by Eden Butler
I’d gotten very little from her apartment and the gifts were just as twisted as I’d expected. The lithograph was fucked up, but not out of the realm of possibility. Greeks gave paintings like that for decades—some twisted representation of how a new husband was stealing a daughter from her family; she’d become his property like that was some good damn thing. Whoever left that painting for Alex meant it as some sort of romantic gesture. The freak.
My camera captured Ironside with so many familiar faces that just by association I could slip what I’d recorded to the cops and have him brought in for questioning. The mayor’s little cousin probably wouldn’t have liked being photographed with him and I was pretty damn certain that Ironside’s small audience of dealers, drug manufactures and pimps wasn’t the sort of element he normally would be seen with. He was planning something, that much was obvious. There were too many different sorts congregating around him and the man looked like he was hosting some sort of meeting, some sort of group with intentions that weren’t exactly pure.
I managed one more snap of the camera, right at Ironside’s face before I loaded the whole thing up in the case and started the car, but before I could put it in gear, Cosmo, the thick henchmen I recognized from Alex’s description, leaned against my open window with a business card between his fat knuckles.
“Mr. Ironside suggests that if you’d like a meeting with him about a certain mutual acquaintance, then you should schedule an appointment.” He dropped the card inside the car when I didn’t take it. “Business hours are from nine till three.”
Maybe Cosmo thought his size was going to scare me. Maybe that’s why he leaned so close to me. But I’d been around guys like him for years. Size only mattered in a wrestling match where body mass determined who could pin who down and hold them until the three count.
“Maybe,” I said, resting my elbow on the door to inch Cosmo out of my space, “Mr. Ironside or, I don’t know, people he sends to bully said acquaintance should be a little more subtle with the gifts they leave. Maybe then meetings wouldn’t be necessary.”
I’d learned all I needed to know about reading expressions sitting across the interrogation table with liars and thieves for years. Some are great of withholding the truth. It’s part of the game. But some, like Cosmo, aren’t as skilled. The mention of any threat to Alex, it would seem, didn’t sit so well with the big man. The small wrinkles along his mouth deepened with his frown and he stood up, looking back at Ironside sitting at his table, holding his damn court of lowlifes, then Cosmo stared down at me, worried, maybe, or just a little confused. “What gifts are you talking about?”
“You don’t know, Cosmo?”
“Man, how the hell do you know…”
“I know all I need to know about you and the threats you made.”
“Threats…” Cosmos leaned down again, this time gripping my door. “That what Alex told you? I threatened her? You shitting me?” I didn’t say anything, just stared at the giant, waiting for him to give me more, tell me everything I needed to know without asking a single question. But then a smile broke over his lips, smoothing out those deep mouth wrinkles. “Oh, buddy, you got no idea what Alex is like. She’s fucking good, the best.” He stood then, taking a step back. “Why you think my boss wants her back?” The easy shrug he gave me pissed me off so did that loud laughed he released as he walked away. “You’ll see though. I promise.”
My phone grabbed my attention away from Cosmo’s obnoxious laughter and I thumbed through the alert and the email from Morton’s and the $125.00 receipt for steaks I apparently had delivered to my apartment.
“Son of a bitch.”
I slipped the car into gear, annoyed and wondering what else Alex had bought on my dime or what that little shit had done to my place, but before I pulled away from the curb, I caught Ironside’s stare as he looked across the courtyard, right at me. There was a cool smile on his face and his expression was calm, maybe a little unsettled as he nodded once, eyes tight. There was a warning in his face, that hard, professed coldness that told me to watch my back.
The smell of steak waffed out from under my door as I approached. I knew the aroma well. Normally, Frank called Morton’s every month for our staff meetings. But this wasn’t our office and that damn sure didn’t sound like the smack talking and laughter of my team on the other side of the door. My Super and two neighbors hassled me before I’d reached the elevators, their complaints bouncing like the sound of a whip off the marble floors and slick, glazed lobby brick.
“The music, Mr. Ryan, is obnoxiously loud,” the Super, Grady said, following me toward the elevator.
