I’d been a good cop, when it came down to it, and I hadn’t always disparaged being one. Maybe it would’ve been helpful to tell Katie that, when she brought everything up, but I just couldn’t bear to. Her springing all that on me, her partnership God, her relationship with Joe Clayton had sent me into something of a defensive shock.
Maybe I’d even handled everything incorrectly, which would’ve gone against everything I used to do while I was working for the force.
I’d done well, risen in the ranks, and had been recruited well, snatched up, really to start working on cases undercover. I understood why my supervisor, Cora Slade, did it. I was honest about my past when I applied to become a police officer. I really was no angel, growing up, in trouble just as much as I was out of it. I had connections in an underworld that I hadn’t been proud of, but Cora had seen the value in being able to smoothly navigate both worlds.
Plus, it helped that I looked a little scruffy, long hair, beard, and all.
It started with prostitution. I was part of a team that was tasked to find out who was behind a surprisingly sophisticated prostitution ring operating in the city, but the deeper I went, the more shit started floating to the surface. I finally reached a juncture of the investigation that was less a revelation than a crossroads of different directions in which we could proceed. I rarely contacted Cora over the course of that time, but I arranged a clandestine meeting to let her know what was going on.
“You can take down the ring,” I said. “There’s enough evidence to do so.”
I was cleaned up well, beard oiled and combed, hair kept back under a nice cap, my table located immediately adjacent behind hers. She was sitting just behind me, and each of us had other people at our tables who we appeared to be talking to when we were really just talking to each other. It wouldn’t look good if I was recognized, even if this restaurant was a little too nice by the standards of the social circles I was operating in, dining with a known member of the police force.
“That’s what this case is about, isn’t it?” Cora asked, and I could see out of the corner of my eye her dining partner laughing and nodding as if she’d made a clever joke. “If we have them, then we have them.”
“What if we could have something bigger?”
A pause. “Explain.”
“I’ve been following the money. It just keeps going.”
“Going where, exactly?”
“South of the border, if that gives you any idea.”
“You’re talking cartels?”
“I’m talking drugs, and, by extension, cartels.”
Cora was silent for a little while, and I took a big bite of a sandwich I’d been neglecting. It would be bad for me to come to this restaurant, be recognized, and not even do what I had come there to do, which was eat.
“You speak Spanish, Black?”
“Just what I learned in high school. Plus the curses.”
“Leave the cartels to the feds.”
“Even if they’re operating within our jurisdiction? Even if their influence runs a lot deeper than any could imagine?”
“You’re telling me that a cartel is fully active here?”
“Not a cartel. Multiple cartels.”
“Christ.”
I let her absorb that information, taking a sip of my water. “We could take down the prostitution ring. It would be good press. A case closed. But if we dig deeper, maybe we can get the cartel players living the life and working here, north of the border, to ensure the various interests of their organizations are pursued. Maybe we keep following that thread and come up with a really big fish.”
“You’re not talking about the head of a cartel.”
“No. But someone definitely higher up. A second-in-command, maybe. Or a son or brother.”
“You’re not sure who’s here?”
“No. But from the way people talk, they’re afraid.”
“Wouldn’t someone just move up and replace them, if you remove the person in charge here? I hate to break it to you, Black, but you’re not going to single-handedly end crime within the city.”
I smiled. “I know that. But I’m going to do what I can.”
“You think that you can find something big and actually reel it in?”
“I think I can.” What could I say? I was young and dumb and full of dangerous things, hope chief among them.
“Then keep following the money. Keep me informed.”
The thing about working a case undercover was that you never really understood how far you were going to go until you broke. It wasn’t my first time at the rodeo, the one that broke me. I’d been around a while, had been good at what I did. I got the case I was working on because I was good at handling things like this, good at submerging the things I actually was in order to become someone else, something that people expected me to be.
I followed the money, followed it from prostitution and straight into drugs, tapped contacts from my past who welcomed me with open arms, and was tracking some of the worst people in the city, skirting around them like shadows, when the unthinkable happened.
I thought a lot about how it had gone down, and what I could’ve done differently to ensure a better outcome. I spent a lot of time thinking about it. Too much time, even. But I could never come up with anything better than what had actually happened. Never anything that would’ve saved everything and everyone involved.
