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“And you believed him?”
“Listen to yourself!” Chloe laughed. “My brother — who’s pretty busy to begin with — has nothing better to do with his time than track you all over Ithaca?” She wrinkled
her nose. “By your… what was it again? Your homing keychain?”
Her laugh turned into a cackle, which made me want to slap the smirk right off her face. Grab her as hard as I could shake her, until I could somehow make her understand.
In the end though, it just wasn’t worth it.
“You deserve each other,” I said at last. “I know you’ve had it rough. Your parents splitting up, your mom kinda going off and doing her own thing… Chris told me all of it, while we were dating.”
All trace of a smile left Chloe’s face. All of a sudden she was deadly serious. Her expression, all business.
“Anyway, good luck with that,” I said with all sincerity. “But if you’re going to hitch your wagon to your brother’s star? Might want to check him on some of his ‘facts’ from time to time. Or one day you’ll wake up to find yourself chin-deep in a vast field of his unending bullshit. Just like I did.”
I pushed back from her desk and folded my arms. It was sad, in a way. I’d really admired Chloe. She was fantastic at what she did. For a long time, we got along. Our goals were aligned, on a good many things.
But like everything else Chris touched, it all went to shit. If she was willing to throw away our professional relationship over some blind devotion to her asshole brother, I couldn’t really stop her.
“I’m going over your head,” I said coldly. “Just so you know.”
“You can sure try.”
We stared at each other for another few seconds, like gunfighters sizing each other up along a dusty, ghost-town street. Then I spun on my heel and left her office… possibly — and sadly — for the last time.
Forty-Eight
DANTE
“Well on the surface it doesn’t look good,” Tony said glumly. “Here. See for yourself.”
He pressed the play button, and the video started running on his phone. It was black and white. Night vision. It was also a film of a film running on a monitor, as he’d had to record it secretly without his supervisors knowing.
On screen, I saw the asshat Brooke once dated sprint into view. A giant hand grabbed him by the hood… and then Trey stepped in, picked the guy up, and slammed him right back down to the pavement.
“Oh man…” I chuckled. Although the whole thing was very serious, I couldn’t help but laugh. “He got him good.”
“Sure did,” said Tony. “But from this angle it looks entirely one sided. Like your friend is the aggressor, and the other guy was just trying to get away.”
I kept watching as Brooke ran into frame. She began pushing Trey away, pleading with him not to go further.
“Shit.”
“Yeah, that looks bad too,” Tony agreed. “This girl here… she’s your buddy’s girlfriend?”
Yes. And mine, too.
“Uh, yeah.”
“At least she can testify he was struck first. From there, it comes down to ‘he said, she said’. Word against word.”
Tony was a good friend, and he was sticking his neck out even getting the video for me. He hadn’t been on the police force very long, though. He didn’t have much in the way of contacts, either.
“Look, I wish I could help you more,” he said. “But this — and that asshole’s statement — is what they’ve got. It’ll be up to the judge, really. Unless you can somehow get this guy to drop the charges.”
That part of our little plan hadn’t gone well at all. Brooke had insisted on trying to reason with this shitstain, and we’d done everything we could to dissuade her. In the end all we could do was go with her, to keep her safe. And even then, after hearing his mocking laughter? We’d come within inches of tearing this guy to pieces with our own bare hands.
But the kicker came later, when she told us what he’d said.
