by L. A. Witt
Naturally, Brando’s apartment was on the second floor, and this building didn’t include an elevator. Though even if it had, I wasn’t sure I’d have gotten in it.
Darren eyed the rickety stairs. “You want to wait down here while I—”
“No.” I held my crutches in both hands, the wobbly railing in the other, and hopped onto the first step. Just that impact—and I wasn’t that big of a guy—seemed to rattle the building. But these stairs were dividing me from someone who was involved in kidnapping my kids, so . . . I hopped up the next one. All the way up, I just tried not to think about the fact that I’d have to come back down.
As I made it past the top step, the door to apartment five flew open and an irritated black woman poked her head out.
“What’s with all the noise? My baby’s sleeping!”
“Sorry, ma’am.” I tucked my crutches under my now-sweaty armpits. “Just trying to get up the stairs.”
She looked me up and down, gaze pausing at my cast. Then she scowled and stepped back inside, closing the door with a bit less force this time.
I couldn’t blame her. Nothing worse than living in an apartment with a baby, and having some inconsiderate asshole make noise at the most inopportune moment. I just hoped her baby wasn’t a light sleeper or borderline insomniac like Ben and Erin had been as infants. I hoped hers was more like—
My breath hitched.
Like Casey. Or Emily. Both of whom could sleep through anything.
I winced at my own thought, then quickly forced it out of my mind. I couldn’t help them if I was too busy getting maudlin over them.
We stopped in front of apartment four. With Darren behind me, I knocked.
“Who the fuck is it?” came an annoyed male voice from the other side.
“Two assholes with badges and guns,” I growled. I smacked my badge against the peephole.
On the other side, there was some movement, followed by some muffled cursing. “Just a minute.” A second later, three locks opened—a chain and two dead bolts. Paranoid much? When the door opened, a lanky white guy in low-slung jeans and nothing else leaned on the jamb. There was definitely a bruise on his ribs. I tried not to think about whether it came from an elbow, a foot, or a fist.
The guy exhaled. “Can I help you pigs?”
“Yes.” I gripped my crutches tighter just to keep my hands off his windpipe. “I’m Detective Ruffner. This is Detective Corliss. We need to ask some questions.”
“Detectives, eh?” He watched us with heavy-lidded, incredibly bored eyes. “I don’t see any badges. How do I—” His eyes flicked past me, and I assumed Darren had shown him his badge. “Okay. So what do you want?”
“Are you Brandon Wallace?” I asked.
“My mom calls me that.”
I tightened my fists, reminding myself they were more useful there than in his left eye socket. “You go by Brando?”
He grinned, almost puffing out his chest like he was thrilled we’d heard of him. “Yeah. So what do you want?”
Your head on a—
“Where were you the night before last?” Only years of training and practice kept the murderous undercurrent out of my voice. “Between nine and ten?”
He tilted his head, resting a hand on the doorjamb and cocking his hips like he wanted to show off his toned torso while he was deep in thought. “Huh. You know, I don’t really remember. I’m a busy man, so I—”
“Why don’t you try remembering?” Darren wasn’t so subtle about his distaste for Brando’s games. “Because it’s kind of important that you answer.”
“Yeah?” He was taunting us, the fucker. “Why’s that?”
“Just answer the question.” My patience was waning rapidly. “Where were you?”
Brando shrugged. “I was here.”
“Can anyone vouch for you?” Darren asked.
The idiot flashed an enormous grin. “Just the girl who was getting my dick wet.”
I gritted my teeth. “We’ll need her name and number.”
Brando laughed. “She’s not hard to find. Soon as the sun goes down, she’ll be over on Fifth Ave with all the others. Just look for the one who’s walking like she got fucked by a horse.” He grabbed his crotch for emphasis.
I glanced at Darren. His puppy-dog eyes were a distant memory, and he stared Brando down with nothing but icy, barely contained fury that mirrored my own. Facing Brando again, I cut to the chase. “We’ve got an informant who saw you paying off a loan shark named Pitbull.” I paused, watching for a tell. His lips twitched subtly, and his posture wasn’t quite so relaxed. “Where’d you get that money?”
