by Jay Allisan
I don’t want to think about what I’d done if I hadn’t had that Glock.
“Catalina gives you the blackmail,” Paddy says to James, “and you warn her what’ll happen if any copies get out. You tell her Cheyanne’s got the keycard that’ll get her to Presley, knowing full well she’s gonna kill Cheyanne. That’s part of your plan. Can’t leave that loose thread hanging. You tell Cat where to find Cheyanne and off she goes. Then all you gotta do is sit back and wait.
“Must’ve been a nice couple days for you, thinking everybody was dead and your empire was safe. You still feeling safe now?”
James is so still, so silent, he could be in shock. I think he just doesn’t care. He’s probably planning how he’ll buy his way out of this. Thinking we’ve missed a piece.
Paddy leans back in his chair, a bastard satisfaction in his eyes. “We got you on everything. Human trafficking, the Speakeasy murders, the Garrison. Everybody gave you up. Scarlett. Cheyanne. Presley. We got Catalina’s blackmail too, by the way. She took a cue from you and sent failsafe copies to Benny Afternoon. And you wouldn’t believe how much Shapiro had to say once we dropped Catalina’s name. She cried for hours about the scared teenager she should’ve helped more. And she was real knowledgeable about the cocaine.”
James twitches.
Paddy laughs. “Hey, that’s on you. You made her complicit, thinking it would make her cooperative. Between her, Presley, and Cheyanne’s SIM card, we got all the details on those secret cargo shipments and where they went. While you been sitting here of your own volition, the BRPD executed a search warrant on your warehouse and cleared it out. Sounds like the street value’s close to a hundred mil. And in case you still don’t think we can tie it to you, we also found coke in your club. What do you wanna bet it’s gonna match up with the stuff in the warehouse and the sample we got off Sonny’s corpse?”
“I’d like to call my lawyer,” James says tersely.
Paddy circles the table. “Just as soon as we get you processed. Get up. You’re under arrest for possession of narcotics with intent to sell. I’ll have to read you the rest of the charges down in booking so I don’t forget any.”
James straightens haughtily. Paddy grabs him by the collar and slams him down onto the table. He wrenches James’s arms behind his back and cuffs him. He glances up at the one-way mirror.
Dixon lays a hand on my shoulder. Everyone’s looking at me.
“You can have a moment,” Dixon says.
Josie releases my hand. I ease out of my chair and turn to the door.
“Do you need assistance?” Whale asks.
I shake my head. I leave the viewing room and step into the hall. I take a breath. Then I let myself into the interrogation room.
James is still facedown on the table. Paddy jerks him upright, holding him by the arm. James’s black gaze meets mine, and a slow smile creeps across his face.
“Shirley. How lovely to see you again.”
I close the door behind me and take delicate steps forward. I can’t hide my injuries, and James watches my careful movements with unabashed delight.
“I sent you flowers,” he says. “Though I don’t suppose you would have received them. They went to your funeral, after all.”
“Thanks for thinking of me,” I answer.
I grip the back of Paddy’s empty chair. James leans forward, as far as the table and Paddy will allow. His breath hangs moist and sweet in the space between us.
“I was only ever thinking of you,” he whispers lecherously. “What Carl Winters did to your husband… he deserves to be punished. Don’t you agree?”
I don’t answer. James smiles.
“I could have helped you. I could have given you anything you wanted. The jury could have found Carl sane. His guards could have found him dead. I could even have arranged for you to kill him yourself.”
I clutch the chair until my knuckles go white. James leans closer.
“Do you trust the system? You shouldn’t. Just because a few police officers and some hookers turned their backs on me, don’t presume I’m weakened. I have people everywhere. I could have had Carl taken care of, but now I’ll see to it that he goes free, while you go to jail for what you’ve done. Now where’s the justice in that?”
Paddy hauls James backward. “That’s enough, you fucking ass.”
He moves past me toward the door, dragging James after him in a clumsy stumble. James is still smiling at me.
