by A. J. Downey
I asked, because I wanted to know, “Anything on my case, yet?”
He lit up and eagerly launched into telling me his news, “Actually yeah, we made an arrest today.”
I perked up, “Really?”
“Ah, yup. We got the guy who posted your address online, he’s being held on inciting violence in the third degree. Did a great job incriminating himself, despite being Mirandized, and the ADA is not only willing to prosecute, he’s pretty sure that the hate crime qualifier he’s dropping as the cherry on top is going to stick. Dude is looking at a ten to fifteen year bid for this with more charges potentially pending.”
“Let me guess,” I said quietly, appetite completely fled. “Those additional charges would be in relation to whoever killed Sami and shot me if it’s discovered that they acted on his posting my address…”
“Yeah.” He looked me over. “Look, I know it goes without saying, but we’ll get that guy, too. We just…”
“Have nothing to go on…” I said and nodded. “I didn’t know him. I mean, I could talk to a sketch artist, but that’s the best I could do.”
“You remember more of what he looks like?” he sat forward in his seat and set his Chinese food aside, whipping out a pad of paper and a pen from his inside jacket pocket.
“He was white, and skinny. Almost nerdy looking with light brown hair, I think.”
“You think?”
“Yeah, I mean, he had his hood up on his sweatshirt, and I only saw his eyebrows. I know that’s silly, that sounds so stupid…”
“No, give me everything you’ve got Chrissy. You’re doing great.”
Bolstered by his small words of praise, which was silly when you stopped to think about it, but much needed given my awfully fragile psyche. I hated that I was this fragile and this vulnerable, but I also had to admit to myself that it was okay to be that way right now. That anyone in my position would be.
Still, I hated it. I was a successful defense attorney, defending my clients to the best of my ability and I was angry that I was judging that in a negative light all of a sudden. That I was questioning everything about it, because even though I knew in my heart that Miranda Maguire was innocent, that Skip really had abused her, and awfully so, I was the one lying here and Sami… It felt like I had killed my best friend. The guilt of that was overwhelming, a cloying, thick and choking thing that welled out of the center of my being like blood from a cut.
Tony was incredibly patient at the second sudden and fierce onset of tears when they came. Stopping, waiting them out, and snatching fresh tissues from the dispenser by the hospital room’s sink and bringing them to me as they were needed.
Did you know that you really needed both hands to blow your nose? I mean to get a really good blow in to clear things up. I found out, but only by virtue of being limited to the one. Tony didn’t judge at all, or even call a nurse when I tried to laughingly complain about it. He just went over by the door, put on a pair of the blue gloves with practiced precision and came over and helped me.
I wondered to myself why I hadn’t tried harder back then, while at the same time tried really hard not to think too much about where he’d learned to put on those gloves with such practiced ease because when I did? A fresh storm of survivor’s guilt raged and I hated myself even more for having been so selfish in asking her over, for having been so afraid and it turns out, for good reason.
“Thanks,” I said as he stripped the gloves off and into the trash. He used hand sanitizer from the wall and winked at me.
“Don’t mention it.”
“Afraid all the other cops and detectives will make fun of you for being a soft touch?” I asked.
“Something like that,” he agreed and came and sat back down.
“I… I don’t think I can do anymore today,” I confessed and he shook his head.
“Wasn’t going to ask you to. You’ve been at it the better part of an hour and you’ve given me way more to go on than most witnesses give me in twice that time. I’ll go back to the station and type up your witness statement and bring it back here tomorrow. We can go over it, you can make any corrections you need or want to it and when you’re satisfied, I’ll have you sign off on it.”
I nodded, “Sounds good.”
We were quiet for a time and I finally broke down and said, “I never thought I would ever see myself on this side of the process.”
“No one ever does, but you’re taking it like a champ.”
“You think so?”
“I do.”
I didn’t know why that meant so much to me, but it did, so I said, “Thanks for saying…”
“Just telling you the truth.”
