The Wolf, page 9
But there was no one taking cover between the sedan and the building’s flank.
“You want to fill it full of holes?” Rhage asked grimly. “I got a suppressor and I can turn it into a fucking sieve.”
“No.” V kept his muzzle on the Hyundai and looked across to the roof of the club. “Not yet.”
“I’m going down there. If something’s under that—”
V slapped a hold on the brother’s sleeve. “Call Butch. I want backup before we get any closer.”
“You got it.”
Rhage outed his phone and hit send. As the soft ringing burbled by the fighter’s ear, V shook his head at himself. Then lowered his weapon and cursed.
Maybe he was just losing it.
“Hey, cop,” Hollywood said beside him. “It’s time to get the troika back together, my brother. Your roomie and I want you to come play with us. We’re four blocks away from you, by the club at—”
“No,” V cut in. “Tell him to meet us at that apartment. Give him the addy. He can be there in eight minutes by car.”
Rhage frowned and lowered the bottom part of the phone from his mouth. “You sure?”
V took one more look over the roof, at the car. “Yeah, I just got a hair across my ass tonight, true? Tell my cop where to meet us.”
Rhage reholstered his gun. “Roger that. Hey, Butch, scratch that. You need to meet us over at Thirty-Second and Market Street—”
“Hold up,” V said. “What the fuck is that?”
* * *
Underneath the car he’d originally snuck behind, Lucan stayed spread-eagled and back-flat’d on the pavement, his head turned away from the undercarriage and toward the building. The vampires were up on the roof. He’d guessed correctly that that was where they were going the instant they’d ghosted from the shadows, and he’d never hit the asphalt so fast in his life. Tangling with that pair was the last thing on his to-do list.
Fuck, he hoped they stayed up there.
And as he heard their voices above him, because it was just a two-story building and his wolf side had ears better than a radar detector, he pictured the fight that was going to roll out as his wolven took over, and they got out their guns, and humans all around went for their goddamn cell phones to take video—
Naturally, things promptly got more complicated. Because it was just the kind of night he was having.
Across the alley, the back door to the club swung wide and a set of staccato heels came racing for the driver’s side of the car. The woman stopped right next to him—and then fumbled and dropped her keys. As she leaned down to pick them up, the ends of her long blond hair trailed into his field of vision—
Beep-beep.
Running lights flashed as she unlocked the sedan with her remote, and Lucan tried to calm himself so he could dematerialize out—but he didn’t get far with that. His wolven side was too close to the surface, still triggered by those male vampires, still too excited that it had been given even a little freedom to come forward.
Great. The damn thing was liable to eat this woman who was wrenching open the door—
“Hey! Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” A human male came bursting out of the club after her, talking at a volume that suggested he’d swallowed a bullhorn at some point in his life. “What the fuck! Leaving me like that! Fuck you, Maria!”
The woman threw herself into the car, slammed the door, and punched the locks. Then she cranked the engine as the man came up and started pounding on the windows and yanking at the handle.
“You bitch!” Pound, pound, pound. “You fucking—”
Lucan had a brief stare-off at a pair of black loafers. Then the woman put things in gear and stomped on the gas.
Under the car, he had to think fast. No dematerializing because there was no chance to calm himself—and she had cranked the tires so hard to the left that he was directly in the path of the rear set of radials. Oh, and then there were the two vampires still up above him, who were looking for the same woman he was.
And surprise, he was the supplier who apparently they ultimately wanted to get to.
Fuck, he mouthed as he reached up into the fruit salad of the Hyundai’s underbelly and grabbed on to whatever he could.
As the wheels spun, and the smell of burning rubber got into his nose, and that man at the window kept yelling, Lucan planked the fuck out of himself, pulling his shoulders off the asphalt and extending his legs out straight. With abs burning, and his ass clenched tighter than a pair of gaffer grips, he held on for dear fucking life as the car’s tires found purchase and there was a thump.
Like the man had jumped in front of her and she’d hit him.
Christ, what was wrong with this alley? Was there some kind of mow-down quota that had to be reached every night?
That was Lucan’s last thought as the Hyundai got rolling and he had to use every ounce of strength and each brain cell he had to make sure his cheeks didn’t get the polishing of a lifetime.
He couldn’t say he’d spent much time considering the relative attributes—or lack thereof—of his posterior region, but the one thing he was suddenly really fucking clear on?
He wanted to keep all of what his mama gave him.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Homicide Detective José de la Cruz knew it was time to head home for the night, but he looked around the murder scene one more time. But like anything had changed since two seconds ago? It was still a dump that had been co-opted by drug dealers, with a hole in its roof, a bloodied-up sofa, and enough coke residue on that busted-ass table over there to give a grown man marching orders. The body that had turned the couch into the biggest Band-Aid in the world had been removed about an hour ago, and the techs had finished up with their photography and sampling about thirty minutes before that. Now, it was just him and—
“It true you’re retiring, Detective?”
