24. Kyle
CHAPTER 24
KYLE
I ’d have been a hell of a lot less scared if I’d been facing down this situation alone. Still scared out of my mind, absolutely, but maybe not quite so fucking paralyzed with bone-deep terror.
Because I wasn’t in this alone. My boyfriend was here. My brother was outside in handcuffs because of me. My damn cats were here, being valiantly protected by a group of teenagers who weren’t nearly as tough as their black makeup and fuck-everything attitude tried to convey.
And that was to say nothing of all the complete strangers who’d looked up from their pies and coffee and mac and cheese bites to discover that Waffles? was on fire, bullets were flying, and the cops were outside.
We had, at best, minutes to figure out a solution before everyone in this building was dead. No pressure or anything.
“We need to get out,” I announced to Everett and anyone else within earshot. To the Goth kids, I said, “Take the cats and go out that way.” I pointed toward the green EXIT sign by the restrooms.
They started to creep out from under the table, but one paused. “Why can’t we just go out the window?” He gestured at the gaping hole where the glass had been a moment ago. “It’s wide open and?—”
“And it was made that way by bullets,” I snapped, and again pointed toward the back. “Keep your heads down, and get the hell out that way. If anyone—including the cops—stop you, just do what you’re told. Got it?”
Whatever anarchy, nihilism, and general defiance fueled these kids must have abandoned them, because they obeyed without a peep of resistance. Two very carefully shielded my cats’ carriers with their bodies, and I had a couple of seconds to feel horribly guilty for dragging them—the cats and the kids—into this situation.
Only a couple of seconds, though, because while the kids and cats were on their way to safety, all hell was busy breaking loose in here. Cops were shouting in through broken windows. Chet was screaming something at Carol. Everett was directing the handful of other patrons in the same direction I’d sent the Goth kids.
Apparently Waffles? was in compliance with state laws, because while Carol thought there was only one fire extinguisher in the kitchen, someone found another one. A young waitress—one who was probably a minor and shouldn’t legally have been working here at this hour on a school night—fumbled with the small extinguisher and managed to discharge it at the flames. Carol took it from her and got in closer, shouting at the waitress to help Chet and get out while she herded the flames back a little bit.
It wouldn’t be enough—not for a spreading fire in a kitchen that no doubt had grease in every nook and cranny—but it helped.
If nothing else, it bought us a little time to strategize.
I grabbed Everett and pulled him down so we were out of the cops’ sight. “Got any ideas?”
He shook his head, looking around with wide eyes. “No. But if she can hold off the fire enough for one of us to get the other extinguisher…”
I glanced over. The fire was still raging in the kitchen, and that small bottle wasn’t going to last long enough to put it out completely. But maybe he was right.
“Okay.” I squeezed his arm. “I’ll go in there and?—”
“The fuck you will,” he snapped. “You’re still hurt.” He used my shoulder to lever himself to his feet. “I’ll get it.”
He didn’t wait for an argument, and he ran in a slow crouch behind the counter. He and Carol shouted at each other, and I swore under my breath; I really didn’t like the idea of him running into a partially engulfed kitchen in search of a fire extinguisher, but we didn’t have a lot of options.
Though—did I hear sirens outside?
Not cop sirens. A fire truck.
Oh, thank fuck…
“Everett!” I called out. “The fire department is on its?—”
“Got it!” came a shout from within the kitchen. “Let me—shit, that’s hot!”
Panic shot through me. Without a second thought, I hurried toward the kitchen. “Everett? You okay?”
“I’m good!” There was some rustling and rattling. Then the whoosh of the fire extinguisher activating. When I peeked around the counter, I found him battling back the flames, his hands protected by oven mitts.
That gave me a little chuckle; there were moments when Everett was definitely smarter than people gave him credit for.
“Come back this way,” I shouted over the noise. “You don’t want to get cornered if it spreads or flashes!”
The response was a nod, and he started backing in my direction.
A few feet away, Carol’s extinguisher sputtered out. She swore and tossed it aside, then ducked behind the counter. The flames started to pick up again.
“Hurry, Everett! We need to get out!”
