Angels With Dirty Faces [The Mary Chronicles: Year One, Episode #1]
Prologue
The Man smokes, staring out his window, the sound of the ocean and the wind nothing but a muffled roar. Clad in a thick ivory robe, he watches the black-edged waves crash against the smooth shore. A colony of grey-headed gulls make a furious noise in the early dawn hours, spots of white taking flight against a sun still struggling to rise above the horizon. Fingers of golden fire-light split the darkness apart but a thick, pervasive mist hovers over the Atlantic like a shroud, muting the coloring of the world for a little while longer. Gusty winds toss oceanic debris in vortexes above the damp sand, like little cyclones at play. In the far off distance, he can barely make out the shadowy outlines of boats drifting slowly across the water, bobbing up and down in slow motion.
The June Winter in southern Brazil has been warmer than usual but it has been a blessing for his aching joints, which seem to ache and lock at even the mention of mild to cool weather. He sits at a wood table, rough-hewn and imperfect, one hand rubbing his left knee while the other holds a disintegrating cigarette, tiny ashy flakes drifting onto his robe. He has been sitting in that same spot since early morning, at 3AM, contemplating the sun’s lazy path across the bruised-blue sky and the pull of the darkness sheathing the world from all the sins invisible to the eye. But not his. He sees much, sees too much.
Beside him on the table, the screen of his laptop bathes him in an electronic rainbowed luster. Images and video clips on pause await his purview. Endless Missions. The cycle never ceases, the pain and suffering, the corruption and the inability for those to do what is just and right. The weak always vulnerable, and the strong doing nothing but standing by to watch.
God, all gods, homespun and made-up, he has discovered, can and will, only do so much. The rest must be left to others on the mortal plane. For the angels here on earth, though human and flawed, make a difference. While not born pure—no—they are reborn in his ideal image, doers of vengeance. Correctors of the wrong.
He fingers the half-empty box of Hollywood cigarettes then pushes it back, with a sigh. A moment later, his attention is diverted, at a vision outside his window. Raptly, he watches a lone figure walking along the beach, a stick in hand and a golden retriever at the other end, stealing it easily. He focuses in on the shapeless figure, standing out in relief against a burgeoning, stunning backdrop. But quickly, the dog abandons the stick. Barking, it chases after a single gull swooping down low. The dog’s tail swishes about and plunges against a wave, but fails to catch its prey. The gull swerves, lifting up on a wind and vaults into the sky.
His eyes turn toward the figure again, now twirling around, arms out and head thrown back. The hat on her head is swept away and long silvery-blond hair dances about. A ghost of a smile graces his face as Amelia slows then stops, eventually facing the ocean.
If not for her hair, it would have been difficult to make out gender. He likes the idea of her just then: a young woman taking an early morning stroll before the world awakens. A brand new day. No sins. No forgiveness. A clean slate.
As the dog trots out of the ocean, shaking its body furiously, The Man can almost hear her musical reaction. When she pauses, and turns her head toward the house, her gaze seemingly going through the window, and directly to him, she waves. He sees her in his mind, now; a face he’s known for years. He lifts a gnarled hand, briefly, in silent communication but she has already resumed her walk along the shore. The dog is not her new companion, but a wanderer, too. Like all of them. It lopes in the opposite direction, the both of them forgetting each other. A moment shared, and gone, between strangers.
After he finishes his fifth cigarette of the morning, flicking the butt in his half-drunk cup of black coffee, he reaches for his cell phone lying nearby. He picks it up, dials a specific number and puts the phone to his ear. It rings but thrice.
The line is scratchy at first then clear as a bell. “Yesss?” the voice seethes. Harassed. Impatient. A blind fury barely kept in check.
“I have heard of your suffering, friend, and it troubles me deeply,” The Man introduces. His voice is smooth, deep and unreadable.
Silence. Then, “Who is this?”
Suspicion should be everyone’s confidant. The Man smiles mirthlessly, his gaze fixed upon the horizon. “I hear things. Whispers on the wind and I take care of what suffering I can. Suffering that has fallen upon you and your family unjustly. I provide solutions that no one else can,” he continues. “For a price.”
“Fuck off,” the other man snaps.
The Man knows he is about to loose the call but the future of these things have already been sketched out to plan. The stars have already witnessed it all before. “My Mary is a good girl. She is very helpful in these types of situations. She only wishes to help ease the sharpness of your pain.”
