No Hesitation

by Kirk Russell

  Wycher reacted. “Like Officer Fallon, I have a real hard time with your injury story but whatever. You get to skate, but at least we made sure it’ll follow you. And I gotta tell you, your supervisor asked me my opinion. I told him you’re a pill popper if I’ve ever seen one. He called and was worried, but I don’t think it was about you. He’s got ambition, your super. He wants to go to Washington and work at headquarters.”

  “Are you ever wrong?” I asked.

  “It’s happened, but I’m not seeing that here. By the way, I was in Afghanistan four tours.”

  “I heard that from a good old friend at Metro. He said you were stand-up.”

  “You checked into me?”

  “Why wouldn’t I, what with you trying to frame me and all?”

  Wycher shifted so he was more face to face with me. He was about to say something much harder but Fallon beat him to it. She asked, “Would you mind if we got a look at your injury? I’m asking because we’ve got an office pool going, and Wycher and I have a lot riding on no injury. If there’s nothing there, we win big, and I’ve got some things I’m looking forward to buying.”

  “And if you lose?”

  Neither answered, and Brady stepped in saying, “Paul, please don’t do it. At the FBI they know who you are. So do the people of Las Vegas. You don’t have to do any of this crap.”

  I stood and untucked my shirt, unbuttoned it, and took it off as I faced them.

  “Which side should we concentrate on when you turn around?” Wycher asked, “So we don’t miss it.”

  “You’ll figure it out,” I said.

  My scars are ugly scars. Jo said one is like a red spider as big as my hand with legs that reach around to my abdomen. Even Jo isn’t really used to the scars, especially that hard lump of scar tissue the surgeon wants to cut out.

  I turned around. Fallon made a sound, then they were both very quiet.

  Wycher asked, “Where did that happen?”

  “Bagdad. In a market.”

  He nodded but didn’t say anything. Fallon looked down.

  I said, “Look, I know I screwed up buying from Potello, but I’d known him for a decade before he started the business.”

  “I’m an asshole,” Wycher said.

  Brady said, “That’s the only thing you’ve gotten right since this started.”

  I put my shirt back on, and Wycher, Fallon, and I made a point of shaking hands. It didn’t mean we liked each other or ever would, but it was a way of saying good-bye.

  34

  When I got back to the office, Jace wasn’t there but Mara was waiting for me. Jace had signed out on something personal and was due back midafternoon. Mara was in his office on a conference call. He held a finger up to keep me there and wrote on a piece of paper he slid toward me, Give me ten minutes. Want to meet with you.

  I read that as a sign he’d already heard the DA wasn’t going to charge me. We met in a conference room fifteen minutes later. Mara had heard. The DA’s office called him earlier that morning.

  “What time?” I asked.

  “Between nine-thirty and ten. I didn’t call you because I knew Metro wanted that final interview.”

  “And you thought it was important they get it?”

  “I heard it went well.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  There are times when you look at the face of someone you’ve known forever and see someone different. He looked back at me then shifted his eyes to the table and back to me. I put it together that he’d anticipated this meeting and was once again ahead of me.

  “You’ve known they were unlikely to bring charges. Something got said to you before today,” I said.

  “I’d heard something. I didn’t want to give you false hope, and there’s no betrayal here, Paul. I never believed the charges, I’ve always been in your camp, but there are some hard realities.”

  “We’ll get to them. I’ve got a few more questions for you.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Who did you call this morning after the DA’s office called you with the news they were dropping all charges?”

  “ASAC Esposito.”

  “And who else?”

  “No one.”

  “Did you tell anyone on our squad?”

  “No.”

  “Did you talk to either of the Metro undercover officers before they interviewed me today?”

  “Officer Wycher called me.”

  “Before or after the DA called you?”

  “After. They knew charges had been dropped but wanted to proceed with the interview.”

  “And what did you say?”

  There was a long quiet in the room before he answered. We’ve known each other a long time; we’ve worked a lot of cases together.

  “I didn’t think it would do any harm. Wycher wanted the interview, and I thought about the bigger picture, our ongoing relationship with the Metro police, and thought it might be for the best. I regret that decision. It put you in an unfair position.”

  “That’s why you didn’t call me. Did you tell Esposito that’s what you were going to do?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “I may have told him.”

  “And he agreed?”

  “He said it was my decision, and by then you were probably in the interview.”

  “The two undercover officers, Wycher and Fallon, told me right away.”

  “They did?”

  “Then we went forward with the interview.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m just putting pieces together, Ted.”

  “I’m very, very glad charges got dropped, but there are big issues that haven’t gone away. The investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility will take months. You know that as well as I do. It limits what I can assign you to because there’s no guarantee you’ll be here a year from now to testify on cases. Or you’ll get suspended and I have to assign another agent and the chain of evidence gets weakened. We could get left apologizing that we don’t have the agent who started the initial investigation because he got suspended and decided to resign. But I don’t have to explain this. You know it as well as I do.”

