Justice

by Dustin Stevens

  The information fit exactly with what Rye would expect, recalling the carefully staged home and surroundings of the Gerard spread, the way the place was scrubbed with a meticulousness that bordered on obsessive.

  Vinson Gerard was a man with very specific tastes. If he was coming across the ocean to avenge his son’s death, he was doing so under his own terms, in the manner to which he was accustomed.

  “It fits,” Rye said. Lifting her face toward the ceiling, she pushed a breath out through her nose, aware that both men were likely watching her.

  “You sure?” Mattox asked behind her.

  “Positive.”

  And she was. Deke was right, the sudden purchase, the history of the buyer, all of it, was too much to be coincidental.

  Vinson Gerard, and Clarence Koob, and whoever else, was near.

  If she didn’t meet them head-on here, it was only a matter of time before they found some other way to lure her out.

  The death of Nora Heatherington was bad enough. Rye shuddered to think what they would resort to next time.

  “Does this mean you have an address?”

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  More than twenty hours had passed since Vinson Gerard last got any rest, but there was no way he could even consider sleep. Not with the amount of adrenaline surging through him.

  Not with Sydney Rye so close, the end of a two-year odyssey now at hand.

  The birth of Vincent was an accident, the kind of one-night-stand-shows-up-nine-months-later-with-a-baby story that occurs in movies or bad daytime television. His mother was nothing more than common trash, the sort of thing Gerard might have cavorted with in his younger days but had long since graduated on from.

  Even if he had to pay most of the women he enjoyed later in life for their company, a man in his position had to have standards.

  And taking home a woman with bottle-black hair and terrible tattoos certainly didn’t fit with the image he was working to maintain.

  The occasion had been the unexpected Premier League victory of his beloved Spurs, the Tottenham franchise one that he was a minority owner of. Considered a shocking upset by anybody that had ever watched the sport of football – or soccer, as the people in his new forsaken home insisted on calling it – it was the kind of night he had spent a lifetime waiting for.

  A rare instance when he had forgotten himself, going out to join the masses in the streets, taking part as the whiskey flowed and substances of various strength were passed around. The next morning, he had woken up naked and alone in a seedy hotel, the evidence of what had happened the night before strewn on the bedspread and floor around him.

  For a solid month thereafter he had tried in vain to search for the woman that had shared his bed, his own thin recollections providing little of value, the collective states of those around him nominally better. Even a thorough scanning of cameras in the area had turned up nothing, this being the days before London became a perpetual police state, the eyes of overseers watching everything that took place.

  Over time – and no small amount of STD testing – Gerard had decided to let the incident go, chalking it up to a learning experience. It was at that moment that he opted for a full-time Head of Security, the precursor to the position Clarence Koob now held.

  Never again did he venture into the streets, keeping his celebrations corralled to his home, no more than a handful of revelers on hand. He even went as far as to sell his stock in the Spurs, a move that was the hardest business choice of his career, but a necessary evil to insulate himself moving forward.

  Nothing could get in the way of his plans.

  Never before had he given much thought to posterity. Himself an only child, he had grown up without a father, had lost his mother shortly after coming of age. Any concept of family was one reserved for greeting cards and commercials, the sort of thing he held a complete ambivalence toward.

  Until the moment it showed up on his door.

  Gone was the black dye streaked through the woman’s hair, though there was no mistaking her the moment she showed up. With her right arm clutched in the grip of his security overseer, she had stood on his front door with tears streaming down her face, a baby carrier on the ground by her feet.

  Beneath the left sleeve of her dress snaked out the vine-and-rose tattoo he had seen so many times in his dreams he had thought to believe it was nothing more than a conjuring of his imagination.

  For three days, he had detained woman and child both, vacillating on how to handle the situation, refusing to even touch the baby until a full paternity test was administered.

  Not until the results came back positive did he accept what had happened, considering for the first time the enormity of what he’d amassed, thinking there might be some further purpose for it all once he was gone.

  The fate of the mother, well, that was an inconsequential matter.

  Just because she had born him an heir didn’t mean she got a slice of what he’d worked so hard to attain.

  Over time, the thought of a son grew from a foreign concept to a fact of life he could not imagine otherwise. Giving him the only natural name he could think of – refusing to ever saddle either of them with the dreaded monikers of Senior or Junior – he first started bringing the boy around the business at age ten.

  By fifteen, he was accompanying him to meetings.

  By twenty-two, he held a master’s degree from the London School of Economics, a young man whose proclivities and thirst for more rivaled only Gerard’s own.

  A thirst that unfortunately grew to include more than just business.

  The first time Vincent brought the little tramp around, Gerard had sniffed things out for what they were. From a poor country upbringing, her goal was to parlay above-average looks into an upper-class life.

  An eventuality he would never allow and had no problem telling his son.

  A move that had driven a wedge between them, contorting their relationship in a way that it never recovered from.

