Chapter 7 #4
Kelly stuck his notebook in the saggy pocket of his jacket which looked like he’d slept in it for the past month.
“Gonna have to take this downtown, Keillor. No other way around it.” He held up a big hand, palm out, when Sam and Harry took a step forward.
“Guys. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. Your choice.”
Mike felt old, all of a sudden. Old and ashamed. He hadn’t beaten the woman up. He knew he hadn’t and he trusted Kelly to be a good enough cop to follow the evidence. He’d be exonerated. Eventually.
But it might come to some nasty things before the situation got resolved.
He might have to put up bail. RBK was doing real well but they were in the process of making major investments and taking a good chunk out of that would hurt his brothers.
Mike knew that Kelly would instinctively try to shield him from the press but if word got out that Michael Keillor of RBK had been arrested for assault, it would be a huge blow against the good name of the company they’d all worked so hard to build.
It was very possible that Mike was going to watch his brothers, his company, covered in mud. Not to mention costing money at exactly the wrong time.
He had no one to blame but himself for this, no one.
He hadn’t beaten this woman up. He wasn’t guilty of that, but he was guilty of everything else.
He was guilty of not being able to spend a night alone, at the age of 35.
He was guilty of getting drunk and picking up a woman he knew nothing about and which two second’s worth of thought in his head, as opposed to doing his thinking with his dick, would have told him was bad news, the worst.
He was guilty of dishonoring his company, his brothers. He was guilty of shaming his brothers’ wives, two women he loved and respected.
“DA’s waiting,” Kelly said and Mike closed his eyes. Yeah, the DA’d be waiting and since he was ex SDPD, they’d throw the book at him on principle. No one could afford to appear to favor a former cop. Kelly’d gone way out on a limb here for him, and he would pay.
If the press got a whiff of special treatment, Kelly’d be in deepest shit. The tabloids and political web sites would bay for blood.
“We’re coming with Mike.” Sam’s voice was flat. It wasn’t a question. Kelly hesitated. He was a tough guy but getting into a pissing contest with Sam and Harry presenting a united front wasn’t anyone’s idea of fun.
Christ, no. Mike didn’t want his brothers anywhere near this.
Mike would have given anything at that moment to have less loyal brothers.
He didn’t want them to troop downtown and watch him being treated like a potential felon.
There’d be newbies at HQ, men who didn’t know Mike and who for the rest of their days would know him as the ex cop accused of assaulting a cokehead after sex.
Mike’s disastrous misjudgments would be right there, out in the open for all to see and snigger over.
His brothers would see that. Would suffer for that.
Mike wanted his brothers safely in their homes, with their families, where they belonged. They deserved that. They didn’t deserve what was about to go down.
Thank God Merry and Gracie weren’t old enough to understand anything at all about this sordid clusterfuck. Mike couldn’t live with himself if he had to watch the confusion and pain in his nieces’ eyes as they realized that their Uncca Mike was accused of something so horrendous.
Mike turned to pick up his jacket to follow Kelly when he stopped in horror.
It was like the entire world paused as he swooped right down into a deeper level of hell.
All his previous regrets were as nothing because there was Chloe.
Standing in the doorway, staring at him with sadness in her golden eyes.
Chloe. White-faced, stricken. She’d been there all along, listening. So she’d had an earful of what Mike Keillor was all about. She didn’t know him in any meaningful way. What she did know about him was what she’d learned over the past half hour, and all of it was horrible and all of it was true.
Mike hadn’t beaten the woman up, of course, but everything else—guilty. He’d drunk too much. As a matter of fact, getting shit-faced on a regular basis was beginning to become a habit with him.
So the one night he was on his own, he got shit-faced and picked up the first woman who came on to him. A woman who turned out to be an addict and borderline insane.
Didn’t make any difference. Mike had heard someone back in the SWAT team locker room joke that if it had a vagina, Mike would poke it.
True.
He’d been using sex and alcohol for a long, long time as a way to drown out his thoughts. It never worked and he never stopped trying. The very definition of insanity. Doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different outcome.
That was the Mike Keillor Chloe was seeing. A guy who drank too much, fucked addicts, slapped around the women he fucked.
That’s not me, he wanted to scream. He’d been a good Marine, a good cop. He worked hard in his company. He loved his brothers, their wives and above all his little nieces.
He helped abused women disappear. He fucking gave to fucking charity.
The man she’d heard described just wasn’t him.
Except—it was. He hadn’t beat the woman up. But except for that, it was all true. He was a borderline alcoholic and a sex addict and he wasn’t fit for decent women. And he had to come to that conclusion the day a woman rocked his world.
Chloe Mason had knocked him off his feet. In the few hours he’d spent with her he’d had this totally weird, totally new feeling in his chest. He couldn’t breathe around the tightness in his chest, while at the same time he felt like he was pulling in pure oxygen.
He recognized it now as happiness—something clean and fresh and beautiful in his world. And he’d ripped it out of his life with his own hands.
They trooped out in a sad little procession, first Kelly, then Mike, then Sam and Harry bringing up the rear.
Instead of spending the day together with his extended family, getting to know quiet, mysterious, beautiful Chloe Mason better, he was dragging his brothers away from their families to deal with squalor.
And every step took him away from Chloe.
That kiss with Chloe at the Del had been the most exciting thing he’d ever experienced, a universe away from the sex he’d been having all his life. Mike had seen a door open and something beautiful beckoning to him from the other side.
That door had slammed shut. He’d slammed it shut with his own fucking hands.
Chloe watched them walk past, her eyes on him. Mike couldn’t meet her eyes. Simply couldn’t. Shame and regret were like acid eating him alive from the inside. He walked past her, eyes straight ahead, face grim.
Ellen and Nicole watched too, eyes sad. Ellen had one of her pretty musician’s hands over her mouth and Nicole was cupping her belly where her second daughter nestled.
Mike couldn’t wait to get away. Away from them and their sad, loving gaze. He knew how much they cared for him. Both women had opened their homes and their hearts to him and how did he repay them? By bringing squalor and filth inside their homes.
He couldn’t even look at his brothers. They flanked him silently in a sign of support as they marched down the corridor, but they looked straight ahead. No one spoke a word as they rode down in the elevator.
There were no words to say.