Dirty Cops Next Door

by Summer Cooper

  “I have to go, but I’ll be back later, Toni. Take care of him. For both of us.” With a soft kiss he was gone, and I was alone with Grant.

  “Want to climb up here with me?” he asked as he pulled his blanket up.

  “You sure I won’t hurt you?” I looked at him doubtfully, not sure how much he could feel but he had to be in pain.

  He waved at the bags and bottles dripping liquids into his IV. “I’m surprised I can feel anything with all of that in me. It’ll be fine. I need to feel you beside me, Toni. Please.”

  “I’d love to.” I kicked my shoes off and climbed in with him, his left arm pulled me tight to his side.

  I held onto him, my arm over his chest, and breathed deeply. The world was back on its axis now. I felt the band that had been wrapped around my chest for hours finally let go. I sighed, content, even under the circumstances. He was alive and that was what mattered.

  “I thought I’d never see you again,” he finally said into my hair an eternity later.

  His voice startled me and I glanced up at him with a smile of embarrassment. I’d been so comfortable with him, just so plain happy that he was alive, I’d almost fallen asleep again.

  “I wasn’t so sure I’d see you either. You really had me worried, you know?” I looked up to see that wall was back in place, that hard barrier I didn’t like at all. It cut me off from him and it was dangerous. This had changed Grant, maybe for good. I’m not sure I liked that.

  “I think you’re going to have to keep an eye on David. He’s not going to let this rest.” Grant’s hands shifted, pulling me tighter to his side. I couldn’t complain; I wanted to crawl into him in that moment and make it all better. To make sure that wall stayed away.

  “I will.”

  “Good. Now, I’m going to sleep. These pain meds are kicking my ass. Tell that pink bunny to fuck off with his hopping, will you?” He waved his right arm at the curtains covering the window, an ugly shade of pink that was hardly inspiring.

  I held back a laugh and closed my eyes. I hoped Grant would be okay.

  David

  I stalked through the hallways of the deserted hospital, a nurse squeaking by me in expensive trainers the only hint I wasn’t alone as I found the elevators and went down to the next floor. Why did they wear such expensive shoes? Then I thought about all the walking, running, pacing nurses had to do, the way they’d been all over Grant earlier, a dozen of them, working together to make sure they stabilized him and got him the tests, medicine, and care that he needed. I guess the shoes helped them to keep up the pace in their Herculean efforts to save lives.

  It’s odd the things you notice when you’re on a mission to take another man’s life. I didn’t really consider Avery much of a man, but he was one. My hand went to my gun as I mentally counted the amount of ammo I had with me. Enough to take him out for what he’d done to Grant. That’s all I needed.

  I hit the doors and was soon at the car. I hadn’t spoken to the chief yet, I didn’t know what the plan was, but I had a plan of my own. Go to his house, shoot him in his sleep, then if I made it out, serve the time I would inevitably have to serve.

  If I made it out of prison alive I could consider a future, but right now, after watching Grant almost die, after watching the crushing pain Toni had felt when she saw him in that hospital bed, I had to do something to make that fucking bastard pay.

  I slid behind the wheel and started the ignition.

  I stopped the car. Grief, relief, pain crushed me within its claws, it stole my breath away and left me gasping. I had almost lost him. Toni had almost lost him.

  I wanted to walk into Avery’s house, if he wasn’t on the run already, and torture him until he expired in a puddle of tears and blood. I wanted to do things I knew would take me beyond my badge.

  Toni had only been in our lives for a very short while, yet I’d come to care about her deeply. She’d earned my respect for her loyalty to her brother, she’d earned my trust by always telling me the truth, even when I didn’t want to hear it, and she’d never backed down. Even when I pushed her to breaking, she never backed down. Toni was strong both in character and in her resolve.

  Avery had inadvertently tried to break that resolve. He didn’t know it, but he’d tried to destroy something we’d been waiting our whole lives for. Alright, it was only the beginning, but we all knew where this was headed. That was obvious the moment I’d lost my cool and kissed her the first time.

