DEATHBLOW

by Dana Marton

  “Thanks for watching over us.”

  “Not a problem.” He cleaned his plate, put it into the dishwasher, then turned to leave. “I’m not sure when I’ll be back.”

  If he wasn’t back by morning, they’d be gone. She wondered when she would see him again. She’d miss him. She squashed that thought. “Stay safe.”

  “You too. And lock up behind me.”

  She did.

  Her cell phone rang—unidentified number—as she was heading up the stairs with Justin to give him a bath.

  “Hey,” a strange voice said when she picked up. “Keith used his one phone call already to call his lawyer, so he paid me to use mine to call you. He said don’t worry about anythin’. He’ll be home soon. He’ll be takin’ care of you and the kid. He says that’s a promise.”

  The man on the other end put the phone down, the cold click ringing in her ear. She shoved her cell into her back pocket, picked up Justin, and held on to her baby as she carried him up the stairs.

  She knew what taking care of her meant. But Justin…. Oh God, would Keith file for official shared custody to teach her a lesson? Yes, he would. He was mad at her, and he would do anything to hurt her, teach her a lesson.

  Keith wouldn’t get full custody, she told herself. He wouldn’t get any kind of custody for years, hopefully. He was going to go to prison.

  She was going to be free of him for a long time. And during that time, she would figure out how to be free of him forever. She would save every penny she made and hire the best lawyer. Or move far away with Justin, someplace where Keith would never find her.

  She’d fought back before. It hadn’t worked, so she’d given in. She knew now that had been a mistake. Keith wasn’t going to turn reasonable. She was going to have to find new ways to fight him.

  Because there was no way she’d let Keith get his hands on Justin.

  Chapter Eight

  Wendy was safe. Joe still hated to leave her, but he had a job, and he was going to do it. He strode into the station, looking for the captain, but Bing had Jack Sullivan, one of the detectives, in his office.

  “That’s a new style for you,” Leila commented from behind the reception desk as she looked Joe over.

  In her mid-forties, she was trim, with short dark hair, a no-nonsense style and attitude. Her only weakness was shoes. A person was well advised not to ask her how many pairs she had. Touchy subject. She wore a modest pair today, although the heels looked like they could be used as a weapon in a pinch.

  She squinted as she scrutinized Joe’s best gangbanger wear: expensive sneakers, loose pants, black shirt.

  Joe shrugged. “It’s good to switch things up now and again.”

  He’d gone undercover as an up-and-coming Jersey wise guy, wearing an Italian suit when he’d first approached Ramos, then he’d changed little by little to fit in. In Ramos’s neighborhood it was better not to stick out too much on the street. Especially since Joe was supposedly hiding out in Philly. Lil’ Gomez had had a lot of fun advising him on how to blend, then mocking him when he’d been slow on the uptake.

  The more he looked like one of the guys, the more they treated him as such. His skills with basketball didn’t hurt either. He’d played football, but he was fast, and he had good hand-eye coordination. Give him a ball, any ball, and he’d do well with it. Ramos had a steel hoop on his garage behind the house, and his crew spent plenty of time bouncing the ball on the driveway. They were just kids, really. Ramos was the oldest at twenty-three.

  Leila shook her head as her gaze settled on Joe’s footwear. “I don’t know if I can trust a man who has fancier shoes than I do.”

  Joe grinned. “You’re jealous, and you know it. Working late?” Then his gaze wandered to the bulletin board behind Leila, where something sparkly hung from a long piece of red yarn and threw a rainbow over the paperwork as the sun coming through the window caught it. “What’s that?”

  “A crystal,” she said in a tone that would have gone better with dog turd.

  Joe raised an eyebrow.

  “It’s something to do with breaking up bad energy.” She rolled her eyes. “Robin. She’s having plumbing issues. She’ll be in later.”

  As Joe nodded, he noticed the lucky bamboo on the counter.

  Leila followed his gaze. “Don’t ask.”

