Chapter Twenty-One
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Lincoln / Present
T he balding man cussing out everybody in the station has three yellow, rotting teeth in his mouth, patches of scaly skin on his face, and track marks near the crooks of both his arms. “I didn’t do anything, fucker,” he snarls as Dickers processes his fingerprints and gets his mugshot.
“That’s not what you said five minutes ago when you claimed you didn’t mean to hit your girlfriend, Mikey,” Dickers says. “Now turn to your left. Your other left. You should know the drill by now, man. Come on.”
Michael Welsh is a regular at the station, and it’s always the same story. “I didn’t! The bitch fell on her own.”
“Onto your fist?” I ask, rolling my eyes at the man’s contradictions.
He spits at my newly polished shoe, making my eye twitch. “You being a wiseass?” he asks.
“You want to add assaulting a police officer to your list of charges, or are you good?” I return, staring at the wad of spit in front of my foot.
It’s three in the morning, and I have no patience left for people like him—repeat drug offenders who are constantly getting reported for something. Domestic abuse. Criminal mischief. Possession. This is the fourth time in the past month and a half that someone from the station has had to bring him in for going off on his old woman. Right now, I’m running on coffee fumes and a prayer since being called in to help with the staffing shortage, which doesn’t bode well for the guy running his mouth. I don’t mind going outside of a regular detective’s nine-to-five schedule, because I’ve got nothing better to do. But the exhaustion weighing on my bones is increasing by the fucking second.
Once he’s secured to the bench, I start heading to my office to finish some paperwork when he stops me in my tracks. “I have information on Del Rossi,” he blurts out.
Dickers gives me a nervous look as my fingers grip the doorjamb.
“I know you’re interested,” he says, and even with my back turned, I know he’s directing it at me. “Because it has to do with your old buddy. What was his name? Conklin. Yeah, Matt Conklin. He came to see me a while ago about what I knew.”
Dickers clears his throat. “What kind of information, Welsh?”
“If I talk, I want a deal, or else you ain’t getting shit from me.”
The guy could be lying, which is likelier than him actually knowing something about my ex-wife’s father. Welsh associates with lower-level dealers in the area to get his heroin fix, not businessmen who own multi-millions-dollar companies.
But I’ll play the nice guy for now. “Look, bud. We’re not at liberty to promise you anything, even if you give us something good. We’ll still have to charge you for the criminal possession and assault second.”
Welsh leans his back against the wall and stretches his legs out as best he can with the shackle around his ankle.
“If you can provide us information on Del Rossi that we deem credible, you’ve got a chance at lowering or dropping some of your charges though,” I add. I don’t mention Conklin. As far as I’m concerned, Welsh doesn’t deserve to even utter his name.
The guy is a well-known perp in the system, mostly for drugs and domestics, which means there are more things for him to lose if the judge decides he’s had enough chances to clean up his act. So maybe he does have something up his sleeve that could help his case. Doesn’t mean I’m going to wake up one of the other investigators over something that’s probably bullshit.
“So, Welsh.” I rest the side of my arm against the wall and cross them over my chest until the fabric of my button-down stretches over my shoulders. “Why should I believe a word you’re saying?”
He’s oddly silent for somebody who was willing to sing like a canary only moments ago. If he does know something, he could be weighing his options and the consequences. If the wrong people find out he was talking to us, he could wind up six feet under like other snitches tend to.
“Word on the street says you’ve got a lot invested in the Del Rossi’s business,” Welsh says, nodding his chin toward my bad shoulder with a smug look on his face. “At least that’s what it seemed like when Conklin came to me asking questions. Something tells me you wouldn’t be entertaining me right now if you weren’t a little bit interested in what I have to say about him and Del Rossi, Detective. ”
My eyes narrow at his tone. It could be deductive reasoning that he knows my title—I’m not in a uniform like road patrol officers are. I get to wear suits. Nicer clothes that don’t make my balls sweat in the wool that the state tortures us with year-round. But Welsh isn’t that smart.
He’s being fed information on me.
Question is, by who?
When the news reported on the shooting, they hadn’t gone into the specifics of where I’d been shot or what my title was within the state. They’d focused on Conklin’s untimely demise and noted the other law enforcement agent in critical condition.
Welsh is letting me know he’s got an in with somebody who knows all the right details.
“Guess you better talk,” Dickers tells Welsh, sitting on the edge of the desk in front of the bench Welsh is shackled to.
