Beyond Blue (20 page)

Fire flew from Ruby's eyes as she tried to pull her hand free. “What the hell makes you think I'm going to let you hang on to that? It's my only contact with Mama.”

“Because I asked so nicely,” de La Fuente said. As his rough grip crushed her hand around the phone Ruby looked around for support. She saw Fear on Hector's face. Rafe's expression combined confusion and conflict. To them, this was a matter of cementing a relationship with a big time drug connection. But it was clear that if she balked now, Rafe would back her up. Touching, she thought, but pointless. Keeping her eyes on Rafe's face, she relaxed her hand and let de La Fuente pull the telephone away.

“Well, honey, it looks like I'll be joining you for dinner after all.”

“Hey, Stone, I'm pretty sure this is the right number, right here!” Steele pointed at a line in the ledger, and made a note in his smaller pad.

“You got it, partner,” Stone said, a bit louder than necessary.

There was a party atmosphere around the Mason dining room table. For much of the afternoon, Stone Mason had sat at one end of the table with photocopied pages from both ledgers. A mug of coffee sat by his right hand, a gin and tonic by his left. His partner Rico Steele was a mirror of his actions at the other end of the table, staring at the same pages, braced by the same mug and glass, except that between his drinks sat an ashtray. Smoke curled up from his cigarette while he scribbled on his pad. On one side of the table, Sherry Mason and Linda Perry sat side by side, reading out number and letter combinations. No coffee cups cluttered their side of the table. Sherry, ever the dutiful hostess, kept their glasses filled from a big pitcher of gin and tonic.

“We have got them cold, partner,” Steele said, almost shouting over the Temptations playing in the background. “Look at this list. Every crooked business Jerome is getting money from, identified clear as hell, the cases they asked him to work, and right here, here and here the sources of his information. You can even tell what things he accused each cop of if you really get into it.”

“Yeah, and he pretty much annotated right on the book here when he knew it was a trumped up charge,” Linda
said. “I mean, he
knew
he was falsifying this evidence and lying to the court. This will get him disbarred for sure.”

“Disbarred?” Sherry chuckled. “He'll do time for this stuff. And a few of the officers of these crooked businesses will join him, right honey?”

Sherry slapped Stone's shoulder with the back of her hand to get his attention but he didn't answer right away. He had suddenly become very quiet.

“What's up son?” Steele asked. “That gin wearing off? Sherry, fill his glass up again.”

Stone rubbed the back of his neck the way he did when he was about to disappoint someone. “Hey, Rico, take another look at that third list and tell me what you see.”

“Come on, Stone,” Rico said. “We have translated almost every one of these bad guys' names. Hell, we know most of them.”

“And the cops?” Stone asked.

“Know a lot of them too, and we got names linked to every one of these cases.”

Stone picked up his glass and drained half of it in one long gulp. “And these names over here? Emmerling? Dalton? Madison? King?”

Steele ran his finger along a column slowly, his smile fading as he did.

“Rico?” Linda asked. “What's wrong? What do you see that I don't?”

When Steele didn't answer, Stone did. “These are crooked cops, Linda. Real crooked cops with real evidence against them.”

“So what?” Linda asked. “Don't you want to bust them too?”

Stone stood up and began to pace the end of the room. “Try to imagine this, Linda. We go into court with a list of cops' names, right? Now, we know that a few are dirty. And there's this other long list of cops that a lawyer has compiled evidence against. Evidence that must be pretty credible, or he wouldn't have tried to use it to attack these
cops.”

“Oh, God,” Sherry said, a hand covering her mouth. “It'll set off a witch hunt through the whole department. It will be a three-ring circus, with the whole city screaming for a total expose. The department will have a full time job proving who's innocent and who's not.”

“The force will lose a lot of effectiveness,” Steele put in. “And a lot of good cops will be hurt, just by the suspicion. We'll accomplish in one shot what Jerome has been trying to do one cop at a time.”

