by Naomi West
Polo nodded ruefully. "Hard to blame folk for that. The Mafia has a bit of a reputation when it comes to snitches."
"What if someone could give you hard evidence?"
He tried hard to hide it, but I saw the spark of interest in Polo's eye. The man who took down Rassi's gang would not be a mere deputy for long.
"What sort of evidence?"
I shook my head. Years of experience had led me to never trust the police.
Polo pulled a face. "I've never been one for deals with criminals. That's another thing I learned from your dad, Cassidy. Letting one off to put another inside just seems like a wash to me."
"I sell hooch," I said, a little injudiciously perhaps. "You want me to list what Rassi's into? You want me to list the deaths that I can tell you he's responsible for, that you can't ever pin to him? Who do you want walking the streets?"
"Ideally, neither of you," Polo said honestly. "The thing is, Rassi is a vague promise. You have no idea the number of times we thought we had something on him, only for him to wriggle out. Taking him down is not guaranteed. You, on the other hand, are sitting here right now, in my kitchen, telling me that you sell illegal hooch."
I sat up straighter in my chair. "Have you been recording this?"
Polo shrugged. "Just a little precautionary thing, when you have a known criminal in the house."
"That's inadmissible!" Cassidy cried angrily.
"True," Polo said. "But it's a hell of a start. You see how easy it is to put you away, Archer? Rassi ... I want him, but I don't think you can give him to me. And, like I said, doing deals with criminals just doesn't sit well."
I took this in. It had been a good idea, and I didn't think we'd have gotten a different response if we'd tried another deputy. Now there was only one thing left to do.
"Cassidy, can you give us a minute?" I asked.
Cassidy frowned deeply, but got up and headed into the next room, not saying anything, but glaring at Polo on her way out.
I turned back to my old school friend. "I need you to get Cassidy home safely and keep an eye on her." I outlined my Mafia concerns, and Polo listened.
"Damn it, Archer, why'd you have to drag her into this? The trouble Ben has with that kid anyway."
"She's a good girl," I said firmly. "I just want to make sure she's going to be all right when I'm gone."
Polo nodded. "Of course. I'll see she's taken good care of."
"Thanks."
Polo drained the last dregs of his coffee. "You want to say goodbye to her before we head down the station?"
# # #
I had no idea how I was going to say goodbye to Cassidy. She was going to blame herself, of course. This had been her idea, and now she was going to beat herself up for how it had turned out. That was the last thing I wanted, but if I didn't say goodbye, then I knew both of us would regret it. How quickly that kid had wormed her way into my life and turned it upside down. I wouldn't be going to jail now if it hadn't been for her, and, yet, I found I could not regret one moment of the time we had shared. What a girl.
"Cassidy?"
Cassidy looked up hopefully as I walked in. "Did you ...?
"I have to go now."
"Go?" It was heart-breaking to watch her face fall.
"Polo's going to take me in."
"No!" she practically screamed.
I went to her, and she fell into my arms, hugging me tightly, as if she could not bear to let me go.
"It's all my fault," she murmured tearfully into my chest. "If I had just left you alone. If I hadn't had to hook up with the most dangerous guy in the room, if I hadn't wanted to mess with my dad, if I hadn't ..."
"Then I wouldn't have known you," I said, drawing her back to look into her tear-stained eyes. "And for the pleasure of knowing you, I'd do back-to-back life sentences, and more. I wouldn't have missed it for the world."
"But if it wasn't for me ..."
"I'd have wound up here one way or the other," I said. "At least this way I got to ..." I struggled to put what she had given me into words. But it was something that couldn't be expressed in mere words. "Look, I should never have come to see you one more time, and I should never have taken you to the waterfall. I should never have let you stay in the car at the warehouse, and I should never have carried you off from the motel yesterday. Don't blame yourself. I've done the wrong damn thing every step of the way. I've been telling myself I'm doing it to protect you, but that's just an excuse. I couldn't let you go. And, even now, even with all that's going to happen, even having said it was all wrong and all a mistake, I don't regret one second of it, and I'd do it all again in a heartbeat."
Cassidy stared. Even if I had stopped short of using the 'L' word, I think she couldn't quite believe that I was finally saying all the things that she had so desperately wanted to hear me say.
"I have to go now."
She opened her mouth to speak, but I held up my hand. "Will you do one thing for me?"
"Anything," she breathed.
"Be a good girl."
# # #
Back in the kitchen, Polo sat at the table, waiting for me. "You really do care about her, don't you?"
"Were you listening in?" I asked, irritated by the intrusion.
"She's a pretty girl," Polo said. "Stunning, really. I have to admit that, at first, I thought you were with her for ... well, you know. And who could blame you? And then perhaps you stuck with her to get some revenge on Ben. That's what I thought. But that's not it, is it?"
