Chapter 9
Rafe had known from the moment he’d been told his dad was dying over three years ago that his life was changed forever. He’d been called out of an ethics class, and at first he’d been pleased by the respite, not thinking that the Dean wanted to see him about anything other than his final year thesis.
“A terrible accident…a car…hit him as he crossed the road.”
* * * * *
The cop who stood there telling him, a young woman not much older than himself, had huge brown eyes that were bright with sympathy. And the Dean laid a comforting hand on his shoulder when she’d left.
“You’re a good student,” Dean Rafferty murmured. “Your dad would be proud of you. I’ll give you some time,” he’d said, and left Rafe in the office with a view over the lawns of the college.
The Dean seemed to think that saying his dad would be proud was enough to balance the fact that his dad was now dead. Shame things didn’t work that way. Rafe assumed the Dean had left him there to cry, but for the longest time – until three days after he got home from the funeral, to be exact – he didn’t.
Until shock slipped away, and halfway through a lecture from his politics professor he felt something wet on his cheek and realized it was tears. Stumbling out of that lecture, with everyone staring, was the low point of losing the protection of shock.
He went through every stage of grief; clinically, he could even identify each one. Only after he’d worked his way through all of them did he track back what had happened. He knew his dad had gone to the West Coast, knew he’d been going to talk to his wife’s brother, Rafe’s Uncle Arlo, but how that had ended with him dying in a car accident of some sort, Rafe couldn’t figure at all.
Uncle Arlo had come to the funeral, with his quiet wife and mean-looking sons, after they’d shipped Rafe’s dad back for cremation. He’d said all the right things, how Héctor Ramirez had been the best of men, a good husband, father and brother-in-law, working so hard to keep his son on the right track. Rafe had believed him.
Then, a few days after, when Rafe realized he was entirely alone, he acted on some of the things his dad had told him, and he found the notebooks in a bank box. The ones that either made his dad look like a madman writing a crime thriller, or implicated him in knowledge of drug deals that would destroy the memory of him forever. Rafe wasn’t ready to accept either reason, so he moved to Arlo’s home to find out the truth.
* * * * *
“Rafe?”
Deacon hadn’t knocked, but the door was half open.
“What?” Rafe snapped. “If you’ve come to talk me out of going home…”
“No,” Deacon murmured, and stepped into the room. “I want to talk.”
Rafe was suspicious of his tone, low and encouraging, and different to what he expected from Deacon.
“Yeah, right.”
Deacon held up both hands. “If you want to go home, I can’t stop you, but give it a week, heal some more, rest, and then I’ll take you back.”
“I want to go back now. I want Felix caught and I want him to pay for what he did.”
“He’ll pay,” Deacon said, and there was a cast-iron conviction in his voice. “One week. Seven days. Records at the hospital reflect you signed yourself out AMA. Kayden will look in on you. No one knows you’re here, and in seven days I will take you home.”
Rafe’s mind rebelled at the thought of agreeing to what Deacon was saying, but his body told him otherwise. He hurt. His stomach hurt, his leg ached, he was tired from lack of sleep, and he’d be safe here. Safer than he’d felt for the past few days.
“Three days,” he said, and tilted his chin in a display of defiance.
“Six,” Deacon said with a shrug.
“Three.”
“Five, and that is where I stop,” Deacon said, more focused, crossing his arms over his chest.
Could Rafe live with that? He called up the images in his head, of his father, and his mom, and the fact that he had neither here with him, and that Felix needed to pay.
But he was tired, and safe.
“Five days.”
“Good.”
“Saturday, I’m going home. I have a job, and school starts back on Monday. I want to be there.”
Deacon gave nothing away in words, but his stance stiffened a little and he set his lips in a firm line. “Okay,” he finally bit out. “Did you hurt yourself going out the window?”
“No,” Rafe lied.
“That was fucking stupid.”
“It was desperate,” Rafe replied. You tried to kill me. I don’t trust you, but I have nothing else I can do right now. “I want to talk to the cops.”
“No.” Deacon grabbed the back of a chair and turned it so he could straddle it.
“Get me a cop to talk to.”
“No.”
“One of the team that put me in witness protection. Evie – I want to talk to Evie.”
“Rafe, listen to me. I need you to listen to me.”
Was this going to be a fucking lecture? He didn’t need lectures from some alpha asshole like Deacon. Still, he could pay lip-service and get the lecture out of the way so that Deacon would fuck right off.
“I’m listening.”