“Yes. The music. All damn morning.” I didn’t know the woman’s name, but her place was across the hall from mine and she always seemed to be wandering outside of her door, conveniently when I was just getting in. I begged them off with mild apologies and even turned down 3C’s offer of a call to the landlord.
“Sorry,” I’d told them, waving them off as I jogged down the hallway. “The new maid, she’s a little eccentric.”
“You should use my girl, Mr. Ryan. She’s very professional and keeps her earbuds in the whole time she cleans.” 3C was a snooty middle aged redhead with too much Botox tightening her forehead.
“Thanks. I’ll… um, I’ll keep that in mind,” I threw over my shoulder as I reached my door.
I’d expected to find the entire place swept of anything remotely valuable—my stereo, my surround sound, my X-Box, all of it I thought would be gone, but when I slammed through the door, everything was where I’d left it and the smell of half-eaten steak and still warm baked potatoes clung around the kitchen, but Alex wasn’t there.
There were still signs of her presence—her leather jacket and boots were next to the stool and her bag, mostly dry, it looked, from last night’s soak on the balcony lay on my coffee table, but the woman herself was gone.
The stereo went silent with a jab of my finger and my ears stopped ringing from the racket that sounded faintly like Cookie Monster shouting in time with the heavy licks of an angry bass line and squealing guitar. The island was cluttered with mess and I stuffed the steak and potato into the fridge, closing my eyes when I spotted four boxes with the Morton’s logo before I walked into the dining room and stopped short, my temper flaring. There was Alex sitting on the dining room table staring up at my wall-sized touchscreen.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” It took everything I had not to drag her off that table and kick her ass out of my place.
She barely registered my question, moving her head to the left to stare at me over her shoulder before she stood and continued to look over the links, the case files and details I didn’t want anyone to know about. “How long?” she asked, tilting her head at the photograph of my mother’s dead body.
Alex didn’t seem scared, not even mildly irritated as I thundered up next to her, reaching for the off button at the bottom of the screen.
“No,” she said, stopping me with her hand on my wrist.
“This isn’t any of your business.” I jerked out of her touch, but she blocked me, standing right in front of the board.
“The hell it isn’t.”
“What?”
“That girl, the teenager.” She pointed to the news clipping of the Atlanta teen, Stevie Rodriquez. The case I could never ignore but that had made zero connections for me.
“Yeah, what about her?”
It wasn’t just curiosity that had Alex glaring at me the way she did. There was something more that had the woman stepping up to me like she thought she could take me, like she thought she needed to. “Why is that article on your board?”
“It’s just a lead that didn’t go anywhere.”
“That’s bullshit, Ryan.” It was the first time I’d seen Alex’s fear completely vanish, morph into something mean and scary and real. “Tell me what you know about her.”
“Why?”
“Do you know who killed her?”
; “No one knows.” I hated that my voice had lowered, I’d let one unhinged glare from Alex deflate my temper. “Why does this girl matter?’
“She mattered. She mattered a lot.” Alex turned back to the board and I swear I thought her eyes got watery, but once again she blinked to keep any emotion from her face. “Stevie.” She looked back at me and that anger had only doubled. “She was my sister.”
“I was twelve.” I’d decided to start out slow, calm, hoping that the memories, the ones I never told anyone, wouldn’t have me losing my shit. I couldn’t let that happen. Not in front of Ryan.
He’d sweet talked me out of the dining room, with that weird frown on his face and those damn green eyes pleading that I walk away from his computer. He was funny about that thing. I understood. I didn’t like anyone in my business either.
The coffee Ryan offered me was sweet, just the right amount of cream and sugar, but I was drained, worn by the connection that somehow put us together, one I’d known about after I left Cavanagh some months back.
Simmons, the dirty sergeant. He’d put hands on both my sister’s case and Ryan’s mom’s.
I didn’t believe in coincidence, but I didn’t think there was some higher power at work here. It was just a small damn world.