The silence is longer this time. When the other man on the end speaks, it is with understanding. With awe. Reverence. “You’re him,” he whispers.
“For a price,” The Man repeats. “Whatever you wish—”
“I—I know…” He pauses, the silence stark and charged. “Money. That is what I have to offer,” the man states, his voice hollow. “After this… I can’t… I don’t want to be bothered with this ever again. After… I just want her to heal. All of this has to be behind her in order for that to happen.”
The price varies between each recipient. Usually money, though The Man favors the less predictable. But this world runs on paper, and those offerings continue the cycle but it is a mere gesture, the most empty. In the end, whatever the man offers, is what will be accepted, no matter what. If it were a hundred dollars, or a million—it would all mean the same thing. Money will always be the most insignificant of all offerings. But he cannot deny its power and usefulness. The majority goes towards an infinite purpose, a payback to others that need it far worse then he. He takes but a tithe, which he safely keeps in check, to continue the Missions. To ensure His angels here on earth are properly prepared.
In the end, it all aids to fuel the greater good. Always. Forever. Until his own Mission has been completed.
“As you wish,” The Man answers, “and so it will be.”
“I’m sorry,” the other man returns, chastised and somewhat worried, “about earlier. How I answered—”
“It is already forgotten,” The Man replies, gently. “The sin done against you is grave indeed. I do not fault you for your anger.”
A lengthy pause, heavy breathing, his words rapid, nearly bleeding together. “You have to understand…this won’t be easy. Hurting him. He’s powerful, my brother-in-law, even with the Feds all over him, they can’t take him down. It’s been months, he’s just that powerful.”
The Man nods, dismissing the warning. “Tell me whatever you wish… I am listening,” he directs, his voice somber but equable. “Nothing you say will surprise or offend me. No matter how dark you feel.”
“Celine…she’s only nine fucking years old!” A strangled, choked pause, his breathing fast, ragged and hard, being torn asunder. “I want him dead. That’s what I need her to do. Gone, however which way she chooses,” the other man states, his voice shaky—full of rage. “What he did to my…she’ll never be the same. He’s ruined her. Destroyed her. Our family.” He stops, letting out a tortured sob. There is static and other jarring noises that filters through over the line. The Man waits, listening. Waiting. When the other man speaks again, it is quiet where he is, and there is more restraint in his delivery. “Look, everyone knows I threatened him… I would immediately be implicated—”
“Do not worry about such details,” The Man returns, his voice soothing. It has an immediate effect. “They are nothing to you now. They will be handled. You need not worry any longer, friend.”
A short moan filters through the phone. “I understand,” the other man breathes, relief evident in his voice. “I understand…”
The Man staccatos out a long bank account number that sits happily in the Cayman Islands, a financial void untouched and unbroken by any law known to man and made by man. “This begins now. But you must be patient. Timing is everything. Interference is not tolerated.”
A long breath whistles over the line. “Yes. Of course. I understand…” he repeats, his voice now long and weary, “thank you.”
The Man hangs up, knowing every sordid detail before he even made the call. No Mission is ever done without thought and careful understanding. The planning takes weeks. The timing truly is everything. God-sent.
He looks over at the young woman by the corner. She chose this Mission, she chose this man and his personal agony. The Man approves, pride swelling in his chest.
“Mary,” he whispers.
Her head lifts up, half an inch. She sits sternly in her wooden chair, back straight, legs together at a perfect ninety degree angle, bare feet flush against the cracked tile floor and her hands folded neatly in her lap. The crumbling and peeling white walls nearly swallow her up. Her eyes meet his. Dark fathomless windows into an apt machine.
“You know what to do,” The Man says, very softly, almost tenderly.
But the girl does not know what soft or tender is. Those words do not exist in her vocabulary, though she has experienced small measures of both. She gives a curt nod, just once, and rises up in a fluid, graceful and elegant movement. Years of dance and ballet lessons have honed her body into a lithe frame, muscled but highly lean. But that is not the only thing she has learned. Clad simply in white linen pants and a white, loose button-down blouse, she is almost angelic looking but the hard glint to her eyes ruins the vision. She is a remarkable creation. An angel of mercy. And the angel of death, as well.
