Chapter 7 #2
He pulled it out to turn it off. Nope, sorry, whoever you are. Not in. Not now, maybe not ever again. Everyone he cared about in the world was right here in the room with him. The rest of the world could just fuck off.
Oh, shit. Bill Kelly. His former boss in SDPD and, most of all, a former Marine.
Being a Marine was the closest thing to a religion Mike had.
Though he wasn’t on active duty in the Corps, Mike was still a Marine.
All Marines were his brothers. The second half of the famous motto.
Semper fi, yeah. But above all, semper fraternis.
Always brothers. Mike had Sam and Harry, his blood brothers.
But he also had the whole Corps. Every Marine was in a sense his brother.
And Bill Kelly was one of the best. A hard-ass but a real good guy. Mike couldn’t blow him off, not even tonight when he might have found the woman of his dreams.
So, with a sigh, he took the call. “Yo. Bill. Now’s not a really good time, but—”
“You home?” Bill’s gravelly voice was flat.
“Nope.” Mike frowned. “I’m at Sam’s, but—”
“Be there in two,” Bill growled and the screen went dead.
Mike held his phone for a second, staring at it, then put it away. For Bill to be here in two meant that he was at Mike’s door five stories down.
What the fuck?
It didn’t take Bill two minutes, it took one. Nicole went to answer the door and Mike heard Bill’s low rumble in the front hall as he greeted Nicole, then he followed Nicole into the dining room.
Bill was no dummy. He saw he was interrupting something. He ducked his head. “Ladies. Reston, Bolt.” He stuck his thumb over his shoulder. “Keillor, you’re with me.”
This was wrong. Everything about it was wrong. Bill had an old-fashioned sense of propriety. He would never interrupt a family party like this on a casual visit. So this was business.
But Mike wasn’t a member of the SDPD anymore. He wasn’t under Bill’s command. If Bill was going to ask for a favor, he was going about it the wrong way.
And, damn it, whatever it was, it could wait. Mike was having a real good time and he didn’t want to leave Chloe’s side.
“Can it wait, Bill?” Mike didn’t even bother disguising the impatience in his voice.
Bill frowned. “No. it can’t. And I’m about ten minutes ahead of an arrest warrant. This is a favor I’m doing you, Keillor, damn it, so you can get your ass on out there, right now.”
Bill never swore in front of ladies, never. He must be under massive stress.
Then Mike focused on what he said. “Arrest warrant?”
“Yeah.”
Sam and Harry were on their feet, chairs shoved back, suddenly bristling with aggression. Nicole and Ellen and Chloe looked shocked.
Aware that something was wrong with the adults, Merry ran to her mom and threw her little arms around Nicole’s expanding waist. Gracie woke up and started crying. Chloe tried to hush her but it wasn’t working. She transferred the little bundle into Ellen’s arms.
The entire table was beautifully set, the food steaming, up until a minute ago immensely inviting. A table of celebration. Now the sharp smells of food rose in his nostrils like a fog and made him nauseous. The celebration was entirely ruined.
What the fuck?
“Now, Keillor.” Bill’s voice was flat, command in it.
Mike didn’t obey because this was a command situation—for the first time in his life he had no command structure at all, and he found he liked it that way—but because this shit was fucking with one of the best days of his life. He wanted this—whatever this was—over, now.
Some kind of mistake had been made and it had to be straightened out, fast.
With an exclamation of impatience, Mike strode into Sam’s living room, indicated that Bill should take one of Sam’s big comfortable armchairs and he sat down on the edge of the sofa, at right angles.
A moment later, Sam sat next to him on the sofa and Harry on the armchair next to Bill’s.
Bill raised his eyebrows. “You okay with this?” he asked Mike.
What a dumb-ass question. “Yeah. They’re my brothers. I don’t have anything to hide from them.”
Kelly nodded, pulled out a notebook. He was the last holdout among the detectives, most of whom took notes on iPads or their cells.
Kelly flipped back a few pages, looked up at Mike. “Where were you last night?”
Mike froze. Christ, last night? Sam and Harry looked at each other, then at him. “Ah, I went out.”
Kelly’s jaw muscles jumped, gray eyes cold and frosty.
He let the silence hang there. Mike knew better than to give that answer, he was a former cop, after all.
But all of a sudden, for one of the few times in his life, he was ashamed of his tomcatting ways.
Sam and Harry had been at home with their wives and daughters while he’d been in a dive, drinking too much and picking up a crazy.
He was too old for this, he suddenly realized. No more bar-hopping. It was a depressing way to drown his problems, and anyway the problems were right there with him, the next morning. Together with a hangover and a burning desire to get far away from the woman he’d been with.
