by Marie Force
After a pause, he said, “No, I didn’t. I need to go, or I’ll be late for class.”
“No problem. We’ll see you when you get here.”
When the line went dead, Sam closed her phone and drew a big circle around the name of Margaret Armstrong. There was definitely more to the story there, and Sam would be looking hard in her direction.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
GONZO REPEATEDLY TRIED to call Christina, but she didn’t pick up. When he tried a fourth time, the call went straight to voice mail, which made him wonder if she’d turned off the phone. He decided to text her.
I’d like to know how my son is doing.
It took half an hour for a reply to come through, and when it did, he was sorry he’d asked.
NOW you want to know how OUR son is doing?!? That’s awesome. Haha! Where were you last night when I had to sign legal documents as if I’m his LEGAL parent, which I am NOT?!?! Go to hell, Tommy. I packed up your clothes, and Freddie is picking them up after work. Have a nice life.
“Fuuuuck,” he said as he fell back against the pillows, closing his eyes. Pain ripped through him, starting in his chest and working its way to the rest of him. She’d had time to pack his shit, which must mean Alex was better. He ran his fingers through his hair, trying to make sense of what she’d said and what it meant.
They were really over. He expected a burst of predictable pain that didn’t materialize. He’d gone numb where she was concerned. She’d become one more thing he couldn’t handle in the aftermath of Arnold’s death, one more person who wanted something he no longer had to give.
Despite the pain that had him craving the relief he could only get from Vicodin, the thought of losing Christina had no impact on him whatsoever. But his son was another story altogether, and he had no intention of losing him. As soon as he got out of here, he’d call Andy, Nick’s lawyer friend who’d helped him in the past, and ask for advice on how best to proceed. He had no desire for any kind of legal hassle with Christina. It was in Alex’s best interest to have them both in his life, and that’s what he would have. But there was no way Gonzo would allow her to cut him out of his own son’s life. That was not going to happen.
A knock on the door had him turning to see who was there. Oh fucking hell. Goddamned Trulo. They hadn’t wasted any time getting the department shrink over there. He’d probably come running when Sam called him. Of course he had. It wasn’t every day Trulo got to work with a head case like he’d become lately.
Trulo, a wiry guy with thinning hair, looked at Gonzo with kind gray eyes and empathy Gonzo didn’t want. Why couldn’t everyone just leave him the fuck alone? “May I come in?”
“Can I stop you?” Gonzo asked, not caring in the least that he was being rude to someone who’d been kind to him since that awful night last January. Not to mention that Trulo could take him off the job, if he deemed it necessary. And wouldn’t that cap off a spectacular twenty-four hours?
“Actually, you can stop me,” Trulo said. “If you don’t want me here, just say the word.”
I don’t want you here, he thought. But rather than say that, he only shrugged. “I promised Sam I’d see you, so I’ll see you.”
Trulo gestured to the chair next to Gonzo’s bed. “May I?”
“Go ahead.” Gonzo resigned himself to getting through this so he could go back to figuring out what to do about Christina and Alex, not to mention where he was going to live now that she’d kicked him out of the home he paid for. Not that she didn’t do her share to support their family, but how was he supposed to swing the rent on two places in DC on a detective’s salary?
He was well and truly fucked in more ways than one. When would that nurse be by with his meds? Checking his watch, he saw that it’d been four hours since she’d been in, and the dose she’d given him then was beginning to wear off. He could always tell when the meds were wearing off. Edginess set in, his anxiety spiked and the pain... Jesus, it could take down a horse. He’d never experienced anything quite like it.
“Sergeant?” Trulo’s voice interrupted the increasingly desperate thoughts running through his mind.
Gonzo glanced at him, noted his brows were furrowed. “Yeah?”
“I was asking about what happened last night that landed you in the hospital. You didn’t hear me?”
“Sorry, I was just thinking.” He shifted to find a more comfortable position, and pain reverberated through his body. Where was that fucking nurse? Or, better yet, where was his coat with the pills he’d stashed in the inside pocket? Remembering he had them was like finding water in the desert. If he could just get rid of Trulo, he could have a pill. The thought of the relief that would follow calmed him ever so slightly.
“Tommy?”
“I, um, my girlfriend broke up with me. I hadn’t eaten all day, and I guess my blood sugar was low, so my blood pressure and heart rate dropped. That’s all it was. No big deal.”
“You said your girlfriend broke up with you? As I recall, the two of you have been together awhile.”
“Almost two years,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Why did she break up with you?”
“You’d have to ask her that.”
“You mind if I do?”
Startled, Gonzo looked at him. “For real?”
“I’d like to know what’s going on with you. I figure she’s probably got some insight.”
“I, ah, I don’t know how I’d feel about that. She’s pissed, and you have the power to control my job. That combination doesn’t sit well with me.”
“No one’s after your job, Sergeant. That’s not what this is about.”
“Then what’s it about?”
“It’s a check-in to see how you are. You’ve been through a lot. There’ll be steps forward and steps backward as you work to get past what happened last January.”
