Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
It was nearly morning when Marco was finally allowed to make his one phone call.
Only Kelsey didn’t answer.
“Shit,” he muttered as he was led back into the holding cell.
The clanking of the bars slamming shut behind him had a shiver racing down his spine, but he tried hard not to get lost in the rising despair. Going to prison for years—maybe even decades—meant he’d lose the one thing in his life he loved.
He couldn’t be away from Kelsey like that.
Who would protect her? How would she get by on her own?
Don’t worry. You still have a long process. This is only the beginning.
As if reading his thoughts, Paul said, “Sit down. No sense in worrying, kid.”
Marco walked to the poured concrete bench that sat along the back cinderblock wall and eased his tall frame onto it.
“I just wish I knew she made it home safely.”
“I know, kid,” Paul said. “I know.”
“Why didn’t she answer?”
The old man shrugged. “She’s probably sound asleep. What is it, three or four in the morning?”
Standing nearby, stretching his back after an hour of sitting on that extremely uncomfortable bench, Benny said, “Gotta be. At least. Maybe closer to five. She’s just sleeping. That’s all.”
It made sense to Marco. But unfortunately, something else did too.
“What worries me,” he said, “is that Niko is the one who set us up.”
“Yeah?” Paul said.
“Well, Niko’s also the one who promised he’d get Kelsey home safe.
And like a sucker I just believed him.” He slammed his right fist into his left palm.
“He lied about the whole fuckin’ thing with those bikers and planted that shit so they’d find it.
What’s to say he wasn’t lying about getting our women home? ”
Paulie raised a hand. “I called my wife. She was home. Woke her up. I’m telling you, Kelsey is just sleeping.”
That didn’t make Marco feel much better. For whatever reason, he just knew something was wrong.
Kelsey needed him.
It was almost as if their souls were linked and he could tell when she was in trouble.
“The old man is going to fight this in court,” Benny said, walking toward where his two friends sat. “I mean, he’s already got the best team in town on retainer. There’s a reason the DA can’t make anything stick to Enzo.”
“He’s right, Marco,” Paul said. “I’m not an attorney, but come on. That didn’t seem like a clean bust to me. It was… entrapment… or whatever they call that shit. We’ll walk on some technicality. We just gotta ride it out until then.”
Marco didn’t know if it was actually entrapment or not. But he could reasonably see Enzo’s legal team tying the district attorney in knots while they ran circles around them. The only problem was, his babygirl was out there alone until then.
And that dismissal or an acquittal weren’t guarantees. Even the best lawyers sometimes lose cases.
But what could he do right now? The boxy holding cell seemed awfully small.
Thankfully, he and his friends were the only three in it.
Across the narrow walkway was another cell holding two drunk guys—one of them sound asleep, snoring loudly, and the other one throwing up every ten minutes.
And at any minute, the door might open and one or four more guys might be shoved into either one of the cells.
To say the accommodations were not ideal would be an understatement.
But the worst part was how powerless Marco felt to help Kelsey.
Yet there wasn’t much he could do right then.
The sound of footsteps on the chipped floor outside the cell pulled Marco from his thoughts and he looked up to see a familiar face on the other side of the bars.
Detective Hal Kellogg was a tall, somewhat bulky white guy with light-blond hair that had turned partly silver—the same as his beard—as he’d passed fifty-five.
He wasn’t too far from retirement, a fact that he often reminded Marco of, but couldn’t afford to draw his pension for a while thanks to three ex-wives, a slew of kids between them all, and a mountain of credit-card debt.
That was one of the reasons he was on the take from the Family.
A uniformed guard was with him.
“That him?” the guard asked.
Hal nodded. “Yeah. I need to speak with him about an active investigation I’m working.”
The guard pulled the keyring off his belt and jammed one into the cell door. “All right. You can use Interrogation Three. You need someone with you? We’re stretched kinda thin tonight.”
Hal’s head shook again. “I can handle him just fine.”
The squeak of the old door swinging back on its rusty hinges made Marco’s skin crawl.
“You.” The guard pointed at him. “Come on. Looks like you have some more stuff to hash out.”
Marco pointed at himself, mouthing, “Me?”
“Yeah. You. Come on. Or I can go get some of my friends to help escort you.”
For a moment, Marco considered playing up his resistance a little more but ultimately decided against it. The guard didn’t seem to care. He was just in a hurry. The acting probably wouldn’t benefit anyone.
“I’ll be back, boys,” he told Benny and Paul.
The guard chortled. “Don’t count on it. You might just get your ass transferred tonight if the detective says so.”
“Don’t give ‘em nothing without an attorney,” Paul said, going along with it, even though he and Benny both knew Hal was in the Family’s pocket.
“Yeah. Remember, you got rights,” Benny called out just as the cell door slammed shut.
“Against the bars,” the guard said. “You’ll be cuffed as we walk down the?—”
“I know,” Marco said.
“Ah. I figured this was the first time for a fine, upstanding citizen like you,” the guard said with a heavy dose of sarcasm as he put the cold metal around Marco’s wrists.
Three minutes later, after a walk through a police station that smelled even worse than most, Marco found himself alone with Detective Hal Kellogg in a small room that had only a metal table that was bolted to the floor, with two chairs on one side of it and one chair on the other.
Unlike on TV shows, there was no one-way mirror. There were, however, security cameras in two of the corners.
Hal must have seen him eyeing them, because he sat down and said, “Don’t worry. They’re off. I made sure of it.”
“You sure?”
“I know how to check a camera. But you’d see little red lights on top of them if they were actively recording.”
Satisfied, Marco sat down—not that he had much of a choice in the matter.
“Thanks for not cuffing me to the table, at least.”
The detective waved it off. “Call it a professional courtesy. Just know I can’t do much for you here. There’s no way I can get you out of the charges.”
