Nightfire (9 page)

The entire table was beautifully set, the food steaming, up until a minute ago immensely inviting. A table of celebration. Now the sharp smells of food rose in his nostrils like a fog and made him nauseous. The celebration was ruined.

What the fuck?

“Now, Keillor.” Bill’s voice was flat, command in it.

Mike didn’t obey because this was a command situation—for the first time in his life he had no command structure at all, and he found he liked it that way—but because this shit was fucking with one of the best days of his life. He wanted this—whatever
this
was—over, now.

Some kind of mistake had been made and he wanted it straightened out, fast.

With an exclamation of impatience, Mike strode into Sam’s living room, indicated that Bill should take one of Sam’s big comfortable armchairs, and he sat down on the edge of the sofa, at a right angle.

A moment later, Sam sat next to him on the sofa and Harry on the armchair next to Bill’s.

Bill raised his eyebrows. “You okay with this?” he asked Mike.

What a dumb-ass question. “Yeah. They’re my brothers. I don’t have anything to hide from them.”

Kelly nodded, pulled out a notebook. He was the last holdout among the detectives, most of whom took notes on laptops or iPads.

Kelly flipped back a few pages, looked up at Mike. “Where were you last night?”

Mike froze. Christ,
last night?
Sam and Harry looked at each other, then at him. “Ah, I went out.”

Kelly’s jaw muscles jumped, gray eyes cold and frosty. He let the silence hang there. Mike knew better than to give that answer, he was a former cop, after all. But all of a sudden, for one of the few times in his life, he was ashamed of his tomcatting ways. Sam and Harry had been at home with their wives and daughters while he’d been in a dive, drinking too much and picking up a crazy.

He was too old for that, he suddenly realized. No more bar-hopping. It was a depressing way to drown his problems, and anyway the problems were right there with him, the next morning. Together with a hangover and a burning desire to get far away from the woman he’d been with.

Mike gave a heavy sigh. “Okay. I went out around eleven, drove down to Logan Heights, drank a few shots in a couple of bars.”

Kelly had his notebook open on his knee, but he didn’t look down. “Ending up at The Cave?”

“I don’t remember,” Mike began, when suddenly he did. He flashed on the big, broken neon sign over the filthy window,
THE AVE
. “Yeah,” he sighed. “The Cave.”

“You picked up a woman.”

What the fuck business was it of Kelly’s. What—he’d suddenly become the sex police? “I don’t see what business that is of yours.”

“What was her name?” Kelly’s voice became even colder.

Jesus. Her name? If Mike were capable of blushing, he’d blush. If she’d told him her name he didn’t remember it. He’d been way too drunk.

He shrugged.

“Real love affair, huh.” Kelly’s voice was icy.

Mike’s teeth ground.

“The name Mila Koravich mean anything to you?”

Mila—Mike closed his eyes, tried to envision the woman’s apartment. Filth, disorder, rank smells. All he remembered was the stench and the sick feeling of drunkenness. Had her name been on anything? He scanned his memory behind his closed eyelids. Nope.

Mike’s eyes opened. “Sorry. I don’t remember her name. So what’s it matter to you?”

“You got rough with her, didn’t you?”

Shame flooded his system in a hot rush. Harry and Sam sat silently, watching him. In the drunken haze that was last night, the memory of holding her down, of seeing her red, slightly swollen wrists with the white marks of his hands circling them, stood out.

“A—a little. Nothing serious.”

“Yeah?” Kelly had been writing in his notebook but at Mike’s words he looked up, face clenched like a fist. “I don’t know what your definition of ‘a little rough’ is, Keillor, but it’s not mine.”

He reached into an envelope and pulled out some glossy 8 x 10s and tossed them down onto the coffee table. Mike leaned forward, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. Red and black, misshapen flesh . . . then the image resolved itself into the shocking images of a badly beaten woman.

He narrowed his eyes. Something about the badly beaten face was familiar . . . Oh God. The woman he’d fucked last night.

Shocked, he looked up into Kelly’s angry eyes.

