Lyn Gala

The Witness Wore a Puppy Tail (Patreon)

Published:

2018-03-15 06:53:24

Imported:

2026-06

Tags:

puppy

Content

“I will get the press out here, and then you can explain why you are harassing a disabled man!”

Detective Kenneth Hoffman considered turning and running for the hills. In this political climate, anyone threatening to get reporters involved posed a real risk to a detective’s career. Ken had made a careful study of avoiding the press at all costs, even when his superiors tried using him as the posterchild for the Chicago police. But from the sounds of it, this witness planned to create drama, and drama led to television cameras and viral videos.

Even now, two vans with their nests of electronics hovered just outside the police line. The trees that lined the street created an island of darkness where the press had chosen to gather, even in this brightly lit corner of the city. As the wind blew, leaves chittered and the edges of the shadows danced and flickered. Ken sidestepped to keep the small cluster of officers between him and the cameras poking in at the scene. In a few minutes, someone would have drones on scene. Ken needed to get the shouting contained before that happened.

“Detective!” one of the patrol officers called out. Since this was Ken’s case, he couldn’t feign ignorance. Well, he could, but it would put his case at risk to allow the uniforms to handle the witnesses, especially since this was the first break in the case.

“Officer,” Ken greeted him. The knot of uniformed officers divided, and Ken spotted a short man holding a department blanket around his shoulders. Two officers stood on the stone steps to the brick row house. Several more gathered around on the cracked sidewalk, and the expressions ranged from furious to gleeful. Ken had no idea how to interpret the scene.

“Are you their supervisor?” the man demanded. He came charging at Ken, one hand clutching the blanket and the other one poking an angry finger toward Ken. “Do you have any idea the sort of damage police harassment and verbal abuse can do? Do you?”

“Yes?” Ken said, but he wasn’t sure because he didn’t know what sort of stupidity the uniformed officers had gotten up to. In general, harassing the physically disabled was bad. If they had done that, Ken had every intention of reporting them to the captain. However, when cops behaved badly, Ken usually saw a subtle pulling together, a closing of ranks with the officers on scene sharing a communal emotional state, with the odd officer out slowly backing away from the pressure to conform. This group was all over the map. Donaldson looked like he was ready to get a bag of popcorn and camp out on the stairs to enjoy the entertainment. No cop reacted that way to harassment.

The witness stared at Ken, his eyes slowly narrowing. Ken could practically feel the storm clouds gathering. It was like an icy wind coming in from Lake Michigan only it was May. This cold front was all from the witness. Ken moved to defuse the situation.

“I understand you saw the attack tonight. Could you come down to the precinct and give a statement?” Ken tried to keep his voice professional and his gaze on the witness’s face. The blanket wasn’t quite large enough and the gap in front allowed hints of leather bondage to peek through. Ken made a point of not looking. Not even a little. Nope.

“I saw a lot, including your officers acting like assholes. What people do in their own homes is none of your business, and if you want to get all Christian morals, I’m going to quote you Bible verses on judging not lest ye be judged.”

“No Bible verses,” Ken promised. He might have been raised a good Bible thumping Baptist, but his own sexuality had put an end to that pretty quick. Ken gave the witness his most sympathetic smile. “One of the officers can take you inside to get dressed, and then I can drive you down.” Ken prayed the man would get dressed because the street lights in front of this house made it hard to avoid seeing the silver studs on the leather bag around the witness’s cock.

This story was getting told around the coffee machine for the next fucking decade, and nothing Ken did would stop it. However, if the cameras got a good shot of Mr. Exhibitionist here, life would get far too interesting.

The witness pressed his lips together in an angry line before saying in a deceptively soft voice, “So I’m supposed to just ignore these cretins’ uncalled for accusations and allow them back into Mr. Espinoza’s home?” His voice went up to a near-shout. “Oh, I don’t think so.” He pulled the blanket tighter and spun around before stomping up the stairs of the three story row home at the center of the activity. He opened the front door and then slammed it so hard that the lion mouth knocker bounced several times before falling silent.

Ken closed his mouth. He’d been prepared to make an apology for whatever insult the officer had offered, but apparently, the guy didn’t want it.

“What’s the story?” Ken asked the nearest officer. Whetham was a solid cop. Guys went into policing either because they wanted to make the world better and protect the innocent or because they were power hungry martinets who couldn’t find another line of work that allowed them to carry firearms and order people around. Whetham was in the first group.

Whetham gave a dramatic shiver. “He’s a piece of work.”

“Professional?” Ken asked. The outfit under that blanket had looked pretty rent-boyish. If he was a working boy, that would explain his attitude toward the cops. At least he looked legal age. Ken hated cases with underage sex workers.

