by Meg Jackson
I should have fucking known, he thought, they’re not gonna believe me, probably think I did it and came in here to cover my ass. When Jimmy looked back up at him expectantly, Cristov fought the urge to spit in his face.
“Damon, my brother, was there last night when I brought her back to sleep. And he was there this morning when we left. And if you could get Paul to spit the truth, he’d corroborate my story, but I doubt that’ll be very easy.”
“I’m not accusing,” Jimmy said, his voice still firm but his eyes honest. “I’m just trying to cover all the bases. We’re going to need you to give a full statement, and…”
“Well, aren’t you gonna send someone over to her place?” Cristov interrupted. “She could be chained to a damn bed for all I know, the way he was treating her last night…”
“I can send someone around to check on her,” Jimmy said, “and I’ll have someone call up to see if Paul’s at work right now. You’re sure it was him, yeah?”
Cristov nodded, his jaw starting to hurt from how hard he was clenching his teeth.
“Alright, and I’m gonna want to talk to your brother, eventually. To be honest, we can’t do much right now. All we have is your statement, and if she’s changed her mind about reporting it…well, things like this can get sort of tricky.”
“You know what else is messy, man? The bruises he left on her damn neck. Even if she won’t come forward…”
“Calm down,” Jimmy said, noting the rising volume of Cristov’s voice as other cops in the station began to look their way. “We’re gonna do what we can. I’m gonna do what I can. I’m just letting you know, if someone doesn’t want to press charges, you can’t exactly make them. Now, I’m gonna ask you straight-up…”
Jimmy’s voice lowered slightly, and Cristov watched as the cop’s eyes flicked around the small station.
“Does this have anything to do with your problems with that biker gang?” Jimmy asked, returning his attention to Cristov. The idea wasn’t entirely new to Cristov; he’d already thought of that. But how could the two things be connected? Until the night before, the most he had ever shared with Tricia was a beer or two at Sammy’s. He didn’t even know her number until that morning. The only thing they had in common was Ricky.
“No. I don’t think so. There’s no reason to believe that, anyway. Look, the longer we stand here, the longer no one is going to check on her, or calling that bastard at work,” Cristov pointed out, bristling at the command to calm down. “Now, you gonna take my statement and get some people out there, or not?”
Nodding, a sigh escaping his lips, Jimmy led Cristov past the dispatcher’s desk and into the back, where he motioned for Cristov to take a seat beside one of the rows of desks. Cristov watched, his fisted hands squeezing in rhythmic pulses, as Jimmy pulled a few of his fellow uniformed officers together and spoke to them, seeming to relate the story. One of the men disappeared into a back office, another sat at a desk and picked up a phone, and a third trotted out of the building before stopping to speak with the dispatcher.
Cristov tried to relay his story perfectly, from the moment he’d first overheard the struggle in the alley to dropping Tricia off at her car that morning. In the course of his telling, though, he was interrupted twice. The first time, Jimmy answered the phone on his desk but looked across the room; the officer who’d retired to his desk after the little powwow was looking back at him.
“All morning?” Jimmy asked into the receiver, nodding slightly and making a scribbled note on a post-it. “Alright, thanks.”
Hanging up, he turned to Cristov with a wan smile.
“Well, Paul Tiding’s been at work all morning,” he said. “So that’s good news.”
Cristov weighed the truth of that statement; it was good news for Tricia’s health and safety, he supposed, but it wasn’t the best news he’d ever heard, either. It meant that Tricia hadn’t showed up out of her own volition. She’d changed her mind. He didn’t want to believe that the fire in her eyes had been snuffed out so quickly after leaving him.
“I guess,” he responded before returning to the story.
The second interruption was worse. The phone rang again, and Jimmy picked it up with a gruff greeting.
“Really?”
Silence, Cristov leaning forward as though to better hear what was on the other end of the line.
“Okay, I mean…yeah?”
