Every Other Weekend

by TA Moore

  “Hey,” he said through bruised, split lips. “This is private property. Get the fuck off.”

  “I’m here to see Gregor,” Kelly said.

  “You are, are you?” the man sneered. The expression split the scabs on his lips, and Kelly remembered the bruised knuckles on Clayton’s unbroken hand. He clenched his jaw against the quick burst of temper. It wasn’t helpful. Not yet. But he did make a note of the man’s face. A childhood with Byron had taught him that grudges took up a lot of your time and were rarely satisfied. Still, he wouldn’t miss a chance to split this guy’s mouth open again if he got it. “What the hell makes you think he wants to see you?”

  “I’ve got a message for him from Clayton Reynolds,” Kelly said. “The lawyer. He’ll want to hear it. It’s about his money.”

  The man licked blood from his lips, spat on the tarmac, and looked around. He searched the scrubby lots around them and found nothing. “You better hope he does,” he said as he pulled a phone out his pocket and dialed. “If not, it’ll be your funeral.”

  ONE OF Kevoian’s men frisked Kelly briskly from ankles to balls and on up. It didn’t take him long to find the crowbar and take it. He bounced it in his hand to check the weight of it and then tossed it. It hit the ground with a thud and skidded under one of the cars.

  Kelly winced. It might not have done much good, but it had made him feel better.

  The other day in Glendale, with greasy hands at Frank’s Body Shop, Kevoian had looked like a wannabe gangster neighborhood thug with a bit of cash and delusions of his own toughness. In the gutted old factory, surrounded by half-stripped cars and sacks of plastic-film-covered white powder, he still looked like a wannabe gangster, just a more dangerous one.

  “It’s nothing personal,” Kevoian said as he wiped his hands on a torn T-shirt. “Jimmy thought he could rob me, cut me out of the deal, and take all the credit for himself. Now. Other way round. Or it will be soon.”

  Nadine huddled on a torn leather car seat, her hands tucked nervously under her thighs. Her grubby T-shirt was stuck to her stomach and sides with sweat. “I told you, Gregor,” she said. “I don’t know what happened to your money. I’ve never known anything about James’s business.”

  He gripped her chin between his fingers and tilted her head back, leaving oily fingerprints stark against her skin. “And I believe you. Now,” he said. “Unfortunately, that doesn’t change anything, does it? Whether you knew or not, your husband still has my money. And I want it back.”

  Nadine pulled her chin out of his grip. “I don’t care about the money. You can have it,” she said. Her eyes flicked toward Kelly hopefully. “Right? Mr. Reynolds is going to do that? He’ll make it happen?”

  “Of course,” Kelly said. “By morning the accounts will be unfrozen. All you need to do is sign this.”

  He pulled a folded rectangle of paper out of his pocket and took a step forward with it held out in front of him. Before he could take another step, Kevoian “ah ah’d” him and gestured for one of his men to snatch it from between Kelly’s fingers.

  “No offense,” Kevoian said. “But weren’t we meant to meet tonight, at that sad little safe house of yours? Why the change in plan?”

  He took the paper and opened it. His fingers left dirty marks on the thick, good-quality paper as he thumbed through the sheets as though he knew what he was looking for. The dense legalese made him frown, but at least he didn’t have to mouth the words as he read them.

  “That didn’t work for Mr. Reynolds,” Kelly said. “Your last meeting with him didn’t exactly go off smoothly. He thought it would be better to meet at your place of business.”

  Kevoian laughed, and Kelly felt the sour burn of anger in his stomach. He bit down on the inside of his cheek to stop from saying anything that would push Kevoian into violence. The plan needed a bit more time to work, and he needed to keep his teeth.

  “The string bean and the shortass,” Kevoian said. He glanced at the man with bruised lips and jerked his head toward Kelly. “The two of them should have a double act, eh, Vic? Fucking jokers trying to intimidate me. Well, Shortass, I’ve got nothing to worry about. The police aren’t going to do shit to me. Never do, never will.”

  Kelly hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans and grinned at Kevoian.

  “You mean Jimmy did,” he said. “It was Jimmy who was the big man, right? He was the one with the track record. He was the one who had the cops in his pocket.”

