Temper
Page 9
I looked up, fork shoveling the first precious bite of the waffle stack in my mouth. The bell above the door dinged as three big guys came in. I chewed and swallowed quickly, trying to enjoy the pecan-crusted sweetness while I still could. It was flat-tasting, far too sweet, flavor like a punch in the face, but it was cheap and it was what I had.
Joey and his two goons came over to the table. Joey was a bulldog, or at least he reminded me of one—bald head covered in folds of skin, mouth turned down, sharp, beady eyes, and a personality that was none too smart and far too stubborn. He was also vaguely ridiculous, dressed in an oversized coat with a collar and cuffs covered in dyed chicken feathers bigger than a Broadway boa, with thick hands that seemed out of place in those sleeves, but which I knew could do plenty of damage. He also had at least one gun hidden somewhere, and his two bruisers—big guys hardly out of high school and well-muscled like athletes, not yet gone to drugs or sloth—had at least two more guns.
Frankly, I felt naked without my own piece. The emergency pop-gun in my boot didn’t count for much, especially with me seated in the booth.
The other three patrons of the Waffle Palace had also looked up when Joey and his people arrived; now, they carefully avoided noticing anything that happened. We were in his territory, and for all that Joey wasn’t the most law-abiding, he kept order in his territory as one of the block captains for the mob. He’d also, once upon a time, helped Adam with a case for his own purposes, and I was hoping he’d listen to me now.
“You Cherabino?” he asked me, looming over the side of the booth.
I wanted to go for the tiny gun in my boot—I wanted it badly. Instead, I cut another piece of the waffle. “That’s right,” I said.
“You’re a cop,” he said, flatly, with enough danger in his voice to remind me not to waste his time.
“I used to be a cop,” I corrected him. “Now I work private investigations with a guy you know. Adam Ward?”
He stared for a long moment then slid into the booth. One of the bruisers slid in next to him and the other found a seat at the bar stool area not two feet away. The surroundings got a lot less quiet then as the other diners resumed their conversations. The waitress wisely took a smoke break, though.
“I know Adam,” Joey said, cautiously. “Why you here and he’s not, then?” He was asking the obvious question in other words—why was I here, and why had I asked him to come? But he was still more curious than angry, or he wouldn’t have bothered to show up at all. Either that, or he would have come with a hell of a lot more than two alert-looking guys.
“Adam is busy on another case. He doesn’t know I’m here.” I gestured sideways with the fork to put emphasis on a nonverbal no. “Not that he can’t find me wherever I am if he chooses to come looking. We both know better than that.”
Joey shifted in his spot in the booth, impatient.
“How about I get you a waffle, boss? I can get you a waffle,” the guy said.
Joey looked over, glanced at my waffle, then back at his guy. “Yeah, you do that. Chocolate chips. Whipped cream, too.”
“You got it, boss,” the guy said and went outside to get the waitress on her smoke break. Behind the bar stools, the short order cook in the middle of the room gulped and started running waffle batter through a cone onto the iron, adding chocolate chips in layers as it poured. He’d obviously heard the order.
This really was Joey’s territory, I realized, and for one, tense moment, I hesitated.
“Look, you’re here to give me information, you said,” Joey told me. “Ward’s okay. He does what he says most of the time, and he ain’t too shy about making known where his real loyalties are. You, I ain’t got a handle on. You gonna be good for my business today or are you just yanking my chain? I don’t like it when people yank my chain just for the hell of it, you got it?”
I’d painted myself into the corner, hadn’t I? “Yeah,” I said, feeling the words coming out of me like hot lava. “I just thought you should know a bit of information, okay? There was a—one of your associates. Yours, if you know what I mean.”
He nodded, slowly.
“Guy went by the name of The Rabbit. Rumor has it he went missing with a bunch of your money about a year ago. He didn’t. Or, at least he didn’t disappear on his own, and he didn’t take the money.”
Joey leaned forward. “You’re talking Jerry Toodle.”
“Toodle?” I echoed, completely distracted by the name.
“Yeah, Toodle. Goes missing over by the Manufacturing District. Sent postcards from Brazil. Bosses weren’t happy.”
“I know who was behind that disappearance, and it had nothing to do with Brazil.”
Joey leaned back, strummed his fingers against the table while a chocolate chip waffle with whipped cream and a perfect strawberry on top appeared on the table in front of him. “It’s not my territory,” he said, finally, but with the tone of voice that said he could be persuaded if necessary.
“I’d rather deal with the devil I know,” I said.
Joey threw back his head then and laughed. “The devil you know.” He pulled the waffles closer to him, cutting them up and eating with apparent relish. “The devil you know,” he said again, shaking his head, his mouth full of food. “You’re funny, ex-cop lady. You’re funny.” He swallowed and cut the next bite. “What I want to know is, why come to me at all? I ain’t gonna pay you nothing for the information. You’ve still gotta be a cop, in there, somewhere. Cops don’t do this shit. At least not cops like you.”