“Who knows? His name’s Robert Millan, student at Loyola, and our witness to tonight’s assault. He was visiting Edgar Espinoza, who owns this home.”

Loyola. If they caught wind of Mr. Millan’s line of work, they would put him out on his ear in a second. Catholics had a pretty limited tolerance for the world’s oldest profession. “Espinoza. Would that be the disabled man he feels you disrespected?”

Whetham cleared his throat and puckered his lips, but that didn’t disguise his clear attempt to avoid laughing. “Karla might have been a little out of line, but she wasn’t intentionally disrespectful.”

“Karla?” Ken had no idea who that was, but if some officer pissed on his witness’s cornflakes, Ken was perfectly willing to make them miserable in return.

“Don’t target her,” Whetham said sharply. “She was caught off guard, and she expressed surprise that someone who used a wheelchair could get that… um… creative in his sexual… fantasies. She never intended to imply that Mr. Espinoza was impotent or that disabled individuals were less likely to have sex, and she certainly did not deserve the history of sexual marginalization of people with disabilities. She’s going to need therapy after some of the things Millan said.” Whetham ran a hand over his face. “Millan is very well endowed and he chose to yell the statistics at full volume while wearing a g-strap and an insertable dog tail butt plug; that might have contributed to her trauma.”

Ken blinked. That was not what he had expected to hear.

“Have fun with this one,” Whetham said before he walked away. He headed for the police line where a number of officers were holding back a growing crowd. The wind chittered through the trees and Ken told one of the officers at the door to take Millan back to the precinct if he came out. If he decided to hide in the house, Ken would have to try and sweet talk the man. First, Ken would give him enough time to put on clothes. In the meantime, Ken weaved through the patrol cars blocking the street. The crime scene specialists were already at the scene of the assault, the pair of them taking pictures with the help of three large spotlights.

All this activity around the assault was new. The captain hadn’t thought the other crimes justified calling out the big guns. Most of the victims had been rushed from the back, shoved to the ground and called a few choice names. This was only the third victim to be injured enough to need medical care, and the first in serious condition. But if the forensics folks were here, maybe Ken could expect a little more support. He understood that the city had more important crimes, but his gut told him these suspects were working their way up to killing someone.

Maybe several someones.

That was his real fear—that he was looking at the opening stages of a deadly crime spree. His captain thought Ken needed to stop taking profiling classes because he was seeing potential pathologies in every case. And maybe Captain Jenkins had a point, but that didn’t settle Ken’s gut.

When Ken came near, Mel glanced up and offered a halfhearted wave, but the sidewalk demanded her attention. Ken stayed well back. Crime scene specialists were the best the department had in forensics—nationally certified, more highly trained then their crime scene techs who worked property crimes, and definitely more highly strung. One wrong foot inside an evidence line and they all turned into mythological beasts able to kill a man with a single glare.

“Anything?” Ken called.

Mel straightened up and gave him a dirty look. “Do you really expect me to answer that?”

“Ballpark it.”

“Fine, but none of this is certain—”

“Until you get back to the lab,” Ken finished her sentence. “Got it.”

“The reports of your charm are overrated,” Mel said drily. Ken gave her a sweet grin, one that made his dimple show up, and she caved. “I have shoe impressions, but I don’t think you’re going to get anything out of them. They’re too smudged to give us any accidental characteristics, and the tread pattern is too common for it to be useful. However, I will get you a full report of everything we have when I get back to the lab.”

“Thanks,” Ken said. At least now he wouldn’t worry about waiting for the report. That meant he really needed his witness’s statement. His whole case was going to rely on the testimony of a man who made a living out of shoving a dog tail up his ass. Ken was a big fan of sticking stuff up his ass. In high school, his mother had once charged into his room without warning, and he’d laid under the covers with the end of a hairbrush shoved up his butt while she lectured him about taking out the garbage.

Good times.

But a dog tail crossed a line in his head that Ken didn’t realize he’d drawn. To each his own, but Ken felt a frisson of discomfort at the idea of anyone putting himself on display like that. He headed to his car, watching as a patrol officer ushered a now-dressed Millan into a black-and-white. Hopefully that meant their escort had decided to help out.

Ken never hid from his own bisexuality, but he also never flaunted it. When he’d gone into the Army, he’d known he would have to hide part of himself, and he had made that choice, so watching others be so open made him uncomfortable in ways that he disliked. Even when he’d dated women, he couldn’t escape the feeling that he didn’t deserve to have an open relationship with one gender when he couldn’t have one with another.

