CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR BUDDY COP FIELD TRIP
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
BUDDY COP FIELD TRIP
LUNA
“Good timing,” Judge said when Rhys and I walked through the front door of the clubhouse the next day.
When I’d woken up that morning, my brain was a whirl of good and bad.
Good? I loved Rhys, he loved me, and it hurt a little to walk thanks to how earnestly he’d shown that love at Rye and then again in the early morning hours.
Except that time, it’d been slow and tender yet just as incredible.
Bad? Pretty much everything else.
We didn’t know what was connected to whom.
The Irish-Nash connection could be unrelated to Rye.
Or whoever took over for Nash was behind it, and the FBI was mistaken about the Irish mafia being involved at all.
Maybe there was a third door just waiting to be thrown open to reveal a mystery bad guy we never saw coming.
Then there were the protestors and super PAC to think about.
I couldn’t see the uptight protestors busting out the spray paint to create the detailed penises, much less masking up to shoot at us. But the timing gnawed at me.
My brain kept twisting the pieces of the puzzle, trying to get them all to fit. But for all we knew, there were ten puzzles mixed around in the same box, and they would never go together.
That was why we needed to talk it out as one cohesive unit.
Unlike the last time we were at the clubhouse, the vibe wasn’t easy with flowing drinks and amazing fried chicken.
Instead, just the inner circle of brothers sat at the long table.
Judge held his phone. Glitch didn’t even tear his focus from the computer he was furiously typing on.
Jury, Haze, Scythe, and Hollywood were all doing their own things on various devices.
I’d thought Nox and his two guys were supposed to be there, but there was no sign of them.
“Any time with me is a good time,” Rhys shot back. “Why specifically?”
“Remember that bounty hunter Nox and Gus know from Tennessee who lives in LA?”
Obviously, I had zero clue what he was talking about, but Rhys nodded.
“He just called.” He tapped his screen. “Okay, tell them what you told me, Atlas.”
“Right. I dug into all my usual sources, and I’ve got nothing. Not a whisper of a hint of a damn rumor.”
What are they looking for in Tennessee or LA?
Before I could ask, Nox came from the kitchen with a glass of whiskey, an unlit cigar, and a phone ringing with an outgoing call.
Oh.
And a baby.
There was that, too.
She was a little older than Hollywood and Mac’s Maeve, but just as adorably cute.
“Both your guys got jack-shit, aye?” the bearded man asked with an arrogant smirk.
He probably should’ve held off his victory lap because when his call was accepted, it wasn’t a greeting he got. It was a similarly accented man saying, “I got jack-shite.”
The disembodied voice from Judge’s side spoke again. “I know a guy in Vegas who’s good with tech. The best I’ve worked with.”
“Whoa,” Nox’s phone guy bit out.
A sentiment Glitch echoed from the table. “Yeah, what the fuck?”
“Ayy,” Nox cut in. “All you walnuts are equally nerdy. That better? Good. ’Cause we need all the damn help we can get.”
“Help with what?” I asked, still lost.
“Finding Nash,” Judge answered.
They were both on speakerphone with people I didn’t know and didn’t trust. Definitely not with my brother’s life.
I made a throat slit motion. Probably a bit gruesome given the circumstances, but it worked to get my point across.
“Hold off on that,” Judge said to Atlas while Nox said something I didn’t catch. Both men hung up and looked at me.
“Why were you looking for Nash in LA or Tennessee?” I asked, wondering if we were missing a far-reaching connection somewhere. Preferably the lynchpin that connected all the dots into one tidy package.
“Atlas travels around and has connections across the country he was touching base with to see if anyone had eyes on Nash recently,” Judge explained.
“Did you already find him?” Nox asked while the baby yanked at his beard.
“Parts of him,” I said. “A year or so ago.”
“Fuck. Any insight into who is running his Empire of Excrement?”
“You missed your calling as a poet,” Hollywood said.
“Thank you. It’s about time someone appreciated my way with words.” Nox gave me his focus again. “Did your brother say who?”
I rocked back as my protective hackles rose right alongside my distrustful instincts. “How do you know about him?”
He shook his phone. “Don’t know any more than the basic public record, lass.”
“Okay, but how did you know that he knew something?” I started to turn a glare toward Rhys—and it was a damn doozy—before Nox gave a firm headshake.