“There is no justice,” I say.
Paddy stops, James dangling in his grip like a marionette. I let go of the chair and turn to face them. “There’s nothing anyone can do to rectify what happened to Max. He’s dead, and it’ll never be okay. But I can be.”
There’s moisture in my eyes, and there’s a hole in my heart that will never be filled, but for the first time in years, there’s also a sense of peace. Of a burden lifted. I understand why he did it now, why Max sacrificed everything to try and save Maria. I understand because I did it too. And no matter what brought him to the bridge or me to the hotel room, no matter what outside forces came into play, we made a choice, both of us, to try and save the people we love. And I can’t begrudge either of us that decision.
Because once upon a time Max saved me too, the day he came into my life.
James is looking at me like I’ve lost my mind, and I realize I’m smiling, tears spilling down my cheeks. I wipe my eyes, and before I let my hand fall I press my lips to Max’s wedding band.
“I wouldn’t expect you to understand,” I say to James. “You’ve never loved anything but money. You don’t know what it’s like to have someone take your family from you, to lose something that’s truly worth killing for. Well, I have. And let me tell you, anyone worth killing for is worth living for, and I’m not going to disappoint him again.” I look at Paddy. “Any of them.”
“A lovely sentiment,” James spits. “But surely—”
“What happens to Carl isn’t my concern. What happens to me, and to the people I love, is. That’s what I’m living for now. See you on the witness stand.”
Paddy tightens his hold on James and opens the door. I call out before they leave the room.
“One last thing. Just a little detail, really, but it’s been getting on my nerves.”
James smiles coldly. “Do enlighten me.”
“My name.”
“Your name.”
“It’s Mordecai.”
“So—”
“So don’t call me Shirley, you son of a bitch.”
James sends me a withering glare but Paddy snorts, and as the door swings shut and I’m left alone in the room, I get the feeling that Max would be proud of me.
PADDY WALKS with me down to the basement. When we reach the storage room I immediately lie down on the bed, taking the pressure off my wounds. My eyes close for a moment, then open at a familiar sound. Paddy’s holding handcuffs.
“I gotta,” he says quietly. “That door doesn’t lock, and now that you’re mobile we can’t leave you down here unrestrained. Give me your wrist.”
He cuffs me to the bed frame.
“When’s it my turn to get booked?” I ask.
“When you’re healthy enough to go into holding. Another week or so.”
There’s a chair beside my bed but Paddy doesn’t take it. He just stands there, not even looking at me.
“So,” I say. “Josie and Whale.”
Paddy rubs a hand over his jaw. “Yeah. Didn’t see that one coming.”
“Did Dixon know they were with Internal Affairs?”
“Hard to say. He must’ve known something, but he looked pretty damn surprised when Whale gave him a folder with Shapiro’s name on it. Thick as a dictionary.”
“What are they going to do now that the Shapiro investigation is over? Are they staying on with homicide? They probably can’t go back to IA once this all goes public.”
“I don’t know that they’re thinking that far ahead. After the last couple weeks eve
rybody’s ready for a vacation.”
Paddy sighs, his eyes closing. He sinks down into the chair and rests his head in his hands.
“How are you doing?” I ask softly.
He laughs. “Fuck, don’t ask me that. I got no fucking clue how I’m doing, or what I’m doing…”
“The Garrison connection must have been hard for you.”
“Wasn’t easy. Eight years I’ve carried Kris’s death, and it still… fuck.”
He looks exhausted. Beaten. He’s weathered so much more than just the past couple weeks, holding fast because he had to. Because I needed him to.
“You were a good partner,” I say. “For Kris and for me. Maybe not so much for Scarlett…”
“Kid was never my partner. Cocky little bastard.”
“But he did good in the end.”
“Yeah.”
Paddy shakes his head, his voice so low, so muffled, I almost miss it. “I should have been there.”
“You were there,” I say. “You’ve always been there for me.”