  “So why are you explaining it, especially after you, Esposito, and I talked?”

  “Then there’s the question of whether you’re fit for active duty, a question that would have come up whether or not the Potello fiasco happened.”

  “What would you do if you were me, Ted?”

  “I’d look hard at my situation.”

  Mara had clean features, what people would call an honest face, even handsome, with a chiseled look and an easy smile. He was a popular supervisor, and as Wycher pointed out, he was ambitious. The FBI hadn’t yet reached the level of the incessant Internet question that would sooner or later infiltrate even the FBI: “On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your experience with Supervisor Ted Mara this morning?”

  We weren’t there yet, and agents would laugh at the idea, but we might get there. Mara will do well if we do. He’s made for that new world. I’m not.

  “We need everybody right now,” I said.

  “We do, and you’re right at the top for solve rate. I’d hate to lose you.”

  But you’ve been planning for it and you were surprised charges got dropped. So was Esposito.

  “Did you think I’d bought street drugs, painkillers?”

  “I never thought that.”

  “I want to believe that.”

  “It’s true. Grale, you’re the best investigator in the office. I’ve done everything I can to protect you. You’ve been a supervisor; you know the realities. I’m very glad charges got dropped. I wish I’d been there to hear the interview. Did your attorney ask for a copy of the interview video?”


  “She did.”

  “Can you get a copy to me?”

  “If and when we get it.”

  We both knew I’d never see a copy, but what went down in the interview room would get around. Brady, my lawyer, was very angry about it. She called it “demeaning and humiliating,” but I felt something closer to relief showing them my scars. What Wycher said was true—cops need to see things. I’m the same way. It’s why I had to drive to Panguitch Lake. It’s what I was trying to show Jace: you can’t do it all with a computer.

  “Tell you what,” I said, as we stood to leave the conference room, “I’ll call my attorney. She wants to talk to you anyway. Her last name is Brady. I’ll see if I can get her to call this morning.”

  “Good. I’d like to hear what happened.”

  “I’m betting she’ll call you.”

  When I called Brady and gave her Mara’s direct number, I also told her that Mara had gotten a call prior to the interview that charges were dropped.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said. “Why would he do that? I’ll call him right now.”

  35

  Jace

  Jace’s father left on her sixth birthday. Went to work one morning and never came home. For years she blamed herself.

  He left because . . . she had all kinds of reasons that had to do with her. She’d hunted for him and finally located him three years ago, but she still hadn’t contacted him. Eddie Blujace was sixty-two and working for a firm that repaired heavy equipment. She’d driven by the business, a warehouse with a metal roof and rows of vehicles and machines outside. Funny that it could still affect her the way it did. The hurt was still there.

  After her father left, her mother had boyfriends who stayed at the house. Mama didn’t like to drink alone, and to be with her you had to be fun. To be fun you had to smoke dope and drink, but still be a man later in the night. Some of the boyfriends lasted months, most only weeks, if that. They couldn’t handle the pace, but one, a tall, skinny guy with a made-up name, Jimmy Strings, made it almost two years.

  The summer Jace turned sixteen the skinny man raped her while her mother was passed out drunk on the couch with the TV turned up loud. He came into her room quietly, got in bed with her, and put a big bony hand over her mouth. She woke and fought him, his thumb holding her jaw shut. He squeezed her nostrils shut, and as she struggled and forced her head back, he kept whispering, “You gonna quit fighting?”

  She didn’t tell her mother. She hadn’t gone to the police. Where they lived, no one went to the police. What Jace did was leave.

  At the FBI, as she’d gotten to know other agents in the San Francisco office where she’d worked four years, she made a kind of painting in her head so they would understand what the streets looked like where she grew up. The painting included the type of people living there and why the streets were safest near dawn. She put the agents in her old neighborhood, but she never took them inside the house.

  But they’re FBI, they’re investigators, so they kept digging and asking, and now she was in a new office and the questions were there all over again. Same as when she and Grale went back to Ralin today, agents on the DT squad came back to her with new questions. Her current version was more heavily themed on an alcoholic parent. There were plenty of those to go around, so the agents absorbed that more easily. The full thing was, My mom was an alcoholic and messed up. My father left. I owe my aunt, my mom’s sister, everything.

  The night she was raped she went out her bedroom window and called her aunt Lilly, who took her in over the phone right there. That had been and still was the single biggest act of kindness anyone had done for her in her lifetime. Driving now through the summer dusk heat in Las Vegas, she could still easily feel what it was like when her aunt had said, “You’re going to come live with me.”

  Her aunt Lilly worked long hours and saw sixteen as more than old enough to be independent and responsible. That’s how Lilly had shaped her, independent and responsible.

