Deuces Wild

by Christina C Jones

  I had no complaints.

  When it was over, she collapsed against me and I collapsed backward, taking her with me. To my surprise, she didn’t immediately move away – she rested on my chest for a moment before she peeked up, looking me in the face.

  “What?” I asked, after a few seconds had passed without her saying anything. She let out a sigh, and then propped her elbows on my chest as she looked at me.

  “Get out,” she said, in a tone that was playful enough, but not so much that it made it seem like she wasn’t serious.

  “I was expecting that,” I told her, grinning as my gaze traveled her face, taking her in. “But I’d still like it on the record that you could at least offer me breakfast or something.”

  She bit her lip, obviously suppressing a smile. “I can’t have you thinking you’re welcome here.”

  “Where? Your home, or here?” I asked, slipping my hand between us, between her legs, making her gasp a little, closing her eyes as my fingers slid over her clit.

  “Neither,” she whispered, eyes still shut tight. Her lips stayed parted as my hand moved, and I used the other hand to brush her hair out of the way, giving me an unobstructed view of her chest.

  My hand stopped moving.

  After a moment had passed, Alicia opened her eyes, obviously wondering why I’d stopped. My gaze went back to her chest, back to the tattoo she’d so deftly kept out of my view last night and this morning, and I removed my hand from between her thighs.

  I sat up, taking her with me, only to have her finally give me the cold shoulder I’d been waiting to see again. She moved away from me, covering herself with the sheets as if I hadn’t seen everything now.

  “Okay,” I said, breaking the silence. “So about that talk I’ve been saying we needed to have…” she looked at me over her shoulder, her eyes holding a mixture of anger and trepidation. “No more skirting the shit. It’s time.”

  &

  “Could you… say something,” Alicia snapped, crossing her arms as she paced back and forth in front of me. She’d gotten dressed now – we both had. Me in my shit from last night, her in leggings and an oversized hoodie that she’d seemed to want to shrink into more than once as she told me a story of kidnapping and brainwashing and advanced tactical training and spies and a whole bunch of other shit that seemed more at home on Netflix than in real life.

  But she was serious though.

  And whether or not any of this was actually true, I was certain that she believed the Belrose crime syndicate was dealing in a lot more than just guns.

  I didn’t want the shit to make sense.

  It would have been so much easier to wrap my head around it if I believed Alicia was a liar, if I hadn’t seen those tattoos myself, if none of this added up.

  If a piece of this puzzle hadn’t revealed itself to me while she was talking.

  “I…” I finally opened my mouth, since my silence seemed to be making her anxious, but my brain was teeming with too much information to know what to say. “This is… this a lot.”

  “No shit, Sherlock.” With a harsh sigh, she finally stopped pacing, dropping herself onto the chair across from where I was sitting. “Any more insights?”

  “Cool it with the sarcasm, Winter Soldier.”

  “Cree I will kill you.”

  “After the dick I gave you, I’m pretty sure you’d break your blood oath for me, so that threat doesn’t mean anything baby.”

  Her eyes went wide as her chest swelled with an angry breath. I half expected her to launch herself across the coffee table at me, but instead her shoulders sank, and she shook her head.

  “It’s not funny. At all. Not to me,” she said, in a similar tone to the one she’d taken last night, before the tears. It would be a stretch to suggest that I knew Alicia “well”, but from what I did know… this shit had to be taking a major toll for her to be wearing her emotions so plainly, for me of all people.

  “My bad,” I told her, offering a deep nod. “I’m not trying to upset you, just… this shit is intense.”

  She propped her feet on the chair with her, wrapping her arms around her knees. “Yeah. It is. Especially considering that I have no idea where to go next. What to do. How to find her.”

  “Well, we know she’s been with Maxim.”

  “And we know Maxim is connected to the Belroses. So what am I supposed to do – just walk into his mansion, demanding he tells me where this nameless woman is? I got away once – I doubt I’ll get that chance again. Especially now that I know Brielle is dead. What if they’re coming for me next?”

