Jonny's Redemption (Gemini Group Book 7)

by Riley Edwards

  Evie relaxed back into her corner of the couch and smiled.

  “All right. So now that’s done, tell me all about the beach and don’t leave any of the good parts out.”

  I thought back over the time I’d spent in Dewey with Jonny. There were a lot of good parts, there were some really great parts, but there was only one best part. And I knew that was what Evie was after.

  “He told me he loves me and I believe him. He thinks I’m beautiful and smart and funny and loyal. Oh, and wise.”

  Evie pursed her lips and her pretty golden eyes danced with humor.

  “Wise? That’s laying it on thick, don’t ya think?”

  “What does that mean? I’m totally wise.”

  “A wise-ass, maybe.”

  “Whatever.” I rolled my eyes.

  “I’m happy for you,” Evie whispered.

  “I’m happy for you,” I returned.

  My cell shrilled, interrupting our moment, and when my gaze hit the screen I groaned.

  “It’s Leslie,” I announced and tagged my phone off the coffee table.

  I’d barely swiped the screen to answer the call and I already heard Leslie babbling.

  “Hang on, Les, I need to put you on speaker,” I said loud enough for her to hear even though the phone was nowhere near my mouth. “I’m with Evie and you’re on speaker.”

  “Sean and Bonnie Lovette would like to visit The Farm,” Leslie cut straight to it.

  “Well, hello to you, too, Leslie,” Evie drawled.

  It wasn’t a stretch to imagine Leslie rolling her eyes to the ceiling and shaking her head. Leslie was all business all the time. Before she’d come to work for Evie she was with a record label, a highly sought-after label, full of stick-up-their-asses artists. The woman had been with Evie for years but still had not shed her all-business-all-the-time attitude.

  “Hello, Genevieve,” Leslie returned.

  I didn’t have to imagine Evie rolling her eyes, because there was no way to miss the over-exaggerated movement.

  “Did he say when he wanted to come?” I asked.

  “Next week. He has a break in his schedule and thought Genevieve would be more comfortable rehearsing there.”

  Sean was correct and it was nice of him to think of that, but then he’d been in the business a long time and understood why Evie had backed away.

  “Next week works. We don’t have anyone scheduled to come in,” I told Leslie.

  Evie gave me big eyes coupled with her brows scrunching up. I knew that look and I knew it well. She’d scheduled someone to come in and since that booking hadn’t gone through me, it meant it wasn’t a booking. It was an off-the-books session with Evie.

  “Actually, Les, before you call Sean’s people back I should double-check the schedule. I’m not at my desk. I’ll call you back in ten.”

  “Um-hm,” Leslie hummed. “Who’d you book, Genevieve?”

  “I don’t know why’d you ask such a thing.” Evie’s singsong lie was mixed with a low chuckle.

  “For starters, I know Bobby. She doesn’t need to be at her desk to look at a calendar. She has it in her phone and she doesn’t need the phone because she has everything memorized and does not make scheduling mistakes—ever. Which means, my dear friend, you gave her a look. My guess? It was the wide eyes and the eyebrow thing you do. Oh, that reminds me; I called your normal makeup artist, she’s free to do the concert. I assume you’ll be waxed and polished before you come.”

  “Sure,” Evie huffed.

  “Bobby?”

  “She’ll be ready,” I promised. “And I approved the wardrobe.”

  “Just a note for future reference, should this ever happen again. Never, and I mean never, suggest a pregnant woman wear light gray. I looked like an elephant. And flowers…um, no. Ditto on small prints.”

  “Noted. Bobby, call me back with some dates.”

  “I will.”

  I disconnected and pinned Evie with a stare.

  “What?” Her gaze went over my shoulder and I sighed.

  “All right, who is it?”

  “She’s so sweet, Bobby. And her voice…” Evie zoned out like she always did when she was thinking about music. “It’s magic. Low and husky and a little raspy. She plays the drums better than Sandy West ever did. Great breath control. She’s a throwback to Joan Jett. Leather-wearing, choppy cut black hair, gobs of makeup, loads of silver. The girl was born to be a star, she just needs to be polished.”