Jimmy’s lips pursed and he seemed to study the ceiling, repeatedly clicking his pen until Cristov wanted to rip the damn thing out of his hand. The half-completed incident report on the desk was nearly illegible to Cristov’s eyes, Jimmy’s handwriting leaving something to be desired in the neatness department.
“Yeah, well, nothing else we can do about that. Come on back, I guess, and we’ll talk to Chief,” he said before hanging up again. This time, when he turned to Cristov, his expression was unreadable.
“No response at her place,” he said. “Her car’s there but no one’s home.”
“Well, did he go in?” Cristov asked, bristling.
“Can’t just go breaking into innocent people’s places,” Jimmy said, shrugging. “And no judge is going to give us a warrant on this.”
“But she could be in trouble,” Cristov argued, frustration nipping his throat.
“Well, if Paul was the one after her, and we know he didn’t leave work…”
“What if he had a friend or something? Or, shit, what if there were, like, complications or something from what he did to her, and she passed out in the bathroom or some shit?”
“That’s a hell of a lot of speculation,” Jimmy countered. “All we’ve got is your report and…”
“Call Damon,” Cristov demanded, knowing his tone was growing damn near hysteric. “He saw the marks on her neck. He’ll tell you what she said this morning and…”
“I will,” Jimmy said, making a motion for Cristov to calm down. “I’ll talk to him, but even if he backs up what you told us, we can’t…”
“You’re the damn police,” Cristov interrupted, “you can do whatever you want, and you usually do! Dammit, she’s in trouble, I know it! Even if she’s not in trouble now, she’ll be in trouble soon enough if no one puts that asshole behind bars.”
Jimmy took Cristov’s outburst with patience, but Cristov could tell that patience wasn’t infinite. His hands were clenched so hard he was sure there would be cuts in his palm from his nails.
“We’re gonna talk to him, after we finish here,” Jimmy said, gesturing to the incident report. “But I doubt he’s going to give anything up willingly…”
“You’re gonna talk to him? Or are you gonna detain him? You need to get him off the streets until I can find her and…”
“This isn’t a movie, Cristov,” Jimmy said. “We can’t just arrest people without evidence or even a victim. We do something too rash and he’ll walk free no matter what.”
“I saw it, man! I saw the whole damn thing! Isn’t that enough?!”
Jimmy shook his head, regret evident in his eyes.
“I’m afraid not,” he said. “Do you know how much shit we could be in if we just pick him up and interrogate him on the basis of this?”
He gestured to the incident report. Cristov huffed, his shoulders nearly touching his ears as his body bunched and coiled with frustrated energy.
“What about Damon’s testimony? Won’t that be enough?”
“Did Damon see Paul doing it? Did Tricia tell Damon who did it?”
Cristov shook his head and ran his palms over his eyes.
“But who else would do it?” he pointed out, mind racing to find a loophole in the situation that would make the cops see things his way. See the truth. “They were dating. I mean, anyone could tell you that. Anyone could tell you they were a thing. Damon saw the marks on her neck. How else would something like that happen?”
“You’re talking about pure speculation again, Cristov,” Jimmy sighed, picking up his pen and shaking his head. “Listen, let’s just
get through this and…”
“What fucking difference does it make?” Cristov shouted, drawing the attention of everyone in the little station. Including, it seemed, the Chief of Police, who appeared in the doorway of his office with his arms folded across his chest and his gaze fixed directly on the young, red-faced gypsy at Jimmy’s desk. Gulping back his anger, Cristov continued in a low mutter. “You’re not going to do a damn thing to protect her, are you?”
Jimmy’s eyes sparked, his own anger showing in the way his fingers whitened around the pen in his hand.
“I’m going to do whatever I can, Volanis,” he hissed. “Trust me, when my patrol starts, I’ll be looking for her, I’ll make sure to go by her house. But right now? The best thing you can do for her is finish giving your statement. That’s the best thing you can do for both of you, you hear? You’re telling me you were the last person to see her. That she spent the night with you and your brother, and had some nasty marks on her neck. If you don’t think that this can swing around to smack you in the ass, you’re dead wrong. So cooperate, man. I’m serious about that.”