She gives The Man a kiss on his right temple, the skin there mangled and tough but her lips are cool against his warmth. Her long, thick and dark hair tumbles forward around him, smelling like the ocean. Of purity. She leaves without a word, her careful expression never altering, her moves as silent as wind that he cannot feel.
The God that The Man believes in has not always been clear in His message but he believes in Him. Believes in the idea of Him. And that is enough. But he knows that his interpretations are of his own making; his and his alone. But his Marys are proof-positive, to him, that his God approves.
The Man’s gaze returns to the window, the sun also rising with a brilliance that warms his soul. He smiles at the good works his Mary will perform.
God is good. He is kind. And into the Valley of Death…some shall go…
Part I: Dorian
Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.
1 Peter 5:8, King James Bible
Chapter 1
Carmen Elena Santiago. Moved to Vegas a month and a half ago. Nineteen, moving on to the ripe old age of twenty in just a few days. Only child. Parents killed in a home invasion in Laughlin when she was young. No living relatives. Jumped around to various foster care families all over Clark County. Since eighteen, she’s been everywhere. A roamer. Nomad.
She’s held jobs at every no-nothing, low- and dead-end job she could find, never staying for long. A few weeks here in this state, a couple weeks there in that state. But there’s nothing like coming back home and it’s the longest Ms. Santiago has stayed put. Currently, she’s working at the MGM as a hostess at one of their restaurants. Her address is on D Street off of Owens, north of Downtown. It’s a shitty part of Vegas. Probably one of the shittiest, he thinks, and about as bad as where he now currently resides.
A few hiccups here and there.
Perfectly normal.
No arrests or formal charges.
No sealed juvie records either.
Shocking, really, considering her background. She’s lived relatively clean. Or maybe not. Appearances are nothing. And everything when you least expect it.
The look she’d given him, as their paths crossed in the station, had been disturbing. That expression on her face, that still plays in his head, got to him. It was like she was waiting, searching only for him and when her eyes landed on him, it was as though she were found, by him. Truthfully, it’d hooked him. Even if he’d just imagined it, the mystery around her was too tempting to ignore.
He tosses the file on the battered square table behind him, a thin folder that holds quite pedestrian and dull information but he’d only given himself twenty minutes to look her up and find what he and Ash could in a rush. His action ends up sweeping aside the two, empty styrofoam coffee cups as the folder slides across the table. Under the hiss of the air vents from above, they barely make a sound as they hit the tired concrete floor. One bounces off the leg of a metal chair on the backside of the table, but both roll in opposite directions.
Ash, of course, hears the barely-there sound. Standing tall by the window, hands on her hips, she eyes the cups and gives him a look over her left shoulder. “Anxious much?” she asks, dryly. Her voice echoes in the plain small viewing room.
Yeah. He’s asking for more than what he knows should be there. There is absolutely nothing suspicious about Ms. Santiago, and yet, something about her is…off.
It eggs him on.
Compared to him, she’s a baby, still a girl but she acts like someone much older. She has something distinct about her in which the world is reflected in her eyes. She’s seen what reality is, and not the bubble a great majority get to exist in. She has the look of someone who’s lived a much longer life. It’s not the bleak and downtrodden heartache that most foster kids have. Hers is one of awareness, and detachment. A flavor of distance and untouchability he can’t pin down. That stare, the deadness, the gravitas, it makes him hold his breath.
If he and Everly had had kids when they first got married, right out of high school, that child would be around the same age as this young woman sitting before him. Hell, his phantom daughter could have been friends with her, gone to the same school, participated in the same sports, heading to the same college… Imagining that, even thinking that, is a little unnerving. Absentmindedly, his thumb fidgets with his gold band, which feels tight around his wedding finger.
Dorian rubs his eyes hard, his eyelids feeling heavy and itchy. The late afternoon staleness has settled over the station and the moisture from the recent monsoon rain is pervasive and cloying despite the powerful A/C units working nonstop. His jeans seem to weigh a thousand pounds, his belt digging into his hips, the plastic pancake holder holstered to his belt only adding to the weight pulling him low and down.
He feels stretched out, his muscles bunched around his bones too fixedly; but that’s mainly due to the pudge that he’d gained over the past ten years having slowly faded away these past ten months from private struggles and long workout sessions to clear a mind already empty of anything meaningful. He breathes in and out, feeling his lungs expand and his stomach muscles flex. His skin retracts.
