Chapter 37 #3
“It looks good,” Kevin spoke up even as he continued to hold tightly to Emily.
“A graze of the upper arm, about two and a half inches of owie boo-boo, no stitches needed. I’ll get it cleaned up when we get back to the house.
Oh, but he will need an antibiotic. I’d like to get him started on that tonight if possible, so if you have any contacts who can write a script, now’s the time to shoot ’em a boy-howdy.
Let’s use the pharmacy over near the hospital, instead of the one closest to Rod’s as long as we’re being all clandestine and shit.
Mick, you got any drug allergies you wanna share with us? You good with penicillin?”
“I am,” he said.
“I’ll get right on that.” The other investigator—Cassidy—must’ve finished with his other call, because he spoke up, his voice coming through the car speakers. “And good idea about the pharmacy, Hob. Mick, are you able to talk, or would you prefer waiting until we arrive?”
“Why do you call him Mick,” Emily asked, “when his name is Milt?”
“Hello, Emily,” Cassidy replied in his calm, even voice. “I’m Jules. It’s so nice to meet you. I’m glad you’re safe. But Mick’s name isn’t Milt. He changed it, legally, years ago.”
“And even if he didn’t, Boo,” Kevin interjected in a whisper, “it’s disrespectful not to use someone’s chosen name.”
“O’Rourke was my mother’s maiden name,” Mick spoke up from the other side of the car.
“When I was around ten, she told me she’d wanted to name me Mick, after her father, but my father told her that was stupid, that she was stupid, that Mick was a nickname, and a low-class one at that.
She tried to settle for Michael, but Milton wanted a junior, and he always got his way, so.
.. I was making things right, and yes, I was trying to separate myself from my felony conviction. That, too.”
There was a moment, then, of not-quite silence as the car’s tires hummed along the road.
Mick broke it. “I don’t need to wait,” he said, answering Cassidy’s question. “I don’t want to wait. If you have questions for me...”
“We’re a little curious about why you hired us to find Emily when you knew damn well where she was,” the Texan said, his voice slightly louder in the speaker. He was probably driving the investigators’ car, and was closer to the Bluetooth mic.
“I panicked,” Mick answered him. “She didn’t know who I was—I meant to tell her, but as time passed, it got harder and harder and.
.. I didn’t trust Harper, and... I was just so shocked that my father did the right thing—well, a right thing.
He should’ve told the truth in that note he wrote to her, the one that was attached to his will, but he didn’t, so I’m pretty sure he only named her as his heir to, I don’t know, punish me?
I honestly don’t know. But hey, joke’s on him.
Because there’s nothing in the world I wanted more than for Emily to get what she should’ve gotten if her grandfather had sued my father—and me, too—in a civil case, the way I hoped he would. ”
“You hoped my grandfather would sue you?” Emily asked, emerging from the warmth of Kevin’s arms.
“I wanted justice. I knew that a civil case would help me prove my innocence,” Mick said quietly.
“After I got out of prison, I discovered the truth when I gathered evidence for a civil trial—I was looking for info to give to your grandfather to use to sue us, yes and…” He took a deep breath.
“Instead, I found out that I couldn’t’ve been driving that car that night.
That I wasn’t. That it was really my father who killed your mother. That I was framed.”
Cassidy spoke up. “As we were learning more about your father,” he said, “we stumbled across evidence that that so-called leaked video tape that ‘proved’ your guilt was absolutely altered. The original date and timestamp had been removed and a new one was added.”
“Are you serious?” Emily said.
“Wow,” Mick said. “You guys are good. I have a video file of the original—and yeah, that video, where I puke on my father’s slippers, was not recorded on the day of the accident.”
“I want to see it,” Emily said. “All of it. All of the evidence. Alleged evidence.”
“Okay,” Mick said. “Of course. Whatever you want.”
As she looked across the car at him, in the intermittent light from the street lamps they were driving past, she saw hope in his eyes. “This changes nothing,” she said. “You fucking liar.”
“Speak your truth, girl,” Kevin murmured as Cassidy’s voice came back through the speakers.
“How long have you known Ernest Harper?” he asked.
“I don’t know exactly,” Mick said. “He was my father’s lawyer for... as long as I can remember?”
“From before Marina Santana’s death?”
Emily deeply loved the way Cassidy called it what it was, instead of using a euphemism—before the hit-and-run or before the accident or before you went to prison, with the implication that her mother was nameless or somehow less important than everyone else who’d suffered inconveniences from her death.
