One, the lie to Talbot.
Two, Matt hadn’t told Tony about the surveillance op. And he’d been totally pissed off when Tony had shown up.
Three, as soon as they’d gotten to the factory, Matt had separated from the main team, which would have given him a chance to signal the Cardozos — specifically the sniper — and, at the same time, stay out of the line of fire. Matt’s appearing to be stuck in the warehouse, pinned down, would keep Boyd in the target zone.
Four, Elena Velasquez, the confidential informant. Matt had kept her to himself, which was odd. Detectives always shared their CIs and their information with fellow officers. One reason to keep her out of the picture? He was setting her up to be the perfect fall woman to blame for betraying Boyd.
Five, the grenades should by rights have killed the two officers but didn’t. Had they been tossed by a Cardozista away from Matt — to make sure he wasn’t hurt?
Okay. Those were circumstantial arguments of Matt’s betrayal. But they weren’t particularly damning, absent an answer to why — the number-one question on cops’ minds when they look over the puzzle of a crime.
Was there a why? Did Matt have a motive for betraying the team?
And Tony heard in his mind another question of Agent Shea Talbot’s.
Do you know anyone who might have an issue with Jonny Boyd?
Sorry I can’t help you. I don’t know anybody who’d want to take Jonny out.
Yes, it was a crime to lie to a federal agent.
But lie Tony had.
Because he did know someone who might have a reason to take the DEA agent out. His own brother.
August. Two years ago.
EPPD was running a drug takedown in an empty shopping mall east of the city, Matt being one of the officers on the job. Not the cartels; some scrawny cracker had been cooking up batches of meth like he was going to start distributing through Walmart. He was selling a mother lode to a fat, bearded biker. The bust went fine... until a carload of the tweaker’s buddies showed up, armed and eager and stupid.
All to hell.
The gun battle ran for twenty minutes, before all the perps ended up in metal.
It was a good day: More than twenty-two pounds of meth — enough for nearly forty thousand hits — and $600,000 cash. Six assholes off the street and the only injury one of the cracker’s friends, who got a pinkie shot off.
Then somebody in the DEA got to thinking. The going price for meth was $80-plus a gram. That meant the stash was worth nearly $800K. Why the discrepancy? Had $200K been stolen?
Tony wasn’t on the op but he was at the press conference, with all the drugs and cash piled high for the cameras, a typical dog and pony show the brass love. Tony happened to see the chain-of-custody card on the wrapped bags of cash: M. Wright was the first name on the list. His brother was the one who had packed up the money at the scene. If there had been a theft it could have happened anywhere from there to the evidence room, sure, but it’s always easier to pilfer from the scene rather than the vault in the evidence room.
In the profession of policing, it’s called “shrinkage.” It happens some but rarely to the tune of $200K.
Tony had heard that Boyd was getting pressure to find out if the money had in fact been stolen. So he was interviewing everyone who’d been at the scene. This was probably the subject of the meeting between Boyd and his brother that Tony had witnessed a week ago.
The meeting that Matt had lied to the FBI agent about.
Had his brother arranged for Boyd to die because the DEA agent was closing in on the truth?
Ridiculous, of course.
Impossible...
Except for the Douglas factor.
Five
“Twenty bucks says you don’t jump.”
“Jump?”
“From the roof. I say you don’t. I say you’re a fucking coward.”
Tony mutters to his thirteen-year-old brother, “M, forget it.”
The high schooler turns on Tony. “I know you’re a coward.” The kid looks back to Matt, who cocks his head and looks up at the roof.
The three are on the asphalt playground of Santa Maria Academy in El Paso, which the Wright boys and this asshole, Douglas, attend. Classes are over and Tony has been dawdling, in hopes of a chance to say hi to Sheree Grenner. No such luck. All he and M caught was this guy, who plodded up to give them shit. Douglas is a demibully. (In school Tony just learned about demigods. He likes the word a lot. Demi. Demi. Demi.) Douglas is into football, of course. Kids who play basketball and soccer rarely bully. He has broad shoulders and curly black hair and massive hands, more freckled than his face. He’s a tackle and he tackles very well.
Tony wants to defuse everything. Douglas is dangerous.
So is gravity. The school is four stories high.
Matt: “Let’s see your money.”
“Let’s see yours.”
The bills appear and they give them to another kid to hang on to, Randy, a skinny sciencey sort. “It’s a bet,” Matt says to him. “If I jump off the roof it’s mine. If I don’t, it’s his.”
“The roof?” His eyes go up. “That roof? You sure?”
“Take it,” both Matt and Douglas say.
He does. Fast. Tony can see Randy’s palm glisten with sweat.
Tony is fidgety. “Come on, man. No.”
“Hm.” Matt is examining the challenge: leaping from the roof into a tall pine and grab-falling to the ground. It’s been done three times that Tony can remember. Stan Fredericks will be in a wheelchair forever.
Matt gives a grin to Tony, ignores his imploring eyes and scrabbles up the fire escape. He climbs to the top and then takes a ladder to the roof. He walks to the edge and looks out over the view. El Paso in late spring.
A demidesert, Tony thinks.
Matt’s face seems happy, like he’s seeing something nobody else ever has before.
Tony thinks, as he often has: Are we really related?
He walks to the lip and, fuck, without a moment’s pause he does a swan dive toward the tree. Not what Tony would do — that would be a feet-down, head-up leap, staying vertical and clutching branches to his chest until he worked his way to the trunk and climbed down slowly.
Not Matt. It’s like he’s going off the board at the municipal pool. He disappears into a mass of boughs and branches. All Tony can see is a figure in black — Matt’s totally goth — tumbling and cartwheeling down, down, down, grabbing branches to slow and to steer himself away from the solider limbs. Finally, six feet above the piney earth, he stops and hangs, dangling. Then drops into a heap and lies motionless.
Tony runs to him. “Yo, M? You okay? Say something, dude!”
Jesus. Did he break his neck, after all?
Wheelchair...
But then he slowly rises and pats himself up and down, pulls needles out of his thick, now messy hair. “Awesome.”
“You hurt?”
“Hurt? I just jumped off a roof. Of course I’m hurt. But what’s that got to do with anything?”
Exhilaration and balls-out adrenaline have numbed the pain. Matt walks over to Randy and holds his hand out. Just as the boy was offering the bills, another hand snatches them away. Douglas’s. Of course.
Matt looks up, not frowning, not glaring. Just locking eyes with a boy who outweighed him by fifty pounds, most of it muscle. “What?”
“It wasn’t a fair bet. We didn’t shake on it.”
“Give me my money,” Matt says.
“Get the fuck out of my way.”
Matt doesn’t.