  I hadn’t just wanted her for myself, oh no, I’d wanted to share her with Grant; I’d wanted to share with her, in every aspect of the word. Not just the sex, but in our joys and sorrows. Avery had put that all at risk trying to keep himself and his drug-running alive.

  Everything had changed for Grant and me the minute Toni walked into our lives. The night we’d all spent together had finally set it all in motion. It had released in me something I thought I’d forgotten how to feel a long time ago. Avery had threatened that.

  My phone started to chirp as I sat there, contemplating the many ways you could torture someone.

  “Marshall,” I said simply when I saw it was the chief.

  “Get over to the station, son. I know what you have planned. You can’t do it.”

  “Why not?” I asked as I looked out of the windshield at the now deserted parking lot. There was no use in denying it; the chief had been around long enough to know how this had to play out. The parking lot was a blanket of black glitter. It had rained while we were inside and the pavement glistened under the overhead lights.

  “I’ve been where you are, David. I lost a partner once. Guy named Johnny Lawson, out on parole, decided to rob a convenience store. My partner and I were the ones who responded. Dan, my partner, went in first. Guy shot him in the kneecaps and the stomach, then spent three hours letting him bleed to death. It wasn’t pretty.” The chief stopped speaking and I heard a long sigh on the other end.

  “Guy was messed up on drugs, ended up passing out halfway through his little standoff. I wanted to get him to the station and give him my own brand of justice, but I got this same lecture from my chief. Don’t let them make you hard, son. Don’t let them make you them. You’re meant to enforce the law, not be the law. Understand me?” The chief’s voice was stern, uncompromising, and hard.

  I heard him loud and clear and sank in the driver’s seat, sliding down. He was right.

  “Come into the station, son. Let’s do this right. Let’s put this crook away for good.”

  I couldn’t disagree. How could I?

  I drove to the station in silence, weariness starting to blur my vision, but I shook it off. There were things to do. Justice to serve. Proper justice.

  I got to the station and found my way to the chief’s office.

  “He’s holed up in his house. We have the warrant, and now we have you. We’ve been waiting for you to show up.”

  “I couldn’t leave, not until he’d woken up. I had to know he was alright before I could leave.”

  “I hear you, son. This is what we have planned…”

  The chief led me into a room they used for group meetings and I saw a crudely drawn map of the house with its entry points marked.

  “We’re going to go in hard and fast, boys. But you don’t go in until I give the go ahead, you understand? I don’t want to see any accidental discharging of weapons or any of you knuckleheads jumping the gun. We do this right, we do it to the letter of the warrant, and nobody else gets hurt today, understand?” He gazed out at the gathered force, moving on when he got the nod of acceptance from each one.

  “Now, get your gear, and let’s move out.” The chief moved to gather up his protective equipment and came to me. “You’re coming with me, David.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I followed him out to a waiting van, the others all piled into another van or into ours. There were twenty-two of us altogether. The fire department and ambulance services were waiting on standby.

  It took twelve minutes to go
from the station to the gaudy, white castle of a house Avery had built with his drug money. A mixture of gothic romance, Victorian charm, and modernism crashed together to form what Avery obviously thought of as the modern mansion. White gingerbread cutouts on the wraparound porch clashed with large white columns along a brick wall. A bay window on the first floor was topped by a glass wall on the second. None of it really made sense to anyone but the man who’d designed it. I’d always hated it.

  “Right, we knock, we go in, we take him out, nobody gets shot, right?” The chief didn’t bother to check this time. “David, come with me.”

  The chief had a file of papers tucked under his arm as we parked across the street from the open gate of Avery’s mansion. Thoughts plagued me as we walked up to the house.

  The memory of Grant’s body juddering when he was shot, the way he twisted as he fell, caused a lance of pain to slice into my heart. The beam falling and the way his body jerked on impact made my fists clench.

