Chapter Eighteen #2
“You know,” he said, giving me a small smile, “I’ve never asked,” he laughed. “One would assume at least Antony has spilled some blood. I suspect they all have. But because I know them, I know none of that blood belonged to some innocent.”
“So it’s okay when criminals kill other criminals?”
“For the most part, yeah. It’s a system of checks and balances when the police force can’t or won’t do anything about typical justice.
The mob, in particular, has a pretty good record of keeping shit between them and the people they have a beef with, not attacking families or anything like that.
The point is, there’s no stopping crime.
Junkies need drug dealers. Drug dealers need arms dealers.
It goes on and on. And, let me tell you, ‘cause I know a fuckuva lot of organized criminals, most of the time, they’re better human beings than the shitheads I work cases on. ”
Again, he had a point.
I couldn’t claim to know a lot of good criminals, or any criminals at all, but I knew a lot of terrible human beings.
And, well, I think I’d much rather rub shoulders with mob members than unconvicted rapists, racists, or wife-beaters. Of which I knew a few in my life.
“Why private investigation?” I asked as I took my wine. “It seems that after so much darkness, you’d want to go into something lighter.”
“See, that’s the thing though, isn’t it?
” he asked, smiling. “You join up right after high school. You get normal training; you get LINE training; you get black ops training… it leaves you with a very specific skill set. And your choices back in this life are limited. There’s private security, but I don’t have it in me to play babysitter to million—and billionaire assholes.
You can open a gym and train other people in your fighting skills.
But I had enough day-in and day-out training to last a lifetime.
Or you can use them skills you used to track targets and learn to use it to track down missing people or cheating spouses. ”
“Do you like your job?”
“I like figuring shit out. Do I like sitting and listening to the same story about husbands on suspicious ‘business trips’ or weird hotel charges to the credit card? Fuck no. Sometimes you want to slap a client for their idiocy.”
“They’re idiots because their spouses are cheating?” I bristled.
“No, babe. They’re idiots because they know their spouses are cheating.
They come to me with some sad hope that I’ll prove them wrong.
I never prove them wrong. Chances are, if it seems like they’re cheating, they are.
Hell, even if it doesn’t seem like they’re cheating, they probably are. Very few people know loyalty anymore.”
“Do you?” I asked, needing to know for my own peace of mind.
“Did I maybe start flirting with Shelly when I was still dating Meg in high school? Yeah, I did. I was sixteen and stupid as fuck. But I grew up. I watched countless families get torn apart by infidelity. I have had to comfort dozens of crying women in my office when I handed them the pictures they paid me to take. And I’ve gotten to witness the awful thing that happens when they stop crying. ”
“What’s that?”
“They make up their minds to never let themselves get hurt like that again. See, cheating doesn’t just screw up that one relationship; it tends to screw up every single one later because the person gets bitter or scared or distrusting.
It’s a sad fucking thing to see. And it’s not something I am ever willing to do to a woman.
” He paused, and I let those words sink in.
He was so right about that.
Because of Derek, I never fully trusted Timir.
And because of Michael, I was finding it hard to not be bitter.
“Besides, if you can’t learn to keep your fucking dick in your pants when you’re over thirty goddamn years old, you’re just a weak-ass, insecure beta who needs to have meaningless sport sex to validate your fragile ego. It’s pathetic. Babe, no one would ever call me pathetic.”
The conversation turned to lighter subjects—Sawyer’s childhood, where it sounded like he truly tested his mother’s patience and made his little brother’s life harder.
He told me about Brock as a kid and what Brock was like when he first came back from overseas.
He told me all the horror stories of what it was like to have Barrett working for him, most of which I laughed at because they meshed very well with my own experiences with him.
Sawyer asked me about my time in the system, most of which was full of a lot of changing homes, but I was lucky enough for most of them to be decent.
Granted, they were all wholly devoid of any real love for me, and that was why I took every ounce of the love my adoptive parents poured into me so greedily.
We ate.
We had dessert.
We drove home.
We had sex.
We fell asleep.
Everything was perfect.
And everything stayed that way for the next week.
Until I woke up one morning after some takeout with food poisoning.