He picked up the pace, backing quickly in my direction. His hip bumped a counter, but he only stumbled for a second before recovering. When he was close enough, he whipped around toward me, extinguisher still in hand, and he ducked behind where Carol and I were hiding.
“We have to get out,” he said, breathing hard. “There’s all kinds of shit in there that could blow up.”
I nodded. “Let’s go out the back. The way we sent everyone else.”
“No.” Everett shook his head. “Guaranteed there’s cops out there if they’ve seen people come out. They’ll?—”
“I’d rather take my chances with the cops than the fire.”
He chewed his lip, but one glance at the kitchen seemed to persuade him. “Okay. Let’s go.” He looked at Carol. “You good?”
“I’m good. But let’s get the hell out of here.”
None of us had any argument against that. I shooed them both toward the other end of the restaurant. First Carol, then Everett. With my gun in hand, I followed.
We’d made it about three steps before another window shattered. I ducked, covering my neck and head, and glass rained down on my back. I thought I heard Everett yelp in surprise, and Carol swore.
“Go! Go!” I shouted. “Be careful of the glass!”
We started moving again, faster this time as glass crunched beneath our feet.
Something clanked on the counter. Then it clanked again on the floor just inches away from Everett’s leg.
It only took a heartbeat for me to recognize it—a fucking flashbang.
“Everett, get down!” I shouted, and I tackled him from behind in the same instant I kicked at the flashbang. I covered his ears with my hands, squeezed my eyes shut, and ducked my head as much as I could and?—
POW.
In an instant, the world was silent except for a high-pitched whine. My head hurt like hell, as did my ears. Then I was moving. I was vaguely aware of being tossed around. Landing on the ground. Something moving—crunching?—beneath me, but all I could see were spots and all I heard was that whine.
Someone shook me. On some level, I knew someone was shouting, but I couldn’t hear it.
Then hands grabbed me under the armpits, pulling hard at places that already hurt. I was moving. Being dragged? Couldn’t make sense of anything.
Something broke through the silence, and I realized it was the concussion of a gun being fired.
I blinked a few times, trying to clear away the spots. The gun fired again, close enough to make the darkness behind my eyelids flash red, and when I opened them this time, I could make out some shapes.
Everett was crouching partway over me, and he had my pistol up and ready. He was saying something, too. Shouting, maybe?
He glanced over his shoulder and gestured at someone. A motion I recognized as “go, go.” Carol, I thought? Good, maybe she was getting to safety.
I wiggled my jaw, then wiggled my finger in my ear. My finger came away wet. When I squinted—blood.
Oh, fuck. Was my eardrum ruptured? That would explain the pain. And the near deafness.
Everett glanced down at me and did a double take. His eyes widened, and he looked at someone else as he gestured furiously at me.
Through the cotton stuffed in my ears, I finally made out some words: “Needs an ambulance! Now!”
Did I? Was I in that bad a shape?
Well, I sure didn’t feel like I was in good shape, so… maybe?
Above me, Everett showed his palms. He still had a gun—my gun?—in hand, but had his finger outside the trigger guard.
With his free hand, he motioned over his shoulder, then down at me. From his gestures and his facial expressions, he was negotiating something. Urgently but calmly.
Then he wasn’t speaking, but he was nodding. He’d pause, nod again, pause, nod again.
After a few rounds of this, he exhaled, his shoulders slumping, and my hearing was returning just enough to catch him saying, “She’s safe outside? And you’ll get him an ambulance?”
From somewhere thousands and thousands of miles away, a male voice replied, “She’s fine. Ambulance is waiting outside. Just put the gun down, and come quietly, and nobody gets hurt.”
“Everett,” I moaned.
His jaw twitched. Then, in a painfully slow gesture, he leaned toward the counter, set the gun down, and put his hands up again.
He was surrendering? Why was?—
What else could he do? I was down. It was him against the whole damn police force.
A memory cut through the fog in my brain, and I realized someone had tossed in a flashbang. That was what had fucked up my head.
And only one department on the city’s police force deployed or even carried flashbangs:
Fucking SWAT .