“Shattered jaw, concussion, broken forearm, three broken ribs, internal hemorrhaging it took surgery to stop, and a crushed spleen. That’s not what I call ‘a little roughness,’ Keillor.”

“Christ. I didn’t do that to her.” Mike stood, unable to sit still. “I couldn’t do that to any woman. The only thing I did was hold her down when she asked for it.” And well, fuck her harder. But she’d asked for that, too.

Kelly made an angry gesture at the spill of horrific photographs. “That looks like someone who was just held down? She was beaten half to death.”

“Christ, Bill.” A sudden shudder of fear struck Mike. He wasn’t used to fear, but this was a new type of fear he’d never encountered before. If Bill Kelly, who knew him, thought he was capable of doing this, what about other officers in the Violent Crimes Squad? All his dealings had been mainly in SWAT. But the SDPD was big. There were plenty of officers who didn’t know him and weren’t willing to take anyone’s word that Mike simply wasn’t capable of this kind of violence against a woman.

Against an enemy who attacked him, sure. But a woman? Never.

It was beginning to sink in that he was going to have to convince skeptical officers he wasn’t the one. And the D.A. And—God—maybe eventually a jury.

Kelly gave him a hard look. “So you’re telling me you didn’t have sex with this woman? And be careful what you say because we found a used condom in the bathroom.” He snorted. “Used, not filled. You didn’t even come, you poor bastard. So—what’s the DNA test gonna show? And remember your DNA is on file.”

Every police officer had donated DNA via a cheek swab to establish a data file.

“Yeah, okay, we had sex.”

“Uh-huh,” Kelly said. “And?”

“And . . . I didn’t come. She was . . . asking me to be rough with her. Couldn’t do it.”

Now Kelly looked at him in pity. Kelly was a straight and narrow kind of guy who probably only got laid on St. Patrick’s Day. Mike used to feel sorry for him but he suddenly realized the truth. Kelly was right and he was wrong. Fucking around was not good.

Kelly sighed. “The, um, lady in question used crack. We found it everywhere. You’re a former police officer. Former Marine. Marines and crack. That’s not a good mix, Keillor. You should have kept it in your pants.”

Mike closed his eyes. Kelly was right. He should have kept it in his pants.

“So . . . what’s your version? Tell me what went down.”

Mike clenched his jaw. Christ, he didn’t want to talk about it. Any of it.

Silence. Mike could hear his own teeth grinding.

Kelly sighed and stood. “Okay, if you’re not talking, we need to take it downtown, Keillor.”

Sam and Harry rose together.

Mike unclenched his jaw. It took effort. “Stand down, guys. Sit back down.” Man, he wished his brothers weren’t here, but they were and they weren’t leaving. For the first time since he’d walked into Old Man Hughes’ house of horror and discovered that he’d landed in another shithole of a foster home, but that there were two other boys who immediately had his back, Mike wished Sam and Harry were less loyal. What he wanted was to quietly clear this up with Kelly and not have his brothers involved.

But Sam and Harry were hard-wired for loyalty. They weren’t about to let him face this alone.

Shit.

“Down, everyone,” he repeated, and Sam and Harry sat back down, on the edges of the couch. Kelly stood for another long moment, grim-faced, then finally sat back down. He pulled out a notebook and waited.

“Okay,” Mike said. He closed his eyes for a moment, almost tasting the cold steel in his mouth as he bit the bullet. “I was feeling restless last night. Went out around eleven. I wasn’t in the mood for trendy bars, martinis, picking up investment bankers.” No, he’d felt like going to a place as shitty as he felt. But he couldn’t say that in front of Sam and Harry because they’d beat themselves up over not recognizing that he felt shitty and busting their asses to make him feel better.

Sometimes Mike wished his brothers weren’t such stand-up guys. Wished they were worse friends. Wished they didn’t care so much about him.

“I, ah, tooled around a little. Ended up in Logan Heights, in a place called The Cave.”

Kelly held up a hand, spoke quietly in his cell, flipped it closed. Bent back over his notebook. “Okay. Get on with it.”