He narrowed his eyes. “None of your business unless you’re the IRS. So, you know, when I finish my tax return, I’ll send you a copy and—”
Sudden movement shut him up and startled me, and in the time it took me to blink in surprise, Darren had stepped around me, grabbed Brando by the throat, and slammed him against the wall hard enough to crack the drywall.
“What the fuck, man?” Brando squawked. “Police brutal—” He howled when Darren dug his other hand into that angry bruise on Brando’s chest.
“You want to play games?” Darren snarled, his face inches from Brando’s. “Because I know a good one. It’s called ‘How long can I press my thumb into your jugular before you pass out?’” For emphasis, he pushed in his thumb, and Brando gagged.
“Jesus!” Wide eyes darted back and forth from me to Darren. He met my gaze, and the fear in his eyes deepened. Quite likely because I probably looked as stunned as he felt. “Okay! Okay. Just . . . not out here.”
“You gonna talk?” Darren didn’t let up on Brando’s throat. “Or are you gonna jerk us around?”
“I’ll talk! I’ll talk!”
Darren held on, looking straight into Brando’s eyes. I couldn’t see his expression, only the way it made Brando try to draw back.
I was about to tell Darren to ease off, when he let go.
Brando slumped over and coughed, clutching his bruised side and revealing the Brando-shaped dent in the drywall. His landlord would be thrilled.
While Brando was occupied with getting his breath back and letting some blood return to his brain, Darren turned toward me. Rage still burned in his eyes, but he was in control. And he’d sure as shit gotten Brando’s attention.
We stepped inside. Darren shut the door behind us.
“Come in, Detectives,” Brando croaked with equal parts fear and sarcasm.
“Now might be a good time to talk,” Darren said coldly.
“Whatever.” Rubbing his throat gingerly, Brando looked at me. “So you must be the good cop.”
“No. I’m the one who wouldn’t have let you go.” I wasn’t even joking.
His eyes darted between us again, and he drew back into the dent he and Darren had made in the dingy wall. “What the fuck do you want?”
“No more games.” I glared at him. “I want to know who paid you to kidnap my kids.”
In an instant, his eyes went round and his jaw went slack, but he recovered quickly. Sort of. “What? No, I . . . You’ve got the wrong guy.”
“Do we?” Darren asked. “Because our informant gave us your name, your address, and told us you were drunk and bragging about kidnapping a cop’s kids. And right now, we’ve got two others in custody who said they worked with you. First person to give us the information that leads us to the kids might have a shot at a plea deal.”
Brando gulped. “What? But I . . . What are they saying?”
“You tell us,” Darren said flatly. “Or you take your chances when your buddies roll on you.” He gestured at me. “He shook one of them up bad enough, the guy was pretty eager to give a statement.”
Again, he eyed us both.
Then, slowly, he deflated, and it was like the Brando persona slipped away in favor of Brandon Wallace. Not a smarmy kid who liked to taunt cops, but an adult who knew when he needed to man up and cooperate.
Well-played, Darren.
<
br /> Motioning for us to follow him, Brando pushed himself off the wall and shuffled into the corner of his studio apartment that was apparently the living room. He dropped onto the sofa, offering us the mismatched folding chairs on the other side of a footlocker that doubled as a coffee table. We both stayed standing.
“There isn’t really much I can tell you,” he said. “My crew and I, we usually just steal shit, you know? Cars and whatnot. But then Weyland and I were leaving the courthouse after our probation hearings, and this guy stops us. Says he’s got a guy who needs a job done, and they’ll pay us a fuckload of money.”
“Can you give us a description of the guy?” Darren flipped open his notebook.
Brando nodded. “Yeah, he was a white guy. Clean cut and all. Last person in the world you’d expect to offer something like that. I actually thought he was a cop at first, but he checked out.”
