by Tina Whittle
I recognized the acronyms. AMMO was the Atlanta Metro Major Offenders task force, a combined effort between the Atlanta Police Department and the FBI, currently headed up by his friend and former partner, Dan Garrity, which is how Trey got hooked up with it. LINX was some kind of official law enforcement database, one he’d been unable to access until he passed the second tier of training. Which apparently, he had.
“Congratulations,” I said.
“Thank you.”
I smiled at his reflection. “I’m glad you have cop work to do again. I want everything to be good, you know?”
“I know. So do I.”
“Us things, too.”
His eyes crinkled. “Us things are good for me. Are they good for you?”
“Yes. Of course. It’s just that…I don’t know.”
Trey frowned, then turned around so that we were face to face. He put his hands on my hips, which took me by surprise. Trey rarely initiated physical contact, but the doctors always said the same thing—that even though his frontal lobes would never fully recover from his injury, his brain would develop new coping strategies. I knew this, and it still caught me off guard sometimes, the tiny infinitesimal steps he took into a recovery that looked different every single day, but which tonight looked like his thumbs resting lightly on my waist.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“Nothing. It’s just that you’ve been working fifty hours a week, plus volunteering with Garrity, plus training.” I gave him my serious face. “And I know that staying super-busy is your favorite coping device when you’re not okay.”
He bristled only the slightest. “A structured schedule is a significant part of my recovery complex.”
I reached behind him and pulled the eucalyptus rub off the shelf. The stuff smelled to high heaven, but worked wonders on stressed and strained muscles.
“I simply want to make sure that you’re not decompensating. Because Gabriella thinks I’m a destabilizing influence.”
“She said that?”
“Sort of.” I massaged some of the liniment into the corded tendon on the left side of his neck. “Am I? You have to tell me if I am.”
He considered. “I wouldn’t say destabilizing.”
“What would you say?”
“What’s another word for ‘chaotic’? One that doesn’t sound as…”
“Chaotic?”
“Right. Because that’s not the right word.” He dropped his eyes. “I know this wasn’t your fault. I said that because I was frustrated, and tired, and…you know.”
“I know.”
I wrapped my arms around him gently, trying not to aggravate his injury. My reflection gazed back at me alongside his scarred and taped shoulder. Spring was the reenactment season, and hundreds of hours on the mock battlefield had tanned my skin, lightened my dark blond hair with honey-gold streaks. Even my eyes seemed lighter—a gray-flecked green now instead of the deeper hazel—and I saw new wrinkles at the corners. I was no longer a twenty-something either, thanks to my last birthday.
“You need to lie down,” I said.
“Okay.”
“I’ll get the ice pack.”
“Okay.” He raised his eyes. “I really am sorry. About tonight.”
I kissed him on the chin. “It’s all right. I would have preferred champagne and dinner to liniment and oxy. But I’ll take you however you come.”
Chapter Three
Trey was asleep fifteen minutes after the meds hit his system. I looked up comme de le merde in the online French-to-English dictionary and decided that was for the best. I picked my red dress up off the floor and re-hung it in the closet—it had spent approximately ten minutes on my body—but I opened the champagne. Poured myself a glass and hoisted it in a toast to the bedroom door.
“Cheers, boyfriend. I’d like to say this is an unusual way to end a date, but we both know it’s not. Here’s to us anyway.”
I slid open the door to the terrace and stepped into the night. Down below, Peachtree and Piedmont streets glittered like rivers of dirty diamonds. I suddenly panged for a cigarette. There was no tobacco in Trey’s apartment, of course, and I’d been smoke-free for almost five months, but down below, there was anything I could have wanted, from the gritty and grungy to the luxuriously illicit.
I stared up at the slate gray sky, a city sky, familiar now. This spring marked not only a year with Trey, but a year in Atlanta, a year with my gun shop and its Confederate clientele. From spring to spring, like the Civil War itself, bookended between two Aprils. And in the morning I’d be on the reenactment field again. But until then, I savored the rising night breeze, closed my eyes…
And heard the doorbell.
I grumbled to myself as I padded back inside and peered through the peephole. Garrity stood there, running his hand through his already messy red hair.
I unlocked the door and opened it a crack. “Go away. You can’t have him. Tell your task force they can—”
“I’m not here on AMMO business.”
“Then why…Wait a second, you’re supposed to be in Alabama. With your kid. Doing dad-and-kid things.”
“Yes. And I want to be in Alabama. But I have to get this last minute thing straightened out, which I can’t do in the hallway. So let me in, okay?”
I stepped back and opened the door wide. In his navy suit, Garrity looked like an FBI recruitment poster, but he still wore the gold Atlanta PD detective shield pinned to his belt.
He fixed me with an accusatory glower. “Neither of you are answering your phones. I’ve been calling for over an hour.”
I heard the beeping then, both our cell phones, like dueling banjos. “Sorry. I was on the terrace and Trey’s asleep.”
He glanced toward the bedroom. “You wore him out already?”
“You could say that.”
Garrity plunked down on the leather sofa and put his feet on the coffee table, examining the apartment with his typical bemusement. I plopped on the sofa next to him.
