by Tina Whittle
“You gonna give me my gun or what?” she said.
I hooked my thumbs into my pockets. “Nope.”
“What?”
“You don’t like it, call the cops. I suspect they’ll be keen to know why you came in here claiming to want to buy a gun for yourself when in reality you’re buying it for your boyfriend in the parking lot.”
She blanched. “He’s helping me pick it out, that’s all.”
“From inside his truck?”
“He didn’t want to come in.”
I tsk-tsked. “Don’t blame him there. He’s probably got a felony or two under his belt, which means he can’t buy a firearm. So he sends you in here to buy it for him, which is illegal, but since I didn’t actually sell you a gun, you might only get a few years in prison.”
She directed a furious, fearful glare out the window. That was when she noticed the camera above the door. She turned her head abruptly, but then she saw the camera over the other door.
I smiled. “Yeah, your face is on the video instead of his. Every spook in Washington D.C. is running down your record as we speak. You got any secrets? Guess what? They’re not secrets anymore.”
She made like a jackrabbit for the parking lot. Her boyfriend had the truck started, so she barely had time to shut the door behind her before he was peeling out, kicking up gravel on the sidewalk. Trey watched them drive off. He now had my flashlight in hand, the giant Maglight he’d bought me for my birthday. He was holding it like a police baton.
“Did you get the license plate?” I said.
“I did.”
Not a word I’d said to her was true, of course. Well, the cameras had caught her face. And I would be downloading a still shot into my Do Not Ever Under Any Circumstances Sell A Gun To This Person file for my assistant Kenny.
I switched off the display lights. “I am sick to death of them, all of them. Cheaters. Liars. And I swear if one more person asks me if I have anything with a werewolf on it, I’m gonna commit bloody murder.”
Trey held up one hand, and I tossed him the keys. He put away the flashlight and opened the cash register. While he ran the day’s tally, I went around pulling the shades and double-checking the burglar bars. The air conditioner coughed and wheezed, like an asthmatic alien on its last legs.
“You didn’t stay for lunch,” he said, counting bills into neat stacks. “After the scenario.”
“I had to get back here.”
“You left before I could talk to you.”
“You were busy yelling at the entry team.”
Trey raised his head. He knew I wasn’t telling the whole truth, and I knew there was no use trying to lie—his overly sensitive brain would register the deception before the words left my mouth. The best I could do was throw a bone in some other direction. But it was only him and me in the shop, and I was fresh out of bones.
“Garrity told me what happened,” he said.
I joined him behind the counter. “I’m fine. Paint-splattered, but fine. I still have some in my hair, I think.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Not much.”
“Let me see.”
I unbuttoned my shirt to reveal the reddish splotch above my breastbone—it would be a lovely purple bruise in a few days. Trey ran his fingers lightly across the skin. His touch was delicate, but his expression was sharp and annoyed.
“I recommended that individual be dropped from the training program.”
“You’re just mad because he was mean to me.”
“Garrity said the same thing. Nonetheless.” He dropped his hands, let them rest hesitantly on my hips. The bloodhound in him could smell something wrong even if he couldn’t dig it up easily. “Come back tomorrow. Tomorrow is mantracking at Doll’s Head Trail.”
“I thought you sucked at mantracking.”
“I do. That’s why Price is leading it. I’ll be the target, which I do not suck at.”
Keesha Price. His partner back when he’d been a SWAT sniper with the Atlanta PD. I’d never met her, but I’d heard stories. Suddenly the training held a spark of interest. But then I remembered the sore spot on my chest and the marrow-melting rage that seethed millimeters beneath it.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I mean, I’m happy that reenactment therapy works for you. That’s a good thing. But for me? I still got angry. Super angry. Practically homicidal.”
“That’s to be expected.”
“I almost kicked his knees in.”
“But you didn’t.”
“But I wanted to. Real bad.”
“And yet you didn’t. That’s progress.”
I looked up at him—so earnest, so wanting to help—and sighed. “I’ll think about it. That’s the best I can offer.”
“Okay. Good. Thank you.” He regarded me seriously, his hands still on my hips. “Tai?”
“Yes?”
“I saw the envelope from the lab. Under the drawer in the register.” He hesitated again. “Is it the paternity results?”
I kept the curse under my tongue. Damn it, I’d meant to hide the letter before he’d arrived. He knew I’d been waiting to find out whether or not the disreputable bootlegging felon I’d always thought of as my uncle was actually my biological father. He also knew the emotional gut-wrench I’d been going through, so I understood his concern. Still…
“I’m not messing with that right now,” I said.
“But—”
“You were the one who told me—and I quote—that I get to make these decisions, nobody else. Not even you, you said.”
“Yes. That is true. But sometimes—”
“I know Boone calls you. I know you talk to him.”
Trey’s eyes narrowed in puzzlement. “Of course you know. I’ve never hidden—”
“What does he want? To get you on his side? Convince you to give him a chance?”
“No. He simply asks how you’re doing. He knows you don’t want to talk to him, so—”
“Of course I don’t. I don’t trust him!” I could feel my heart rate going up again. “You can’t trust him either, Trey. Not one bit.”