  Even two years removed, the thought of it was enough to bring on overwhelming emotion, a mixture of anger and sorrow roiling through Gerard.

  If his son had just listened to him, if he had kept to the plan they had laid out.

  If that bitch had never entered their life.

  How or why that grew to include Sydney Rye, Gerard didn’t feign to know, was reasonably certain he didn’t even want to. All that was certain was that his son was gone, any hope for future lineage extinguished with him, snuffed out in a most cruel and heinous manner.

  For that, he would ensure that even worse was done to her, stripping away whatever audacity she possessed that made her believe she could dare come near him or his progeny.

  Standing in the middle of his office, his jacket cast aside, he was rooted in place, his hands squeezed into tight balls by his side. Holding the pose until his shoulders and forearms ached with lactic acid, he slowly released the tension, feeling the cool night air wash over him.

  In his life, he had made two things that really mattered – his business and his son.

  Both he would kill to protect, but only one would he take an extreme amount of pleasure in doing so for.

  On the far side of the room, the door to his office jerked open, pulling his attention toward it. An instant after, Koob strode through, having ignored his usual entry knock, his hands swinging free to either side.

  “They’re coming.”

  “They?” Gerard asked.

  “Rye, and the detective,” Koob replied.

  The back half of the statement meant little to Gerard, his focus solely on the front. For more than two years he had waited, devoting endless time and resources to her demise.

  The time to finish things was finally at hand.

  “Good,” he replied. “Do what you want with him, but remember what we talked about for her.”

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  There was a familiar tingle that Reed Mattox always got when on the cusp of something big, something t
hat would likely result in personal danger, would put him or his partner in a situation where something bad could happen. He’d heard it referred to as many things over the years, everything from butterflies to The Itch.

  Regardless of title, it was something every officer knew, a simple mention of it being enough to elicit a room full of head nods.

  If such a thing was ever actually discussed.

  For Reed, it was something a bit more visceral, a rippling sensation that started deep in his core. Rising like hundreds of tiny bubbles through his chest, it passed up to his scalp, leaving his upper body tingling, on the verge of fire.

  Never before had he equated it to nerves. There wasn’t a fear factor involved, not a true concern for his own welfare.

  It was more like a heightened state of being, an uber-awareness by his senses.

  Ascending the steps from Deke’s basement, Reed could feel the first hints of it beginning. Starting deep and gaining momentum, by the time they reached the front door, it was in his chest.

  Two minutes later, as he and Sydney Rye stood along the street, filling the space between their respective vehicles, it was permeating most of his body, sensation pulsating through him.

  “Wow,” he muttered, shaking his head slightly. “Wow, wow, wow.”

  “Damn right,” Rye replied. “We got the bastard.”

  Flicking his gaze to her, Reed processed the comment, trying to force the jumble of information Deke had just given them with what they already knew.

  The sum total of it was, Vinson Gerard was a despicable human being, a criminal in every sense of the word.

  Except for the one place that Reed most needed.

  “Not yet,” Reed said, “but this is a huge first step.”

  Jerking her attention up from the ground, the faint smile she’d been wearing evaporating from her face, Rye said, “What the hell do you mean, not yet? Did you not hear what Deke just said?”

  “Of course I did,” Reed snapped, feeling agitation start to rise, mixing with the cocktail of physiological responses already passing through him. “But in our line of work, there’s a huge gap between knowing something and being able to prove something.”

  “Prove-“ Rye said, raising a hand as she took a step to the side, turning her body perpendicular to his. “Are you serious with this shit right now?”

  Matching her stance, her tone, Reed said, “Are you? Everything he just rattled off in there happened on a different continent. Thousands of miles away in a country we have strong relations and ironclad extradition with.”

  “So you’re hiding behind that stuff now?” Rye asked, her eyes widening. “You’d let someone fly in here, murder two people, and leave, all because you’re afraid of some jurisdictional issues?”

  Opening his mouth to respond, Reed paused. Turning in the opposite direction, he paced out into the middle of the street, raising a hand to his scalp. Running his palm back over it, he drew in a deep breath through his nose, staring up at the sky.

  He had to calm himself, to not let her goad him, to stay in control.

  The Bottoms was his turf, and in a day or a week or even a month, he still needed to be able to live and work there. Rye had no such conflict, no care if she torched every bridge and disobeyed every rule, so long as she finished her objective.

  Turning back to face her, he could see Billie staring out through the rear window, the ambient glow of a nearby streetlight reflecting from her eyes. Able to sense his moods, his physical shifts, better than anything he had ever witnessed, she was up on all fours in the backseat, aching to get out, the car barely able to contain her.

  “Circumstantial,” he said. “I agree with you, the odds of this guy suddenly buying a property in Columbus two months before a woman he had former dealings with is gunned down is too much to ignore.”

  Across from him, Rye raised a hand to respond, her jaw sagging open, but he matched the pose, signaling for her to wait, to let him finish before saying another word.

