The water was cool and I stayed under, letting myself drift slowly to the bottom. I stayed under as long as I could, my eyes closed tightly. Behind them flickered images of the desert, sand blowing into my mouth, my eyes, even my ass. You could never get it off you, and you either had to get used to it sticking to your skin or go crazy.
I came up for breath and slicked my hair back. I realized I hadn’t brought any goggles and I hopped out and went to the front desk. I bought a pair before jumping back in.
I swam for forty-five minutes. Freestyle and breaststroke. The strokes were violent and water was splashing everywhere. I tried to smooth them out and enter the water calmly, but I couldn’t do it.
I swam until my arms burned and my back muscles felt like they were stretched and torn. I was winded and hot and it was always a strange sensation since you can’t feel the sweat on your skin in a pool.
Winded and in pain, I got out and toweled off. There was a deckchair nearby and I lay down and closed my eyes, letting the sun heat my skin. I could hear kids playing Marco Polo in the shallows and it made me smile. I had played the same game with my brothers when I was younger. Before wars and death and growing up. When life wasn’t much more than what you were experiencing in that exact moment.
“I like the pool here.”
I opened my eyes. In the deckchair next to me sat Elis Brennan. He was in a full suit and tie but somehow didn’t look out of place.
“What’re you doing here?” I said, closing my eyes again and laying my head back.
“I wanted to talk to you. See how you’re doing.”
“I’m fine.”
“Really? Before you got shot, you hadn’t been in so much as a yelling match on the job and now you’ve been in two officer-involved shootings. That sitting okay with you?”
“It is what it is.”
He was silent a while and then said, “Where’d you learn to swim like that?”
I ignored the creepy feeling I got thinking of Brennan watching me swim and said, “College.”
“You majored in Classical Studies. Right?”
“Yeah.”
“Usually people who major in that become lawyers. What made you want to be a cop?”
“Just thought I could do more good I guess.” I looked to him and he was nodding. “What made you want to be a cop?”
“Me? I just fell into it. My father was a cop. My mother would’ve been a cop too except my father didn’t think it was proper for women to work outside the home. So when I graduated college, my path was laid out in front of me. I don’t know if that’s destiny or not, but I never felt I had a choice.”
“What do you want, Elis? I’m not helping you.”
“Why would you say that? You’re sworn to uphold the law. You just told me the reason you became a cop is to do good. Well there’s someone on our radar that is not doing good, that is the opposite of good. Does he get a pass just because he wears a badge? ‘Cause if that’s what you believe, then tell me now. Because you’re right, you’re not going to be able to help me if you think the badge is a free pass to do whatever the hell you want.”
I didn’t say anything and he kept talking.
“I don’t want anything from you right now other than to stay in SIS and keep your head down and your ears open. But eventually I’m going to want more. I’m going to want evidence. A recording. I’m going to want Ty Reeves on tape doing the things he does. And you’re going to help me get those.”
“You don’t have anything on me. There’s no reason for me to cooperate with you.”
“You’re wrong about that, Thomas. I think you’re a good person. And good people do the right thing. Eventually, I think you’re going to help me.” He sat up, stretched his neck, and then stood. He was tall, much more so than I had initially thought, and he had long, white fingers protruding from his pasty hands. “This man is dangerous. It doesn’t matter that he has the badge. He needs to be stopped, Thomas. I think you already know that.”
“I haven’t seen him—”
“Spare me the bullshit. You have seen him. That’s his MO. He gets you in and quickly makes you an accomplice so that you’ll always feel like if he goes down you’ll go down too. We’ll you won’t go down. You have my personal guarantee about that.”
He glanced over to the pool, taking a moment longer than necessary on a woman in a two-piece bikini.
“If you’re ready, Thomas, we could begin tomorrow. We could get you a mic and get you back into SIS before they know you’re gone. The sooner you start, the quicker it would be over.” He turned to me, facing me square on as he put his hands in his pockets. “Roberto didn’t have a choice when Ty blew his brains out. You have a choice. Don’t make the wrong one. Eventually, you’ll go down too if you stick with him. There’s no other way out.”
He walked off and I watched him a moment before laying back and closing my eyes. I focused on the children playing in the pool and took myself away from this place and back to my childhood, splashing water on a brother that was still living and breathing and laughing.
CHAPTER 15
There was knocking at my door at six in the morning. I reached for my gun on the nightstand and walked to the door. I looked out the peephole. Ty stood there, glancing around the neighborhood. I debated for a moment whether to open the door, and then unlocked it and swung it open.
“Let’s go,” he said as he brushed past me. “Get your clothes on. We got work.”
“I gotta give my statement about Roberto.”
“You can do that later. No rush. We gotta move on somethin’ now, though.”
“What?”
“Found a name in Roberto’s cell phone. Followed up with an address. He owns a business just off the strip. A storage facility. We gotta move now. Roberto’s death’s already hit the street.” He looked around my house, grimacing. I figured because of how bare it was. “Get some fuckin’ art work in here, Baby Boy. Bare walls are depressing.” He looked to me. “Come on come on, let’s go.”