  Jace took the next exit and went left at the underpass, not more than a mile from her father’s house.

  Way back when, but years after her father left, a local wannabe drug gang loomed large. She was bright and tough, but tough doesn’t protect you from gangs. Neither does bright. There was a twenty-three year old, Teddy Duluth, who called himself TD. He came up behind her, wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and said, “I want you to come work for me.”

  “Doing what? What do you do besides sell drugs?”

  “We’ll find something for you.”

  He never let up. He gave her presents, rides home, even tried to give her a car. He bought books he was told were things she’d want to read. He’d reach for her, touch her, put his arm around her, walk her halfway down the sidewalk with one of his dudes carrying her pack. He wanted to own her and pressed her to leave her mother’s house and stay with him. He’d give her money.

  That all ended when she moved in with Aunt Lilly. At nineteen, Jace had a high school diploma with midrange grades and a year and a half at junior college where she felt like she was fighting all the time to catch up. She’d known she wasn’t making it in a way that mattered.

  She quit junior college and walked into an Army recruiting station. She’d traded with the Army, figuring they’d keep their word mostly. A year in the Army for a year of college later. They taught her discipline comes from inside. You make yourself something. Dreams don’t make things happen. You do.

  Then college, and a conversation at an FBI recruiting station one afternoon changed her direction and her life. It wasn’t overnight, but when it finally happened, it gave her identity. It gave her purpose. She was working hard now to get better at investigating, but she was still messed up in some ways inside. Things she hadn’t dealt with, things that needed to be dealt with.

  In San Francisco her boyfriend became her fiancé. His wealthy liberal mother didn’t like him being with someone of mixed race, but they didn’t care. He had motorcycles and taught her to ride. They were riding in Marin on a beautiful morning when he got hit by a car and was now brain-dead. Still numb with shock, she’d visited him once a week until his mother said, “Never come here again. If he’d never met you, this never would have happened.”

  Why was all this coming up now? She knew why. She’d taken a career risk messing with Potello. How and where Grale took what drugs he needed was his to deal with, not hers. His goofball arrangement with Potello was nothing she could solve. So why had she done it?

  She’d thought about that a lot. In a way she was trying to protect Grale. She’d learned so much from him. Grale knew how to press and when to hold back in interviews. He had a natural feel for people. She knew she had it too but she was still learning things from him, how to move with the right question, how to be quiet and let people come to it their own way. Grale gave her confidence. He’d helped her. He wasn’t trying to make her respect him. He was trying to make her respect herself. There, that was the true thing. That’s why she liked him so much. That’s why she’d done that crazy thing with Potello. She thought about that with her heart pounding as she knocked on her dad’s door.

  36

  Jace

  When she approached the house, Jace saw a man in the backyard and in an instant knew it was her father. She leaned over a short wooden fence to call out to him.

  “That you, Eddie Blujace?”

  Maybe he didn’t hear, maybe it wasn’t him. She moved to the porch and rang the doorbell and tried it again before knocking. Her mother always said her father was a drug user, but her aunt Lilly said, “That’s your mother lying.”

  Jace was close to leaving when she heard firm footsteps. The door swung open, and she didn’t need the photo. It was her father.

  “If you’re selling something, no thank you,” he said.

  “I’m not.”

  “Okay, then?”

>   “Don’t you recognize me?”

  He looked. She saw his eyes change, his disbelief. She said, “Invite me in.”

  He stepped back to do that and said, “Kristen? Kristen, oh my God, child,” and she stepped in.

  He smiled but looked puzzled, as if he didn’t know what to do with her. He didn’t reach out and hug her. “This is a big surprise. How did you find me?”

  “I just moved to Las Vegas,” she said. “I live here now.”

  “You do? You work in Vegas? Doing what?”

  “FBI.”

  “FBI? My daughter is FBI?”

  She took him in as he looked her over. His face was smooth, his skin good, hair black and gray. She got the feeling he lived alone and liked it that way. He had the same cheekbones Aunt Lilly used to say were from Cherokee blood.

  “I recognize you, daughter.”

  He opened his arms, and it was an awkward hug but she needed it, and stronger emotions welled in her as he led her into his kitchen.

  “I’m sorry, Kristen, sorry for everything. I’ve thought about you so many times.”

  “Did you ever look for me?”

  “For a long time, I knew where you were. But . . . but I thought you were better off without me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because what was done was done.”

  “I don’t understand. Did you know I moved in with Aunt Lilly?”

  “I knew.”

  “Then why didn’t you reach out? She was your sister.”

  “Because I’d left, and time had gone by. I didn’t think you’d respect me, and I understood that. But I thought about you all the time, Kristen. I still think about you every day. You’re my big regret.”

  “They call me Jace.”

  He smiled. “They do that with me too. Are you married?”

  “No.”

  “You’re an FBI agent?”