My blood ran cold at the thought, just like it did at the thought of my brother being tortured and killed. Still, I couldn’t give in. “Turn yourself in, sweetheart. Please. They can help you, the cops. I know they can. Don’t tell yourself it’s hopeless, because it isn’t. They’ll protect you.”
“Nobody can protect me. I have to do this.” The shaking in his hand stopped, and he steadied as he took a deep breath. All the air left the space around me. I couldn’t breathe. Jesus, my brother was about to kill me. Or was he? I couldn’t bring myself to believe it, even as every memory we had ever made together flashed before my eyes all at once.
I hardly noticed the shadow that crossed over the floor, in the middle of the patch of light thrown down through the hole in the ceiling. Michael didn’t notice it, either, too busy aiming at me. He didn’t see Brett swing down through the hole on the cable attached to a harness around his waist. In the blink of an eye, the gun flew from my brother’s hand and he clutched his arm in pain. Police flooded the warehouse, while Brett detached himself and took me in his arms.
“Don’t watch,” he murmured, taking my head and pressing it to his chest. “You don’t want to see this.”
“I do,” I insisted through the tears clogging my throat. But I didn’t fight him. Hearing my brother’s grunts of pain under Ricardo’s reading of his rights was already too much for me.
Chapter Nineteen – Brett
I couldn’t stop touching her, even as we sat in the police station. I had to remind myself that she was okay. There was that one moment there, just before I got off the shot, where I didn’t know whether he was going to fire on her or not. I hadn’t felt real, gut-wrenching fear like that in years.
Ricardo was in the hall, looking over some paperwork with a handful of his team members. Molly and I sat in his office, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were being spied on through the glass walls. People couldn’t stop looking in at us. Probably because they knew what just happened and needed a look at the girl ballsy enough to put herself in harm’s way.
“I’m so cold,” she whispered. I could hear her teeth chattering. Ricardo’s suit jacket was over the back of his chair, and I didn’t think he would mind if she wore it for a little while. I draped it over her shoulders, then wrapped my arm around them and pulled her close.
“You were so good in there,” I reminded her. “You did the right thing. It was perfect.”
“Yeah, I know,” she whispered as she shivered. “I wish I didn’t feel like shit over it.”
“You won’t once you talk to Ricardo. I promise.” As long as Michael held up his end of the bargain. By that time, the cops would’ve presented their offer. It was up to him to take it. If he loved his sister, he would. And I had the feeling he did—I had watched as he struggled over whether or not to shoot her. It was his life or hers in that moment, and he still couldn’t pull the trigger. That told me something about him. I had heard his explanation, too, and my opinion of him had softened a lot since then. He was just scared. I could identify with that.
“Where is he, do you think?” She leaned her head against my shoulder. I was glad to feel her body relax a little.
“In an interrogation room, I guess.”
“Would they let me see him? Behind the glass, I mean? You know, the two-way mirror?”
I grinned over the top of her head. She watched a lot of TV. “I don’t think so.”
“And you didn’t shoot him too badly, did you?”
“Nah. Just in the bicep. He’ll be okay—they treated him at the scene.”
“Right, right. My head is going in a million directions.”
“I know.” I held her a little tighter. “But you’ll see it’s all okay. Trust me.”
“I do trust you.” That was all I needed to hear.
The door opened, and in stepped Ricardo. He was trying hard to hide his smile, but he was failing. It played at the corners of his mouth. “It couldn’t have gone better if we tried,” he announced.
Molly straightened up and let out a snort. “Wow. I’m afraid I can’t agree with you there.”
He sat on the edge of his desk, in front of us, and fixed her with a hard stare. “Do you really mean that? Would you rather him shoot you, or himself?”
“Of course not.” That was all it took for her to slump down a little in her seat.
He softened. “I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. When we look at every direction this could’ve gone in, what ended up happening is the best we could’ve hoped for. We have your brother in custody and he’s more than willing to go along with the offer we’ve made.”
She sat up a little straighter. “What offer?”
“Let me explain.” I took her hand before he continued, since I knew what the offer was all about and wasn’t sure how she would take it. “When we looked it from all angles, one thing was clear: we had to create a situation in which you would be safe, one which offered your brother a degree of safety as well. I know he committed murder, but it’s the only crime we have him on. He’s never even stolen a stick of gum before this, as far as we know. Now, he might have for the family before this, but we don’t have him on it. Regardless, the last thing we wanted was to put the finger on him for the murder and let another one of his crew kill him before we arrested him.”
“Right.” She shivered, and her fingers squeezed mine reflexively.
“It was clear, then, that we needed to set up a situation that would make it look like he was the hero—and our unnamed witness was taken out of commission.”
Her eyes widened. “You’re going to pretend he killed me.”
“No, not you. Just the witness.” He grimaced a little, and I knew him well enough to know that he hated skirting the rules. It made me wonder why he was willing to do it for her. What did he feel for her, really?
“I don’t understand.” She looked at me, like I had the answers.
