Authors: Rhys Ford
“Look, I’m glad we’re sitting around here braiding each other’s hair and having hot cocoa, but life’s not sunshine and kittens for everyone. Bottom line, I saw the chance to go legit, and I took it because it’s hard to live your life looking over your shoulder.” Rook snatched the bandage out of Manny’s fingers, then peeled off its plastic backing. “Stealing kept me fed. Now something else does. That’s pretty much all there is to it.”
“There’s more to life than being fed,
bebé
.” Manny tugged the gauze out of Rook’s grasp, then rolled Rook’s sleeve out of his way. After laying the bandage down, he sealed its sticky tape edges to Rook’s skin with a press of his fingers. “Don’t you deserve more than that? Don’t you respect yourself? Can’t you dream a little bit bigger for yourself than that?”
“Manny, people like me don’t get the two-point-five kids and the Sunday BBQs with the neighbors who don’t return my weed eater. We’re disposable, someone to slough off when people get tired of us.” Rook frowned down at the bandage, wondering how the hell he’d allowed Manny to slap one on him. “Don’t go measuring Dante for a tux or anything. After he gets his fill, he’s moving on to someone else. Just like I will. It’s how things are, Manny. Because no matter how much you polish up a trash can, it’s still a fucking trash can.”
“I don’t know what to think then,
cuervo
, because my Dante, he doesn’t throw people away. Not like you expect him to,” Manny mourned. “I don’t know what I find more pathetic and sad—that you’d think Dante would be like that… or that you believe that is all you deserve in life.”
“It’s all I’ll ever be worth, ’
mano
. A quick fuck and maybe a good-bye kiss.” Rook rubbed at the bandage. “And if Dante isn’t smart enough to realize, then he’ll be the next thing I’m walking away from. ’Cause I’d rather do it to him way before he does it to me.”
Most of the debris was drywall, paint, and wood, but there was enough of it to give Dante a struggle as he tried to dig out the woman lying motionless under the rubble. His hearing was spotty, tuning in and out as his eardrums tried to balance themselves. The sirens he heard through the falling crashes of the townhomes crumbling faded in and out, so it was difficult to know how far away the cavalry was.
There were others digging, mostly poking around the edges to look for the fallen, and one enterprising teenaged boy discovered a flat-screen television hanging untouched on one wall and took off with it, running clumsily away from the scene. Focusing on the pale fingers and wrist he could see, Dante kept excavating, his hands bleeding from the broken wood and twisted metal around him. It took a few minutes, but Dante eventually had a path through the mess. He waded in, flinging an enormous slab of drywall aside, then closed his fingers around the wrist.
Her flesh was cold, dead cold, and up close, Dante felt a rigid stiffness in the joint. Whoever lay under the rubble had been dead a long time before the townhouse went up. Shouldering a broken side table off the body, Dante finally got a good look at the corpse.
The young woman was pretty, slender, and with her short black bob haircut, nearly an exact match for the two dead bodies he already had in the morgue.
She also had a very large bullet hole in the middle of her forehead.
“Well, shit.” There was little chance she was anyone but one of the Pigeon’s Betties. In death, she looked much younger than most of the other grifters he knew. Rook’s edgy prettiness lacked even a hint of innocence, even when he was passed out on painkillers. She’d been someone’s daughter, and apparently, knee-deep in things too deadly for her to handle.
Torn between excavating the dead body or leaving it for the crime lab guys, Dante decided to move on, climbing over the remains of a floral-print couch to get to a pile of drywall.
“Hank, any sign of anyone else?” Dante shouted as his partner stepped into the debris. “This one’s gone!”
“Going to see if there’s anyone else in there,” Hank screamed back at him, motioning toward another large pile. “Gas line’s shut down!”
He waved Hank off and plunged into the rubble near him, scrabbling to clear out the larger piles in case someone was buried under the debris. A few seconds later, he came up with a dusty gray cat, its flat face dripping with distaste as he pulled it from under an overturned recliner.
“Oh God, Mr. McGee!” The high pitch of the woman’s squeal must have been enough to cut through the buzzing in Dante’s ears, because he heard her crying out what he presumed to be the cat’s name over and over again as she tried to get through the rubble. “Oh thank God, he’s alive. Please let him be okay.”