For a second, I nearly reconsidered all over again. This was crossing a line, a line I’d never get back. This was a whole new kind of fire in which to forge my soul. But I was here, and it was done, and I couldn’t help thinking of Abby Joiner and that smear of blood in her kitchen. “This guy used my information, my work, to set up a hit on a girl who didn’t deserve to be killed, over money and secrets he didn’t have to share. He had a way out, and instead, he killed her.”
“Sounds like my kind of guy,” Joey said around another bite of food.
Now I was angry. “But he made me complicit. I can’t go to the cops to report him without getting caught up in all of it. And if I know anything—anything at all—about the justice system, her case is going to slip farther and farther down the priorities list until it gets looked at once a year, if that. There’s no body. It’s not a murder, not yet. And he did this to me. He did. And he promised me extra money like that would just make me go away.” I spat the last.
Joey smiled then, the smile of a shark spotting its prey. He swallowed and set the silverware down. “I can work with that. You gonna tell me who disappeared Jerry Toodle?”
The words were carried out of me, thrown out of me by the self-righteously angry knowledge that he’d done this to me. “James Collins and the union guy at his plant, Todd Elmer. One of them did it, the other helped, or knew about it, or set it up. They both covered it up, and both of them are involved in this girl’s murder.”
Joey nodded, a solid nod, and pushed his plate of waffles over to the bruiser next to him, who ate like he hadn’t eaten in weeks. Joey looked me in the eye then. “You know I ain’t gonna use this information to give this guy a back rub. Bad things are gonna happen. You cross The Darkness, they always happen. It’s like nature. Like the sun coming up tomorrow.”
“I don’t care,” I spat and realized that, in that moment, I didn’t. I didn’t care at all.
Joey nodded, that heavy, significant nod, and gestured for his henchman to stand up. The one at the bar did too, stuffing a bagel in his mouth hurriedly. Joey leaned over, putting his hand on the table in front of me. “I don’t owe you nothing,” he told me.
“No,” I said. I saw it then again, the weight of who he was and what he stood for. I saw all the evil and the power, like some high-powered predator sitting across from me at the table. But I wasn’t his prey, not today, and I didn’t give a shit. “No, you don’t,” I said slowly and carefully, an acknowledgement.
“Okay, then,” he said and nodded one more time. “You’re right, you really aren’t a cop anymore,” he said. “Nice doing business with you.”
And he turned, leaving me feeling like I’d been beaten with clubs.
As he walked out, his two goons behind him, I asked myself: What did I do? What in hell did I do?
I’d gotten justice for Abby Joiner, I told myself. Justice.
But I’d done it by illegal means.
Guilt and shame and anger and self-justification all swirled together in my head like a torrent of water in a whirlpool sent to suck me down to the bottom of the ocean.
I looked up as the lights came on at the front of the PI office; Adam was here.
I pushed my emotions down, down, hidden, where they should have been from the beginning. I’d live with the consequences of my choices like anybody else would, like I had when I’d shot the two perps on duty as a beat cop, like I had when I’d taken Adam home to meet my grandmother, like I had after Peter had died. Like I would now. That was what it was to be an adult.
“Hi,” Adam said, just barely loud enough for me to hear. He looked sad, frustrated.
I felt much the same, but I forced myself to respond. “Hi.”
He got closer, and he must have picked up on what I was feeling because he said, “What aren’t you telling me?”
I stood up, body language defensive. “Don’t you dare yell at me right now!”
“I’m not yelling.”
“I don’t care! I made a thousand ROCs for the agency today. You have to care about that. You have to respect that, if not me.”
“I respect you.” He looked like I’d hit him with a two-by-four. “I never said I didn’t. At all. Um, how’d you get a thousand ROCs for the agency?”
I was frustrated. He didn’t appreciate anything I did for this agency while he was off gallivanting around working with the police. And if he overheard me thinking that, all very well and good. “As it happens, a client hired me to do some research and find somebody for him.” I was proud of the money, I really was. With that and the papers I had served, maybe—maybe—I could pay the bills on this place this month, even make a dent in my mortgage and not lose Peter’s house. “I don’t appreciate you not being here,” I said to distract myself from everything I wasn’t proud of.
His shoulders tightened, and he got that crease in his forehead that meant he was mad. “I was off making eight hundred ROCs with the police. We have to pay the bills. Me working pays them.”
Fury rose over me. “I work, too!”
“I never said you didn’t.” He took a deep breath, uncurled his fists, and said: “Let’s start over. I got paid, too. But I got paid for a shitty case and an even shittier ending. They’re dropping the case, Cherabino. The wife’s holding shit over their heads, and they’re dropping the charges.”
I forced myself to unclench my own fists and lean back against the desk behind me, try to let the tension go. Adam didn’t start this. It wasn’t Adam’s fault I had—my mind shied away. “That does sound pretty crappy. You know, even though I don’t know what the case is about.”