  “She’s a rocker.”

  “Girl, she is rock ’n’ roll. I want to sign her. She’s all for it but her manager is a money-grubber. Wants her with a label that he feels will elevate her status, not foster her career. He has no clue about the business. The issue is the manager’s also the boyfriend and he’s not real management. I want her to come to The Farm to cut a few tracks. But more, I want her here so we can show her a different side of this business. She’s young, just turned twenty and she’ll be eaten alive and spit out within a year she goes the way her boyfriend’s leading her.”

  There were a lot of reasons I loved working with Evie—this was one of the big ones. She spent more time mentoring than she did making money. The artists she signed to her label were treated fairly. Evie didn’t take the industry standard as far as royalties went; her contracts were heavily in favor of the artist, the way it should be. Evie was well-aware of how many hands were in the coffers. Agents and managers got their cut. Assistants, stylists, crew—they all needed to be paid and that came out of the artist’s cut. Therefore, Evie took very little and offered a whole lot.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Penny Cash.” Evie smiled and nodded her excitement. “Straight up, Bobby, that’s the name on her birth certificate.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh at Evie’s enthusiasm.

  “Okay, that’s pretty rock ’n’ roll. If you’re serious about giving Penny the full experience I’ll talk to Sean, see if he’s down to come when she’s here. He might be the King of Country but there’s a lot he could teach a Rock Princess.”

  “Yes. That’s brilliant,” Evie rushed out. “We’ll go old-school, show Penny and Sean what we’re all about.”

  “Does that mean you’ll perform?”

  Evie groaned and gritted out, “Sure.”

  “Awesome. I’ll call Colleen. And if Sean and Penny are good with it, we’ll do a whole set.”

  Colleen was Evie’s publicist. She was going to be thrilled to have something new to promo for the benefit concert.

  “This is the part I miss,” Evie said softly. “The music.”

  “I know.”

  “I want Penny to see this part, the good side. I want her to remember what it’s like when you strip away all the shit and it’s just you and your guitar, your words, and your people.”

  “You want that for yourself, too, Evie, and that’s okay.”

  “I do and I get it every time I step into the studio we built. That’s my real. That’s where I’m safe to be Evie. My life is now free of the shit. It’s all about the music. That’s what I was talking about earlier, what you give me, what we built. You gave up a lot to give me my soul back.”

  Evie was full of crap, I didn’t give up anything.

  “No more gushy, I have calls to make and a studio to run.”

  I pushed off the couch in preparation to do just that but I had one more thing to tell Evie.

  “You are the bestest best friend ever.”

  “I know.” She winked and I moved toward the foyer but stopped when Evie called my name. “You are the bestest best friend in the whole world.”

  “I’ll remind you of that when I schedule your wax and polish.”

  “I don’t want a polish,” she shouted after me.

  “Too bad, your elbows are looking ashy, girl.”

  “They are not.”

  “They are,” I yelled and opened the door.

  “They’re not! Chasin would tell me.”

  “No, he wouldn’t, h
e loves you. You could have a face full of acne and he’d swear he didn’t see a single pimple.”

  “Oh. My. God. Do I have a zit?”

  I shut the door behind me and walked to my car, laughing my ass off knowing Evie was right then waddling to a mirror to inspect her face. Further, I knew she’d then waddle her pregnant ass up to the studio in less than ten minutes and tell me to schedule her a facial.

  Her skin was flawless but sometimes it was fun to rile her up.

  Seven minutes later, she was in my office. Fifteen minutes later, I scheduled her a facial. Then I got back to work. It sucked that lunch with Jonny had been canceled. But dinner and mind-bending sex after he fed me made up for our missed lunch date.

  19

  “You should head out,” Jameson said from Jonny’s doorway.

  Jonny glanced up from the report he’d been reading to the clock on the wall. His friend was correct; Jonny should’ve left ten minutes ago. But Jonny couldn’t stop going over the case file.

  Anderson Bull.

  Missing.

  Instead of getting up, Jonny asked, “Did Candy Bull explain why she contracted Gemini Group to find Anderson?”

