Page 41 of I Need You to Read This
“Yep.”
Raymond seems not to have noticed, pushing himself up against the bar and calling out to the bartender, “A whiskey, Michter’s. Neat.”
“What about these two?” The bartender, a man with arms as big as fire hydrants, points at Alex and Janice.
“Do you have any pineapple juice—” Janice starts to say, but Alex gives her a look.
“We’ll do three whiskeys,” Alex says. The bartender grunts his approval, lining up three smudged shot glasses on the bar.
“So, this is where you come in your spare time,” Janice says, looking around the dimly lit room. “Fun-looking group of people.”
Two men look up at them from the end of the bar. Alex braces herself, glancing at the door. She could run if she had to, but what about these two? Her companions are not exactly agile.
One of them nods familiarly, giving Raymond a little wave. “Former Hell’s Angels,” Raymond says under his breath. “Those guys did some informant work for me a while back.”
The bartender slides the shots across the bar. Raymond’s hands are shaking so badly that he struggles to pick up his glass. When he finally gets a grip on it, he throws the entirety back into his mouth, shuddering after. Janice raises her whiskey and gives Alex a look. Alex takes a sip of hers and sets it down, the memory of Howard’s breath in the hall making her stomach roil.
Janice turns toward Raymond. “Okay, now are you going to tell us what the hell happened back there?”
“What did that woman mean?” Alex asks him carefully.
Raymond brings his hands to his face, pressing his thumbs into his eye sockets. “She was the wife of someone I used to work with,” he says quietly.
“An enemy?” Janice speculates.
“No. A friend.” Raymond’s voice tears. He looks away from them, out the window.
Alex can tell that he wasn’t just an acquaintance.
“Why did she say that?”
Raymond stares down at the bar for a beat. Just when Alex thinks he might start to cry, his eyes harden. His knuckles grow white against the empty glass.
“You have to forgive me. All this time.” His voice is ragged. “I’ve been lying.”
THIRTY-FIVE
He sighs deeply, rattling his entire body and ending with something like a moan. “I didn’t retire. Not on purpose anyway. I was kicked off the force.”
“No! Ray?” Janice puts a hand to her chest.
“There was a guy we’d been looking for. He was real bad. Used to send little kids out as drug runners for him. Two of them even died. This guy wasn’t an idiot like some of them though. He had a few brain cells on him. I had been trying to pin him for years, but he never did anything risky enough for me to catch him. We didn’t want to bring him in on something small. We needed him to fuck up big so we could put him away. It’s harder to get these guys than you’d think. You have to see them moving massive quantities of the stuff, and even then. But he never touched it himself. He was too smart for that.”
“What happened?” Alex says.
“Well, we watched him. We were patient. It took, like, a year, but finally we got a wire on him. We got word from this kid that we befriended that a shipment was coming in. We were ready to move in on him.We got him,I said to my partner the night before. I was so confident that we were going to be able to do the right thing then. We were so close.”
He picks up his glass and tilts it toward the bar, nodding to thebartender for another. When he gets his full glass back, his hand is shaking so hard, whiskey sloshes over the edge as he draws it toward himself.
“The plan was for Armond to go in the front, and I would circle around to the back of the house and wait for his text. It was dark out already when we got there, which was great. I crept around back to this dilapidated screened-in porch. All the blinds were drawn in the house, but I could see through the window. I eased up to the door. I could see the guy in there. Huge guy. Face like a fighter. Broken nose. He was talking to his friends. Armond’s text came through on my phone. It just saidgo. Then it was like slow motion. I saw him go in through the front door.” He shivers and throws back the whiskey.
“When I heard the first shots, I had, like, PTSD or something. I had a panic attack. I am telling my body to go but it won’t. And he is in there and I can see him. He is looking for me through the window, but he can’t see me. I couldn’t move. I see this look on his face right before they got him. He was afraid, sure, but beyond that. It was just pure disappointed.”
“Oh, Ray, you didn’t want it to happen,” Janice said.
But Raymond shakes his head violently. “It doesn’t matter. I basically killed my own partner. I wasn’t brave enough. I fucked up. I ended his life, ruined his family in one stupid moment. Do you know how many times I’ve replayed it all in my head, trying to go back there to make myself move?” He grips the shot glass.
“You can’t take that all on,” Alex insists. “Not for your whole life, Ray.” She puts a hand on his arm. It feels thin and knobby beneath the jacket.
