Avenged

by Janice Cantore

  Detectives Peter Harris and Jorge Romo were the on-call homicide guys assigned to investigate the triple shooting. They’d called the gang detail out to assist at 4:30 a.m. Carly had grinned at the sight of her sleepy-eyed but focused husband arriving on scene, moving with the fluid grace of the athlete he was.

  The look on his face still brought a smile to her lips—the excitement she was certain only she could see. For so long he’d been afraid that his injury would keep him from being a cop. Carly knew how much it had meant to him when the doctor cleared him for full duty. Passing the physical agility test and landing a job like gang supervisor was icing on the cake. Now his first big case was a double—most likely triple—homicide. Seeing Nick was the highlight of a shift spent mostly securing a scene.

  Carly pulled into the driveway bathed in brilliant early-morning sunshine. It was a day made for a swim, and she felt as though she had enough energy for a crossing to Catalina. Turning off the motor, Carly gazed at the house she and Nick had purchased six years ago. She twirled her new wedding band with her thumb. It had been nine months since they’d remarried, and still Carly felt like she had on the honeymoon. In awe, amazed that things could be so fresh and new with a man she’d been married to, on and off, for nearly ten years, all she could do was thank the Lord.

  She climbed out of the car, dragging her equipment kit across the seat as she did. Nick would likely be out all day. Even with his afternoon gang assignment, they usually made a point to have devotions together before she went to sleep. They wouldn’t be able to do that today, and the fact that he and his people would be turning over stones in a gang neighborhood to find a killer was a worry she tried to dismiss. Nick was a good and careful cop.

  Once she opened the front door, an injection of dog love chased away fatigue and anxiety. Maddie, their black Lab, was all wagging tail and happiness. As the dog weaved around her legs, Carly smiled, set her kit down, and knelt to scratch her. Hugging the warm, happy dog did a beautiful job of chasing the ugly images of murder from her mind.

  “Okay, sweetheart, walk first and then bed.” Carly paused to set her handheld police radio in its charger and then grabbed a bottle of water before hooking Maddie to the leash. They were off.

  They lived only two blocks from the Huntington Beach dog park. In the warm sunshine the walk relaxed Carly. She released Maddie to play as soon as they were inside the gate at the park, then found a place to sit in the sunshine.

  The pleasant warmth acted like a sedative. She had almost dozed off in a sitting position when the chime of her phone jolted her awake. She pulled it out of her pocket and read the caller ID.

  “Good morning, Mom.”

  “Oh, I expected to leave a message. Glad you’re not asleep.”

  Carly yawned. “I will be in a few. What’s up?”

  “Londy called me, very upset. I turned on the news and saw what happened at Catalina Shores. Three shot. Are they all dead?”

  Carly closed her eyes and brought a hand to her brow. She doubted that the coroner had notified the families this quickly, but it didn’t surprise her that Londy had already heard about the victims of the shooting. Word traveled fast on the streets, especially if it was bad word. Odds were that the remaining Ninja gang members were already juicing up to retaliate.

  “No, one of them is still alive—or was, when I logged out. But Londy’s friend Diondre didn’t make it.”

  “Oh.” A moan of sorrow came through loud and clear. “Londy was afraid of that. Diondre was supposed to meet him this morning and didn’t show up. But one young man is still alive? Who?”

  Carly thought a moment and then said, “Tell Londy it was Crusher. He went to Memorial Hospital.”

  “I will. This is just so sad. Londy arranged for Diondre to get a job at Half Baked.”

  Carly heard the distress in her mother’s voice. Her heart for troubled youth was breaking. Carly had told her more than once that she set herself up for disappointment with these kids. With Londy she’d been lucky. She stifled another yawn as Maddie bounded over, exhausted, tongue hanging out.

  She hadn’t known that Erika and Ned Barton, the couple who owned and operated Half Baked and Almost Grounded, were going to hire Diondre, but she wasn’t surprised. They were good people. They’d given Londy a chance with a job and had not been disappointed. It made sense they’d trust Diondre.