  Leila was a no-nonsense woman who was likely a Marine drill sergeant in a previous life. The front desk, the break room, the files, the entire station, in fact, were organized within an inch of their lives. Which made life easier for everyone. They had more time to spend on fighting crime if they didn’t spend half their lives looking for something.

  Robin Combs, the new part-time dispatcher, was a hippie in her mid-sixties, a self-professed psychic.

  “She wants to paint the front door red,” Leila said. “It brings good luck in feng shui.”

  “She’s not Chinese.”

  Leila’s nostrils flared. “She’s one with the universe.”

  Joe looked at her and made a mental note to suggest to the captain that there was always someone at the station around shift change. It’d be bad press for the PD if the two dispatchers strangled each other.

  Come to think of it, it wasn’t like Leila to get upset over every last little thing. This was about more than lucky bamboo. About to walk off, Joe pulled back. “What did Robin really say?”

  She huffed, but then she drew her spine straight. “She said I’ll fall in love again. That I’m going to get married.” The last words were uttered in a tone so cold it could have frozen the leaves off the lucky bamboo. “As if I didn’t love my Billy.”

  Joe clamped his mouth shut. In fact, he grabbed an oatmeal cookie from the counter and shoved it in there. “Mhm. Uhm.” He made some sympathetic noises, then took the coward’s way out and slinked off for coffee.

  He caught Harper coming from the interrogation room.

  “Hey, the captain said you’d be coming in. I just brought in the suspect in the Brogevich case. The schizophrenic patient, Lewis Brown. He’s not saying much.”

  Joe thought of Phil, stepped forward. “I’d like to give it a go.”

  Harper moved aside. “No problem. He’s all we got for now. Judge’s dragging his feet on the warrant for patient records. Touchy subject, since the victim was a psychiatrist. He could have prominent people among his clients, the mayor, anybody. The captain put a call in. We’ll get a warrant, but it might take a while.”

  “I can help with going through the patient records when you get them.”

  “That’d be great.”

  They exchanged a look of we’ll-get-this-done, then Joe stepped into the interview room, while Harper went to the observation room to watch.

  The man sitting by the small table in handcuffs was in his mid-twenties, average height, skinny, wearing faded jeans and a wrinkled yellow shirt. His wild black hair stuck up in every direction. He fidgeted on the chair, clasping and unclasping his hands on the table, clearly agitated.

  He started with, “They want to frame me.”

  “Hi, Lewis. I’m Officer Kessler. I’m here to help you.” Joe took the seat across from the man. “Who wants to frame you?”

  “The government.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I don’t trust you. First they used my doctor to make me crazy. Now they’re using you.” Lewis dropped his hands into his lap and shrank back. “You’re here to kill me, aren’t you?” He shrunk back in his chair, sweat beading above his lips.

  Joe kept his posture relaxed. “I’m here to help. I promise. Where’s your doctor now?”

  “Dead. They killed him. They killed him because he failed with me.”

  “Were you mad at Doctor Brogevich?”

  The man wouldn’t meet Joe’s eyes. “He set me up. He was a bad man.”

  “Bad men have to be punished. That’s what I do. Did you punish the doctor, Lewis?”

  The suspect shook his head with over-the-top vehemence. “The government did. No
t me.”

  Joe went a few rounds with him, getting nowhere, before his lawyer arrived. And then, with the lawyer came the alibi. Lewis had been with his attorney at the time of the murder. He was suing his parents for trying to force him to take his pills.

  “Would have been too easy,” Harper remarked once he released Lewis to his attorney.

  Joe nodded. “Maybe we’ll get a better lead from the patient records.”

  “I’ll call you when the warrant comes in,” Harper said. “We might have another clue. Lab reports are back on the murder weapon. All the blood on the phone is from the victim, but there are also traces of fresh paint.”

  “The railings outside were freshly painted the day before the murder,” Joe said.

  “Right. That paint might have preserved the killer’s fingerprints before it dried. I’m heading out there to see about that.” Harper hurried away.

  Then the captain spotted Joe through the window of his office and waved him in. Jack was still with him.

