“More than moments. It implicates both of them. It gives the FBI cause to bring them both in for questioning.”
“Honey, it fucks them both inside out.”
“Yes. It really does. And yes, I can do it. It’ll take me a few minutes.”
“Take your time. Bert and I will go for a little walk while you work.”
He snagged a couple more slices of pepperoni on the way out—one for him, one for the dog. A nice evening for a stroll around, he thought, with time to check out the progress of the garden, think about what he might do around the place on his next day off.
“This is our place,” he said to the dog. “She was meant to come here, and I was meant to find her here. I know what she’d say to that.” He laid a hand on Bert’s head, rubbed lightly. “But she’s wrong.”
When Bert leaned against his leg, as he often did with Abigail, Brooks smiled. “Yeah, we know what we know, don’t we?”
As they circled around, he saw Abigail come to the door, smile.
“It’s done. Dinner’s ready.”
Look at her, he thought, standing there with a gun on her hip, a smile on her face and pasta on the table.
Oh, yeah, he knew what he knew.
“Come on, Bert. Let’s go eat.”
* * *
Brooks spent a chunkof his morning—too big a chunk, in his opinion—meeting with the prosecutor on the Blake cases.
“The kid’s crying for a deal.” Big John Simpson, slick as they came and with one eye on a political future, made himself at home in Brooks’s office. Maybe a little too much at home.
“And you’re giving him one?”
“Save the taxpayers’ money. Let him plead guilty to assaulting an officer, resisting, the trespass. Got him locked on the vandalism at the hotel, the assaults there. All we give him is a buy on the deadly weapon. We’d never make attempted murder stick. He gets five to seven inside, with mandatory counseling.”
“And serves two and a half, maybe three.”
Big John crossed his ankles above his mirror-shined shoes. “If he behaves himself, and meets the requirements. Can you live with that?”
“Does it matter?”
Big John lifted a shoulder, sipped at his coffee. “I’m asking.”
No, they’d never make the attempted murder stick, Brooks admitted. A couple years inside would do one of two things, he calculated. It would either make Justin Blake into a halfway decent human being, or it would finish his ruination.
Either way, Bickford would be free of him for a couple years.
“I can live with it. What about his old man?”
“Big-city lawyers doing their big-city shuffle, but the fact is, we’ve got a lock there. We got the phone records proving he called Tybal Crew. Got three separate witnesses saw Crew’s truck outside the house on the day in question. Got the cash money turned in, and Blake’s fingerprints are on a number of the bills.”
He paused a moment, recrossed his ankles. “He’s claiming he hired Ty to do some work around the place, paid him in advance ’cause Ty needed the money.”
“Kosseh sher.”
“Say what?”
“Bullshit in Farsi.”
“Don’t that beat all?” Big John let out a chuckle. “Yeah, it’s bullshit in any language. We can bring in a couple dozen witnesses who’d swear Blake never pays in advance, never pays cash,alwaysgets a signed receipt. True enough Ty was pretty damn impaired by the end of it, but he hasn’t changed his story by an inch. So.”
