boss wore glasses with a slight golden tint to conceal the expression in his eyes. His hair, once the same shade of gold, was developing a distinguished silver cast that contrasted nicely with his medium-toast tan. Launce Lawrence. How Hollywood a name was that? And, in fact, he'd started out in the Los Angeles field office where he'd presumably developed the vague beach boy vibe he still projected all these years later in not-so-beachy Washington, DC.

White collar criminals trusted him a little too much. He'd come up as an expert in interrogations— at human manipulation— then got booted upstairs when nobody's lawyers would let him talk to them anymore.

Now he turned those oh-so-clever gold-tinted eyes on me. Guess who was being manipulated this time.

The original problem remains, Greene, he said. You let your emotions get away from you.

Flare Greene, that's me. And you could say I'd gotten a tad too famous around the FBI for my little anger problem.

Early in my career, I'd gut-punched a piece of crap Kluxer who turned out to be funding his neo-Nazi activities by moonlighting in child porn. The combination of a video of a nine-year-old with a noose around his neck and that smug, smirking Kluxer's face when he said we'd never find the body... I'm not proud of how fast I was over that desk to slam a fist in his overfed belly, but I'm not exactly ashamed of it either.

It wasn't like I even really hurt the guy. A couple of fellow agents pulled me off the creep before I could get myself in too much trouble, but you got the sneaking feeling they wished they could have landed a punch themselves. We're not officially allowed to be human, but even the best FBI agents have blood in their veins. Everybody understood.

What came next was the part they didn't understand. The way I handled it when some asshole judge granted bail to this piece of shit, that's the part they weren't so crazy about.

See, the judge had the usual arguments judges always have when they grant pre-trial home arrest. Something about overcrowding in lockup, something about how the creep wasn't a flight risk because he owned a historical plantation home... Stop me if you've heard this song and dance before.

Everybody behind the scenes knew there was more to it than that, but nobody was going to speak up and ruin the FBI's relationship with that judge.

Nobody except an angry young agent who had too much access to the FBI archives. Turned out the judge had a granddaddy who liked to wear the old white sheets himself. Did that influence his decision to grant house arrest? I couldn't know for sure, but the reporter I gave the files to was happy to speculate.

Result: Judge recused himself, home arrest deal was revoked, and the creep ended up back behind bars where he belonged.

FBI wins. Creep loses. Go, team.

Except I didn't fully foresee the cost of the win. Nobody likes a leaker. I could forget about getting cooperation from any federal judges in that district for a long, long time. And my fellow agents knew better than to stand too close to me.

So I ended up here, riding an unimportant desk in a back office in financial crimes. When I first arrived, there was still some momentum behind the goal of running down the guys behind last decade's economic meltdown. Ten years after the crash, with a new administration that wasn't so crazy about the FBI, and now the thrill was gone. Oh, don't get me wrong. There were some potentially explosive cases being developed by special agents with experience in money-laundering crimes, but I was shut out from working on those cases. They had the potential to become a little too newsworthy, and nobody trusts a leaker with anything newsworthy.

Executive summary: One file shared with an alert reporter, I'd fucked my career, and I still wasn't sure how I was going to get it back on track.

The anger management dude was real big about how I needed to breathe more from my diaphragm, so I took a deep breath. Maybe it helped.

I realize that it's critical to the health of this nation to investigate economic crimes. A second breath. Sir. I realize this is an important job, sir.

But you're sick of this important job. The glasses had slipped, and Lawrence was studying me over the golden rims.

I signed on to catch violent offenders.

Perhaps your ambitions would be better served in a state law enforcement office. Lots of violent crime there. Lots of gun crime. Lots of terroristic threats.

We were fencing. He was a fair enough boss, but he didn't like me and I didn't like him. If I resigned, he wouldn't shed many tears into his pillow.

First day I was assigned to his office, he took me to lunch at some diner where he pulled out a bureau credit card to buy me a lemonade and a cheeseburger. "Just so we get started on the right foot, if any FBI files from my office appear in The Washington Post, you're going to jail."

That won't happen, sir.

Since then, we'd had a rather distant relationship. Not too astonishing. Most of what was said in this building was said in the way little favors got done for some people and