by Mallory Kane
At least there was one problem he didn’t have, yet. It was obvious Sin hadn’t reported to the BPI that she’d had sex with the subject of her investigation.
As he clocked in and ran his mental inventory of drinks, mixers and supplies needed for his shift, he saw Nina signing in on the computer. “Hey, Nina,” he said, keeping his voice even. “Who’s working today?”
“Sorry to disappoint you, Rick,” she said with a wink. “It’s just me and Connie. Sin doesn’t come in until—” She dug a sheet of paper out of her pocket and waved it toward him. “Schedule. Okay, here she is. Sin should be in at three and work until midnight. I’m working until midnight but Connie gets off at three o’clock, when your girl comes in.”
“Thanks, Nina,” he said, smiling at her. “You’ll do just fine.”
Nina giggled as she headed toward the tables, looking for drink and snack orders.
Rick smothered a curse as he began his shift by mixing Pimm’s Cups for a young couple dressed in what could only be described as prom wear. Then he continued unloading and shelving bottles, a job that didn’t require thought, which was good, because no matter what he tried to think about, his thoughts kept turning back to Sin.
What she’d done was inexcusable. She’d spied on him. She’d betrayed him. The only question he had for her was why. Not why she was investigating him. He knew the answer to that. It was her job. She was a cop and cops did their jobs. His question was why had she slept with him? Was she hoping he’d tell her his secrets?
“Richard? Hi.”
He started at the sound of the familiar voice. It was Montoya, sliding onto a barstool in front of him. He wore a sad smile as he laid down two twenties. “Join me in a toast to Johnny?”
Rick’s jaw clenched. “No thanks.”
“Come on, Richard, don’t you remember? Today’s his bir—” Carlos bit back a sob, then spread his hands, palms down, and sighed. “His birthday. I promised myself I wouldn’t do this.”
Rick wanted to yell or punch something, or both. He should never have been even halfway nice to the man. He should have closed the door in Carlos’s face when he showed up and he should have never taken Johnny’s jacket or asked him questions about his brother. Now Carlos considered the two of them connected by Johnny.
“I tell you what I will do,” Rick said, glancing around to be sure no one was in earshot. “I’ll let you give me that information you were so hot to share with me the other day.”
Montoya gave him a disgusted look and leaned forward. “Here? Not on your life. You had your chance.” Then louder he said, “Give me two shots of Courvoisier, one for you and one for me. It was Johnny’s favorite.”
Irritated, Rick acquiesced. He pulled down the bottle and poured two snifters. “There you go,” he said grudgingly. “I’m not supposed to drink on the job.”
“But it’s a special occasion,” Carlos said, picking up one of the snifters and swirling the golden liquid.
Rick looked around. It wasn’t particularly busy yet. “I’ll drink your damned toast, Carlos. But I’ve got questions and I want answers.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw one of the ever-present bodyguards watching him. He needed to calm down or he’d be the one answering the questions.
Montoya ran his finger around the brim of the shot glass, then dipped it into the amber liquid and brought it to his mouth to taste. “It’s smooth.”
Pulling his bar cloth off his shoulder, Rick began polishing the shiny wood. He did his best to look as though he was talking about the weather. “I want to know what happened to Johnny. How he died. How in hell did he even get near any heroin, much less the bad dope?”
“And you think I know the answer to that? If I did, don’t you think I’d have told the police?”
Rick shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know you. I didn’t know Johnny. For all I know, he could have been doing H.”
“Johnny?” Carlos laughed, a deep, genuine laugh. “No. You didn’t know your brother. And that was your loss.”
Rick’s heart ached. “I screwed up,” he said. “I know now that he had to leave, for himself and for me. I get that he thought my life would be better if he were gone. And now I’ve got the rest of my life to regret not knowing him.”
“You work with Detective Devereux Gautier, right?”
“Dev? Sure. He’s in the Eighth, just like me.”
“So you know he has a shelter for kids.”
“Yes. I’ve done a little off-duty investigating for him at times. Once when a killer was targeting his Thibaud Johnson scholarship recipients. What about him?”
