“Didn’t he tell you? I used to be a cop.”
Diego looks straight ahead, out over the garden. “I guess I was hoping he was lying.”
I clear my throat. “Don’t like cops?”
He looks at me, his eyes blank, nearly dead. “What do you think?”
A shudder washes over me. I wouldn’t want Diego on my bad side, because even when he’s being polite, he’s a little scary.
“I grew up taught to revere cops,” I admit. “My father is first generation Italian, but he worshipped cops. Especially Irish ones.”
“Plenty of those to go around,” Diego drawls, but I get lost in my thoughts, barely hearing him.
“We had this one cop that patrolled around our place. My mom got sick. Really sick. And one day, a man posing as a salesman tried to get in.”
I shiver at the memory of it, of the man’s cold, beady eyes. I’d only been ten years old, just watching my mother for a few moments while my dad ran to the corner store for milk.
He’d rushed me and I’d screamed, and Officer O’Hara had heard me.
“Let me guess. The cop saved you.”
“He did,” I admit. “Came swooping in and arrested the man. Sat with me until my father got home. After that, all I wanted to be was a cop.”
“And your mother?”
I frown, glancing at him. “What about my mother?”
“You said she was sick. Did she get better?”
I tighten my mouth, lips thinning. “No.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.”
Three days before my eleventh birthday, I’d gotten home from school and walked in my mother’s bedroom to find her cold. My father sat at the kitchen counter until the ambulance arrived. No sirens. They knew they wouldn’t need them.
“Lost my mom when I was young, too. Not that young, but still. It never gets easier.”
“I imagine it doesn’t."
“Guess that’s something you, Luca, and I have in common.”
“Dead mothers?”
Diego snorts out a laugh. “I guess you could put it that way.”
I had read in the dossier that Luca’s mother died when he was a teenager, but I didn’t know how. I could ask more of Diego, but it almost seems wrong to ask something so personal without Luca here.
Why?What the hell? Too personal? I’m trying to take down an empire here.
“So you went into the police academy to make your father proud?” he asks.
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess so.”
“Did it work?”
“For a while,” I muse. It comes out sounding like the truth because it is. My father was proud…at first. But there were cracks in the armor of the Chicago Police Department. My father knew it, saw the news, read the articles. Corruption is just as present now than it ever was.