I nodded and sniffed and he asked, “You done eating?”
“Yeah, thank you. I’m sorry I couldn’t eat more, I mean, it was good I guess I’m just not that hungry.”
“I wouldn’t be either if I were you, and it’s fine. It really is.”
“Thank you for bringing it. It was a nice change from the hospital’s food, which really isn’t all that bad, honestly.”
“Jesus, if you don’t think this food is bad, then I should really get the doctors to reexamine that head of yours.”
I laughed and it broke off into another moan. “Don’t make me laugh!” I admonished and he smiled, those damn dimples in full force.
“Sorry.”
“Yeah, not sorry,” I accused and he smiled bigger.
“Yeah, not that time. Sorry, it was worth it to see you smile.”
I couldn’t help it, I smiled again and said, “Now for some reason that I believe.”
Chapter 5
Tony
“It’s a brick fuckin’ wall, McCormick and yeah, we can release it to the media, but I need to put you guys back in rotation unless something breaks. We got more cases that need handling than we do detectives.”
“What about the threat?” I asked.
“Did it pan out?” Captain Roberts looked to Jaime which pissed me off, but Jaime had to tell the truth and the truth was…
“No. It was a dude in a black jacket and grey hoodie, but he kept his hood up and his head down. Paid in cash, and the clerk at the florist said the guy wrote the card right in front of her and that the card said ‘Get well soon, we miss you’ not the actual threat. She swears by it, but he could have slipped the threatening message in when she wasn’t looking. Wouldn’t be that hard.”
“Prints?”
“On the envelope, just the nurse’s, the florist’s and Tony’s. On the card, just the nurse’s and Tony’s.”
“Goddammit.”
“My thought’s exactly, Captain,” I said grimly.
“So we don’t even know if it’s the same guy?”
“Both are white males, similar descriptions but not exact,” Jaime said.
“Similar, what’s that mean? Be more specific.” The Captain was glowering at me and I sucked in a breath to answer him but Jaime, ever the good partner, drew the captain’s fire off me.
“Both around the same height, same build, but different hair and eye color.”
“That’s not exactly similar.”
“You know how ID’s from witnesses can be, and the surveillance video at the florist’s was in black and white, so no help there.”
The Captain shook his head, “It’s not enough. Look, I know the guy is still out there but this department has nothing to go on, nor does it have the resources to keep at it. I hate to say it, but we can’t do anything until somebody fucks up. You know what I mean?”
I did, but I didn’t have to like it. It’d been three days since I’d seen Chrissy at the hospital over shared Chinese. I’d been working every angle of this hard, hoping something would break, but no dice and here we were, predictably, having the plug pulled on us and I couldn’t say I blamed the Captain for doing it. The case was cold and impossible to follow up on. He was right, we just had to wait for some other shit to happen and hope this guy fucked up. He was also right in that we
didn’t have the manpower to devote to protecting Franco. At least not on the clock.
I had a couple of ideas on that front, but nothing I could or would share here or with Chrissy. She didn’t know about the threat and I didn’t want to tell her unless I had to. I didn’t like it, but one of the unfortunate bits about our criminal justice system and society as a whole was that it was, and probably always would be, purely reactionary. You couldn’t do shit to prevent shit – it had to happen and then you could move in and deal with it.
The shitty thing about that, is even with how horrible and catastrophic the thing that’d happened to Chrissy was, we’d gone as far as we could go with it. We were at a solid dead end with no leads and nowhere to go, which meant we had to hurry up and wait for something to happen somewhere or to someone else.
This was the part of being a cop we never talked about because we loathed it just that damn much. The hopeless, helpless, and powerless feeling didn’t jive with being the great white knights we all secretly were proud as hell of being. It felt good to get out in the community and do some real good but this part was becoming all too prevalent and we could all agree across the board it sucked hard. Especially when the vic was genuinely a good or nice person who deserved justice. Despite her field of defending the scumbags, like us and not being able to choose the victims, Chrissy didn’t always get to choose her clients. It was how the system worked and as much as she was reviled for some of the douchebags she defended, she was still one of the good guys, like us.