God, of course he was surrendering—he may have had a reckless streak, but he wasn’t going to be a one-man vigilante against SWAT.
I felt around for his leg and grabbed it. He glanced down at me, but returned his attention to someone else.
“You coming quietly?” that other voice asked.
Everett nodded slowly. When his hands moved again, this time to the back of his head, my blood turned cold. Oh no. No, we weren’t getting out of this, were we?
“Anything you want,” he said unsteadily. “Just get him to a hospital. Okay?”
“Soon as my boys cuff you,” the other man said, “the paramedics will be on him. Agreed?”
Everett swallowed hard, fear radiating off him but not as much as fierce determination. “Agreed.”
Then everyone was in motion. Two guys in black tactical gear appeared, and despite Everett surrendering, they hauled him to his feet and slammed him over the counter.
“Hey! Hey!” I shouted. I tried to get up but my head was spinning too fast. The world lurched under me, almost making me puke. I managed to grab one cop’s calf, though. “He’s surrendering! You don’t have to be so?—”
But EMTs were swarming around me.
And the SWAT guys were gone.
And so was Everett.
And I had no idea what would happen next.
The flashbang’s effects had mostly worn off by the time they loaded me into the ambulance. My vision had cleared. My hearing was still muffled; one of the EMTs said that would probably last until my eardrums had healed. Allegedly, I’d get all or most of my hearing back. We’d see.
My head still fucking hurt, though. The EMTs had thrown around the word “concussion,” a few times, and I thought they’d meant it in reference to the blast from the flashbang. And they kind of had—except thanks to said blast, I actually had a concussion. Lucky me.
The emergency room doc sent me for a CT to make sure the concussion wasn’t severe, but he didn’t seem too worried. I got the impression it was more of a standard procedure thing than a we’re-genuinely-afraid-you’re-going-to-bleed-out thing. Fine. But could they hurry the hell up so I could get out of here and help Everett? Because he was not safe in the custody of cops who were willing to kill to keep us quiet. Not safe at all.
I’d barely shot off a text to my dad— I need you at the ER right now! —when a cop stepped around the curtain partition beside my gurney. He looked familiar, but what cop in this town didn’t?
Except he was familiar in the sense that we’d crossed paths outside of “I work with your dad/brother.” My concussed brain couldn’t quite place him, though.
“Mr. Bowman.” He crossed his arms over his broad chest. “Glad to see you awake. I’ve got some questions for?—”
“I don’t talk to cops without a lawyer,” I gritted out.
His eyebrows shot up. “Mr. Bowman, you’re not being interrogated or detained. I just want to ask?—”
“I don’t talk to cops without a lawyer.” That was my policy in any situation because I’d been raised in a house full of cops. Ever since Ricky Leighton’s death, that policy had become non-negotiable. And today, my head was throbbing and my ears fucking hurt, so I really wasn’t in the mood for this.
The officer’s lips pulled tight beneath his stereotypical cop mustache. “You’re involved in a very serious situation here, so?—”
“So get me a damn lawyer,” I snapped, “and we can get to your questions.” Ugh, I was already in pain, and every word he or I said just made my ears hurt more .
He scowled. “I don’t think you want to make this situation worse for yourself than it already is.”
The words “is that a threat, Officer?” were on the tip of my tongue, but I bit them back. Right then, my dad replied to my text, letting me know he was on his way inside.
Please hurry, I wrote back. There’s an officer grilling me and won’t let me get a lawyer.
Then I set my phone to record and rested it facedown on my leg. With a sigh of resignation, I said to the officer, “How am I going to make my situation worse?”
His eyes narrowed just slightly—probably an unconscious response to his own thought that I was finally complying. He came a little closer, positioning himself beside the gurney instead of at its foot, and I glanced at his nametag.
Hansen.
Officer Hansen.
Right then, a synapse in my jostled brain fired, and I remembered him being pissy with me that he’d had to babysit a crime scene longer than he’d expected.
Ricky Leighton’s crime scene.