“Checked out?” I asked. “With who?”
“Weyland made some calls. Checked with people we knew. Couple of them even said they’d been approached by the same guy for the same job, but didn’t take it because they didn’t deal in people.”
I shuddered. “So why did you take the job? I thought you just stole things?”
Brando’s cheeks colored, and he stared at the well-worn and stained carpet between his feet. “I owed people money. A lot of money. The cash they were offering . . .” He sighed, then looked at us again, all the fight gone from his posture and his expression. “I couldn’t pass it up. I mean, we grilled the guy as much as we could. This wasn’t a human-trafficking thing. It wasn’t anybody getting killed.”
Nausea tightened my throat, and before I could speak, Darren asked, “What was it, then?”
“They didn’t give us a lot of details. Just said they wanted to fuck with a cop who’d fucked them over.” Brando’s eyes locked on mine, and he drew back like he thought I might take a swing at him.
“Tell us how the job went down,” I said.
He pulled in a deep breath. “We had people inside and waiting in cars. Figured we’d follow everyone out and make our move. When Weyland saw the older daughter and the younger one go in the bathroom, he changed the play a bit, and had me grab them on their way out. Lead them through the kitchen and out the back door.”
My blood boiled, and I hoped Erin had fractured a couple of his ribs when she’d left that bruise.
Brando went on. “I took them out the back, put them in one of the cars, and then they grabbed the other two. The boys. Tried to, anyway.” He shook his head. “Somebody got in the middle of it. Shot at us. Crane tried to shoot him too, but thank God, Weyland stopped him. I mean, we weren’t in this for murder, you know?”
I was definitely going to get sick if I heard much more. I glanced at Darren, who’d blanched. How did somebody take the realization that a thief trying to stay out of maximum security might be the only reason he was still alive?
Brando pressed his elbows onto his thighs. “That’s all I got, man. That’s how the night went down, and all the details I had. I’m surprised they gave us that much.”
Nothing in his tone or expression suggested he was lying. Maybe it was wishful thinking on my part—I was desperate for something that might lead us to Emily and Casey—but I believed him.
“We need you to put us in contact with Weyland,” I said.
He scowled, but nodded, and wrote his buddy’s information on the back of a Chinese takeout receipt.
After I’d tucked that away in my wallet, I turned to Darren. He shook his head as if to say he had nothing else to ask.
“All right.” I pulled a set of cuffs out of my pocket and handed them to Darren.
Brando’s eyes widened, and he drew back like we were passing a venomous snake between us. “What the fuck? I told you what you—”
“You kidnapped my kids,” I said through my teeth. “Trust me. You’re safer in a holding cell.” I glared down at him, and he paled.
Darren motioned for him to get up and turn around. After he’d cuffed Brando and read him his rights, he put him back down on the couch and motioned for me to join him at the opposite end of the tiny apartment. We both turned so we could still keep an eye on our cuffed suspect, but kept our voices low so he didn’t hear us.
“What do you think?” Darren asked. “About his story, I mean?”
“I think he’d still be fucking with us if you hadn’t put the fear of God into him.”
He managed a quiet laugh, and I was grateful for that. Nodding toward Brando, he said, “I think he’s telling the truth.”
“Yeah. Me too.” I touched his arm. “You okay?”
He nodded. “You?”
“As okay as I can be right now.”
That seemed to be enough for him. Beggars couldn’t be choosers at the moment. “So after we dump his ass in holding, what’s our next move?”
“Next move is we find Weyland and the guy who put them up for the job.”
“Paula might have some connections. Or Pitbull.”
“Right. We’ll put in a call to her, and get him on the horn too.” I shifted my gaze toward the front door. “In fact, you can do that while I’m getting down those fucking stairs.”