“We assigned our witness a name, age, the whole nine yards. Her name will appear in reports, including your brother’s arrest record. According to the charges being filed against him today, he’s up for indictment on two murder charges.”
“Two? No! That’ll just make it worse for him!” She was about to get out of the chair, but I held her in place.
“Just listen,” I urged. “Sit there and listen and understand this is the best possible outcome. Give him a chance.” Her eyes were full of resentment when she looked at me, but she knew I had her beat. She could try to get up while I held her there, but she wouldn’t get far.
“It was either this or admit you’re still out there, walking the streets,” Ricardo explained. “If we say he killed the witness, that gives the other members of the DeMarco organization confidence that he did what they needed of him. They’ll look at him as a stand-up guy and make sure he’s protected once he’s inside—especially since he refused to give any information to us or the Feds. I’m making sure it’s leaked to the family that he kept his mouth shut. This is the best possible outcome for him now. And for you. It protects you as much as it protects him.”
She pressed her lips together as her eyes welled up. “And he agreed to this?”
“Yes. He understands every angle, and he knows it’s best for you. He’ll take the second murder charge in exchange for his safety and yours.”
“How long will he be in prison?” she whispered.
“I don’t know. That’s up to the judge. But we’re talking double murder, so…probably for a long time.”
“His life is over anyway,” she whispered. A tear hit her lap, then another, as she bowed her head. “If I hadn’t followed him that night, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Ricardo surprised me by crouching in front of her. “Look at me,” he whispered. I might as well have not been there, even though my hands were still on her arms. She raised her eyes to his. “This is the best outcome for him now. He only would’ve gotten in deeper after this. It wouldn’t have ended well, either way.”
She sniff
led, then nodded. He patted her knee before standing. Meanwhile, I wondered what the fuck parallel universe I had just walked into, one where Ricardo got personal with my client.
“Have you contacted our parents?” she asked, wiping her eyes.
“Not yet. He didn’t want us to call them—just a lawyer, after we spoke with him privately.”
“I feel like I should be the one to tell them,” she whispered, then looked at me. “Don’t you think so?”
“I don’t know them,” I admitted. “If you think it would be easier to hear it from you, then yes. I think you should.”
“I just don’t want to leave them in the hands of a stranger,” she explained. “They deserve to hear it from me. In person.” When she squared her shoulders, I was even more proud than when she walked into that warehouse, knowing her brother might try to hurt her.
***
“So it all went as planned,” Pax said as he flipped through the file the day after the arrest. “Michael was willing to go along with the story that he killed the witness, which is what the police are citing as the reason for his arrest.”
I nodded. “He agreed to it almost the minute the option was put on the table. Once he knew what Ricardo planned all along, it was easy.He’ll be a protected man once he’s inside.”
Pax shook his head. “Wow. It’s all so complicated, that life.”
“I know. I always wondered why a person would want to get involved in something like that. The mafia.”
“There’s no such thing as the mafia,” he smirked.
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, right. You know what I mean.”
He grew serious. “There are people out there who wonder why we did what we did. Why would a man or woman willingly sign up to go through the hardship and maybe lose their life?”
That got me thinking. I tented my fingers under my chin. “But we did that because we believed in something. That’s different from getting brainwashed.”
“Some would still call it brainwashing,” he pointed out with a wry smile. “Either way, it comes down to the need to be in another person’s shoes. We don’t know what was going through the kid’s head when he got wrapped up in the family.”
“It sounds like he had everything going for him, too,” I pointed out. “I mean, popular, smart, good-looking. He had the world by the balls.”
“He was a good kid who wanted to get into something a little bad. He wanted the excitement. Plenty of kids fall for that sort of bullshit,” he mused. “I mean, how many kids drink and drive, or shoot heroin because they wanna see what it’s like? And what happens after that?”
“This is why I’m glad I don’t have kids,” I smirked.
“Nah, it’s still great.”
“You can say that, but you’re still years away from having to worry about what your kid’s up to when she goes out with her friends.”
“Please. Like I don’t worry about that now.”
“I guess the feds aren’t too happy with Ricardo right now,” I added.
“No, they’re not. But Michael was small-time. I would hate to see them put him in witness protection or get him killed just for the tiny bit of info he could get them.”
I remembered the look he had exchanged with Molly in the kitchen of the safe house, and the way they had whispered to each other, face-to-face, in his office. That feeling that there was something between them I couldn’t ever understand. “You know Ricardo pretty well, right?”
“Sure. We were kids together in school.”
“Right. I forgot about that.” How could I ask what I wanted to know? “What’s the deal with him? I mean, what was he like when he was a kid?”
“Pretty much the same as he is now. Smart, serious.”
“He was never mixed up with the wrong side of the law?”
Pax snorted. “Yeah, right. Him? The straightest, most solid guy I’ve ever known.” But he didn’t grin for long. “Actually, his sister was another story. I haven’t thought about her in a long time. Connie.”
“What happened with her?”
