“You’re upset.”
Shannon’s hand squeezed her phone like she wanted to strangle it. “Oh wow, you really are as good at reading people as everybody says.”
“I must’ve forgotten to mention my son’s football scrimmage to you. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? You’re sorry? You said you’d be here and you’re not. You lied to me, Marcie, and now everything is a stiff breeze from rolling over a cliff.” Somebody across the street whistled at Shannon. She didn’t have the time or patience to muster up a better comeback than a middle finger. “I needed you to be here.”
“You may think that now, but given a little more time, I think you’ll find you’re a perfectly capable woman, Shannon.”
“Dedrick is inside the bar,” she said. “You told me he wouldn’t be here.”
“If you’re worried about him, maybe you should slow down on the drinking a tad.”
“I’ve only had one shot—I was the last detective to solve a case before the party.”
“Oh, dear. I’ve had to do that shot before. Was it Wild Turkey again?”
The mention of it made Shannon taste a little bit of whiskey clinging to the back of her throat. She almost gagged. “I don’t like doing shots,” she said. “I like wine and I like mixed drinks, and that’s where it all stops.”
“Well, why don’t you go back inside the bar, sip on a mimosa, and strike up a conversation with someone? Try not to think about Dedrick.”
“Try not to think about him? He’s right inside the door.”
“I know the situation seems untenable, but the only thing wrong between the two of you is that he feels he can’t trust you anymore. He can’t trust you aren’t going to lose your mind every time he comes around.”
“What? I don’t lose my mind—”
“Prove him wrong.”
Shannon couldn’t lie to herself. Yes, she’d been a little squirrelly around Dedrick … on her best days. With a jumbo shot of Wild Turkey eating the lining of her empty stomach, today did not appear to be one of her best days. Then there was the fact that she hadn’t seen or heard from Michael for an entire day.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m just going to go in, mind my own business, and enjoy myself.”
“I have every faith you’ll be able to do just that.”
Shannon looked through the glass double doors, which gave her a pretty good view across the bar, lengthwise. The bar stool where Dedrick had been sitting when she walked outside was now empty. “Promise me one thing before I hang up,” she said.
“I’ll try.”
“Don’t tell Dedrick about any of this.”
“Girl talk stays between us girls. But you know, Shannon—before you go—there’s someone I’ve been thinking about as well.”
“If you’re having an affair, leave me out of it.”
Marcie laughed. “I barely have enough time to take a shower before bed.”
“Then who is it?”
“Black Francis,” she said. “Or Frank Black, depending on what you prefer.”
Shannon smiled. “You figured it out.”
“Did I?” Marcie squealed. “I had my doubts, but my son is a fan of the Pixies, and when I told Steve about the teaser you’d given me, he overheard it and offered that name up. He said Black Francis sang for them, and that if you were into indie rock, you’d have to be a fan, too.”
“Their music got me through some of the hardest times of my life,” Shannon said. “I’m practically an acolyte.”
“So much so that you named your dog after the lead singer.”
“I’d tattoo his name on my forehead, but that sort of thing is looked down upon.”
Marcie was silent. She probably didn’t get that it was a joke. “Well, Shannon, I just want to say that I know we had our differences with this case, but I’m proud to have ended it with you.”
Saying the case “ended” was a funny way to put it. Though calling it “solved” didn’t exactly fit, did it?
“I was glad I ended this one with you, too. I couldn’t have done it without your help, Marcie.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Now, try not to drink too much tonight.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Shannon ended the call. She turned around and looked through the double doors again. She wasn’t ready to face Dedrick tonight, but she wasn’t going to leave. Marcus Adelson had been a friend to her early in her career—it’d be wrong to ditch him.
She looked into the reflection of herself on the door and checked her hair. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough for her to grab a Sex on the Beach, talk to Adelson for a minute, then head to the rooftop bar to collect herself before heading home.
Maybe she’d try calling Michael again tonight. She had to hope it wouldn’t go straight to voicemail again, or she had a long night of worrying and crying with Frank ahead.
Be strong.
She pulled the door open and smiled at Adelson, who spotted her coming in and immediately waved her over to a table with about a half dozen other detectives. She sat and ordered her drink from the waitress.
Marcie was right. The more Shannon swallowed down her drink and remembered the old times with Adelson, the more her troubles disappeared further behind her. She and Adelson laughed over the time the two of them kicked in some old lady’s door by mistake. The woman was so happy to see someone that, rather than get mad about it, she stuffed the two of them with fresh cookies right there on the spot, then sent Christmas cards to the both of them at District 12 later that year.
Shannon and Adelson must’ve sat together for an hour, reminiscing and trading stories before the table cleared, and Adelson’s face went from jovial to a little too grave.
“I heard you fell on some hard luck,” he said.
Her troubles were about to catch up to her again.
“I’ve had better luck.”
“I had a time when I got tripped by a string of bad cases. The union wouldn’t let me lose my job, but I almost lost my desire to work all the same.”
“How’d you get out of it?” Shannon’s drink was long gone by now. She tipped the glass up, caught a piece of ice between her teeth, and chewed it.