  My eyebrows went up. “Brielle? That’s the woman’s name from the park?”

  She nodded. “It’s what I knew her as. She was… the same thing I was. A Rose. But I’ve never seen another Rose here. Why now?”

  “So she was an assassin. Not a prostitute?”

  “Trafficking victim,” she corrected with a hiss, and I nodded.

  “Of course. I’m sorry,” I said, raising my hands. “So you knew her, but hadn’t seen her around here before?”

  “Never. I trained with her. Liked her, as much as I was equipped to “like” a fellow Rose, I guess. Something is off about all of this, but I don’t understand what. Like why Maxim would just happen to bring my sister to Reverie – why? I can’t buy that it was just a coincidence.”

  Before I could answer her, my cell phone chimed with a message. I took my eyes off her just long to see the name on the text before I asked her to give me a second, so I could read it all.

  “Guess who our vic from the park was pictured with just last week – all over him at a club, and word is that he took her home? If you guessed Sebastian Gray, bingo. Get your ass to the station. We need to murderstorm, asshole. – Russel”

  Oh, shit.

  “I have to go,” I told Alicia, pushing up from my place on the couch. Immediately, she was in my face, shaking her head.

  “You can’t just… go. I thought you were going to help me figure this out?”

  “And I am, but I still have a job.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “So that text was about your case? About Brielle?”

  “I cannot talk to you about an active investi—goddamnit!”

  Before I could even get the word from my mouth, she’d snatched my phone, and before I could react to that, she’d gotten away from me in some kinda ninja shit, disappearing somewhere in her apartment.

  “Fuck,” I muttered out loud, pissed at myself for not knowing better than to let her get that close. I didn’t have to look for her though – she’d appeared as soon as I started down the hall, holding out my phone, which I snatched back.

  “Somebody wanted Sebastian Gray dead. They sent a Rose. That Rose ended up dead.”

  I shook my head, still annoyed at what she’d just pulled. “How do you even know that?”

  “I just do. And I need to see her autopsy.”

  &

  Everybody was looking at me.

  Or at least, that’s how it seemed, when I was walking into the precinct strongly considering some shit I had no business even giving a second thought to. Of course I wasn’t about to show Alicia those autopsy results – that was crazy….

  Or was it?

  I mean… we gave little tidbits of extra information to confidential informants all the time, it was just part of the process. You gave some to get some – hopefully to get a lot. But there were several issues with applying that to my current situation.

  For starters, Alicia would probably consider “confidential informant” to be fighting words, and would never agree to such a title. She wanted nothing to do with the police, in any capacity, so I didn’t even want to think about her reaction to being asked to formally cooperate with an investigation.

  The shit wasn’t happening.

  And then there was the tiny little fact that we’d slept together. That in and of itself wasn’t really an exclusionary factor, but for anything official, we’d have to disclose the full terms of o
ur relationship – or lack thereof – that went back more than three years, to when she and her employer first fell under my radar.

  When Sebastian Gray had briefly lived in Vegas, and Kingston Whitfield kicked in his door and tried to kill him – a fact I only knew because of my unauthorized surveillance of Gray’s home, because I suspected he was up to no good. I just didn’t know exactly what at the time – didn’t know exactly what now to be honest. But back then, when I realized what was happening, I couldn’t just let Kingston kill the man. Luckily for everyone involved, Alicia had been there too, and had managed to get King off of him.

  Metro police didn’t know about any of that.

  And I had no intention of telling them.

  But I really wanted Alicia’s input about this case. If these “Roses” and “Thorns” and all of that other shit really existed, she was the absolute best – maybe only -- person who could give us any insight into this.

  Shit.

  Maybe I was going to show her the autopsy report for the woman with no fingerprints, who was still filed under Jane Doe for our records.

