Luke

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After that, things went just about as expected. That is, they went to shit.

It was never going to be a good day.

By noon I was sitting in a little room, windowless and stuffy, with the air conditioning wheezing through the vents, bringing barely a puff of cool air. I was seated in a plastic chair in front of a small wooden table, and there was a plastic cup filled with water sitting on the table, the water sweating down the sides of the glass. It was a hot fucker of a day, a mean kind of hot, with smog-colored clouds that tinged the sky and air that smelled like an armpit. What the day needed was a bitch of a storm to blow through and blow everything away.

The door of the room opened and a cop came through, a middle-aged guy in uniform. “Riggs,” he said.

I looked at him. “Get me Nora Parker,” I said.

He shook his head. “That’s not going to happen.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“No,” he said. “But we really, really suggest you answer our questions.”

“Then I really, really suggest you get me Nora Parker. Or I’m not answering a damn thing.”

He looked mad, but there was nothing he could do about it. We both knew it. He turned around and left again.

I waited, and the water sweated down the sides of the plastic cup.

At long last, she came. Nora Parker wasn’t wearing a uniform; she’d been promoted out of the uniform ranks, though I had no idea what the police ranks even were. She wore dress pants and a light blue blouse, and her hair was tied back in a braid. She was tall and elegant like Lauren, but her eyes were exactly Emily’s, the color and shape of them. It made me ache to look into those eyes, so I did it again and again.

All we do is screw.

Nora pulled out the chair across from me and sat down. She didn’t look very pleased to be talking to me, but she was almost painfully alert, taking in every detail of me. She was keyed up, because today was a big day. I wondered what she saw when she looked at me, just like I wondered what Emily saw when she looked at me. Deep down, I didn’t think I wanted to know.

She put a pad of paper and a pen on the table in front of her. “Hello, Luke,” she said. Her voice was different from Emily’s, calm and melodious. But still a Parker woman voice, with that backbone of steel.

“Officer Parker,” I said.

“It’s sergeant, actually,” she said.

I didn’t say anything to that. We looked at each other across the table.

“You thirsty?” she asked me, motioning to the cup of water. “It’s hot.”

“Your air conditioning doesn’t work so good,” I said.

“Yeah, we really need it fixed.”

I almost smiled at that. Almost. Need the air conditioning fixed, my ass. It was probably a psychological tactic. They were trying to sweat me, literally.

She and I stared at each other for another minute. Me and Emily’s mother.

“Do I need a lawyer?” I asked her, though I already knew the answer.

“Do you want one?” she countered. “I suppose you can call one, though you’re just here for questioning. You’re not under arrest.”

No, I wasn’t. Because they had nothing to arrest me for. The cops had come to Riggs Auto, just like Emily had said they would. They’d come to the front door with a warrant, and they’d marched right in, a whole team of them. It was impressive work.

But they hadn’t found anything. There were no stolen cars in the garage, and none parked out back either. When they’d handed me the warrant to search my house, I knew they’d find nothing there either. I’d moved the money from the second safe, stashed it. Even if the cops had the combination, they’d find nothing.

So I wasn’t under arrest. But Tim Cleaver was. That was the guy who’d tried to sell a stolen watch at a jeweller’s. It was a dumb idea. I always knew it was the stolen goods that would bring the whole thing down.

They couldn’t arrest me, because they had no charges. But they could sit me in this room and sweat me. For as long as they wanted, really. Actually, right now that was fine with me. Because I didn’t want to get out of here and go home, or go back to Riggs Auto. I didn’t have anywhere that I wanted to go.

All we do is screw.

I looked at the pen and paper in front of Nora Parker. “Are we being recorded?” I asked. There were no windows in this room, so I already knew there was no one-way glass.

She smiled a little at that. “No,” she said. “Westlake is a small police department. We don’t have a budget for secret recordings. When we need to talk to someone, we just sit face to face and ask them. And if we need to record the conversation, we have a recorder we bring in the room with us.”

She was telling the truth, I could tell. There were obviously no cameras in this little room. All that stuff from Law and Order didn’t really happen in Westlake.

Which made this a private conversation. So I said, “I’ve been seeing Emily for the past two weeks.”

For a second her face went slack with shock. Then she reassembled her expression, admirably I thought. “Seeing,” she said, picking a word out of what I’d said.

There was no reason to be coy. “Sleeping with,” I said.

Her expression got a little hard at that, but she was watching me closely, and she believed me. “I knew she was seeing someone,” she admitted, the mother in her coming out for just a brief second. “So. You.”

“Me,” I said. I broke my gaze away from her and stared at the wall, at nothing, making the thoughts come together. I made myself say the words, because they were important. “I love her,” I told Nora. “I’m in love with her. However you want to put it. I shouldn’t be, but I am.” I rearranged the words, tried to make her understand. “I want to be the kind of guy who deserves her.”

When I made myself look back at her, she’d put her neutral cop’s expression on again. But I could see past it, just a crack. Those words meant something to her. Just a little bit, but something.