José looked across at the kid he’d been partnered with for the last six months—who was actually thirty and had a wife and two children at home. Treyvon Abscott was tenacious, a little bit arrogant, and smart as hell. With his perfectly tended fade and his navy blue departmental perma-fleece, he looked more like a Marine who was off duty than any kind of donut-munching homicide detective—
“Yup, I’m calling it a wrap on this job.” José snuck a hand under his blazer to pull his pants up over his dad-bod belly. “Sixty-four days left. Not that I’m counting.”
Trey walked over to the sofa and stared down at the blood-stained cushions. “Hate to see you go, sir. We’re going to miss you.”
In spite of the guy’s casual khakis-and-fleece action, which was worn no matter the season, no matter the weather, there was a formality to Treyvon that José approved of. Then again, when you felt tired in your bones and weary in your soul, you appreciated when someone two decades younger than you paid you a little respect.
One newbie last year had tried to call him Joey, for fuck’s sake. He’d nearly slapped that nickname right out the guy’s mouth.
“Nice of you to say that.” José closed his notebook and ran his forefinger over the cover. To think he wasn’t going to have to buy another of these spiral-bound steno numbers. “So I think we’re done here, Trey.”
“Yeah, not much to go on.”
“Nope.”
And yet both of them hesitated to leave. Which was the sign of a good detective, wasn’t it. Until you got your answers, you couldn’t let anything go.
Maybe that was why he was so tired after all this time. Too many questions with blank spaces after them, the catalogue of what he considered failures weighing him down. He was praying that retirement would get him not only a gold-plated watch from the department, but a cord-cutting from all that shit, a freedom, from everything that haunted him.
Dead children. Brutalized women. Innocent men who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Missing partners, who disappeared without a trace.
“Maybe the bullet will turn up something,” Trey said.
“Maybe.” But José didn’t think so. This was all very professional—and not as in the shooter’s gun skills, but the drug trade context of the murder. “Well, I’m gonna head back and type up the report.”
Trey frowned. “You sure? I can do it.”
“It’s my night to cover the desk. Besides, Quiana will appreciate the extra set of hands with that new baby of yours. How late were you out on scene last night?”
“I don’t remember.”
“And here comes the next generation,” José muttered. Then, a little more loudly, he felt compelled to add, “Be careful. This job can not only eat you alive, but your whole family.”
“You’re still happily married.”
“I’m lucky. I hope the same for you.”
“My wife understands me.”
“Just make sure you take time to understand her. That’s the tricky part.”
“Yes, sir.” Trey looked over at the worktable. “Listen, if you hear anything about that missing undercover officer, will you let me know?”
José frowned. “We have someone missing?”
“That’s the rumor.”
“Who?”
There was a pause and the younger man put his hands in his pants pockets, a physical parallel for whatever he was keeping to himself. “It’s a female. I don’t know. I just heard something. Maybe it’s a rumor.”
No, José thought. There were no rumors about that kind of stuff—and there was a protocol for all undercover assets. They had to check in every twelve hours to their administrative contact with a code when they were actively working a case.
“That fucking Mozart,” he muttered, thinking of the dealer who had taken over the city. “What else do you know? Did she miss her check-in—”
“I got nothing else.”
So that was why the detective didn’t want to go home. Trey was waiting for the other shoe to drop about the absent officer, and José wasn’t about to badger the guy into revealing his sources. He could guess how the intel drop had happened. The identities of undercover personnel were need-to-know only, but clearly the administrative contact was reaching out to homicide—and undoubtedly had some kind of personal relationship with Trey that made that easier.
José had had his own share of those phone calls over the years, and the fact that he didn’t get this one was yet another sign things were moving on without him already.
“If anything comes in,” he said, “I’ll let you know immediately.”
“Thanks.”
As their eyes met, they both knew what the “anything” was: A body. They also both knew that sometimes you didn’t even get that. There were plenty of missing people who stayed gone, and plenty of cases that were still cold. Take this scene. Yeah, they had a corpse, but you could bet your Dunkin’ that the ballistics on the bullet inside the guy wasn’t going to link to anything. And there was so much contamination here at the scene, they weren’t going to find many prints that were useful or fibers that meant anything.
Just one more murder in the brutal drug world.
“Go home,” José told the guy. “Tell that nice wife of yours I want more of her gumbo.”
“I will.”
Trey went to the exit and glanced back, a tall, strong man with smart eyes and a serious expression. “I’m gonna call you after you’re off the force. And not just for coffee.”
“Anytime you need me to look something over, I’m there for you.”
“Thanks, Detective.”
As the last partner he would have in his professional life walked out and hit the creaky stairs, José turned back to the sofa. The bloodstain was still red now, but by the time this ruined piece of furniture ended up in the dump, the mark would be brown. He pictured the couch when it had first been bought from some kind of showroom or depot, the pattern fresh, the cushions perky and pointed at the corners, the feet square on the floor. If inanimate objects could die, then this one had suffered greatly on the way to its final occupant’s occupancy, battered, stained even before the pool of blood, worn out.