Ryan stared down at me as I sat on the floor right between his uncomfortable leather sofa and the driftwood coffee table in front of it.
“When she died?” he asked, gripping his coffee cup between my fingers. I nodded, not quite yet able to let the weirdness or shock pass and Ryan seemed to get that I was still flustered with the way he nodded—cop demeanor that had me guessing his friendly tone was some sort of throwback to the good cop he must have been. “Her case, Alex… I’d come across it ten times as I shifted through cold cases and the files Simmons had touched while I tried fish out details about his life in Atlanta.” He sat back in his recliner, fingers rubbing against his forehead as he held his coffee cup on his knee. I guessed I wasn’t the only flustered dumbass in the room. “Simmons,” he said like he still couldn’t believe how far his old boss’s reach was.
“Simmons,” I echoed him.
Ryan didn’t seem pissed anymore, of course he wouldn’t. Not with this reveal shaping before us. But I still caught the tension from him, like he had a thousand questions to ask me, none of which had a damn thing to do with me lifting his credit card number from his paid bills stack on his desk to buy steak.
“What… I mean…” he rubbed his neck, looking frustrated, uncomfortable, as though asking for me to fill in the details was somehow rude, but I thought we were beyond privacy at this point. I had his dick in my hand last night and he’d seen my tits. Pity that’s where our friendliness had ended, but I thought him being delicate, acting too much like a cop was sort of pointless. Ryan exhaled, fingers against his eyelids before he finally got the question out. “How did it happen?”
At least he was trying to be subtle.
If I closed my eyes I could almost remember her face. My big sister. She got the good blood, our meth-loving mom always said. I was Seminole, just like mom. So was the guy who’d knocked her up with me. But Stevie’s father was a beautiful Puerto Rican from the island, barely spoke English and called my mother mi cielo. My heaven. She’d talked about that enough in the nearly six years of memory I had about her and then Stevie took up the story, reminding me of our mother so I wouldn’t forget her as we tried to sleep side by side in whatever foster home twin bed we’d lucked up to land in together.
Mom didn’t stay heavenly and Rodriquez was gone back to his island before my sister was born. But he’d left behind something beautiful—those narrow black eyes, the bottom lip, full, thicker than the top and skin so flawless that strangers would stop Stevie on the street just to compliment her complexion.
She had a plan for us both. She’d almost made it, but then, that internship and whatever it was that had happened in that office had changed my sister; had her thinking her grand plan wasn’t all that grand.
“You alright?” Ryan asked when I stayed still, was too silent.
“Yeah. I’m just…” I waved my hand, trying to push back Stevie’s face and all the things that ran in my head. They were memories I tried to forget. Regrets that had started to reform when I took off for Tennessee hoping to stay out of Wanda’s trial. “Sorry,” I told him, clearing my throat and then I tried again, making my voice louder. “I knew you were connected.”
“How?” he asked, slipping from the recliner to sit in front of me on the coffee table.
“Ryan…” I had to wipe my eyes. The damn burn came back and it annoyed me, reminded me that I should keep this shit locked tight. I needed Ryan watching my back, but I didn’t need him fighting my battles. His mother, Stevie and Simmons, it wasn’t new information, but seeing that newspaper clipping on his board reminded me what I’d tried to forget when I took a bus out of Cavanagh: a dirty cop connected my sister’s murder to Fiona Ryan’s and all that drama, all those lies would only weigh me down. But Ryan was looking for something, that much I knew the first time I saw him. I wasn’t interested in solving crimes, but I couldn’t keep what I knew to myself either. I wasn’t that cruel.
He slid down next to me on the floor, his back against the coffee table as he waited for me to continue. One brief glance at his face and I recognized that desperation, that eager hope that another piece of the past’s puzzle would be offered up. “You’re not going to want to hear it.”
“Try me.”
I exhaled, rubbing my neck, ready for his immediate refusal to hear the truth. Cops usually had a one-track mind; they saw a lowlife and that lowlife was usually guilty until something concrete proved otherwise. Ryan wasn’t a cop, but I got the feeling he still thought like one. “Isiah Ferguson.” As I suspected, Ryan’s ready-to-disagree denial rose up. I saw it in how straight he sat, how he held his fingers together over his knees.
