Chapter 17 Levi
SEVENTEEN
Levi
Frank was waiting for me by my car, arms folded tight across his chest as if he’d been standing there long enough to talk himself into and out of this conversation a dozen times.
The lot was mostly empty—those dead hours between shifts—and he didn’t look away when I approached.
He just watched me the way he always did—blunt, steady, as if he saw more than I ever said.
“I want to know where you get your intel,” he said, voice low, intent. Not accusatory. Concerned.
He’d asked questions before—little ones, casual ones—but never this. Never with that crease in his brow, the one that meant he’d reached the end of pretending he didn’t notice how I worked.
I froze. “You’ve never asked before.”
Frank huffed, rubbing a hand over his jaw, the lines at the corners of his eyes deepening.
“Yeah. Well. I’m six months from retirement, and I don’t want to spend the next thirty years watching daytime TV and reorganizing my sock drawer.
Sandy will want me out from under her feet, and I want to keep working.
I want to feel useful.” His gaze sharpened.
“I’ve been hinting for months for you to tell me. ”
“You have?”
“When I ask if I can help you, Levi. Or when I say you should loop me in.” A short, dry laugh. “Jeez, son. For a detective, you’re very slow.” He smirked at me, but it faded fast. “Where are you getting your intel? And how can I help?”
That hit differently. Not suspicion. Not judgment.
Loyalty.
Frank wasn’t just my partner—he was the closest thing I had to family outside the Cave. And the idea of dragging him into my shadows felt wrong… but leaving him out of them felt worse.
I jerked my chin at my car. “Get in.”
He blinked, surprised, but didn’t hesitate, and I drove us out of the precinct, sticking to side streets out of habit.
Old habits. Bad habits. The kind that kept you alive but eroded the clean edges of a badge.
Frank didn’t comment—he’d seen me do it a thousand times, and maybe he’d known even then something wasn’t by-the-book.
We pulled into the Walmart lot and tucked between a semi and a tall delivery van—a dead zone for cameras, a blind spot for anyone watching.
Frank looked around, uneasy. “You planning to kill me, or confess to a crime?”
“Neither today.” I shut off the engine. He stared at me as if he was ready for anything and terrified of all of it. “But you wanted honesty. So here it is.”
He angled toward me, shoulders squared, bracing for impact.
“I have people,” I said. “Off-book. Skilled. Connected. People who do the work LAPD can’t—or won’t.”
“Okay…”
“You know what my dad did,” I said, and the words scraped coming out.
“How he wrecked cases. How he twisted the system. My brother died…” I inhaled sharply, a familiar grief tightening my chest. “You know how many people suffered because of him? And how much worse it could’ve gotten if certain men in LA stayed in power. ”
Frank’s posture shifted, the fight going out of him. “You’re not your dad.”
“Tell that to my conscience.” I ran a hand through my hair.
“So you’re a guy with secrets. I get that.”
“Not just me. A group of us met at college, and we set up a team that works behind the scenes. We call it the Cave.” Frank’s brows lifted. I huffed a laugh. “It started as a joke—Bat Cave. Shortened. It stuck.”
“And what exactly does this Cave do?”
“Whatever it takes,” I said simply. “We have hackers. A lawyer. Me, a cop. All four of us were people who’ve been burned by the system and wanted to make things right. We get information fast. Faster than warrants ever could. And we’ve saved more lives than I can count.”
Frank nodded slowly, absorbing it with that steady patience that made him the best partner I’d ever had. “So, the Cave is why you’re always three steps ahead.”
“Most days, yeah.”
He leaned back, exhaling. “Well. Fuck.”
I laughed under my breath. “That’s the reaction I was expecting.”
“Promise me something,” he said.
“What?”
“That these people aren’t going to get you killed before I retire.”
I didn’t have an answer. Not with Alejandro and his pet murdering cleaner in my orbit. Not with the lines I crossed daily.
“They won’t,” I lied. “At least… not intentionally. But hanging around the wrong men might.”
Frank’s eyes narrowed. “I want in on this?”
“You’re sure?”
He nodded, and I sent the coded message—911, but I’m not dying—looping in Caleb, Sonya, and Killian. We’d discussed bringing Frank in before. Quietly. Carefully. But it mattered that it came from me.
Caleb responded first. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
Sonya joined the call. And lastly, Killian. “Everyone,” I said. “I’m with my partner, Frank Mullins.”
“Hi, Detective Mullins,” Sonya said warmly. “I’m Sonya.”
“Please—call me Frank,” he replied, awkward but trying.
“Detective,” Killian murmured, razor-edged and suspicious, and not handing out his name. Caleb stayed silent—always thinking too fast for words.
“It’s time to bring him in,” I said. “Agreed?”
I waited.