Welsh isn’t paying attention to Dickers, though. He’s staring directly at me. “Your friend asked me who I was getting my supply from. I wasn’t willing to talk to him then.”
Then why is he willing to now? “What makes you so interested in being the one who talks now?”
Welsh’s nostrils flare. “Because they’re everywhere. Always watching. Always listening. Always waiting. I can’t fucking stand it. They show up and talk to my girl when I’m gone too.”
“Who is ‘they’?” Dickers asks, picking up a notepad from the desk. “Give us a name.”
Dickers and I sit silently, waiting for him to tell us.
Welsh’s eyelid tremors get worse. “I only have one. Little J. He gets his shit from the city. He knows a guy who knows a guy.”
Isn’t that always how it works? “So this guy is your dealer? What does he have to do with Del Rossi? I don’t like my time being wasted.”
“He said he had a big clientele list,” Welsh tells me. “That Del Rossi was cutting into some of the supply and not paying full cost for it. Little J told me he didn’t want to be punished for Del Rossi’s addiction. That his boss was going to blame him for the money not counting right.”
I suspected from past interactions that Del Rossi used. But I need to play dumb and let him confirm it. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would Del Rossi take the drugs?”
“Little J said he looked like he needed to take the edge off.” Welsh shrugs. “But how the fuck am I supposed to know? J never said anything more about it. Just that Del Rossi was going to screw him over if he wasn’t careful.”
Dickers and I share a skeptical look.
“Who is Little J?” I ask him. It’s not uncommon for dealers to go by nicknames. I’ve arrested a guy named Shorty too many times to count. Then there’s Mr. Hush, who was dumb enough to get a custom license plate made with the name that basically advertised that he was a goddamn dealer.
Welsh sniffles, using his shoulder to wipe his running nose. “You already know who he is. Your buddy knew damn well who he was by the time he tried getting the info out of me.”
Conklin knew?
I rack my brain for a name, when something clicks.
Son of a bitch.
I push off the wall, heat rising under my skin like someone just lit a fire. “Thanks for the intel.”
“What about my deal?” Welsh calls out.
The district attorney might offer him a lesser charge if the information helps me, but I’m not sure I want to give him that. Welsh is the kind of asshole who deserves to rot behind bars.
“I’ll call the DA when I can. I’ve got more important things to do.”
“That’s it?” he yells.
Dickers follows me into the back office. “Do you know that name? It’s not one I’m familiar with and I’ve read up on the dealers in our area. If he’s a repeat offender, it’s not anyone we’ve arrested before.”
I grab the file that he gave me, opening to the fifth page.
There’s smeared black ink next to Jakob Volley’s name where Conklin put something in quotations. I thought the first word might have been “little” or “title,” but it was hard to tell what the letter next to it was.
But now it’s obvious.
Jakob Volley is Little J.
“Son of a bitch,” I growl, throwing a pen against the opposite wall and scraping a hand through my hair.
We’ve been close the entire time.
“Hawk?” Dickers says cautiously.
“Don’t talk to anyone about this,” I tell him, slamming the file closed and putting it back into my bag. “I already lost one man thanks to this asshole. I won’t be losing another.”
Grabbing my bag, I walk past a stunned Dickers and toward the back exit.
He follows behind me. “We still have two hours left of our shift,” he calls out. “What do you want me to tell the sergeant on duty if he realizes you left?”
“Tell him whatever the fuck you want,” I say right before the door closes between us, and the cold night air bites into my face.
The night Conklin was shot, I’d managed to pull us out of range from the shooter at 123 Cover Creek Road. It’d been the adrenaline that enabled me to work past my own injury to try tending to his. As he bled out on the ground, he looked at me with fading eyes and said one name.
Del Rossi .
That was the last thing he’d ever said to me.
It could have meant anything.
But I knew it had to do with Volley.
And if Del Rossi is using, it makes him even more unpredictable. It makes him a flight risk.
*
The good doctor pretends we never ran into each other at the store—like the momentary interest I saw in her eyes never existed. It’s probably safer that way, so I let her control the narrative.
I’ve got bigger things on my mind anyway.
“You seem tense,” she notes, sitting in her usual seat across from me.
It’s impossible to get comfortable on the couch when my back and arm are killing me today. I slept like shit for the past three nights and spent way too much time at the gym trying to distract myself from Welsh’s information and the millions of phone calls I’ve made to try getting into Rikers Island, where Volley is being held.
