Payback (21 page)

“Try to speak louder, Tyler. We’re recording this. And his voice?” Chris prodded. “Do you recognize his voice?”

“No,” I said. “The fat man wasn’t the one who said those words. I’m not sure which of the other two it was, but it wasn’t him. He said something that night, but I don’t remember what it was. I—I don’t recognize his voice at all. But it’s him, dammit. I’ll never forget that fucking face.”

I was shaking all over, with fury more than anything. Chris gripped my hand more tightly. “Calm down, Tyler. We’re not done yet.”

He tapped on the mirror, and immediately the third man stepped forward into the light. He recited the words blandly then moved back to the wall as if he did this ten times a day. And who the hell knows? Maybe he did. He was another cop.

It was all I could do to tear my eyes away from the fat man to pay attention to the other suspects.
We’ve got him
.
What the hell are we putzing around with these other guys for?

I contained my impatience until the last man stepped forward. He was obviously Latino. He had a tattoo on the side of his neck of what looked like a dying rose. Tattooed petals fell from the blossom onto his chest. I could see them through his half-open shirt.

“Cute,” I mumbled. The man was ugly as sin.

Not only was he ugly, but he was thin and wiry and wore the same belligerent look on his face as the fat man did. Looking more closely, I could see a resemblance between the two. The skinny guy even had a mole, only in the course of all his DNA pulling together in the womb, his mole had slid from his cheek to below his ear. But it was just as grotesque as the one on the fat guy.

Coincidence
, I thought. Then number six opened his mouth. Again, his accent was mild. It was the street accent of every Latino criminal in training. Raised in poverty, steeped in hatred, they all spoke the same language, sounded alike. At least to my ears.

Like the fat man, the ugly guy smirked as he recited the words. “Enough of this shit. Let’s kill these fuckers.”

I leaned forward and pressed my hand to the glass to retain my balance. “It can’t be. It can’t be.”

“What is it, Tyler? Do you recognize the voice?” The skinny Latino stepped back into the line, unaware of the reaction he had caused on the other side of the two-way glass.

“Yes,” I breathed, still in shock. “He’s the one who said the words that night. He’s the one who spurred the other guy to use the metal rod on Spence. He’s the one who started it all.” I turned to Chris, studying his face in the shadows beside me. “You knew. You knew it was him.”

“I suspected,” he said, loud enough for the stenographer to hear. I could still hear her jotting down everything we said. “He’s the fat man’s brother. We arrested them together in a crack house just off the Barrio.”

“How did you find them?” I asked, euphoria setting in. Hatred too. Hatred more than anything.

“We tracked a cell phone that made calls to the pawnbroker who bought your ring. It was the fat guy’s phone. The little guy was carrying it at the time.”

I still couldn’t believe it. “You found two of them. Two out of three. You’ve got ’em.”

Chris nodded. “And with your testimony, I’m pretty sure we can keep them. They don’t have any other outstanding warrants on them, but that doesn’t matter. Now that they’re in our custody, we can compare them to the trace elements we found in the park bathroom. If we can put them at the scene by matching their hair or prints or whatever, along with your pulling them from a lineup, their gooses are cooked.”

The six men in the other room still stood in the bright light, staring forward. Two of those men were now beginning to look a little nervous. A moment later, four of the men in the lineup, cops every one, stepped away from the wall and left the stage, leaving the two Latino brothers behind.

“Fuck,” I heard the fat man mutter as the lights went down in their room and came up in mine. The mirror went black.

I turned to Chris and saw a smile on his face. He gave me a wink, then turned to the stenographer. “Did you get it all?”

She held up her pad and tapped the tape recorder with a fingernail. “Twice,” she said, smiling. “Congratulations.”

With that, she gathered up her equipment and stepped from the room.

I lifted a hand and gently touched the bandage on Chris’s ear. “Is the fat guy the one who…?”

“Yeah. He’s a mean bastard. They both are. We’ve done a good thing today, Tyler, getting them off the street.”

“I don’t know how to thank you,” I said. “Well, actually I do, if you’ll let me.”

A light glinted in his one good eye. The other eye was too bunged up to show much interest. “Does that mean what I think it means?”

