by Daniel Pyne
“Right.” The man nodded, staring out at the freeways. “Fuck those guys,” he said after a while, and it sounded sad. “It was a helluva thing.”
Finn glanced at the platform clock. “I’ve got to get back to her.”
“You’re the picture man.”
“Yeah.”
“You know what’s in the sack?”
“I could make a pretty good guess, yeah.”
“Don’t.” The man stood, hitched his pants, but they fell low again, and he held them up on one side. “Just leave that shit there and forget about it, okay?” He looked at Finn with quiet eyes. Emphasis on “forget.”
Finn nodded, put the sack on top of the journals, and walked back down the suspended staircase to the blue line platform, where a southbound train was just pulling in.
—
“HOW CAN YOU THINK Albert will be better raising your kids, if he was the one who pulled the trigger?”
Willa, petulant, replied that Riley didn’t know anything about her father, or raising kids. Both were true; Riley felt her case going sideways again. The Möbius tangle of cross-intentions and misunderstanding that Willa and her father had created kept looping back on itself.
The public defender said, “Are we done?”
Willa wasn’t, though. “You’ve killed somebody,” she said, and stared at Riley, intent. The shootings were not something Riley wanted to get into, but Willa took her silence as an opening to continue, dismissive: “So you know what I’m talking about.”
Riley tried to deflect, “Your little girls—”
“Ma’am, I’ve been gone so long and so many times they don’t even know me,” Willa said, without rancor. “And you of all people should understand about how the triggers I’ve pulled and the lives I’ve watched bleed out—how that changes you and what that might have done to my soul.”
Riley didn’t. She hadn’t experienced it in that way. But before she could say anything, Terry Lennox had opened the door and come in, hot.
“What is going on here?”
The public defender shot up out of his chair, startled.
“We’re done,” Riley said simply, because there was no point in pressing Willa any further. Even if Riley got something more than vague threats on a phone to offer him, Lennox would never be able to see beyond the narrow window of his personal and institutional bias; this was his case, he had everything he needed to win it.
She pushed away from the table and rolled past her presumptive fiancé without even looking at him, out the door, into the corridor, and she was almost to the security door when Lennox caught up with her.
“Riley—hold up—hold up!—What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Don’t worry. Your ass is covered, Terry. I didn’t record anything, I didn’t misrepresent my status on the case. Congratulations on your big bust.”
“That’s not—”
“I don’t know what’s more discouraging,” she said, fiery, pushing her chair faster, hoping that Lennox would have to break into a run, “the fact that you didn’t want me in Homicide before I got shot, or the fact that now that I’m crippled you want to pretend that it’s all about that.”
The desk officer saw her coming and buzzed her through. But she had to slow for Lennox to open and hold the door. “That’s not—” His indignation was already starting to splinter with the usual tumult Riley knew she caused for him. She stopped, turned her chair to face him down. He made a point of calming himself. “Look, you’re a doer, Riles, not a thinker.”
“What?”
“That’s a compliment.”
“Is it?”
“Go-go-go. You know? That’s you. And it’s what I love about you. Hell, a year ago you were applying for the SWAT team. I mean. Homicide is slow, it’s cerebral, you’d be bored stiff—”
“I don’t see a lot of deep mental activity going on in Homicide right now, Terry. Just saying. Or you wouldn’t be letting Gunnery Sergeant Willa Ko take a fall for a killing she didn’t commit.”
Twice Lennox started to say something, then thought better of it and stopped. Riley just waited; watched him go through the half a dozen mental calisthenics he needed to prevent himself from saying something to her he’d regret. They’d known each other forever, it had always been the same. She wondered if he had always just assumed that she would change into the woman he wanted her to be, needed her to be, or was it just his foolish pride (and hers?) that had kept him from giving up. Finally, sighing and mumbling as part of an exasperated exhaling of breath, he surrendered:
“What do you want from me?”