  “She said she didn’t think the sheriff’s department was taking Anderson’s disappearance seriously,” Jameson answered.

  Candy Bull had officially reported her husband missing after he hadn’t come home two nights in a row. However, she’d called the station the first night just after midnight after she’d exhausted all other avenues—hospitals, boss, friends, the list of people she’d called was long. Candy had then only waited three days after she made the report to call Gemini Group.

  There were lots of reasons why a husband didn’t come home and ninety-nine percent of those reasons had nothing to do with foul play. Not that the deputy who took the report would’ve explained those to Candy, but any cop who’d been on the job long enough had taken at least one missing person report about a spouse not coming home only to find out the missing party wasn’t missing—instead they’d left the relationship or they were messing around doing shit they shouldn’t have been doing.

  Jonny didn’t know Anderson all that well. He was also intimately aware a man could act a certain way in public and be a total douche in his home. But even knowing that, Jonny didn’t think Anderson was that kind of man.

  “She doesn’t trust KCSD,” Jonny surmised. And he couldn’t blame her one bit.

  “She didn’t say outright, but yeah I got that feeling. And just to say I wouldn’t have missed it even if I hadn’t read Anderson’s arrest report.”

  So Jameson was picking up on that, too. Jonny made a mental note of it. “When Anderson was arrested, I was fairly new to the department. But even green, something didn’t sit right. We live in a small community, I grew up here, so even if I didn’t know Anderson personally I knew of him and what I knew was, he was straight. We went to school together, we didn’t roll in the same circle, but when you go to a school with only six hundred students—a lot of those you’ve been coming up with through the grades since kindergarten—you know pretty much everyone. So I knew him even if we weren’t close friends. He was one of the smart kids—no sports, no parties, or at least not at any I attended. He literally went to school, kept to himself, did his work, and left. But everyone liked him; he wasn’t a social outcast, he just wasn’t a jock or a partier.”

  Jonny paused to gather his thoughts, hating what he needed to share with Jameson. “I couldn’t prove there was anything wrong. It was just a gut feeling. But Clifford made that traffic stop, Dick Dillinger rolled out as his back-up, and another deputy, Keagan showed up. Three units for a traffic stop.”

  “Three dirty cops,” Jameson added.

  “Three dirty cops,” Jonny unnecessarily confirmed.

  “So you’re saying the charges were false?”

  “I couldn’t prove it,” Jonny repeated. “But I’ve thought on it a lot over the years. And as I got more experience on the force, I thought on it more. And after Dillinger went down after fucking with Nix and McKenna and the department cleaned house, Jarrod Clifford, Dick, and Keagan all got fired, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how a strait-laced kid went to college, stayed clean, got good grades, graduated college, got married, held down a good job, and throughout all of that never once had a single run-in with the law. But one day Anderson just up and decides to start selling heroin? No debt, no drinking problems, no gambling, no reports of him carousing, no shitbag friends. That doesn’t jibe, not by any stretch. So, yeah, I’d say the arrest was dirty. I think Jarrod Clifford pulled Anderson over and either he planted the drugs or Dick did.”

  Jameson stared at Jonny, the scrutiny of that gaze uncomfortable. It was a look of an honest man outraged by the indecency of others. The uncomfortable part of that was Jonny had been caught up in a shitstorm he couldn’t stop nor had he had any control. There was a difference between knowing something and being able to prove it. And Jonny hadn’t been able to prove Sheriff Dillinger was guilty of anything other than being an asshole. The man was a monumental prick but he was a smart one. Same for Clifford, Dick, and Keagan. All three assholes, none of them good at their jobs but not bad enough that Jonny could go over the sheriff’s head and approach county officials—which would’ve led to Jonny’s life in the department being hell but he would’ve done so if it meant their removal. And since Jonny had nothing substantial or concrete he’d been forced to weather the storm.

  “Was there heroin missing from evidence?”

