by Rhys Ford
I’d like to say I felt no pleasure in smashing apart the guy’s forehead, but I’d be lying.
The first hit was hard. It had to be. There was no going back from this. I had to take the guy down as fast and hard as I could, because if he gained any advantage, I was going to die. As healthy as I tried to keep myself, there were things I’d never been able to overcome—scar tissue from the bullets Ben put in me and the chasm opening up in my chest where fear rushed in to fill. My muscles were seizing up. I hadn’t stretched out that morning, and now the burn was reminding me I was getting too old for this kind of shit.
The gun went flying, but I wasn’t going to chase it. I was done dealing with this asshole, and there was no way in hell I was going to leave him in any shape where he could get to Jae. His hands were how he made a living. They needed to go first. I wasn’t going to leave him in any condition to ever get his fingers around anything ever again. If I didn’t, he was going back to killing, and he would probably succeed if he came for me and mine one more time.
That was never going to happen. I was never ever going to walk in and find this asshole waiting for me in the dark. And I didn’t care what I had to do to make that a reality.
There wasn’t any blood splatter until the third strike of the phone down on his gun hand. I’d tackled him to the floor, pinning him in the chair and using my weight to hold him down, my free hand at his throat while I concentrated on pulverizing his fingers. The rotary chimed and rang as I smashed it down, its bell clapper striking the metal dome hidden in its guts from the wild flailing of my arm rising and falling. It was a curious infinity of noise, a jangle of bells punctuated by the snapping of crushed bones and his high-pitched screaming.
There might’ve been begging. I didn’t know. I didn’t care, and I wasn’t listening. I’d stopped listening to whatever was coming out of his mouth right after Jae’s name dropped off his tongue. I’d already lost everything once, including myself, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to go through that all over again. I wasn’t going to hold Jae’s lifeless body as he bled out, his eyes filming over and the too-painful stillness of his heart beating one last time. Not if I could help it.
Never again.
When I was done with one hand, I started on the other, working to make sure neither one of them would ever fit around a knife’s hilt or through a trigger guard. I didn’t stop until I heard Jae’s voice break through the rush of blood coursing through my brain, yelling at me to put the phone down, his hands desperately yanking at my shoulders.
I sat back then, actually resting against the man’s twitching legs because I’d ended up in his lap, nearly as trapped in the chair as he was. I couldn’t catch my breath for the fear and anger racing through me, but Jae being there helped.
“Let it go, hyung. The cops should be here soon,” Jae murmured, helping me up.
My legs were numb, too rubbery to stand on, but I did my best. My fingers were cramped around the phone, and Jae had to pry them up, the rotary falling to the floor with a loud clatter. I didn’t hear any sirens, but the heavy tread of running boots and shoes beat up the sidewalk and onto the stoop. My hands were wet, and I looked down at them, not surprised to see them coated in blood and sweat.
“I want to know who sent him. I want to know who brought him to my front door and put Jae in his crosshairs,” I growled at O’Byrne as she came through the front door, her gun up and sweeping the room while a uniformed cop followed close behind her, covering her blind side. “And I want to be there when you start asking him those questions, because I’ll be damned if some asshole like him sits a couple hundred feet away from my husband and threatens him. I don’t care who started this. I’m going to fucking finish it, and they’re going to wish they got off as lightly as he did. I’m done playing, O’Byrne. It’s time we got some answers.”
THE CITY of Los Angeles didn’t put a lot of money into their interview rooms. The paint scheme ran to baby-puke green, and the metal tables and chairs looked like they’d gone through a few wars in a middle school before finally ending up providing a seat for the asses of cops and criminals alike. They were hard and mean, digging into the back of my screwed-up knee and angled so straight it was a guarantee I wouldn’t be able to walk right once I left.
Assuming they would let me leave.
O’Byrne herself deposited me into the room, telling me to sit down and wait without much more than a backward glance as she closed the door. It was either a courtesy to me because I was an ex-cop or it was a subtle form of torture because there was no way I could ask somebody to use the bathroom. A fresh-faced young kid in blue wearing a badge so new it blinded me when the lights hit it came by to give me a bottle of water.
