Chapter 7 #3
Mike unclenched his jaws. It took effort.
“Stand down, guys. Sit back down.” Man, he wished his brothers weren’t here, but they were and weren’t leaving.
For the first time since he’d walked into Old Man Hughes’ house of horror and discovered that he’d landed into another shithole of a foster home, but that there were two other boys who immediately had his back, Mike wished Sam and Harry were less loyal.
What he wanted was to quietly clear this up with Kelly and not have his brothers involved.
But Sam and Harry were hard-wired for loyalty. They weren’t about to let him face this alone.
Shit.
“Down, everyone,” he said, and Sam and Harry sat back down, on the edges of the couch. Kelly stood for another long moment, grim-faced, then finally sat back down. He pulled out a notebook and waited.
“Okay,” Mike said. He closed his eyes for a moment, almost tasting the cold steel in his mouth as he bit the bullet.
“I was feeling restless last night. Went out around eleven. I wasn’t in the mood for trendy bars, martinis, picking up investment bankers.
” No, he’d felt like going to a place as shitty as he felt.
But he couldn’t say that in front of Sam and Harry because they’d beat themselves up over not recognizing that he felt shitty and busting their asses to make him feel better.
Sometimes Mike wished his brothers weren’t such stand-up guys. Wished they were worse friends. Wished they didn’t care so much about him.
“I, ah, tooled around a little. Ended up in Logan Heights, in a place called The Cave.”
Kelly held up a hand, spoke quietly in his cell, flipped it closed. Bent back over his notebook. “Okay. Get on with it.”
“I…drank. A lot.” Mike looked over at Sam and Harry.
Both had poker faces. When Harry came back a human wreck from the war, essentially wanting to die, he’d tried the drinking himself to death thing, night after night for a while.
He and Sam had let him, because it’s not easy to drink yourself to death, though God knows Harry tried.
Mike and Sam had taken away his guns, wouldn’t let him swim out to where he couldn’t come back and for a very bad month there had put up unbreakable screens around Harry’s balcony.
But they let him try to drink himself to death because it was really hard to do and Harry wasn’t managing it.
Mike had his drinking moments too, only not with Harry’s good reasons. It had been touch and go whether Harry would ever walk again, ever spend a minute of his life without excruciating pain, would ever have anything resembling a normal life.
And Mike’s excuse? Nothing. Which was precisely what he felt sometimes—absolutely nothing inside.
It shamed him, but there it was. He didn’t even have Sam and Harry’s tragic childhoods as an excuse.
He’d been securely wrapped in the strong embrace of a loving family until scumbags shot his mother and father and two brothers in a botched robbery and his childhood ended.
That was on the 12th of March 25 years ago when Michael Patrick Keillor was ten years old.
On the 13th of March of that year, he was already an old man of ten, broken in two by grief.
But until that day, his life had been charmed.
And he drank to forget his life from that March 13th on.
“Get shit-faced?” Kelly asked.
It was sort of a technical term. Drunkenness had its own taxonomy and ‘shit-faced’ was what he’d been.
“Yeah,” Mike answered quietly.
Kelly sat and looked at him, pen hovering over paper. “And?”
“I picked up this…” This what? Girl wasn’t the right term. Lady wasn’t right either. “Woman.”
Actually, she’d picked him up.
“Name?” Kelly was staring at his notebook and Mike had a sudden flash that Kelly didn’t want to watch his face as he recounted something depressing.
Mike didn’t answer, and Kelly finally looked up.
“I told you. Don’t know her name,” Mike said quietly and the three men winced all together. Man, not getting a chick’s name was bad. He’d fucked her, at least partially, but he didn’t know her name. There was really no excuse and he didn’t offer one.
Kelly was staring at him now, as if trying to get inside his head. Kelly was an alpha male, too and Mike didn’t ordinarily let men stare at him. He’d have bristled except he knew that Kelly was only doing his job. He’d forfeited his right to indignation.
“I gave you a name,” Kelly finally said. “Mila Koravich. Ring a bell?”
Mike shook his head. He doubted they’d exchanged ten words together.
“Working girl?” Kelly asked casually and this time Mike winced.
“No.” Though she might have been. Crackhead, filthy hovel of a place. She might have been. “Not that I knew of, anyway. She didn’t ask for money.” If she had, he’d have refused. Part of his no-go list. No married ladies, no addicts—though he’d sandbagged on that one—no working girls.