The cat’s owner was older than Dante by about a decade or so, with a soft, plump body and a pleasant face made for gentle expressions and loving smiles. Despite the slight nip in the air, she wore a pair of purple capris and a matching print top, and her casual tousle of graying ashen blonde hair had been gone through with probably frantic fingers because it stood away from her head as if she’d been caught in a wind tunnel.
“Stay there, ma’am. I’ll bring him out. He’s fine.” He came out with the cat, spotting Hank being joined by a battalion of firemen and a few paramedics. Once he stepped out of the townhouse and into the sunlight, he recognized the woman holding her hands out for the cat. “Debbie Pridgeon?”
“Yes?”
Her reply was automatic, and then Dante waited for her to respond to the situation unfolding around her.
A second later, there it was—that little twitch of personality in the depths of her guileless hazel eyes. A moment later, it was followed by a slight hardening in her face and a sudden tenseness in her shoulders as she swayed back a step. It was a slip of the mask, the glimmer of the real person behind the construct Dante’d been staring at. In that split second, Dante could almost see her weigh her options as she spotted the badge hanging in clear view from his belt and then looked to the squirming cat he held in his arms.
It was the cat that broke her, and the con artist grimaced as she held out her arms to take Mr. McGee from Dante.
“I take it you weren’t just passing by and stopped to get my cat out.”
Her voice was still pleasant, but the cookies-and-milk tone was stripped clean, leaving behind a watery alto. When Dante handed her the Persian, she buried her face in its soft, dirty fur.
“Thank you for saving him. He’s all I’ve got. I suppose you’re here about the dead Betties. Truthfully, I’m kind of glad you guys showed up. There’s another dead one in my house I’ve got to get rid of, and I’d like nothing more than for you to take her off my hands.”
For some, home was where they went after a long day of trudging through the routines of their lives. For Dante Montoya, home was a maze of beige corridors, enormous bullpens of cubicles and cops, and the scent of bitter, burned coffee in the air. Home had a hint of gun oil and profanity. Nothing challenged his mind like the puzzle of a crime, and there was no finer feeling in the world than when he cornered his prey, taking them down to pay for what they’d done.
The first time he donned his badge, something stirred deep inside Dante, a calling that humbled and honored him to answer. And he’d been determined to never let anything or anyone persuade him to step off the path he’d placed himself on.
But then, Dante mused, that was before he’d fallen for an oddly eyed former cat burglar and sat across of a Romper-Room-sweet woman who apparently had, at some point, run one of the largest bait-and-switch cons in America’s history.
After boarding the cat with a neighbor, Pigeon dutifully climbed into a patrol car and left the partners to deal with the dead body lying among the remains of her home. Two and a half hours spent with the crime lab people, paramedics, and another detective on the scene and Dante was ready to climb the walls.
“Jesus, I thought we’d never get out of there.” Hank brushed at his hair as they walked into Homicide’s bullpen. “Did I get all of the drywall out?”
“Yeah, I think so.” A uniform strolling past winced, and Dante grimaced an apology. “Shit, I think we’re still screaming at each other.”
“Can’t hear a damned thing,” Hank confessed. “Well, not without the whole buzzing sound. Ambulance guy said no eardrum damage, but shit, it feels like I’ve got a wasp or something in my head.”
“Montoya! Camden!” Their captain stuck his head out of his office and stabbed his forefinger at them. “Get in here.”
It was a short and thankfully muted scolding, and more than once Dante caught Hank grinning foolishly as their captain turned his back to them to rail about something neither one of them could catch. The man’s low bass growl thrummed and dove, dropping most of what he said beneath anything they could hear. Near the end of the man’s rant, Dante’s ears popped, and he was blasted with a wall of rumbling complaint. Hank continued his grinning, and the captain turned, catching them staring at him.
“You didn’t hear a damned thing I said, did you?” he growled at the partners.
“I caught the end of it,” Dante admitted with a helpless shrug. “Something about our day off, chasing down rabbit holes, and finding dead bodies.”
“Jesus, the two of you are going to give me an ulcer. Tell me why you two idiots headed out there, and who’s the broad sitting in Room One?” Captain Book eased into his chair then reached for a bottle of antacids sitting on his desk. “And Camden, quit grinning at me. You look like fucking Howdy Doody.”
