Light Before Day Read Online Free PDF Page A

name hang. In the rarified social scene of West Hollywood, Scott Koffler was notorious for bringing barely legal pretty boys to the most exclusive pool parties. In fact I was fairly sure his young charges weren't legal at all, so I stayed the hell away from him. He seemed to have no actual profession aside from high-class pimp, and even though he was in his early thirties, he always dressed the part of the college undergrad, in university sweatshirts and backward baseball caps. He and I had never exchanged anything aside from a thin smile.
    "So anyway," Nate continued, "Koffler asks me to get in, so I do. I mean, he's not my favorite guy or anything, but he's kinda cool." I didn't ask him how a jailbait supplier could be considered cool. "So I climb in the backseat, and guess who's in there with me?"
    "Daniel Brady."
    He nodded. "Brady was nice enough at first. Kinda antsy. Freaked out. I figured he was closeted, but I didn't have any idea he was a marine."
    "Or married," I said.
    "He's hot, though," Nate said, as if this dismissed the fact I had just given him. "I almost thought he was you. You guys have the same build and everything."
    He gave me a slight smile, and I wondered if he was buttering me up in anticipation of how this story of his was going to end. I didn't smile back.
    "Suddenly Koffler's asking me if I would like to do stuff. You know, like, mess around. With Brady." Nate didn't see what he wanted to in my face. "So I started following Scott's instructions. The whole setup. I don't know. It turned me on." His voice lacked conviction, which told me there was another layer to the story he was leaving out. His hollow cheeks and the welts on his arms gave me some idea what it might be.
    "For a second, I thought Brady was going to go along with it," Nate said. "Then he just flipped out. He slammed my head into the side of the door, and the next thing I knew the motherfucker had thrown me out into the street and I was lying there watching them speed off. I almost got run over."
    I gave him a moment to catch his breath, and then I said, "Sorry, Nate. I'm not buying it."
    "What?" he barked. He turned his back to me and peeled the back of his tank top up over a skid mark that covered the right half of his lower back. His skin had been turned to ribbons over a bruise that looked like a giant ink stain. "What about this?" he cried.
    "Why'd you really get in the car, Nate?" I asked. "Come on. You've got no shortage of willing sex partners, not in your line of work. Brady's hot, but he's not that hot. Why agree to go down on a guy who doesn't seem interested?"
    I watched the fight go out of him. "I was high," he whispered.
    "On what?" He didn't answer. "You asked me if I was a real reporter, Nate. These are the kinds of questions real reporters ask."
    Slowly he reached inside the front of his shorts and removed something. Holding it in his fist, he sank to his knees on the carpet and laid a plastic bag of small white rocks and a glass pipe on the table. Even though this was one of the few drugs I had never done before, I knew what the rocks were the minute I saw them.
    "You ever done Tina?" he asked as he loaded the pipe.
    "No. I value my HIV-negative status."
    "Some of us play safe," he said.
    He extended the pipe toward me with a slight smile. I took it, turned it over, and tapped the rock out onto my coffee table.
    "Koffler promised you some crystal meth if you screwed around with Brady You agreed and they humiliated you. Put your life in danger, even."
    He shoved the bag and pipe back into his crotch, made a snorting sound in his throat, and started for the door with his eyes on the carpet.
    "Do you want me to write this story or not, Nate?" I asked.
    Nate whirled around. "The story is that some closet-case Marine thought he could come up to WeHo and fuck with some fags and it didn't go so well. A couple days later, the helicopter he happens to be flying makes a nosedive right into the ocean. Does that sound like a