  You just can’t save them all, she thought. “Tell Londy I’m sorry about D.”

  •••

  Carly woke with a headache around six, but Nick still wasn’t home. For a time she lay in bed and tried to force herself back to sleep, successful only with dozing for a few minutes. What brought her fully to consciousness with a smile was her husband’s lips on her brow. She should have known he was in the house when she felt Maddie jump off the bed.

  “Oh, hey,” she murmured, reaching up to hug him but pulling away as his scratchy face rubbed her cheek and the smell of cigarettes assaulted her nostrils. He’d been hanging around Mickey Tumanyan, a longtime gang officer who was also a chain smoker. She opened her eyes to Nick’s bloodshot blue ones. “And you look really tired.”

  He smiled as she lay down again. “I’m whacked. I’d love to fall into bed and sleep for a week, but I’m starved. Came home for dinner.” He stifled a yawn. “And since I got called out, I didn’t get to do the shopping.”

  “Shirking your responsibility because of work?” Carly teased. They’d divided household chores; Nick did the grocery shopping and yard work while Carly took care of housecleaning and bill paying. He’d teased her the other day about shirking her duties because Maddie had found a toy behind the couch with a huge dust bunny attached to it.

  “Guilty as charged,” he said. “But I come bearing a peace offering. I brought home pizza.”

  “Pizzamania?” She sat up, already salivating at the thought of their favorite local pizzeria.

  He grinned. “Sausage and pineapple. Put together a salad while I shower?”

  “You bet,” she said, throwing her arms around his neck, ignoring the beard and tobacco odor this time.

  As Carly made her way to the kitchen, Maddie popped in through the dog door and shadowed her. Carly was wide-awake, and her headache faded as she fed the dog and inhaled the wonderful aroma of pizza. Her idea of heaven was a deep-dish pizza, a pitcher of Diet Coke, and a quiet corner with her husband. And knowing there was pizza kept her smiling even when she opened the nearly empty refrigerator. Salad wasn’t that important, she thought. Which was good, since they had no lettuce. All she found were two tomatoes and some Italian dressing. And no Diet Coke. They’d have to settle for iced tea.

  By the time Nick joined her, she had the table set with sliced tomatoes, pizza, and tropical iced tea.

  His hair was still wet, but when he hugged her from behind and rubbed his smooth cheek against hers, she could only smile and lean into his arms.

  “Okay, I guess now you smell better than the pizza.”

  “Hummph.” He kissed her, then sat, reaching out to grab a piece of sausage and pop it in his mouth.

  “So how did it go? Tell me what’s happening with the shooting,” she said, sitting across from him.

  Nick ran a hand down his face. “I’ll tell you everything after at least a few bites.” He said a quick blessing and they dug in.

  “Crusher is still alive, and he might just stay that way.”

  Carly swallowed and arched an eyebrow in surprise. “I didn’t think he really had a chance with a head wound like that.”

  Nick reached for a second slice of pizza. “He was even conscious and talking in the ER.”

  “Talking? Did he say who shot him?”

  “No. According to Kyle, he was awake but confused. Kept asking for Rojo and D.”

  “His dead friends.” Carly rubbed at gooseflesh on her arm.

  Nick nodded. “He couldn’t answer direct questions. Doc told Kyle while the wound is serious, the bullet entered and exited without doing a lot of damage.
Victims of head trauma have a better chance if only one side of the head is injured.” He bit into another slice of pizza and spoke with his mouth full. “’Course, only time will tell. His mom was there.”

  “That must have been hard.”

  “Yeah, but she’s a strong lady. You know Crusher had five brothers and sisters?”

  “I knew he had a big family. He’s a fence kid, I think—not all bad. I arrested him a lot as a juvenile and always came away feeling like he didn’t have a hard-core attitude.”

  Nick took another piece of pizza. “He just wants to belong to something. His mom said as much. She’s praying for Hector and asking the same thing of their priest, but she couldn’t stay at the hospital; she had other kids to care for. And she was praying they don’t end up like Hector.”