"No," I said, honestly.
Polo drummed his fingers on the table a while. "So, how would this informant thing work then? There's usually some paperwork to fill out, but it's at the station, and I'm guessing that, for now at least, you'd rather keep the sheriff out of this. So, you might have to just take my word for it." He looked up at me. "So, what about it? Do you trust me, Archer?"
I nodded. "Oh, yes. I trust you Polo. You've had my back before, remember?"
Polo nodded. "Let's take that bastard Rassi down."
Chapter Seventeen
Cassidy
I don't like the term 'emotional rollercoaster.’ I think it gets over-used and so loses any meaning it might once have had. People have a bit of a bad day at work and, suddenly, it's an emotional rollercoaster; someone spills their coffee, but finds a penny while mopping it up, and it's an emotional rollercoaster. Give me a break. But I think when you've gone from being hunted by the Mafia, to hoping that you've found a way to be with the love of your life, to learning that that love may be on his way to prison, to that previous hope being rekindled, all within the space of a day, then I think it's fair to break out the phrase 'emotional rollercoaster.’ Certainly, by the end of it, I felt as if I'd been on some sort of nausea-inducing fairground ride, but at least it had all worked out.
Polo Carter very kindly invited us to stay the night.
"I've got a spare room, and we can order in take-out."
Archer and I gratefully accepted. It was nice to be reminded that there were people who were on our side, and I actually took some comfort from the fact that he hadn't initially been on our side, until he learned how much we cared for each other. If that was enough to change Polo's mind, might it be enough to change my father's as well? The problem was that I had spent years giving my father a bad opinion of me, making him think that I hung around (and, in fact, screwed around) with bad guys, as a matter of course. So why would he now believe that Archer was any different? Of course, if I had just let him know the real me, then none of this would have been an issue. He probably would have respected my choice because he knew I was trustworthy and made good decisions. But there was no sense in wishing that things were different. I had to deal with the situation as it was and the mess that I had made of it.
"Have you called your dad?" Polo asked, as we ate our evening meal together.
"No," I admitted. "I wouldn't know what to tell him, and I don't want to get into an argument. I did text him to let him know I'm all
right."
"But, of course, anyone could be sending a text from your phone," Polo said, a little cagily. He didn't want to get into an argument either, but my dad was his mentor.
"If I call, then he'll want to know where I am," I pointed out. "Do you want me to tell him?"
"I guess not," Polo sighed. He had agreed to help us, and I was sure he would stick to it, but he was still a little conflicted, feeling as if he was going behind the back of the man he looked up to so much. He knew that Dad would be out of his mind with worry about me, and it was, theoretically, in Polo's power to alleviate that concern. But to do so would be to betray Archer and me. It was a tough spot for him, and I didn't want to underestimate what Polo was doing for us.
"You could give him a quick call," suggested Archer, joining Team Dupont. "Just so he could hear your voice. Like Polo said, anyone could be sending a text. He probably thinks it's from me. It would set his mind at rest, and he might hate me slightly less. Not much, but slightly."
"How about everybody stops telling me how to deal with my own father?" I suggested in a pointed tone, and the two men got back to eating.
It wasn't that I didn't recognize the good sense in what they were saying, particularly Archer's point about making my dad feel slightly less burning hatred towards the man I hoped to spend the rest of my life with. But neither of them had had to grow up with Ben Dupont. Neither of them grew up with the judgment and constant disapproval. They didn't know what it was like to have been in the wrong every day of their adult life. Nothing I did ever pleased my dad, and there was nothing I could say in a short phone call that was going to please him now. I had run off with his arch nemesis. It was an ultimate betrayal. I didn't want to hear the disappointment and the hurt in his voice. Maybe I was being selfish, but it was my decision.
"We go to the station tomorrow morning," said Polo, changing the subject. "I don't see any other way forward. We need to get the proper paperwork done to ensure you have proper informant status, otherwise some people may still object. I don't think this is going to be an easy sell, so you need to think about what information you can give me. I need something that's going to nail these guys, with no way out. Anything less than that, and I'm going to struggle to get this done."
Archer nodded. He said nothing, and I didn't either, but we both knew that tomorrow could well be another rollercoaster of a day.
# # #
The spare room was up under the eaves of Polo Carter's little house. It was not used often and had become a store room for stuff that was in the way elsewhere, the kind of stuff that everyone keeps from their childhood, but will probably never look at again. Still, I found myself rather happy there. It was nice to be in a proper room, rather than a motel. It felt homey. And, while I was trying to keep my eagerness for domestic bliss as subtle as possible around Archer, I couldn't help wondering what it might be like when, and if, Archer and I made a home of our own. And yet, it seemed Archer's own thoughts might not be a million miles away from mine.