Killian—the de facto leader of our chaos—answered first. “Agreed.”
Sonya followed. “Of course. We trust your instincts.”
Caleb added, “Access granted. Activating a security pass now.”
Relief hit me harder than I expected. I hated keeping secrets from the one man who’d stood by me in every mess.
And now Frank was stepping into my world. But he wasn’t running. I ended the call, then took a few breaths. “Want to see?” I asked, and wide-eyed, Frank nodded.
“Levi! I have so much to tell you,” Caleb said as soon as we stepped out of the private elevator.
“Hello, Detective Mullins, nice to finally meet you.” Frank held out a hand, and Caleb shook it with energy.
“I’m a big fan of how you put up with Levi’s shit,” Caleb added, for which I slapped him upside the head.
Meanwhile, Frank let out a low whistle, wide-eyed as he took in the wall of glowing monitors. “Jesus… this is like the deck of the Enterprise!” he muttered, half impressed, half overwhelmed.
“Star Trek fan?” Caleb grinned. “Original?”
“Watched it with my dad — the one thing we never argued about.” Frank gave a slight, almost sheepish shrug. “Kirk first, but I have a soft spot for Picard.”
Caleb’s eyes lit up. “Same. Original for nostalgia, Picard for everything else. Guy practically redefined what a captain should be.” Then he was back to the data. “So, we’re looping him in on everything?” he asked me.
I nodded as Frank noticed the board with the stupid sign and the pictures of the hole in the hill and the bodies. “Crime scene photos,” he murmured. “And this is the dump site case?”
“We have some potential names, and we’d linked them to the older Dryden-Wells.”
“Before the LAPD did?”
“Yep.” I motioned to Caleb. “Do you have any updates?”
“Yep, Lyric—you haven’t spoken to him yet, Frank—flagged some interesting data about Doc, AKA Alejandro.”
I winced. Shit, I wasn’t expecting intel on that specifically, and the mention of it hit too hard. Too direct. Too soon after last night. “What about him?”
“Who is Doc?” Frank asked and glanced at me.
“Medic for hire,” Caleb said. “Might well be connected to this dump site case in more ways than one, and also he’s Levi’s boyfriend.”
I spluttered. “He’s not my boyfriend—”
“Okay, casual fuck buddy then.” Caleb opened his laptop and turned the screen toward me. “Lyric found another file—sealed, partial, but enough.”
Frank edged closer, the earlier wide-eyed awe fading as he narrowed his gaze at the data. His shoulders squared, posture shifting from visitor to investigator. “Levi is having sex with a suspect. Hell, what is he a suspect for?” he asked and threw me a confused glance.
I sighed. “It’s a long story,” I said, “we can talk after.”
“Oh, you bet your sweet ass we’re talking.”
Caleb watched us talking and smirked, then settled down to whatever he wanted to tell us. “Metadata puts Doc or whatever his name is with a cartel.”
“Which one is he working for?” I didn’t have to ask; I already knew the name that Caleb would say. My world imploded. I knew I should have listened to my gut and not gone anywhere near Doc.
“águilas, but not working for them, no.” He pointed at a line of text on the screen.
“Then what?”
He shot me a glance as if he couldn’t understand my impatience. Of course, he couldn’t; he wasn’t sleeping with the enemy.
“Okay, so cartel information. águilas is in their second iteration, but Alejandro, AKA Doc, was there during the first. It was wiped out when every top-level leader was massacred fifteen years ago. Anyway, Alejandro would have been a kid back then. Not a fighter. Not a trafficker. Not cartel muscle—he was a child in a cartel death camp.” He paused to let that sink in, and the horror of it nauseated me.
“There’s something else, though: I hit an old, unsecured mirror in the Sonora Sheriff’s archive.
Cross-referenced with DEA and Border Patrol intel breadcrumbs, and I think he’s on there, aged fourteen. Not deep, but enough.”
My mouth went dry. “Possible witness relocation? Maybe Alejandro turned on the cartel?” A flare of hope warmed me—maybe he wasn’t a bad guy, perhaps I could justify having sex and getting all these feelings inside whenever I thought about him.
Caleb hesitated. “New life up here? Seems possible. But if it were WitSec, no handler would let him do what he does now.”
“What exactly does this Alejandro do?” Frank asked.
“People pay him to fix injuries, keep them alive, that kind of thing, on the down-low.”
“This is a whole new world,” Frank muttered.
“Yeah, it’s a gray one as well,” Caleb said. “Anyway, no handler would be okay with him doing that, so I think it’s something else that has him up in LA. I don’t know what.”
Frank glanced up from the screen, brow furrowed now that he was actually processing the implications. “Wait—circle back to the massacre,” he asked, voice steadying as he shifted into detective mode.