“I shoulda gotten there sooner. I shoulda checked up on you. You shouldn’t have had to go into that hotel alone.”
“Paddy.”
He just shakes his head. I reach for him but the cuffs stop me short. I lean up against the pillows so at least I can see him better.
“Paddy, you have been… I don’t even know how to say it. You’ve been the one constant in my life when everything else fell apart. You’ve gone so far beyond anything I could have ever asked of you, as a partner or a friend, and I could never tell you how much that means to me, because it means everything. And I know I’ve never said it and I know I’ve taken you for granted, but I’m so grateful, Paddy. If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t have made it.”
He sits, hunched over, his shoulders swelling and deflating with every breath. When he straightens his eyes are glossy.
“I’m gonna tell you a story,” he says. “About Max.”
“Okay,” I say hesitantly.
Paddy gives me a ragged smile. “It’s a good one. It’s from when he first joined the force.”
He drags the chair closer to the bed and props his elbows on his knees. He looks down at his hands, then up at me. “You remember your first day?”
I stare at him incredulously. “You mean the day you handcuffed me and locked me in the trunk of your car?”
“Time-honored Old Town tradition,” Paddy says. “Keeps the rookies in their place.”
“Yeah, I can still picture the satisfaction on your face when you shut the lid. But what does that have to do with Max? Nobody did that to him because…”
I blink dumbly at Paddy. He nods.
“This is the one story Max would never tell me,” I whisper. “He said it was a secret. A guy thing.”
“He was just embarrassed.” Paddy smiles to himself, his expression perfused with nostalgia. “The night before his first shift we took him drinking, me and Kris. We’d just met him that day, and I gotta tell you, neither of us thought he was cut out for homicide. He was so innocent, so goddamn optimistic. Thought he was gonna save the world.
“We started out downtown at some shitty bar, doing shots. Kris only had a couple, but Max was trying to keep up with me, and I was going hard. He wanted to impress us and we were egging him on, and by the time we left for the next bar he was blasted.”
“With Max that would only take three shots,” I say, and I can’t help but smile. “Especially on tequila. Was he doing tequila?”
Paddy grins back. “You bet he was. So we’re outside the bar, waiting for the cab, and he starts rambling all this touchy-feely crap about what a great city Briar Rose is, how me and Kris are the best, and how he’s gonna make us proud. And then—” Paddy laughs. “And then he turns to Kris, and he grabs his face with both hands and bursts into tears.”
I wince sympathetically. “Aww. Max.”
“Like I said, we barely knew him, so we didn’t know crying was standard when he gets drunk. We’re feeling kinda bad so we walk him around the block, trying to get him to shake it off, but he’s just hanging off of Kris and bawling. We turn a corner and Max just stops, won’t go any further. I’m almost out of patience, but Kris is being Kris, all considerate and gentle, and Max is fixating on him. He touches Kris’s face again and then he says, no joke, he says, ‘I never took your watermelon’ and then he pukes all over Kris.”
“Oh God. He didn’t.”
“Sure did.”
“Poor Kristoph.”
“Yeah, Kris wasn’t too thrilled about that, but the best part was Max tried to hug him right after. I had to hold him back while Kris cleaned up.”
“Thus ended Max’s evening,” I say.
Paddy grins. “Not quite. Kris caught a cab and I said I’d make sure Max got home safe. Thing is, Max couldn’t remember where he lived.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I wish. I asked him for his wallet so I could get his address, but he couldn’t find it. I told him to wait outside the bar while I went inside and looked, and he nodded like he understood, but I got this feeling like he was on his own planet. I did a quick search inside the bar, no wallet, and when I came back out Max was gone. Like fucking gone.”
“So what did you do?”
