Price gazed down at the gore for a moment, and then he said, “Wouldn’t want to eat that for lunch.”
Darger stopped wiping with the hanky, her blood suddenly running cold.
Chapter 64
Darger froze.
She wanted to ask him to repeat what he’d said, but she knew.
I wouldn’t want to eat that for lunch…
She’d heard that little quip before. From a little boy named Lijah Ingram. It was what the “little guy in charge” had said after the Striga executed Angelo Battaglia.
Price. Agent Price was the third man.
Once that realization hit her, other pieces fell into place.
Huettemann. Jaworski had been insistent that he hadn’t been responsible for the deputy’s death, though he knew intimate details. She wondered if the deputy had made the mistake of revealing what they’d found out about Jaworski or if it had only been chance that led Price to him.
And then there was the ambush. Surely Price had orchestrated that as well. Now that she thought about it, he’d been the one insisting everyone be in body armor. Probably thought he could minimize the fallout on the FBI’s end, and as long as Jaworski took a bullet to the head, it wouldn’t matter if he was wearing a full Kevlar bodysuit.
Footsteps echoed in the hallway beyond, and then Luck pushed his way into the room. He grimaced as he took in the carnage — Rocco Battaglia’s bullet-riddled body, Jaworski’s blown-apart face. Then his eyes fell on Darger.
“Violet! Are you OK?”
She didn’t answer. Couldn’t. Her mind was still unraveling the web of lies woven by Price and the Battaglias and trying to figure out what the hell the next move was.
Concerned by her lack of response, he hurried over and took a knee beside her. He prodded at her, checking her over for wounds.
“What’s the status out there?” Price asked.
“The shooting finally stopped, but Jesus, what a mess,” Luck said, continuing to fuss over Darger while he spoke. “One of the hostile vehicles sped away, not sure how many were inside, but the Battaglia side took heavy casualties. There are ambulances en route.”
Luck’s hand bumped the place the bullet had struck her vest, and she winced.
“Ouch. Goddamnit, I’m fine,” she said finally and brushed him away.
She’d made her decision.
“Now help me up.”
Luck threaded an arm around her, lifting her to her feet.
Using Luck as a makeshift crutch, she hobbled over to Price. Before either of the men knew what was happening, Darger had plucked Price’s sidearm from its holster.
He frowned in confusion.
“Agent Darger, what’s—”
One loop of her handcuffs slapped over his wrist.
“What the hell are you doing, Violet?” Luck asked.
“It’s him,” she said, securing the other side of the cuffs. “He’s the mole.”
Epilogue
Darger and Loshak sat in her rental car outside of the Wayne County Jail, the light fading from the day. It’d been a few hours since the massacre that left their key witness dead among so many others, but it felt like much longer. Days or weeks, she thought.
They’d let Price go within six minutes of his arrival, assistant US attorneys uncuffing him and whisking him out of the interrogation room Darger had sat him down in. He smirked at her as he left. Gave her a little wave. A smarmy bounce in his step.
And the next thing she knew, Loshak was tugging at her arm, guiding her out to the parking lot.
“I can’t believe it,” Darger said, for perhaps the eleventh time. “Insufficient evidence. That’s what they said. Can you fucking believe that?”
“What I can’t believe is what passes as hot coffee in this dump,” Loshak said, setting his Styrofoam cup in the cup holder.
“Are you even listening to me?”
“Yes. And to be honest, they have a point. You’ve got a witness — a kid, mind you — who says the accomplice to the Angelo Battaglia murder used the same one-liner that Price did after he shot Jaworski—”
She was in shock. She knew she must be. Cold feelings blowing inside where the anger should be, where the outrage should be.
Only numb.
“Executed. He executed Jaworski. Who more or less told me there was a mole in the FBI.”
“And who was also a hitman who would have said just about anything to save his own skin.”
“I thought you believed me.”
Loshak sighed.
