Chapter 7
Stakeout
“GOD, WE need more people,” Gideon complained, leaning his head back against the rest. Carlyle sat next to him, quiet and still, which he’d been doing a lot since Crosby had been hospitalized.
But maybe he was, like Gideon, exhausted.
They were stretched thin, and Pearson and Kylie had been partnered with Kylie running point from a laptop in the passenger seat while Pearson hauled ass through NYC and much of the East Coast, terrifying the unwary, because the two of them were still allowed their weapons, while Gideon and Carlyle were on administrative or surveillance duty after the shooting.
Kylie had confided that while Crosby and Gideon were the fastest drivers of the unit, Gail Pearson was the one most likely to die as a grease spot on the highway, for impossible turn reasons.
But Gideon’s and Harding’s encounter with Jay Arnold hadn’t been without repercussions, and one of them had been a come-to-Jesus meeting with the FBI about the NYC Gambling Commissioner, and how long it had taken him to take down the Gleeson Brothers.
It turned out their supposition about politics had been right on.
Arnold had called in favors with Connie Deaver, the Manhattan based ASAC—the big cheese, the one that Harding sort of reported to—to get an agency that he had no jurisdiction over and no connection with, to close down the dogfighting ring.
He’d been getting an amazing amount of heat about it, and they knew that because Deaver had authorized a wiretap and a culling of all Arnold’s professional and private records regarding the operation.
And they’d discovered that a local businessman known for his absolute lack of ethics, his shoddy workmanship, piss-poor deals, and the string of suicides he left in his wake when his business partners found themselves bankrupt and without legal or financial recourse had listed Jay Arnold on his payroll for the past six months.
In fact after Kylie had run their financials, she’d commented acidly that Jay Arnold was the only person Halsey Garber had ever paid on time.
And in return, Arnold had stayed carefully away from certain business enterprises—like the Gleeson brothers and their junk business, which was the official title on the deed for the property.
So now they knew why Arnold had pulled the one favor Connie Deaver owed him from college to get a smaller, lesser-known agency involved with the Gleeson brothers, and at first they thought that the civilian abduction—and that of his Chihuahua—had been a windfall.
But then Natalia had commented in the middle of the group debrief—Crosby joining by Zoom from his hospital bed—that Arnold must have been biting his nails hoping for something to happen so he could authorize the operation to get shut down without tipping Garber off that he’d had anything to do with it.
And the entire room had gone silent.
“Guys?” came Crosby’s voice from Kylie’s computer screen. “Guys, do you really think…?”
“Somebody pulled their strings,” Harding said. “And it was probably Arnold. That’s why he was so freaked out about us killing the dog. If he got nailed for it, he’d be included in the cruelty to animals charge.”
“I don’t know if the charges would be any worse,” Gideon mused. “Maybe it’s just his own guilty conscience.”
“Arnold’s or Garber’s?” Pearson asked.
“Arnold’s,” Gideon said decidedly. “Garber hasn’t shown an ounce of guilt or even an iota of responsibility his entire career. Arnold actually worked his way up through the ranks in Atlantic City before he was elected gambling commissioner here.”
“What was the charge? Blackmail or corruption?” Carlyle asked, his voice clinical and removed.
“Which guy?” Harding asked.
“Garber first,” Carlyle told him. “Arnold was weird and erratic—and an asshole—but he seemed… I don’t know. Human. The rest of this is off the rails inhumane.”
“Corruption,” Gideon said, glancing at him.
He wondered for the umpteenth time how Joey Carlyle had managed to escape his father’s clutches with only that coldness as a scar.
Carlyle had used that tone of voice a lot when he’d first started, but over the past six months—particularly in the past week since they’d broken up the dogfighting ring—Gideon hadn’t heard that tone so much.
Given that he knew who Joey’s father was, Gideon had begun to assemble a private and very personal, unofficial, undocumented profile of his new partner.
And he was somewhat impressed.
Joey Carlyle had grown up with a conscience, but not because his father had ever given him one. In fact, much of the coldness, the predatory aloofness, that Carlyle had exhibited when he’d first arrived at SCTF appeared to be in defense of living in close proximity to a known sociopath.
But since that first day, when Carlyle had realized his lack of instincts regarding Chester Schumer had almost cost Gideon his life (no matter how many times Gideon reassured him that Schumer had a lot of people fooled), Carlyle had been working on improvement.