“She’s gorgeous,” his partner says, shifting her weight to the other foot. There is a touch of heat and admiration in those two words. “Didn’t mention that when you came in. I’m startin’ to think you forgot to mention a lot of other things.”
Dorian looks over at Detective Tenasha Bradshaw, his partner of eight years. Her badge, a seven-pointed star, is clipped on the front of her belt and to the left, winks at him and he stares at the gleaming gold metal. He’d come armed, but had forgotten his own badge, which he keeps in the trunk of his car, along with a sundry of supplies for crime scenes. The badge that has been in his trunk for two months, all but forgotten, until right now. He blinks, and meets his partner’s steady, black-eyed gaze. Her skin is so dark she’s practically a shadow. A tall and athletic one at that. She keeps her hair brutally short, shorter than his, but with her angular lines and feminine features, she can pull it off. Her light grey, fitted suit and pant ensemble and white button-down is wrinkled but she still looks better than most, including himself. The scruff on his jaw, broken-in black Nikes, his worn but fitted jeans and short-sleeve plain black tee aren’t regulation but it’d been his day off.
Well, technically, every day for the past two months has been his day off. Today, as he called it when Ash gaped at him from their desks, shoved together front to front, was an unofficial trial run to being reinstated as a detective in the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Her eyes had darted around for their supervisor and then an accepting shake of her head as he told her why he was showing his mug where it wasn’t likely wanted.
“Well?” she prompts.
“Yeah. Sorry,” he offers, perfunctorily. He leans his ass against the edge of the bolted down table, thinking.
Ash sighs. “So…what’s this really about, Dorian?” she asks, speculatively. “Cuz as far as I know, she hasn’t been read her rights because she hasn’t been formally charged with anything. So what’s the deal? Are you going to arrest her for looking like a Victoria’s Secret model?”
“Not tall enough,” he says, adding to himself, but she’s definitely thin enough. She’s about five-seven and quite toned despite her slenderness. Not skinny for the sake of skinny. He can tell she has muscle mass, someone who is purposeful in the maintenance of their body. Like an athlete. His stare at her is intense, but she divulges nothing, only provokes more questions.
“I was really hoping I could spend my Monday catching up on my paperwork and prepping for court,” Ash says, almost to herself than to Dorian.
“And I’m not stopping you,” he returns, eying her.
A little smirk appears. Yeah, he knows his partner well. Carmen Santiago is way more interesting than the mountains of boring paperwork forever waiting to be tackled and court prep. “Let me guess…you have a crush on her,” she baits, giving a none too delicate snort. “And couldn’t figure out a way to ask her out like a normal divorcé?”
Unlike his previous partners, joking about shit like this with another female officer would have gotten him canned but he and Ash have always had a kind of friendship and partnership that had gotten him through the toughest hangups in his life. Like when he’d started to spin out from the stress of his divorce and not admitting how much it was affecting him. She’d convinced their LT and the department’s shrink to put him on administrative leave due to personal issues sooner rather than later, and continuing to be an asshole to pretty much everyone around him and then eventually getting canned. She saved his ass. But when he doesn’t take the bait, which he usually does to some degree and merely gives her a distracted frown, she raises a brow at his seriousness. She stops with the quips and remains quiet. She knows he’s not fucking around.
His entire focus, his mind, is centered around a conundrum that his un-used police brain wants to figure out but is failing to glean even the simplest concept he’s already figured out—that Ms. Santiago is more than the sum of what’s before him. A lot more. He knows it like the way that if he eats too much spicy food, he’ll have heartburn an hour later. Or the way Ash will look at him when she’s scared but is trying to hide it.
The parts he’s figured out about Santiago, don’t make a lick of sense.
“I gotta feeling about this, Ash, about her,” he says, gently; distractedly disgruntled. He turns his head slightly toward his partner but keeps his eyes on the girl. Serene but there is an intensity to her eyes that seems to know he’s there, watching her back. “She’s guilty of something. I just don’t know what, yet.”
“That doesn’t make any sense, Dorian,” Ash states, echoing his thoughts exactly but for completely different reasons. Irritation laces her voice but that’s normal, and she’s made a fair point. Also normal.