I could see that. I knew it from the talks that we’d had on the subject. Chrissy had gotten into criminal justice for the same reasons I had, and I’d liked her for that then and I could tell, she was one of the rare ones, one of the ones that’d held onto her morals and her ideals. Who clung fiercely to the tenets of her profession; everybody deserved legal counsel. Everybody deserved the best defense she could provide.
My tenets were much the same, to protect, to serve, to bring justice by executing my duties and much like the lawyers further along in the system, I didn’t get to pick the vic. The street thug who spent his life bangin’ deserved just as much justice as Samantha Lynn Hayworth. Justice was blind, and so we had to be. It was one of the things we understood, both as cops and as Indigo Knights.
I couldn’t wait to get out of the Captain’s office once his edict that we had to refocus our efforts had come down. We were almost done with the day and I needed to head to the Ten-Thirteen and call together what club could make it in. I sent a mass text on my way back to my desk and Jaime looked me over appraisingly.
“What?”
“Coloring outside the lines on this one, eh?”
“I was never very good at staying in ‘em when I was a kid, either.”
He leaned in and whispered harshly, “You watch your ass with that shit, Youngblood. That’s the kind of thing that gets IAB sniffing around.”
“None of us are on the clock, you old dog. None of us are doing any investigation into things we shouldn’t, either.”
“Eh? So what are you thinkin’?”
“Protective detail.”
“Think she needs it?”
“You watched the news or looked at Facebook or Twitter lately?”
“Fuck no, I like my sanity intact and I ain’t got anger issues. No need to start that shit now.”
I huffed a laugh, “Good point.”
“You headed to the hospital?” he asked, already knowing the answer.
“Nope, headed to the Ten-Thirteen, first. Figured the lady could use a decent dinner. Trinity Gen ain’t known for its gourmet food.”
“Hmm, well, I figure that you’ve broken enough bad news for this investigation. I think I’ll head over to Trinity Gen and be the bearer of the bad news so you can try and cheer her up with some decent chow. She seems like a nice girl.”
“Yeah, it’s a hell of a thing happening to her.”
“Ain’t that the god’s honest truth?”
I rode to the Ten-Thirteen, and watched Jaime turn out of the garage in my side view in the opposite direction heading for Trinity Gen. I didn’t think I could get her exactly ‘round the clock coverage, but we could do our best. I’d see what the guys would have to say about it when I got there. I pulled into the alley by the bar and felt pretty good about the number of bikes lined against the side wall of the place. I went around front and into the bar to a packed floor.
Skids caught my eye from behind the bar and gave me a hearty chin lift and then jutted it towards the back where the room typically reserved for private parties of ten or more was. I nodded and headed that way, pushing past a few couples waiting to be seated.
I opened the glass door to the fishbowl to just about everyone here. Seven men sat around the table. Four in leathers and colors like me and three still in their work wear.
“Any of you boys on meal break?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Poe said raising a hand.
“Kay, I’ll try and make it quick as soon as Skids and Reflash get in here.”
The door opened and Skids slid through saying, “Reflash’ll be just a minute.”
“Reflash is right there,” Golden said, thrusting his chin at the door.
Skids got the hell out of the way and Reflash, a short and stocky Hispanic dude with curly hair shorn short on the sides and back pushed into the room and demanded, “Where’s the fire at?”
He was in his fifties, but barely looked a day over forty-three, he just aged real damn well that way. His medium brown eyes were sparkling with good humor, but shrewd at the same time, and even though he’d been fire, he might as well have been a cop. He didn’t miss a damn thing.