I surveyed his damages. “If you’re up to it, yeah. It means exactly what you think it means.”

“Tonight?” he asked softly.

“Tonight.” I lifted his injured hand and began to bring it to my lips. Then I cast a suspicious eye on the two-way mirror.

“Don’t worry,” Chris said. “They can’t see us.”

I pulled him toward me, but to my surprise, he resisted. “We still have things to talk over, Tyler. This isn’t over yet.
None
of it is over yet. You know that, don’t you?”

I felt an ache swell up inside me. It was almost identical to the ache I felt after Spence had died. I studied Chris’s face. His poor eye. His injured ear. He reached out and laid a hand on my arm. It was the hand without the injuries.

“There are things I have to think about, Tyler. There are decisions I have to make.”

“Concerning me?”

He hesitated. “Yes.”

I took in a deep breath and fought the burning sensation of tears rising to my eyes. “Do you still… want to see me?” I asked. “You said you did. Is it still true?”

His smile was sad and weary. He looked exhausted. “It will always be true,” he whispered.

We let silence settle over us until we heard voices approaching out in the hall. Those voices spurred Chris to action.

“Go home now, Tyler. I’ll come by later tonight. We need to talk. I have a lot to do here, so it will probably be late. That okay?”

I nodded. “No matter how long it takes. I’ll wait. It’s supposed to rain tonight, you know. Don’t forget to wear your rubbers.”

He grinned, brushed a finger down my jawline, and left the room.

A
T
THE
house, I stood in the middle of the living-room floor and stared at the ring on my finger. I remembered Spence’s eyes the night he gave the ring to me. I remembered his excitement. His sweetness. I remembered the taste of his seed on my lips after we made love. The way his sex-warmed body pressed up to mine as he helped me slip the ring on.

The memories hurt so much I pulled the wedding ring from my finger and headed straight for the bedroom to tuck it into the satin box it came in. The other slot in the box was empty. Spence’s ring was still missing. For all I knew, it would always be missing. Somehow, in my mind, the severing of the two rings tore me farther from Spence’s side than even his death did. It was a division greater than material separation. It was a division of the heart. A transcendental distancing more than a physical one.

Transcendental distancing, my ass
. It was bullshit. That’s what it was. The distancing was all my doing. I had moved on because I had fallen in love with someone else. It was as simple as that. I was just too much of a coward to admit it. If not to Spence, at least to myself.

I snapped the satin box closed, and a burst of sadness darkened my sight. Sadness because I knew now I had truly moved on. It was Chris who filled my thoughts now. It was Chris who stirred my feelings. I closed my eyes against a rush of need and tried to figure out what I had to do.

I had to tell him, certainly. Tell him the truth. About everything. But there was more I needed to do than that. Much more.

And where was the euphoria, knowing two of Spence’s attackers had been arrested? Did even that euphoria pale beneath my fear of losing Chris because of what I had done that night on the Blue Line trolley? I didn’t have to ask myself that question twice. The answer was yes. Yes, a dozen times over.

It was early evening. The sky was so heavy with approaching storm clouds that dusk had morphed into night in what seemed a matter of seconds. As I sat on my deck at the back of the house and watched the rain draw nearer, waiting for Chris to arrive, I felt the hours drag over me.

There was a fear inside me that roared out its anguish every time I saw Chris’s face in my mind. Every time I remembered his words.
We need to talk. There are decisions I have to make.

I knew what those decisions were. Chris was torn between doing his job and not wanting to hurt me. The crime he had helped solve today was only the smallest part of the equation. Somehow I knew it was the trolley murder that mattered most to him. If he didn’t know for sure I was the one who killed the man on the Blue Line, he certainly suspected it. The big question now was what he would ultimately decide to do with those suspicions. He had said he loved me, yes. But would even love be enough to make him turn his back on everything he believed in? Right and wrong. The law. Would he honestly be able to love someone who had broken the rules of society he believed in so strongly—the rules he worked so hard to maintain every day of his life as a cop?

Yet once in a while, that twisted little grin Chris had shot at me when I told him to wear his rubbers popped into my head, and every time it did, I drew hope from it. Maybe things weren’t as dire as I thought they were. Maybe there was still a chance for a happy ending. A happy ending for Chris and me. A happy ending to all of this.