  The sensation of the hot spray from Grant’s blood across my face, blood I had yet to wash away totally, almost took me to my knees but I kept walking, trying to blink it all away. My mind wouldn’t give me peace.

  I remembered Toni as she exited her car, the way her knees had given out on her. I’d run to her, held her up until she found her strength, but I’d been on the verge of falling myself. The tears she’d cried in her sleep had stung me, as if each tear was a drop of acid burning my face instead of hers.

  My hand twitched over my holster but I kept my cool. Don’t lose it, I repeated as a mantra, don’t lose it.

  “Wait!” I called out, my hand reaching for the chief to stop him moving forward.

  I’d tried to distract myself by scanning the area around the house and the house itself. Movement in a window caught my eye. Horror filled me and I hunkered down behind a tree, the chief right behind me.

  “He has a hostage!” I whispered to the man beside me and pointed to the window.

  I looked up at the spotlight lit window, the only one with such a light, and knew this day was far from over.

  Eric stood in the window, a gun to his head, held there by a maniacally grinning Avery.

  How was I going to tell Toni?

  13

  Toni

  “Ma’am. Your phone keeps ringing. You really need to turn that off in here. It can make the equipment glitch. Take it outside, please, if it’s important.” A nurse stood over me, and I glared up at her blearily. Who was she again?

  Oh right, I thought, I’m in the hospital with Grant.

  “What?” I pushed myself up and tried to disentangle myself from Grant. I went over to my bag and finally figured out the noise I could hear wasn’t just one of the machines Grant was connected to.

  “Sorry, I forgot to turn it off.” I took the phone out of my bag and headed down the hall. The phone had stopped ringing.

  I could barely see straight as I went down the elevators. I finally managed to swipe the correct pattern on my phone as I stepped outside into the cold night air.

  Sunlight was only just starting to tinge the skyline a fainter shade of black. What time was it?

  <8 missed calls from David. Return call?>

  The text on my phone was almost an accusation. How dare I miss a call!

  Why was David so desperate to reach me? Eight calls in the middle of the night?

  I closed my eyes as I hit the green call button and waited.

  “Hello?” David’s voice came over the line and I breathed in sharply. Something was wrong, he didn’t sound right.

  “What’s up?” I wanted to say, “What the fuck is wrong now?” but held those words back.

  “I’m sending a car over to pick you up, it should be arriving now.”

  The sound of a car pulling up meant he hadn’t been kidding. I glanced up and saw the marked car.

  “Okay, why?”

  “Don’t ask questions, Toni. I can’t explain until you get here. Just get in the car, and don’t argue.”

  “Alright. Let me go tell Grant—”

  “Just get in the fucking car and get here, Toni!” David’s voice exploded in my ear and I wanted to hang up on him but that niggling feeling of panic was coming back.

  Why wouldn’t he tell me what was wrong? Why didn’t I have time to explain anything to Grant? What could possibly have gone so wrong now? And why did I have to be there? Nope, not good at all.

  I got into the car and let a little of my anger at being talked to with such disrespect show through. “I’m in the car.”

  “Good. Thank you. See you soon.” He hung up and I wanted to sling my phone out of the car window.

  The officer driving didn’t even look back at me much less try to make small talk so I sat in the back fuming over the way David had spoken to me.

  Sure, David was an alpha male, he was used to being listened to, but I’m not anyone’s whipping boy! He was so going to get a piece of my mind when I got to wherever this car was taking me. A huge piece of it. I might even use the f-word a time or two!

  By the time the police car drove along a road I was vaguely familiar with I’d worked myself into a fine little rage. Who the fuck did he think he was? Just because we’d had sex didn’t mean he was my lord and master… Wait, wasn’t this Avery’s house? And what’s with all the flashing lights, the police officers everywhere?

  “Come on.” David opened the car door before the car had even completely stopped and pulled me into a large van, the kind used by moving companies. This one had computer screens, people, and other stuff I couldn’t recognize inside of it. “Get out for five minutes. This is her.”