“Ha, ha, fucking, ha,” Backdraft uttered with absolutely no sense of humor. He hated Reflash’s bullshit puns almost as much as I did. That one had actually been pretty mild, though so I was pretty sure something else had put a bug up his ass. I liked Backdraft, if there was any guy in the club that I would consider myself closest to in any regard, Backdraft was it. I was wondering what was up with him but didn’t feel right in asking with everyone here. That, and I knew Backdraft was a big boy and capable of handling shit. If he needed me, he knew where to find me.
I looked him over and raised an eyebrow, an invitation to talk later but he didn’t catch on. Instead, he leaned back in his seat and propped his boots on the table, glowering in general. His hazel eyes sparking under his dishwater blonde hair only a couple of shades darker than mine. He was in need of a cut, he just had better not let the guys at his firehouse do it like last time. It’d turned into a half shaved head going out looking all manky to at least one call. Funny as hell and the whole thing posted to YouTube for posterity’s sake.
“Hey!” Reflash barked, “Get your fuckin’ feet off Skids’ table, man! You’re in a fuckin’ restaurant, not your house. What’s the damn matter with you?” Backdraft dropped his feet to the floor immediately and put up his hands, shaking his head and ignored the exchange. Something was definitely up his ass… I really wanted to know what, but couldn’t risk losing focus on why I’d called everyone here just now. Chrissy’s life sort of may depend on it.
I looked around the table and sighed, and laid it out for them. They listened and Golden let out a low whistle.
“You sure drew the shit end of the stick with this case. I had no idea you’d drawn the Franco thing,” he said.
“Look,” I said, “I don’t know, and I don’t care what you guys have heard, or what you think about the whole Maguire shit-show, but I can attest – Chrissy is one of the good ones and she legit doesn’t deserve this shit.” Silence met what I had to say as the rest of the guys mulled it over.
Leave it to the lawyer to come to the aid of one of his own, “I’ve come up against Chrissy Franco a few times in court, and Youngblood is right. She is one of the good ones, and I was and am sorry as hell what happened to her.” Yale looked slowly around the table, his deep brown eyes making contact with every man who looked back, which of course, ev
ery single one of us did.
“So what are you asking exactly?” Backdraft asked and some of his moodiness diminished.
“Take it in shifts, post up outside her room when we can, the threats are credible, I can feel it, and I can’t be everywhere at once.”
“Who’s with her now?” Skids asked.
“Jaime,” I answered and he nodded. “He’s breaking the bad news about the investigation grinding to a halt. I’m supposed to head up there with some decent food when I’m done here and relieve him.”
“I’m in,” Reflash said, “I’ll go fix you something up to take with you. You too, Poe.”
“Thanks,” Poe said. “I’m in, too, but I’m going to have to get going in a minute, break time’s almost over. Just get a text pool going and I’ll let you know when I can cover.”
“Thanks,” I said and nodded.
“Shoot, you know I’m in,” Oz said and ran a hand over his bald head. Half black and half Cuban, Oz had been a correctional officer at a maximum security prison originally. He’d signed on with the ICPD and worked the jail, now. He was also a beefy motherfucker. We were on the same basketball team in the spring and played regular matches against the fire guys.
“Thanks, Oz.”
One by one the guys knocked knuckles around the table and declared themselves in. I nodded. Yale asked, “Anybody from that firm of hers been up to see her yet?” I shook my head and he snorted, a disgusted noise. “Figures, most of them are a bunch of bottom feeders.”
“I know that her friend’s family has been up, they tried to see her when she was in ICU but hospital policy is no one but immediate family.” I shook my head and said, “At any rate, thanks guys, I fuckin’ owe you.”
“You don’t owe us shit,” Skids said and got up. “I gotta get back to the bar, I’ll let you boys know when your food’s up.”
“Thanks, pops!” Poe called after him, green eyes sparkling. Skids flipped him off over his shoulder. Poe ran a hand over the top of his medium-brown hair and grinned hard with a perfect set of teeth only braces could have given him. The lot of us laughed. Skids wasn’t any of our daddy, he just liked to act like it sometimes.