And now he was here, beating my dad to my bedside and wanting to grill me before I’d even been discharged from the hospital. Was he in cahoots with Detective Reardon too? Fuck my life.
Though my guard was still fully up, I put on the face of a tired, open book. “What’s going on?”
He lifted his chin a bit and glared down his nose at me. “That’s what I’d like to find out.” He took out his notepad and clicked his pen. “Seems like you and the Mulligan kid are in a lot of trouble. You want to tell me why that is?”
“‘Trouble’?” I asked, playing stupid. “Why? We were just doing our jobs, and then we?—”
“That why you took off to a safehouse?” He narrowed his eyes a bit more. “Seems like the kind of thing someone would do if they have something to hide.”
“Or if they’re being threatened.”
“ Were you being threatened?” His arched eyebrow suggested I answer that very, very carefully. “Or was it the natural consequences of sticking your nose where it didn’t belong?”
I gulped, grateful I was no longer attached to any machinery that would give away my skyrocketing pulse. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t play stupid,” he hissed, leaning in closer. “You and the mortuary kid were warned—repeatedly—to move along. But you didn’t, and now here you are.”
I drew back as much as the hard pillows would allow. “You’re working with Detective Reardon, aren’t you?”
“Detective Reardon is trying to clean up a mess you and your boy made,” he growled. “But you just can’t leave well enough alone, can you?”
“How did we make a mess?” I demanded. “All we did was point out that Ricky Leighton didn’t kill himself.” I set my jaw and glared up at him. “Or did we interfere with you and Reardon cleaning up that mess? Maybe trying to spare the chief embarrassment by people realizing who his daughter’s baby daddy is? Is that?—”
“You think the chief needed that miscreant hanging around his family?” Hansen scoffed. “He’s the next commissioner, and he’s?—”
“So… what? You and Reardon offed Leighton and tried to make it look like a suicide? Just to keep the chief on track to become commissioner?”
Hansen huffed a bitter laugh. “Listen, kid. This kind of thing is way above your paygrade—not to mention your brother’s or your daddy’s paygrade.” He rested his hands on the bedside rail and loomed over me. “And if you want that boyfriend of yours to make it through his first night in holding, I would suggest you work with us.”
My heart dropped. As much as I was trying to bait him into saying as much as possible for my phone to record, he still had the upper hand. If he really was working with Reardon, and Everett was in jail, then they had all the power here. All the leverage.
All the opportunity to hurt Everett, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do.
I pushed back a wave of nausea. “What do you want?”
“I want a sworn statement from you,” he said. “You say you knew from the start Rick Leighton’s death was a suicide, and you confess to fucking with the crime scene in an effort to make us investigate it. You fall on your sword, accept all the responsibility for everything that’s happened, and we’ll let your boyfriend go.”
Swallowing took a ton of work. “So you want me to admit to tampering with evidence, making false official statements, and?—”
“Well, and let’s not forget that Rick Leighton isn’t the only one who’s died.”
My teeth snapped shut. “I didn’t kill Meyer or Taylor. I didn’t kill anyone!”
He laughed almost soundlessly. Or maybe that was just my malfunctioning ears. “Son.” He patted my arm. “You made a stink about a suicide, and people got killed. That’s on you.”
“You just admitted you and Reardon wanted him dead in order to keep?—”
“Do you want your boyfriend to stay in jail?” he growled. “Because there are a lot of very nasty individuals down there, any one of whom could be assigned to be his cellmate. And if the COs can’t get the door open in time to help someone—well…” He shrugged, grimacing apologetically. “Sometimes there just ain’t much they can do.”
My stomach churned. I had him all but admitting that Leighton was murdered, but he had an ace up his sleeve. He didn’t have my back against a wall—he had Everett’s back against it. If I pushed this, I might very well have enough to get him and Reardon to go down for their crimes… but at what cost?
I sat up a little. “You’re getting nothing from me until Everett is released and all charges are dropped.”