Dante laid out the case for their captain, starting with Dani’s death, the discovery of the first set of Betties, then Rook’s shooting. The man sat through all of it, chewing on the end of a pen and nodding at a few places. He’d just gotten to why he and Hank were going to talk to Pigeon when Captain Book held his hand up for Dante to stop.
“Back that up. You took a witness to a hotel.” Book leaned over his desk. “Don’t think I didn’t catch that little bit of it.”
“Technically, not a witness, sir.” Dante caught Hank’s eye roll and sighed. “Stevens and I have….”
“I know your history with Stevens, Montoya. I read the reports, remember?” The wet end of Book’s pen bobbed about in the air as he gestured it at the partners. “He’s still key to this case. You shouldn’t be… doing whatever the hell it is you guys do in… shit, I don’t want to have this conversation. I don’t have this kind of talk with my own kid when he brought his boyfriend home for Christmas.”
“You probably should, Captain.” Dante elbowed Hank in the ribs when his partner snorted. “In all fairness.”
“In all fairness, Montoya, I let their mother deal with the whole sex thing,” Book rumbled back. “I don’t have that kind of talk with my daughter either, and she’s done married the last one she brought home. But this isn’t about my kids. It’s about you and Camden here fucking around with a case.”
“I’m not doing any fucking, sir.” Hank raised his hand. “I’m married.”
“Shut up, Camden.” Book didn’t spare Dante’s partner a glance as he rounded in on his target. “I can’t tell you who to get in bed with, Montoya, but what I can do is take you off the case. O’Byrne’s freed up a bit—”
Hank definitely heard that because he was up on his feet as Dante rose to protest. “Captain….”
“Stevens’s involvement in this case is crucial. He’s the one who led us to the woman who ran the Betties, and he’s our in to talking to anyone else involved.” Dante stood shoulder to shoulder with his partner. “We’re still trying to figure out who the players are in this. Giving it to O’Byrne will restart the clock.”
“No way in hell would Stevens talk to her. He’s a squirrel. Look at him wrong, and he’s up a tree.”
Hank’s booming voice was cranked up to eleven, and Dante winced at his partner’s volume.
“We definitely need him, sir. No one’s going to get any traction without him opening a few doors and pointing people out. When it’s all said and done, he trusts Montoya here.”
“He’s shot straight with us from the beginning, Captain, even after those assholes on patrol tried to kill him,” Dante pointed out.
“Shit, don’t remind me. There’s a bloodbath brewing over that. Stevens’s lawyers are fucking sharks, and damn it if those fucking uniforms didn’t chum the waters.” Book leaned back in his chair and stared up at the partners standing in front of his desk.
“They’ve got cause, sir.” Dante caught the full heat of Book’s glare. “They shot up a Wookie statue, Captain.”
“We’ve also got a theory that the fingerprint on that fake diamond isn’t real either. Did some preliminary digging on that, and there’s ways of getting it done,” Hank piped in. “So someone’s definitely got it in for Stevens. It’ll be a good idea to keep him close and safe. Don’t know how safe he’ll be with Montoya, but you know—”
“Respectfully, Captain, I’d like to tell my partner to fuck off,” Dante muttered at Hank.
“You two can take that shit outside. Right now, I’ll let you keep the case if you two agree to step carefully. Camden, take a day to get your hearing cleared. You’re not going onto the street with compromised senses.” The captain tapped his pen on the desk. “Montoya, no running rogue. You document every single damned conversation you have with any witness Stevens drags up for you. Someone left us three—no, four—dead bodies, and you two aren’t any closer to figuring out who the fuck that someone is. I want this case closed… and by all that is fucking holy, don’t get Archibald Martin’s grandson killed in the process.”
“Can you state your name for the record?” Dante set a cold bottle of water in front of the woman Rook called Pigeon.
More schoolteacher than seductress, the older woman thanked Dante for the water, then spoke clearly into the flat microphone set on the table between them. She spelled out her last name, then added, “But they call me Pigeon. Everyone does. I don’t really answer to anything else.”
“Do you understand your rights as they were read to you?” He glanced down at the reports the on-scene detective e-mailed him before he’d stepped into the room. He could hear Hank shouting through the wall, and Dante resisted the urge to look over his shoulder at the one-way mirror behind him.