Chapter Thirty-Two

 

The apology has gone through three separate drafts. None of them have resembled each other except in passing, and none of them sound good when Josh Meadows finally reads them all aloud.

There's a good reason that he never took up a career in speech-writing, and that reason is that he's not good at it. There are other reasons, as well, but the first and biggest is that it would be impossible for him to keep any sort of job doing it.

Not enjoying the work comes at a distant second, though it would have disqualified the job to begin with, all the same.

So it's with a heavy heart that he forces himself to ignore the temptation to simply not write a speech. Because this is going to be a big deal, in front of several television cameras, and he'd better not fuck it up in front of… well, at the very least, several hundred people.

Thinking the numbers will be any higher than that might just cause more nervousness still. So in the interest of keeping himself sane and stable, Josh is using the old tightrope-walker's trick and not looking down. Because much like tightrope-walkers, he's got a long way to fall beneath him, and he's walking a very thin line indeed.

A thin line between sounding like an ass-kisser who won't do his god damn job if it happens to run up against the wrong sort of person, and punching Mitch in the mouth again until they need to wire his jaw shut.

Still, if he says the right things, who knows. Some guys end up on easy street after lying through their teeth, offering to file paperwork wrong, offering to protect anyone who will pay them.

If he offers similar 'services,' maybe he can live the rest of his life free and easy. Maybe he can get himself a nice boat house, and keep his mind off of things. Maybe he can forget that Anna Witt ever existed, that he'd ever met her.

Maybe he can forget what she felt like in his arms. Maybe he can forget the way the pit in his stomach that opened up whenever Josh made the mistake of thinking what it would be like in that house for her daughter.

The little girl wasn't his concern. She wasn't his daughter. He hadn't even really dated Anna. It wasn't a real relationship. It was a fling. It lasted a couple of days, and then it went away.

Which is exactly what it should have done. He'd made a mistake falling for someone when he was working her case. He was a professional. He should have known better. He did know better. He knew better than to let himself get involved with someone like that.

But it had happened anyway, in spite of his knowing better. In spite of the fact that he was smart, good at his job. He knew exactly what he was supposed to do. Which made it that much more upsetting that he was sitting on a whole lot of trouble that wasn't going away no matter what he did.

There were things that worried Josh. Things that should have worried him more. If he'd been worried about Anna before, how much more worried should he be now?

Now, he had a lot more concerns than when he'd first met her.

Girls get into trouble. They get into trouble with the wrong sorts of guys. It's what they do. She'd gotten into trouble, and she's turned to him. It showed a sort of pattern. The wrong sorts of guys.

Well, that was fine. That was understandable. Nobody could fault a girl for turning to the same sort of trouble that they know best. It's totally within the realm of the ordinary. She was just doing what she knew to do.

It's in her bones. She's used to turning to guys who like trouble. Who are good at trouble. Mitchell's one of those guys. Josh is another one.

But what was eating at the edge of Josh's mind was that Mitch seemed to have gotten himself into a good amount of trouble this time. The kind of trouble that doesn't just go away on its own.

He'd looked through those safety deposit box videos thirty times before he'd been suspended. Now he only had the images, but the video played in his head just fine. It wasn't hard to remember.

After all, there wasn't much to see.

He'd looked through the footage, he'd looked through the papers. He'd looked through the list of what was missing. There was a lot missing.

There always seemed to be, after all. A whole lot of everything, and not a whole lot of evidence of anything.

It had struck Josh as a coincidence the first time he noticed it. The masks were totally ordinary. Anyone who watched an action movie would have been able to figure out to get themselves a ski mask to cover up their face. It's about as standard as ideas come.

Nobody would have blinked an eye at it the first time. But someone else had used the same trick. Someone else had used the same trick several times. It wasn't easy to say with any confidence, of course.

Anyone could have pulled it off. At least, anyone who could do all the things that they'd done.

Which is why they were having trouble. Partly, because the suspect list could fill an average box of files, printed out in two columns on letter-sized paper with a twelve-point font.

Partly because of those, the ones who really looked good for it—the ones who weren't out of town but could have done it if they really wanted to, the ones who weren't in jail, the ones who hadn't gotten out of the business years ago—they all denied it.

Well, of course they denied it. But they seemed a little surprised to hear that a job had been done at all. It was a big damn surprise to them, according to the Lieutenant's interview notes.

So who the hell could have done it? Well, there was a little thought that Josh, in spite of himself, couldn't get out of his head.

The thought that Mitch didn't seem all that surprised when he'd heard that Ava had been taken.

At first it had seemed like he was numb. Like he might have had thoughts about it, but he'd kept those thoughts to himself.

Now it was harder to think that way. It was easier to look at it and see things from the perspective of seeing a guy who liked to yank his ex-girlfriend's chain.

Josh is struggling to see it any other way, really. Because that's the kind of guy that Mitch Queen is. The kind of guy who yanks chains. He yanks them because he likes yanking them, and when he yanks them, he yanks damn hard.

It's a purely instinctive read, of course. It's a pure gut feeling. He shouldn't even have thought it, because proving it all is not just impossible, it's beyond impossible. People call shit impossible, but they mean it's very difficult.

Well, this is impossible with a capital I. Josh met the guy a few times, got a good sense for him, and it means that he hired a crew of guys to go grab his ex-girlfriend's baby.

He wouldn't just be thrown out of the courtroom with them laughing behind him. They'd be laughing so hard that it would be a real struggle for the lawyers to file their slander suit. Somehow they'd find the strength soldier on through it, in spite of the difficulty.

Which meant, the same as he'd repeated to himself a thousand times, that he'd have to have something real solid before he even dreamed of doing anything about it.

Which is where his little thought came in. The ski masks and covered-up eyes sounded a hell of a lot like what Anna had described the fellow in the Subaru to be wearing. It had sounded a lot like that, in fact.

Now, it could be nothing. Two guys wearing ski masks. They both figure, they'll hide their skin tone by covering up what little skin is showing. It's not much of a connection.

But it's a connection.

And now that he's writing these God damned speeches, trying to find ways to turn everything around, to figure a way to get out of this damned rat race, it's starting to fit together.

Because just as he reads the fourth draft of his apology speech, another total rewrite that still sounds like he thinks he's holding his nose and bobbing for apples in sewage, his phone buzzes in his pocket.

'Terry,' the Terry who works for Al Queen's estate, is Terry Green. He's a rough sort of guy. It doesn't take more than a glance at his face to know that, though. His entire life story seems like it's written there.

The guy's got 'rough sort of guy' plastered across his thrice-broken nose. But what he's also got is a history of violence. He used to be a knee-cap breaker for the mob, and did some time in the pen.

When he got out, Al was mayor. Rehabilitated the guy. Now he's as upstanding a citizen as you can ask for, aside from the nose. And that's what interests Josh Meadows.

Because if you rehabilitate one guy, how many others could you have working for you?

A guy like that gets out, an ex con with a history of violence, he knows exactly what the work-force looks like for him. It looks like 'fuck you and get out of my office.'

You hire a guy like that, you get him going straight? That's the kind of loyalty that you can't buy for a dollar. And that's the kind of loyalty that Mitch Queen has in his hands, for whatever needs doing.