“You keep stopping by when you feel like it—just text Ernie or Sonny or me first. And if you’re ever out on a call and you feel like nobody’s got your back, you call us. I mean, I can’t promise it’ll be a can of olives, but I don’t like knowing that a boy who’s been pretty good to me and mine is out here with nobody on his six.”
Brady swallowed, trying hard not to tear up at the offer. “You trust me?” he asked.
Ace let out a breath, and some of Brady’s elation faded. “Brady, there’s a lot of crossed lines out here. Some of them are for good, but some of them arenot—”
Brady wasn’t aware he was going to say it until it sprang out of his mouth. “I think my commanding officer is trying to bury a pedophile ring.”
Ace was so clearly surprised he fumbled the poop bag he was ripping out of the little container on the leash. He ended up with an entireribbonof poop bags, festooning the desert like the red tape of a murder.
“Holy fuckballs, son. That was not where I expected this conversation to go.”
Brady was actually sweating in the diamond-cold night. “I’m sorry,” he said, while Ace wrestled with the poop bags before cleaning up after Duke—who was beginning to shake. “I… see—I told Eric before I came in, and it’s something weighing on me, and… and you seem toknowthat it’s bad out here. You seem toknow, and you didn’t want to say anything because you didn’t want the whole department down your back, but it’s just fuckin’me, and I’m all alone and—”
Ace was staring at him, and he petered out.
“Sorry,” he said, his voice small.
“No, no. You’re fine,” Ace said. “Okay, then.” He scooped up the dog and turned back to the tiny house on the edge of the freeway. They’d gone a lot farther than Brady had anticipated, because the porch light might as well have been a star, and the garage faded into the dark of the night shadows.
“Okay, then, what?” Brady asked.
“Well, for starters, you need to give me some specifics about that bomb you dropped on me. And then I’m going to give you a wholeshittonof telephone numbers so you can call one of us—preferably me or Ernie—if you get a tickle up your spine.” Ace stared at him, and then, stopping for a moment, stared all around them, and Brady felt it. That terrible, terrible aloneness of being a tiny soul in the vast indifference under a desert sky.
“I’m all alone,” Brady said, getting it after a moment.
“Nope,” Ace said with decision. “See that tiny light?”
“Your house?”
“Yeah. Thems my people. There’s more’n you think. But we got your back. Come on in. You can have some ice cream and cookies. Sonny’s favorite part.”
BRADY LEFTabout an hour later, pleased with the ice cream and cookies—and by Sonny’s childish delight over them. He and Sonny had engaged in a lively discussion over which German automobile Ericshouldlike, versus which one he professed to like the most, and while they’d never fully convert Brady to an Audi, he had laughed a lot.
Ernie had devoured enough ice cream to support a man as big as… well, Jai, the giant Russian, who had seemed to delightin terrorizing Brady by subjecting him to his baleful glare. The third time Brady turned toward him and startled, Ace had called him out on it.
“Now come on, Jai—he ain’t done nothing yet that’d warrant all that. He gets the idea.”
Jai had rolled his eyes as though bored. “American police,” he said, as though that was an entire treatise on the species. “That Subaru better have a magic engine.”
Brady had smiled with only his teeth, knowing his eyes were a little bit terrified, and to his surprise it wasEricwho burst into laughter.
In the end, though, Brady had done the dessert dishes, with Ernie as his copilot, before taking his leave.
“What’d Ace say?” Ernie asked.
“He said you all would have my back,” Brady told him, not sure what that would mean to everybody else.
Ernie—who was drying the dishes—reached up to grab his shoulder.
For a moment Brady was alone, under a black sky, with no moon, no light of any kind.
And suddenly he was surrounded by stars.
Them’s my people. There’s more’n you think.
He heard Ace’s words, clear as the diamond-edged light, and he found his way back to the little kitchen with the pale yellow paint and the battered tile.
He sucked in a startled breath and stared at Ernie. “What the—”