“Johnny worked with him. They had plans to build a second shelter, near the Warehouse District. Johnny was going to run it. I didn’t want him to be involved.”
Rick stepped away to fill an order for one of the waitresses, then fixed a drink for a guy who sat down at the bar. He half-hoped that Montoya would leave, but the other half of him was relieved that he’d stayed. Rick hadn’t intended this to be a conversation about his half-brother, but he was willing to listen if Montoya wanted to talk.
“Why didn’t you want him to run the shelter?” Rick asked curiously when he came back to stand in front of Montoya’s barstool.
“Why not indeed,” he said. He looked up at Rick with a small shake of his head. “It’s the same as with a lot of lovers. I guess I didn’t want anything to change. I knew how he was. He’d get all caught up in helping the kids. Not that he didn’t have enough love to go around. He did, but I was selfish. We argued a lot. It was my fault. In fact, on the night Johnny died, we’d had a big fight. He finally told me that with or without me, he was going to open the new shelter with Gautier. He stormed out of the house.”
“How did you find out?”
Carlos nodded slightly. He understood Rick’s unspoken question. “No. The department didn’t know that Johnny and I were together back then. As a CI, I was briefed on his death,” he said, “just as I was on the other deaths from contaminated heroin. In fact, that’s when the media named the deaths the Bad Dope Murders—when the ME ruled that Johnny’s death was a homicide.”
“So how did you hear that he’d been killed?”
Carlos swirled the snifter, then watched the liquid slide down the glass. “I—followed him.”
Rick stared. “You followed him? You know where he went? Who he talked to? Did you see anything?”
A couple sat down at the bar near them. Rick acknowledged them with a nod.
“Listen, Richard. I can’t talk any more here. There are eyes and ears on me everywhere I go. Can we talk tonight? At your place? I’ll bring a bottle of Johnny’s favorite—” he nodded toward the snifters “—and continue this conversation. There are things we both want to know. You need to know about his death. I’m dying to know more about his childhood and his life before we met. Would you—would you be willing to do that?”
Rick looked away, rubbing his face. He saw Earl walk by and glance curiously in their direction. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. That’ll be fine. You might be right about talking here. You know my apartment. It’ll have to be after I get off at midnight.”
“I don’t usually walk around that late. There are gangs that like nothing better than to beat up somebody like me, you know.”
“Fine. Here’s my key. Go on in. Make yourself comfortable. And, Carlos, if you see Sin Stone, don’t let her in, okay?”
“If that’s the way you want it,” Carlos said, pocketing the key and lifting his shot glass. “Salud, Richard,” he said, then threw back the shot. “Whew. Go ahead.” He nodded at the other glass.
Rick shook his head. “There are eyes and ears on me too. Take it yourself.”
Carlos threw back the second shot and stretched his lips wide across his teeth. “Smooth,” he croaked.
“One more question, Carlos.”
“I told you, I can’t talk any more here.”
“Why was he killed?” Rick watched Carlos, waiting to see if he would answer.
“He tried to stop Beau.”
“Stop Beau?” Rick whispered. “From what?”
“I’ll see you tonight.”
Chapter Fifteen
Lusinda had spent the night at her own apartment near the Garden District because she had no place else to go. She’d called O’Reilly again to explain about being locked out of her apartment by the landlord. She’d tried—she’d really tried—to tell him about Rick finding out she was a cop, but she couldn’t. She had to talk to Rick first. She figured he hadn’t said anything to his bosses either, because if he had, they’d have been all over the Bureau of Public Integrity and O’Reilly would have been all over her.
She got another cash advance on her credit card and managed to get her apartment back, so it was business as usual, except that she was walking on eggshells, wondering when Rick was going to out her as a cop. Working her shift was brutal, with Rick alternately staring at her and ignoring her, and the other waitresses teasing her about having an argument with him, as if they were lovers.