  A muscle jumped under the unshaven skin of Kevoian’s jaw. “So what? Jimmy Graham was this, he was that. Jimmy Graham might have been a whole lot of things. Now he’s in the hospital and I’ve got his business, his wife, and—as soon as she signs this bit of paper—his money. A couple of stacks of green and that cute, bought-off red-haired cop he worked with will be in my pocket. Not his. So what exactly does Reynolds think he’s got on me here?”

  Kelly shrugged. “Last I heard, Jimmy was out of the hospital,” he said. “He’s got a few bumps and scrapes, and he’s asking a lot of questions about what’s going on. And you really think the only hold he had on those cops was money? Anything happens to me or Nadine, and Reynolds will tell Jimmy just who was responsible.”

  “You think he gives a crap about her?” Kevoian asked with a harsh laugh. He ruffled his hand roughly through Nadine’s hair, and his fingers caught in the tangles. “She tried to leave him. Take his kid. You think he’s going to give a flying fuck what happens to her now?”

  “You tried to kill him,” Kelly pointed out. He could feel the sweat itch in the small of his back. “You’re going to steal from him. I bet he’ll give a crap about that.”

  Kevoian snorted and looked around to enlist his men’s help in scoffing at the idea. “Shortass here thinks I’m scared of Jimmy Graham. What the fuck, right?” He turned back to Kelly with a snarl. “You know what Jimmy Graham was before I met him? Nothing. I was the one with the contacts. I was the one with the business. You think Jimmy Graham is behind all of this? All he brought to the table was something on a few grubby cops and a prison record.”

  It would have been more convincing without the bluster. Kelly supposed he should have more sympathy. He knew better than most how disorienting it was to deal with the erratic, flash paper moods that took Byron from good humor to red-faced rage and back again.

  Clayton had told him to keep Kevoian talking for ten minutes. It felt like he’d already done that. It felt more like half an hour, but he’d lost track of the count in his head.

  “Then I guess you don’t have anything to worry about,” he said.

  “And I guess that you’re finally right about something, PI Shortass,” Kevoian said with a forced laugh. He stalked over and stiff-armed the creased handful of papers against Kelly’s chest. “Show her where she’s gotta sign. Then we’ll see who’s scared of Jimmy Graham.”

  Kelly walked over to Nadine and crouched down next to her. He smoothed the crumpled sheets out roughly, the swipe of his hand smearing the gritty smudges of oil further over the heavy paper and pointed randomly at three blank spots in the text.

  “Here, here, and initial here,” he said.

  Nadine nodded shakily. She flicked back to the beginning and started to read through the dense wall of text, one finger at a time as she marked her way down.

  “You don’t need to read it,” Kevoian snapped. The harsh tone made Nadine jump and lose her place. “Just sign it. Someone give her a pen.”

  One of the men—not Vic—stepped forward with a well-chewed pen and pressed it into Nadine’s stiff fingers. She stared at it for a second as it trembled and then scribbled a test in the empty margins of the paper to get the ink to run.

  “James always said I shouldn’t sign something without reading it,” she said in a tight voice.

  Kevoian yelled in frustration as he heard Jimmy’s name one too many times. He grabbed an unanchored steering wheel from one of the cars and threw it in Nadine’s direction. It missed her by a couple of feet and
clattered off a sedan that was up on blocks. When she flinched and dropped the pen, Kelly slung a protective arm and pulled her head down. She smelled sour and faintly metallic as he hugged her close—of sweat and fear and the nervous energy that made her tremble under Kelly’s hands.

  Somewhere in the building, a fire alarm started to blare, the sound of the siren loud enough to make everyone flinch as it echoed off the high ceilings and bare walls. Kelly breathed a sigh of relief and gently squeezed Nadine’s knee.

  “It’s all right,” he muttered in her ear. “We’ll get out of this. Harry’s safe and sound. No one will get to him.”

  She grimaced. “Just give him the money,” she begged in a breathy whisper. “I don’t care what he does to me.”

  “Just sign the goddamn papers, Nadine,” Kevoian yelled, his voice thick and his face red blotched up to his hairline. The anger was authentic. The explosion wasn’t. Kevoian had taken a second to decide what to throw, and he’d thrown too wide to really sell that he’d tried to hit them. It was like he’d watched Byron—Jimmy, Kelly supposed—and hadn’t quite practiced enough to pull the scene off.