Linda emptied her glass and got to her feet. “Wait a minute here. What are you all saying? After talking me into testifying, putting myself and little Danny on the line, now you want to keep all this quiet? What kind of jokers are you?”

Stone stopped pacing to face Linda. “What kind? We're cops, that's what kind.”

“You might have been once, but not anymore.”

Steele's boots hit the floor with a loud thump. “Always, girl. You don't get it.”

Sherry held a palm toward Steele, hushing him, as she turned to Linda and said, “It's like a fraternity. Once you swear that oath, you never really leave. People like Rickard and my Sam, they stay cops forever. It's in their blood. And they don't want to do anything that will hurt another officer.”

“So now what?” Steele filled his lungs with smoke and pushed it out in a downward rush to bounce off the table and away.

“I've got an idea,” Stone said, heading for the living room. “But before we do anything else, I need to call Paul Gorman and let him know what we've found.”

Chastity Chiba loved the sound of crickets. She associated them with home, with love, and with peace. As a child in Japan she imagined that the little insects were
singing to each other. She remembered lying under the stars, sipping hot green tea and feeling the dew on the grass. The scent of wet grass turned out to be universal around the globe.

In those childhood days she would stare at the moon for hours and wonder if, somewhere, her father was looking up at the same bright orb in the sky. But on this evening, she sipped tea through a straw and her focus was not the moon but two people at the other end of her binoculars. She wore a ghilli suit, a ragged camouflage outfit that made her just about invisible at the edge of the Brooks' small backyard. She had been stretched out on her stomach behind a thin row of hedges since a few minutes before sundown. She wasn't there just to keep track of the family members. This was her opportunity to see Alex and his daughter together. She had to be sure.

In the twilight, Alex had pushed Amy on their swing as the sun was going down. Amy's mother chose to stay inside the whole time. This fact was not lost on Chastity. As time passed, Chastity began so see the relationship that no one else seemed aware of. She saw Alex and Amy talk and play. She saw the way Alex hugged Amy when no one else was around. She saw Amy's reaction to her father's playful teasing and tickling. And alone in the damp grass, Chastity began to cry.

She had been prepared for the worst. Would Alex really show the kind of behavior that betrays child molesters when no one is watching? Instead of fear, Amy's relationship with her father filled Chastity with envy. Alex was the father Chastity always imagined. He was the man her own father would have been, if only MI-5, or whoever, had not called him home and away from his loving wife months before Chastity was born.

The real tragedy was not what Francine was planning for her husband, but what she had already done to her daughter. The lies she had forced Amy to memorize must have been eating at the poor girl's heart like a tapeworm.
Did she understand that it was a ploy to destroy her father? Or had she been fed a long string of lies justifying the lies somehow. Chastity had no way to know.

Moving her binoculars away from her face to wipe her eyes, Chastity realized that she didn't care why. She now knew for certain who the villain was. She knew the stakes, and she knew the villain's project. And she knew that the solution would not be found in legal maneuvering.

Highlighted by a beam of moonlight, Rafael Sandoval rubbed his hands together to warm them before beginning to spread lavender-scented oil across Ruby Sanchez' back.

“How does that feel?” Rafe asked. Her response was a sound much like a kitten's purr. She had to admit it, the man had the touch. Of course, almost anything would feel good while she was lying naked between satin sheets beside a handsome man in a room lighted only by the moon through the windows.

This was doubly true since the visitors had stayed up drinking and watching sports until almost three o'clock. Ruby had followed Rafe's lead, pretending to join in with the fun and basically returning to the part she had played since de La Fuente and his friends arrived. She knew she was being watched closely that evening. The one time she managed to steal a moment alone, she picked up a telephone only to find it disabled.

When bedtime arrived, Ruby looked at the visitors and at Hector, and decided that she didn't want to be alone in the guest room. That fact, combined with her genuine affection for and attraction to Rafael, had convinced her to pull him close and whisper in his ear.

“Do you suppose I could spend the night in your room tonight?”