“I know. Would raise way too many red flags,” Marco told him.
“You have no idea,” Hal agreed. “But I didn’t come down all this way to tell you that.” He cleared his throat, a concerned look shading his face. After a sigh, he said, “There ain’t an easy way to say it so I’m just going to come right out with it. Sal got a hold of me.”
Marco waited for the rest of the story, his mind flashing back to when he’d seen Sal at the club earlier. Or he supposed that was yesterday night, at this point.
“He wanted me to tell you that Niko… Well, it’s your girl, Marco.”
Anger mixed with dread flooded Marco’s core and his vision turned white for a moment before the detective and the bleak, bright interrogation room came back into focus.
“What’s wrong? Where is Kelsey?”
Hal clearly didn’t want to deliver the news he was about to give, but he rubbed the back of his neck and spoke.
“Niko said he was having someone see her home, but they really took her to some other location. An old warehouse or something. Sal didn’t know where exactly and he wanted you to know he wasn’t a part of this.
But he overheard some of the guys talking about it.
Word has gotten out what happened to you and Benny and Paul, and he didn’t know how to get to you on the inside.
So, he called me. I looked you up in the system and saw where they were holding you after the arrest.”
Marco was still as he tried to process what he’d just been told.
There were still so many questions, but Kelsey was all that mattered right now.
“So they have her?”
“That’s just the thing,” Hal said. “She got away. Niko’s shitting bricks over it too. But from what Sal said, he can’t bring many guys in on this because the majority are loyal to you.”
The pieces were starting to fit. This was a power play. “He thought he’d get me, Benny, and Paulie out of the way and then take care of Kelsey just in case she knew too much. In case I talked to her and she could provide evidence against him and the Family.”
Hal shrugged but said, “Seems likely.”
Marco fought hard to stop his mind from reeling. Now was the time to keep a clear head if he wanted to help his Little girl. Flying off the handle wouldn’t do her a damn bit of good.
Plus, there was a silver lining in all this: Kelsey had gotten away. That didn’t mean she was safe, exactly, because she was still out there on the streets, scared, alone, and probably hiding. But at least she was alive and out of Niko’s hands.
For now.
“Where does the old man play into all this?” he wondered aloud.
Even though he’d been talking more to himself than Hal, the detective still answered. “Sal doesn’t know. But he did tell me no one has seen him in two days.”
Marco tried to remember the last time he’d actually talked to Enzo. It had been a week. Maybe more. That wasn’t unusual. They were close, but the older Enzo got, the more he kept to himself. He’d told Marco that he trusted him. There was no need to micromanage.
But now he wondered if Enzo was all right. He’d been so wrapped up in making his own exit that he had neglected to check on the old man.
The man who’d been like a father to him deserved better than that.
One thing at a time, he reminded himself. Right now, the most pressing matter was getting his Little girl to safety.
“Whatever you need, Marco, you know me. I’ll help.”
Marco indeed knew Hal—knew the guy’s angle. The cop wasn’t doing this out of the kindness of his heart. Still, he was a good asset to have.
“You’ve got a marker over at our casino, huh?” Marco asked.
Hal looked a little embarrassed, but that passed, and as his brain connected the dots of where this was going, he actually licked his lips like an alcoholic being offered a drink after a long day of trying to quit. “I’m in eight large.”
Marco nodded. “Forgiven. And there’s another ten thousand cash in it for you if you join the search for Kelsey. Pull security footage from the club last night to see what she looks like.”
“I’m on it,” he said, standing.
“Don’t talk to anyone else about this until we know who we can trust,” Marco said, finding irony in the statement.
He wasn’t certain he could trust Hal. Dirty cops weren’t the most reliable, after all. But he figured two things were going in his favor.
First, Niko didn’t know Hal. The detective was an asset Marco had cultivated.
And secondly, everyone thought Marco was going to be the next guy at the top once Enzo was gone. That meant if Hal wanted to continue getting paid, he needed to hitch his wagon to the right man. Right now, that seemed to be Marco.
“Do you think this interrogation excuse would work again or was it a one-and-done?”
It took Hal a moment before he answered. “I’m not sure I can pull it off again. My captain doesn’t breathe down my neck, but if he caught wind I keep coming here, eventually he’s going to want me to read him in.”
“That’s what I figured,” Marco responded. “Okay, how can you get word to me?” He stood and stared into the cop’s eyes.
Hal smiled. “I peeked at the transfer schedule. This little south station doesn’t hold many and it fills up fast. They’re moving you three in about two hours to CCDC.”
Marco winced. The Clark County Detention Center would be even worse.
“Like I said, I can’t get you out of this. And word is the DA is going to make an example out of you all. It’s an election year. I wouldn’t expect the judge to grant bail.”
Marco nodded. Hal’s words just confirmed what he’d already feared.
“But,” the cop continued, “I did leave a car for you two blocks south of here. Key’s under the back-passenger-side mat. Cause a distraction. Do anything you can. When you’re out, I’ll help you lay low.”
Marco smiled for the first time since leaving the club earlier. “Hal, buddy, you just earned yourself another twenty-five large.”
The man looked pleased. And loyal.
A wise investment, Marco felt. Keeping a guy like Hal in his corner was important. Plus, that was a tiny fraction of the cash Marco had at his disposal. Anyway, he’d give every last cent to ensure Kelsey was safe, if that’s what it took.
“Good luck. You know how to reach me once you’re out,” Hal told him.
Marco stopped short of shaking the man’s hand, just in case any of the correctional officers happened to wander by and see the display through the slender, rectangular heavy glass window set in the door.
He was so pleased with Detective Hal Kellogg that he could have hugged him.
But the assistance he’d received didn’t guarantee anything. Marco still had to break out of jail.
And something told him that was not going to be easy.