“I . . . drank. A lot.” Mike looked over at Sam and Harry. Both had poker faces. When Harry came back a human wreck from Afghanistan, essentially wanting to die, he’d tried the drinking-himself-to-death thing for a while, night after night. Mike and Sam had let him, because it’s not easy to drink yourself to death, though God knows Harry tried. Mike and Sam had taken away his guns, wouldn’t let him swim out to where he couldn’t come back, and for a very bad month there had put up unbreakable screens around Harry’s balcony.

But they let him try to drink himself to death because it was really hard to do and Harry wasn’t managing it.

Mike had his drinking moments, too, only not with Harry’s good reasons. It had been touch-and-go whether Harry would ever walk again, ever spend a minute of his life without excruciating pain, would ever have anything resembling a normal life.

And Mike’s excuse? Nothing. Which was precisely what he felt sometimes—absolutely nothing inside.

It shamed him, but there it was. He didn’t even have Sam and Harry’s tragic childhoods as an excuse. He’d been securely wrapped in the strong embrace of a loving family until scumbags shot his mother and father and two brothers in a botched robbery and his childhood ended. That was on the twelfth of March twenty-five years ago when Michael Patrick Keillor was ten years old. On the thirteenth of March of that year, he was already an old man of ten, broken in two by grief.

But until that day, his life had been charmed.

And he drank to forget his life from that March 13 on.

“Get shit-faced?” Kelly asked.

It was sort of a technical term. Drunkenness had its own taxonomy and “shit-faced” was what he’d been.

“Yeah,” Mike answered quietly.

Kelly sat and looked at him, pen hovering over paper. “And?”

“I picked up this—” This what? Girl wasn’t the right term. Lady wasn’t right, either. “Woman.”

Actually, she’d picked him up.

“Name?” Kelly was staring at his notebook and Mike had a sudden flash that Kelly didn’t want to watch his face as he recounted something depressing.

Mike didn’t answer, and Kelly finally looked up.

“I told you. Don’t know her name,” Mike said quietly, and the three men winced. Man, not getting a chick’s name was bad. He’d fucked her, at least partially, but he didn’t know her name. There was really no excuse and he didn’t offer one.

Kelly was staring at him now, as if trying to get inside his head. Kelly was an alpha male, too, and Mike didn’t ordinarily let men stare at him. He’d have bristled except he knew that Kelly was only doing his job. Mike had forfeited his right to indignation.

“I gave you a name,” Kelly finally said. “Mila Koravich. Ring a bell?”

Mike shook his head. He doubted they’d exchanged ten words together.

“Working girl?” Kelly asked casually, and this time Mike winced.

“No.” Though she might have been. Cokehead, filthy hovel of a place. She might have been. “Not that I knew of, anyway. She didn’t ask for money.” If she had, he’d have refused. Part of his no-go list. No married ladies, no addicts—though he’d sandbagged on that one—no working girls.

No, siree. Mike Keillor had standards. High ones, too.

Another long silence. Mike couldn’t meet Sam’s and Harry’s eyes. You wouldn’t catch them puking the bourbon out of their guts at 2
A.M.
in a miserable hole. No, at 2
A.M.
they were with their wives, where you could find them every night of their lives they weren’t on the road for work. And both of them made real efforts to come home as quickly as possible because what waited for them at home was something pretty damned wonderful.

“So,” Kelly said the words in a level voice, one by one, without any inflection, “you got rough.”

Mike stared at the floor.

“Real rough.” Something in Kelly’s voice made Mike raise his head and frown.

He was nauseated at the memory. “I, ah, I held her down. My hands were, yeah, a—a little rough. She asked me to hold her down, do her hard. But I hated that. Her wrists were a little red when I lifted my hands.”

“And?” Kelly asked, his voice harsh.

Mike shrugged. “It wasn’t
that
bad.”

Kelly leaned forward, got in his face. “I don’t know what your definition of bad is, Keillor. But mine includes the kind of violence that was done to that woman. No one deserves that kind of treatment. She was under the knife for four hours.”