Which they were not! What had happened between them was an aberration. The dark rain, the drowsy day and their close quarters had combined in the perfect proportions to cause an explosion. That the explosion had manifested as sex was just a toss of the dice. It could have easily culminated in a shouting match.
Finally, it was midnight, the end of her shift, and Lusinda breathed a sigh of relief. She could get away from Rick and get back to her apartment at the Ace Hotel. When she got her handbag out of the locker, her phone was dead. She’d get home and plug it in before she fell asleep.
As she passed the second-floor landing on her way up to her place on the third floor, she glanced at Rick’s door. It was slightly ajar. A sliver of light cut across the floor of the dimly lit hallway. Had he been in a hurry when he left for work and not pulled the door closed? That wasn’t like him.
Lusinda’s police-trained brain assessed the situation. Approach with caution. Someone could be inside. She didn’t have a weapon, nor could she whip out her badge.
She approached the door quietly, setting her back against the wall as she sidled closer. She took hold of the knob and used it as leverage as she peered around the edge of the door. She almost shrieked in shock. Carlos Montoya was lying on the floor of Rick’s living room, ominously still.
Then she saw the shadow. Someone was standing over him. Lusinda jerked her head back and tried to sneak away from the door but it was too late. Before she could take a second step, a large hand grabbed her upper arm and jerked her backwards, into the living room.
“No!” she cried as he slammed the door. “Help!” She filled her lungs to scream but the man jerked her by her arm and punched her in the stomach. All her breath whooshed out and her body jack-knifed. The blow hurt like hell. She couldn’t make her lungs work and she couldn’t straighten, because her muscles were in spasm. Still, she did her best to throw herself away from him, toward the door.
But she was too slow. He was on top of her. He straddled her back and shoved her face into the hardwood floor. She gasped desperately, sucking in dust and dirt. She still couldn’t catch a full breath, so she worked to get her arms under her, hoping to get some leverage against his weight. But he was much bigger than she was, and with no oxygen in her lungs, she didn’t have enough strength or traction to fend off a mosquito bite.
His hand left her head. She lifted it but a sharp stinging on the side of her neck surprised her.
“Ow! No!” she huffed, struggling against his weight. She tried again to use her arms. It was no use, so she used the only other weapon she had—her head. She jerked it backward as hard as she could—and collided with his head. It hurt like the devil but it must have worked. He grunted in pain and rolled away from her.
Immediately, she rolled in the other direction and used the momentum to leap to her feet—or at least she tried. She was still bent forward from the pain in her belly. Her head throbbed from its collision with his. She could barely get enough oxygen into her lungs to keep from passing out. But she tried to rush him, not really expecting to be able to do anything.
He scoffed at her and held out a hand to push her away, but she ducked and came up between his arms and his chest. She shoved the palm of her hand up into his nose with all the strength she had left. He roared with pain and rammed her against the wall. Then he bolted for the door.
Lusinda’s legs melted and she felt herself sliding down the wall. Pushing away, she managed to take half a step before her legs gave way. Her head felt as though it was floating far above her body. She reached out to steady herself against the wall, but the wall wouldn’t stay still. It hovered just out of her reach.
Something strange was happening to her. Stranger than her floating head and the elusive wall. Her heart was stuttering, faster than she’d ever felt it. Her eyes were blurry, or closed. She wasn’t sure. Her tongue quivered in the back of her mouth. Somewhere out in front of her she could see Carlos, but he apparently wasn’t feeling right either. He was taking a nap.
“C-carlo, wate ut,” she said, but he didn’t pay any attention to her. “Carl—” She lost her breath. “Way—unph.” The floor was calling her. Her legs were melting again. She collapsed next to Carlos, feeling her heart racing even faster. So fast she couldn’t keep up with it.
*
As soon as Rick stepped inside the lobby of the Ace Hotel, he heard a scuffle coming from the direction of the second floor. He took the stairs two at a time. Had Carlos gotten into an argument with another resident, or was it drunks arguing or a couple in a knock-down-drag-out?