“I don’t.” His expression remained calm, but his voice was laced with worry. “Do you want me to stop taking his calls? I will if you—”
“I don’t know!”
Trey didn’t say anything. Six months since that night on the dock, since Boone’s revelation, and I still woke up in a cold sweat, remembering. Three people died that night, including his son, who deserved every lick of hellfire he was surely suffering. Boone himself was dying too, though not by the sword. Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis would be his eventual nemesis. It would be a slow, hard death, robbing him of breath long before it robbed him of life. A different kind of hell, especially for a man as vital as he’d once been.
That night he’d told me he was my father. Which would never be true, no matter what the envelope said. My father was Bennett Randolph, a man of hangdog hazel eyes and a tall, lanky frame, an academic who drank himself into a heart attack when I was twenty. Boone was raw-boned and rough, a former KKK Grand Dragon reformed of any race-hating, though two stints behind bars had not broken him of smuggling and gun-running. He’d married my mother’s sister, who had abandoned him with two small boys and fled to parts unknown, probably dying young, as the fast-living and loose-moraled tended to do. That was the story I’d been told, one of them anyway. My mother had edited the family history with a ruthless eye for sanitation, and she hadn’t been afraid to revise.
My mother. Lillian Randolph, a poor redneck who’d made good and who was always trying to make better. Always with her eye on a finer horizon, my mother. Whatever had happened between her and Boone, she’d taken it to the grave. I wished Boone had made the same decision.
“It’s more than I can deal with right now,” I said.
&nbs
p; “Okay. It’s just that…” Trey stared at the register, his forehead creased in deliberation. “I know Garrity has told you that after the accident, I was…difficult.”
“He said you were a pain in the ass.”
Trey considered, then nodded. “Not an unfair assessment. But he engaged me, nonetheless. Gabriella too, and your brother, and the PTs. They couldn’t make decisions for me, but they reminded me over and over that I had to decide, even if my decision was no. Because no is a choice. Does that make sense?”
I sighed. “It means you’re gonna keep bugging me about that envelope, that’s what it means.”
He winced almost imperceptibly. To an untrained eye, his expression never wavered—he usually seemed to be a combination of annoyed and bored. But there were subtleties, shadings, like quick clouds scudding before the sun.
“I don’t like bugging you,” he said. “You think I do, but I don’t.”
I felt myself soften. We bugged each other something awful at times. I stepped closer and slid my arms around his neck, ran my fingers under his collar. His skin was warm, fresh from the shower, his hair still damp.
He moved his hands to the small of my back. “You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Trying to distract me.”
“You always say it like I’m laying some trap. Like you’re just standing there and then, whoops, suddenly we’re making out and you have no idea how it happened.”
He pulled me closer, gently, but with definite intent. “I’m not complaining.”
My bedroom was upstairs, only a few steps away, but I contemplated taking him right where we stood, with all three security cameras still rolling and the OPEN sign still out. And I could forget the envelope in the drawer. And the bruise on my chest. And the cash register with very little cash in it. I stood on tiptoe, the better to reach his mouth.
The front door jingled. A familiar female voice said, “Uh oh, I’m interrupting something, aren’t I?”
I glanced over Trey’s shoulder. He turned toward the door as his right hand instinctively reached for the gun he didn’t carry anymore.
“Finn,” I said.
Chapter Three
Finn Hudson let the door jingle shut behind her. I hadn’t seen her in months, not since Savannah. Now she’d materialized in my shop like some Goth fairy, her tawny hair pixie-cut, her slight frame decked head-to-toe in black—black mini, black tights, black stack-heel boots.
Trey stepped away from me, facing her. He kept his body at an angle, his left foot slightly behind, a fighting stance. He didn’t trust Finn as far as he could throw her, and I’d seen him throw people quite a ways.
Of course, I didn’t trust her either. She was a private investigator who occasionally worked for one of Atlanta’s best known defense attorneys, although whether you’d call him infamous or celebrated depended on your frame of mind. For ex-cops like Trey? Definitely infamous. I tended to agree, especially since his firm had represented the racist sociopath who’d tried to kill me not once, but twice.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
She looked around the shop. “Nice place.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
“Not yet.” She smiled. “How have you been, both of you? I’ve been thinking about you.”
“That makes me nervous.”
She laughed. She had a lovely bright laugh that rang as false as tinsel. Back during my tour guide days in Savannah, I’d told stories about the glamour, a sheen of magic that disguised a person’s true nature. If any human being could conjure such a thing, it was Finn.
“Have a second?” she said.
“For what?”
She flipped the door sign to CLOSED. “It’s complicated.”
Trey remained silent and taut, like a trip wire. Finn spooked him. He could read most people, separate lies from truth with ease, but Finn was a blank. During the most recent troubles in Savannah, however, she’d been instrumental in our success, dropping us hints and pointing us toward clues that she herself could not investigate. She’d claimed it served her larger moral purpose. I doubted that, though it had served something, that was for sure, and it had served Trey and me well enough.
“Make it simple,” I said. “And quick.”