José tried to imagine not doing this anymore, not standing in the middle of a murder mess, trying to put the puzzle pieces together—and he succeeded beautifully at the task. He was going to spend more time with his girls, help his wife out around the house, cheer at graduations, cut birthday cakes, light off fireworks, take care of the dogs. No more Christmases being missed or Thanksgivings lost.
Hell, if he wanted to celebrate Groundhog’s Day, he was going to do it.
Fishing in the summer. Homemaking beer in the fall. Cozy winters and cheerful springs.
No more dead bodies.
No more… missing bodies.
No more questions with no answers, no trails, no nothing.
Even though he didn’t want to think about his old partner, Butch O’Neal, he couldn’t help it. Coming to the end of his career had brought up all kinds of loose ends, and Butch was the loosest of them… maybe because it felt like that cop from South Boston, with his Good Will Hunting accent, and his hair trigger, and his incredible nose for the truth, was still with him.
José could still remember walking into his old partner’s apartment that last morning. As usual, he’d been braced for a body, not because someone had murdered the guy, but because Butch had drank himself into a stupor, fallen down in the bathroom, and cracked his skull open.
Or maybe overdosed because he’d added a prescription chaser to all the booze he pounded at the end of every night.
That particular bright-and-early, José had been aware that he’d gotten addicted to the cycle of peaking anxiety as he knocked on Butch’s door and let himself in, and then the sweet relief when he’d find his partner in that sloppy bed, passed out, but breathing. The ritual of aspirin, water, and throwing the guy into the shower had been part of his day.
Except that last morning… there had been no one there. Nobody asleep facedown in the sheets. Or slumped on the couch. Or one-arming the toilet.
And in the days and weeks that had followed, there had been… nothing. No clues, no evidence, no body. Disappeared. But given the way Butch had handled himself and the hard life that he’d led? José couldn’t say he’d been surprised.
Nah, he’d just been heartbroken.
He glanced back at that couch. “Nothing worse than trying to save someone.”
As the good Catholic he was, José had spent a lot of time praying for his former partner. He’d also missed the guy, and not just on a personal level. Like Trey, he wished Butch could have been here on this scene, be back at HQ going through files, be knocking on doors and asking questions.
O’Neal had been sucky at real life, but a helluva detective.
What a haunted man.
From time to time, José dwelled on him, and when the memories got too painful—which was almost immediately—he’d switch to imagining that Butch was living in a parallel universe on the flipside of Caldwell, with a beautiful wife and a bunch of strong protectors around him—
As a sharpshooter pierced through José’s frontal lobe, he groaned and stopped going down that rabbit hole. It was just fiction anyway, something his mind coughed up when he couldn’t handle the fact that there hadn’t been a body to bury.
Rubbing his face, he knew he was never going to get over all he didn’t know about what had happened to the guy. And it had always made him feel for those families who never got their justice.
“Where did you go, Butch,” he said out loud.
He was used to talking to his favorite partner, as crazy as he knew that was—but had long ago decided, hey, people used their dogs as sounding boards, right?
Heading for the door, he flipped off the overhead light, and closed things behind himself. Picking up a roll of yellow police tape that had been left on the floor outside, he ran it across the portal, stringing the official-business banner between a set of nails that had been driven into the jamb. Then he affixed a fresh seal to the juncture and signed it with his pen.
As he went to the stairs, he jacked up his slacks again and patted his belly. Maybe he’d take up running. Touch football. How about the basketball games at church on Tuesday and Thursday nights?
The stairs were stained and dusty—but what wasn’t in this building—and they squeaked and creaked under his street shoes. Then again, as he considered the roof damage to the crime scene, the fact that the structure was standing at all seemed like a miracle. On that note, he stuck to the wall side of the steps. When he came to the floor below, he—
A shuffling sound, like rats hightailing it across a bare floor, brought his head to the right. The apartment directly below the victim’s had a closed door. Unlike the rest of the units.
Surely someone had checked to see if anybody was in?
He walked over, curled up a knuckle, and went a-rapping. “Hello? Detective de la Cruz, CPD.” He reached into his jacket and got his badge ready to flash. “Hello, do you have a minute to talk to me about your upstairs neighbor?”
It was hard to believe anyone was inside, though. The dealer clearly did so much business here that he’d want to secure the entire premises—which, according to records José had searched on his phone, had been abandoned by its commercial real estate property owners, foreclosed on by its bank, and then been left unpurchased for the last eight years.
José looked across the hall. That door was lolling open. Turning back, he knocked again.
“Hello?” he said more loudly.
A muffled shuffle was all he got in return, which suggested inhabitation by something larger than a medium-sized dog—but if the person didn’t answer, there was no way he had probable cause to enter. It could be a cat, somebody taking cover, a man or a woman just living their life.
Which had to be entwined with that dealer’s.
“I’m going to leave my card.” He took one out of his wallet and pushed the stiff square into the doorjamb. “I’d like to ask you a couple of questions.”
José waited a little longer; then he kept going down the stairs. It was frustrating, but he would try again—and set up a surveillance outside of the address. The person or people in there had to leave for food at some point. He’d cross their paths sooner or later.