“Yes,” Mick was saying. “From before my mother died, too—before she got sick even. I remember she used to go into her room whenever Harper came over. She said he was creepy. My father would laugh at her and say that’s what he was paying him for.”
“Do you think—”
Mick cut Cassidy off. “That Harper’s behind this?
Absolutely.” He told them again about the man he’d seen in Harper’s parking garage, about his theory that whoever he was, he’d put a GPS tracker on his car.
And because he’d had car trouble and dropped it at a local garage for repair, he’d only brought it back to the hotel this afternoon.
“I think that’s why they didn’t find us until tonight. But here’s the thing...”
“If they wanted to harm you, they could’ve done that when you went to pick up the car,” Cassidy concluded, “since they were surely watching for you. Yeah, my guess, too, is that the bullet you took tonight was meant for Emily. It’s notable that they took a single shot—the weapons they used to shoot at us while we were at her house would’ve done significantly more damage to everyone on that sidewalk.
Oh, that reminds me. I have photos of the damage to Emily’s house—we got them from the police report.
I’m texting them to you... right... now.
But yes, compared to that, the attack on you tonight was a surgical strike.
Emily, I don’t know for sure, but I’m close to certain that whoever is behind this—Harper or whoever—wants you dead.
So please stay alert, and until we arrive, follow Rod’s instructions.
If he tells you to duck, you duck. If he tells you to move, you move. Is that clear?”
I don’t know who the hell you are or what authority you have to make those kinds of assumptions and demands of a total stranger... But Emily only got the “I...” out before Kevin leaned in.
“Weird new world you’re in, huh?” he said.
“Apparently inheriting twenty million dollars has a massive downside—who knew? Still, to help you get your feet beneath you as you figure this crazy shit out, I can give you some advice that has proven extremely useful to me since I was, mmm, fifteen years old. Trust Jules Cassidy. He’s one of the good ones, Em.
And Rodney up there? He’s not so bad himself.
Mick, over here, may be a fucking liar, but he did a very good thing when he hired Jules to help him.
And if Mick’s somehow behind this, or mixed up with this guy Harper in some way?
Jules’ll be first in line to kick his ass. ”
“Nah, pretty sure I’m first. But Cassidy’ll be right beside me,” the Texan, Sam’s voice said over the speakers as Mick passed his phone over to Kevin.
“Sam’s a former Navy SEAL,” Kevin whispered loudly as he delivered Mick’s phone to Emily. “I just met him, but I’m already madly in love with him.”
The pictures that Cassidy sent were up on Mick’s screen and Emily swiped through them with a growing sense of shock. Dear God, her house looked like a bullet-riddled war zone. If she’d been home when that had happened, she’d probably be dead now.
“Kevin, you flirt,” Sam was saying. “I’m happily married, but I suspect you already knew that. Emily, we’d really like a verbal acknowledgment, because if you’re in danger, that means we’re in danger, too. So if Rod says to—”
“Spin in a circle, I’ll spin in a circle,” Emily said, looking up from Mick’s phone as the interior of the car around her snapped back into focus. “I understand. It’s very clear.”
Across the car, Mick started to laugh—except he wasn’t laughing, he was trying not to cry. “Thank God,” he whispered as he covered his face with his hands. “Thank you, Em.”
“Mick, I have a few more questions for you,” Cassidy’s voice came over the speaker.
“We need to take a little break here in the Galileo shuttlecraft, Captain,” Kevin said. “Some of us have a few things we’re struggling to process. We’re also approaching the Enterprise, so...”
Sure enough, Rod had turned a corner into a posh-looking community, where a security gate blocked both the entrance and the exit.
As Emily watched, he pressed one of the buttons in his car’s overhead remote.
The gate went up and he nodded at the woman in the gatehouse as they went through and the gate lowered behind them.
“...how about we call you back after we get inside and get cleaned up?” Kevin was still talking, shifting slightly as he took his phone out of his pocket and unlocked the screen. “My estimated ETA has you arriving in an hour and forty-seven minutes, so if it’s okay with you, we won’t rush.”
“Of course,” Cassidy said. “Thank you, Mr. Spock.”
“Ooh,” Kevin said to Emily as the call disconnected. He was intentionally giving Mick privacy by turning away from him in that crowded back seat. “Jules usually calls me Hobbit. I think I just got a nickname upgrade.”