“We don’t know who helped Felix get out, or even if he needed help. We’ll find out, but right now, your life is in danger and there will be no cops involved in this.”
“Says the controlling asshole,” Rafe muttered. “Surely the more people who know—”
Deacon stood up abruptly. “Five days. No cops. Get some sleep – you look like shit.”
He left and pulled the door shut behind him. Fucker thought he was getting the last word. Rafe hobbled to the door and crutched out, past a startled Deacon, and through to the kitchen.
“I’m hungry,” he said, and opened the nearest cupboard, which held, by luck more than judgment, cereal. Seemed like someone in the house liked their morning fiber – there wasn’t a decent high-sugar multicolored cereal in there. He pulled out cornflakes and placed the box on the counter.
“You want some help?”
“No.”
He found a bowl and pulled milk from the fridge. Awkwardly, with his crutch leaning next to him, he climbed one-handed onto one of the kitchen stools, holding back the yelp of pain at the pulling in his side.
And all the while Deacon watched him, irritation on his face.
“You’re a stubborn idiot,” Deacon said as he shook his head.
Whatever. Rafe had things to do, and he needed to eat if he hoped to heal enough to get back to his home, to his school. Slipping off the stool he took a bottle of water from the fridge, crutching past Deacon he had to give some kind of comeback.
“Takes one to know one,” he answered, wincing at the stupidity he was displaying, and watched Deacon spin on his heel and leave the kitchen, muttering something under his breath about idiots.
“What am I?” he said to no one in particular. “Five?”
Back in his room, he noticed someone had been in and straightened his covers, the sheet taut on the mattress, the quilt pulled back at one corner. The drapes were drawn and the only light was the small bedside lamp. There were also meds right there on the table, and more water.
Sam? Mac? No, probably Deacon. Considerate bastard.
Rafe felt grungy, wanted a shower, however complicated that would be, but the bed looked so comfortable. So white. Swallowing some pain meds, he climbed onto it, his crutch toppling to the floor, and lay back on the pillows, staring up at the ceiling.
He’d move in a minute and get a wash or something.
When he woke, the room was in absolute darkness, no lamplight, and no sense that anyone else was in the room with him. He had no concept of the time, but he woke up needing a shower, or at least to splash water on his face. Cautiously, he opened the door, and from the darkness in the hallway he realized it must be night; he’d slept the day away. He opened the bathroom door and flicked on the light, blinking at the brightness, calculating carefully how the hell he was going to wash. Then he saw the note on top of a pile of plastic.
I know you’ll want to shower. I know you won’t ask for help. Wrap your leg in plastic, tape it. If you can’t then please ask Sam for help; he’s in his office all day and he can come home. D.
Rafe didn’t need help. He could manage this. He didn’t feel dizzy, and it had to be simple to tape up a leg in a cast. Surely.
After ten minutes, he finally stepped into the shower, tension in every line of him after the struggle to cover the cast and extra time covering the bandage on his operation wound, and a headache banding his head. The water was hot, and he relaxed under the steady stream, the heat of it clearing his head, and he allowed himself the luxury of thinking about nothing at all. No earth-shattering events, not the intense fear mixed with something else he couldn’t identify that he felt for Deacon, not the fact that the dangerous-looking Mac was so openly affectionate with Sam, or that somewhere out there Felix was looking for him.
He attempted to forget it all.
Wrapped in a robe, he sat on the edge of his bed and peeled away the plastic protecting his stomach and his cast, checking if everything had stayed dry and thankful that it had. God knew what shit he’d have to listen to if he’d made the damn thing wet. Exhausted, he lay back on the bed, his feet still on the floor, closed his eyes, willing each of his muscles to relax, and he slept.
In his dreams, someone lifted his legs and turned him, and tucked him in. In his dreams, he told the person he was fine, that he needed sunlight, that it was daytime. In his dreams, someone sighed at him and touched his hair.
When he woke up warm in the darkness and tight under his covers, he knew one thing.
Deacon had been there, and none of it had been a dream.
Rafe realized he had no idea how to react to Deacon. Instinctively, he rebelled when Deacon got protective, and he couldn’t bear to get too close to the man, because every time he got too close he remembered those last minutes on the jetty. He recalled Deacon’s calm expression, the absolute certainty in his eyes as he aimed the gun at Rafe’s chest and asked for something to weigh Rafe’s corpse down in the water.