—
MALLORY, Finn finally remembered, was the name of Charlie’s girlfriend.
Windows rolled down to embrace the last rays of sun before it sank into a gathering chill of four-o’clock haze, Finn had the Fiat wedged into what wasn’t really a precinct parking space, and was idly fiddling with Charlie’s phone while he waited for Riley, flipping through the messages, the contact list, the text messages, keen to test what Riley had told him about how sometimes it’s not what you see, but what you don’t see.
And what he wasn’t seeing was the name of Charlie’s girlfriend, Mallory, in any of those lists and archives.
He flipped back and forth between the screens. No contact information for anyone named Mallory. No call history. No text thread. Where’s the girlfriend? It wasn’t credible that Charlie wouldn’t have her queued up somewhere, easy to access.
Maybe, Finn considered, she was listed only by her last name, though, considering Charlie, and all the Charlie-like guys Finn had ever known, women—girls—were never allowed the formal importance that accrues from a family name.
Nickname?
Maybe Charlie had Mallory under some kind of alias so that Willa couldn’t Tiger Woods him. Or maybe there was another, secret dedicated phone they used to talk to each other exclusively.
Or, he realized, a different, dedicated app.
On his hunch, Finn backtracked to the main page, sorted through the app icons. There were several screens of them. At least two dozen games, alone.
And a German chat app called Sicher. Which was . . . eccentric, for Charlie Ko, to say the least. And which Finn opened to discover had but a single contact name, with scores and scores of secure messages to and from a “King Friday.”
Not Mallory, surely. Was this the guy Riley was undercover trying to get closer to? “King Friday” rattled around his brain, seeking purchase. He was sure he knew it from somewhere. Who’s the detective now? Finn thought, pleased with himself. Me. I am.
Dates, times, pickup, delivery.
Drug deals? Some other criminal enterprise?
The last message Charlie received from King Friday read:
we need to talk about u leaving
—
THEY USED THE CAPTAIN’S OFFICE, because it was quiet and private and unused on weekends. It looked civil. Anyone glancing in through the glass would have assumed, perhaps because they’d heard something about it from Lennox, or from someone who’d heard him bitching about it in an unguarded moment, that maybe Riley was finally coming to terms with her condition, and with Lennox.
In fact, they had been slowly spiraling out of each other’s orbit since the day they met, were now more estranged than not, and all that held them together was the photographic evidence Riley was showing him, copied and chronicled on Riley’s phone, including Finn’s candid-camera shots of Don Mexico from their close encounter in the condo.
“Anybody could have tampered with your informant’s phone over the past several weeks,” Lennox said. “This is not evidence that will hold up.”
“I know that. But maybe Mexico went back to the—”
“And camera boy broke into court-sealed condo. I should be filing a warrant.”
“Did Mexico go there on your ord
ers?”
“No, but there are about a thousand legitimate reasons for him to go back to an active-case crime scene.”
Riley shook her head. “Mexico went to the condo looking for Charlie’s phone. Had to be. There’s a dirty cop in our department, it comes from more than one source. Taking payoffs. Contract killings. Protecting this human-trafficking network. Why did you think they took me off book?”
Lennox said, “I made a call, Riley Mac. They told me they had shut you down six weeks before the shooting.”
Riley was quiet. Trust was one thing they always had.
“That they hadn’t heard from you since. That you might have gone into business for yourself.”
“Tell me this, Terry, what’s the protocol for protecting your cover in the event you stumble across the possibility of an inside source, but have no way to know his reach, or his rank?”
Lennox closed his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose with a pained expression.
“I can’t prove anything, if that’s what I’m hearing in your tone. Putting me on inactive has made it impossible for me to prove.”
“Well, what are you asking me to do?”
“Gee. I dunno, Terry. I guess that depends upon how comfortable you are having one of your detectives on some very bad guy’s payroll.”
“How can I be sure,” he said carefully, “that it’s only the one cop?”