  Carly sighed, understanding where the woman was coming from but still amazed.

  “She told the doctor to let the police talk to Hector if he was able to and she also said she’d pray for us, that we’d find out who shot him.”

  Carly smiled. “You will.”

  Nick reached for his tea. “We served some search warrants on the Garnets, made some arrests, and confiscated some guns. But everyone denies shooting up the Ninjas.”

  Carly cocked her head as she chewed. The Garnets were the known leaders of the Playboyz. Three brothers—Marcus, Harley, and German—alternated control, depending on who was in jail at any given time.

  “Marcus Garnet is still in jail, isn’t he?”

  “He’ll be out by the end of the summer,” Nick said. “German’s on parole, and he was minding his p’s and q’s. Claims he’s not feuding with anyone. Harley is the big gang boss right now and we couldn’t find him.” He frowned. “The thing is, this really doesn’t feel like their kind of gig. I mean, they are thugs and crooks, no doubt, but their MO has always been for cowardly drive-bys and intimidation. I can’t see any of the Playboyz having the guts to execute three guys point-blank like that. Besides that, this is so out of the blue. I haven’t been in gangs that long, but there was not the ghost of an inkling that something like this was brewing.”

  “I agree. I thought the whole thing looked staged.”

  “Staged to start a gang war?”

  “Yep, for whatever reason.”

  Nick tilted his head. “Mickey thinks that too. But who would gain from such a war? We’ve been through this before. Nobody wins.”

  Carly could only shrug. She knew what he meant, and as the memory came alive in her mind, fear sliced through her like a sharp claw. But the last thing she wanted was Nick worried or second-guessing himself because of her fear.

  He closed the pizza box. “Want some coffee?”

  “I’m meeting Andi at Half Baked before work.”

  “Then I’ll just make a cup.”

  She didn’t want to tell him she was afraid for him. Telling him that seemed so weak, so faithless. So clingy.

  When she’d first been hired over ten years ago, there’d been a bloody gang war going on in Las Playas. Back then, crack cocaine was the product of choice for both gangs, and two main groups fought over turf. Carly remembered all too well the bloody toll the war extracted. Thankfully, no officers lost their lives, but over the course of the five-year war, four innocent people were killed. One family lost a three-year-old, caught in the cross fire during a family barbecue where five other people were wounded. She’d been in training when she’d been dispatched to the crime scene that resembled a war zone.

  The carnage broke the backs of both gangs, and now neither existed in the city. The Ninjas and the Playboyz had formed to fill the vacuum and began as tagging crews. Were Carly and Nick seeing the start of something vicious and bloody?

  Carly prayed with all her might that they weren’t.

  4

  AS CARLY DROVE to work that night, she battled an icy fear creeping through her—that she would lose Nick in the line of duty.

  But God was in control, right?

  That’s what her mother reminded her of frequently. It was also a recurring message at church. However, one of the hardest things for Carly to face in her relatively new faith was the fact that bad things often happened to good people. When Jeff had run interference for her on Correa’s yacht before sacrificing his life, she’d found herself in this odd conundrum: his death left Elaine, a wonderful woman, a widow and single mother to three children. It should have been Carly who died that night. Yet Jeff never could have made the swim she made. If she hadn’t jumped when she did, she would have died along with him and the killers most likely would have gotten away with several murders and major theft. Jeff’s sacrifice was the only way.

  But why? They were both fighting bad guys.

  God is in control.

  “Ugh.” Carly slapped the steering wheel. Nick had been sleeping when she’d left home. He planned to be back to work at midnight. When she’d kissed his forehead before leaving, the memory of the night with Jeff had grabbed her by the throat. She thought she’d put the demons from that incident away, but now, as she worried about Nick, they came roaring back. Just because Nick was a good and honest Christian man didn’t mean he couldn’t be snatched from her in an instant. That thought scorched her mind and made her physically sick to her stomach.