When his head rose over the landing, he saw that his apartment door was open. He thought he saw something or someone lying on his living room floor. A third person—a hefty man with blood dripping from his nose down his face, neck and shirt—stumbled out the door, coughing and cursing. Rick vaulted up the rest of the stairs and before the man focused on him, Rick had him in a headlock. He punched him twice in the kidneys. The man grunted, then started heaving and splattering blood everywhere.
Rick risked turning him loose for a moment as he dug into his pants pocket for one of the zip ties he always carried, just in case. He rarely got to carry a weapon when he went undercover, but he’d refused to give up the thin plastic zip ties and duct tape he kept in his pockets. He’d carried those two items ever since his first undercover job, and they’d come in handy many times.
While the thug retched and groaned, Rick zip-tied his hands around the sturdy wrought-iron rails that lined the second-floor landing of the old hotel.
“You’re lucky I don’t just throw you over the rails,” he growled when the guy started yelling for help. Rick grabbed his hair and pulled his head back. “Make any more noise and I’ll stuff a rag in your mouth and duct tape over it. Want to try to breathe through that?” He squeezed the guy’s broken nose until he yelped in pain and shook his head, spreading more blood spatter.
Rick left him there and rushed inside. It was Carlos on the floor—and Sin. He pulled out his cell phone. “Sin!” he cried, then heard the dispatcher. “Yes, Rampart and Iberville Street, the Ace Hotel, second floor. Three injured. Need ambulances—” he paused for a second “—and police.”
He hung up the phone and started toward Sin, who had propped herself up on her elbow. “Sin?”
“Better,” she mumbled. “A li’l goofy. Carlo? Dead?”
Rick quickly checked Carlos’s pulse and cursed. “Ah, Carlos. I’m sorry.”
He turned back to Sin. Her head was drooping. “Sin!” he snapped.
Her head rose slowly and she opened her eyes. “Hey, Rick,” she muttered.
She was drugged. “Sin, what happened? Wait.” He noticed something shiny on her neck. Not a necklace. Reaching out, he touched it. “Sonofabitch!” It was a needle with an off-white suspension dribbling out of it.
He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. “Sin! Talk to me.”
“Hey, Rick. I am.” Her eyes were closed.
“Look at me.”
“Don’ feel good,” she mumbled and went limp.
“No! Sin!” At that moment, he realized he heard sirens. “Come on!” he yelled at them. “Come on!”
“What’s all the racket?” a gruff voice yelled.
“Nothing!” Rick shouted. “Just a misunderstanding.”
“Well shut the eff up!” The door slammed.
Within minutes, the EMTs were rushing up the stairs. They began to focus on the bloody-nosed murdering fool, but Rick grabbed one of them. “In here. Overdose. Not him, he’s dead. Her.”
He watched, feeling more helpless than he’d ever felt in his life, as the EMTs quickly assessed her, started an IV and administered a narcotic antagonist.
They were handling Sin, so he tore his gaze away from her and started searching the floor. “Here it is!” he cried, automatically reaching for his pocket before he remembered that the pocket where he normally carried gloves was empty.
“What?” the woman who appeared to be the head EMT asked.
“The syringe. The needle is still in her neck.” He touched the syringe with his toe. “It’s the bad dope. Look, it’s not empty!”
She looked at the floor. “Don’t touch that,” she cried. She’d been talking over a mic to the physician on call ever since Rick had said overdose. “Did you say bad dope?”
The physician on the speaker said, “Did he say bad dope? Carfentanil?”
“And heroin,” Rick said, nodding.
“Who is that?” the physician asked.
“I’ll answer your questions once we’re at the hospital.” He heard sirens again. It was a second ambulance and the police.
“Let’s get her down the stairs and into the bus,” the head EMT said to the other two. “Come on. We’ll get her on a respirator as soon as she’s inside. Move it!”
“I’m going with you,” Rick said, heading down the stairs, hoping to avoid the police, who were almost there, judging by the sirens. The odds were extremely high that at least one of the cops would know him. He jumped into the first ambulance, prepared to do whatever he had to do in order to stay with Sin until he was sure she was out of danger.