Hansen laughed and clapped my arm hard enough to jostle my sore body. “Son, I don’t think you quite understand who’s in charge here. Either you take the fall for everything you’ve done since you walked onto that crime scene, or your boyfriend spends the night with an inmate hand-picked and well-paid to make you regret your life choices. Those are the options, kid. And you have maybe another hour before Reardon decides to book him and put him at the mercy of one of this city’s best and brightest. So I wouldn’t dawdle on this, all right?”
Icy panic wrapped itself around my heart. I couldn’t let these assholes get away with murder, but God help me, I couldn’t leave Everett to the wolves either. I’d heard the stories of what happened in jail. Jail could be way worse than prison, and sometimes a low-level non-violent offender ended up sharing a cell with a murderer. Just last year, a college kid who couldn’t afford bail on a minor charge ended up permanently paralyzed by a cellmate who’d attacked him after the jail withheld his antipsychotic meds.
My moral compass was firmly fixed on “do the right thing and don’t let the cops get away with literal murder,” but I couldn’t let someone hurt Everett either.
“Clock’s ticking,” Officer Hansen taunted. “What’s it gonna be? Save your own ass? Or save?—”
“I think you might want to save for a lawyer,” my dad said as he stepped around the curtain.
In that instant, I felt like a little kid who’d been trying to stay stoic after skinning my knee, but upon seeing one of my parents, collapsed into tears. I didn’t cry this time—I think I was in too much shock—but holy shit. My dad was here .
And he was looking at Officer Hansen like he was about to rip out the man’s windpipe through his left nostril. “You want to tell me what the fuck you’re doing, Officer Hansen? Why you’re threatening my son and trying to compel him to make a false official statement?”
My heart slammed against my ribs. How much had my father heard? Because my phone recording would probably be admissible, but a witness statement from Detective Bowman would help a lot .
Hansen blanched as he stared at my dad. “I… Sir, listen, I?—”
“Don’t you ‘sir, listen,’” Dad snarled in a voice I had never heard before. “These boys have been trying to sound the alarm that something was hinky with the Leighton suicide, and now here you are—an officer of the goddamned law—trying to compel a false official statement.” Gaze still fixed on Hansen, Dad took out his phone and speed-dialed someone. Then, “Sergeant Gonzales, this is Detective Bowman.” He rattled off his badge number. “There’s a young man, Everett Mulligan, in holding right now. I want him taken to Lieutenant Jarvis’s office, and I want you to stay with him until I get there. Am I clear?”
I couldn’t hear what the desk sergeant said. Everything was still too muffled.
Dad replied, “Do whatever you need to do, but I want your eyes on that kid until I get there.” He ended that call, then made another, ordering the person on the other end to release Colin from custody as well as Everett, and then to…
Holy shit.
“I want Detective Reardon placed under arrest, read his rights, and waiting for me in an interview room.” He paused. “ No one talks to that son of a bitch until I get there. Am I clear?”
Evidently he was, because he ended that call a moment later.
“Now.” He looked right at Officer Hansen as he took a pair of cuffs out of his pocket. “How about we do this the easy way and not make a scene here in the hospital?”
Hansen glanced at the cuffs, then at my dad. With a sigh of defeat, he turned around with his hands behind his back.
I never thought I’d be so grateful to be on a hospital gurney. I didn’t even think it was the concussion making the room sway. I just… couldn’t fucking believe this. My dad had heard. He was taking charge and arresting Hansen and Reardon.
And Everett was being released. Not just released, but watched like a hawk by a sergeant who I knew Dad trusted with his life. Colin was being released, too.
Was it over? Was it really, really over?
Probably not. But immediate danger was over. The fire was out. I could breathe.
Dad glanced at me. “I need to take him downtown. Will you be okay here on your own?”
Nodding, I croaked, “Y-yeah. I can, uh… I can get an Uber or something. I want to see Everett.”
Dad grunted. “I’ll have your brother come pick you up.”
That sounded even better. “Okay.”
He gave my arm a squeeze. “You did good, son. We’ll get this all straightened out.”
And with that, he left, frog-marching Officer Hansen out of the emergency room in handcuffs for all to see.
Closing my eyes, I pressed back against the pillows.
This wasn’t over yet. But in some ways—in the most pressing and important ways…
It was.