Fallen (13 page)

He thought of the nine mil from that morning’s raid that hadn’t been a match.

He didn’t plan on giving up on Nate, either.

At the moment, however, he sat at his desk in front of the computer. Mateo was gone, the lights lowered around the building’s interior, and only one other detective remained, absorbed in his own paper load. The background check was unauthorized, but Kirkpatrick’s warning about Ian Brandt had been on his mind. As an ER doctor, Lydia was no stranger to confrontations with patients or their families, but it was pretty clear she’d been upset by the exchange.

He found nothing on Brandt in a criminal history check in the National Crime Information Center database. But moving to its Protective Orders files, Ryan located his name twice. Two women had filed restraining orders against him, one not too long ago in Atlanta and another in Boca Raton five years earlier. Not good news.

Closing out of the database, he conducted a general Web search that generated a landslide of hits. Interspersed with the PR and marketing spin, including Brandt’s participation on several entrepreneurial and nonprofit boards, Ryan found what he was looking for. According to several articles, Brandt had been named in local investigations on two separate occasions—one related to money laundering and one an assault, but he could find no mention of actual arraignments. Not that it mattered. He had been a cop long enough to know that cash and connections, as well as highly paid attorneys, could often make such things go away.

A short time later, he turned off the monitor, hoping Lydia’s involvement with Brandt was done. If the wife had refused to file charges, her entanglement should end there.

It was nearly ten. He said good-night to the remaining detective and walked out through the lobby. Adam stood talking with a clerk at the reception desk. He was in uniform.

“What’re you doing here?” Ryan asked.

“Transfer from my zone to yours. Background check at a traffic stop showed three active warrants. You have a detective here with dibs on the guy. I’m just waiting on papers.” He hitched a thumb toward the hall that led to the restrooms. “And for my partner.”

Adam noticed Ryan’s bandaged forearm. “What happened?”

“A disagreement with a window. I lost.” Ryan filled him in on the raid, including their failure to locate the murder weapon.

“Tough luck,” Adam said seriously. He shifted his stance to allow two officers escorting a struggling arrestee to pass. The handcuffed male shouted obscenities. Adam shook his head as he accepted the transfer papers from the clerk. “It’s a full moon. The nut jobs are out.”

“Any interference getting Molly to the station last night?”

“It was late so I just gave her a ride home.”

Ryan raised his eyebrows.

“We had another beer at her place and hung out. Could’ve been you, man.” He changed the subject. “Hey, there’s a group of us getting together to watch the game on Saturday night. You in?”

Ryan thought of his caseload. Uniforms worked assigned shifts while detectives generally worked around the clock. “It depends. I’ll let you know.”

Adam’s partner exited the restroom. Nodding a greeting to him, Ryan watched as the two officers departed through the precinct’s front doors. Then signing out at the desk, he walked to the rear compound to his SUV. After stopping at the all-night pharmacy to fill the prescription, he took Peachtree to Ponce de Leon Avenue, known to the locals as simply Ponce. The street was a mishmash of older deteriorating buildings interspersed with new loft condominiums and strip malls. Ryan traveled up it a couple of miles, going past the newly renovated Ponce City Market before turning right onto North Highland Avenue and into Inman Park. Reaching his house, he pulled into the single-car driveway. The anesthetic used for the sutures had worn off hours ago, and his arm throbbed. He was dead-tired, he realized, recalling just how little sleep he’d gotten the previous night.

Parking under Tess’s unlit apartment window, he went up onto the bungalow’s front porch and, using his key, inside. The security system wasn’t on—not unusual since Tess detested any type of electronics and typically left it off after she’d done housework around the place. Sure enough, she’d been here, he noticed as he dropped the pharmacy bag onto a table in the shadowed entry. She had left a note there, letting him know she’d fed Max and given his insulin injection.

He’s too fat. Don’t let him talk you into feeding him again
, she’d written in her flowery script. But the cat was nowhere around.