  “Jack will drive you into the city. He’s heading in to pick up Maddie from her grandfather.”

  “Thanks.” Joe followed Jack out. “How is Maddie doing?”

  Maddie belonged to Jack’s girlfriend, Ashley. The seven-year-old cutie-pie pretty much had Jack and the entire station wrapped around her little finger. Looked like an angel on the outside. On the inside…. Inventive. The week before, she’d jammed chocolate chip cookies into the fax machine to send a few home, since her mother had said when Maddie came to the station with Jack, she could have only one cookie per visit.

  “She spent the day with her grandfather,” Jack said. “I’m preparing myself for the sugar high. I can tell you this much, little girls are not sugar and spice.”

  They barely reached reception when the captain called after Jack, “If you change your mind. We’ll be here.”

  Jack nodded, glanced at Leila who was on the phone, staring balefully at the rainbow the crystal cast over her paperwork. He raised an eyebrow at Joe. Joe shook his head. He wasn’t going to go there.

  “Change your mind about what?” he asked as they strode out of the station.

  “I handed in my resignation.”

  Joe stopped in his tracks. “What are you talking about?”

  Jack smiled, which would have been unheard of a year ago. He’d been a morose bastard and then some, obsessed with tracking down the serial killer who’d murdered his sister. He did get his man—and saved Ashley and Maddie in the process. And he’d found love.

  Love was a pest, no doubt about it. Joe had tried it once. It’d ripped his guts out. No sane man would go back.

  Yet not only did Jack’s smile not fade, but his lips stretched even wider. “Ashley’s expecting.”

  Joe almost asked, Are you sure? Quitting a job because a woman said she was pregnant didn’t seem like the best idea. Okay, Ashley wasn’t Erika. All women didn’t make up pregnancies to trap men. But some did. Erika had done it to Joe. And these days, a woman could buy a positive pregnancy test for fifty bucks online to drive her boyfriend crazy.

  None of which had anything to do with Jack, so Joe reached out to shake his hand. “Congratulations. Man, that’s big.”

  “Yeah. I can’t wait.”

  Joe thought of the single day and night he’d spent guarding Wendy and Justin. Would living with a family be like that? That hadn’t been too bad. It’d been kind of nice, actually.

  “You don’t have to quit because she’s having a baby,” he told Jack as they got into his car.

  They were out of the parking lot by the time Jack said, “I became a cop for one reason only, to catch the man who took my sister. All my adult life, all I’ve done was look for a murderer. I want to try something else.”

  Okay, that made sense. “What do you think you’ll do next?”

  “Maybe get into private security. I’m going to take a few months off, be there for Ashley when the baby is born. After that….” He shrugged. “I’ll figure something out.”

  “How did the captain take it?”

  “He’s not happy that I’m leaving, but I think he’s happy for me.”

  That made sense too. “When are you leaving?”

  “I’m going to close out my current cases, but I won’t take any new ones. Once my desk is clear, I’m good to go.”

  “You need help with anything?”

  Jack shook his head. “You?” He checked over Joe’s unusual clothes and narrowed his eyes. “I guess you’re in some kind of undercover gig. Bing wouldn’t say.” He waved off his last words. “Never mind. It’s on a need-to-know basis, and I don’t need to know. Be careful. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “I promise not to go out of my way to get myself shot.”

  They talked about Jack’s current caseload on the drive into Philly. Then Jack dropped Joe off two blocks from his car and drove away.

  The black Camaro—with red racing stripes—was where Joe had left it. He hadn’t even gotten a ticket or his hubcaps stolen. Sweet.

  He drove down dirty streets, past an abandoned factory with the windows all broken out, then down Brant Street to Gomez’s aunt’s house.

  The neighborhood was poor, with a mix of ethnicities. The kids in the hood grew up together, joined the gang together, replacing members who were killed. Black, white, Hispanic, Chinese—color didn’t much matter. Their common link was the bone-deep poverty they’d been born to and their burning desire to conquer it somehow in their own way.