“I refused to run away from it,” he said. “I kept working case after case knowing that something would turn out for me so long as I didn’t stick my head in the sand.”
“Lately, I think my entire body is stuck in the sand.”
“We all get that. The job gets hard. Your personal life takes a couple hits. Maybe you get a divorce, or your dog dies, or your department gets downsized. In a fair world, all that stuff would jump at you one at a time, but this world never had a reputation for being all that fair, did it?”
“Never for me,” she said.
“Me neither.” He smiled at her. “But you know, Shannon, the worst thing you can do is let that stuff bury you. You gotta get back up and get at it. I know you. I know how hard-nosed you can be, and I know it takes a whole hell of a lot to knock you on your ass. But the way you’ve been since that Colm Keane case, I can tell something changed in you.”
She leaned back in her vinyl diner chair and sighed. She had too many drinks in her to lie to Adelson—not that she ever could. “I think that case changed a lot about me.”
“Maybe it did,” he said. “And maybe another one’s around the corner, waiting to pound you over the head.”
She put her hand in her pocket and thumbed the side of her phone, wishing Michael would call. “You’re good at making a girl feel better,” she said.
Adelson laughed. “You know me. I wouldn’t sit here and feed you lies just to make you go to bed a little easier tonight. If I did that, you’d wake up tomorrow feeling twice as bad.” He clapped her wrist. “You’ll get at it. I know you might run from it at first, but from one old Marine to another—we always bash our heads through the wall eventually.”
Adelson got up from his olive-green patio chair, tipped the last of his beer back, and walked toward
the bar.
Shannon picked the last chunk of ice out of her glass and popped it in her mouth. She scouted the room. Where was Dedrick now? Over near the far wall, tossing darts at an electronic board.
She wasn’t ready to head-butt that wall yet.
Instead, she took the staircase up to the rooftop bar. She didn’t need her coat now. There was more than enough booze in her blood to keep her warm.
When she got to the top of the steps, the view snatched the breath out of her. She wasn’t expecting anything spectacular, but that was only because she forgot that The Salvage Bar and Grill was a dozen blocks from the lake—and for her money, there was nothing more arresting than a full moon skipping its light across Lake Michigan.
It reminded her of the Indiana Dunes. Of sitting next to Frank with her toes in the sand, his ear between her fingers, and the Pixies album, Doolittle, thumping from her earbuds while she watched the starlight pulse in the waves.
Beautiful.
The rooftop bar itself kept the appearance of downstairs’ junkyard decor, but somehow it felt more delicate up here—more peaceful. Strings of white lights had been draped like vines across overhead scaffolds. There were a dozen or so picnic tables (made from reclaimed wood, of course) and lots of wicker chairs and side tables stationed around the perimeter.
A handful of people had come up here to sit, so it was relatively quiet, intimate, and—dare she think it—a tad romantic if she had someone to share a little space with.
Shannon walked past the bar and took a seat in a wicker chair with a back that ballooned up and over her head like a pod. It was positioned at the side of the building nearest the lake. She simply had to get the best view she could.
Was Michael out there somewhere, standing on the edge of Lake Michigan, throwing stones into the water? She’d called every hospital she could think of, and none of them had him. She’d even checked the arrest database, but no luck.
Hopefully Rochelle, or Miss Honey, or whatever name she went by, hadn’t abandoned him—that was to say nothing of how Shannon would rectify Michael’s likely involvement with Gregory Wendt’s death.
Was she going to arrest her own brother?
She rested her arms on the half-wall at the edge of the roof and watched the whitecaps catch moonlight before they sunk back into the lake.
“Shannon.”
She swung around. The hair on the back of her neck pricked up when she saw Dedrick standing behind her, stone-faced.
“I didn’t come to yell at you,” he said. “I didn’t really even come to talk. I wondered if you wouldn’t mind me sitting over here for a minute.”
He pulled a wicker chair within arm’s reach of her.
“That all right with you?”
There wasn’t room for a thought in her head—not an inch of space for any sort of deliberation to figure out if that was actually alright with her or not. Yet somehow, it felt right.
She nodded.
“Thanks.” He settled into the chair and put his feet up on the half-wall at the roof’s edge. He had a beer in his hand, which he drank like morning tea.
Meanwhile, inside Shannon’s head, her brain went to DEFCON-2. What had prompted this rash, unprovoked action on Dedrick’s part? Had she unknowingly antagonized him in some way? She thought they’d done a pretty good job of steering clear of each other tonight, all things considered. It wasn’t like she asked to be thrust in the spotlight by Boyd and made to drink a double-shot of Wild Turkey. She didn’t mean to grab Dedrick’s attention when she raised her hand at the bartender. And did she ask him to come up here for a sit?
No.
But she felt like she had to brace herself for an invasion.
“Actually,” Dedrick said, “I lied.” He swung his long legs off the wall and sat up in the chair, facing her.
Everything swirling in her head came to a dead stop. What was he going to do? Chew her out? Spit on her? Push her off the roof? She’d earned any and all.
“I wanted to say sorry,” he said.
What in God’s name was going on?