He’s always been the irrational and irritating one between the two of them. She hasn’t always understood his hunches. She’s much more left-brained and by-the-book than he will ever be. It’s why they compliment each other so well. He defies logic and reason, going for what instinct whispers to him, a skill honed from his days as a kid living in Compton with an abusive, alcoholic father and drug-dealing, drug-abusing mother. The color of a crime, the nature of a criminal come in all shapes—some with the appearances of good but bad to the core and those that you’d accuse just because they looked the part, but had hearts of gold. Some clichés endure despite being a cliché because they are, drenched in the repetitious cycle of life and human folly. All vices send people to the same final destination at some point. It was why he became a cop. To help the process along.
Ash, on the other hand, relies on the facts. Her interpretations are more severe, black and white, but she’s excellent at reading people and the situation quickly. She thinks fast on her feet but doesn’t get emotionally entrenched or single-minded about something small, which he has a bad habit of doing at times.
Like now. With her. If he were to judge Ms. Santiago’s name alone, it would pinpoint to the obvious. Judging by her features, her origins hail from somewhere south. Not Mexico, but more south, and exotic. His educated guess would be Colombia or Brazil but it was hard to say. She could hail from Europe for all he knew. With her perfectly caramel skin, long dark hair and dark eyes, her beauty is striking and not at all subtle. The light, random dusting of freckles all over her skin is distracting yet somehow makes her less indistinct but leaves Dorian a little uncomfortable. Those damn freckles make her seem younger. A little more innocent.
But something is still off.
“We can’t hold her,” Ash reminds him. “Hell, we have no right to even question her. I’m surprised she cooperated.”
That’s the other thing—she did cooperate. She didn’t offer any resistance at all. The officer in charge of Santiago’s apprehension, whom Dorian had reached out to on his drive to the station, had said she’d just shrugged, gave up her name when the officer asked then willfully went into the backseat. No questions, no other words at all. It was just so weird.
He could make up a list of reasons as to the why of these things but it didn’t matter. She was here for a reason, by some grand design or not, and he wanted to find out what she was about.
Ash gives an errant wave toward the one-way mirror. “She could file a complaint and it would be with merit. If she lawyers up, we’re screwed. Did I mention that this is a really bad idea?”
Dorian nods, thoughtful but determined. “I hear you but I’m not wrong about her,” he promises.
“Why’d you even have her picked up?” A pause. “You think she’s a hooker…a high-end one?” Ash brightens. She likes that because it gives them probable cause. A reason, however flimsy.
“She’s not a prostitute,” Dorian returns, crushing his partner’s heart.
In Vegas, the possibilities are endless and prostitution is a huge moneymaker for this city. Santiago’s attire would certainly qualify for an immediate assumption of something naughty and sexual: it’s tight, red, very short and strapless.
There’s some big fashion event that had started this past weekend, at one of the casinos, and she definitely looks like maybe she got lost on her way to the runway instead of the lobby of his motel but his gut told him that she has nothing to do with that, either. He would also bet big that Santiago isn’t a hostess at some goddamned restaurant. She’s something more, way more, but what?
“When I heard the news over the radio—about the Mayor getting assassinated in Downtown—and that it was some gunman on the roof business,” he finally explains to her, “I saw her walking through the lobby of my motel, not even an hour after the fact, the timing was—”
“I can’t believe you’re still staying at that seedy place,” Ash interjects, off topic and making a face. She turns toward him, resting a hip against the sill of the mirror. “What’s it been? Almost a month now, right? And the place isn’t even on a hilltop for Christ’s sake…it sure ain’t a palace by any stretch of the word.” She shakes her head. “Can’t you find something better?”
The Hilltop Palace is seedy but dirt cheap and Dorian couldn’t even afford a toothpick let alone paying the kind of rent that’s expected in even the semi-habitable parts of Vegas. With the rank of Sergeant and many years with Metro, he made a better-than-decent salary but his finances were for shit right now. It would take a full year to rebuild while his ex got the house she sold three days before he moved into the Hilltop, and taking all the profit with her, along with the cars, the dog…pretty much everything that was worth a damn. He got to keep his savings. A small victory as he actually needed to live.
He really doesn’t miss any of that, the material stuff—not even his ex anymore. Their marriage had become a struggle for the past several years but not to the point he thought it needed to end for real. But when she’d asked for a separation ten months ago, then five months ago, for a divorce, it’d really spun him for a loop. She’d moved to Laguna Beach as soon as the house had sold but had been making frequent trips to California since the separation. It still felt like it’d happened so fast but, in hindsight, it had been a long time coming.