"This is cozy," he mused, looking around. "I never really had a home you could call a home. When I was a kid, home was never a home. Then, in Battle Pride, we moved around so much that home was wherever you wound up, or wherever your friends were. Come to think of it, the longest I've spent consistently in one bed might be when I did six months in jail. I think that's the only time I've ever had a chance to personalize a place and make it mine."
I grinned. "I'm guessing there were vases of flowers and some lacey throw pillows?"
"Mostly it was girlie pictures on the walls and a shiv under my mattress, just in case, but still."
"It was your own."
"Exactly." He looked a little embarrassed. "It would be nice to do that properly. To own a space. Sorry."
I frowned. "What are you apologizing for?"
"It's hardly the bad boy that you signed up for, is it? Dreaming of interior design."
Suddenly, I felt a bit embarrassed myself. "I didn't go for you just because you were an outlaw biker."
"Yes, you did," Archer cut in. "That's what you want in your life. A little excitement, a thrill, or something forbidden."
I wanted to deny it, of course, but just hearing him say the word 'forbidden' made my knees weaken. He wasn't one hundred percent wrong. "It worked out though. No matter how it started—look what happened."
"Yeah, but for how long?" Archer stood, narrowly avoiding cracking his head on the low ceiling. "Let's say this all goes to plan."
"It will."
"Well, okay. What then? We settle down in a place together in the city? You paint, and I get a job? Is that what you're thinking?"
"Maybe."
Archer half-smiled. "And then, on the streets of the big city, you meet a mugger, or a drug dealer, or someone else who awakens that thrill-seeker inside you, and I never see you again."
"That won't happen!"
"You don't know that." Archer shrugged. "You're encouraging me to stop being the thing that you found attractive in the first place."
"That was bad Cassidy,'" I argued. "You told me that she's not real anyway."
"There may be no such thing as bad Cassidy," agreed Archer. "But good Cassidy has a thing for bad Archer, and bad boys in general. Are you going to tell me that's not the case?"
I pouted a bit and kicked at the carpet. "I don't know."
"That's because you won't look inside yourself. You don't want to examine yourself too closely because you're afraid of what you might find."
"Well, listen who's talking!" I wasn't just going accept that level of hypocrisy. "How many years have you been on the wrong side of the law? Are you going to tell me that was because you were happier, or because you weren't willing to take a good look at yourself?"
"My childhood ..." Archer began, but I interrupted.
"Ended like fifteen years ago. You've got to stop using that as an excuse."
Now it was Archer's turn to hit back at me. "I use my childhood as an excuse? At least my parents deserve to be blamed. You blame a man who loved you, looked after you, and gave you everything you wanted."
"I'm so sorry my childhood wasn't as bad as yours, but everyone has an equal right to be screwed up by their parents, even if those parents were good. And I still had a bad mom. You can't take that away from me."
"You don't want to end up like her," said Archer firmly, saying something that my dad must have said to me a hundred times.
"I should end up like my dad?"
"Not necessarily. You should end up like Cassidy. And the only way to do that is to stop running, and look at yourself. You run away from your dad, toward this memory of your mom, toward danger, toward bad influences, like me. You're always running, when you should be settling down. Stop flying by the seat of your pants. The right thing won't just bump into you. You've got to look for it."
"Didn't you just bump into me?"
Archer paused. "Okay, maybe that was a bad example. But I was just a lucky chance. Generally speaking, the good things in life don't just fall into your lap. You've got to make them happen."
I gave him a hard look. "I take it this is 'do as I say and not as I do' type of advice?"
"I learned the hard way," Archer said. "I don't want you to have to."
I shook my head. "Are you reading this stuff from The Big Book of Ben Dupont Quotes?"
"Is that your way of telling me that I sound like your dad?"
He really did. Except that I was listening to him. "I'm just saying that you're being pretty damn judgmental about the decisions I've made in my life, given that you're turning yourself into the police tomorrow, and there's still a fifty percent chance of you going to jail for crimes you did commit. How about understanding rather than judging?"
Archer sat back down on the bed. "That's a totally fair comment."
I went and sat beside him. "I bet there were times when you enjoyed being a part of Battle Pride. Times when it was a thrill, like nothing else you've ever felt, and when it was good to be part o
f something. Hell, I'll bet there were times when it felt good to be bad."
Archer couldn't suppress a smile that spread across his face. "Okay, while I'm not saying it's a good thing, or endorsing criminality as a lifestyle—hell, yeah! There were times when I loved it."
"But you're happy to step away from it?"
He turned to look at me tenderly. "Of course. The good times with Battle Pride were fleeting, a surface thrill. Deep down, there was always an emptiness. Even when you're surrounded by people, you can still be pretty lonely. I could have quit years ago, but I guess I didn't know what I would have left if I did. Now I've found something better."