I had been with one my contacts, Miles, who was a mid-level drug dealer, and we were meeting his contact. It was just another piece of the puzzle for me, though I knew that there would probably be more pieces than I would ever understand how to deal with. I never knew, though, when the right piece would come through, the one that linked the whole thing from top to bottom. That’s why I had to take all of it, every single tip, every single name I learned, seriously. I never knew when I was going to crack the thing.
“Seriously?” I sighed as we pulled up to an alleyway filled with overflowing dumpsters.
“This guy likes his privacy,” Miles said.
“If he likes his privacy, we could’ve gotten a hotel room, or hidden in plain sight, like a bar,” I said. “A fucking alley?”
“It was his call,” Miles said. “Now, come on, or we’re going to be late.”
“It’s not even midnight.”
“One minute late, and he gets spooked. Do you want to meet the guy, or not?”
I did, and I didn’t care about the alley. I was just trying to keep in character. “I guess. Let’s do this.”
Introductions were made, and I didn’t think anything of it. Joe Clayton was just like any other guy, just another cog in this big machine, proving my point when he asked if we had any cocaine on us.
“If you’ve got money, we’ve got cocaine,” Miles said.
“What, no bump for an old friend?” Joe asked, his eyes bloodshot.
“Business doesn’t work that way,” Miles told him. “You, of all people, should know that.”
“I just thought I’d try,” Joe said, getting his wallet out and slitting it open.
To this day, I wasn’t sure if Joe had meant to flash me his badge, or if I had just been suspicious that he wasn’t handling his wallet naturally. Whatever it was, I was surprised enough to give a knee-jerk reaction of shock that changed everything.
“You’re a cop,” I’d blurted out, pretty much dumbfounded when I saw that flash of silver in Joe’s wallet as he reached for cash. I’d been surprised, and that had been the downfall of everything.
“You have a law enforcement officers’ discount?” he joked, slipping the bills from the fold.
But as soon as Miles had heard the word “cop,” he swung into action, firing four shots directly into Joe’s chest before I could even get my gun from the waistband of my jeans.
“Miles, stop!” I shouted, swearing a blue streak as Joe went down hard. He gaped at me, like he couldn’t believe this was happening, and I couldn’t believe it, either. My idiocy had caused violence to someone on the same side of the law I was on.
I stared at the blood blossoming like roses beneath his white shirt, the darker pool of it spreading on the pavement beneath him. He died right in front of my disbelieving eyes, drowning in his own blood. The look in Joe’s eyes stayed with me longer than I cared to dwell on. It was accusation, and confusion. It had all happened so quickly that he probably didn’t have it figured out that he was dying before his heart gave out. For me, though, it was one of those moments when everything slowed down, every detail becoming crystal clear. The blood blossoms on the shirt. The wallet falling open, tumbling from his fingers, the badge flashing upward in the orange security light flooding the alley. The smell of the gunfire, hot and acrid, the sounds of the shots still ringing around in my head, amplified by shock and the acoustics of the brick walls around us. It felt like it was going to rain, of all things. Unseasonable rain I could practically taste the humidity in the air even as the hairs on my arms raised in horror and response to the electricity when a clap of thunder rattled my bones nearly directly above me. That was what jolted me out of the stupor I’d sunken into. Only seconds had passed, though it had felt like ages, watching a life trail out over dirty asphalt.
Only as an afterthought did I turn on my heel and run after Miles, my gun clutched in my hand. I caught up to him at the van, hopping in the front seat as he twisted the keys in the ignition. It took everything I had not to put my gun against his head and arrest him right there and then, operation be damned, everything be damned, because I had just watched a cop die because of a mistake I’d made. It would mean work lost, a case that wouldn’t mean anything anymore, but I would have someone to answer for the murder of a police officer.
No. I couldn’t let that death be in vain. I had to ride this thing to the end, to make sure that the right people got to face the consequences of their actions.
To let the slow wheels of justice turn.
“What the fuck was that?” Miles demanded, wheeling out of there. “How’d you know that guy was a cop?”
“Saw his badge in his wallet,” I said.
“Dumbass.”
“Yeah.” But I was the dumbass, not Joe. If I’d simply gone cold, maybe I could’ve saved Joe’s life. He was an idiot, buying drugs like that from people he didn’t even know, but I was the bigger idiot, saying something about it. What, really, was a man’s life worth? Was it worth breaking my case? Was it worth losing years of my own life, spent neck deep in corruption and shit?
