Page 63 of Shattered Fate

Begging cops on the KCPD for work isn’t something I’m proud of, but I hate seeing Pop down. He thought we had something with JodiAnne. Pop should’ve been the cop, not me.

He shrugs.

“Maybe it’s time for a vacation.” I slam the door shut and use my fob to lock the doors and set the alarm.

“Now there’s an idea. We’ll wrap up what we got and go somewhere warm.”

“Perfect.”

After a lunch of sub sandwiches I pick up at the questionable deli three doors down, I call Zarah, but I get her voicemail. I think about finding Stella’s number or lowering myself and calling Zane to see if she’s okay, but she’s been okay without me for the past year, and just because all of a sudden I’m around doesn’t mean she needs me. Zarah has a life. She could be napping or talking to her shrink. Maybe she and Stella went out to lunch. I’d be hurt though, if she made a trip into the city and didn’t tell me.

I scoff. If a woman started acting and feeling how I am, I’d peg her as needy and cut her loose ASAP.

Without leaving a message, I disconnect.

Dr. Solis, JodiAnne’s and Marci’s psychiatrist, cancels through her receptionist and reschedules leaving Pop and me free for the rest of the afternoon.

I put in a call to my old partner on the police force. He says he envies me the freedom to do my own thing. When we graduated from the academy, he was already married to his high school sweetheart and had a little one on the way. There were aspects of the job he disagreed with too, but he needed the steady paycheck and couldn’t afford to hate the office politics enough to quit. Ididn’t need long to realize the KCPD wasn’t a good fit, but Ross and I did enough time cruising the streets we got to know each other pretty well. We stayed friends after I tossed my badge onto my chief’s desk and went into business with Pop. It’s been thirteen, fourteen years now, and I have zero regrets. At least, not about that.

“Burglary came in last night. Lots of jewelry. Reward if you can find the bastards,” Ross says, his car’s scanner buzzing in the background.

Ross is a dick now, bigger than me, I tease him sometimes, and the KCPD’s budget doesn’t allow for plainclothes detectives to have partners. Whenever I call, Ross is always snooping around on his own. Sounds dangerous to be without built-in back up, but Vance Huxley is a year in the ground and the new mayor has been trying to clean up his shit ever since. First thing she promised to do was throw away the garbage, and she put all her budget and manpower into internal affairs investigations of the King’s Crossing Police Department.

She’s not winning any popularity contests, but she’s cutting through the crud okay. While the Blacks ran the KCPD, there wasn’t much hiding, but Ross said there was a lot of scrambling after Huxley’s suicide made the news. It will be interesting to see how many cops wiggle out from under IA investigations because they were quick enough to shred paper and wipe hard drives.

I write down all the deets Ross rattles off and a couple of other crimes the cops couldn’t care less about. Pop will be happy though, the higher-end stuff. The jewelry thing could set us up real good—the reward’s five figures. Fund our vacation. I should swallow my pride more often.

He invites me out for a beer, and I accept. We haven’t met up to bullshit in a few months, and I don’t want him to think all I’m doing is using him for potential cases. He’s a good guy, and maybe he can give me some advice on Zarah. He’s managedto keep his wife happy all this time, and I’m not above saying I could use a married guy’s opinion.

I email Polly Donnelly, let her know the shrink canceled. JodiAnne’s funeral is in a couple of days, about the same time as Marci Grayson’s, come to think of it. There’s no reason not to bury her, and Polly will disappointed but she can’t hold off any longer. She was hoping to wrap this up before the funeral, but if Dr. Solis cancels on us again, it won’t happen. I think about mentioning Marci Grayson, but besides them sharing a therapist and time at Quiet Meadows, there’s no connection, so there’s no point. No use getting Polly riled up over nothing.

Pop and I do some legwork on the girl, giving me a change of scenery I desperately need and giving Baby a chance to sniff around.

We make a little headway, and we have a list of names to look up in the morning. People she could be hiding with or may know where she is. By the sounds of it though, she didn’t run off to get married. She wanted to get away from her overbearing parents who were telling her what to do every five seconds. It doesn’t matter to me as long as we can get a location on her and report back to collect our fee. We’re not getting paid to haul her ass home—we can rattle off an address and that will be the end of that.

I leave Pop in the office looking over street cameras the night of the jewelry theft. We have all the fancy gadgets the police do: access to street cams, no problem running a license plate. We have authorization to search missing persons databases, and we can search IAFIS, the FBI’s fingerprint database, if we need to. A lot of what we do is running around questioning snitches, picking through lies (and garbage), and hunting people down online because they’re too stupid to stop using their credit cards.

Being a PI is pretty fucking glamorous. It’s grunt work but pays well, and I’d rather have the freedom to beat the shit outof someone than having to walk because I have a badge on my hip and I’m supposed to be protecting people, not the other way around. Sometimes a guy just won’t talk without a fist to the face, and cops doing whatever the fuck they wanted because Black had their backs, that kind of police work is going to be long gone when the mayor’s through with them. They’ll be lucky if they can take a shit without a hall pass.

Baby’s anxious to get home and eat, but an empty evening presses on me. I used to like having the nights to myself after having people in my face all day or listening to Pop quiz me on my sex life, but meeting Zarah reminded me that sometimes it’s nice to have someone waiting for you to walk through the door.

Finding her on the floor this morning freaked me out, and I better get used to crap like that if I want to see where this goes. She’s got more baggage than traveling royalty, and it’s going to be my job to tiptoe through it all. I sound like I mind, but I don’t. When I first decided I wanted to be a cop, I had this naïve idea I would be helping people, making a difference. All I did was slap parking tickets on cars and tell homeless people bunking down on my beat to move along. I wasn’t pulling cats out of trees or buying lemonade from little kids while keeping their neighborhoods safe.

Maybe that’s my fault for thinking so pie-in-the-sky, but I’d never had a run-in with the cops to know any differently. I wasn’t a punk who got beat up in an alley by an asshole wearing a badge who needed to vent his pent-up rage. I had a pretty idealistic view of what police officers did, mostly because Pop kept me out of any real trouble.

Even twenty years ago Clayton Black kept half the police force in his pocket, and it just got worse when Ash took over parts of his business. I never did like the vibe or the reality of being a beat cop, expected to kiss ass to climb the ranks, and I think my true calling should have been social work. Being a PIworks too and holding a light so Zarah can see through the muck of what Ash did to her won’t be a hardship. The road is long though, and my real fear is we’ll reach the end of the path and she’ll look at me and say, “Thanks, but no thanks,” and I’ll have put in all that time for nothing.

That’s true of any relationship, but if Zarah decides she doesn’t want me after she’s off her meds and can build a real life for herself, it’s gonna hurt, big-time.

I know we’re wrong for each other, but I can’t change who I am any more than she can change who she is, and it’s a risk I’m going to have to take if I want her in my life in any real meaningful way.

Baby noses me, and absently, I rub her fur. “I know.”

I coast into the parking lot, and a moving truck from a furniture store I’ve never shopped at is taking up a hell of a lot of space. The truck’s headlights are off, but the dome light’s illuminating two men laughing at something on a large tablet. The guy sitting behind the wheel spots me and grins. They’re waiting for someone, but if they think I’ll have information on anyone living here, they’ll be sorely mistaken. I barely know my neighbors. I park and climb out of my truck.

The guy who’s excited to see me jumps out of his. “You Davenport?” he yells.

“Yeah?”

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