“So what are you doing here if you don’t want Trey?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Crap. What have I done now?”
“Nothing for once.” He pulled an envelope from his pocket. “But I figure you might be able to explain why I’m getting a letter from Ainsworth Lovett’s office wanting to set up an interview with his investigator.”
“Who is Ainsworth Lovett?”
He stared at me. “Seriously? You’ve never heard of Atlanta’s most notorious criminal defense attorney?”
“I’m not a criminal, so no, I haven’t. Why is he notorious?”
“Because he takes on the worst of the worst. He hates the death penalty. Hates mandatory sentencing. Hates anything that makes my job easier. And he’s taken your cousin Jasper as a client.”
“What the…? Give me that!”
Garrity handed me the letter. I read it quickly, and saw that he had spoken true—Jasper now had a genuine, spit-shined, top-notch lawyer. This was the same Jasper who’d led a white supremacist militia group in rebellion against the Ku Klux Klan, and who was now a guest of the Chatham County Detention Center awaiting trial on charges from criminal trespass to felony assault to conspiracy to commit murder. The same Jasper who’d tried to kill Trey and me, and who’d come damn close to doing it. Which was why he was in state-sponsored rehab for a shattered wrist and ankle, courtesy of the three bullets Trey had pumped into him. It was a clear case of self-defense, backed up with two eyewitnesses and a security camera, so no charges had been filed against Trey. But I knew that could change.
I threw the letter on the coffee table. “This is bullshit!”
“My reaction exactly. Have you heard anything from anyone down Savannah way?”
“Not a word. Trey and I have already given our interviews. Last time I talked to the p
rosecutor’s office, they said we were out of it until the trial.”
“So has this investigator, this…” Garrity peered at the letter. “This Finn Hudson person. Has he contacted you? Or Trey? Or anybody else connected with the case?”
“Not that I know of. I left the shop early, though, and didn’t get the mail. I’ll check tomorrow.”
“What about Trey?”
“He hasn’t said anything. Neither has Marisa, and you know if Boss Lady got a letter like that, she’d be screaming bloody murder about it. That woman does not like surprises, especially not legal ones that involve Phoenix Corporate Security, and she’d have Trey in her office ASAP if she—”
Trey’s phone rang. I picked it up, peered at the screen, and felt my stomach drop.
Marisa.
Chapter Four
Marisa got right to the point, as usual. “Where’s Trey?”
“Asleep. He’s—”
“Wake him up and put him on.”
I tried to keep the annoyance out of my voice. “Let me rephrase. He pulled his shoulder, and now he’s in a drugged stupor. Can I take a message?”
Marisa exhaled in frustration. She didn’t much like me, a feeling I returned, plus she seemed to think I was a trouble magnet. It made our relationship antagonistic, touchy, and difficult to navigate.
“Is he okay?” she said.
“He’s fine. Gabriella doctored him up and now he’s sleeping off some heavy-duty narcotics.”
“Oh.” She paused, and I could almost hear her foot tapping. “So perhaps you could help me.”
“You got a letter from Ainsworth Lovett’s investigator, didn’t you?”
“Worse. Trey got a letter and has scheduled a meeting with this investigator without telling me.”
I was momentarily flabbergasted. “But Trey would never—”
“I’m looking at his desk calendar right now, and I see an appointment on Monday morning at eight-thirty for—surprise, surprise—Finn Hudson.”
That was surprising. Trey was scrupulous in all ways procedural. “Perhaps he just—”
“Did you get one of these letters too?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Marisa’s tone grew stern. “I don’t want either of you talking to this person, do you understand? Defense council cannot compel you to cooperate.”
“This has all been explained by the prosecutor, trust me.”
“Good. Because this is not the kind of situation Trey needs to be involved in. Tell him to stay out of whatever Lovett and his minion are stirring up. And tell him to call me first thing in the morning.”
“Perfectly happy to do so. But I could also let you talk to Detective Garrity, who also got contacted by this investigator person, and who is sitting right beside me.”
I shoved the phone at Garrity. While he dealt with Marisa, I rummaged in my tote bag for more nicotine gum. Then I got my phone and looked up Finn Hudson, PI. His website popped up instantly, heavy with respectable blues and professional reds. His photograph dominated the space—a sturdy white guy with a high forehead and a salt-and-pepper comb-over. I imagined he’d once been a federal agent, or a police sergeant. Something bossy and rule-bound. There was no résumé, no other photographs beyond that nondescript headshot. Finn Hudson obviously liked to keep a curtain between himself and the world, which I supposed is what made him the kind of investigator a criminal defense attorney would hire.
Garrity threw Trey’s phone on the coffee table and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Marisa wants to know the same thing I do—how can Jasper afford the services of a big-gun lawyer like Lovett?”
“I don’t know. As far as his family is concerned, Jasper might as well be dead. Not that the Boone family is rolling in the big bucks anymore. The Feds snatched the marina, which not only put the kibosh on the smuggling, but the legitimate business too.”
Garrity rubbed his chin. “You think that militia group he created is funding this?”