“Wasn’t your man, so do me a favor, don’t get him pissed at me. Was just a guess on my part. That kind of secret for that long? It’s a safe bet that one of the three-letter agencies is involved.”
That made sense, even if him casually bringing up my brother had initially thrown me.
“You’d be correct,” I said.
“Is it the Irish they’re looking into?” he wagered, again nailing the bullseye.
“Yes.”
Technically, I wasn’t violating my brother’s trust by sharing any of it. Grayson had given the okay once Rhys had told him that talking with Nox could be mutually beneficial.
Which was why I tacked on, “And he wants to talk to you if you’re open to it sometime.”
“Not here,” Judge said instantly.
I wasn’t sure why he didn’t want an FBI agent at the clubhouse, and I wasn’t asking. If there was more to the Court of Mayhem than MayCo and parties, I didn’t want to know.
“I’ll make arrangements,” Nox said.
“It doesn’t have to be—
But after passing off his baby to Rhys, he moved toward the exit.
What is with them and infant hot potato?
Without thinking, I shifted to take the little one—partially because I didn’t know how he felt about kids but mostly because it was a baby within reach, and I kind of wanted to hold her.
I didn’t get the chance. He tucked her into his body with ease as he whispered, “Remember, Uncle Rhys is your favorite. Uncle Rhys equals favorite. Got it, kid?”
The baby stretched her arm upward as she slept, and Rhys bumped his tattooed fist to hers to seal the deal.
My ovaries exploded.
Pop. Pop.
Gone.
I’d already assumed having kids was out of the question for me.
I worked hard to get where I was, and having a kid would set me back.
It was wrong and messed up, but it was the truth.
My male colleagues were labeled as amazing fathers when they took off work to attend school functions or whatever.
When women tried to do the same, they were told that missing the events was a sacrifice they had to make.
That it wasn’t everyone else’s job to cover so she could be a mom. All the usual crap.
If I ever shared how badly I wanted to be a mom, I would no longer be viewed as badass Detective Luna Oscar.
People would joke I was only working until I got accepted into the female three-letter agencies—MRS and MOM.
It would soften my authority in a way I hadn’t been willing to accept.
And since I was usually single or with men I didn’t see an extended future with, it was no hardship to lock that part of me away.
But seeing Rhys holding the baby made that part of my mind rattle. Just a little. Just enough for an image of Rhys holding our baby to pop into my mind.
One day in love, and I’m already daydreaming.
Should I grab pencils and a notebook so I can start doodling hearts around our names now, too?
Internally rolling my eyes at myself, I resecured those locks and added a few more for good measure. Because not only were my original points still valid, there was the knowledge that Rhys might’ve liked the cutie for a little visit, but that didn’t mean he wanted any of his own.
His vasectomy made that pretty cut and dry—pun intended.
Tightening his hold on the baby with one arm, Rhys moved closer and gripped my ass with the other. Hard. He used that tight hold to pull me up onto my toes. “Don’t think you’re getting away with that bullshit.”
“What bullshit?” I asked, playing dumb.
“Thinking for a second that I would betray your trust. Just wait till we’re alone, hellcat.”
“Add it to my tab, barman.”
Rhys looked tempted to drag me to a room—or just a dark corner—right then and there. Unfortunately, there was no time.
Nox returned to swoop up his daughter before I got a turn to hold her and walked away again.
“Where’s he going?” I asked.
Judge hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Gus doesn’t like to hear the specifics of what Nox does.
They call it the Gus-Protocol. With everything happening, though, no one is leaving their women alone.
They’re camped out in a bedroom with a shit-ton of face masks, snacks, and whatever else O had Texas get earlier.
They’re rebranding the lockdown into girls’ night. ”
I had other things I needed to do, but that didn’t stop me from making a mental note to request a girls’ night invite at a less dangerous time.
Nox came back empty-handed and declared, “Field trip, kids.”
The vibes were… tense.
That was probably the biggest understatement ever said in the history of understatements, but still.
Standing in a mostly empty warehouse in the middle of nowhere, I looked around the motley crew that’d been assembled.
A bar owner. A motorcycle club president and his tech guy—the rest of the club was stationed at Rye or with the significant others. A… whatever Nox was. An undercover detective.
And an FBI agent, there in secret.
