by Cindy Dees
She nodded, her eyes big and scared. He got why she was scared of cops, but she was going to have to get over her fear of all of this police procedure to be with him for any length of time—
Whoa. Wait. What? Since when had he decided to definitely go for a long-term relationship with her?
Stunned, he stumbled out of the observation room and leaned against the closed door to calm his racing heart. Things were happening so damned fast between him and Carrie. He needed to slow down. Catch his breath. Hell, think with his brain and not his crotch.
Right now he needed to get his mind on business and break these two jerks. Get them to admit they worked for Lonnie Grange and most importantly, get them to tell him what had happened to Gary Hubbard and where he could be found, alive or dead. For Carrie’s sake, he sincerely hoped her uncle was still alive.
As it turned out, Broken Nose—who identified himself as Stevie Desilva—caved first. He wasn’t the brightest bulb in the bin and fell for the ruse that his buddy had decided to save his own hide and confess.
Broken Nose was furious that Siccario was going to get immunity from prosecution for talking first and burst out, “Tony’s the one who should go to jail! He’s the one calling the shots. I just do what he tells me to!”
“Oh, dude,” Bass replied sympathetically, “he’s screwing you over hard in the other room. Totally threw you under the bus. He said you were the one in charge of kidnapping that ghost show guy.”
“Not even close!” Stevie replied indignantly. “Tony got orders from his boss to do it! Tony only brought me onto the job to help out.”
Bingo. Confession to kidnapping. “Who’s his boss?” Bass asked casually.
“Some guy in Philly. Grunge. Grange. Something like that.”
“Lonnie Grange?” Bass echoed. “I’ve heard of him. You work for him? I’m impressed. He’s in Philly now? Last I heard he was running a crew in New York.”
“Hell, yeah, we work for him. And he moved to Philly to get a new start after he got out of jail. You know. Less heat in a new town. And he’s got the best lawyers in the business.”
Confession number two. They worked for a known felon. Now that these yahoos had tied Grange to the kidnapping, he could investigate ole’ Lonnie hard-core. In addition to finding Gary, maybe Bass could find out what the deal was between the bastard and teenaged Carrie. Unfortunately, his internal radar still wasn’t satisfied he’d heard the whole story from her.
Now the trick was to keep these two thugs talking. The more they said before they clammed up and lawyered up, the better. Although Bass highly doubted any lawyer, no matter how good, was going to get these two out of the long and growing list of charges against them.
Bass nodded sagely at Stevie. “A good lawyer can get pretty much anybody out of any charges. I doubt we’re going to be able to hold you more than a day or two before someone screws up some police procedure and we have to let you go. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”
Stevie visibly relaxed.
“Soon as you and I are done talking, I’ll call Grange for you and tell him to get his lawyers down here. That way you can save your phone call for someone else.”
“That’s decent of you, man,” Stevie replied.
“No problem. You help me, I help you, right?”
“Sure thing.”
Bass was equally comfortable playing bad cop or good cop, but given that Carrie was watching the interrogations, he was abjectly grateful he got to play good cop today. His version of bad cop would probably send her running, screaming, for the hills, never to return. It wasn’t that he was actually that big a bastard. He was just very well trained to make hardened criminals think so.
“Okay. So after you guys picked up Gary out of that alley and threw him in your vehicle, where did you take him?”
“First we took him back to the motel. Tony had some stuff he made the old guy breathe that knocked him out. Then I stayed at the motel and Tony took him somewhere. I don’t know where.”
“How long was Tony gone?”
“Couple hours. I dunno. I fell asleep.”
“Is he going back to Gary and taking care of him?”
“Oh, yeah. Every other day or so, Tony takes a couple a’ bags of groceries and drives off for three or four hours.”
“That’s square of him,” Bass commented pleasantly. “Is the car muddy when he gets back to the motel?”
“It was a few nights ago. The night we had that big rainstorm come through.”
