Page 66 of Shadows of Justice

“Every minute you waste in here pretending like I’m feeding you lies is another minute you’re not out there saving her. I’d go after her myself if I thought I would succeed, but I’m not willing to risk her life with that asinine plan. Hence, why I’m here.”

The chief slams his fist onto the metal table.

“You were willing to risk her life before! When you sent her right into the snake pit without any help!” he yells, a vein so large on his forehead it’s a wonder it doesn’t burst.

“As I told you before, I did not send her there. We discovered the location of the iron oxide and deemed The Roost as a likely location for the making of the MG-T12, and I told her to bring said information to your precinct to take care of it. The problem is, she’s got dirty higher-ups barring the way for her to do her goddamn job!”

The old man rolls his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, you can skip over that part. Jennings isn’t fucking dirty, asshole. You wouldn’t know a man with a good moral compass if one fucked you in your wetback ass.”

I narrow my eyes, but disregard his ignorance. Breaking down how that slur is not only offensive to an ethnicity I’m not a part of, but also that I entered this country legally, would just be a waste of oxygen on my part.

“It’s all on my laptop, in my car. Everything you need to link Jennings to the current owner of The Roost. You’re welcome to everything I have. But, that’s not our focus, and you’d be smart to not clue him in on what you know. Genevieve’s life may depend on it.” I spit again, rising to stand. “Deal with him after you save the officer in this precinct with more balls than all of the men in this room combined.”

“You’re full of shit! Something this big, Jennings would have told me. My daughter would have told me. She would have come to me,” the chief says, stabbing his thumb into his chest.

I scoff. “You? The man that has threatened her, beaten her, and kept her as low as possible her entire life? She couldn’t come to you even with her life in her hands. You’d still tell her it wasn’t worth your fucking time.”

He shoves out of the metal chair, the legs screeching over the linoleum. The old man stalks toward me, a rage in his eyes that I recognize—the look of a man who’s lost his grip. He charges me, my back slamming into the wall, his hands clasped around my neck. I know they won’t let him kill me—at least I think they won’t—I just need to hang on until he gets it all out of his system.

He squeezes my throat, dark spots dancing in my vision. With his teeth bared he roars, sounding more like an animal than a man.

“You got her into this shit, Barone!” he yells. “She kept her head down before she met you. She did what was right before you started filling her head with all of this bullshit!”

If he’s expecting an answer, I’m unable to provide one from beneath his hold. Gavin watches with cold amusement in his eyes, but Carlos shifts uncomfortably. Finally, when the only sound in the room is that of my choking, Carlos sighs and pushes off the wall, setting his coffee down. He comes to the chief’s side and pulls against his hands. They struggle for a minute, but Fernandez eventually pulls him off of me, murmuring in his ear.

“That’s enough now, chief. You’ve hung him out to dry. It makes no sense that he’d be here if he wasn’t telling the truth about Viv. Let’s keep our heads or she doesn’t stand a chance. Come take a walk with me for a minute—outside.”

The old man looks from me to Carlos again and again as I cough and hack, my crushed throat bruised and swollen. Finally, they turn away, Carlos’s hand on his shoulder. The two men exit the interrogation room, leaving me and the all-American poster boy to get better acquainted.

Gavin takes a seat in one of the metal chairs, slapping a pen and file onto the table and coolly beckons for me to sit across from him. I stagger to the chair, landing heavily in it, my wheezing starting to sound very loud in the echoey chamber.

He stares at me, a long silence stretching that’s supposed to intimidate me, but it’s only pissing me off. Viv could be suffering God knows what sort of torture right now, and he wants to measure dicks.

“When did you meet Officer Schaeffer?” Gavin asks.

“I told you—on July third. I flagged her down and asked for her help with a young girl that was locked in the back seat of a car.”

“And did she know who you were as she was assisting you with this situation?”

A wet cough takes over for a moment, my splintered ribs pressing into my lungs with every convulsion. “I don’t know,” I say, groaning. “I don’t think so, at least not right at first. I eventually gave her my first name—that might have been when it clicked.”

The rattling in my voice is a sickening accompaniment to all my words. I may have a punctured lung. I wonder if he’d let me borrow his fancy pen in case I need to stick it in my chest and help it expand.

“So, you’re saying that she knew who you were and yet she just let you go?”

I shoot him a look of irritation from underneath my brows. “These questions have a point?”

Gavin scoffs. “I’m just trying to figure out why a decorated officer with a stunning reputation would let a lowlife like you off without a second thought.”

I suppress the comment that wants to fly off my tongue—that this asshole is more of a lowlife that I could ever be on my worst day.

“She has excellent instincts, and I wasn’t a threat. Am not a threat,” I say, shifting uncomfortably in the hard chair.

“So, the multiple accounts of you having ties to illegal chemical deals are false?” He flips open the file, pretending to read through it, even though he could probably recite it from memory by now.

It’s flattering, having fans.

“How about the man apprehended last year who stated he was employed by you, that was driving a truck full of nitric acid and sodium perchlorate? Both prohibited materials by the DOT and both used in the manufacturing of explosives?”

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