“Anybody say anything about what happened?”
“Sure, sure,” he said. “I still got some buddies in SWAT who talk. Loyal guys. Guys still torn up about it. Yeah, word is someone was causing him problems. A high-ranking special operative—someone with a vendetta. There was a report, an official complaint your dad filed just weeks before…” He stopped to make the sound of a bomb exploding and illustrated it with his fat little hands. “They didn’t tell you this stuff? Not even Mathews, your dad’s replacement? I thought the two of you were close.”
“A report?” I said in half disbelief, half rage. “No one ever mentioned a report! Certainly not Mathews. What did it say?” Could the “special operative” be Mr. D. S.?
“I’m not sure. I never saw it. This is just what I heard from Mathews, off the record. I’m not supposed to…” Uneasy, he started to look around. Like he felt someone watching us. “Look, that’s really all I know.”
“Can you find out? Could you ask Mathews again?” I knew I sounded desperate, but I didn’t care.
“That’s all I got,” he said, nonchalantly running his tongue around the inside of his mouth as if he was checking for lucky leftovers. I had to force myself not to gag.
“I don’t want to talk to you any more than you want to talk to me, but please, if you find out anything else, will you let me know?”
Either I’d said something that amused him or he found some beef jerky stuck in an incisor, because his goofy grin made him look far too satisfied.
“I’ll tell you one thing, sweetheart,” he said, backing away. “Talk to Detective Martinez. He knows more than you think he does. Waaaaaayyy more.”
Sweetheart? Martinez? This loser knew just how to piss me off.
“Why him?” I started to follow the trail of slime, but he held up his hands like I’ll touch you with these greasy things if I have to.
“Remember that corrupt-cop thing your dad and I were working on all those years ago?”
“You can’t mean Martinez? If that was true, he wouldn’t have been promoted to Detective.”
“Let’s just say that Martinez was good at getting in and out of more than just your mom’s panties.” He dropped his chins and grinned. A quick palm thrust would wipe that smug look off his face. “Not long after your dad found out about the affair, he turned Martinez in to Internal Affairs for some ‘misplaced drug evidence.’ Nothing stuck of course. Jack made the move to SWAT, and Martinez made his way up the ladder all the same. That’s the thing about corruption, it’s hard to know how deep it goes. But make no mistake, Martinez’s hands weren’t clean.”
“But my dad couldn’t prove it?” It was more a statement than a question.
“The thing is, Jack and Martinez were both damn good at their jobs. In some ways, they were a lot alike. Both highly trained, ambitious Marine brothers until the end of time and all that jazz. They were tight. But the way they did things couldn’t have been more different. While Jack was all letter of the law, Martinez was all spirit of the law. Martinez bent the rules, did things his own way, and Jack didn’t like it. Jack thought he could change Martinez. That as his partner, it was his duty or some shit…pardon my French. But obviously, that didn’t happen.
“While Jack made his way up to Sergeant fairly quickly, Martinez built a reputation as a dirty cop. About a year ago, your pops allegedly began suspecting Martinez of suspicious dealings with a few drug rings.” Sammy paused to make a full-circle motion with his chubby hands, then said, “So, when I heard Martinez’s name came up in the personal complaint Jack filed the month before his death, I couldn’t help but wonder—”
“Wait,” I said. “My dad filed a report against Martinez one month before he died?” I couldn’t believe the vast amount of information I didn’t know. It kept falling on top of me like an avalanche.
“No, the report wasn’t filed against Martinez. Remember, I said the complaint was against someone else—someone from both of their pasts. Somebody I don’t know about, unfortunately. But Martinez was a witness to threats against Jack. Apparently it would’ve taken a lot more than a nearly wrecked marriage and an almost-destroyed career to break the Marine bond they shared. Water under the bridge.” Sammy stared with skeptical eyes at the water slamming against the Pier’s beams.
I shook my head in astonishment. Was he insinuating that Martinez didn’t hate my dad anymore? That they made up, and he was actually helping my dad, trying to protect him from someone—maybe the same someone who’d been setting me up? Could I believe this dirty little slop of a man? Had I misinterpreted Martinez’s concern all this time? Was he trying to protect me against the same man who murdered my father?
“Look, kid…” Sammy paused and glanced around nervously. “I gotta go, but don’t forget to call. Remember, I scratch your back, you scratch mine.”
The only thing I wanted to scratch was my skin in case some of his head lice had jumped onto my body.
But he really did know my dad—and in a way I never had.
I was supposed to go see Dr. T at 3:00. First, she pushed the appointment back, which I thought was lucky since that was the time Sammy had wanted to meet. But while I was on my way over to her office, she canceled altogether, saying she wasn’t feeling well. That had happened like two times ever. Snow at the beach was more common. I wondered if I’d told her too much. If she was distancing herself from me because of what she knew I’d done.
I would’ve considered it another stroke of luck that the house was empty when I got back, but who was I kidding? My mother was never home.
I pulled the pictures out of the envelope and thought about burning it in the trash can to make sure all Sammy’s slime was gone. But that would raise flags I didn’t need, so I put it in the kitchen trash compactor and washed my hands four times. Just to be sure.
He had four pictures of the van. Clear, digitally enhanced photos. I pulled open my dad’s database again and plugged in the plate number.
One name popped up: D. Silver. I almost couldn’t believe my eyes. D. S. now had a last name and an address: 4081 Royal Hill Bay, Newport Beach, California—only twenty minutes from here.
Now I wished Liam wasn’t away at his game. I shouldn’t go—no, I couldn’t go—to Newport without him. And yet it would be virtually impossible for me to sit here alone and twiddle my thumbs all night. Surely doing a simple drive-by would be a safe enough activity in my Mary Poppins–equipped Big Black. We could just go check out the address.
I closed out my dad’s computer and headed over to his gun safe, putting in the pathetically simple code—911. The safe door creaked open, and I stared at the racks of weapons like a kid at a candy store. Since my handgun, Smith, had gone into the LeMarq evidence logs, never to be returned, I wanted something similar. Hanging on its hook was my dad’s nickel-plated Glock, but I could barely stand to look at it, let alone touch it. Maybe I shouldn’t be taking a gun at all.
I’d been somewhat successful at blocking out most of what happened that night at the warehouse. Liam and I had an unspoken agreement not to talk about it. But now, as I stared at the Glock, I couldn’t help feeling the darkness of those deaths creep over me again. Why had Silver returned my dad’s gun to me?
The only reasonable choice seemed like my mom’s Ruger pocket revolver. It was tiny enough to seem like middle ground between a real gun and nothing at all. The only reason we even had it was because my mom once told my dad she wanted a gun small enough to fit in her small Coach purse, and he bought it for her anniversary present. She got so mad that he’d dared offer it in the place of a “real anniversary gift” that she never picked it up. I couldn’t tell if it had ever been used. I knew my dad wouldn’t have been caught dead with a little thing like this.