  “It’ll be okay,” Kelly told Nadine. He didn’t know if she believed him or not. He supposed she didn’t have much choice, but he picked up the pen from the floor and handed it to her. “Here, here, and here,” he repeated.

  She clutched the pen tightly, her knuckles white, and used her knee as a desk as she scrawled an unsteady, ragged-edged version of her name in the first space. Behind them Kevoian grabbed one of the men by the collar and growled at him to “go kill that fucking alarm.”

  “Not long now,” Kelly told Nadine.

  She gave him a worried look as she turned the page and jaggedly scrawled her name again. “Are you sure that Harry’s safe?”

  How much could you trust the police, Kelly wondered. They had their own motivation for the investigation, and it was to expose Byron, not protect Nadine. But doubts weren’t what Nadine needed.

  “I’m sure,” he lied.

  She closed her eyes with sharp relief. The final signature was the steadiest.

  The alarm blared, stuttered, and then whined into silence.

  “Finally,” Kevoian groused. He stuck his finger in his ear and wriggled it as he turned around. “You signed it?”

  Nadine mutely handed it over. Kevoian looked at it, grunted with satisfaction, and folded it up to tuck into his shirt. Then his pleased expression soured, and he grabbed Nadine’s arm to yank her onto her feet.

  “Now all I need you to do take the money out of the bank for me,” he said as he shoved her roughly toward Vic. Once she was out of the way, he turned to look down at Kelly. There was something self-satisfied around his mouth when he said, “As for you, I don’t need you at all, do I?”

  He cocked his fist back and punched down at Kelly’s face in a short, angled jab. Kelly caught the fist against his forearm and fell back onto his ass. The jolt of tailbone on concrete ran up to his skull.

  “You know, I’m going to enjoy this,” Kevoian said as he stepped forward to straddle Kelly’s legs. “There’s just something I don’t like about you.”

  Someone hammered on the door outside, loudly enough to rattle it in the frame. “Open up!” they barked. “Police.”

  Apparently Kevoian’s men were loyal enough to terrorize a woman and her kid, but not to stick around once the cops turned up. They scattered and ran for the back of the building.

  “I probably remind you of my brother,” Kelly said. He drew his knee back to his chest and drove his heel up into Kevoian’s crotch. The air whooshed out of Kevoian on a pained groan, and the color drained from his face as he hunched over. “Asshole.”

  Kelly scrambled to his knees and drove a short, vicious uppercut into Kevoian’s jaw. He felt the impact jar his knuckles and snap Kevoian’s teeth together with the sound of a crack and a spray of blood.

  Kevoian’s eyes blurred over, and he staggered backward into one of the cars. He tried to catch himself against it but just broke the side mirror off and slid to the ground.

  The police hit the door with something, and the wood cracked. Kelly shook the feeling back into his hand and took a step forward.

  “Who’s the shortass now?” he jibed.

  Nadine’s voice cut through the noise. “Watch out!”

  He had forgotten about Vic. Kelly turned just in time to see Vic drop a hammer and clutch at his neck. Blood poured out around the pen that Nadine had jammed into his throat.

  “Bitch,” he spluttered indignantly. “Look what the bitch did to me!”

  He wrenched the pen out and threw it away. That was a mistake. A gout of fresh red blood poured down his chest, and his eyes rolled back in his head. He went down like a bloody tree.

  “Is he….” Nadine wiped bloody hands on her dirty T-shirt with a fastidiousness that looked out of place. She licked her lips, and her voice went small and shocked. “Dead?”

  “No,” Kelly said.

  Not yet.

  The temptation to do nothing was far too strong. It wasn’t as though it were even all Vic’s fault, but Vic would have made an easy scapegoat.

  A dead thug, however, would probably be more messy than they needed.

  He pulled his T-shirt—his dad’s T-shirt—over his head and limped over to Vic’s prone, bloody body. How much blood did “too much blood to lose” look like, he wondered as he knelt down next to him. It looked like a lot, but maybe that was just because it was all over the ground. It couldn’t be that easy to kill someone. He wadded up the T-shirt and pressed it down hard against Vic’s throat.