“In fact, I’m sorry for everything wrong I did,” he said. “For kissing you when I shouldn’t have, for not apologizing sooner, for yelling at you the other day about my car. I put too much on you. I ambushed you at every turn, and I treated you like I treated a lot of other women, when, in reality, you aren’t other women. You’re unique, you’re tough, and you’re beautiful—”
Shannon kissed him. Even she didn’t know it was coming.
Dedrick leaned into it. He wrapped his big arms around her, lifting her out of her chair and onto his lap, never breaking the embrace of their lips, of their overwhelming desire to find something good inside of each other.
But then he stopped. He pulled away from her. His big brown eyes felt the lines on her face, probably looking for some hint that she was going to run again.
She didn’t. She leaned forward and kissed him again. A little peck on his lips—like a stamp. “I’ve never been called unique before.” She smiled at him and he laughed.
They shared the wicker chair, holding each other and watching the moon watch them from over Lake Michigan.
CHAPTER 43
The next morning, Dedrick kissed Shannon awake in her own bed. In that moment, she forgot about her missing brother.
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand.
“Don’t answer it.” Dedrick kissed her neck, then moved his mouth southward one peck at a time.
“Careful what you start.” Shannon giggled and looked at her phone. With her head on her pillow, she couldn’t make out the text on the screen, but it looked like a number she hadn’t saved.
Was she going to answer it? Hell no. She let it ring and ring while she watched the top of Dedrick’s head drift further away from her face. Eventually, the phone stopped, and so did Dedrick.
“But I didn’t answer it.”
He looked up and smiled. “I’m keeping you in suspense.”
“Shut up.” She pushed down on the top of his head, the both of them laughing.
Shannon’s phone buzzed again. Two calls? She sat up in bed.
“No, you don’t.” Dedrick tried to pull her back down from under the covers.
“It’s the same number again.”
She didn’t know that for sure, but it made the most sense, right?
“Answer it, and I’ll start biting.”
“You start biting, and I get my Glock out of my nightstand.”
“I like a challenge.”
She reached for the phone. At the same time, Dedrick surfaced from the covers with his lower lip out.
“I’m gonna tell them to buzz off.” She answered it. “Hello?”
“Good morning, Shannon.” Ewan Keane’s voice turned her stomach. Of all the terrible times to call…. “You have my apologies for calling so early.”
“It’s no problem,” she said. “I was just hanging up anyway.”
“I have a message from Michael,” he blurted.
Shannon snapped upright. He didn’t have a message from Michael. He couldn’t have. He was playing a game. But then, how did he know telling her that would get her to listen? Did he know Michael was missing?
“You’re a liar.”
“That’s probably true, Shannon, but there’s an exception to every rule—you know I wouldn’t lie about Michael.”
“Okay, for the sake of argument, let’s say you aren’t lying. In which case, you can tell me where my brother is right now.”
There was a pause on the line and a sound like silverware clinking against a plate. Was he eating breakfast? Of course, a man like Ewan Keane would be able to emotionally torture someone and finish his egg in the basket at the same time.
“I wish I could answer that, but the truth is I don’t know.”
“Then how could you have a message from him?”
“Because twenty-four hours ago, he was with me.”
Shannon jumped out of bed. She almost dropped the phone when
she hit the floor, almost tripped over Frank, almost cried and screamed and put her fist through the window all at once.
Why would Michael go back to Ewan?
Instead, she took a breath, waiting for the blood in her muscles to slow. When it didn’t, she took another and another until the shards of reality came into focus.
“I understand why that news of Michael staying with me would be upsetting to you. But in the interest of an open dialogue, I’d like you to know he slept in my guest room last night, sharing his bed with a woman nicknamed Miss Honey. It seemed that she knew you,” Ewan said.
“In the interest of an open dialogue,” Shannon said, “I wish you’d shove your head up your own ass.”
Ewan cleared his throat, a subtle gesture that he was above all her emotional foot-stamping. “Please know that it was not my choice to wait before I made this phone call—I would’ve told you immediately, if it were up to me.”
“I understand,” Shannon said. “Your hands are tied because your bosses make every choice for you.”
“It was Michael’s request, not theirs.”
Michael’s request? The floor fell out from beneath her. That had to be a lie.
“He never said that—he wouldn’t hide from me.”
“He did, Shannon. And he asked me to call you just as I am now—six hours after he left,” Ewan said. “I keep my promises out of the love I have for your brother. I wouldn’t betray my children. It is because of the same love that I wouldn’t lie to you. I know you’ll never accept me as a father, but that doesn’t change my feelings one bit.”
“So that’s why you forced Tommy to commit suicide. Because you love me.”
She turned back to Dedrick laying on the bed, listening with a look of complete disbelief. Hopefully, he could only hear her half of the conversation, but even that was enough to complicate her life more than it already was.
“Your verbal sparring won’t take me off-track, Shannon,” Ewan said. “Your brother is in trouble. He killed a man he should’ve crossed the street to avoid. Now, there’s a firestorm about to drop on his head. I know you’ll probably ignore my warning, but I’m pleading with you to keep your distance—my influence can only stretch so far.”
Chicago Broken: Detective Shannon Rourke Book 2 Page 23