Walking into the dark living room, Ryan called to him, sliding off his shoulder holster with his gun inside it and laying it on the sofa. Reaching for the lamp on the end table, he froze at the metallic sound of a clip dropping into a chamber. His blood iced as the tip of a gun barrel pressed behind his right ear.

“You’ve been so worried about two dead cops,” a guttural voice said. “Almost like you knew you’d be next.”

Chapter Ten

Ryan recognized the
street-hardened rasp. Heart thudding, he straightened cautiously and lifted his hands to his sides. “I’m unarmed.”

Pooch pressed the barrel harder. “You think I give a fuck?”

Eager to get payback for Antoine’s shooting, the police had issued a BOLO—a
be on the lookout
—for Pooch following that morning’s raid. Patrol cars had been scouring parts of the city where he was known to frequent. Ryan wondered how long he had actually been
here
, waiting for him.

Tess. He felt a wave of dread. She had been in the house. “There was a woman—”

“That your momma?”

“No. She cleans the place, that’s all—”

“Too bad. I like the idea of
Detective Winter
being a momma’s boy.” Nudging Ryan forward with the gun barrel, Pooch steered them away from the porch light filtering in through the front windows. Out of view of possible passersby on the street. Ryan looked around for some sign of Tess, hoping the note meant she had come and gone without incident. He didn’t want to think of Pooch confronting her.

The pressure left his skull. “Turn around slow …”

He obeyed. Gun trained, walking backward, Pooch scooped up the holster and weapon from the sofa and tossed them out of reach. His eyes glinted like fire in the shadows. “Good as your word, huh, Winter? Had Narco rain down hell on us. Turned up the heat like you said you would. I got some advice for you, Detective. Never confuse a single defeat with a
final
one.”

Throat dry, Ryan met Pooch’s hard stare. “Narcotics was coming for you regardless. They’ve been waiting for the opportunity. The meth shipment gave it to them.”

“See, I think you had a little more to do with it than that.” He gripped the gun sideways, obviously enjoying the control he held.

Tension tightened Ryan’s chest. If he could distract him, he could make a run at him, but his rational mind knew it would almost certainly result in a lethal gunshot. “So what do you want, Pooch?” he asked calmly, despite the adrenaline pumping through him.

The other man’s mouth stretched into a sneer. “What I
want
is to watch your brains explode all over that wall!”

Still, he didn’t pull the trigger. Instead, he made a show of taking in the place. He walked a few steps before sending the lamp on the end table crashing to the floor. Picking up the framed family photo that had been next to it, he looked it over. “This your old lady? Your kid?”

Ryan’s jaw clenched. The thug’s hands on the treasured image burned at him.

“I asked you a question!” Still pointing the gun, he took a menacing step closer, his raised voice echoing off the high ceiling.

“It’s my ex-wife.”

“Ex, huh? Couldn’t keep her satisfied? Bet I could.” With a leering grin, he threw the photo. Ryan flinched as it missed him by inches, hitting china and glass items on the bookshelf and sending shards spraying. Pooch tilted his head, his raw-boned features hardening. “What? You ain’t gonna beg me? Plead for your life?”

Staring down the weapon’s barrel, Ryan felt his lungs squeeze. Still, he spoke the truth. “You’re here for a reason. If it’s to kill me, then my begging isn’t going to change that. But the cop you shot? He’s going to be okay. You take me out, and it’s a whole different story.”

Pooch closed in like a predator, the powerful handgun now aimed at Ryan’s face. His heartbeat thrashed in his ears. He battled the urge to raise his arm in self-defense, a natural but pointless instinct. Few survived gunshots to the head at close range. No one would want to. Nerves crackling and stomach sour, he prepared to make a grab for the gun. At least he would go down fighting.