“Get past it?” Gonzo asked, instantly infuriated. “You expect me to get past watching my partner be slaughtered right in front of me? You expect me to get over the fact that he was killed because I was annoyed by him and told him he could take the lead with the suspect if he would only shut the fuck up about how cold and hungry and tired he was? What’s the timeline for getting over that? I’d sure like to know.”
“I apologize for my poor choice of words. Obviously, the impact of Detective Arnold’s death is still very present for you.”
“You mean Detective Arnold’s murder, don’t you?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I have to testify soon at the probable cause hearing for the scumbag who killed him. It’s taken this long because they gave him a full psych eval to make sure the poor baby is up for enduring the trial. Did you know that?”
“I hadn’t heard that, but I’m not surprised you have to testify as you were the only witness.”
“Yeah, lucky me.”
“Is the probable cause hearing stressing you out?”
“What do you think?”
“Is the stress perhaps making you do things that you wouldn’t ordinarily do?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
Gonzo rolled his eyes to high heaven. “Do they make you guys take a class in shrink school on how to ask vague questions?”
Trulo laughed. “Nah, we figure out how to do that on our own. We find that when we let the patient figure out their own crap, it tends to be more effective than when we lead them to it.”
“If you say so.”
“Back to whether you’ve been doing things out of the ordinary. Perhaps it’s because you’re feeling stressed about having to testify against the man who murdered your partner. I mean, that would make anyone stressed. For instance, I imagine the lieutenant is stressed about having to testify against Stahl.”
Gonzo shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess she is. She hasn’t sa
id anything about it to us.”
“Doesn’t mean she isn’t feeling it, the same way you have to be feeling this next stage in getting justice for Arnold and what that’ll require of you.”
The words “getting justice for Arnold” resonated with him. He’d do whatever he could to make sure the man who killed his partner would spend the rest of his life rotting in jail. That would be a small price to pay for what he’d done to a young man who’d had his whole life in front of him.
For fuck’s sake. Gonzo realized tears were rolling down his face. He angrily brushed them away. The last thing he needed was to break down in front of the department shrink.
Trulo handed him a tissue from a box on the bedside table. “You’re dealing with a lot. What can we do to help you through it?”
You can take me back to that night in January. I would’ve done it all differently. I would’ve taken the lead the way I always did. It should’ve been me. I wish it had been me. “Nothing.”
“Can I offer one piece of advice?”
“If you must.”
“Keeping it all inside is a recipe for disaster. You’re surrounded by people who want to help—at home and at work. People care, Tommy.”
“What can they do? No one can change what happened nine months ago, so what exactly do you want me to say to them?”
“Tell them how you feel. Tell me how you feel. Tell someone.”
“I feel like fucking shit! All the time! What do you want to me to say? That I can’t get a minute’s relief from the images that torture me, of the gurgling sound he made when he was trying to breathe or the way he was dead before I even realized what’d happened? Do you want me to say I don’t give a shit about anything or anyone—not the woman I supposedly love or my job or anything other than my son? Is that what you want to hear?”
“It’s a good place to start.”
Exhausted by the outburst, Gonzo fell back against the pillows.
“Does it give you any relief to say those things out loud?”
“No. Nothing brings relief.” Except the Vicodin, but he couldn’t say that, or Trulo would lock him up, and he’d be unable to get it. The thought of being without it was enough to spark a full-on panic.
“Before I came over, I took a quick look at your jacket to refresh my memory on a few things,” he said, referring to Gonzo’s employment file.
Panic overtook him. Where was he going with this?
“Not that long before you lost your partner, you were shot in the neck in a near-fatal incident.”
Gonzo pointed to the three-inch scar on his neck that served as a reminder of another day he’d much rather forget. “My war wound. Ironic that Arnold was the one who saved my life by applying pressure to the wound, huh? I couldn’t do a fucking thing for him, but he saved me.”
“In addition to that, your lieutenant was kidnapped and tortured by the man who used to command your squad. Detective McBride was kidnapped and raped. The mother of a son you didn’t know you had until he was several months old was murdered, and you were briefly considered a suspect.”
“What’s your point, Doc?”
“You’ve been through a lot, Tommy. Any one of those things would be enough to rattle the strongest person. Taken together, and I wonder how you’re still soldiering through on the job.”
A twinge of discomfort rose above the numbness. Gonzo didn’t like where this was leading. “What would you have me do, Doc? I have a family to support—or I did until last night anyway. I don’t have the luxury of walking away like Will did.”
“Let’s talk about Will, shall we?”
“What about him?” What the hell did his former coworker have to do with anything?
“Were you close to him?”
“Not particularly. We were work colleagues. He was a good detective. I was sorry to see him go. He was Arnold’s closest friend. I didn’t even know that until after Arnold died.” Gonzo let out a huff of laughter. “Some sergeant I turned out to be, huh? I don’t even know that my partner’s closest friend was someone who sits right next to us every day.”
“Why did Will leave?”