She hesitated, another ugly Terry truth dawning on her. “What does that mean?”
Lennox dodged her question. “And if I accuse my decorated investigator, Don Mexico, and you’re wrong . . . he’ll have my badge, he’ll have my job, which he’s been after since day one—and I can basically kiss my whole career goodbye.”
Riley stared at Lennox, expressionless. “Bummer.”
Frustrated, Lennox stood up. “What’s happened to us?”
“Nothing. I don’t know. Maybe you having to ask what happened is what’s happened.”
“You don’t mean that,” he said. She could see in his eyes that he was realizing: She does. His next move was too predictable, “Look, if you’re afraid that I’m not going to stick with you—help you get fixed—”
“I’m not broken,” she said, “I’m just changed.”
Lennox wasn’t hearing her. “If I do this for you,” he said sullenly, “will you stop with all the getting-your-job-back nonsense and reconsider what I’m—”
“—For me?” Riley cut him off. “I don’t want you to do this for me. Do it because he’s a criminal, Terry—do it because he covered up a murder, almost two—do it because he’s on the fucking dole, working for a monster—” Her eyes were on fire. “You wonder about me? Who are you? Who the fuck are you?” She wheeled and stormed out.
—
FINN THUMBED HIS TEXT onto the glowing Sicher app screen:
i found this phone and all ur texts—
whats it worth to u?
Whatever vague worry he might have felt about what he was about to do got trumped by the thrill of doing it. The safe remove of digital communication had suckered him in.
He pressed Send and looked up to see Riley come out of the station’s side entrance, powering herself around the switchbacks of the wheelchair access ramp toward where he was waiting, through the twilight mist halos of parking lot halogens, leaving Lennox holding the door in her wake, his body language strangely impotent, like he didn’t know whether to chase after her or what. The anxious moment where Finn wondered if they’d patched things up passed, and as she got closer he could see that Riley was pretty steamed. Finn thought if he were Lennox he’d let her cool down a bit, too. He slipped Charlie’s phone in his pocket, deciding not to tell her just yet what he’d done, in case his amateur sleuthing put him on the wrong side of a Riley typhoon.
He clambered out to help her transfer into the car. “How’d it go?”
Riley said nothing, and used him like a valet: ignored the transfer board that he’d gone to get from the back hatch, and, as the door warning dinged like a timer, using only the handhold inside the door, violently muscled herself out of the wheelchair and into the passenger seat as if she’d been doing it this way all her life, and then lifted her useless legs in after.
While Finn collapsed her chair and slid it in the back cargo space, she slammed the door shut, the dings ceased, and she waited impatiently for him to drive her away.
“That good, huh?”
He punched the clutch and shifted into reverse. The station side door had closed, and Lennox was back inside his safe haven.
“You want to talk about it?” Finn asked, after driving for a while.
“No.”
But later, on the 405 South, tires ticking over the concrete expansion gaps and the cityscape flooded woolly with the fog’s dream glow, she said, “I’ve been wrong about everything,” and left it at that.
9
RILEY’S ANGER hadn’t abated much as she rolled along the shiny hardwood in front of the ball-return racks at Seal Beach Penny Lanes, interrupting the happy hour bowlers and intent on Albert Zappacosta, who was down on his knees, inflating a gutter guard for a rowdy party of little kids.
Albert looked unhappy to see her. “You upset the girls yesterday.”
“Really? What will they think when they find out you let their mom confess to killing their dad?”
Riley said it softly, and no one but Albert heard her; he scowled, rose stiffly on old-man legs, and hurried off behind the scorers’ tables, to short stairs that split the spare-ball shelves and led up to the shoe desk and concession, stairs where Riley couldn’t follow him.
“Hey,” she said, irritated, “don’t do that.” She raised her voice so that now everyone could hear, kids and their mothers and the early-bird leagues, and a pro giving a lesson. “Really? So is this you running away, Albert? Running from a cripple in a wheelchair?”