“Ran up and down the streets like an idiot, looking for him. Must’ve been twenty minutes before I found him four blocks north, sitting at a bus stop and staring at his shoes. I’m fucking pissed by then, and I go over and scream at him. He just sits there, not saying a word, and when I run out of names to call him I ask him what he’s doing. He looks up at me, so goddamn sad, and he says that he’s going home. To Tennessee. Says his parents are dead and his girlfriend dumped him, and he’s been thinking about leaving for a while.
“I tell him that’s a dumb idea. He just finished four months at the academy and he’s got his first day of work in the morning. Max shrugs, says it doesn’t matter. I ask him why not. He closes his eyes and says he knows we don’t like him. He says he’s sorry he intruded. And then he starts sobbing.”
I shift uncomfortably against the pillows. “You know, this started out as a funny story but I don’t think I want to hear—”
“Yeah you do.” Paddy waits, and when I don’t protest he continues. “I got him on his feet and we called a cab. He still couldn’t tell me where he lived, so I took him back to my place and set him up on the couch. He’d stopped crying by that point, but he didn’t look like he wanted to be alone. I told him I’d sit with him for a bit and we wound up talking for hours. He gave me his whole life story, and I realized he was just really fucking lonely. And it got to me. I could blame it on the booze, but I know it was just Max. He was smart and brave, but he was never the best for that stuff. But he had the biggest heart of anyone I’d ever met.”
I let out a shaky breath and Paddy glances at me. I give him a weak smile. “Keep going.”
“I convinced him to give the force a chance, at least for a couple weeks. At the end of a couple weeks he still wasn’t sure he belonged, so I talked him into staying a little longer. And a little longer. Kris had him over for the holidays. I helped him move into a new apartment. It took a while, but for the first time in a long time I think Max felt like he was moving forward. Then one day he comes into work with this stupid look on his face, and Kris starts ribbing him about falling in love. So he tells us about the girl he met at a hardware store.”
I close my eyes. Paddy’s voice goes soft.
“I know you got this idea in your head where Max saved you, but the truth is you saved him too. You gave him the best years of his life. Maybe you couldn’t get to him out on the bridge, but you were a good wife and he loved you. He loved you from day one and he never stopped.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I whisper. “Why now?”
“Because it’s all I got left to give.”
The chair scrapes against the floor and I open my eyes. Paddy’s standing, looking down on me. He takes a step back.
“I’m leaving,” he says. “I’ve been doing this too long and I got nothing left. Not for this job, this city. Not even for you.”
Dread sinks in my stomach and I struggle upright. “Paddy—”
“I’m flying out tonight. Don’t ask me where.”
“But you’re coming back, right? You’re coming back.”
He doesn’t answer.
I stare at him, ashamed, afraid. My heart thrums. “Are you leaving because of me?”
He turns toward the door.
I panic. I tumble off the bed but the cuff around my wrist holds me back. I jerk hard on it but nothing gives. The bed doesn’t budge an inch.
“Paddy!”
“Watch your stitches,” he says hoarsely. “Don’t wanna hurt yourself.”
“Paddy, wait, I’m sorry, please don’t go—”
“I got a deal for you with the district attorney. Two years in prison, possibility of parole after one. Keep your head down, okay? Do it for Presley.”
“Paddy, wait—”
He opens the door, and I strain against the handcuffs with all my might. He glances back, just for a second. Then he walks away.
“Paddy. Paddy!”
Silence. My chest hitches.
“Paddy?”
50
IT’S HOURS later when I hear a knock.
“Hey Mordecai, guess who—oh. Uh. Is this a bad time?”
I glance up from where I’m curled on the cot. Benny’s in the doorway, one foot in the room, one out. Judging by his grimace I look as miserable as I feel.
I push tear-damp hair out of my eyes and sit up. Benny plasters a smile on his face and comes in, plopping down in the chair.
“You look great!” he says brightly. “And I love your new digs. Very dungeon-esque. I mean, not that you’re in prison, because you’re not, at least not yet, which sucks, by the way, but for a scary room with no windows in the basement of a cop shop this place is really very—”
“Benny.”
“Am I rambling?”
“What do you think?”