“I can’t tell you, I told you that, but it doesn’t matter anyway. They say I’m done. Done. And Freeman’s backing them up. What about justice? What about doing the right effing thing?” He looked frustrated to the point of tears, to the point of killing something.
“Yeah, well,” I said bitterly. “Nobody’s all that interested in doing the right thing anymore, now are they?”
“They sure aren’t. They care more about the politics than justice.” He met my eyes, looked wounded.
“At least you still get to work there,” I said harshly before I could hold it back.
He turned away. “You didn’t miss anything. It’s going to be a shitshow tonight anyway.” He sighed, sat down on the edge of his overly-neat desk across from mine, maybe three feet away, and then started telling me about his case in general terms, and about the high-level administrative officer in charge who’d been caught in corruption.
I whistled when he was done. “Holy crap. I wonder how long that’s been going on.”
“Apparently, a long time.”
I shook my head. “If IA’s going after somebody so high up, it would have to have been a long time. They’re serious about stamping out this corruption thing I’ve seen in the papers.” I paused, thought about it, and wondered if I’d seen anything suspicious I should have reported. I didn’t think so. “Well, good for them, though. Taking out the rotten apples makes everybody better. Even if they thought I was one of those rotten apples.”
He got up from the desk and crossed over to me, getting almost—almost—too close. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Isabella. Really.”
“I really don’t know anymore. I need to prove that I…”
“I know.”
I took a deep breath, tried to focus on something other than myself. “They really aren’t interested in finding the perp for your case?” I asked, finding it hard to believe. My old boss, Branen, sometimes pulled political moves, but always with warning and always for what he saw as the greater good, which usually had a decent resemblance to the real greater good. “And they just pulled the rug out from under you?” I asked, interested despite myself. Caring, despite knowing that caring too much would only hurt me.
He gaze looked past me, far away, sad. Not really tracking in the here and now. “I wanted to solve it. I wanted to get the journalist justice.” He focused on me, then, those beautiful eyes and that incredibly sad look.
“It’s the worst, isn’t it, when they won’t let you finish?” I… I wanted to touch him. I wanted to make him feel better. I moved my hand slowly, so slowly—he was a telepath, he needed warning—up to his face. At the last moment, I settled it down on his shoulder.
“It really is,” he said, looking right into my eyes, less than a foot away, looking down with that expression he’d had when we were dating, when he was thinking about kissing me.
For a moment, I wanted him to. I wanted to throw all of the rest of this crap aside and do something stupid. End up on the desk, the floor, someone’s bed. But—but this was Adam. And stupid wasn’t going to be once, and it wasn’t going to be stupid.
I’d broken up with him once, I thought. I’d had my reasons, and they must have been good reasons for me to be left here, feeling like my insides had been scooped out. I wanted to cross that distance so badly.
He leaned forward—and I pulled away. Breathing. Wanting.
I picked up my jacket from the back of the desk chair. Carefully, I said, “You want dinner? You can tell me about the case then. Maybe I’ll tell you about mine.” The safer parts. The parts that didn’t make me wonder who I was now. The parts that ended with me having a bunch of money and pride that I’d figured out who the blackmailer was—those parts, I’d tell him.
He held his hands very still in front of his body, careful, very careful with me like I was a glass sculpture that would break with any sudden movements. “I do like food, and we can afford it today. Since we both went out and worked at this.”
“We’ll be okay, Adam,” I told him, as much for me as for him. “We’ll figure this out and the clients will come. They will.” I had to believe that. “We’ll figure out how to find justice for people. Somehow.”
He took a deep breath. “I hope so. I really hope so.”
“We will,” I said. I didn’t know who I was trying to convince more, him or me. “And then…and then we’ll figure out how to prove those charges were wrong. Publicly.”
“Sure,” Adam said. “Sure. You’re innocent. And that needs to be said.”
<<<<>>>>
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Check out the rest of the Mindspace Investigations series:
Rabbit Trick (short story)
Clean
Payoff (novella)
Sharp
Marked
Vacant
Fluid (novella)
Other works:
The Three Words Project
How to Drive Yourself Crazy as a Writer
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About the Author
Alex C. Hughes, the author of the award-winning Mindspace Investigations series from Roc, has lived in the Atlanta area since the age of eight. She is a graduate of the prestigious Odyssey Writing Workshop, and her short fiction has been published in several markets including Fireside Magazine, EveryDay Fiction, Thunder on the Battlefield and White Cat Magazine. She is an avid cook and foodie, a trivia buff, and a science geek, and loves to talk about neuroscience, the Food Network, and writing craft—but not necessarily all at the same time. You can visit her at Twitter at @ahugheswriter or on the web at www.ahugheswriter.com.
Temper: A Mindspace Investigations Novella
Alex Hughes
Copyright © 2015 by Alexandra Hughes
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