East Los Angeles, California

 

Andres was exhausted. He’d been up for a full forty-eight hours, just about, and he simply wanted this day to be over. He stood on a street corner, the pockets of his jeans filled with small rolls of bills, each tightly wrapped with a rubber band. There were still four boys milling around as he waited for the last two of Isaac’s corner boys to show up. He leaned back against the brick corner of the building behind him, watching traffic slowly beginning to pick up. It was getting on to rush hour time, normal people who knew nothing about the drug-fueled nightlife that went on while they were all safely tucked in their beds in neighborhoods far from here hurrying off to work.

He might have been one of them if he’d chosen school over joining the police department after the Marines. But then again, he had never been the sit behind a desk all day sort of guy.

“Lobo says we can come to the club on Thursday. You going to be there?” Andres heard one of the boys say to another.

“Sure! I wouldn’t miss out on that, man!”

Naïveté rolled off these boys almost as thickly as it did the suburban idiots who followed the gangs around. These boys had seen more of the street life than the average suburbanite kid, but they still thought the gang was just a series of parties, day after day, week after week. They believed the drive-by shootings and the outright murders of rival gang members were justified, just another part of the job. Wait until one of them was the guy standing on the wrong side of the barrel. Wait until one of them lost a good friend, a brother.

Andres had lost four friends on the street before he was arrested and forced to choose between prison at seventeen or the military. He lost three more in the Marines.

These boys would learn.

Another of the corner boys walked up and slipped a wad of money into Andres’ hand. It was then that Andres noticed a tan sedan that had been sitting on the corner for a few minutes. He thought it was someone visiting the small bodega there, but a sudden chill rushed down his spine as he saw the flash of a camera snapping his picture.

“Get the fuck out of here!” he yelled.

But it was too late.

Squad cars, their lights blazing, pulled into the street from both directions, cops suddenly swarming the area. Someone threw Andres down onto the sidewalk, one of the kids who had been talking about the club falling beside him, his nose blooming with blood as the fall caused it to break.

“You’re under arrest!”

 

***

 

There’s chaos that follows any arrest. Andres had been on both sides of the process many times in his life. He was arrested four times when he was a kid, but the charges only stuck the one time, that final time when the judge forced him to choose between jail and the military. As a cop, he’d been on the other side, slapping the cuffs on and dragging unwilling criminals to the processing rooms.

This was different from any of those.

They’d searched him on the street, pulling out all the rolls of money he’d taken from the boys and tossing them on the sidewalk. It was all Andres had on him, but when they stood him in front of the camera for his mug shot, one of the cops informed him that he was being charged with possession of marijuana.

Marijuana. Andres hadn’t done drugs. Ever. And if he were to do drugs, he would have chosen something harder, something more like the cocaine and heroin the Varrio pushed.

Something odd was going on here.

After the mug shots was fingerprinting. The cop who did it seemed almost bored, barely looking Andres in the face as he grabbed his fingers, one at a time, and rolled them in the ink. Andres wondered how long it would take them to run his prints through the system and realize he wasn’t who he said he was. He was hoping it would take long enough for Lobo to do something about getting him out of there.

If he blew his cover, the senator’s kid was never leaving Isaac’s little posse.

Next was a small room where he’d be searched before he relinquished his clothes for the jail garb. Then hours in a crowded cell while waiting to be arraigned. He knew this process like he knew how to breathe every few seconds. Didn’t make it any easier to go through it now.

One of the boys he’d been brought in with was coming toward him down the hall, bawling his eyes out like he’d just been caught stealing cookies from his grandmother’s cookie jar.

“Keep it together, hermano,” Andres hissed at him.

The kid looked up, almost startled, meeting Andres’ eye. Then he nodded, reaching up to wipe the tears away.

Andres was pushed into a small room, his fingers still dark and sticky from the fingerprinting process. The room was dark, and seemed empty at first. But then someone behind him cleared his throat.

“Strip, asshole!”

Andres turned just as the lights were flipped on. It took him a second to adjust from bright florescence to darkness to the dull yellow of the single light bulb in this small room. When he did, he found himself alone with an average-sized guy with the telltale haircut of a serious cop. He had brown hair, a hint of a five o’clock shadow, and grey eyes that were almost familiar.

This had to be Robert. Gray’s brother.

“When I heard you’d been brought in, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to have a little conversation,” the smaller man said, crossing his arms over his chest. “I’ve got a lot of friends here. They had no problem giving me the task of searching your sorry ass so that we could talk.”

“What do we have to say to each other?”

Robert’s eyes narrowed. “I think you know.” He thrust a finger toward Andres. “Strip!”

Andres slowly began slipping the work shirt he was wearing from his shoulders, watching this man carefully. Andres knew he could take this guy in a street fight, but this wasn’t the street. This was county lockup, and this average, almost small, guy was a cop. A respected cop from what little Andres knew of Gray’s family.

Andres dropped the work shirt in a convenient chair and stripped off his plain t-shirt, scratching at his chest as the cool air of the room touched his skin.

“She thinks she knows you so well, but she hasn’t seen those, has she? If she knew what they meant, if she knew what you had to have done to get some of those tats, she would never go near you again.”