And the dreams weren’t good, because they always ended in fear and sickness and screaming as water closed over his head. Intellectually, if he believed Deacon’s story, then he needed to get over himself. Right? But what if there was doubt? What if his gut feeling told him that he couldn’t trust Deacon? How was he going to get over that? And did he need to? Because after this was done, after Felix was caught, what would Deacon be to Rafe? A distant memory, that was all.
Evie arrived the third day he was there. She was all smiles and reassurance about how well he looked and how everything was fucking fine.
Only it wasn’t, and he knew it.
“Why didn’t you tell me about Deacon?” That was his only question.
She sighed and took the seat opposite him, nursing the coffee Deacon had made her before disappearing to give Evie and Rafe “time”.
“What would I have said?”
“Something like, he wasn’t a murderer, or a bad guy at all.”
She looked at her coffee momentarily. “You have to have some bad in you to be effective undercover,” she finally offered. “You have to be able to draw on something inside you to convince others.”
Something bad inside Deacon? Maybe he should hold on to that thought. It would certainly help him come to terms with some of the hate and fear he had for the man.
“But Deacon?” Evie had more to say. “He thought so much of you, wanted to grab you and drag you out of that house and never let you go back. It broke him to see you in danger.”
“Could have fooled me,” Rafe muttered.
He listened as she extolled Deacon’s virtues, and more than once the fact that he was a good guy. Seemed to Rafe that she thought if she said it enough it would sink in and he would immediately begin to accept who Deacon was.
“Tell me about Felix,” he said, interrupting a story that no doubt would have included Deacon rescuing orphaned kittens in the snow or something equally heroic.
She blinked at him. “What do you want to know?”
“How did he get out? Why wasn’t he in chains somewhere?”
“He killed a guard to get away.”
And that was all Evie said, because she was the first to admit she didn’t know how he’d got away so easily. Although a guard dying wasn’t exactly easy. Another person dead because of Rafe’s family.
He spent a lot of time in his room, when he wasn’t walking circuits of the house on his leg, exercising the muscles, hoping to hell he could walk the pain away. It was on one of those walks, up in the attic, that he found the office space. Not a typical space, with a PC on a desk and maybe some pens and paper. Nope, this was high tech, and the door wasn’t locked, so he limped into the space and sat on the first available chair. There were six monitors showing images of various angles on the house, the garden, the garage, the kitchen. Two other monitors with scrolling text that meant nothing to him, and which every so often was replaced by a representation of something on a radar, like the kind used by air traffic control. Then there were the computers. Three of them, all shiny and new, and none of them turned on at the moment. Whatever it was that Mac did, it was clearly some heavy stuff, and something that Rafe didn’t want to get involved with.
“I see you found the Bat Cave,” Deacon said from the doorway.
Rafe spun on his chair and knocked his leg on the table. He cursed in equal parts sudden pain and shock that he’d been discovered wandering into rooms he maybe shouldn’t have. Deacon’s expression changed immediately from one of teasing to one of serious worry, and he stepped closer before Rafe could stop him.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine; stop asking me that,” Rafe ground out, even if the pain was shooting up his thigh and down from his scar.
Deacon came to a halt on the other side of the desk and forced his hands into his jeans pockets as if he didn’t know what else to do with them.
“Are you?” he asked softly.
“Am I what?” Rafe was confused, which wasn’t difficult at the moment with the pain and the drama and the rain of shit he was living under.
“Fine. You said you were fine, but you look as if you’re in pain.”
Rafe snapped. “Of course I’m in pain; a car drove right into me.”
Deacon hunched his shoulders and guilt carved into his expression. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“Why?” Rafe was abruptly pissed at this hangdog, guilt-ridden Deacon who was slap-bang in the middle of his life. “Why are you sorry? Did you let Felix out? Did you want to him to kill me? Do you know it was him? Or was it actually you? What is it that you’re not telling me?”
Deacon stared at Rafe for the longest time, and Rafe could see the other man’s brain working furiously. The Deacon he’d known at his uncle’s place hadn’t made thinking deeply quite so obvious. In fact, Rafe had pretty quickly judged Deacon as being a shallow muscle-man. How wrong he’d been.
“I didn’t let Felix out – I don’t know anything about that. I wanted him dead. I hated that he wasn’t put away like his brother and father. But…”
“But what?”
“I had to shoot you.”
Rafe didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but it hadn’t been that cold, blunt admission from Deacon. His chest tightened.
“You wanted me dead.” That wasn’t right. Deacon had explained that he’d been trying to make it look real.
Deacon grabbed a chair, turned it around, and straddled it. His expression was one of internal conflict, indecision.