Within minutes she was lying on his bed with the top sheet pulled down to her waist so that Rafe could deliver a
promised massage. She could hear his hands sliding smoothly over her skin, coaxing the tension out of the muscles beneath. It was heaven, but Ruby knew she needed to pull her mind away from romance.

“Rafe, honey, we need to talk,” she murmured. “I'm not sure how to say this but…oh, baby, where did you learn to do that?”

Rafe had straddled her and was kneading her trapezius muscles with his thumbs. “I used to do this for my mother and sister. Not quite this way, of course, they stayed dressed. Guess I couldn't have handled it at your house, eh? Too many female backs. How did your mama ever keep you all straight anyway? I only had one brother but my mother used to cross up our names.”

“Well, Mama wasn't very creative,” Ruby said. “She started naming her kids after flowers. So the first girls were Daisy, Iris, Jasmine, Lilly and Rose.”

“You're putting me on.”

“Nope,” Ruby said into her pillow. “When number six came along she had apparently run out of flowers, so she switched to months of the year. That's when April, May and June turned up.”

“Now I know you're making this up,” Rafe said, sliding off her to lie on his side. “So how come you're not July or something?” Propped on one elbow he continued to slowly rub her back with his free hand.

“Clearly Mama knew she had used up the calendar, so she switched again, to jewelry this time. Not that I'm complaining. I'm a lot luckier than my baby sister, cause in the twenty-first century, being a black woman named Sapphire must be a bitch.”

“You are too much, chica,” Rafe said, but then his hand grew still on the small of her back. Did he sense her mood shift?

“Rafe, I really do need to talk to you about something,” she said into the darkness. “Something important.”

“Okay,” Rafe whispered. “I'll tell you anything you want
to know if you'll just answer me one little question.”

“That's fair. What do you want to know, sugar?”

“What caused this scar near the base of your spine?”

Ruby froze for a moment, but then her body relaxed. She would have to open up to Rafe and tell him the truth, or at least a big piece of it. She may as well start here.

“It's a bullet, hon.”

“What?” Rafe's hand recoiled from the scar as if it was radioactive. Ruby turned to rise on her elbow so she could be face to face with him.

“There's a bullet lodged in my back down there. Where it is, doctors don't want to go messing around in there. I could get paralyzed. So I keep it as a memento.”

She wished she could see his eyes, but she stared at the space where they should be through a few seconds of silence, after which Rafe asked, “Of what?”

“For a little while there, I was a cop over in Jersey City,” Ruby said. “I took this bullet in the back and not long after that I took a medical retirement. I can't feel it or anything.”

Rafe reached to run a hand through her hair. “I am so sorry.”

“That's past,” she said, sitting up and crossing her legs. “But because of that training, I tend to get a sense of when things aren't right, and they ain't right here. Now.”

“Okay, you said you had something to tell me. What is it?”

There was no way to ease into it. “Rafe, honey, I know what you really do for a living.” Silence. “I found your stash in the basement, in the duct work over the furnace.”

When Rafe spoke, his words were encased in ice. “So, you a cop or a crook these days? You here to bust me, rob me or blackmail me?”

“Baby I'm neither. Not a cop, not a crook.”

“And all that bull about being worried about me…”

“Was all true, I swear to God.” Ruby placed her hand on Rafe's thigh, a tentative but sincere expression of closeness. “Besides, even if I was still a cop, I couldn't bust
you. That stuff you've got stashed downstairs, I don't know what it is but it ain't any drug I know.”

“What?”

“Not smack, not coke, not ecstasy,” Ruby said. “I don't know what it is those boys have got you smuggling in and out of here. That's why I'm worried they're taking advantage of you.”

Rafe stared at her in the darkness. “You're serious about this.”

“Serious as a heart attack, sugar.”

“Ruby, you have got to believe me when I tell you that I would not ally myself with smugglers. I am a business man.”

“But baby, what I found in the basement…”

“Must have been put there by Hector. He made contact with these particular clients. I suspected that he might be mixed up in something crazy but…cara mia, he
is
my brother.”