“That was a big one, wasn’t it? Woke me up from a dead sleep,” Bass replied conversationally.
“Me, too. Tony was plenty pissed when he got back. Said that storm was a bitch to drive through.”
“I can imagine.” Bass stood up. “Well hey. Thanks for your help, and you sit tight. I’ll be back in a little while and we’ll get you out of here. You need anything to eat or drink?”
“Yeah. I could use a beer, but I’ll take a soda. Something caffeinated.”
Bass grinned affably. “I wish we could have beer around here. I’ll send in a drink.”
He stepped out into the hall and paused in front of Tony’s door, collecting himself. Time to put the screws to this jerk. He stepped inside.
Chapter 12
Carrie moved across the small, dark room to the other window as Bass shifted from Stevie’s room to Tony’s. She was impressed by how good Bass was at questioning these guys. He’d put Stevie completely at ease and had the guy singing like a bird without even realizing he was confessing to a bunch of serious crimes.
The female cop Carrie’d seen before in the squad room ducked her head into the room, asking, “How’s it going?”
“Great. Stevie just confessed to kidnapping Gary Hubbard and to working for Lonnie Grange.”
“Wow. That was fast. Usually these types hold out for a few hours before they break.” The woman came into the room all the way, closing the door behind her.
Carrie watched as Bass sat down in front of Tony, who looked a great deal more hostile than Stevie. She listened closely as Bass said gently, “Your friend, Stevie, is a talkative guy.”
Tony swore long and hard, and Bass seemed content to let him rage. As the guy’s tirade eventually ran down, Bass said calmly, “You know the score, Tony. He who talks first, walks first. Unless you can offer me some information that Stevie hasn’t already spilled, he’s walking out of here in a few minutes, and you’re going to jail for the rest of your life.”
“Life? I didn’t kill no one!”
“What you would call first-degree kidnapping in New York, down here in Louisiana, we call aggravated kidnapping. Unlike in New York, where you can be sentenced to twenty years in prison for first-degree kidnapping, in this fair state it’s a mandatory life sentence without probation or parole. Did you know that?”
Another storm of swearing erupted from Tony. Carrie was impressed at its breadth and creativity. That must be what swearing like a sailor referred to.
“Your boss, Lonnie Grange, had to know that. It’s why he didn’t kidnap Hubbard himself. He threw you to the sharks, man.”
When the guy wound down from a third outburst of profanity, Bass leaned forward in his chair, staring hard at Tony. Carrie wasn’t even the target of that lethal stare, but still, it made her squirm. Guilt did that to a girl.
Bass growled, “Your best bet is to tell me where to find Gary Hubbard. I can get you put in a lower security prison, get you privileges. Trust me, you don’t want to go into general population in the federal penitentiary in this state. Gen pop in Angola is a very, very risky proposition.”
“Maybe I’m the guy who’ll make it risky.”
Bass looked Tony up and down. “You’re soft. Going to fat. Approaching middle age. The boys in Angola would chew you up and spit you out.” Tony bristled as Bass continued, “Lonnie G.’s got no p
ull down here. He and his boys can’t protect you at all. You go into the pen without a hard-core gang affiliation, you’re going to be for sale to the highest bidder. You can’t even begin to imagine the stuff they’ll do to you. Bending you over in the shower’s gonna be a walk in the park before they’re done with you. Guys die from the stuff they do to cream puffs like you.”
There was notably less swearing from Tony this time. Bass’s warnings appeared to have gotten inside the guy’s head.
Carrie silently cringed as Bass stepped on the gas pedal a little harder. Lord, he was scary when he talked like this. “You wanna die in prison, Tony? You got any family back home? Kids? Grandkids someday? You wanna ever see them? Hug them? Only way you’re seeing any of them is through Plexiglas, my friend.”
Tony was silent this time.
Bass let the silence draw out until it was so uncomfortable that even Carrie was fidgeting. “Where’s Gary Hubbard?”