Andres glanced at Robert. He was studying the arrangement of tattoos that covered Andres’ chest and arms, most of them gang tats that he’d gotten cheap on the streets as a teenager. Most of them were offensive, some downright dangerous if the wrong people were to spot them, even now. He could have them removed, but there was this masochistic part of Andres that liked to see them in the mirror some mornings. They were a reminder of what was past. Of what he’d overcome. It was proof that he’d changed his life and lifted himself out of the dirty alley where he'd been born. It was a badge of courage. And it didn’t hurt when he needed a little street cred, like with this case.

It'd never occurred to him what someone as innocent as Gray would think of them.

Andres didn’t comment. He took a seat and began unlacing his boots, taking his time as he felt Robert’s eyes continue to move over him.

“I told her you were back with the street gangs, told her I had proof. You know what she said?”

Andres just kept working on his boots.

“She said you had no good reason to do such a thing. She said you would never do anything that would put your daughter in danger.”

That made Andres look up. But he still kept his mouth shut.

“She believes in you, my sister does.”

Andres bit his bottom lip, his attention returning to his boots. He remembered the tension in Gray’s shoulders when he last saw her, when she came home from her father’s barbeque. He remembered the worry lines around her eyes. Was that because of him? Was it because of what her brother had told her about him?

Andres slipped out of his boots and stood again.

“We’re good people,” Robert continued. “My father worked his way up from a simple laborer to the owner of the construction company. He worked hard, taught all his children to work hard. And my mother is a good Catholic. She dragged us to church every Sunday without fail, no matter how hard we had partied on Saturday night, no matter how unruly we proved to be during the mass. They taught us basic morals, taught us how to be productive members of society.” He paused, looking Andres up and down, making it clear he didn’t feel that Andres would ever fit into the same category as him and his family. “Gray always wanted to be a preschool teacher, always wanted to work with little kids. She loves children! Loves everything about them!”

“I know,” Andres said softly, memories of Gray with Alyssa forever burned in his mind.

“She should be a teacher right now, but you…you came into her life and turned everything upside down! She should be engaged to some hardworking, honest guy, teaching her preschoolers and dreaming of babies of her own. Instead, she’s raising your little brat and defending you to anyone who will listen!”

Andres’ jaw tightened at the characterization of his daughter, but he continued to refuse to answer his accusations.

Robert gestured toward Andres. “Strip, prisoner!”

This had to have been the most bizarre—and most infuriating—situation Andres had ever been in. But he knew he couldn’t deny Robert what he was going for. Robert had all the power in this room right now.

But that would change when Andres was out of here.

Andres slowly unbuckled his belt and released the zipper on his jeans, slowly lowering them to the ground. He took his time folding them and laying them on the chair with the rest of his clothing.

“Do you care about my sister at all?”

The question caught Andres by surprise. He hesitated, afraid to face Robert, afraid the truth might be written all over his face. And what was that truth? He wasn’t sure he was even capable of admitting it to himself.

“The way she fights for you, the way she argues with everyone whenever we try to warn her about you, I know she cares for you. But my sister cares for everyone. She was one of those little girls who always befriended the class outcast, the one who brought home all the stray animals in the neighborhood.” Robert paused a second. “That’s you, you know,” he said, real scorn in his voice, “some stray she’s brought home. A stray she fancies herself in love with.”

Those words hit Andres hard, right in the center of his chest. He couldn’t help but look at Robert in that moment, needing to see if he really believed what he’d just said. And as he did, as they studied each other, he saw surprise and shock rush across Robert’s face. But then that hard mask of distaste filled his expression again.

“I’ll make a deal with you, Andres Maldonado or Andres Garcia or whatever you’re calling yourself these days. You stay the fuck away from my sister, and I won’t tell every inmate in this place that you’re a cop. I won’t tell them that you’re probably responsible for fifty percent of their friends going to jail. But I will encourage my buddies here to lose your fingerprints long enough for your friends on the street to get you out.”

Andres tilted his head slightly. “How do you want me to stay away from her? She’s my employee.”

“Fire her.”

“Just like that? You do realize that would break her heart, right?”

Robert shrugged, crossing his arms over his chest again. “She’ll survive. She’ll miss that baby, but she’ll get over it. Eventually. What she won’t survive is you bringing this bullshit back on her!” Robert gestured around them. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing. I don’t know why you were on the street in known Varrio territory collecting money from a few of Isaac’s known dealers, and I don’t want to know.” He squared his shoulders and looked up at Andres with a sternness that Andres suspected he’d perfected in the mirror at home to intimidate the gang members he dealt with on the streets. “But I work these streets and know how these people think. When they figure out whatever it is you’re up to, they’ll come after you and take out anyone who stands in their way. I don’t want my sister there when that happens.”

He was right. Andres had seen it happen before.

“I would never do anything to put Gray in danger.”

Robert’s expression softened for half a second. Then he moved up against Andres, that intimidation stare back.

“Stay away from her. If anything happens to her, you won’t just have me to worry about. You’ll have the entire Simpson family to face.”

“I get it.”

“I hope you do.”

Robert stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him. Andres sank into the chair on top of his clothes, both elated and more depressed than he’d ever been in all his life.

Gray loved him. That was so much more than he could ever have hoped for.

But this…he was in jail, sitting bare-assed in a room waiting to be probed and poked to make sure he hadn’t hidden a knife or drugs up his ass.

She loved him, but he couldn’t be with her.

And if his cover was blown, all of Robert’s threats, all his own promises, would come too late. Once Isaac and Lobo had his real name, it wouldn’t take them but a heartbeat to find Gray and Alyssa.

What the fuck had he done?