  The four-bedroom row house belonged to Gomez’s aunt who was pretty much restricted to her upstairs room, in a wheelchair. The downstairs belonged to Gomez and his crew as gang headquarters. He liked to keep the “family” together.

  Trigger, a pitbull recently retired from fighting, guarded the property. Paco, Will, and DeShawn lounged on the derelict front porch. Trigger recognized Joe first, running to him when he was still two houses away. The dog was missing most of his left ear, his muzzle crisscrossed with scars. He had a limp, but he didn’t let that slow him down any.

  He greeted Joe, his whole body wiggling, as sweet as a lapdog. When Joe squatted to give him a treat, he swallowed it in one gulp, then licked Joe’s face with enthusiasm. Trigger loved people. However, he’d been trained to hate other dogs, and he did that with a burning passion. Letting him run free outside was beyond stupid.

  “Hey. Better take this bad boy inside before he eats a Chihuahua,” Joe called to the men as he straightened. “Ramos needs no police around here.”

  Paco and DeShawn pushed to their feet, swearing after the dog and calling him back, staring wide-eyed at Joe.

  “What the hell?” DeShawn bumped fists with him. “We thought you was dead, bro.”

  Joe put on a miserable expression. “Freaking concussion. Got my face busted. I had to go to the hospital, then just laid low, whacked out on painkillers.” He shrugged. “My phone’s on the bottom of the river. What’s up here?”

  Paco and Will came to clap him on the back. They escorted him in. He made sure the dog went inside with them.

  “Going to war,” Paco said, grinning, once they were inside.

  Ramos Gomez and six others were in the sixties kitchen in the back, sorting ammo on the scarred, yellow Formica kitchen table.

  Ramos was as badass as they came, would shoot a guy for looking at him the wrong way. Joe had studied his file, did some of his own research too, before he’d gone undercover. And he’d been collecting every snippet of information he could find on the gang leader since.

  Ramos Gomez had been born to a drug-addict single mother. He had other brothers and sisters, but they were taken from the home by Social Services. By the time he was six, he was buying his mother drugs on the street. By the time he was eight, stealing their daily food was his responsibility. He killed his first man when he was ten, his mother’s dealer who’d come to their house to harass her for money, then proceeded to rape her.

  They had one semi-good year after that, at the end of which she gave
birth to another child, Jesus. She overdosed the day she got home from the hospital with the baby. That was when Ramos and Jesus, a crack baby no one ever gave much of a chance for making it, came here to live with their aunt.

  The brothers stuck around with the aunt, even after she had to go into a wheelchair, even after her mind gave out to Alzheimer’s. She wasn’t much trouble. She spent her time watching TV upstairs. She was happy as long as she was fed three times a day. She didn’t interfere with any of the business going on downstairs.

  Ramos loved three things: the gang, his aunt, and his brother Jesus. He was the only person who called the kid by his given name. Everyone else called him Lil’ Gomez.

  “Hey.” Joe stepped forward, keeping his eyes on Ramos.

  A cheer rose when the crew around the table spotted Joe. They all got up to punch him in the shoulder or whack him on the back.

  “Yo, bro.”

  “Back from the dead, man?”

  Ramos stayed in his seat, watching him.

  Joe said, “Fucking Hummer pushed us right off the bridge.”

  Ramos’s face tightened. “We gonna take care of that.” His eyes narrowed to slits as he looked Joe over. “Where you been, bro?”

  “Got a concussion when the car crashed into the river. I thought my head was gonna fall off.” He shrugged. “Wasn’t sure who pushed us over. I thought I’d better lay low for a couple of days.”

  Ramos swore. “Word on the street is J.T.’s guy did it.”

  “Where’s Lil’ Gomez?” Joe made a show of looking around. “Last I saw him, he was hanging on to a log.”

  “He couldn’t swim,” Ramos said darkly. “Those fuckers killed my brother.”

  Joe swore his own blue streak. “When are we gonna hit them? I want to be there, man.”

  He didn’t normally join the gang when they did business, but he had a perfect excuse this time. He’d been personally affected.

  “You got those guns you promised?”