Cristov blanched. He wanted to kick that desk over and tear the damn incident report into a million pieces. But the last thing he needed was to make more trouble for himself and his people. It wasn’t enough that the fucking Steel Dragons were on their tail, was it? No, he had to get himself involved in this shit, too. To be truthful, he’d damn near forgotten all about the biker’s threats while dealing with Tricia, and now as he stared back at the uniformed policeman, it rushed back to him and chilled him all down the spine.
His shoulders slumped. He surrendered, hating the feeling with every fiber in his body. He got through the rest of his story without incident, noting out of the corner of his eye that the mustached man in the doorway never took his eyes off him. And then he was summarily dismissed, Jimmy offering a placating pat on the back as he ushered him out the door.
The rain had started, a fine drizzle. Blinking in the damp air, fragrant with loam and asphalt, he did the only thing he could think to do, even though his fingers shook as he dialed her number and his throat closed up when he heard her voice.
“Cristov? What the hell do you want?” Ricky said, sounding more than a little worse for the wear. When he closed her eyes, he could see her in bed, her voice croaky and full in the morning, eyes red and bleary and yet still beautiful as he pulled her body underneath his and did his damn best to fuck her headache and hangover away.
“I need to talk to you, and I think it better be in person,” he said, wondering if he was saying that because it was true, or because just hearing her voice wasn’t really enough. How long had it been since that last morning? How long since he’d heard her speak? And now, just the sound of her on the other end of the line was like a worm on a hook, and he was the fish who wanted a nibble.
“I have to be at work soon, and we don’t have anything to say to each other,” she said with a cranky sigh that almost made him smile for all the memories it ignited inside him.
“We do,” he said, gritting his teeth against the emotions roiling into a storm in his stomach. “Trust me, we do…”
“Fuck off, Cristov,” she said, her voice now taking on the tone of a child about to cry. And that, too, made his body tense with the need to see her. Even though he knew, full damn well, that the desire to see her wouldn’t be slaked by seeing her. It would just turn into the desire to touch her. And that would turn into the desire to hold her. And then…
“It’s about Tricia,” he said. “I need to talk to you about Tricia. She’s in trouble, and you need to help her.”
Ricky drew a sharp intake of breath across the line, the shocked silence its own sort of language.
“Come over, then,” she said, tight and reserved. “Give me a half hour.”
34
Ricky sat cross-legged on her couch, doing a series of miniature cat’s cradles with a hairband. She wasn’t very good at cat’s cradles to begin with and the hairband was far too small to get very far, but it kept her hands busy while she waited for the door to open; she’d told him just to come in, the door unlocked.
She itched to get a beer from the fridge, to take the edge off, but she’d drank enough last night, hadn’t she? And she didn’t think that Cristov would respond well to coming in and seeing a beer on her coffee table. At 11am. On a Monday.
She’d gone to the weekly meeting that morning but dodged out afterwards, saying she’d do her writing from home. It had raised some eyebrows, but she was still making her deadlines on time, wasn’t she? Ed Kerry, who was tired of her breaking their Monday morning gossip sessions, had agreed to meet the next day instead.
What do you care what Cristov thinks about your drinking, she asked herself, that little demon on her shoulder sneering. You’re not together anymore, remember? He dumped you. Fuck him. Who cares, who cares, who cares what he thinks of you now?
She sighed and scratched an itch on her thigh through her black leggings, dropping the hairband to the polished wood of the table.
What the hell did Cristov have to do with Tricia? What kind of trouble was her friend in? Those were the things she should have been thinking about. Her stomach knotted slightly as horrible possibilities ran through her mind.
The worst possibility of all was that Cristov and Tricia had some sort of clandestine affair, behind Paul’s back, and something had gone wrong. She got pregnant or had AIDS or something, even though, realistically, if Tricia had an STD, Ricky would have it too. So maybe she was pregnant? But then why would Cristov be coming to tell Ricky about it, instead of Tricia herself?