I didn’t move for a second. Then I walked to the closet and began to put on my clothes. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t tell him to get out of my house right then and that I was quitting the force because I now knew that people like him existed. Maybe because I figured I could quit anytime and curiosity got the better of me. I don’t know. But I put on my clothes and grabbed my gun and holster and ran out the door with him.
We headed west on Twenty-Eighth for about ten minutes and then hopped onto a freeway entrance. I was driving; I didn’t want to be stuck somewhere and reliant on Ty to get home. We drove down Henry Park until we got to an exit I’d never taken. There was a 7-11 off to the right with graffiti on its walls. Some men were sitting on a tricked-out Mitsubishi, blaring rap music so bassed I couldn’t hear the lyrics.
We pulled into the 7-11 and Ty told me to wait. He ran inside and was gone for what seemed like a long time. When he came out he was staring at a strip of white paper in his hand, and then he threw it in the garbage can, eyeing the men on the hood of the Mitsubishi.
“Go down Seventeenth until we get to Wasatch.”
I pulled out of the sev and took Seventeenth up to Wasatch. I stopped at the corner.
“There’s a house up the block. It’s just me and you today; the crew’s out doing somethin’ for me.”
“Should we call for backup?”
Ty shook his head. “You still don’t get it, do you? There is no backup. Not for us. SIS works alone. Always. No matter what. Now park across the street.”
I parked in the parking lot of a liquor store and we began walking down the sidewalk through the residential neighborhood. The sidewalks were cracked, with graffiti tagged onto it in some places. Through the cracks I could sometimes see flowers or weeds coming up. I wondered what determined if it was a flower or a weed that came up through this mess.
“We’re goin’ in hot,” Ty said, not looking up from the sidewalk. “Total dog psychology. We might be outnumbered and outgunned
so we gotta use fear as a weapon. We only got thirty seconds. After that, they start thinkin’ and shootin’ back.”
We came to a house that looked like it had been abandoned. The lawn was yellow and the chain-link fence around it was falling apart. A pit bull was chained to the front and it growled at us as we came up. Ty took out some mace, which was attached to his keychain, and walked within feet of the thing as it jumped to its feet. He sprayed into the eyes and the dog yelped and sprinted away.
“Let’s go.”
We walked up the steps to the porch and got on either side of the door. I pulled out my Desert Eagle and held it low. Ty placed his ear on the door and listened. He nodded to me and I nodded back.
He spun around, facing the door, and rammed his heel just under the doorknob. The door didn’t open at first and he kicked it again and again until the wood began to splinter. Then he threw his weight into his shoulder and the door flew open.
I saw movement, someone running past us down a hallway. I shouted, “Police, don’t move!” I dashed for him.
He got to a bedroom and ran to the closet. I saw the charcoal-colored barrel of the shotgun and tackled him at the waist, the shotgun flying out of his hands. He spun around on me and hit me in the face. He tried to do it again and I wrapped my legs around his waist and brought him near me so he couldn’t swing. I still had my weapon and I thrust it in his ribs.
“Don’t fucking move!”
He kept struggling. I twisted him off me and onto his back, taking the cuffs off my belt and snapping them around his wrist. I took the shotgun, emptied it, and threw it across the room. I ran out to check on Ty.
I got down the hallway to the kitchen and he had two people on the ground with their hands on their heads. Women, younger. I pulled out some plastic ties, slipped them on, and tightened them around their wrists.
“Haven’t cleared the rest of the house,” he said.
I ran from the kitchen down another hallway. There were two rooms, one on either side. I chose right and kicked in the door, going in gun first. I looked under the bed and in the closet. It was empty. I ran over to the other room. Empty. I looked out the windows and didn’t see anyone.
“Clear,” I shouted.
I went back to the kitchen and saw Ty crouching down and talking with the women. He was whispering something in their ears. One of them was crying. After a few moments Ty stood up and looked to me.
“The basement,” he said.
I saw a door near the dining room table and I opened it. There were stairs leading down. Ty had lifted the women up and pushed them in front of me. We went down after them, Ty using a flashlight he had brought. When we got to the bottom one of the women said there was a light switch on the wall and I searched for it and flipped it on.
Chained to a pipe, were four little girls. Maybe around the age of seven, maybe younger. They looked unkempt and were smeared with dirt, their hair matted and greasy. I saw buckets near them that were filled with urine and feces.
Without thinking, I ran to them. I looked to the women and said, “Where’re the fucking keys?”
They pointed above me. There was a ledge in the wall and I ran my hand over it and found a key. It opened all of the locks on the chain and I kept whispering, “It’s okay, we’re the police. It’s okay.” Hot tears were streaming down my face and I couldn’t stop them.
“This is what we stopped, Tommy,” Ty said. “Some other piece a shit will take his place in a few months. But for a few months, we stopped this.”
One of the girls was trembling. She looked up to me as I pulled the chain off her and she said, “Can we go home?”
“Yes,” was all I managed to say. She seemed to brighten even though I could tell she had been abused and starved.