“I can’t tell you,” Tony replied.
Carrie’s hands fisted in frustration. He knew. She could feel it. Through the glass, Bass asked the guy, “You can’t tell me, or you won’t tell me?”
“Same diff. I’m a dead man either way.”
“Lonnie G. tell you he’d kill you if you rolled over on him?” Bass threw out. “Guys like him always say stuff like that. They make big threats to get their guys to shut up and take the fall for them. Lonnie’s just out of prison. He knows how bad it really is in there. He’d do anything not to go back, including giving you up.”
“He would not!”
Carrie nodded. Bass was good at this interrogation stuff, all right. Tony had just confessed to knowing Lonnie Grange.
“You’re willing to go away for the rest of your life for Lonnie? Is he that good a guy? He must be some kind of special friend for you to die for him. Are you really willing to go to hell for him?”
Carrie was ready to confess everything to Bass, and she wasn’t even in the same room with him. Who knew he’d been taking it as easy on her as he had been so far? Thing was, the day would come when he would demand to know what she wasn’t telling him about her past. He would come at her like this.
And she wouldn’t be able to hold out against him. She was deluded if she thought she was going to be able to keep her secret from Bass. He would tear her open like a cheap tin can and pry every last, humiliating detail out of her.
The thought made her physically ill.
“You okay?” the female cop asked her.
“No,” she muttered. “Yes. Never mind.”
“You look like you’re about to faint.”
Carrie waved off her concern. If the woman went next door and told Bass his girlfriend was sick, he would rush in here and demand to know what was going on. He would interrogate her like he was going after Tony Sicarrio, and it would be all over. She leaned against the wall, gasping like a dying fish.
On the other side of the glass, Tony was stubbornly silent.
Bass leaned even further forward and began describing in a quiet, terrible voice the graphic, violent detail of things he’d heard of happening to inmates in federal prisons. Bile rose in Carrie’s throat at some of the abuses he described. They were nothing short of the sickest forms of torture. It appalled her to know that Bass was even aware of such things, let alone familiar with them.
Tony paled.
Carrie glanced over at the female cop, who seemed completely absorbed in the interrogation. She glanced up at Carrie. “Bass is the best, isn’t he? I love watching him work over perps.”
“If being gross constitutes being good at this stuff, then I guess Bass is pretty good at it,” Carrie managed to reply.
The other woman nodded, seemingly oblivious to Carrie’s reaction. “Being good means doing whatever it takes within the law to get the criminals to confess. Saves us a ton of time and resources if we can get them to confess instead of having to go out and gather physical evidence to prove they’re guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt.”
Bass’s voice—unusually clipped for him—floated out of the speaker on the wall. “And then there’s the torture...”
Oh, God. It could get worse than he’d already described?
Carrie tried to tune out his words, the cruel way he battered at Tony, the way he broke down a hardened criminal’s defenses, waxing eloquent in describing the worst excesses of torture Tony could expect to experience in prison. It sounded to her like Bass had dipped into his military training for some truly gruesome forms of torture to describe.
She couldn’t unhear any of it. How did Bass live with having seen, or possibly even experienced, horrors like that?
“Jeez, you’ve got a twisted mind!” Tony finally blurted.
“No kidding,” she muttered.
The female cop shrugged. “Bass breaks everybody. They all spill their guts to him in the end.”
He breaks everybody.
The words were daggers to Carrie’s heart. She couldn’t spill her guts to him. Ever. If he knew the truth, he wouldn’t want anything to do with her. She would take her shame to the grave with her.
But she knew him too well. Bass would never stand for secrets between them. Telling him the truth would totally be a condition of their relationship. She would have to rip off the scabs she’d so carefully nurtured over her worst emotional wounds.
She couldn’t do it.
Tony blurted, “You’re sick, man.”
