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Not that Trey was a kid.
And now he was here, giving Willie’s empty desk a wave in the darkness and going over to the glass door to Stan’s crib, feeling like he was a hundred years old.
The wave thing was pure habit, really. Every time he came in here, he walked by Willie’s desk, waved at her, and went to open Stan’s door. She never stopped him, no matter what Stan was doing—even if there was a meeting going on or the chief was on the phone.
Willie always said he was the only one allowed to interrupt like that.
So there was no hesitation as he passed by. Like the trained seal he was, he followed his greeting routine and went directly to Stan’s inner door. It wasn’t until he started to turn the knob that his tired brain woke up and pointed out that this entry was absolutely going to be inaccessible after hours—
Things opened no problem.
“Of course you don’t lock your door,” José murmured as he entered and overhead lights came on automatically.
Stan was such a product of the eighties, when battening down the hatches the second the sun went behind the horizon for the night had not been a thing. Then again, this was the police station, so everyone was getting checked in as they came into the building itself. And there were cameras everywhere.
Well, out in the hall there were cameras. Not in here.
“Whatever.”
José walked across the red-and-blue carpet and then stood over the piles of paperwork on the desk. Man, compliance would have a fit if they knew all this . . . departmental shit, whatever it was . . . was unsecured. But that was the way Stan was. Too trusting. Then again, who could find anything in this—
The sound was so quiet that, had José not been standing still as he contemplated where he should put the report in the midst of the mess, he never would have heard it.
And if it had not repeated, he wouldn’t have bothered to do anything about it.
But the soft noise was a phone. A cell phone on vibrate.
Setting the report down on the corner of the desk, not that there was any rhyme or reason to that particular location, he followed the brrrrrr’ing, brrrrrrr’ing to the door to Stan’s private crapper.
“You forgot your phone, Stan,” he said as he pushed the door wider.
The sound was still muffled even as he leaned into the sacred space—and then, before he could zero in on the where, things went silent. He glanced around the counter. Nothing there, out in the open. And on the back of the toilet—only golf magazines. And he wasn’t going into the guy’s drawers—
The sound started up again.
José bent down. Bent farther. The phone was vibrating in the lowest of the cabinet’s drawers.
He pulled the handle slowly, sliding things open. But for godsakes, he’d known the guy his entire professional life. What was he going to find other than toilet rolls—
There was a button-down shirt wadded up in the drawer. Blue-and-white-checked. No doubt another mustard casualty.
Reaching in, he pulled the cotton folds out.
Underneath them was a black nylon wallet . . . and a cell phone. And as the caller hung up again, or things went to voice mail, the vibration stopped.
With a sense of total disbelief, José took a pair of nitrile gloves out of his pocket. Yet after so many years in his job, he’d learned to trust his gut.
And his gut was telling him that what he was about to find was going to break his fucking heart.
Leaving the phone alone, he picked up the wallet, tore open the Velcro, and—
Officer Leon Roberts’s face stared up at him from a driver’s license that had been slotted into the see-through half of the two flaps. And across on the other side . . .
. . . was the Caldwell Police badge the man had earned and done proud.
“You know, you’re quiet. Even for you, you’re really frickin’ quiet.”
As V stopped under the fire escape and looked up, he wondered, if he stayed silent, whether Rhage would move on to another topic. Like, food. Or . . . food.
Or maybe . . . food?
You know, just to mix it up.
“Hello?” Hollywood prompted.
“I’m focused on what we’re doing here.”
Rhage stepped in front, and given his size, it was like the earth had coughed up a big, blond, beautiful mountain. With a piehole that, with no pie around, was flapping in the wind.
“And we’ve walked aimlessly for how many blocks now?” the brother said. “What’s wrong.”
“Fine, you want to chat? Answer me this. How does getting in our three hundred and fifty thousand steps tonight correspond to conversation—”
“V, what’s up your ass.” Rhage crossed his arms over the black daggers that were holstered, handles down, to his massive chest. Then he winced. “Actually, how ’bout you just tell me what’s on your mind. I think I better leave your ass and what may, or may not, be inside of it out of this. No offense.”