I stood up. Rage coursed through me in a way I hadn’t felt in a long time. I saw the two women standing there, looking at the floor. I walked over to them. I slapped one of them hard, causing her to look up, shock in her eyes.
“Don’t you fucking turn away. You look at them.”
The women stared at them. The only emotion behind their eyes was fear. Fear that they had been caught and fear about what was going to happen to them now. There was no remorse, not even the semblance of a human emotion relating to the horrors they had committed.
Ty walked in front them, looking me in the eyes. “You see it, don’t you?” he said. “There’s nothin’ there, Tommy. You’re lookin’ for a person but they’re not people. People couldn’t do this. Do you understand now?”
I didn’t say anything. I stared at the women long enough that they turned away. I lifted one of the girls, the one that had asked if they could go home, and had the others walk in front of me as we went up the stairs. I turned once and could see a grin on Ty’s face as he put his arms around the women and kissed each of them on the cheeks.
CHAPTER 16
Uniforms were brought out along with ambulances and trauma social workers. I sat on the hood of my Jeep and watched quietly as Ty gave his statement and then convinced the uniforms to simply write the same statement for me. He walked over when he was done.
“You okay?” he said.
“I didn’t know people were capable of that.”
“They do a lot worse than that. The people they were goin’ to be sold to were goin’ to do things that, once you learn about ‘em, you can never unlearn it. It’ll stick with you the rest of your life. It takes a special kind of person to do this job. Not everyone can see that shit day in and day out and still function, much less have faith in anythin’ and be happy.” He hopped up on the hood. “You still wanna be a cop?”
I looked at him. “What makes you say that?”
“I’m exposin’ you to a lot, Tommy. On purpose. I want to see if you have what it takes. I’ve had other guys come through SIS that didn’t have the stomach or the balls for it so I need to vet my guys quick.” He looked to the house. “This is God’s work. We rid the world of evil. We’re the flood, Tommy. We’re the motherfuckin’ flood and there’s no ark for these sons of bitches.” He stayed silent a long time, lost in his head, and then snapped out of it and looked to me. “You need to decide why you became a cop. Was it to rid the world of evil or to push paper? Once you make that choice, you let me know.”
He jumped off the Jeep and headed out to a car that waited for him on the curb. Dax was driving and he nodded what’s up. I did the same and they drove off.
A statement was presented to me and it was almost word for word what Ty had given them. I signed it and as a matter of course had to have an OIS—Officer Involved Shooting—detective come speak to me about the incident. He didn’t even take notes and at the end he said, “Off the record, I wish you and Ty woulda blasted these fucks.”
I got into my Jeep and was about to drive home but realized I didn’t want to be alone right now. I called the number for Maria I had programed into my phone.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey. What’re you doing right now?”
“About to have lunch. What’re you doing?”
“Let me take you somewhere. I know a place off the strip where there’re no tourists.”
“Okay. Give me fifteen minutes to get ready.”
“All right, bye.”
I drove down to her house and parked out front. No one patrolled the streets and there was a quiet in the neighborhood that was pleasant. I could hear the wind blowing through the trees, the leaves shimmering in the sunlight, and it sounded like pebbles falling into a stream. I closed my eyes and listened until I heard a door open and some voices in Spanish.
Maria came out in shorts and a V-neck shirt. She hopped in without saying anything and we took off.
Delio’s was a small restaurant that used to cater to cops until the locals discovered it. Then Las Vegas’s elite—politicians, celebrities, millionaires, and billionaires—took over and the atmosphere changed and the menu changed and cops didn’t go there as much. But the food was still some of the best in the cit
y if you liked grease and unusual combinations like a fried-egg-and-duck sandwich or heavily salted French fries dipped in a chocolate shake.
We sat in a corner booth and I looked out the windows at the passing cars.
“Did you quit?” she said.
I shook my head. “No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Something’s changed. Ty, that’s the unit leader, the big one that was at Remy’s apartment, he showed me something.”
“What?”
“He showed me what it is we’re really fighting. I knew people could be bad before but I hadn’t seen evil. Not until today when Ty showed it to me.”
She nodded as if she knew what I was talking about. She played with a napkin that was in front of her and then tossed it to the side and leaned back. “People are capable of good and evil. They always have been. But that boss of yours, Ty, I don’t think he’s one of the good guys. I think he murdered Remy. I don’t have any proof and it’s my word against his, but I’m not giving up.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“I found a law firm that said they’ve been going after your unit for a long time. They said they think your unit is as dirty as it comes. I called the ACLU too and they’re gonna help with a lawsuit.”
“You want money for Remy’s death?”
“No, it’s not about the money. But that’s the only way to make the police department listen. That’s the only thing that will get their attention.”
“That’s fine, Maria, but have you considered that maybe Ty’s telling the truth and Remy went for his gun?”
“Yes, and I don’t believe it. Remy was a peaceful person.”
“Really? ‘Cause he didn’t seem that peaceful when he tried to crack my skull with a baseball bat.”
“He didn’t know who you guys were. People were always trying to rob him. And you’re lucky he was a peaceful person because if he wasn’t, he might’ve had a gun and shot you instead.”
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