When we brought Brando into the precinct, Paula took one look at the three of us and promptly took the guy off our hands, which was good because mine were starting to shake. I’d been running on next to no sleep for the past forty-eight hours, there was more caffeine in my veins than blood at this point, and I was starting to get punchy. Almost literally, in Brando’s case. I didn’t like the way I’d lost my temper with him, but I didn’t like the fact that he’d helped kidnap and terrorize Andreas’s kids either. One definitely weighed more strongly on my conscience, and it wasn’t Brando’s tender feelings.
Walking up and down those flights of stairs hadn’t done Andreas’s foot any good. He was wincing as we made our way to the conference room, and it was on the tip of my tongue to ask him to stay here while I went to pick up Weyland myself. Maybe I could talk him into it.
Someone had left bottles of water and sandwiches in a cooler in the conference room. I regarded them with suspicion until Andreas noticed them and smiled. Actually smiled, and unwrapped one of them almost immediately.
“So. Not poisoned, then?”
“Nah. Marcy left these. She always uses this kind of cooler.” He tapped the top of it with an index finger. “Turkey and Swiss, probably. She used to make these for me when she knew I was going to pull an all-nighter.”
“Ah. So your ex-wife made them.” I glanced down at the sandwiches and back at him. “Are you sure they’re not poisoned?”
Andreas rolled his eyes. “We’re divorced, not at war. Eat. I can hear your stomach growling.”
The sandwich was okay, but the water tasted like nirvana. I downed a whole bottle without stopping to breathe, then reached for a second. I waited for Andreas to be in the middle of a bite before saying, “I can go get Weyland if you want to grill Brando some more.”
He shook his head and swallowed before speaking up. “Are you kidding me? I’m not letting you go into that part of town alone.” The address Brando had given us was on the upper north side of the city, where a public housing crisis in the eighties had led to refitting a bunch of old clothing factories into lower-income family housing. They’d been neglected ever since, and would probably be condemned if the city council ever bothered to get formal about it. As it was, they were mostly forgotten, which made them a good place for bad things to happen.
“I could take someone else with me. Blaine, maybe.” He might be squarer than a Rubik’s Cube, but he seemed eager to help, and he’d move faster than Ross or Schneidmiller. It wouldn’t be too hard to hunt him down and ask.
“In that neighborhood, he would only get you shot faster. Don’t even try this with me, Darren. I’m not in the mood to fight you right now.” But I will, his dark eyes shouted, so I gave up.
“Fine. So we’ve got an address, but we don’t know wha
t this guy looks like. We should get a description before—”
“I’ve got you covered!” Paula walked in, waving a cell phone in one hand. “Brando—and how adorable, right? It sounds like a stripper name—was more than happy to pull up some pictures on his phone. I’ve got one of him, Weyland, and some guy named Crane right here.” She grinned. “Gotta love millennials. They can’t resist the chance to take a selfie.”
“Hey! I resent that remark.” Just because I occasionally used Snapchat with Erin . . .
“Aw, Darren.” Paula patted my shoulder. “At least you’ve never taken a selfie during the commission of a crime.”
Andreas’s jaw dropped. “You’re kidding me.”
“Nope. Say hello to Dumb, Dumber, and Dumbest, complete with masks and guns.” She turned the phone toward us. Brando was on the right, a black mask pulled high on his forehead, one hand wrapped around his friend, the other holding what looked like a Glock 9mm. One of the other guys had his tongue out, and the last one was flexing his biceps. Holy shit. We were going after the frat boys of the criminal underworld.
“Marcus Weyland is the one in the middle,” Paula added. “Is it wrong for me to think that drawing a dick in permanent marker on his cheek would really complete the picture?”
I laughed, then turned it into a cough in a last-ditch attempt to save my dignity. “We, uh . . . This only accounts for three of the kidnappers. There were at least five people total.”
“Brando apparently doesn’t know the others—they’d been hired before he and his boys agreed to pick up the slack, and there was very little fraternizing between the crews. According to him, the only one the other guys would deal with was Weyland.”
“What about the go-between? The man that hired them originally?”
Paula frowned. “I’m not sure where he fits into things yet.”