  Once I made it to our floor, I headed straight for Vivica’s desk, hoping she had more than what she teased me with earlier by now. When I didn’t see her there, I frowned, and then looked around, wondering where the hell she could’ve gotten off to.

  I checked the break room first, and then waited a few minutes outside the bathroom, where I pulled out my phone to shoot her a text. She answered back immediately, with two words that made me feel uneasy as hell.

  “Captain’s Office – Russel.”

  Why is she in there?

  I didn’t waste too much time wondering, choosing instead to head straight there. I rapped my fist against the door a couple of times, waiting to hear Santiago’s gruff “Come in,” before I turned the knob.

  He was on one side of the desk, wearing his usual scowl. On the other side was Vivica, her faced etched in a sort of deep frustration that wasn’t typical for her. Before I could even open my mouth to ask what the hell was going on, she filled that blank for me.

  “He’s shutting us down. Again.”

  “Again?” I repeated, immediately scowling as I turned to Captain Santiago for confirmation.

  All he gave was a shrug. “It’s not Vice this time. This is higher, from—”

  “Police Nationale,” Vivica filled in, putting an extra, ugly twang on her faux French accent. “Somehow, they got ahold of my file, and they’re intervening on behalf of their bed partner, Sebastian Gray. Nobody was interested in my Jane Doe until his name came up.”

  “Russel,” Santiago growled, in a warning tone that didn’t seem to faze Vivica, who shook her head.

  “No, Captain, because you know exactly what this is! You cannot tell me they aren’t pulling these strings!”

  “I’m telling you what I know, not what I suspect, Detective Russel. And what I know is that we’ve been ordered off of this case, and asked to turn over all files. Immediately. And it’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

  I pushed out a sigh as Vivica sat back, arms crossed and pouting. “So… is this about to be our new normal? Every time we get a case that steps on somebody important’s toes, we get muzzled? I thought we were here to solve crimes, not push this shit under the rug.”

  “I don’t like this shit any more than either of you,” Santiago insisted, looking back and forth between us. “If it was up to me, this Jane Doe wouldn’t have even been on your desk in the first place – you’d still be shaking Roach down for more names. But this is out of my hands, and there’s no arguing about it. Spend the morning prepping everything you have to pass it along. Someone will be here for it this afternoon.”

  “This is bullshit, Captain. And you know it.”

  Captain Santiago blew out a breath. “Russel, if you don’t like it, you can hand in your badge. Either way, both of you get the hell out of my office.”

  Vivica opened her mouth to keep going, but I stepped in front of her, pulling her up from her seat.

  “Shut your ass up, Russel,” I hissed in her ear as I ushered her through the door, and toward the corner of the room that housed our desks.

  “Can you believe this shit?!” she asked, as soon as we were in the relative privacy of our cubes. “This is the second case in what, less than a week? How much you wanna bet they’re related?”

  “I’d give you really good odds on that.” I glanced around to make sure no one was close by, and then leaned in to tell her. “I know for certain that they are.”

  “How?”

  I took a deep breath, hoping I wasn’t messing up when I responded back with, “Alicia Miller. I… I can’t tell you all the details right now. Not here. But she knows our victim. And maybe knows our suspect too. She wants to see the autopsy.”

  “I will forward you the pictures I took of every damn piece of evidence we had, as soon as I found out they were taking us off of this. I waited until I’d done that to go talk to Santiago about it, because I knew there was something funky going on,” she told me, determination lighting her eyes.

  I’d known Vivica Russel a long time. Knew her husband, her kids, her mama. Couldn’t ask for a better partner, didn’t know any better cop. So if she was taking her own pictures, willing to bring in an unofficial source… I considered that confirmation that something crazy was going on. And I was glad to have her on my side.

  “I want to talk to Sebastian,” she continued, keeping her gaze locked on mine. “I’m not letting this shit go until I know what happened, and until we’re officially off the case… may as well investigate. I need to see his reaction to our questions about our Jane Doe.”

  “Brielle. That’s what Alicia says her name is.”