No, siree. He had standards. High ones, too.
Another long silence. Mike couldn’t meet Sam and Harry’s eyes.
You wouldn’t catch them puking the bourbon out of their guts at 2 am in a miserable hole.
No, at 2 am they were with their wives, where you could find them every night of their lives they weren’t on the road for work.
And both of them made real efforts to come home as quickly as possible because what waited for them at home was something pretty damned wonderful.
“So.” Kelly said the words in a level voice, one by one, without any inflection. “You got rough.”
Mike stared at the floor.
“Real rough.” Something in Kelly’s voice made Mike raise his head and frown.
He was nauseated at the memory. “I, ah, I held her down. My hands were, yeah, a—a little rough. She asked me to hold her down, do her hard. But I hated that. Her wrists were a little red when I lifted my hands.”
“And?” Kelly asked, his voice harsh.
Mike shrugged. “It wasn’t that bad.”
Kelly leaned forward, got in his face. “I don’t know what your definition of bad is, Keillor. But mine includes the kind of violence that was done to that woman. No one deserves that kind of treatment. She was under the knife for four hours.”
Mike’s head snapped up. “Whoa. I held her wrists, that’s it. They were red and a little swollen when I lifted my hands, I told you. But that was absolutely it. There wasn’t anything that would require—God!—surgery. Nothing even remotely like that.”
“Let me remind you.” Kelly flipped back to the beginning of his notebook but he had it all memorized. He barely glanced at his own notes. “The woman was brought into the hospital with a shattered jaw, concussion, broken bones, crushed spleen.”
“No, man.” Just hearing the list made him sick.
“That wasn’t me. Jesus, I could never do that to a woman.
Listen, this is what went down. I picked up this woman at a bar, The Cave.
We went to her house and had sex. Some sex, anyway.
She wanted me to get rough with her and it just turned me off.
I went into her bathroom and took off my condom, which won’t have sperm DNA and puked in her toilet.
I left her mad at me and screaming, so if anyone reported noise, that was it.
I thought I might still have alcohol in my system and I needed air and exercise, so I ran to the ferry, ran down to Coronado Shores. ”
“What time did you get home?”
“I don’t—wait. I got home around five. Yeah. When I got out of the shower my digital alarm clock read five seventeen. I stood on my balcony and watched the sun come up and went in to work.”
Kelly’s jaw muscles worked as he stared at Mike, eyes cold.
“Well, let me tell you what we’ve got, Keillor.
We’ve got a 911 call clocked at 4:02. Screaming and the sounds of a violent beating in room 321 at 445 Alameda Street, the home of one Mila Koravich.
The cops find her unconscious and EMS took her to E and A, where she was in surgery by five fifteen.
We dusted for prints, found some good ones on the iron bedstead and on the tiles over the toilet. ”
God. Mike had a very good vision of pumping into the woman while holding onto the bedstead because he’d suddenly had an aversion to touching her anywhere except with his dick. He’d only held her down when she insisted. And he remembered bracing himself against the wall over the toilet while puking.
“We ran the prints.” Kelly huffed out air through his nose like an enraged bull. “Prints pinged with a lot of low lifes, but all of us were astonished when your prints came up. Fresh prints. We ran it twice.”
Mike had been in the armed services and had been a law enforcement officer. Of course his prints were on file. He had a sick feeling in his stomach.
“So we took your SDPD ID to all the bars in the area, and at The Cave we struck gold. You left with Mila Koravich, who by the way has had two arrests for prostitution and possession, at a quarter past midnight. The bartender confirmed the ID. He said he saw you leave with Koravich. This morning at eight, when she came out of anesthesia, Koravich ID’d you as the man who beat her up. ”
Sam and Harry rose again, as one unit, big tough men, presenting a united front. “That’s ridiculous,” Sam growled. “You heard Mike, he was home by five am.”
The four men stood staring at each other. Mike could feel the aggression bristling from Sam and Harry but Kelly stood his ground. He wasn’t the kind of man to be intimidated. He’d been a Marine, he was now a very good cop. Not the kind of man who bent when pressure was applied.
Kelly ignored Sam and Harry and fixed Mike with a glare.
If he looked carefully, though, Mike could see pain behind the cold gray stare. He didn’t like suspecting Mike. And he didn’t like investigating him. But it was his duty, so he was going to do it.
Like that old SEAL saying. You don’t have to like it, you just have to do it.