Better When He's Brave

I growled at him as he turned to open my office door. I wanted to launch myself over the desk and throttle him. “I wouldn’t blackmail a victim to get my own way.”

“It’s not blackmail. You’re already hanging the girl out there as bait. You know Roark is going to charge at her like a hungry shark reacting to blood in the water. I just gave you a friendly reminder of what exactly is at stake should emotion start to interfere with what needs to get done.”

“You make it sound like she’s expendable.” Reeve was driving me crazy, and while I didn’t agree with most of the choices she had made that led her to where she was now, she was still a person. She was still a young woman that deserved a shot at righting some of her wrongs. She was trying to help, and trying to do the right thing, and that needed to be acknowledged.

The older cop gave me a hard look. “We are all expendable. We only matter as long as we’re doing something to change the world around us, hopefully for the better, but far too often the folks that matter are changing our world for the worse. Good luck, Detective King. You’re going to need it.”

I watched him wind his way through the chaos of the precinct house and felt my hands clench tightly at my sides. I didn’t need luck. I needed a shot. One shot and I was going to bring Conner in and shut him down. I was starting to really resent that the only way to do that was by asking Reeve to offer up her elegant and lovely neck on the chopping block. It didn’t seem right even if she kept saying she knew she was doing the right thing, that she was atoning for past sins. If Roark ended up better at this game than I was, paying with her life seemed like an awfully steep price when all she had done was take an abuser and killer off the streets. Using one bad man to rid the world of another bad man suddenly didn’t seem like an unforgivable crime. I still struggled with the way she had used Dovie and how her actions had led to what was really one of the worst nights of my life. But everyone used everyone else in the Point so the penance waiting for her shouldn’t be any harsher than what was waiting for any of the rest of us.

I took the piece of scrap paper with the name of the man in Colorado the agent had left with me and poked around on the Internet until I thought I found someone that fit the description. It took a little more clicking and two calls to the wrong number before I connected with a man named Alby Jones. He sounded like he smoked twenty packs a day and seemed totally disinterested when I explained that I was a detective looking for information on a possible murder suspect. He was going to hang up on me until I mentioned that I knew he had been in the service; it was the key to opening up the communication door.

He went on and on about his various tours of duty. Regaled me with his heroics and tales of war. I listened patiently because as long as he kept talking I could guide him where I wanted him to go.

I asked if he had ever been married or if he had any kids, and he just snorted, which led to a round of coughing that lasted five minutes. He told me he had been screwed over by a woman once and since then had never trusted the fairer sex again. He explained that he had met a beautiful Irish lass while he was stationed in Turkey. She pursued him, seduced him, and then used him and his status with the military to gain access to weapons she would never have been able to get her hands on otherwise. She used his name and rank to smuggle guns across secure borders, betraying him and ruining his career along the way. He called her a terrorist and then finally, after what felt like hours, mentioned the kid.

A few years after he had been kicked out of the army and sent home disgraced and shamed, the woman contacted him to let him know that he had a son. She wanted money and she wanted his name so that her baby boy could have dual citizenship. The disgraced soldier agreed because despite how she had screwed him, he still loved the beautiful Irish gal and thought raising their son right was the way to win her heart.

Only the boy showed up and the man knew from the start something was wrong with him. He tried to love him, tried to show him guidance, but every summer they spent together the boy seemed to be worse. The man wanted to blame the mother; after all, she was a killer and a terrible person in her own right, but the boy seemed rotten to his very core. He was wild. He was disrespectful. He was cruel to animals and the staff that kept the man’s ranch running. He was explosively violent, but what really worried the man was how effortlessly the boy could turn it on and off. He told me when the boy joined the military he thought maybe he would finally turn it around.

Only to his dismay he saw that arming an already unstable young man and teaching him how to kill just made him more violent and dangerous. He told me that his last contact with the man he had always thought was his son was about four years ago. The boy had come home for the holidays right after getting out of the marines and switching to the Border Patrol. The man was looking forward to reconnecting with his son, but what happened had scarred him forever and ripped them apart instead.

According to the man, the boy went missing not long after Christmas dinner. No one thought much about it until they noticed one of the young women who helped take care of the house was also gone. Sure, it could just be two young lovers escaping for a quiet moment alone, but the man knew better, so he went to find his troubled son.

The boy had the girl pinned down in the barn, a knife to her neck and seconds away from ruining her for life. The man pulled the boy off the girl, they struggled, and the man ended up getting a knife to the gut for his troubles.

“I knew you were too weak and pathetic to be my father,” the boy said as he stood over the man scoffing. With that, the son kicked him in the ribs and disappeared out of the man’s life forever, leaving the poor bastard that had raised him to bleed out where he lay. Only the man was a fighter and had survived the destruction both the mother and son had leveled at him. He was all too happy to tell me all about it.