  People looked at me with pity in their eyes and then they all moved en-masse to leave the vehicle.

  “David. This is scaring me. What’s going on? Why exactly am I at this house?” I watched the people leave and panic began to strangle my heart and brain. I wanted to follow those people out to a world that still made sense, I didn’t want to hear whatever it was David was about to tell me. I wanted to run away from it all, it was just too much! I didn’t want to be here in this confined space, the walls closing in on me. Something was wrong, very wrong.

  I felt that band go around my lungs once more, only this time it was squeezing tighter. So tight I could feel my pulse beating in my head. The staccato rhythm kept repeating one word… Eric.

  “It would seem Avery was prepared for us. Somehow…” His words broke off and he banged his fist on a table to relieve some of his frustration. “Somehow he’s managed to take Eric as a hostage.”

  He wouldn’t look at me for a long time as I sat there, my feelings turned off, my mind blank, my body nothing more than a shell. My consciousness had flown away, taken me to a land of nothing where sights and sounds did not exist. Only the sound of my own heartbeat existed and it was still beating out a single name. Eric.

  “Toni? Come on, sweetheart, come back to me. Please.” I felt David’s hand on me and I looked up at him, everything still numb but sharper, more real.

  “What? What did you say?” I swallowed hard, hoping he’d say something else this time. Maybe this was all a dream and I was still at the hospital, in bed beside Grant, still asleep.

  “Avery has Eric in the house and he’s using him as a hostage. We thought he’d have run by now, but he went in a totally unexpected direction.”

  “No, no, that’s not Eric up there. Eric went to bed before I left the house last night. He wrote a paper and then he went right to sleep. That’s not Eric.” I shook my head, not willing to believe it. Eric had been in bed when I left him. None of this was real!

  “Toni, it’s him. I saw him with my own eyes; it’s Eric.”

  “You’re sure it’s not his son?” I knew my eyes were begging him to give me that sliver of hope because it was all that was going through my mind, it can’t be Eric!

  “No, it’s definitely Eric.”

  “But...” I was going to say, maybe he’d been mistaken in the darkness but Mark was
light where Eric was dark. He was also a few inches taller and heavier than my brother. “What are we going to do?”

  “Right now, you aren’t going to do anything, you’re going to sit here and wait for me to think of something. We haven’t figured out where Mark is, if he’s in on it, what they have in that house, if anything. There might be more men in there that would make it difficult to enter. We just don’t know. So right now, please stay nearby. I had to let you know what was happening, but don’t split my attention, okay? It could cost Eric his life.” He softened the blow of his words by taking my hand and kissing the knuckles.

  I could only watch him, numb. He was insane if he thought I was going to sit here and wait for him and the SWAT team, or whatever the local branch was called, to go in and save my brother. My phone started to vibrate in my pocket and I took it out.

  “Toni, are you alright?” Bee’s sweet voice came over the line in a rush as soon as I hit the button.

  “Yeah, I’m dealing with it. I think!” I watched David stand up and walk out of the back of the van, likely thinking I was distracted for now.

  “You let them do what they need to do, you hear me? They’re trained in this, Toni. I’ve only just found you, don’t make me lose a friend this early on. Besides, I like you. You keep your head!”

  “I’ll try to,” I said, but I was distracted, wondering how much longer it would be before the sun rose. I stepped out of the van, scanning every square inch of the property and the surrounding area.

  I’d driven Eric over here once since he’d gotten in trouble that first time. I hated every moment he’d spent with Mark, even more so now as I got a good look at the monstrosity of a house he lived in. What kind of deranged mind had built such a place?

  I stared up at it, feeling kind of sorry for the kid now. He couldn’t help who his parents were, and if he’d only ever been taught bad choices, well, maybe he did need to be around a kid like Eric to help him see there was a different path in life. I let Bee continue her stream of directives as I walked, keeping my head low and my voice lower. I was just another bystander walking by, don’t look at me, I thought as I passed each one.