While the Hilltop was meant to be a temporary stay, he hadn’t bothered looking for something more permanent. Not just because his finances were shot. He just didn’t feel permanent about anything and committing to even a month-long rental agreement had been too overwhelming for him. For now, he was happy to pay weekly for a simple room. A place to dump the crap he does own and a place to bed down and escape from the world around him for a few hours. Then again, with the heat of summer in full swing, he’d been escaping his room for any place with working A/C and open all night. The swamp cooler in his motel room did a piss-poor job fending off the steep July sizzle and when he was there, he felt like a turkey basting in a large oven most of the time. The nights were even worse.
“Ex cleaned me out, Ash, and I mean that in the fullest sense possible—financially, emotionally, everything,” he reveals, and caring even less he got shafted because a part of him truly believes he owed Everly for years of unhappiness that was all his doing. “She’s living it up, on the beach, with our dog and probably happier than she’s ever been. I’m here, still trying to figure it out and yeah, admittedly, not getting very far.”
He shrugs. He’s not bitter. Not anymore. But he missed Samson, their four-year-old blue heeler. His precious baby that he’d cried over losing when Everly had left him for good. He’d been more heartsick about loosing his damn dog than losing his wife. That was the problem and even he knew it was all his fault.
“You two had some good times. I remember how you and Ev used to be…” Ash gives him a quiet, almost soft, look; one of her few ways to offer any comfort and with her words, it was good enough in his book. For the most part, he hadn’t really spoken about the failure of his marriage with anyone, even Ash, who he was the closest to. “Anyway…” she resumes, and gives a chin gesture toward Santiago. “You were saying about your girl?”
She’s not my girl. He shakes his head. Whatever. “Yeah, anyway,” he continues, glad she’s back to shop-talk. “I saw her. In that getup. Five-inch heels, too. I could tell the dress was nice. Not cheap.” He pauses, rubbing a spot under his bottom lip, thinking on what had captured his attention. “She had a large briefcase, not a suitcase or business briefcase. Steel. Heavy-duty.” He looks over at Ash. “Special.”
“Jesus,” she mutters, under her breath and just between them, even though they’re the only ones in the room. She stares right into his eyes. “You think she’s the gunman on the roof?”
No.
Yes.
Maybe?
He still couldn’t decide but it seemed plausible to him though if the expression on his partner’s face was any indication that he may have jumped off the deep end, he’d better not say it that loudly to anyone else.
He knew how it sounded. Just like the rarity of female serial killers, female snipers are virtually unheard of in the modern age, and the most notables came from Russia, well before the fall of the Soviet Union. He wasn’t sure about anything concerning Ms. Santiago; regardless, his gut had also told him she was out of place. That something was up with her and it could not be dismissed. Not a sniper, then what? That’s what he couldn’t figure out and what he wanted to unearth. He was almost desperate to know.
While his personal life was, and likely still is, a clusterfuck, professionally, he and Ash had been on top of their game. On and off the clock. They’d argue cases on the phone till midnight, or have late night coffees at some local diner until they were blue in the face and pissed off at each other for being so thick-headed. But they’d always clicked when it mattered. He hoped this was one of those moments.
Ash rubs her temples. “Okay, for the sake of argument, and the migraine I feel comin’ on, let’s pretend there is no such thing as coincidence, add the fact there is nothing wrong for a woman to wear a sexy dress in the middle of the day, even in one of the shitiest parts of the city… Where’s her rifle?” She pauses to raise her hands, palms facing him. “Oh wait, let me guess, in the case, right?” she retorts, lowering her hands and giving him a pointed look.
He just shrugs, arms across his chest. He doesn’t bother to add a verbal rejoinder, just stares down his suspect.
“Dorian,” Ash resumes, sounding somewhat exasperated, “from what we’ve gathered, she checks out on all accounts. More importantly, she’s got no rap sheet. Even more important, she had no briefcase in her possession and no weapon of any kind on her person by the time you called it in and she got picked up. All less than a handful of minutes. Plus, patrol has yet to recover whatever she was carrying anywhere within that vicinity, including the area around and at your current abode.”
All valid observations.