  Vivica nodded. “Good. He probably won’t expect us to know it, so we can use that to catch him off guard. If this son-of-a-bitch is involved in this, I want to nail his ass to the wall – official investigation or not.”

  I returned her nod.

  “Grab your keys then, partner.”

  &

  Sebastian Gray was a different kind of dude.

  If I’d gotten my ass kicked in my own house, and the dude who did it had me so scared that I hopped on a plane to go live in another country for a few years, I definitely wouldn’t come back to the same house.

  But Sebastian did.

  I had a weird ass feeling as we pulled up, but I attributed it to the fact that we weren’t really supposed to be here.

  “So are you good cop or bad cop?” Vivica asked as she unstrapped her seatbelt.

  I shook my head. “Unfortunately, Sebastian and I have a bit of rapport, since I saved his ass once. And I suspect ol’ Bas has a problem with women in authority, so I should probably be good cop. Let you get under his skin, have all the fun as bad cop.”

  “Oh I love playing bad cop,” she squealed, rubbing her hands together as we stepped out of the car. “If we’re lucky, maybe I’ll get to smack him around a little or something. Work out some of this aggression from Santiago taking our cases fro—”

  She never got the rest of that statement out.

  Whatever she was going to say was drowned out by the loud, distinctive zip of a “silenced” gunshot ripping through the air.

  I was tuned in to her, grinning as she joked, so I had a front-row seat to the explosion that happened right in the middle of her forehead – skin and bone and blood suddenly bursting forth from a hole that hadn’t been there before.

  Except for the ringing in my ears, there was silence.

  Immediately, I dropped down low, using the car for cover as I pointed my weapon in the direction the shot had come from – behind me, from the long driveway that led up to Sebastian’s home, flanked by tall, thick wooded arbors on either side.

  With my gun in one hand, phone in the other, I scrambled to the other side of the car, calling for backup and an ambulance that was more than likely pointless.

  Still, with little regard for my own safety, I went to Vi
vica’s body, turning her face up. There was blood everywhere, and… goddamnit, that hole. There wasn’t shit a paramedic could do for her, nothing behind her suddenly lifeless eyes.

  Behind me, there was a flurry of activity as Sebastian’s door opened and his armed security came out, probably wondering what the hell had just happened – a question I couldn’t answer myself. We hadn’t even been out of the car long enough to pose a threat, and hadn’t told anyone where we were going.

  Did the person who fired the shot even know who we were?

  “Cree Bradley… LVMPD,” I answered one of the security guys when he questioned who we were. “Get that fucking gun outta my face before I kick your ass.”

  Even without seeing my badge, he must’ve understood the danger he was in, because he lowered it, to stupidly ask, “Is she dead.”

  No, just resting.

  I didn’t say that out loud though, keeping my sarcasm to myself and just shaking my head, because… what the fuck?

  In the distance, I heard sirens, moving steadily closer. I stayed where I was, frozen, staring at Vivica, willing that hole to just close up on its own, willing her chest to rise and fall again with breath, but of course… neither of those things was about to happen.

  And I didn’t understand why.

  Because it didn’t make any sense, at all.

  “Is this hers?” Someone asked me, as the arriving sirens became deafening. I looked up to see one of the security guys handing me a cell phone – her cell phone. And something in that simple gesture snapped me into the reality of what had just happened.

  Vivica had unauthorized pictures of evidence on her phone – pictures taken after we’d been informally removed from this case. Pictures she’d sent to me on the drive over. Some of which I’d had her use my phone to forward to Alicia.

  As quickly as I could, I unlocked her phone, thanking God that I knew the code. With fingers slippery from her blood, and time not on my side, I hurriedly deleted all the pictures and texts from her phone, then pulled mine out to do the same.

  Suddenly, words the only mother I’d ever known – my foster mother Janie Cartwright – had spoken to me came clearly to the front of my mind. “Cross a line one time, it gets easier and easier to keep stepping over it.”