Chapter Twelve
“IT LOOKSlike Shepherd’s courtship of this new contact of his is about to finally be consummated,” Bass said. “Luckily just as he started to trust me. At least enough to use me to do his dirty work. So I should be involved when the meet finally takes place, although I doubt I’ll get much of a heads-up. Your people will need to be ready.”
And that was that. Fifteen loudly ticked-by minutes on the cracked clock on the wall to summarize the last month of his life…. Most of it.
“They will be. I’ll make sure of that. Did Shepherd give you any idea of why he needed to intimidate Cochrane?” SSA Merlo, the mover and shaker behind the last year of this organized crime investigation into the Corpse Brothers, asked. The note and the gun Bass had lifted from the Brothers’ armory were laid out neatly on the desk in front of him, sealed into plastic bags for their expedited run through the crime scene tech’s battery of tests. “Or why he needed him alive?”
Bass rocked back on the chair, balanced on the two rear legs, and tapped his hand on the table. The stark relief of being able to peel off the slick undercover mask had faded, and now he just wanted to get out of there and drop the mask of good cop Detective Nico Sebastiani as well.
“Nope.”
Merlo looked at him. “Are you still able to do this, Sebastiani?” he asked. “If you need to be pulled out, we can do that.”
When Bass first rode into town—his flight had dropped him off in Nevada so he could look dusty and road worn when he hit the town limits—he thought the supervisory special agent in charge of the local office was a buttoned-up prig, a pencil pusher with no idea how it worked in the trenches.
Just what he wanted in a handler. He had to break the rules, lie, fuck people over, break the law to fit in with the people he was there to take down. If he ever forgot where the line was—and he had, at least, lost sight of it a couple of times over the years—he wanted someone who knew what he was doing to pull him up. Once your handler started to cover for you instead, that was when shit got out of hand.
But sometimes in Bass’s line of work, you had to cross that line to get the job done.
“Then what?” Bass asked. He rubbed his wrist absently, as though the healed ink had the same weight as the metal it represented. “You won’t be able to get another agent on the inside with the Brothers. That’s why you dragged me back here, remember?”
It took more than just a beat-up bike and a well-curated criminal record to get the Brothers to accept you. Oh, the Feds were able to run a couple of stings with drugs and guns and threw a handful of bikers in jail. Never enough to destabilize the gang, and never anyone they could coax into snitching to get out. Once the cell doors slammed, the Brothers clammed up and did their time.
They never even got close to the Brothers’ inner circle. For all the Feds could prove, Shepherd was a law-abiding business owner who’d never so much as jaywalked and just had really bad taste in friends.
To get him they needed to get closer than a scabby dealer with a stack of heroin bricks to sell cheap. When the Brothers only swore in scumbags born and bred in Plenty, that was a problem.
Unless you found an undercover cop who was an aspiring local scumbag before juvie gave him a reason to turn his life around. Someone like that, if they were willing to take the risk, might just be able to make it work.
“I want to take down Shepherd and his organization,” Merlo admitted. He sat back in the chair and laced his fingers together on the table. His voice was cool and unsentimental as he laid out his argument. “He’s not the biggest fish in the area, but he’s bad enough, and he runs interference and drugs for the cartels that greases the wheels for them. The information you’ve been able to get out is going to help me put him in jail where he belongs, but if you burn out, then everything we’ve done so far will go with you. I’d rather pull you out now with a good cover story. We can throw Bass the biker in jail, and Nico Sebastiani can go back to his life in New York.”
That should have sounded better than it did. Bass raked his fingers through his hair and clenched them into a fist at the base of his scalp. Maybe it was just because the legend he’d been handed this time was too close to home—if broken ribs and a concussion hadn’t gotten him pulled out of that Nebraska juvie and into foster care, if he hadn’t decided that whatever crime paid, it wasn’t worth going back somewhere worse.
“What is it?” Bass asked. “Do you think I’m going to turncoat all of a sudden?”
Merlo pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Divided loyalties are a problem for undercover cops,” he admitted. “Good liars fool themselves before they fool anyone else, and you are very good at being a Brother, Detective.”
Bass leaned in, and the front two legs of the chair hit the ground with a crack as he braced his elbows against the table.
“I was good at being a Long Island sleazebag who sold kids into slavery too,” Bass said. “I gambled with Triads, I sold guns they’d never seen to white supremacists and convinced some made men that I had a market for stolen Bugattis. This is what I do, SSA Merlo, so trust me, if I need to be pulled, I’ll let you know.”
It was a lie. He figured Merlo knew that too, but he let it go this time.
“I’ll hold you to that,” Merlo said. He looked down at the table and tapped his finger against the receipt. Plastic crinkled under his finger as he did. “If you’re still in, then we need to decide what to do about Ryan Cochrane. Obviously we aren’t going to approve of you beating up a law-abiding citizen.”
Officially.That went unsaid. It always did.
“If that’s what he is,” Bass pointed out. “I haven’t heard his name before, but I might have seen him around…?”
Merlo nodded and stood up. He gathered up the gun and receipt off the desk. “I’ll get Tancredi to look up, see if he has any priors or has come across our radar before. Once we know a bit more about him, it’ll be easier to make a decision. If all else fails, I’ll put him in protective custody. You can tell Shepherd that he either ran or you went too far and killed him.”
Bass grimaced as he slouched back into his chair. He stretched out his legs under the table until his scuffed boots kicked Merlo’s chair back. The metal feet scraped loudly against the tiles.
“I’d rather not mess up the first thing he asked me do,” Bass said. “We want Shepherd to think I’m someone he can depend on, trust to get a job done, not another fuckup he can deploy as cannon fodder.”
The key to being a good UC wasn’t to get people to trust you, not in Bass’s experience, anyhow. That was useful if you could pull it off, but half of the people he had arrested over the years didn’t trust their own mothers—for good reason. Some criminals even a mother couldn’t love. What they wanted was someone they could use, and for that, you needed results.
Merlo acknowledged the point with a nod. “That wouldn’t be the ideal solution,” he said. “But it might be the one we need to go with. See what Tancredi turns up on Cochrane.”
