by Hazel Parker
“I said I’d get put out to pasture sooner than I wanted, but it’s not like that means I’m going to retire that much further out,” he said. “Some weekends, I think, hell, put in my two-month notice now. Some weekends, I think I’d rather do this until I close my eyes forever. But let’s be honest, it will probably be closer to a couple of years, and then I’ll hit the road. We benefit from friends in other places. Nothing good ever came of an antagonistic relationship.”
My phone buzzed in my pocket, but I ignored it. The waitress came by a few moments later, taking our orders; I had a truffle egg sandwich, while Chief Gutierrez ordered the chicken fried steak. He laughed off my concerned look with, “What, I’ve gone fifty-some years without worrying about my diet, you think I’m going to start now?” He did, however, excuse himself to use the restroom, giving me a chance to check my phone.
It was a local number that I didn’t recognize. But as soon as I read the text message, I knew who it was immediately.
“Hey, Jenna, I need a favor from you.”
There was nothing identifying about that. It could have been many people. But only one sprung to mind.
“How did you get my number?”
A few seconds later, the text confirmed what I had already mostly known.
“You’re not the only cop at the PD that we have handy.”
Of course, I thought. I think the better question is how many of us do you have handy—and who would be left if the mayor’s office cleaned out everyone who was in your back pocket?
“I need you to go through the case file for Danica’s murder. I need an edited version.”
An edited version? What the hell did that mean?
“Why?”
I looked over my shoulder. Chief Gutierrez was coming back. I stole one last glance at the phone.
“I need the truth. But I can’t see her face.”
I “liked” the message, which showed a thumbs up. It felt a little tacky and a little callous to thumbs-up such a personal request, but I didn’t want him to think I’d just left him hanging. I locked my phone, slid it into my pocket, and smiled as the chief sat back down.
“So, are we good?” he said. “Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said. “Keep public police affairs public and keep private ones private.”
“Not just private,” he said. “Hidden. So far removed from the public sphere that people wouldn’t even think to check on it. If it ever got discovered, I don’t want people to say, ‘I knew it!’ I want them to go, ‘I never would have guessed.’”
We shared a relatively normal breakfast after that. Chief Gutierrez advised me that if I wanted to, I could have had the inside track to getting the chief job—he didn’t say that I’d get it when he retired, as that would go to one of the more senior officers, but he could position me so that the next time it opened, I could claim it.
I immediately agreed to it, fully aware that my dalliance—if that was the right word; I’m not sure there was a word to describe my relationship—with Dom could put all of that at risk.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about that request. Was he trying to see something that would exonerate me? And why did he want something without photos? Was the file that particularly gruesome? Was it that disturbing that he couldn’t look at it?
If memory served me right—and I hadn’t looked at the case file, ever; it felt like jinxing myself after getting exonerated—she hadn’t been shot in the head. The photos of the actual autopsy or crime report would not have been that bad.
But I shouldn’t have been judging. It wasn’t the love of my life lying lifeless on a steel table. It was his.
Chief Gutierrez noticed that I was distracted, even going so far as to call me out on it, asking if my mind was in the right place. Jokingly, I told him that it was so far removed that he would never have guessed where it was. He gave a smart laugh, winked at me, and kept picking at his food.
Just before we walked back into the police station half an hour later, I wrote a quick, curt message.
“I’ll get it taken care of.”
I closed my phone and left it in my civilian car, not wanting Dom to distract me for the rest of the day.
I didn’t get it taken care of, though, until the evening of my shift. I knew if I looked at it and it revealed something damning about me, I’d never stop thinking about it. That, and, well…
I wanted to hand-deliver it to Dom. Maybe that was stupid. Actually, that probably was stupid. Something that emotional… he needed to see it on his own.
That thought made me sound a lot more altruistic than I was. Selfishly, I wanted to be the one near him when he read it. I wanted to be the first person he saw, the innocent one, when he completed it. I…
Well, there was more to it than I was willing to admit to myself right now. A lot more, actually.
When the evening came, and my extended shift had come to a close, I finally went through the case files, pulling up homicides from January 1st, 2010. As it turned out, a whole lot more than usual murders took place on that day. The confluence of alcohol, large groups, and people making poor decisions led to a lot more deaths than a typical day would.
With that said, “a whole lot more than usual” didn’t mean there were thousands of murders to go through. It did not take me very long to find the final report on Danica Robinson’s death. I opened it, and after the cover page, I could see why Dom could not view it with photos.
The first photo was a full autopsy photo with her eyes open. It was sort of haunting, but not in the way that one would have a painting’s eyes follow. Rather, it was just so… stark. She was naked on the table, the bullet holes in her chest. She looked more like a prop to show fatal points of entry than she was a person. It was all so inhuman.
There were other photos, including ones taken at the crime scene, that were decently gruesome. There were witness testimonies, statements, reports, everything. The whole thing ran quite long.
But there was only one thing I, myself, had a particular interest in.
The conclusion.
I skipped to the very end.