So far, I’ve had no luck.
“My week hasn’t exactly been ideal,” I tell her, shrugging and ignoring the wince of pain that radiates from my injury.
“Would you like to talk about it?”
“No,” I say instantly, though my foot starts bouncing and giving me away. She watches me for a moment, jots down something in her notebook, and sets the pen down when I ask, “If you could go back and change something that happened in the past, would you?”
She’s thoughtful, the leg that’s draped over her other swinging lightly. “I suppose it would depend on what it was. Could I choose the event?”
“Sure.”
“Then…yes.”
I expect her to give me some crapshoot answer about how all of our experiences shape who we are, not this. “What would you go back and change?”
She’s quiet, her lips twitching. Then she says, “How about we go tit for tat? You tell me yours, and I’ll tell you mine.”
The fact she’s offering to tell me anything is impressive, considering she’s been locked down tighter than Fort Knox. I’m breaking down her barriers.
“If my mom got to choose, she’d probably make sure I never met Georgia,” I admit, staring at the stain on my jeans. It reminds me that I need a new pair. All of mine seem to have grease or grass stains on them.
“But you wouldn’t choose that?”
I find myself shaking my head. “No, I wouldn’t. Georgia and I were good for a long time. We learned to love each other.”
Our love story isn’t like any of my friends, and nobody knew that we only got married so she didn’t have to be stuck with the likes of Luca Carbone. If they did, maybe they would have talked me out of it.
My chest fills with a pressure that presses against my heart. “I would go back and tell Conklin not to look into the Del Rossi family,” I say quietly, my whole leg bouncing. “I would tell him to forget about everything. I can handle the pain that comes with divorce because it’s only for me to cope with. But I dragged a lot of innocent people into the mess that left him dead. That’s not fair to them. That pain is…”
All I can do is shake my head.
“When you asked him to look into her family, what do you mean?” she questions, her pen remaining on the notepad.
“Georgia’s father knew some dangerous people, and I wanted to make sure I could stop him from pulling his daughter into the middle of the mess he’d made.”
“Did she ask you to?”
“No.”
“But you chose to because…?”
“I loved her,” I say by default.
It’s not the entire answer.
I did learn to love Georgia.
But I also wanted to make sure Nikolas Del Rossi didn’t get the two things that he wanted most: his daughter back and my career to end.
I needed to make sure I took him down first.
“Conklin died helping me find answers,” I tell her, feeling my throat thicken. It’s harder to swallow past the lump that wedged itself in the middle of it. “He died to give me answers I still don’t fully have yet. His death just made more.”
I swore to him I would get him justice. Whether he heard my promise or not before the blood loss left him unconscious, I was going to fulfill it.
No matter what.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Since when do you need permission?”
She ignores my cool tone. “Do you think it’s worth finding those answers now that you’re no longer involved with Georgia?”
Let it go? “It’s almost ten years of my life.”
She nods. “Sure,” she agrees gently. “But if you’re putting your life on hold until you get those answers, are you really living at all?”
Looking away from her, I stare out the window at the slow fall of snow. January is always depressing because it’s cold, dark, and moody. There’s nothing to look forward to after Christmas. Everybody just waits for it to be warm again, staying miserable until spring comes.
I told Conklin I’d find out who was behind the shooting, and dammit, I was going to stand by that. Come hell or high water, Matt and his family are getting closure. That included bringing Nikolas Del Rossi down in the process.
“You never told me what you would change,” I say, changing the subject.
She must expect it because she smiles. But there’s something weighing on her lips as we lock eyes. “I would go back and tell my husband that I love him. I wasn’t home to see him off for a business trip that, unbeknownst to either of us, he would die on. Drunk driving accident. To this day, I don’t remember what my last words to him were. But I know it wasn’t ‘I love you,’ and I wish it were.”
She lost her husband.
I guess she knows grief firsthand too.
“You wouldn’t stop him from going?”
Leaning back, she picks up her pen and holds it tightly between her fingers. “I believe that fate leads us exactly where we need to be. I wouldn’t have been able to stop him if I tried. He loved his job and had a big presentation that his firm counted on him to give. Fate can be cruel sometimes, Mr. Danforth. But it can also be healing if we allow it.”
I stare at her.
She stares right back.
That’s when I realize Theresa Castro and I have far more in common than I ever could have imagined.
I say, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
And for the first time, she says, “I’m sorry for yours.”