  “Come on, Jameson, we both know shit was going on back then that would make it easy for any of those three to get their hands on the drugs. All I know is, Jarrod Clifford pulled Anderson over for speeding, said he smelled alcohol, and ordered Anderson to get out of his car and performed a field sobriety test. According to Dick when Anderson exited the vehicle a glass pipe was in clear view and a baggie of white powder fell onto the ground. That was enough to search the car where Dick found the rest of the heroin. Yet Anderson lawyered up, and less than an hour later his attorney demanded a breathalyzer and Anderson blew a zero. Sober as a nun. The attorney also ordered a drug test. Twenty-four hours later, that test was performed and it came back clean.”

  “Says he pled guilty to possession.”

  “Lesser charge. He did ten months instead of what he was facing for possession with the intent to distribute.”

  “Fucking hell,” Jameson snapped.

  “He’s not the type of man who’s gonna walk away from his wife.” Especially not Candy. Jonny was familiar with her as well. She’d always been one of the nice girls, somewhat quiet.

  “Anderson’s been missing three weeks, Jonny. No activity on his cards, no missing cash, and nothing was taken from the house he could sell. Micky dumped his phone and there was nothing out of the ordinary on it. Texts to his wife—all normal. Clear as day he loves her. He communicates with his boss, his brother in Wisconsin, and his father in Pennsylvania. Other than that, no one. Unless he’s got a second phone we don’t know about he doesn’t have friends he’s close with. Anderson Bull left work and vanished. Again, that was three weeks ago, so I didn’t have a good feeling about this before you filled in the story. Now I really don’t have a good feeling about this.”

  Neither did Jonny, but he didn’t verbalize his confirmation. Instead, he thought about the players involved and didn’t want to have to do what he was going to say next but it needed to be said.

  “Keagan died last year, liver disease. That leaves Dick Dillinger and Jarrod Clifford. We need a full work-up on both of them.”

  “Micky can—”

  “You sure that’s the way to go? Time can heal a lot of wounds but it hasn’t been that long and Dick fucked with Micky’s family, fucked with her, and his father nearly killed her. And this is no slight to her. She’s tough and our best shot of getting what we need, but maybe we need to find another way.”

  Jameson's face was tight and so was his voice when he answered, “We’ll talk to N
ixon tomorrow. But just to say, if he doesn’t think she should be involved, I’m taking a vacation day when he tells her and I suggest you do the same. Micky will lose her mind if she’s blackballed from the investigation, then she’ll go around our backs and do it anyway. And maybe the best way for her to move past any residual feeling about what Dick did to her sister is to let Micky do her thing and nail the son of a bitch.”

  Seeing as Jonny’s gut told him Dick and Jarrod were involved in Anderson's disappearance, there was a good possibility McKenna Swagger would have the opportunity to do just that.

  “Right,” Jonny muttered and stowed the file in his desk before he stood. “Appreciate you staying and giving me your time.”

  Jameson didn’t move from the doorway as Jonny collected his keys and phone in preparation to leave. He’d been running late when Jameson showed, now he was seriously late getting home to Bobby and he still needed to pick up dinner on the way or go to the grocery store. And since Jonny was eager to get to his woman, he wouldn’t be wasting time walking the aisles of the market.

  “We’re a team,” Jameson said and Jonny rocked to a halt. “Different than your brothers on the force. Any time, any way, we have each other’s backs. Part of that means giving each other time. In other words, you don’t need to thank me.”

  Jonny stood immobile. The sincerity of Jameson’s words blanketed Jonny, making him believe in something he never thought he’d fully be a part of—a brotherhood.

  “’Preciate that, too.” Jonny cleared his throat before he continued. “It’s late and you’ve got a wife and son to get home to, I should let you do that.”

  “And you’ve got a woman to get home to.”

  That he did. A woman who was going to grill him the moment he walked into the house. And for some reason that didn’t bother Jonny.

  “Yeah, Bobby’s waiting.” Jonny smiled.

  The men said their goodbyes at the sidewalk. Jonny waited until he was in his truck to call his uncle. He didn’t want to make the call, he didn’t want to care, he wanted to wash his hands of his mother and be done. But he couldn’t. Years of conditioning made that impossible. And she was still his ma. Somewhere deep down, under all her pain, the woman who once upon a time was a good woman, who loved him, was still there. Or at least he hoped she still was.