“Police believe the preponderance of evidence points to Stewart Elliot being the primary suspect.”
Stewart Elliot… where had I heard that name before?
I ran the name in the database, and I suddenly realized why no arrest had ever been made.
Scar, the leader of the Degenerate Sinners, had killed Dom’s girlfriend.
Chapter 9: Dom
It was four in the morning again, and for the second day in a row, I’d gone home alone.
I didn’t even have Jenna to blame this time. I didn’t have Richard to blame, either, since he was back at the club. We hadn’t exchanged anything more than the normal greeting, in part to keep appearances up at the club, but also in part because I had spent all day waiting for Jenna to get me the edited case file.
I guess in that regard, you could say she was at fault for why my head was so fucked. But I didn’t see it that way. Maybe it was because I just didn’t want to see the file.
I’d lived the last decade with a story in my head. I had left Danica at the party. Someone had fired a gun that killed Danica. Jenna’s fingerprints were on that gun. Jenna, therefore, had killed Danica. That the LVPD couldn’t pull it all together was just the fault of a broken criminal justice system, not some sign of her innocence.
That was a fine story, until Jenna showed back up in my life and demonstrated that she was not the guilty person that I’d believed her to be. Quite the contrary, actually.
But the story I’d concocted and believed about what had happened could still be true. Jenna could have murdered her, and I would have just been played for a fool for this time. Or, as I believed now, Jenna had not murdered her, someone else had, and someone had gotten away with it.
It was just that the way it went down…
* * *
Ten Years Ago
“Hey, baby,” I said.
Finally,
Danica was going to come home. She’d had her fun, sure, but now it was time for some good, hot engagement sex. I’d obviously never had anything like it, but I liked to think that it was the deepest, most satisfying kind of sex there was. Well, maybe besides marriage sex, but that was inevitable since I’d proposed to her.
No, combining the surprise of the engagement, the knowledge of forever, and the physicality of youth all meant that this was going to be the most intimate and best sex we’d ever had.
“Mr. Browning.”
That’s not Danica. That’s a man. What the fuck? What the fuck!
“This is Officer Mario Gutierrez of the Las Vegas Police Department.”
The fuck? What’s going on here?
No cop ever called this late at night with good news. I was a law-abiding citizen who had never had any run-ins with the cops—I’d spoken to more cops at donut and coffee shops than I had for speeding or other crimes—but even I knew that a call this late was a really bad sign.
“Something happened to Danica. Son—”
“Where is she?”
“She’s at a house on—”
“I know where she is. Don’t let her leave without me getting there.”
“Mr. Browning—”
I hung up before Officer Gutierrez could say a word. I wanted to see with my own eyes what the hell had happened. If she’d gotten robbed, I wanted to hug her there. If she’d been assaulted, I wanted to comfort her. If, God forbid, something worse…
I couldn’t think like that. I tried not to think like that, which of course meant I thought even more like that. Had she died? Had she gotten in an accident? Would they even keep her there? What in the actual fuck was going on?
I hurried to my bike and sped out like a bug attracted to a flashlight. I swerved past cars, ran red lights, and generally broke just about every traffic law to get to where I needed to go. Danica needed me.
I turned the corner to the neighborhood, and before I’d even turned onto the side street for the particular house party, I could already see the flashing cop lights. I had a sickening feeling at the number of lights I saw, as it was certainly far more than one, probably way more than two cop cars.
When I turned, I nearly skidded out in horror. Not only were there two cop cars, but there was also an ambulance there. A crowd of people that I vaguely recognized sat out front, bawling their eyes out, holding each other, or just staring at the scene with numb expressions. She’s just hurt badly. She’ll be fine. She probably got hit by some drunk asshole leaving the party.
The thoughts were comforting. But they were fleeting.
I parked the bike in some neighbor’s driveway, not giving a fuck what was going on.
“Danica!” I shouted as if she might reply.
But when she didn’t, I shoved my way past the officers.
And that’s when I saw her.
She lay in a pool of blood. She was wearing the same outfit she’d been wearing just hours ago, but now she had three bullet holes in her chest. Her body did not move. No air came in and out.
“Danica, no, no, no, no!” I shouted, collapsing to my knees in front of her. “Come on, baby, come on!”
I put my hands on her neck, begging for anything resembling a pulse. I put my ear by her nostrils as tears started to form in my eyes.
“Baby, please, no, no.”
I could barely choke out the words. My entire body shook in horror and shock.
My fiancée… she was…
Gone.
I couldn’t even muster the d-word. It just seemed so final. Maybe if I just said she was gone, she could be found. Some miracle of science, some miracle of medicine would pull her back and bring her back. If I said the d-word…
“I’m sorry, son,” the familiar voice of Office Gutierrez said. “She was like this when we got here. The paramedics declared her deceased on the spot.”
And there it was. I had permission to say the word.
Dead.
Danica Robinson, my future wife, the love of my life, everything in my world, was dead.
“Baby, no… no… no…”
* * *
“No!” I roared, snapping myself out of the flashback.