Despite the news of the Mayor’s untimely and shocking death, Dorian had been on his way to the gun range to meet up with a US Marshal buddy of his and plans to have lunch afterwards when he’d spotted her coming down the stairs of his motel. Without a second thought, he’d gone after her and followed her down the street.
The area just below I-515, in the Church-Noblitt neighborhood, is crime riddled and poor. His home for the past month. A lot of cheap buildings line that void just east of Downtown with derelict buildings, predictable family housing and small, pathetic shops that no one thought existed. One thing absolutely clear? A young woman like Carmen Santiago, looking like she does, in that expensive and very sexy outfit, had stuck out and in a big way. Especially to Dorian’s police eye. He hadn’t been the only one to see her and wonder what the fuck she was doing in the slums.
But it hadn’t been Santiago’s getup alone that had caught his attention. It’d been her effortless way about her, her economical and fluid progression through the lobby and her expression. Controlled panic, edgy, brows furrowed, eyes darting quickly, assessing for nearby threats and obstacles. Their gazes had actually collided, briefly, but she hightailed it out the front door, wasting no time but not rushing too much either.
Sirens had been screaming all over the city as news broke, which was over two hours ago by now. And when he’d made it to his home away from home, Convention Center Area Command on Sierra Vista, most people had found a reason to keep off the streets as police flooded the whole city. On his way into the side entrance of the station, he’d noticed how the gated parking lot behind the building that is usually full of police cars was all but empty. Everyone had been called in, everyone but Dorian. No one wants a fucked up detective on the hunt, even if all hands needed to be on deck.
Regardless of everything and anything…she’s good. It’d only taken her three blocks for her to sense him. Then she’d dodged him. Deftly, easily. Like a pro.
He’d called it in to dispatch with his cell phone by then and lady luck had been smiling down on him for once. A patrol car had immediately spotted her heading south, toward Fremont, but no longer carrying the case, and as Ash had pointed out, completely empty-handed. They’d picked her up, dispatch had alerted him and she was deposited to his station for questioning—and now she was here, sitting on the other side of the window where she couldn’t see him but her unblinking eyes were steadfastly trained on the one-way mirror, through it, and right to him. Or so it felt. She hadn’t even moved a muscle for the past five minutes.
That, too, made his hackles rise.
Add the fact that, since she’d been in that room for about forty-five minutes, she had yet to speak, not demand for a lawyer or ask to make a phone call. Or yell epithets and toss around derogatory language at how unfair she was being treated. She wasn’t acting right in a situation like this. Just serene as can be, forever patient. Nothing to hide and had all fucking day to waste.
“And if she’s an assassin—wearing that?” Ash rolls her eyes at him.
That’s his point. Dorian looks over at her. “I’m going to have a chat with her. See if I can’t get some answers.”
With a heavy sigh, Ash checks her Invictus watch she got from her girlfriend a few weeks back. Twelve years together. Good for them. It makes him hope that long-term relationships of whatever sort still mean something good in this modern world. “Captain’s gonna be back from his ass-kissing fest with the Sheriff and new Mayor for a full meet and situation update. Obviously, you’re not invited since you’re not really supposed to be here and requesting patrol to pick up your new girlfriend so you two can finally have a date.”
Hardy-fucking-har-har. He offers her a floppy grin that even she can’t resist for long. “Tell me, is the ass-kissing before or after we catch the assassin?”
Her grin widens. “There he is,” she teases. But sobers quickly and groans. “LT’s with him. He’s going to be in a shitty mood so let’s get this cleared up pronto, yeah?”
Dorian nods, also sober in a flash. Lieutenant Makai Racine is their immediate supervisor. He’s got a decent sense of humor, especially since he and Ash have one of the highest percentages of solved homicide cases and the fewest complaints about how they go about their business, but considering Dorian isn’t supposed to show his face at the station unless his presence is formally requested—and it hadn’t been—he did need to wrap this up. “Yeah. I’ll be done by then. Won’t even know I was here…”
She crosses her arms under her breasts. “Make it so, partner.” She gestures toward Santiago with her right elbow. “I am not explaining her to anyone; uh-huh, no way, no how. Just sayin’.”
With that warning in his ears, he walks out the door of one, and heads toward the other, just three steps away to his immediate right. He’s not sure what to expect, and if he should expect anything at all.