“You know why he left. He couldn’t deal with the way Arnold died and what happened to Sam and Jeannie and me getting shot. Police work lost its luster for him. He’s a single guy with no responsibilities to anyone but himself. He can do what he wants.”
“What would you do if you could do anything you want?”
“What does it matter? I can’t do anything I want.”
“Roll with me. What if you could?”
“I’d go to the Florida Keys and spend a month fishing.”
“Why don’t you do it? You have forty days of sick leave on the books. What’re you saving it for?”
“I don’t take sick leave when I don’t need it, Doc.”
“I think maybe you might need it, Tommy. It might do you good to get away from it all for a little while. Your girlfriend takes good care of your little boy, right?”
“Yeah,” he said softly. “She adores him.”
“Maybe if you told her you need a little time to get yourself sorted, she might actually understand.”
Gonzo shrugged. “I’ve already asked too much of her.”
“What’s one more thing? I assume she loved you at one time, and she’s proven that she loves your son. You ought to take a break from the pressure cooker for a while and see if you can’t find a productive way to cope with what’s happened.”
Gonzo took note of the way he said that. A productive way. Did that mean Trulo knew about the decidedly unproductive ways he’d been coping? “I’ll think about it.”
“Do I have your permission to speak with Christina?”
He took a deep breath. “Yeah, I guess. Knock yourself out. She’s fucking furious with me right now. Good luck.”
“She’s not furious with me. I’ll be fine.” Trulo stood and handed Gonzo his card. “Call me if I can help. Day or night. If you need me, call me. Nothing that happens between us will ever affect the status of your job, unless I feel you’re a danger to yourself or others. Okay?”
Gonzo nodded and took the card. “Thanks for coming by.”
“Go easy on yourself, Tommy. As crappy as it might seem to you, what you’re feeling is perfectly normal in light of what you’ve been through. I really want you to consider some time away. I think it might help.” He extended his hand.
Gonzo returned the handshake.
“I’ll check in on you later.”
He was almost out the door when Gonzo said, “Hey, Doc?”
Trulo turned back, eyebrow raised.
“Thanks again.”
“Anytime, Sarge.”
For a long time after he left, Gonzo stared down at the business card in his hand, thinking about what the doctor had said. The idea of getting away appealed to him but going away without Alex and Christina didn’t. Maybe it was time for all of them to take a break—together—and see if they could somehow put their family back on track.
First, though, he had to get Christina to talk to him. That would take some doing.
* * *
WITH NICK SEQUESTERED with his team in the dining room and the kids upstairs watching a movie with Shelby and Noah, Sam dug into the Beauclair case reports her squad had put together yesterday, thoroughly reviewing the principal players in the case—Jameson Beauclair/Armstrong, Cleo Beauclair/Armstrong, Duke Piedmont, Margaret Armstrong and others associated with the now-defunct APG. Sam was thankful for the break in the action that gave her time to read early in the day rather than later when she was tired, and her dyslexia tended to kick in.
More than one thousand employees had been let go when APG shut down, and Sam wrote down the name of the human resources director in case they needed to look into who, if anyone, might’ve been out for vengeance on the guy who’
d done the right thing and cost a lot of people their jobs. It was a stretch, but Sam had learned to pull every thread and stretch in every direction when investigating a homicide.
Jameson had been a rock star. There simply was no better way to describe his meteoric rise in the high-tech industry, which began with work on what would turn out to be APG’s signature product while he was still living in a Stanford dorm room. With the help of his friends, Piedmont and Gorton, he’d built APG into a Fortune 500 powerhouse and made himself and his partners billionaires with software that had revolutionized the way products were moved around the country. Anyone with a warehouse and shipping function had adapted APG’s software, and it had become state-of-the-art within three dizzying years of its initial launch.
The company had been among the darlings of Silicon Valley, with their employees housed within a one-million-square-foot campus that teamed with innovative hipsters in hoodies and Chuck Taylors. The APG principals had been on the covers of Forbes and Wired and had been featured no fewer than six different times in the Wall Street Journal, once in a story about self-made billionaires.
They’d had the world by the balls. Until one of them got greedy. She read the reports in the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and many other publications that chronicled the company’s downfall. They’d gone from Silicon Valley darling to pariahs, with the SEC, FBI and other regulators swooping in and shutting them down so fast that employees hadn’t even been able to retrieve their personal belongings before being locked out of the office.
One high-tech publication had called it “A Dizzying Fall from Grace,” noting how the company had gone from one of the top ten most buzzed about companies to ruin, literally overnight after Armstrong reported what he’d uncovered about his partner, Piedmont, to the SEC. The downfall had been swift and merciless, with Piedmont charged with insider trading days after the company was shut down.
Again, she was struck by the obvious decline that played out in Jameson Armstrong’s appearance. He went from a handsome, dark-haired, smiling, youthful man to a gray-haired shell of his former self in the span of six months. The change in him was startling and told the true story of the strain he’d been under as he put together the case against his former partner, friend and Stanford roommate.