“Okay.” She kept her expression business-like. “I’m investigating a possible assassination attempt.”
“That sounds like a situation for the cops.”
“My client wishes to avoid the PR nightmare that would result from filing a police report.” She turned her attention to Trey. “Which is why I’m here. I need your help.”
It was at this point I realized Finn hadn’t come to my shop for me—she’d come for Trey. He realized it too, and immediately went into “absolutely not” mode.
“I don’t contract independently,” he said. “I’m bound by a strict noncompete clause at Phoenix.”
“Yes, yes, I know. Marisa keeps you on a short leash. Not that I blame her—if I were your boss, I would too—so let me rephrase. By help, I mean off the books. Unofficial.”
Trey crossed his arms. “I don’t—”
“What if I told you that the target of this alleged assassination was Nicholas Talbot?”
Trey’s head snapped back. His expression hardened, and I was grateful at that moment he didn’t have a gun on him.
“Nicholas Talbot?” I said. “Wasn’t he that hotshot Hollywood import who got charged with his wife’s murder a few years back? The case is still unsolved, isn’t it?”
Trey’s voice was level, but his eyes burned. “No. It was solved. But the evidence that solved it was thrown out of court, and Talbot went free.”
Uh oh, I thought. Trey was holding a grudge. A big, nasty, deeply embedded grudge, one that he’d cradled and nurtured for a long time. And Finn knew it.
She kept her voice low and calm. “Of course the evidence was thrown out, it was compromised.”
Trey glared. “What I saw was not compromised. What I recorded was not compromised. My testimony should have gone into evidence, and it would have gone into evidence if…if…”
He shook his head, frustrated. The words weren’t happening. He’d lost them, a casualty of the brain damage exerting itself again, as it did during times of high emotional stress. I placed my hand on his back, which was a rigid sheet of muscle, full lockdown. He looked my way, then back to Finn.
“The evidence demonstrated that the scene was staged to look like a burglary gone wrong. I documented this evidence and turned it over to the crime scene techs, following all the proper protocols. But because the first responding…because he was…”
“Dirty,” Finn supplied softly.
Trey didn’t reply, but I saw it clear on his face. Finn was right. A dirty cop was the bottom of the barrel as far as Trey was concerned, the worst kind of criminal, and what I was seeing now was a mixture of hatred, disgust, and violation.
“What happened?” I said.
Finn gave Trey a second to fill in the blanks. When he didn’t, she started explaining. “The day Jessica Talbot was killed, Trey was second responding to the scene. The first responding, an Atlanta PD patrol officer named Joe Macklin, took an opportunity to stuff his pockets with some of the victim’s jewelry. He also altered the scene to hide the theft.”
“That did not change the other evidence,” Trey said.
“The judge thought it did. Fruit of the poisonous tree.”
“The judge was wrong. It was murder. And the murderer went free.”
Trey was on high seethe. He was certain where he could not be certain. Where he normally would have hedged with an “approximately,” he was now doubling down on wrongness and guilt.
“What does this have to do with us?” I said.
Finn’s expression turned businesslike. “I’ve been
contracted by the Talbot Creative Group to investigate—discreetly—whether or not someone tried to kill Nick Talbot last night.”
Trey was not biting. “None of this concerns me.”
“It should. Your hatred of the man is well-established. There’s paperwork on it. And considering how the assassination attempt occurred…”
She trailed off, but I got the gist.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Somebody took a shot at him.”
She pointed a finger in my direction. “Bingo.”
“Is that why you’re here?” Trey said. “To accuse me of trying to kill Nicholas Talbot?”
“Of course not. Mr. Talbot is still alive, and if it had been your finger on that trigger, he wouldn’t be. Dead simple, that. But if the authorities come, and if they ask Mr. Talbot who in the area might have a reason to want to kill him, your name would go to the top of the list. With a bullet.” She smiled tightly. “You might want to be figuring out your alibi.”
Trey stared. His hands, normally open, had been clenched into tight fists. I waited for him to speak, but he didn’t. Whatever words he had remained locked inside. But he didn’t need to say anything. I had this one covered.
“In that case, Ms. Hudson, you’re dogging the wrong bush,” I said. “Trey was with me last night. At his place. I can vouch for his presence.”
“All night?”
“All night.”
Trey shook his head. “Most of the night. You were asleep some of the night. So you can’t verify that I was there the entire night.” He looked back at Finn. “When did the shooting take place?”
“Around ten p.m.”
Trey had been asleep then. So had I, which was a sad commentary on my evening.
“This is ridiculous,” I said. “You think Trey snuck out of bed, snuck out of his apartment, got in his freaking Ferrari, which has a decibel level of ninety-five, then drove—”
“Two point two miles via Piedmont and Powers Ferry, which at that time of night should have taken less than ten minutes. But no, I’m not suggesting Trey drove that supremely loud car anywhere near Mr. Talbot’s home. With his background, he would have left the car in Chastain Park, jogged three blocks, set up in Mr. Talbot’s backyard, then took a ping at his head before vanishing once again into the night. Round trip less than thirty minutes.”