I was guessing the warehouse belonged to Nox since he’d set the location, but I got the distinct impression I couldn’t prove that guess no matter how hard I dug. Not that I was going on that particular archeological adventure. Like Mayhem, I was living in ignorance about Nox, too.
Contrary to my brother’s insinuation the night before, I wasn’t blindly following the rules like I had as a kid. Not when my gut said it wasn’t the right thing to do.
Surprisingly, neither was my brother himself. As the oldest sibling at forty-four, Grayson had always been an adult to me. Literally since he’d been a legal adult when I was born. Not just that, he was the typical oldest child. Too serious. Shouldering too much. Too annoyingly bossy.
Joining the FBI hadn’t softened him, but it had given him the same ability to see the shades of gray between the black and white that I had.
Hence why he was meeting us in the warehouse from every horror movie to share what he could.
Glitch had brought a whole smartboard to the meeting, which was cool and more organized than printouts and a tangle of yarn.
There was a small timeline of loose events, some notes about what Nash had been into when he was alive and wasting space, and some other random occurrences that might’ve fit in somewhere.
Once we had the gist laid out—including the details of the drive-by that no one in my family was aware of, though it was unlikely to remain that way now that Grayson knew—it was my brother’s turn to share.
“The Irish mob is making moves,” he said.
“Big ones. Crime families have been dying off all over, and up until recently, they were following that trend. Losing territory, members, and funding. No support. No fear. No one needs them for gambling when people can bet on everything right on their phone. It took too many bad movies, but people finally learned not to go to them for loans they’ll never get out from under.
We suspect they’re still trafficking women, but we haven’t been able to pin anything on them because they’re careful. ”
“That doesn’t sound like them,” Nox put in. “They’ve always been crazy fookers.”
“Not anymore. They’re making aggressive moves, but they’re doing it quietly.”
“Quiet sure as shit doesn’t sound like them.”
“If they’re being so cautious, how did you get involved?” I asked.
“Huge shipments of 3D printer filament,” Grayson said.
Rhys’s mouth curved down. “You’re tracking craft supplies?”
“People print ghost guns,” I explained. There’d been a surge of them hitting the streets.
The basic kind were bad enough, but like everything in tech, abilities evolved—for the good and the very, very bad.
“Modified untraceable weapons that can be melted down to a lump of burning plastic have been making our jobs pretty damn difficult.”
My brother nodded. “Bingo. Agents a couple years ago thought they had the Padric patriarch on RICO charges, but they couldn’t get anything to stick. Now, we can’t even get eyes on him.”
“And you won’t,” Nox said. “The whole family was wiped.”
Grayson lifted a brow.
The bearded man put his hands up. “Don’t look at me. Someone from within the family decided it was out with the old guards and time to usher in a new era.”
“Any ideas who that ambitious entrepreneur might be?”
“No. And there are some people back home who would like to know. All their usual haunts are ghost towns now.”
Grayson tapped something on his phone and turned it. “These are the new locations of interest.”
Since it was hard to see the map on the tiny screen, Glitch did his techy magic—which was likely just AirDrop or something—to transfer the image onto the smartboard so everyone could see it.
I had no clue what Judge, Glitch, Nox, and Rhys saw on the normal map, but there was something.
Judge and Glitch had a whispered conversation before the former moved to Nox to have their own clandestine gab sesh.
Rhys didn’t seem concerned—or maybe he hadn’t noticed—their secretiveness. His focus was on the board.
He rocked back suddenly. “Holy shit.”
“What?”
“I’ve been digging into Butler and his history to find a way to get him off my back.
Including researching the other businesses they’ve gone after.
” He pointed at a few of the marked buildings.
“These were previous targets of his super PAC. Independent Results and Abundance. IRA. Neither of those things can be a damn coincidence.”
That explains why they never use the acronym.
I thought about Sean Butler and all his smooth interviews.
His earnest and believable pleas that he loved the city and wanted to make it a better place.
His milquetoast looks on the for-sale signs around the city.
I’d assumed he was gearing up for an eventual run for mayor or some other political office.
I never expected the kind of power he was actually after.
“The IRA is defunct,” Grayson said, referring to the Irish connection and not the retirement savings. He looked at Nox. “Correct?”
Nox lifted his chin. “Aye. This is them being cute while they play right in our fookin’ faces.”