  “Let the police in, Nadine,” he said.

  She wiped her hands on her T-shirt again and limped over to the cracked blue door.

  “I’m going to open the door,” she yelled. “Let me open the door.”

  The hammering stopped for a second, and she stumbled forward to fumble the lock. Then she dragged the door open, and two policemen and three firemen burst into the room.

  Messy, Clayton had said, and loud.

  Chapter Twenty

  KELLY GAVE up his place to a paramedic and let a uniformed cop lead him outside. Kevoian was cuffed and in the back of a police car already, and, from the look of it, most of the men who’d scattered had been caught trying to leave the building.

  A news van was already there. Well, when an ex-ADA called the station with a tip, it would be a dumb anchor who didn’t at least send one crew to investigate.

  “Shit,” the cop muttered as he turned Kelly away from the cameras. “Keep your head down.”

  He gave Kelly a shove toward one of the empty cars.

  “Wait. He works with me,” Clayton said as he cut across the pockmarked parking lot toward them. He had ash on his hands and dirt on his shirt where he’d crawled through a gap into the warehouse. “I’m the one who called in what I saw.”

  The cop shifted his body between Kelly and Clayton, one hand pointedly on his gun.

  “Sir, I’ll need you to step back. Until we’ve finished our interviews—”

  “Let him go.” Kelly recognized the voice before Claire pulled the ballistic helmet off. Her red hair was plastered down against her cheeks and curled with sweat. “He’s Captain Kelly’s son.”

  The cop glanced dubiously at Kelly. “I thought Cole was taller.”

  “Captain Kelly has more than one son,” Claire said impatiently. “Let him be. He has nothing to do with this. Get back in there and help clear out the factory.”

  The uniform hesitated—torn between duty and orders—but finally did as he was told.

  “Thanks,” Kelly said.

  He slumped back against the side of the patrol car, the metal hot through his jeans. Clayton brushed a hand over the nape of his neck and then settled on his shoulder.

  “Don’t thank me yet,” Claire said. She raked her bright hair back from her face with her fingers and stuck it behind her ears. Her face was pink with sweat, and there was a line dug into her forehe
ad and over her eyebrows where the visor had rested. She glanced over to where Nadine was being questioned by two other officers. “She says she’s Jimmy Graham’s wife.”

  She tried to keep her voice professional, but there was a crack of pain under it.

  “You knew him?” Kelly asked.

  Claire wiped her forehead on her sleeve and grimaced sourly. She glanced around and said quietly, “I was his go-between with Lepson. Anytime Jimmy needed a message, we’d have a run-in. That’s how I got to know Byron. I knew he was separated, but I thought she died. Your mom said that’s why he had Maxie.”

  Kelly hesitated. “You should talk to Byron,” he said. “It’s his business.”

  “You should talk to Internal Affairs,” Clayton corrected. “It’s their business now.”

  Claire took a deep breath and pressed her lips together in a grim white line. “So, yeah,” she muttered as she pulled the visor back down over her forehead. “She’s telling the truth. What the hell was he thinking?”

  Kelly shrugged. It wasn’t the first time that someone had asked him that. He never knew the answer. Most of the time he doubted that Byron had even thought about whatever it was. He just did things and decided what he meant later.

  “Do me a favor,” Claire said briskly. She snapped the visor in place, her face stern behind the scuffed plastic. “Tell your mother that I won’t be able to make the barbecue tomorrow.”

  She jogged away.

  Kelly was pretty sure his mom wasn’t going to take his calls anytime soon. He supposed he could pass the message on through Cole. His brother had always been able to turn bad news into something his mother would agree to hear.

  “Stop it,” Clayton said.

  “What?”

  Clayton tightened his fingers on the back of Kelly’s neck and pulled him in close to press a kiss against his temple. His lips lingered for a second.

  “Just this once, don’t worry about your family,” he said. “They can sort themselves out.”

  Kelly thought about what that would be like. It felt strange. “Easier said than done,” he admitted wearily. Especially now that family included Maxie, and his brother’s traumatized new—old?—wife. “It’s what I’ve always done.”