“How ’bout we do this nice and slow,
Detective
?” Smiling coldly, Pooch flicked the gun’s barrel like a laser pointer. “One to the knee, one to the gut. You can
feel that
for a while before I put one in your head. I can make it last for hours—make a
sandwich
in your goddamn kitchen while you lie on the floor and bleed. You don’t want to beg for your life, motherfucker? How ’bout I make you beg
to die
?”

He was close enough now that even in the darkness Ryan could see his bloodshot eyes, their sclera threaded with veins. Spittle flew from his lips as he continued railing at him. It was time.

Heart clenching, he sprang forward, grabbing Pooch’s arm and forcing it up. The gun fired into the ceiling as the two men struggled for control. Ryan’s dress shoes slipped on the wood flooring, giving Pooch’s elbow the opportunity to jab him hard in the ribs. He staggered, catching himself against the hunt table just as the gang member backhanded him with the gun’s barrel. Jagged pain shot through his skull. He went down, sprawling. His vision blurred.

“Lucky for you, it ain’t up to me.” Pooch hovered somewhere above him. “You hit the lottery, asshole. Quintavius is pissed, but he’s gonna let you live.”

Ryan listened through the encroaching haze, the floor tilting.

“
Jewel Magill
. That’s why you’re still breathing. But Quintavius wants you to understand one thing.” He punctuated his words. “We ain’t killed no cops, you hear me?
Yet.
Now step off this.”

Ryan attempted to right himself, but a hard kick to his side sent him back down. Spit hit the back of his neck. He heard the thud of fleeing feet and a door opening in the house’s rear. By the time he’d regained his equilibrium enough to pull himself up, tires screeched outside. Ryan stumbled to the window, but the car had already disappeared down the tree-lined street.

“Tess!” he called into the silent house. He checked the rooms one by one, finding only Max in an open closet, hiding from the intruder. The feline’s yellow eyes blinked at him. Pushing aside dizziness, Ryan ran outside. Shouting Tess’s name, he’d gotten halfway up the stairs to her apartment when he heard her voice in the driveway below.

“Ryan, what on earth?”

Relief threaded through him as he went back down. She wore a red tunic with gold beading over her leggings. Stacks of bangle bracelets clinked as he clasped her upper arms.

“Where were you?”

“The Inman Drip,” she said, referring to a nearby coffee shop. “They had a poetry reading—”

“Did you see a car?”

“No. I took the back way.” Like many in-town dwellers, Tess didn’t own a vehicle. She pointed to a gap between the garage and hedges bordering the neighbor’s yard. Although the neighborhood was returning to gentrification, crime remained a problem, and he had warned her about using the unlit route in the dark. Ryan grimaced as he felt the side of his head. He wasn’t bleeding, but a painful lump had formed. His side ached from Pooch’s kick.

“Child, are you all right? What happened to your arm?”

He didn’t answer, instead digging his phone from his jeans pocket. Holding up one hand in a silencing gesture, he made a call to 9-1-1, identifying himself with his badge number and explaining to the dispatcher what had just occurred. But without a car description, apprehension was unlikely. The vehicle had gone left on the main road, he knew that much from the sound. It had probably taken Boulevard to the nearby interstate, already slipping from the area.

Ryan felt a growing uncertainty. Quintavius had gone to a lot of trouble to assure him the HB2s weren’t involved in the shootings. Along with their failure to match the confiscated nine mil to the homicides, he had to open himself to the possibility that the key scratches weren’t a connection to the gang. Just a dead end he’d been blindly chasing.

“That was a
gunshot
I heard instead of a car backfiring,” Tess fretted, her face pale as he disconnected the call. “This is all my fault. You’ve told me time after time to reset the alarm—”

He shook his head. “Then he would’ve been waiting for me outside.”

Jewel Magill. Ryan knew the name. She’d been a public schoolteacher, a decent woman brutally beaten and shot dead during a home invasion. After a two-day investigation, he’d made the arrest, one of his first after being promoted to detective. That had been years ago, before he’d been partnered with Mateo. He wondered what connection Quintavius had to her.