Gideon hadn’t missed his steady thawing toward Crosby, and it didn’t surprise him. Crosby was warm-blooded, an instinctively good protector, sensitive and attuned to other people’s pain.
Carlyle had probably spent much of his childhood insulating himself from somebody he was afraid of. He’d had no room in his psyche for that sort of empathy, but he did have a clear set of rules that he played by.
Protect the innocent. Well, that was the code of the Green Berets and most advanced military units. But also there was the language he used—predators, prey, hunters, meat. Carlyle was a firm believer in not destroying the helpless unless there was a reason.
And in human terms, he’d realized there was never a reason.
These rules were hard and fast, and the more he interacted with his unit on a human level, the more that bare-bones conscience grew.
Finding Carlyle and Pearson sitting in the bed next to Crosby’s to defend him from Jay Arnold had been a surprise.
Gideon had expected to find Pearson, but he’d expected Carlyle to be doing something useful but not nurturing.
Instead he’d been shoulder to shoulder with his comrade in arms, and he’d been defending their friend.
And, well, obviously panicking about it, but Gideon couldn’t blame him really, even if he’d had one foot out the door.
It was encouraging, Gideon had thought, pleased.
It meant that his and Harding’s faith in the little shit wasn’t misplaced.
But it was also reassuring to hear that ice-cold intelligence coming into play.
While Carlyle had been upset his human instincts hadn’t picked up on Schumer, it was that cold analytical side of him that had come rushing to Gideon’s aid and helped them recover the bodies of Schumer’s victims.
Carlyle had come to them lacking certain skills but proficient in others. If he could pick up what he was missing, he’d be a superlative agent.
He was already a decent partner.
Reluctantly, Gideon shook off that moment when the three of them had been listening to Harding’s takedown of Arnold. He and Joey had been face-to-face, breath mingling, and the heat in those obsidian eyes….
Gideon had felt it in his gut, hard, warming… warning.
He’d taken enough chemistry classes to know some combinations were explosive. He had to be careful—very careful—of not allowing the two of them to mix in the wrong way.
He wasn’t sure there was a device made that could pick up the fragments if they exploded.
But for now Carlyle was reserving his cold, predatory side for analysis and strategy and allowing some warmth, some human connection, to seep in regarding his colleagues. Gideon would take it. It was a win.
Especially because Gideon hadn’t ever had a partner he’d enjoyed as much as Joey Carlyle.
Ruthless and predatory? Absolutely. But he was also funny, curious, and as excited about learning as a child.
That first odd venture to Broadway hadn’t been their last. Once a month—sometimes once a week—they saw a show.
Or live music. Or listened to buskers in the park.
Stakeouts and travel times were filled with battling playlists and discussions as to what the lyrics said, how the songs were put together, how the music mattered.
And Gideon now knew more about monkeys than a Wild Kingdom special.
Gideon had to admit he’d been having a lot of fun, but it was good to know he wasn’t having fun with a complete sociopath. Watching Carlyle slowly learn to care about his teammates had been a huge relief.
“What about Arnold?” Carlyle prodded during the staff meeting, his reserve of judgment proof of everything Gideon had come to believe about him.
“For Arnold I suspect blackmail,” Gideon had responded slowly. “What do you think, Clint?”
“Why do you say that?” Harding returned—one of his most irritating qualities, actually.
“Because he’s only now on the payroll,” Kylie said promptly. “Like, he’s resisted being on the payroll for years, and what he’s getting now? It’s not very much.”
“And he was sweating through his suit,” Gideon added, remembering that encounter in the hospital. “He… he was fixated on shooting the dog, because he likes dogs. It was like the legal implications had gone to the wind. He was going to bully a man under anesthetic because we shot the dog.”
“Well, then,” Harding murmured, “if we think it’s blackmail, we need to find out what Garber has on him. Which means….”
“Aw fuck,” Carlyle muttered, seeing the implications for surveillance. “Goddammit.”
“Half of us are out for active duty anyway,” Clint said with a shrug, which was true since Gideon and Carlyle were out for another week, until their shooting cleared Deavers’s desk, and Crosby was still laid up.
Technically, the whole squad should have been doing paperwork, but they were pissed.
They felt used, and one of their own was down, and they’d killed two men and one whacked-out Rott-something because a businessman had a gambling jones.
They wanted some payback.