I took a small break from the investigation, just long enough to touch base with Cora, even if we had to be even more careful than before about meeting. I was certain there were eyes on me. I felt them as a physical presence.
“Joe Clayton,” I said, staying out of the pool of light the streetlamp threw down.
“What about him?” Cora was in the light, her phone to her ear.
“He’s dead.”
“Is that why we’re meeting? You don’t have any other leads on the case for me?”
“A cop’s dead, Cora.”
“That’s not something you need to worry about right now. We shouldn’t be meeting out in the open like this. The risks are too great.”
“It was my fault. Joe Clayton’s dead because of me.”
That apparently hadn’t been what my supervisor was expecting to hear. “How do you figure?”
“I was with one of my contacts when we ran into Clayton. My contact shot Clayton dead.”
“Then it’s your contact’s fault. We’ll get this all taken care of, when the time is right.”
“The time is now,” I said. “Think of Clayton’s loved ones. They deserve justice.”
“They’ll get it. But not at the expense of your investigation.”
“Cora”
“Joe Clayton was a dirty cop, Black.”
“What?”
“He was under investigation by internal affairs.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“I’m telling you that he wasn’t worth the angst you’re experiencing, and you didn’t put a bullet in him, and you need to focus on your own case before someone puts a bullet in you. This is how you fuck up, Black. You pull yourself out of the investigation. You get caught. Is that what you want? For all of your hard work to mean nothing?”
No. That wasn’t what I wanted. I was too far in to pull myself out again. I couldn’t let all that work fall by the wayside. I had a job to do, and that’s why I returned to the apartment I was renting, called Miles up, and sank down in to that world again.
But once the arrests were made and my case was complete, I found I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t just file away all my notes and observations and move on to the next task. The promotion I got and all the various commendations that came along with it was like adding insult to injury. I couldn’t forget about my mistake, about how it had cost a cop his life, even if he was corrupt.
It didn’t matter. In the end, a life was a life. Everyone was redeemable. I couldn’t justify deadly force, let alone the death penalty. And in my line of work, that just didn’t make sense anymore.
I left the force and just wandered for a while, trying to make sense of things. For a long time, longer than I cared to admit, the closest thing I had to a friend and confidant was my motorcycle. There was a certain kind of intimacy, a kind of camaraderie, between man and machine as I roared up and down roads I’d been down before until I reached a part of the state I’d never been in, and then I discovered it together with my bike. I got a hotel room in Rio Seco as I explored, and when I realized I’d stayed there for two whole weeks, I looked into renting an apartment. Something about the wildness of New Mexico soothed whatever was raging inside me, and I found I could stop running, think about rebuilding my life.
So that was what I did. I found work through Jack, who was still trying to rebuild his own life after coming back from Afghanistan. He and I hit it off right away, though I suspected it was because I was one of the few people in his life who didn’t know him from before his incident. He had a blank slate with me, and neither of us expected anything out of the other, even if it turned out that our friendship helped both of us in unexpected ways.
We built the motorcycle club with friends who turned up along the way, and I thought everything in my life was finally going to be all right.
Until Katie Kelley entered it and threw everything for a loop.
I wished…well, I wished a lot of things. I wished that I could go back and somehow make everything all right with Joe. That I could have reacted or not reacted in the way that would’ve saved his life, whether he was a good cop or a bad one. Of course, that would’ve meant that I would’ve never left Albuquerque, never found the life and friends that were waiting for me in Rio Seco, never given purpose to my life, or opened my eyes to the beauty around me that made my heart beat true.
But maybe I wished most of all that I could’ve met Katie in other circumstances, that she wasn’t out for my blood because she believed whether she was right or wrong that I was the one who had put bullets in the chest of her partner and lover. Because I loved Katie. I’d loved her since the moment I laid eyes on her, drifting into the bar at sunset, beautiful and a mystery. I liked to think that she fell in love with me, too, just as helplessly, if I could believe her words.
I didn’t want to be back in this place, re-examining my time undercover. They had been dark days, even if they were for the greater good.
And I didn’t want to completely write Katie off. We might’ve been in a bad place together, but whatever we had shared had been real, at least to me. Maybe it had all been a plot on her part to get me to let her in. Or maybe it had been a complete accident. Either way, I missed her. If I knew how, if I knew what to say or what to do, I would’ve done it.
Anything to get her back.