“I know,” I said to her, “I’m Mike Riggs’ son. I’m not that guy. And maybe she’ll never talk to me again. But I still decided I want to be that guy, the guy who deserves her even if he doesn’t get a shot. That’s the guy I want to be. That’s all I want to be.”

She frowned at me. “Luke?”

“You’re doing really good,” I told her. “You and your team, whoever you’re working with. You’re on the right track. Your guy on the inside is leaking good information, and you’ve got them scared.”

Nora blinked. “What?”

“The arrests freaked them out,” I said. “It made them change tactics, that’s all. They shut down the warehouse on Meadowvale Avenue. They cleared it out, because they figured it was a dirty site, that you guys would be knocking on the door any day.”

“We’re aware of the warehouse,” she said in a guarded voice.

I shook my head. “You can raid it all you want, but you won’t find anything. They’ve moved to the old sugar refinery off Route Two. You know the one?”

She seemed a little stunned, but she nodded once.

“The loading dock in the back,” I said. “That’s where we deliver the cars when we’re done with them. Big Jim does most of it, but you probably already know that.” They’d taken away Big Jim when they’d taken me, and he was probably sitting in a cell, waiting for his turn in this hot little room. “The guy who delivers the car to us is named Dave Matthews, like the band. He works as the car wash place on Roosevelt Avenue, the one with all the soap suds on the sign. Car delivery is what he does as a side gig. He’s probably there now.”

Nora pulled the pad of paper to her and made a note, then another. She wrote for a minute, then looked up at me again. “Luke, where’s the money?”

“We got a drop two days ago,” I said. “The guy who drops the money is named Gus White. He’s a big bald guy. He works for another guy named Dennis Mitchell.” I watched her expression flinch as I said the name, because she knew it. He was one of the bigger fish in the organization. “Gus knows the security code at Riggs and he drops the money in the safe out back. The last drop was one hundred and fifty thousand, exactly.”

“And where is that hundred and fifty thousand now?”

“I tracked down Gus White and gave it back to him. I told him to give it back to his boss.” I shrugged. “What he actually did with it, I couldn’t say.”

She stared at me in shock. “You had a face-to-face meeting with Gus White?”

“I have resources.” It was Dex who had tracked down Gus and set up the meeting, using his contacts. But I was leaving my brothers out of this.

Gus had been pretty chill, actually, about the fact that I was telling him not to have cars sent through Riggs Auto anymore. That we were out of business.

He could have been pissed off about it. He could have killed me, even. But people are usually chill when you’re handing them money and not the other way around.

“Okay,” Nora said, “I admit that’s impressive. The guys who run the old warehouse—the sugar refinery, I mean. Do you have names?”

“I have names.”

“Jesus, it’s like Christmas in June,” she said. “We’ve questioned Ron Ruvinsky more than once. The man who calls himself Ronny Red. He’s never told us anything.”

I shrugged. The cops didn’t have the Riggs brothers’ interrogation tactics.

“In any case,” Nora went on, “Ronny Red has left town. No one knows where he went. We also interviewed your father before he was arrested for trying to kill Ronny. We had him sitting in that same chair you’re in four times. He never had a single thing to tell us.”

I ran a hand through my hair. “Yeah, well, I’m not him.”

“I’m starting to see that.”

“No, you don’t,” I said. “Maybe you’ll never see it. It doesn’t matter, really. Maybe you’ll never have to see me again. Or maybe Emily will give me a shot and you’ll be stuck with me. That isn’t up to either of us.”

A frown appeared between her eyebrows. “Luke, if you love her like you say…” She trailed off.

“Then what?” I asked.

Nora shook her head. “Good God, a Riggs boy,” she said softly to herself. She pinched the bridge of her nose with her fingers and closed her eyes. “Of all the men in the world for my daughter to fall in love with.”

My heart did a slow turn in my chest, but I was quiet. I waited. If Emily was actually in love with me, I could wait a long time.

Besides, even though it was insulting, I got it. If I had a daughter, I’d be pissed if she ended up with a guy like me.

Well, that was just too bad.

Nora sighed and opened her eyes. “If you love her like you say, then this was the right thing to do.” She picked up her notebook and pen and stood, heading for the door.

“That’s it?” I forced the words out. “I’m free to go?”

She turned back. “I see no evidence of criminal activity on your part,” she said—a little reluctantly, I thought. “You seem like a good guy who is trying to do the right thing. I try not to make a habit of locking guys like that up.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. “That sounds like bullshit.”

“Does it?” she said coolly. “It is, a little. I’m going to check every part of this out. I’m going to check you out. And my PD knows who you are, where you are. We know what you’re doing. If you try to leave town, there will be an APB before you can hit Road Six.”

“That’s more like it,” I said. I pushed my chair back and stood up. “I’m getting out of this fucking hot room and going home.”

Nora paused and caught my gaze with hers. “Tell her,” she said quietly. “Emily probably doesn’t know how you feel. She puts on a tough exterior, but on the inside she’s vulnerable.” Then she turned, and walked out the door.