So what else could it be? Was Tricia smoking too much pot, and Cristov wanted Ricky to talk to her? Was it something worse, some heavy shit? Opiates? Coke? Meth? She couldn’t believe that she wouldn’t have noticed if her very best friend was strung out on something…
The click the doorknob turning had Ricky on her feet before the door even opened. Her heart jumped up into her throat and she forcibly swallowed, as though to tamp it back down.
And then: there he was.
All six-plus feet of him.
With those green eyes and that sandy blonde hair and those cheekbones cut like daggers. He’d grown some stubble. His flannel shirt, unbuttoned, over a white wife beater, was snug around his biceps, the sculpted plane of his chest a dirty hint through the sheer fabric.
“Cris,” she said, knowing that her right to use that name ended a while ago, still unable to stop herself. “What’s wrong?”
There was clearly something very, very wrong. His eyes, which usually gleamed and danced with easy humor, were dark and stormy. He licked his lips as he let the door shut behind him and walked toward her.
“I don’t know,” he said, collapsing onto the sofa with his head in his hands. Ricky stood, uncomfortable, above him. She wished, again, she had a beer in her hands. Instead, she sat back down, beside him, wanting to let her hand fall on his back and rub his shoulder and feel his arm around her neck, pulling her face into his chest as he held her…
Tricia, she reminded herself.
“You said Tricia…”
“Fuck, Ricky, you gotta call her. Did you call her already? Did she answer? I should have told you to call her,” he said, raising his head from his palms and looking at her with wild eyes. She shook her head as cold blood flooded her veins. This was bad. Look at him; he was frantic. He looked worse than he had when she’d first told him about the Steel Dragons.
“What happened? What’s wrong with Tricia?” Even as she asked, she grabbed her phone from the coffee table and pulled up her friend’s contact number. The call went straight to voicemail, and she held the phone out so Cristov could hear.
“That asshole…that fucking asshole she was dating, Paul whatever, he’s been hurting her, Ricky. I saw them last night, in that alley besides Sammy’s, with his hands around her neck, choking the damn life out of her…”
As Cristov spoke, retelling the whole story, Ricky f
elt her stomach plunging deeper and deeper. Anger and fear and regret battled in her heart; how long had this been happening? Why hadn’t she noticed? She thought of all those scarves and turtlenecks, and all Tricia’s smiling affections for Paul, how she told Ricky again and again how happy she was, and the odd pains that kept her from their girl’s nights…
“I’ll kill him,” Ricky blurt out as Cristov was telling her about his encounter with the police. “I’ll fucking kill him.”
She stood up, hands in fists, face red. Cristov yanked her down beside him. When he looked in her eyes, he saw that she meant it. He didn’t blame her. But he also thought that as much as she might have every intention of killing the man who’d hurt her friend, she never would. Still, she might go to his office and raise hell, and that wouldn’t be great.
“He doesn’t matter right now, Ricky,” Cristov said, his effort to calm her down strangely working on himself, as well. “You can’t do anything to him. The cops are going to talk to him, but none of that matters if we can’t find Tricia. Where would she go? Would she leave town? You know her best, Ricky, that’s why I came to you. You need to find her and convince her to come back and go to the cops. Dammit, I tried, and I really thought…”
“I’m calling her parents,” Ricky said, grabbing her phone and leaving the room, not wanting an audience. She returned quickly, however, and threw the phone onto the couch while her body shook with rage.
“I fucking forgot! They’re in fucking Havana! I can’t get in touch with them! Shit!”
“What about work? Would she go to someone from work?”
Ricky shook her head.
“She hates all her coworkers. She wouldn’t go to anyone if she wasn’t going to me. Or Kim. Shit, Kim! I have to call Kim!”
Cristov handed her the phone she’d thrown onto the sofa beside him and she disappeared again, although he could hear her shouting from the other room.
“Call me back SOON, Kim. This isn’t about me or you or any of that shit, okay? Tricia’s in TROUBLE and we need to figure out how to help her, okay? So CALL. ME. BACK.”