Working this case brought so much of that unease to the surface. As Ken talked to others about their sexuality, he could see their assumptions, see their fear that a straight man would brush their assaults aside as unimportant or deserved. People tended to assume butch men with square jaws and huge work-rough hands couldn’t possibly be gay. Clearly they’d never seen Rocco Steele pound some guy in a gay porn classic.

And sometimes Ken wanted to shout at them that he was gay and he wouldn’t do that. He wanted to shove their noses in the idea he was bisexual and he understood the fear of being outed in a professional setting. But in the end, that always felt like too much work.

Gay men thought he was crawling back into the closet if he dated a woman; women thought he was some sort of a challenge if they learned he’d been with a man. Either that or he’d trigger some deep well of disgust that Ken would tough a man. Then again, the few men he’d dated were equally quick to act like vaginas were disgusting. They rarely appreciated Ken for pointing out that every man in the universe lived in one for nine months. So he kept his mouth shut and then felt like shit when he got a firsthand seat to all the homophobic shit that got flung around.

Setting aside his self-imposed sexual crisis, Ken started his car. Before he put it in drive, his phone rang, so he put it on speaker.

“Hoffman here.”

“I hear you caught a doozy of a witness.”

“Captain?”

“I just got a call from Hennery in Vice. Apparently one of the officers gave him a heads up that you were bringing in a Robert Millan.”

“Yeah. He saw the attack, but it was a little awkward on scene so I asked a uniform to drive him in to the station.”

“Great.” Captain Jenkins did not sound amused. “You do know this is the little nosebleed that led a protest against Hennery’s guys, right?”

“He what?” Ken put the car back into park.

“You didn’t know? You have got to spend less time with your nose in a book and more time looking around. Hennery has picked Millan up twice for soliciting and promotion of solicitation although he has never gotten the charges to stick,” Jenkins said. “And now you’ve brought that little social reformer down on our heads. Just handle this one with kid gloves, okay?”

Ken thought about the puppy tail butt plug. “I’d rather wear rubber gloves and a whole lot of antibiotic soap.” The second the words came out, Ken regretted them. He’d made it sound like a gay escort was somehow more disgusting. He was not choosing his words well tonight. When Ken glanced at the car’s clock, the yellow numbers read 2:19. It was too damn early in the morning for real coherence.

“Yeah, well don’t let him hear you say that. He’ll take offense as sure as the sun comes up in the east.” The captain paused for a quick second. “The guys on scene said he was in bondage equipment, some really special shit.”

Ken wasn’t sure what special shit meant, but maybe it was just the tail. “He had on some stuff, which is why I asked him to change and meet me at the station. It was uncomfortable for everyone.”

“Well I hope he gets paid a lot. I called the DAs officer and asked them to take Darleen off the case. If she finds out her star witness gets paid to let men tie him up, the top of her head is going to pop off. And if you inspire another round of protesting, I’ll make your head pop off.”

“Wait.” Ken backed the car out and carefully detoured around the other cars on scene as he headed for the street. “Are you talking about those student protestors that accused Vice of targeting gays?”

“That was Millan. Apparently he’s some political prodigy, and his father is a lawyer at the Poverty Initiative. He can get a protest going with one phone call.” Jenkins started chuckling. “I hear he was wearing a gag.”

“Not when I got there.”

“If he’ll wear a gag for money, I’m half tempted to hire him myself. Just watch yourself on this case. Millan has friends in uncomfortable places—like the ACLU. I don’t need that in my department, and trust me, no cop’s career survives that sort of attention.”

All Ken was trying to do was solve his case, preferably before anyone died. “He really is just a witness.”

“If it turns into anything else, call me. And if you can get pictures of Mr. Attitude wearing a gag, I will pay good money. You know, this city is on the slippery slide to hell when we can have that sort of evidence of solicitation and we still can’t get the charge to stick. I swear I’m getting too old for this.”

Captain Jenkins hung up without saying anything else.

What a mess, but all Ken needed was a description of his suspects, and after that, he never needed to see this guy again.

Chapter 2: https://www.patreon.com/posts/witness-wore-two-17731873

Chapter 3 : https://www.patreon.com/posts/witness-wore-17744417

Chapter 4: https://www.patreon.com/posts/witness-wore-17750264

Chapter 5: https://www.patreon.com/posts/witness-wore-5-17767577

Chapter 6: https://www.patreon.com/posts/witness-wore-6-17772109

Chapter 7: https://www.patreon.com/posts/witness-wore-7-17795246

Chapter 8: https://www.patreon.com/posts/witness-wore-8-17856154

Chapter 9: https://www.patreon.com/posts/witness-wore-9-17964838

Chapter 10: https://www.patreon.com/posts/witness-wore-10-18290483

Chapter 11: https://www.patreon.com/posts/witness-wore-11-18463879