“I wanted you out of there. You should never have been anywhere near that place, and I saw what they’d done to Bryan when we found his body, and I was fucking pleased I’d shot you and taken you out of the equation. They were going to kill you too, and if it had been up to Felix he would have beaten you to death. I had to control the situation, and I won’t apologize for what I did.”
“What happened to Bryan?” Rafe’s voice was quiet. “I liked him. He was quiet and sweet.”
Deacon grimaced, looking pissed that Rafe had even picked up on that particular part of the explanation.
“We found his body in the cellar after the raid. Along with others, all undocumented. There wasn’t much left of Bryan’s face; he’d been tortured. In his testimony, Chumo told the cops that it was his father’s work, but I knew it had to have something to do with Felix. He was unhinged.”
“Jesus.”
“That could have been you, Rafe.”
For a moment, Rafe considered the words, then he nodded slowly.
“But you didn’t know that before you shot me, right?”
Why am I even arguing about this? I know Felix was out to hurt me.
“Rafe—”
“No, I know, I’m sorry. I think. I don’t know who the fuck I’m even apologizing to. Is it the cop? Or the man I knew who dealt with my uncle’s problems? Maybe it’s the man who kissed me or the one who shot me. I have no fucking clue anymore.”
Exhaustion stole over Rafe, and he scrubbed at his face with his hands; his head hurt and he couldn’t make sense of any of this.
“I’m not running,” he mumbled into his hands. “If it was Felix who pointed a car at me, then I’ll face him man-to-man, and we’ll clear up this, and the cops can arrest him.”
“And I’ll be right next to you.”
That made Rafe look up. “What if I don’t want you there?”
Deacon shrugged and crossed his arms over his chest. “What if you have no choice?”
For a moment, Deacon waited, as if he was expecting an answer from Rafe, then he moved to the side wall and unclipped a bracket that unfolded out to reveal what Rafe could only think looked like one of those boards you saw in cop shows. Pictures and lines drawn in different colors, and right in the center of it was an image of him. Grainy and evidently taken from a distance, it sat in the middle of grid and had various lines leading from it.
He pushed himself up from the desk, grabbing his crutch and awkwardly stumbling around the desk that had sat nicely between him and Deacon, protecting him. He came to a stop in front of the board. There was so much detail. Lines to his parents, with remarks next to each picture, cold clinical facts, date of death, cause of death. He inhaled sharply at the pictures and glanced at Deacon, who stared at him.
“I didn’t know when to show this to you,” he murmured.
Then he tapped at another line from Rafe’s picture, tracing it to a part of the board with his uncle’s name and those of both Felix and Chumo, the twin’s pictures near identical. When you knew them, you could see small differences, like Chumo was softer, Felix manic, Chumo smiled more, Felix was bitter. But in the end, the twins had an equal amount of evil in them, Felix’s had just been closer to the surface. Chumo was sly at times, allowing his brother to take the brunt of anything physical and collecting up any leftover crumbs of praise from their dad.
Deacon tapped the picture of Arlo again. “Arlo Martinez. When he arrived in the US, he had nothing.”
“I’ve heard this story before,” Rafe said. “Moved to LA, worked construction, made money that way.”
“That’s half the story. Construction was a cover story for most of what he did, the gray areas, and in 2012 there were several arrests for embezzlement of city funds in the town he’d settled in – the mayor, his staff, giving themselves huge salaries at the expense of the town. But they never linked it to Arlo, even though it was he’d bankrolled some of the nastier things they were into. They wanted someone inside, and that was me; I was undercover for two years, working my way sideways. The end game was always taking down Arlo, working out his supply routes.”
“Supply routes for drugs?”
“Yeah, and worse. Human trafficking.”
Rafe’s legs were like rubber; they wouldn’t hold him up. “What?”
“We need to find Felix. Is there anything you can add to this board that might lead us to where he is?
“Nothing.”
He was lying. Well, half lying. He had no idea where Felix could be, but he did have things that could fill in gaps. But what was the point in sharing anything like that now? His dad’s secrets deserved to be left where they were.
“I don’t know where he is.” He pulled back his shoulders. “But he found out where I was, and I need to go back there. To finish this.”
Deacon nodded mutely. He didn’t look happy at the thought. Then he walked out of the room and left Rafe standing there, staring at the information wall.
Alone, Rafe pressed his fingers to his lips and then to the picture of his parents together.
Today, right here and now, he missed his dad and wished he’d known his mother.