“I do believe you. But there’s a difference between knowing the truth and being able to act on it. And if we can’t prove it, there’s nothing to be done. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, I know. But that’s how it goes sometimes.”
“Well it’s fucking bullshit. Pardon my French.”
“The shootout was bad publicity,” Loshak said. “Our transfer of a person in custody going that wrong? Made the feds look like loose cannon cowboys putting the public at risk. If you throw a crooked agent on top of that, a high-ranking one? It could take decades to undo that kind of toxic publicity.”
“Yeah, but-” Darger started to say.
“Hang on,” Loshak interrupted. “I’m not saying this is what I think personally, mind you, but it’s how they see it. The institution. The establishment. They look at the bigger picture, right? A political picture where everything is a means to an end, where justice is malleable. Just another piece on the chess board, I guess.”
Darger’s molars ground together in irritation.
“And we’re the pawns, right?”
He tilted his head as he considered the question.
“I suppose so.”
“If justice is malleable, it isn’t real. Think about it. You’re saying that this, all we do, is a lie?”
“I’m saying they don’t want to hear what you’re telling them. This Price thing isn’t the story they want to tell themselves, and it isn’t the story they want to tell the world.”
“Price worked with the mafia, with Jaworski, killed Huettemann himself from what Jaworski suggested. He probably tipped off where and when we were making the transfer, caused the whole bloodbath today. He is responsible for countless deaths, for all the problems they’ve had fighting organized crime here for decades.”
“And in fairness, you don’t have a lot in the way of evidence of any of that. Certainly not enough to charge him with anything.”
“Forget charging him, the federal prosecutor cut him loose within minutes. Told me to let it go, to go home. Nobody looked into it in even a preliminary manner. They don’t care.”
Loshak nodded.
“Price has a lot of friends in high places. A few calls to the right people was probably all it took to make it go away,” he said. “And now the higher-ups will spin what happened today. Say that in the end, this shootout brought the notorious hitman Dominik Jaworski to justice, brought the terrible Rocco Battaglia and his men to justice. Splash a little of their bloody exploits onto the front page. Try to skew the headlines to anything positive. Might even need to make a hero out of you again to sell it. They could go with Price as the star of this franchise, but he’s an old man. Balding. Stooped shoulders. You look the part of a hero so much more, you know? They could get you in the magazines again. Turn a disaster into a marketing coup. A picture is worth a thousand words, right?”
Darger closed her eyes. Listened to her pulse squishing in her ears. This wasn’t just corruption. It was corruption masquerading as justice.
“I think I’ll pass,” she said.
“Justice is the product they sell the masses. Not the real thing. The image of it. Just make it look good to get the rubes on the hook, to make them all believe, string them along for as long as they can. It’s all just marketing in the end. Business. Branding and image.”
“Why would I spend my life in service of that?”
Loshak lifted his hands as though she had pointed a weapon at him.
“Let’s n
ot lose our heads here,” he said, his voice dropping in volume to go non-threatening. “Is it perfect? No. Not even close. But you’re making a difference here. Doing a job someone has to do — a job the world needs done. And you’ve got a knack for it. Real talent. You do damn good work. And I mean that both ways. Your work is of excellent quality, but you are also doing good in the universe. Saving lives. Taking monsters off the streets. Don’t throw it all out for idealism, for a few flaws.”
Darger didn’t reply. Instead, she stared out at the jail parking lot, at the sky going dark, at the lights flipping on in the cityscape around them.
After a stretch of silence, Loshak spoke up again. “I shouldn’t have asked you to come in on this case. You needed time away. I knew that. And I let you come back before you were ready.”
“Don’t be stupid. I was plenty ready.”
Loshak started the car.
“I’m taking you back to the motel long enough to grab your bags. I want you to get out of here. Take the rest of your leave with Owen, like you’d planned. Think things over.”
Owen’s name pricked painfully at her heart. She hadn’t told Loshak how she’d fucked that up.
