In this second volume of the Clint Folsom Mysteries Compendium, which includes a previously unpublished Clint Folsom adventure, Death to the Past, the concluding months of Clint’s life as an NPYD special homicide unit detective are chronicled. This four-book set, picking up a dozen years after the Death in Eden adventure that ended the first volume of the compendium, spins out the satyriasis influences of hedonism and sexual want and preference for rough-handling sex that developed in Clint in his early life.
After several years of successful work in an NYPD unit using men’s weaknesses to other men in closing criminal cases, Death in Key West takes Clint on what was supposed to be a vacation in Key West, Florida, on the yacht of the producer of many of his movie star parents’ Hollywood movies. Clint isn’t even in the air for very long, winging his way to the Keys, before he is both reunited with an old colleague and lover and being propelled into a murder case that dredges up his own past. This mystery solved, he is on the move beyond New York City again in his professional capacity, first, on loan to the Colorado authorities in Death in the Rockies to try to prevent a murder of a key witness at a male brothel dude ranch, and then to Hollywood, in Death in Hollywood, to come to terms with his own parents’ mysterious deaths twenty-one years earlier. In a concluding, never-before-published adventure, Death to the Past, Clint races back to Manhattan to help save his new life-partner, Hank Halston, who, while under cover, has disappeared into the world of old-style gangster families.
The compendium ends with Clint finding a love of his early life and beginning a new phase of his life.
Warnings: Contains M/M, BDSM, graphic language, fetish, sex toys, anal sex, group sex, and violent murder/crimes.
“Where? Where?” I asked. I was anxious to see the polished-wood fantail yacht I had so loved as a child. Half the reason I had come when invited was for the chance to sail on her again. It wasn’t all because of Theo and his magnificent cock. And right now I needed the connection with something solid, something I could believe it—some place I’d felt safe.
“There, that sleek white cruiser just over there,” Jerome said. “See, it’s written on her stern. Her name: Final Curtain II. We’ll have to go out there by water taxi.”
“Oh,” I said, deflated now. Theo had replaced the boat. I should have known he wouldn’t keep a yacht as old as the original Final Curtain as his fortunes progressed. He always was more flash than sentimentality.
I groused all the way out to the sleek and admittedly gorgeous Final Curtain II, as upset with myself that I was being so childish at the disappointment I wouldn’t be on the vessel of my childhood as in being denied cruising on the yacht of my dreams again.
The water taxi’s second mate was all thumbs in getting us lashed up to the side of the ship, and the Final Curtain II’s crew wasn’t much better at getting the ladder to us. In fact, they seemed pretty clumsy for crew members of a multimillion-dollar yacht. I wondered where Theo had gotten them. The two I could see looked like South Americans—mean ones. For several minutes we were nudged up against the side of the ship, and I was staring into a porthole of the Final Curtain II’s below decks and getting yet another surprise for the day.
I was looking into the interior of a plush stateroom as if through a television tube, where, on a queen-sized bed, two naked, well-muscled men were furiously fucking. The top was being rough and was slapping the bottom around as he pistoned the bottom with his cock. The bottom was struggling, trying to get out from underneath the onslaught—almost as if he wasn’t a bottom by choice—but the top was too strong and brutal for him. I had no idea who the bottom might be, but I clearly recognized the top. It was Derek Dominick. The movie guy on the flight from Atlanta to Miami, the guy who said he was en route to Lakeland, which was a long way north of here, in the center of the Florida mainland. The guy who had kept me occupied with a hand job in business class while my DEA friend, Gary Meltzer, was being murdered back in tourist. He’d really had to move out to get to Key West before I did. But then he wasn’t held up by airport security in Miami for a couple of hours like I was.
Connections. There were coincidences, yes, but here I sat in a water taxi with a woman who very well might have been the murderess of an old acquaintance I’d just happened upon in the Atlanta airport, while I watched a man being fucked hard by someone who I’d seen in company with that murderess and who told me he was headed a few hundred miles away from here. Connections, yes. Coincidence, I didn’t think so.
I barely made it to my assigned stateroom, having received directions to “get comfortable” and attend Theo and his other guests for drinks and a buffet on the fantail, when I flipped open my cell phone and called Miami.
“Sylvia, it’s Clint Folsom down in Key West,” I said as soon as I got through all of the gates to Sylvia Browne, the Miami homicide detective who was investigating Gary Meltzer’s murder. “Hey, I’m on Theo Kline’s yacht off Mallory Square, and I’ve found the two suspicious people I saw in the Atlanta airport and Meltzer pointed out to me are aboard. He’d told me he was pursuing a case down here. I believe in connections more than coincidences. I had no idea there was a connection to Theo Kline, but there must be. Can you come down here?”
“You are where?” Sylvia almost screamed down the line. “On Theo Kline’s yacht? Theo Kline, the movie producer? The yacht named Final Curtain II? And you really had no idea what was going down?”
“Yes . . . no. Yes, I’m on Theo’s boat. He’s an old family friend. He invited me down here. But no, I have no fuckin’ idea what’s happening in relation to Meltzer down here. That’s why I called you. That’s—”
“Get off the boat,” Browne yelled down the line. “Just get off the damn boat. Yes, I’m coming down. Check in with the police department down there and tell them where I can find you. But get off that boat now!”