Albert sagged and slowed. Everyone was watching him, and Finn was waiting at the entrance, blocking his escape. Like a parade balloon deflating, Albert broke down. Quietly sobbing, making them wait until he pulled himself together, they went into the tiny, grimy coffee shop, Finn and Albert opposite each other in a booth, Riley at the end, wheelchair tucked under.
“She loved him.” He brooded on Riley, ignored Finn. “After everything that K-town loser did. Willa still wanted him back.”
“And she thinks you couldn’t abide that happening?” Riley said without conviction.
“Is that what you think?”
“What we think isn’t the issue,” Finn said.
Riley shot him a warning look. This was her interview. Finn folded his hands and sat back, chastened.
“Okay, sure, I did it. I did it, gladly.”
“Did what?”
He flapped his hands.
“You think she did it,” Riley disagreed.
“He was an unfaithful meat sack and a user and I shot him dead.”
“Willa loved him,” Riley said. “And you love her. So, no, you didn’t. But you’re both responsible for this clusterfuck because you both actually believed the other capable of shooting Charlie Ko. Don’t lie to me, Albert.”
The silence that followed was broken by the clattering of pins falling. Albert stalled. “They let cops be in wheelchairs now?”
“How many cops do you know?”
“Thousands. If you count TV.”
Riley smiled a little. “It’s part of a new cost-saving program, putting wheels directly on the detective instead of buying squad cars.”
Finn laughed out loud and Riley shot him another warning look. Albert measured his words. “I got no concept of Willa’s life over there, you know?” Albert said. “Me, I never left the goddamn base. If my wife—Willa’s mom—was alive . . .” He stopped himself. His hands trembled. “The things these kids have got to do to survive. The lives she’s watched blown
away.” He looked away, at nothing. “My wife would’ve known what to say. I can’t help her with that. I don’t know who she is anymore.”
“You do. She’s still in there.” Finn knew as Riley said it she could have been talking about herself.
“Well she didn’t see him clear enough. Charlie goddamn Ko. No, she was two thousand miles away. Didn’t see him step out on her. Didn’t see him squire that treacherous lady-bitch. Didn’t see him scared, curtains pulled, crybaby, going on and on about how hard it was going to be to get out from under it all. People pulling him all directions.”
Finn watched Riley’s eyes narrow as she listened to this and realized, “You gave him the gun.”
“Willa came back from her third tour,” Albert rambled, on a tangent, “I told her not to go back to him.” He blew out air. “It wasn’t just the racial thing, either, that they’re from two different worlds, I mean—you could see he wasn’t a person she could count on. They don’t have the same values we do.” Albert let that suffice, as if the weak disclaimer But, hey, I’m not a racist was implicit. “The hair, the clothes, the guy was so stuck on himself . . .” Albert stopped and took a breather and stared at Riley blankly, as if transported somewhere else, perhaps a moment in time where he thought it all could have gone a better way. Riley waited. “So I went to see him, yeah. Night he was killed. I brought the girls. Could have been to make sure I wouldn’t . . . you know . . .” Albert reset himself, then. “To talk to him, to make sure he would try to make a go of it. That this wasn’t just another one if his . . .” Again his voice trailed off as he seemed to rerun events through his head. “He swore it wasn’t. He said he was gonna change things and get out.”
“Out of what?”
“I gave him her gun, I did that. He kept saying how the drug stuff was the tip of a much bigger, more dangerous iceberg. How it wasn’t going to be easy shaking everyone off his back.” Albert looked from Riley to Finn. “Charlie was freaked out. His drug dealer, the big, big boss, whatever, I wasn’t sure. His goddamn girlfriend.”
“He was scared of his girlfriend?”
“I guess they have a cop on their payroll, too, you probably know about that. But now I think back on it, Charlie just kept saying he was afraid of her, he was afraid of her.”