Through the glass, Bass smiled so coldly that Carrie felt the chill in here. “Hey, I’m not even a criminal, and I’m not bored out of my mind, sitting around in my cell all day long, thinking up ways to entertain my psychotic self. I’m nothing compared to the boys in orange. They’re gonna have a field day with you, Tony. You’re gonna take that tough guy attitude inside with you, and they’re gonna smash you like glass. You’re gonna be left in so many pieces they have to sweep you into a body bag.”
Carrie was appalled. Bass was showing a streak she was scared to death of. Surely it was all an act. But the cop beside her was staring at Bass in open appreciation, as if that was the real Bastien LeBlanc revealing himself in there.
An overwhelming urge to bolt from the room and run for her life tore through her, leaving her entire body shaking and her mind jumping from thought to thought like a manic rabbit standing on an electrified panel.
“Where’s Gary, Tony?” Bass asked forcefully.
“Why in the hell should I tell you? I want a plea deal before I’ll cough it up.”
She gaped. The man had basically just admitted to knowing where Gary Hubbard was stashed.
Bass stood up, moved around the table and loomed behind Tony. Then Bass looked up, straight at the mirror, and said clear as day, “Get her out of there.”
The woman cop reached for the door and said, “You heard him. Let’s go.”
“But I have to know where my uncle’s being held!”
“Bass needs you gone. And he’s the boss.”
Carrie might have resisted further, but the woman officer actually reached out and took her by the elbow, politely, but firmly steering her out into the hall.
Even though she wanted nothing more than to run, she owed Gary. Carrie demanded, “Why can’t I stay?”
“Think about it. Why would a cop not want a civilian witnessing an interrogation?”
“Is he going to beat up Tony?”
“Cops don’t beat up prisoners,” the woman replied scornfully. “But we sure as hell jog their memories when someone’s life is on the line.”
Bass was going to rough up Tony Sicarrio? If she’d been shocked before, she was stunned speechless, now. In an intellectual way, she understood that Bass was capable of violence. But somehow, she’d always pictured him shooting a gun at terrorists from a long way away—something bloodless and technical. But using his fists to pummel the truth out of Tony? It w
as so...real. So violent.
That was it. She was out of here.
Her thoughts must have shown on her face because the cop paused in the doorway of the squad room to ask her, “Do you want to know where Gary Hubbard is or not?”
“Of course!”
“Then let Bass do his job, and don’t overthink it.”
Carrie fell into the chair beside Bass’s desk and absolutely overthought it. With every passing minute, her imagination spun more wildly out of control. The more she thought about it, the more she convinced herself that Bass was probably murdering Tony. Slowly.
The hell of it was that even if he hadn’t murdered the guy, she knew without a shadow of a doubt that Bass was capable of it. Every fear she’d ever had of Lonnie Grange, of men in general, roared to the front of her mind, blinding her to anything else.
Must. Run.
Now.
She couldn’t take the waiting any more, imagining Bass pounding another human being into pulp. She jumped up from the chair, mumbling something about needing to find a restroom, and all but ran out of the building. She had to get some fresh air!
She burst out of the precinct, hyperventilating so badly she felt as if she might faint. But she didn’t stop. She headed down the street, stumbling along blindly, going nowhere in particular.
She had to get away. Away from Bass’s aggressive curiosity. Away from his willingness to resort to violence to get the answers he wanted. She spied a park and veered into it, drawn by the green grass and inviting benches. She fell onto one, and wasn’t surprised to realize tears were streaming down her cheeks.
She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t stand and fight like Bass wanted her to. She wasn’t as strong as him and not anywhere near as tough as he was.
Yes, she was a coward. She owned that about herself, and she was okay with it. Running away had kept her alive for this long—there was no reason to believe continuing to run wouldn’t continue to work for her.
Except for Bass himself.
She’d thought she knew him. Thought she could trust him. But who was the man back in that interrogation room? Was that all an act to get a criminal to talk, or was it a glimpse into the real monster lurking beneath the nice guy?
