“If you had that gun, why didn’t you fucking pull it?” Brady asked, hoping to startle him into striking.
But apparently this customer was cooler than most snakes.
“That’s how innocent bystanders—and helpful law enforcement—get shot,” he said simply. “No. The last thing that situation needed was another damned gun.”
Brady grunted and eyed him again. “I agree with you,” he said, surprised. “I mean, what you did was smart and brave—but it’s not what most men would have done. Where’d you train?”
“High school baseball,” Eric replied with a shrug. “What did you put in your police paperwork?”
“A helpful Samaritan with one hell of an arm,” Brady said—which was pretty much an exact quote.
“Your superior bought that?” The man—and he was handsome, with a face that had probably been piquant and sweetas a teenager but was simply standard, decent-looking white male now—cocked his head in question.
“My superior has other things to deal with,” Brady said grimly and shook his head.
“Like what?” Eric asked. “No, seriously, what? That poor man in the store was shot—he could have been killed if Bruce had gone for a head shot. That could have been a bloodbath—youcould have been shot if I’d drawn a weapon. Didn’t your sheriff raise a single suspicion?”
Brady studied him, thinking that for a moment, those arctic blue eyes had heated up a little—on Brady’s behalf, no less. And because he seemed to give a rat’s ass, Brady found that he was honest.
“My sheriff has… well, I don’t know if you heard this or not, but there was something of a clusterfuck about a week ago. One of our officers died in a fiery car crash, which you knew, but the phone found next to him implicated him in some pretty nasty stuff, along with his brother, who was one of those tent-revival preachers.”
“What kind of stuff?” Eric asked, and Brady’s stomach churned.
“There were pictures. The brother with a bunch of minors, and not in a good way. And when somebody….” He swallowed. “Me, whenIchecked the place out, I found the guy dead at his desk in a puddle of blood, with his pants around his ankles, his thing out, and pictures on his computer.”
“Dear God.”
It wasn’t Brady’s imagination. His eyes were wide open and his horror was real.
“Yeah, the guy was a real fuckin’ piece of work, and his death was nasty and not his idea. So we’ve got the choice—break up the child porn ring on his laptop or chase down his killer, who, you know, sort of did us a favor. Guess which side won?”
“I know which side I would choose,” Eric said. “I don’t know which side you or your captain would.”
“WellI’dchoose the child porn ring. Lots of dark-web stuff, but a lot of it we could track. The murder has about a million suspects, but nobody sawanything. There wasn’t even anything on all the tapes they had. Some guy with a red baseball hat and long blond hair, and that was about it. So I’d go after the stuff that keeps hurting kids, or, you know, the murder, but nope. That’s not what we’re going after.”
“What are we going after?” Eric asked, legitimately interested.
And Brady shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t. He keeps saying we’ll get detectives from an LA precinct, because we’re a tiny little patrol office out here, but we haven’t. I called the FBI in, day one, and have suggested he give them the phone to study, but he told me if I so much asthoughtabout calling the Feebs again, I’d get fired. I mean… adouble murder, one of the victims a dirty cop, and aporn ring—and all sorts of potentially important people on this guy’s phone list. And I’m starting to wonder, you know? Is my sheriff on the phone list? Is the county DA? Are there members of the chamber of commerce in any of the towns there?Whois putting on pressure for us to do jack shit while this trail goes colder? So when I bring in a case, with a guy already confessing to shooting his wife’s friend in the middle of Walmart, I’m greeted as a conquering hero, because this other shit, it’s justrottingon the vine.”
Brady heard his voice cracking and tried to rein his frustration in. He didn’t know this man—all he knew was that with a couple of great pitches, Eric, who had yet to give him a last name, had made his day a little easier and was now simply listening to him, and his unsettling eyes no longer felt like ice chips on his skin.
“You’re a good man.” There was more surprise than comfort in Eric’s voice.
“Is that bad?” It didn’t sound like comfortora compliment.
“Inconvenient,” the other man said cryptically, eyes narrowed. He let out a sigh, and something about the sound of it reminded Brady of when he smoked in college. That ritual of breathing, in and out, had soothed the nerves, and he cocked his head at his companion.
“Marlboro or Lucky Strikes?” he asked, and was surprised by the man’s quick, startled grin.
“Lucky Strikes,” he said. “Miss it?”
Brady shook his head. “Yoga breaths do the trick for me. You?”
“No. It taught me how to hold my hands still, but it cut down on my wind.” His mouth twisted at one corner. “It did make me look rather deadly as a disaffected youth, though.”
Giving in to the sunset at his back—and the quiet pleasure of his companion—Brady laughed a little and moved to lean against the building next to Eric.
He smelled pleasantly of expensive cologne—just a spot—and motor oil.