“I doubt it. Most of them are in jail too, waiting for their own trials.”
Garrity grimaced in distaste. Jasper’s co-defendants were all dirty cops. There was nothing Garrity hated worse.
“What about the KKK?” he said.
“They booted Jasper from their ranks, so there’s no money coming from that direction. Of course there are hundreds of KKK groups in the US. Any one of them could have decided that Jasper’s brand of race hate is exactly what their mission needs.”
“Enough to throw a couple hundred thousand his way? ’Cause that’s what a lawyer like this costs.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. What did Marisa think?”
“She was as polite as a glacier just then, but she told me she’d have somebody’s balls for breakfast if anyone from Ainsworth Lovett’s office sets one foot into Phoenix on Monday morning.”
“Somebody meaning Trey.”
“That was the gist of it. And I don’t blame her. Savannah was complicated business, especially where Jasper and your uncle were concerned, and she and Phoenix got tangled up pretty bad.” He lowered his voice, gentle. “Fess up, Tai. Is there something you’re not telling me?”
“No. I thought we were almost done with all this. I want to be done with all this.”
“You had any more cryptic messages?”
I felt an involuntary shiver down my spine. “No.”
“No more photographs?”
I shook my head. The photo I’d received was innocent enough—a candid shot of me, my back to the camera, taken at the top of Kennesaw Mountain with Atlanta shimmering in the distance—except that I had no clue who’d taken it, nor who’d written the message on the back: And all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. From the Bible, where Satan tempted Jesus at the top of the mountain.
Garrity squinted at me with his cop eyes. “Are you sure? No weird e-mails, no strange customers?”
I visualized my clientele down at the gun shop. “No stranger than usual.”
“Odd phone calls?”
“The past few months have been quiet. I work, Trey works or runs or lifts weights or hangs out with you down at the FBI.”
Garrity caught my tone. “Is something going on with him I need to know about?”
“He’s over-scheduled for sure, but he assures me all is well.”
Garrity took his feet down from the coffee table. “I don’t know what’s brewing, but you want to be on top of it, I promise you, before it turns into a three-ring circus.”
“I thought I was done with bloody circuses.”
“There’s always another bloody circus.” He pushed himself up, gave my shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “Call me when you find out what’s going on.”
“I will.”
I walked him to the door. I suddenly realized that I missed Garrity too, that he and Trey regularly retreated deep into their law enforcement world, which was the one place they could still understand each other. But when Trey talked about their official work, it was necessarily redacted, the juicy parts off-limits to a civilian like me. Like so much of his life, so much of his past. Suddenly I felt even more like an outsider.
I stopped at the threshold. “Garrity? Can I ask you something completely off topic?”
“Shoot.”
“Why did Trey and Gabriella break up?”
He shook his head as he stepped into the hall. “You’ll have to ask Trey.”
“I did, a long time ago. He said they didn’t have that kind of relationship, and I said what kind, and he said the kind that breaks up, and I said, what does that mean, and he stared at me for a while, then walked off.”
“See? Clear as a bell.”
“Garrity—”
“For real, Tai, I’m not the person to ask. I don’t know shit about relationships. Ask my ex-wife.” He put his hands on his hips. “I kn
ow this one thing, though. They were never really a couple-couple. Trey is a one-woman man to the middle of his marrow. But Gabriella? The woman’s as fine as china, but she doesn’t have a monogamous bone in her pretty little body.”
“Are you telling me I need to be watching out?”
“I’m telling you what I know. You decide what to do with it.” He gave me a weary smile. “One whole year together. Doesn’t seem that long and yet it seems like forever.”
I returned the smile. “I suspect Trey would describe it exactly the same way.”
Chapter Five
Trey always slept deeply, even without a dose of oxy in his system. His mouth softened and his forehead unwrinkled, smoothing the furrow that deepened between his eyebrows when he was annoyed or frustrated or confused.
I lay on the bed face to face with him, ran my fingers through his hair. “Trey?”
No response. I stroked his forehead, heard the deeper inhale, the interrupted rhythm of respiration. After a few seconds, his eyes fluttered open.
“Hey,” I said.
He licked his lips. “Hey.”
“You coherent?”
“What?”
“Guess not.” I propped up on my elbow. “How’s the shoulder?”
“Better.”
He smelled like menthol and shea butter, and the skin on his neck was still cool from the ice pack. His eyes were half-lidded, his voice slurred with painkillers and sleep.
“Trey?”
“Hmmm?”
“I need to ask you a question.”
“A what?”
“A question. About the investigator from Ainsworth Lovett’s office. Marisa said you’d made an appointment with him on Monday.”
“With who?”
“Finn Hudson. The PI who works for Jasper’s new attorney. You’re meeting with him on Monday.”
He shook his head. “No, no. That was blue.” Then he closed his eyes again.
I sighed. Gabriella was right. He was totally useless. I pushed myself up, but he reached over and tangled his hand in my hair, running his fingers deep into the curls. There was something about my hair that enraptured him. Sometimes I woke up to find he’d wrapped one finger around a tendril at the nape of my neck, closing it into his fist like a keepsake.