  When they’d been married the first time, neither one of them had been Christians. And, she thought with some bewilderment, I never worried about him then as much as I do now.

  Working to defuse the fear, she turned up the radio. It was a few minutes before she reached her destination. A light fog drifted about, and she wondered if it would get thicker throughout the night.

  Andrea had asked to meet Carly before work for coffee at Half Baked and Almost Grounded. Even though she knew Andi just wanted gory details about the shooting, Carly was glad for the diversion. It was eight thirty and the shop closed at nine thirty. Carly had to be to work by ten, and she never minded being early.

  Carly smiled at Erika, who stood behind the counter. “Hey, glad to see you got the door fixed.” The door had been completely smashed with the vandalism from the other night.

  “Ned and Londy were able to fix it. That’s why Jinx and I have the night shift.”

  Just then, Jinx, Erika’s cousin, poked her head out from the kitchen. “Hi, Carly.”

  “Hey, Jinx.”

  Ned and Erika owned the shop, but it was truly a family effort. Erika was the queen of the kitchen, baking a lot herself but also employing great cooks for all aspects of the bakery/restaurant. Ned, her husband, did the least in terms of physical work, but he was by far the most inspiring man Carly had ever met. He’d been a Marine deployed in Iraq when a rocket-propelled grenade hit the vehicle he was driving. Ned lost his left hand and suffered a traumatic brain injury in the explosion. He’d been in a coma for three months and doctors said he’d never come out of it when all of a sudden he woke up.

  Carly connected immediately with Erika when the woman shared the story of her husband’s struggle back from the catastrophic injury. He was far from 100 percent—there were issues with memory, concentration, and migraine headaches—but he was alive and working as hard as he could to get his life back. He never complained, instead doing as much as he could to help with the business.

  “What will you have?” Erika asked.

  “Just a large house blend.”

  Erika handed her the coffee. She wouldn’t take Carly’s money; in fact, the shop was a well-known pop, a place any cop would get coffee for free. The policy also applied to servicemen in uniform. Carly put a five in the jar on the counter designated “Donations for the Wounded Warrior Project.” Nodding thanks, she took the coffee and joined Andrea.

  Her friend, as usual, looked immaculate, even though Carly knew she’d just gotten off work. Her nurse’s scrubs were perfectly creased, looking as though she’d just put them on rather than worn them for an entire shift. Every shiny blonde hair was in place.

  Carly self-consciously ran a hand through her unruly, th
ick hair as she sat. She had given up trying to figure out how Andrea did it. They’d been friends since they were kids. When Carly went through her divorce, Andi was there for her, and together they’d rented an apartment by the beach. Andi’s friendship had been a haven for Carly during the year she and Nick were apart.

  “Hey, Andi, what’s up?”

  “What’s up with you? Will the city be embroiled in a gang war, and will ace reporter Alex Trejo miss all the action?”

  “Ah, you look a little too gleeful at the mention of a gang war.”

  “Just channeling my sweetie, Alex. You know he’d love covering a story like this.” Alex, Andi’s current love interest, was the local police beat reporter and Carly’s former nemesis turned friend. He’d also been a part of the investigation into the mayor’s murder and had helped Carly when Joe’s infant son had been kidnapped.

  “Yeah, I do,” Carly said. “And to tell you the truth, I missed him this morning. How is he doing?”

  “Chomping at the bit to get back to his newspaper crime beat. He’s gotten over the shock of his mom dying suddenly, but he hurts. And his dad is a basket case.” Andrea shrugged one shoulder and ran a finger around the rim of her cup. “The short answer is, he’s having a tough time. He was never close to his dad; there’s a lot of bad history there. But the man is so lost since his wife died that Alex can’t believe he’s the same father he grew up with.”

  “Does he know when he’ll be back?”

  “Maybe in a week.”

  Carly told her about the shooting and how everyone thought it looked staged. “The thing is, two gangsters are dead. You know there’s going to be payback.”

  Andi nodded. “And you’re worried about Nick.”