Two messages to two men on different sides of the law, but the same content—I’ll get it done today.The first time he went undercover, Bass thought the hardest part would be tripping the switch between identities. It wasn’t. There was never, even when you weren’t playing a “road not taken” version of yourself, as much clear blue water between who you pretended to be and who you were. There was always bleed through. That’s what made it convincing, and, cop or crook, his bosses always wanted pretty much the same things from him. It was only at the end game that their plans diverged.
No wonder he sometimes lost sight of what he was supposed to want.
Bass shoved his phone back in his hip pocket and pulled away from the curb. Luckily he knew where he could go to jog his memory. It wouldn’t even put him behind the loose schedule he had laid out for the day. His old neighborhood wasn’t that far from here, only a quarter of an hour.
That prediction turned out to be a few years out of date. Traffic had gotten a lot worse since the last time Bass had driven down this way in a social worker’s blue Accord. Not since his dad’s truck had broken down again. He was glad that trip hadn’t taken half an hour. The social worker’s awkward attempts at encouragement to clean up his act had been hard enough to bear.
Nothing much had changed since then. The street had gotten older, the yards had gotten more sparse, and the broken-down cars parked in the road outside had gotten more battered and sun faded. Bass parked behind a canary-yellow Firebird and kicked down the stand on the bike. He leaned on the handlebars and stared over the road.
It was his house now, he supposed. He paid taxes on it, ignored the letters from developers who wanted to buy up the property. Every now and again, the council would try to force him to provide upkeep for it, but he was a cop, and in this neighborhood, it was only a token effort anyhow. He could have paid through the nose to plaster up siding and rip out the rotted-through windows, and the neighbors’ houses would still have dry rot in the roof and dead trees in the garden. Still, everyone and the government agreed it was his, the only thing his dad had to leave him when he died.
Bass hung his helmet off the bike and crossed the road. The chain-link fence was rusted and ragged-looking, loose panels kicked back to list into the neglected yard. A ginger cat, crop-eared and scrawny, sprawled on the sun-warmed concrete path. It shot up and disappeared into the weeds with an indignant yowl as Bass wrestled the gate open.
When he was a little kid, the walls were white with yellow trim on the roof and windows, but it had been some shade of its current dirty gray since Bass was a teenager. There was a stack of paint cans in the shed, ready to finally fix the place up. But either Dad had too much work to make the time, or when the work dried up, he didn’t see the point.
He walked up to the front door and gave it an exploratory shove. It should have been locked—there was a heavy padlock fastened over the frame—but the screws pulled out of the wood as it swung open.
There were drifts of old leaflets in the hall, kicked to the sides where they’d dried out like leaves, and bottles lined in neat rows on the stairs. It didn’t stink since the summer sun had baked out the ripe notes, but there was an undernote of cheap tequila and piss on the air.
Bass leaned against the ripped-up doorframe and rubbed the back of his neck. He didn’t need to go any farther. The stairs were where everything shit in this house happened to him, every bit of bad news and every fight.
He snorted. If he went on what he remembered, he’d spent his life between eleven and fifteen either halfway up the stairs or locked in his bedroom. Presumably he’d watched TV in the main room and ate in the kitchen with his dad, but he couldn’t swear to it. Maybe if he’d stayed, things would have been different. Or they might not have been. He’d been on a straight shot to a bad end back then.
But it didn’t matter because things weren’t different.
Dad’s hand was clammy on the back of Nico’s neck as he dragged him downstairs. His breath was hot and smelled of whiskey—not enough to get him drunk, just enough to give him a dose of Dutch courage.
“Just admit you did it,” he hissed in Nico’s ear.
“I didn’t,” Nico protested as he tried to wrench away. Dad fumbled his grip on his neck, and they stumbled on the steps in a clumsy, foot-mashed struggle before he grabbed a handful of Nico’s hair and dragged him back. “Get off me! I didn’t do anything, Dad!”
It wasn’t the first time he’d said it, but this time it was true. The old woman in the hospital had nothing to do with him. He hadn’t broken into her house, he hadn’t scared her, and he hadn’t pushed her down so she hit her head. What would she have that he’d want?
“Shut up,” Dad said as he shook him. “It doesn’t matter what you did. They don’t care. All they need’s a body in the cells.”
He manhandled Nic down the last of the stairs.
There. Bass’s eyes tracked up the wall until he found a torn strip of wallpaper at the right height. He’d ripped his nails down to the quick on that. Bass rubbed his thumb over the nail on his index finger, the ridge on it that had never quite grown back right.
“I found this in his room,” Dad told the burly salt-and-pepper cop at the door. He pulled a thin purse out of his back pocket and shoved it out in front him. His hand shook. “Hidden under his bed.”
“A law-abiding citizen,” the cop drawled. “Look at that. It’s going to be more than a slap on the wrist this time, Sebastiani.”
Nico knew that. He broke away from his dad, dodged between the cops in the doorway, and made a run for it. He didn’t get far. The salt-and-pepper cop caught up with him and grabbed him by the arm, twisted it all the way up to his shoulder blades, and slammed him into the side of a car. He cracked his head against the metal hard enough that the drone of his Miranda rights was almost drowned out.
“Don’t make it difficult, kid,” the cop said quietly as he snapped on the cuffs and pulled Nico off the car. “Play along. We’ll cut you a good deal. Good enough.”
He marched Nico, barefoot and shivering even in the summer heat, back down the street to the cop car. As he was shoved roughly into the back, Nico saw Ville at the end of the street, sickly pale and with a black eye. Shepherd stood behind him, one hand clenched on Ville’s shoulder. He glared at the cops as they looked his way.
His Dad had done the best he could, Bass supposed. The cops had already been paid off, and it wasn’t as though they could afford some hotshot lawyer to oppose the charges. At least this way they got something out of the deal—money and safety from reprisals.
Bass rubbed the back of his neck as though the memory of that clammy grip had left sweat residue on him. Just because he understood why his dad had taken the money didn’t mean he forgave him.
Or anyone else.
The old anger was back, hot and sour as bile in the back of his throat. It was bitter, but it was familiar too. Most of the time he drugged it with adrenaline and hard work, stuffed it down where it couldn’t get him in trouble, but it was always there when he poked at it.
This was what he’d come back to town for, why he’d agreed to Merlo’s plan that might end up burning his real name. He wanted payback, not a doctor with pretty eyes who gave out too many second chances. And he couldn’t have both.