That was nearly two hours ago.
People paid a lot of money for time in a sensory deprivation tank, yet they could save themselves the expense by being dragged into questioning and thrown into an LAPD interview room. Providing they could get past the subtle stink of burnt coffee and unwashed skin—a perfume unique to police stations everywhere—the outside world stayed firmly that… outside. There was not even a murmur of sound, and the frosted, chicken-wire-embedded window set into the door gave no glimpse of anyone passing by. Even the one-way mirror set into the long wall across of where I sat seemed strangely empty of life. During interrogation there were usually one or two cops sitting behind that glass, either taking notes or waiting for things to go south, ready to provide backup for the cops in the room.
The silence didn’t even hold an echo. I screeched my chair back, and the high-pitched whining of the rubber feet against the thick industrial tile was swallowed up nearly as soon as it broke loose. Tapping at the table helped a little bit, but soon my fingertips began to throb.
Of course the residual stinging along my extremities could possibly have been from gripping Claudia’s phone too tight as I used it to hammer the gunman’s hands into mincemeat.
I was about to check the door for the fifth time to see if it was still locked when O’Byrne came in with Detective Dante Montoya shadowing her. It was odd seeing him dressed in clothes other than shorts and a tank top, because I’d spent more than a few hours trying to beat his face in at JoJo’s, but the Hispanic cop gave no indication we knew each other when he leaned against the one-way mirror, his arms crossed over his chest. O’Byrne had the haunted, tired look of a cop who was reaching the end of her patience with a case. Her jacket was gone, her shoulder holster exposed and fit tight across her lean torso. There was a bit of dirt on her jeans, and either she had been rooting around in my front yard or I was going to have to have a serious talk with the cleaning crew who took care of my office. Montoya was as calm and collected as could be, his brown eyes flat and steady, fixed on my face without a hint of emotion in his authoritative expression.
O’Byrne sat down, putting the folder she’d had tucked under her arm on the table between us. She flipped it open, but I didn’t look down at the papers as she rifled through them. I figured I was brought in because I’d beaten a man with the intent to cripple him—not something the LAPD was fond of—but I wasn’t going to apologize for it. If they stopped using me as a consultant, I was fine with that.
My first priority was always going to be Jae, and as much as I liked O’Byrne, my husband came first.
“I don’t know which way Captain Book is going to fall on this,” O’Byrne said with a tired sigh, shifting back on her uncomfortable chair. “I pleaded self-defense at him, considering the guy got a shot or two off, but you used excessive force, Mac. The DA might have another opinion.”
“The DA can go fuck himself,” I replied as clearly as I could, stating my position in a way that no one could misunderstand. I guessed we’d had some company join us behind the mirror, especially when Montoya shifted away from the glass partition, but I wasn’t there to make friends. “That guy came after me twice now. You guys had him in custody and someone with black robes and maybe an agenda let him walk, so you have to excuse me if I don’t have a lot of faith in wh
at the LAPD or the DA’s office thinks.”
“Doctors don’t even know if they’ll be able to reconstruct his hands,” Montoya said, a hint of Texas-Mexican flowing through his voice. It was a different tone than the Spanish I normally heard in Los Angeles, more of a roundness to it than the staccato, rapid-fire Mexican overheard on the street. “Did you have to go so far? He may not even be able to use them again.”
“If he told you he was going to go have fun with Stevens once he was done killing you, would you have just sat there and taken it?” I shot back, digging my shoulders into the metal bar set high on the back of the chair. “Because nobody comes into my place and threatens the people I love, least of all Jae. You guys are damned lucky I didn’t take that phone to his face. At least he can still talk. This way I know he won’t be able to come back and shoot me. Or at least he’ll think twice about it. Now, have you asked him about why he came after me? And what does this have to do with Adele Brinkerhoff’s murder?”