While waiting for Chris’s knock at the door, I sipped a beer, too nervous to eat. Should I tell him the truth the moment he walked in? Should I confess my involvement in the trolley murder and hope he loved me enough to find a way to protect me from what I’d done? If there was concrete evidence pointing directly at me, surely I would have been arrested already, with or without Chris’s involvement. The fact that I hadn’t been gave me hope. A fool’s hope, maybe, but hope nevertheless.

When my phone rang, I snatched it off the cradle before the second ring sounded.

His voice was hushed. I could barely hear it. “Tyler, it’s me.”

I pressed the phone to my ear with both hands. “Chris.”

The air was filled with static for a few seconds while we each absorbed the other’s presence.

“I’m glad you called,” I finally said. “Are you still at work?”

“Yes. It’s crazy here. A patrolman just brought in the suspect in one of my other cases, so now I’m up to my ass in paperwork. I’ll be late getting there, Tyler. Maybe you’d rather I—”

“No! Please,” I pleaded. “Come tonight. I need to see you. We have to talk.”

“All right,” he said slowly. “I’ll come tonight.”
Did I hear a smile in his voice? Was that what I heard? Or was I simply hearing what I wanted to hear?

And suddenly a flurry of words spewed out of me. “There are things I need to tell you, Chris. There are confessions I need to make.”

“Be quiet!” he broke in. “Don’t say those things over the phone. Not even to me.” His voice lowered as if he was trying not to be overheard. I could hear the clicking of keyboards in the background, the mutter of voices. He was at his desk with a dozen other desks and a dozen other detectives scattered around him. “Baby, I think I know what you want to tell me. Just don’t say it now. We’ll get things settled tonight. I promise. I’ve thought it all through. I know what we have to do.”

“Do you?” I asked. “I don’t think—”

“Stop,” he said. “I know everything. At least I think I do. I can protect you from this, Tyler. You just have to trust me.”

“All right,” I said. “I trust you. I do. Just—please hurry. I need to see you. I need to be with you.”

A silence fell between us. I heard the sound of soft breathing. Again I heard the bristle of his stubble scraping across the mouthpiece, and the sound of it sent a shiver of desire racing through me.

“Don’t worry, baby,” he whispered vehemently. “I won’t let anything happen to you. I swear I won’t. I love you too much to lose you now.”

I swallowed hard. “I love you too,” I rasped.

“Wait for me,” he said in a gentle hush, and our connection was lost.

I gently hung up the phone.

It would be all right. Chris knew everything and he still loved me.

I squeezed my eyes shut to say a silent prayer of thanks. I lowered myself into my favorite chair, and still sipping occasionally at my beer, I considered the turns my life had taken in the past couple of days. I remembered Chris’s proud look as he returned my ring. I thought of the fat fuck and his brother in the lineup, both cockily spouting the words I had heard the night Spence was killed. I remember the fat guy’s worried expression when it finally dawned on him that his past had caught up with him. I remembered the worried, disbelieving timbre in his voice when he muttered “Fuck!” just before the lights behind the two-way mirror went out.

But most of all, I remembered Chris saying he loved me. Without hesitation. Without doubt.

That was the memory that carried me to sleep as I sat in my favorite chair while the beer bottle, forgotten, warmed in my hand.

When I awoke, the night had settled over me. The sky, clouded with approaching rain, lay dark and starless above the rooftops, shot through with occasional flashes of quickly approaching lightning that heralded the coming storm. The city sprawled expectant and tense in the darkness, waiting for it, the air heavy with the pending downpour. I could feel it in the sudden ache of my injured fingers. Maybe they weren’t quite as healed as I’d thought they were.

I tried to ignore the pain, and finally I succeeded. I slept.

Hours later, a gentle sound shook me awake. It was a humming sound, tremulous and high-pitched. At first I thought it was the wind I heard. I tilted my head and listened. The night air had changed. It had a different flavor to it. I could smell the ozone of the gathering storm, the dampness on the wind that now whistled through the eaves outside. The storm was almost here.