“What about him?”
“He was our friend, Stevie and mine, back in Atlanta.”
I wondered what Ryan thought as he stared at me, silent, barely blinking. I knew he didn’t think much of me, why would he? He’d seen my record and that go-to hate of lowlifes that Ryan likely still saw in every crook he came across didn’t allow him to see beyond the broken laws and lame excuses. But when I mentioned that Isiah was our friend, Ryan’s confusion, the weird way he pushed his eyebrows together had me guessing that he was trying to decide if he wanted to kick me out of the front door or off the balcony.
“You and your sister were friends with the guy who killed my mother?” His shoulders had gone stiff and Ryan worked his jaw, moving his teeth together like a lion nibbling on the leftovers of a carcass. There was no way in hell I’d answer him. Instead, I just nodded once, simple, brief but sure. “And you think that this punk is related to your sister’s death too?”
I’d noticed something about Ryan. Well, about me and Ryan. We were both bullheaded as hell. I can’t deny that, don’t think he would either, but when you put two bullheaded, hot tempered people together, the attitude and insults get a little thick. I understood his anger. God, who wouldn’t? Isiah had been tagged for his mom’s murder. Of course Ryan would hate the guy, but he didn’t know the kid Isiah had been. He knew nothing but the bullshit he’d been fed by his dirty sergeant. It was hard for me to keep my voice low, to pull back the curses and insults I wanted to fling at Ryan, but I did. “That punk, as you call him, was barely eighteen when your mom was killed.”
“You mean when he murdered her.” I didn’t expect his voice to get so loud so quickly, but wouldn’t let Ryan think he’d shocked me. The guy was a little full of himself and incapable of realizing how intimating he could be. But, shit, I wasn’t going to let in on that, not in front of him.
Still, if he was a good detective, Ryan would see the holes in the case; he’d know that nothing was clear cut. His knuckles had gone white, one popping as he squeezed his fist together and I dropped my gaze to his hand, ready to take off if he s
tarted swinging before I realized Ryan probably wasn’t the type to attack. Not a woman and definitely not one that had answers for him.
“I get that it pisses you off. I get that you think I’m a fucking crook who can’t be trusted, especially not if I was friends with Isiah, but man, come on, open your eyes.” I didn’t flinch when Ryan grunted, when he shot off the floor and paced with his hands working through his hair. He gave a kick at his recliner, pushing it back and I shook my head, wondering if that hurt. It was his damn place. He could wreck it if he wanted.
I ignored his temper, deciding this bastard needed to hear the truth. “Simmons is the cop that handled my sister’s case. Simmons is the cop that handled your mother’s and Simmons was the only person aside from me and Isiah and his aunt who knew why Stevie was killed.”
“What are you talking about?” He turned, hand on his hips, glaring at me.
It wasn’t his business, none of it, but he needed to know that the secrets went deep. He needed full disclosure to understand how long back Simmons’ reach ran. “She was pregnant, Ryan. My sister, she was seventeen and she was pregnant.”
Ryan only seemed able to stare at me, mouth open like he was trying to push his words out of his mouth and after a second he got over his shock and bit the inside of his cheek. “Isiah?”
“No. Isiah didn’t want her. She didn’t want him, but someone got her pregnant.” I’d only discovered the truth when I paid a visit to Cavanagh. Ryan wouldn’t have known about the pregnancy. It had been left out of the coroner’s report. I flopped onto the sofa watching Ryan as he sat next to me, his attitude less sharp and his anger cooling. “Someone who wouldn’t be seen with her got her pregnant. Someone she’d never tell me about. I don’t know all the details, I was just a damn kid, but I do know that she and Isiah were tight. He knew something about the baby’s father. Stevie told him things she thought I was too young to hear and the second she was killed, Isiah disappeared. He took off to Cavanagh where his old aunt lived.”