Maybe Loshak was right about this whole trip being a mistake. Nothing had gone right since she’d arrived.
* * *
By the time Darger made her way toward the airport, it was full dark. No stars from what she could tell. Maybe the streetlights shined too bright, washed everything in the sky out.
She drummed little beats on the steering wheel as she drove. Restless. Agitated. She couldn’t wait to get out of here. Out of Detroit. Off of this case. Away from everything that happened here.
She thought of Owen and Grace O’Malley, his new boat. If he’d known about their fight, Loshak would have told her to call Owen, to patch things up. Could she do that? Would Owen even hear her out?
She thought not.
Then she remembered everything Loshak had said about her job. That justice was just a product they marketed to the masses, like Froot Loops or gel shoe inserts. Owen had given her a choice, and she’d gone with the FBI, thinking she was being noble. But if what Loshak said was true….
Something clicked then, and she asked herself a hard question. Was she refusing to go to Owen because it would feel like she’d be admitting she was wrong?
Because maybe she had been wrong.
She picked up her phone at a stoplight. Thumbed the appropriate button. Brought it to her ear.
It gurgled a few times, the ringing somehow warbled. And then Owen’s voice was there, and it was not distorted. It was very clear.
“Hey, it’s Owen. I’m off on an adventure, sailing the seven seas and all that. I’ll have very little cell service for the next six weeks, maybe more. If you really need to get in touch, email would be a better bet, though even then it might be a week or so before I’ll see it.”
Darger hung up just as the greeting ended, cutting off the beep. She held the phone in her hand a second, examined it, watched the screen fade and then snap to black.
He was already gone. She was too late.
She set the phone in the cup holder, and a strange finality settled over her. About who she was. About what she should do. She decided at that moment that she had one more stop to make before she caught her flight home.
She had to backtrack to get there. Taking a few lefts to circle back the way she’d come. Fighting through the traffic like a salmon swimming upstream.
And she expected part of herself to protest this new course — to express doubt or anxiety or at least mixed feelings — but in truth, she felt only a calm come over her being, a release of the tension in her neck and shoulders.
When she neared the MacArthur bridge, she pulled over and parked, knowing she’d need to handle the last bit on foot. She gathered herself, checked her reflection in the mirror, finding a tired version of herself staring back. Dark bags under her eyes. A knob on her forehead from her fall.
Again, as she reached for the door handle of the rental, she braced herself for fear and loathing that did not come. She didn’t dally. She stepped into the night.
Wind kicked up all around her as she walked onto the bridge. It picked up strands of her hair, flung them around like tiny tentacles reaching out into the dark.
And now she leaned against the rail, looked down at the murky water of the Detroit River below. Black and churning.
This was the place where dreams went to die, right?
Cars rushed past behind her, their headlights flashing by, little bursts of light that made the dark beyond the bridge seem that much blacker.
She looked at her FBI badge for a moment before she tossed it over, a tiny version of her smiling face staring back at her. Young and fresh.
And then it left her hand. Falling away. The leather case flapped all the way open on the way down, splaying, fluttering like moth wings.
It hit the water and disappeared into the murk.
The Violet Darger series
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Dead End Girl (Book 1)
Image in a Cracked Mirror (A Violet Darger Novella)
Killing Season (Book 2)
The Last Victim (A Violet Darger Novella)
The Girl in the Sand (Book 3)
Bad Blood (Book 4)
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Casting Shadows Everywhere
The Clowns
The Awake in the Dark series
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Tim McBain writes because life is short, and he wants to make something awesome before he dies. Additionally, he likes to move it, move it.
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L.T. Vargus grew up in Hell, Michigan, which is a lot smaller, quieter, and less fiery than one might imagine. When not click-clacking away at the keyboard, she can be found sewing, fantasizing about food, and rotting her brain in front of the TV.
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Violet Darger (Book 4): Bad Blood Page 29