  “But right now, we have nothing in the way of evidence. We have two dead shooters – neither of which can be tied to the scene.”

  As much as he wanted to, he didn’t bother pointing out that was because Rye had killed them before they could be brought in for questioning, knowing it would only hasten what was already fast becoming a sour situation.

  “No fingerprints, no DNA, not even a murder weapon.”

  “We have an address,” Rye replied, her voice quieter.

  To that, Reed paused, considering her statement. There was some validity to it, the information certainly useful, a clear place to start.

  Even if the feeling currently moving through him said there was no way she would ever let things get that far.

  “We do,” Reed agreed, “which is why starting now, we put them under surveillance. We go back to the precinct, we get with Grimes, we start working on a warrant. We call Interpol, see if Gerard or Koob’s prints are in the system, try to get Earl to pull a match from the apartment they’re at now.”

  Bit by bit, the detective side of Reed’s brain, the methodical part, where things like procedure and case building resided, began to take over. Pushing out the immediate carnal response of his body, it pulled reason to the fore, allowing him to see forward to the next step.

  What he had told Rye was correct. This had all the earmarks of becoming an international nightmare, especially if Gerard’s contacts were near as impressive as Deke seemed to intimate they were.

  A few feet away, it was obvious Rye didn’t like one bit of it. From her pointed stance to the expression on her face, disdain seemed to ooze from every pore.

  Whether it was at him or the plan he was suggesting, Reed couldn’t be certain.

  Couldn’t make the mistake of allowing that to be his biggest concern.

  “What do you think?” Reed asked.

  Glancing over, Rye smirked, a mirthless gesture that answered the question without her saying a word.

  “You do not want to know.”

  Not doubting that for a moment, Reed said, “Look, I know it’s a hell of a long way from what either one of us wants. I was there the other night, I saw the inside of the apartment complex.

  “That was a display. Somebody was sending a message. But unless we want the next one to be I can do whatever I want and get away with it, we have to do this correctly.”

  There was so much more he could have added, the sum total resulting in a monolog that he had no interest in giving, knew she had even less in receiving. Falling silent, he looked at her, the quiet of the street settling back in around them.

  A full minute passed before she looked at him, her expression dark.

  “You’re right,” she whispered. “Damn it.”

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  The single sound that rolled out of Blue as Sydney Rye slid behind the wheel of her SUV – a low noise that was part groan, part whine, part growl – pretty accurately summarized everything she was thinking as she turned the car on and gripped the steering wheel in either hand. In her rearview mirror, she saw the front headlights of Reed Mattox’s sedan kick on, shifting away from the curb and sliding out around her.

  Getting the information from Deke was a gift from above. For the past two days, she had been forced to use herself as bait, dangling the only thing she knew Gerard and Koob really wanted. Putting herself into multiple compromising positions, she was forced to work through less-than-optimal circumstances.

  No other way of tracking them had presented itself.

  Now, she had their location. Knew they were down at least two key team members. Were likely tucked away, regrouping, figuring out the best way to proceed.

  She also knew that now, in the dead of night and coming on the heels of losing their shooter, they were least expecting any sort of confrontation.

  Behind her, Mattox eased away from the curb, looping around. Pulling ahead, he moved to the end of the block before hitting his turn signal, leading the way for her back to the precinct st
ation.

  Reaching out, Rye shifted the car down into drive, nudging the gas to catch up with him, making the same turn, falling into a miniature convoy moving through the deserted suburban street.

  On some base level, she understood what he was saying, his need to do things the way he did. He was an officer, had been trained in a very specific order.

  One of the greatest misnomers she had ever encountered was America’s insistence on referring to it as the Justice System, because all too often, that was the largest thing missing from the process.

  Better terms would have been the Slow as Hell System, or the Make Lawyers Rich System, or even the Feed and House Criminals for Life System.

  But not Justice.

  Justice was the sort of thing she pedaled in. It was not concerned with things like jurisdictions or probable cause or even ironclad proof.

  It was only worried about right and wrong, about knowing what happened and moving to correct it.

  Raising the speed of the SUV up to forty-five, Rye stayed two car lengths back from Mattox, retracing the route they had driven just an hour before. Having slipped even deeper into night, the roads were empty, the overhead streetlights and crossing signals the only glow, the storefronts all blacked out for the evening.

  Flicking her gaze to the passenger seat, Rye looked at the printout that Deke had given each of them, two white sheets of paper folded in half, copies of the real estate listing that Gerard had recently purchased.

  Shifting her attention to the rearview mirror, she thought on the assembled weaponry in the rear compartment, all of it tucked away beneath a flimsy vinyl screen, aching to be used.

  Adding it together, she could begin to see the next few hours playing out in her head.

  Breaching the outside gate.

  Firing on the front door.

  Squaring off with Koob.

  Finishing things with the Gerard family.

  With each successive thought, adrenaline began to seep back into her system. Again, she could feel the sense of euphoria oozing through her system, that familiar rush she craved so much coating her senses.