“Jesus, Dom!”
I whirled around in surprise. What the fuck was Pork doing here?
“You got a fucking problem, man? You gotta be here?”
“Dom, I live here,” Pork said, raising his hands. “What’s going on? Are you OK?”
“No!” I shouted.
But I took a few seconds to calm myself. Pork still had his keys in his hand, as if he’d just entered the apartment. He still smelled of motorcycle oil. He hadn’t been watching me.
“No, Pork, I’m not OK,” I said. “I haven’t been OK for ten years.”
Pork looked at me in confusion. Who could blame him? He didn’t know.
No one in the club knew.
Not Richard. Not Pork. Not Barber. Not even Mama.
It was my secret. It was my skeleton in the closet. It was my damning truth.
The reason I liked so many girls and slept with so many was because I could never allow myself to love more than just one girl in this life.
“Dom? What’s going on, buddy?”
“Pork,” I said with a sigh. “You ever wonder why I’m such a whore? Why I let myself get carried away with all these women?”
“Because you can?”
That was oddly flattering. I just laughed, knowing it was probably the only laughing I’d get to do in the next several minutes.
“Well, that, and… well, I guess I should just tell you.”
And so, in vivid detail, sparing nothing, I told him about what had happened with Danica. I gave a brief overview of how I’d met her—at a high school football game, of all places—how she’d stayed with me during my tour overseas, how I knew she was the one. And then, I went into all the detail about what had happened that fateful night.
That fucking awful night.
I didn’t sob as I had that night. I could only bring myself to cry if I saw her dead body, much as I had with the case file the night before. Telling the story itself wasn’t grounds for crying, though. It was just… it was like I’d recited an emotional poem so much that it was less an experience and more of just an automatic retelling.
“Dude…” Pork said, bowing and shaking his head. “And you don’t know who did it?”
“I always thought it was Jenna.”
“The fucking bitch Mama spoke to?”
“I said, I always thought, not I still think,” I corrected.
Strange that I spoke so quickly to try to get that clarified. Not like her reputation matters that much to me.
Except…
“I don’t think she did it anymore.”
“Then who?” Pork said. “We’ve got the LVPD in our pocket. We can ask them to look into it. Arrest someone—”
“I’m having Jenna look at it now,” I said. “She’s going to send me a condensed version of the report.”
It sounded better than saying “edited” version. I knew what I meant, but Pork hearing that could have believed that Jenna would alter it to make herself look better. I knew she was very capable of doing that, but I believed she wouldn’t.
“In any case, with all of this in my head… I don’t ever let myself get close to anyone, Pork. I’m close to you guys and Mama because I’ve never looked at you as anything more than friends, but I don’t love. I don’t date. I don’t court. To do so would… well, it would let this shit happen again. And even if I did think I was ready to take that risk, I’m not over Danica. I think about her every day. I’ve got photos of her in my room.”
“I wondered who that girl was.”
I ignored that I’d never let Pork into my room. It was easy enough to imagine me leaving it open by mistake and him seeing the photos of her.
“So, yeah, it’s easier just to fuck and leave ‘em behind. I get off, I leave the girls, and we both leave happy.”
/> “Except you’re not happy.”
Goddamnit, Pork. How can you say things that are so stupid and ridiculous one moment and then say something that is far more profoundly true than I care to admit?
“That’s not… it’s true, but this isn’t a come to Jesus moment.”
“Maybe, but you know we’re here to help you,” he said. “All of us. Everyone in the club wants to do what they can to have your back. You don’t have to hide it. Don’t be like Tanya.”
It took a second to realize he was referring to Mama and her miscarriage. I got what he was saying. I was just in no mood to take advantage of it. I needed to know what was in that case file.
And right now, Jenna either hadn’t gotten the time to do it, or she had chosen not to.
“Yeah… yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”
* * *
I went to the Starbucks on Rancho Drive that so many of us frequented the next afternoon, sitting at an outdoor table with sunglasses and a hat pulled over my head. I sipped my cappuccino as I waited patiently.
I checked my phone. It was two p.m. on the dot. Up above, the sun shined on the city with nary a cloud in the sky; whatever thoughts we’d had about the city hitting a cool period had evaporated under the vengeful heat. That was the thing about the sun in Vegas—if it had a clear shot, it was merciless. It wasn’t so much that Las Vegas cooled down as much as it was that it went from hellishly hot to moderately hot.
I looked at the clear blue sky, finding my thoughts drifting back to Danica. Was there such a thing as the afterlife? Was she looking at me from above?
If she was, how did she feel about the return of Jenna? And, well, how did she feel that being around her was making me feel a certain way that I had not anticipated?
Would she forgive me for being around her so much? She was a pretty forgiving person in real life, but murder wasn’t exactly a sin that you could make up for with time. It—
The sound of a motorcycle interrupted my thoughts. I’ll have to come back to this one, baby. I promise I will. I stood up from my chair as Richard parked his bike, walked over, and shook my hand.