“She started dating a guy in a gang, I heard. Got sucked into that life. We were already in college when that happened—I remember my mom talking about it, how she saw Connie Montez on the back of a bike in the middle of a gang of guys. How it must have killed Ricky to know she was involved in that sort of stuff.” I bit my tongue to keep from grinning at Ricardo’s nickname.
“Is she out of the life, do you know? Or did she go to jail?”
“Neither,” he said, and his voice was grim. “She died on her twenty-first birthday. They were throwing her a party at some hideout they had, and a rival gang rode up on it and shot the place up. Thirteen people were killed, including Connie.” He shook his head. “She was a cute kid, I remember. Ricardo took a year off grad school, he was so broken up over it.”
“My God.” So that was it. He understood what she was going through. I was glad she had that, then, somebody to talk to who knew how it felt since I had no idea. I was starting to learn that I couldn’t be everything to her, as much as I wanted to be.
“What’s gonna happen now?” he asked.
The question shook me out of my thoughts. “Huh? With what?”
“With you and her. You know what I mean. I saw how you grabbed her when I came in with the cops. That wasn’t a friendly hug you gave her.”
I shifted in my chair. “I don’t know,” I admitted when it was obvious there was no sense in lying. “Now that it’s over, what happens? I mean, there’s no reason for us to be together. She has her life and has to get back to it. And there’s a ton of baggage to deal with—her parents, I mean. It’ll take a long time for them to get over what happened, if they ever do. Their son is going to jail for double murder and they can’t ever know one of those murders never happened. If they know, they might leak it somehow, and everybody agrees it’s too big a risk.”
“Even Molly?”
“Even Molly.”
Pax stood. “Well, I have another case for you, if you’re interested.”
I smirked. “Since when am I not interested?” Anything to forget the fact that Molly hadn’t called since everything ended. Anything to forget how much I wanted to call her, and how much I hated the way I needed her.
Chapter Twenty – Molly
I didn’t speak to my brother for another three months. He refused to see us during the trial, which I thought my parents might have been secretly grateful for. They didn’t want to see him any more than he wanted to see them. It would’ve been too painful on both sides. But I did want to see him, if only to ask him the question that plagued me on a daily basis.
Once he’d been sentenced and sent to the state penitentiary, I couldn’t resist the need to go to him. He still didn’t want to see us, but that didn’t matter much to me. I couldn’t abandon him no matter how hard he pushed me away. Not after what he did to protect me.
So it was a hot Sunday morning when I walked in through the heavy metal door and told the guard behind the Plexiglass divider who I was there to visit. They took my information and handed a pass through the small slot at the bottom of the window, then told me to wait until we were called. I found an empty seat and settled in between a woman carrying a sleeping infant and another who twisted her fingers in her lap, over and over. I could identify with her anxiety.
The walls were cinderblock, and I could tell layers and layers of white paint had been slapped over each other through the years. Some of it was chipped, but there was only more white paint underneath. They contrasted with the pea-green tile floor and plastic chairs. Fluorescent lights along the drop ceiling added the perfect, depressing touch. I wondered what it would be like to show up every week for a visit. How did some of the women—and they were almost all women—stand it?
What would he think when he saw me? I hoped he wouldn’t stonewall me. I wasn’t there to make his life miserable. I only wanted to talk to him and see him and know he wasn’t falling apart. And I needed to know the answer
to one simple question. It was eating me alive.
A guard entered the waiting room and announced we were to form a single-file line. He led us through yet another metal door and down a short hall, then through the door to a long room with a divider along the middle. So that was the way I’d seen it on TV and in the movies. It had to come from somewhere, right?
My heart hammered away as I sat down. This was it. What would he be like? Would he have changed even more in those few months? Had prison broken him? I clenched my fists, nails digging into my palms until it hurt.
The door on the other side of the divider opened, and I watched through the thick plexiglass window in front of me as a row of inmates filed into their side of the room. They all looked the same, and it wasn’t just the jumpsuits. They all had a sort of slumped stance as they walked. They dragged their feet. They didn’t look healthy, for sure, or happy. Who would?
Only one prisoner stood out from them, and I couldn’t help but smile when I saw him. Unlike the others, his shoulders were back and his chin was up. He didn’t have the tattoos the others did, either, and I knew he never would. He wasn’t that sort of person. There were things about him that wouldn’t change, no matter how many other parts of him did.
He gave a start when he saw me sitting there and lowered himself into the chair with a frown. “I told them I didn’t want you here. I don’t want you to see me like this.” So we weren’t going to waste time saying hello.
I had to smile, even if it was a sad one. “Mikey, I’ve seen you a lot worse. Remember?”
He grimaced, and I didn’t know if it was because of the nickname or because of the reminder of what we’d been through. “This is no place for you to be.”
“I understand you feel that way, but I had to come. I couldn’t stay away forever. You know that.”
He snickered. “Yeah, I know you. You can’t stay away even when you know you should.”
It was my turn to grimace. His smirk told me it was the reaction he was going for.
Lewis Security Page 29