Montoya looked away, and I knew I’d scored at least one point, gouging deep into his disgust at my actions. Pacing off at the end of the table, he shook his head, then glanced at O’Byrne. “Are you going to tell him or am I?”
“The feds have swooped in. It seems like, in the DA’s haste to free this guy, they didn’t cross all of their t’s and dot their i’s. They didn’t check to see if he was wanted at the federal level,” she said, glancing down at the papers in her hand. “His name is Ivan Brinkerhoff, Arthur’s nephew from the Ukraine. Apparently Ivan makes his living by eliminating other people’s problems, and I guess, as you started digging into what was going on with Adele, you became someone’s problem. I haven’t been able to get close to Arthur to ask him any questions. His doctors keep blocking our access, and the granddaughter—the real one—says she doesn’t know anything.”
“She’s an assistant DA in San Francisco,” I reminded the detectives. “Could she have any pull down here? Could she maybe have yanked on a few strings and gotten Cousin Ivan released?”
“So you suspect she has something to do with this?” O’Byrne leaned forward, resting her weight on her elbows. “Because I’ve got two dead women, a handful of lab-grown diamonds, an old man in a fugue state, and an international killer the feds yanked from us before we could even get a peep out of him.”
“I think the first thing we need to ask is, why was Adele killed?” My attention drifted momentarily over to Montoya, who’d taken up residence at the end of the table. He stood as stiff as a sentinel, unwavering and not blinking but definitely keyed in on the conversation. “I was only there that night because of Stevens. Could he have tapped me to be there, Montoya? Did he ask for me by name, or did it just come up?”
“It just came up. I told him you or Dawson could probably do the surveillance for him,” Montoya said with a shrug. “He was going to have his cousin Alex do it, but he and his husband were going to be out of town, so that wasn’t an option. I can verify Alex and James were gone, and Rook wanted to get the security shakedown done as quick as possible because the property’s owner was coming into LA soon to start work on the place. It was just supposed to be an easy job, and Rook figured a lot of it was pretty much install cameras here and maybe take a flamethrower to the garden.”
“And instead I find a couple of adulterers with attack dogs,” I replied, grimacing when I remembered the Doberman who’d tackled me was more interested in licking my face than chewing my nose off. “I think me finding Adele was a coincidence, but everything after that wasn’t. The attack on Arthur was somebody looking for something. It could’ve even been the fake Marlena, because we didn’t get a very good look at the shooter, but from what I remember, they were a lot smaller than Ivan.”
“We haven’t got a positive ID on her body yet. Even though lover boy told you they were lovers, he ain’t talking,” O’Byrne said. “They’re running fingerprints on her now, and facial recognition is probably going to be screwy because the coroner tells me she had some work done on her face and body. Those hips were a lie, and that pretty face didn’t start off as pretty as it was when you saw it. If her prints don’t come back with something, we’re going to have a Jane Doe to chase down. Dawson said she sounded like she was from back East, so we might do a few reach-outs toward that coast.”
“If she was working with Ivan and the feds yanked him, maybe they also have an idea about who she is,” Montoya pointed out. “Providing they’re willing to share information.”
“Let me talk to the agent who tagged me,” O’Byrne murmured, shuffling through her stack of papers before coming up with what she’d been looking for. “You were right about one thing, Mac, the Brinkerhoffs’ place looks like a damned museum. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say they had close to thirty million dollars of artwork on their walls.”
“So maybe that’s why they killed Adele,” I said, turning the theory over in my head. “I looked into lab-grown diamonds, and it’s becoming a pretty huge industry. Even diamond companies are beginning to develop their own lines, marketing them as pristine works of art, polished by artisans with years of knowledge so you can’t even tell the difference between one grown in a lab or one dug up from the dirt. If Arthur and Adele switched up their forgery from art—something easily traceable—to fake diamonds being passed off as authentic or maybe from one of those exclusive labs, you’ve got a motive to kill as well as a desire to find out what else they have in their inventory.”
“Because the handful that we got from the body were good but not spectacular,” she commented, tapping her pen against the table. “But why have Ivan go after you? Why was his girlfriend passing herself off as Marlena? What’s the reason behind either one of those people to be in the picture?”