Mike gave a heavy sigh. “Okay. I went out around eleven, drove down to Logan Heights, drank a few shots in a couple of bars.”
Kelly had his notebook open on his knee, but he didn’t look down. “Ending up at The Cave?”
“I don’t remember,” Mike began, when suddenly he did. He flashed on the big, broken neon sign over the filthy window, THE AVE. “Yeah,” he sighed. “The Cave.”
“You picked up a woman.”
What the fuck business was it of Kelly’s? What—he’d suddenly become the sex police? “I don’t see what business that is of yours.”
“What was her name?” Kelly’s voice became even colder.
Jesus. Her name? If Mike were capable of blushing, he’d blush. If she’d told him her name, he didn’t remember it. He’d been way too drunk.
He shrugged.
“Real love affair, huh.” Kelly’s voice was icy.
Mike’s teeth ground.
“The name Mila Koravich mean anything to you?”
Mila—Mike closed his eyes, tried to envision the woman’s apartment. Filth, disorder, rank smells. All he remembered was the stench and the sick feeling of drunkenness. Had her name been on anything? He scanned his memory behind his closed eyelids. Nope.
Mike’s eyes opened. “Sorry. I don’t remember her name. So what’s it matter to you?”
“You got rough with her, didn’t you?”
Shame flooded his system in a hot rush. Harry and Sam sat silently, watching him. In the drunken haze that was last night, the memory of holding her down, of seeing her red, slightly swollen wrists with the white marks of his hands circling them, stood out.
“A—a little. Nothing serious.”
“Yeah?” Kelly had been writing in his notebook but at Mike’s words he looked up, face clenched like a fist. “I don’t know what your definition of ‘a little rough’ is, Keillor, but it’s not mine.”
He reached into an envelope and pulled out some glossy 8 x 10s and tossed them down onto the coffee table. Mike leaned forward, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. Red and black, misshapen flesh…then the image resolved itself into the shocking images of a badly-beaten woman.
He narrowed his eyes. Something about the badly-beaten face was familiar… Oh God. The woman he’d fucked last night.
Shocked, he looked up into Kelly’s angry eyes.
“Shattered jaw, concussion, broken forearm, three broken ribs, internal hemorrhaging it took surgery to stop and a crushed spleen. That’s not what I call ‘a little roughness’, Keillor.”
“Christ. I didn’t do that to her.” Mike stood, unable to sit still. “I couldn’t do that to any woman. The only thing I did was hold her down when she asked for it.” And well, fuck her harder. But she’d asked for that, too.
Kelly made an angry gesture at the spill of horrific photographs. “That looks like someone who was just held down? She was beaten half to death.”
“Christ, Bill.” A sudden shudder of fear struck Mike.
He wasn’t used to fear, but this was a new type of fear he’d never encountered before.
If Bill Kelly, who knew him, thought he was capable of doing this, what about other officers in the Violent Crimes Squad?
All his dealings had been mainly in SWAT.
But the SDPD was big. There were plenty of officers who didn’t know him and weren’t willing to take anyone’s word that Mike simply wasn’t capable of this kind of violence against a woman.
Against an enemy who attacked him, sure. But a woman? Never.
It was beginning to sink in that he was going to have to convince skeptical officers he wasn’t the one. And the DA. And—God—maybe eventually a jury.
Kelly gave him a hard look. “So you’re telling me you didn’t have sex with this woman?
And be careful what you say because we found a used condom in the bathroom.
” He snorted. “Used, not filled. You didn’t even come, you poor bastard.
So—what’s the DNA test gonna show? And remember your DNA is on file. ”
Every police officer had had their DNA tested via a cheek swab to establish a data file.
“Yeah, okay, we had sex.”
“Uh-huh,” Kelly said. “And?”
“And…I didn’t come. She was…asking me to be rough with her. Couldn’t do it.”
Now Kelly looked at him in pity. Kelly was a straight and narrow kind of guy who probably only got laid on St Patrick’s Day. Mike used to feel sorry for him but he suddenly realized the truth. Kelly was right and he was wrong. Fucking around was not good.
Kelly sighed. “The, ahm, lady in question used crack. We found it everywhere. You’re a former police officer. Former Marine. Marines and crack. That’s not a good mix, Keillor. You should have kept it in your pants.”
Mike closed his eyes. Kelly was right. He should have kept it in his pants.
“So…what’s your version? Tell me what went down.”
Mike clenched his jaws. Christ, he didn’t want to talk about it. Any of it.
Silence. Mike could hear his own teeth grinding.
Kelly sighed and stood. “Okay, if you’re not talking, we need to take it downtown, Keillor.”
Sam and Harry rose together.