“I don’t know, but we could start by asking Arthur and maybe put a couple of questions to that ex-cop neighbor of theirs,” I suggested. “He could tell you whether or not he’d seen Ivan around, or the woman.”
“What we really need to do is talk to Arthur Brinkerhoff himself,” Montoya growled. “He can tell you what his wife was doing that night and probably why she was murdered.”
“Maybe,” O’Byrne said, pulling her mouth into a tight line. “Our problem is Arthur Brinkerhoff slipped into a coma about two hours ago and the doctors aren’t sure if he’s ever going to come out of it. So right now our problem is whether or not the LAPD is going to charge McGinnis here with anything, and if they don’t, I have to decide if he’s going to stay on the case.”
“That’s not for you to decide, really.” I stretched my legs out, trying to ease the ache in my knee. “Arthur Brinkerhoff wanted to find out who killed his wife, and his granddaughter gave me a buck as a retainer. I’m on the case whether you want me here or not. So see if you can cut me loose, O’Byrne, so I can get back to doing the job and hopefully not get my head shot off while doing it.”
Sixteen
“YOU SURE you’re up to this?” I asked Bobby as the elevator trundled its way up, dinging loudly as we passed each floor. “I mean, you were stabbed, dude. And my brother’s not too fond of me right now.”
“It’s a flesh wound, Princess,” he said, wiggling his arms loosely. “Look! All limbs are still attached, and even if they weren’t, I’d Black Knight hop after you ’cause I can’t trust you to stay out of trouble if I’m not around. Look what happened at your office. And as for Ichi, he and I had a long talk about this. The two of you need to talk that out. And I get it, he doesn’t like violence, but I hate people getting away with shit even more. I’ve been your backup for years. Not going to stop now.”
“Probably should make you a partner,” I muttered, pressing the top floor’s button once more just to give me something to do. “For all the shit you go through, you should at least get paid for it.”
“Yeah, McGinnis and Dawson Investigations doesn’t have a good ring to it,” he rumbled back, a slight flush washing over his cheeks before disappearing as quickly as it came up. “Tell you what—you buy all the
food and we’ll call it even.”
“I’ve seen you eat. I’d rather give you a paycheck. At least that way, I won’t go broke,” I muttered as the doors slid open. “Since O’Byrne can’t get me into the room with Ivan, she said I could try for something out of their neighbor, that Watson guy. She’s already made a pass at getting him to talk, but he ducked and dodged her.”
“Watson’s an old-school cop,” Bobby grunted, following me out of the elevator. “Might not like seeing a woman with a badge.”
“That was how she saw it,” I agreed. “You know how those guys are. She’s hoping we’ll have better luck with him. I just don’t know what he can give us. Hell, I’m not even sure what we’re doing now. For all we know, it starts and ends with Ivan killing Adele to begin with, and we’re just chasing our tails.”
“That how you see it?” Bobby stopped short, lifting his eyebrow. “Because my gut says Ivan’s just a tool and someone else is cranking the wrench.”
“I’d agree. We just don’t know why or who.” Taking a quick skim down the hall, I spotted Watson’s apartment, and farther down, the Brinkerhoffs’ place at the end of the expanse. “Let’s see what he’s got to say. Then we can do a quick look at their place. If we see anything that jumps out at us, we can tell O’Byrne.”
The hallway was carpeted in standard industrial-grade gray, but there were little touches of personality along the walls, most notably niches with flowers on shelves and bright splashes of color accenting the cut-ins where ornate mirrors hung above the arrangements, bouncing light about. Despite being windowless, the hall was wide enough not to feel claustrophobic. If the doorman who’d shaken us down for our IDs after we came into the glass-wrapped lobby wasn’t a sign of an upper-class clientele, the wide-enough-to-ballroom-dance hallway was a clear indicator the people who lived in the building had money.
“How does an ex-cop afford this kind of place?” Bobby glanced up and down the hall. “Prime neighborhood. Underground parking.”
