Page 48 of Sinful Promise
“It just keeps coming up,” I rush on.
“Sure.” He releases the door so it closes the girls inside, with us on the sidewalk. “The media likes to talk that shit up and give it a cool name. Thevigilante…” He mocks with a roll of his eyes. “When really, he’s just a killer of people others don’t like. Dowel hurt little girls. So instead of calling his deathmurder, the media gave the guy who did it a cape and a hero complex.”
“Right. What ever happened to the information Garzo wanted to give us about it all?” Casual. Cool. Loyalty aside, Archer Malone is a lethal motherfucker, and here I am, the world’s shittiest best friend, calling his integrity into question.Fuck Anthony Garzman for bringing these doubts to my friendship.“I can’t remember what happened to that.”
“I went and saw him,” he says nonchalantly. Then he turns to the door and yanks it open to reveal the dark interior.
The place is empty but for us, considering the hour, so the girls sit with glasses of soda already poured, and Tim watches Aubree with a side-eye he thinks no one else notices.
“Garz was saying some shit about eyewitness accounts,” Arch tells me. “Folks who claimed to see Dowel’s murder go down.” He strolls inside so I’m forced to follow. “Except, every eyewitness he gave me had a different description of the killer.”
“So it was just bullshit?” I drag the door shut and flip the lock so no one else comes in. Tim’s isn’t open to the public yet, but the smell of frying beef is already in the air and tickling my stomach. “Garz was looking for a payday, so he just threw shit at the wall hoping something would stick?”
“Pretty much.” Arch comes up behind his wife and plasters his chest to her back.
Ten minutes ago, I watched them with envy and longing. Not the bad envy, where I begrudge either of them their happiness. But the kind where I wish I could be so lucky.
Now, I watch the way he wraps around her. Protective. Loving. Obsessed in all the ways a man should be when he falls in love.
Guys like me and Arch, we tend to be out flirting, making casual connections with no commitment, until we’rein. And fuck, but once we’re in, there’s nothing we won’t do to stay there.
Jada had that once. She had it for a long time, even after she no longer deserved it.
Now she wants it back, and I have no interest in sharing it with her.
When my loyalty to my ex-wife was put to the test, I set her aside and said no more. Now, a single phone call with a dude I don’t even like brings my loyalty to Arch into question.
I’m either the worst friend on the planet, or the unluckiest son of a bitch to walk Copeland City’s streets.
“So what’s the news on the Jada stuff?” Aubree turns on her stool and uses the bar to rest her back against. Crossing her legs, she plays with the straw in her drink. “Have you heard anything more?”
“Um…” I draw a deep breath until my chest grows larger, then exhaling, I wander to her right and settle onto the stool. “I’ll know in the next day or so exactly when she’s coming home. Then I’ll tell Mia, and we’ll go from there.”
* * *
Later, I storm into Brady’s Bar and work hard not to recoil at the stench of sweat, bad choices, and career-alcoholics broiling in their own filth. Finding Garzo sitting all by his lonesome at a small table, with an unoccupied chair across from his, I pull it out and drop down with a thud.
“You have ten minutes.” I look into his milky brown eyes, sunk deep into his skull, and sit back when he exhales a plume of cigarette smoke. “If I find out you’re wasting my time, I’m gonna cut you off. No more money, no more help, and no more police protection.”
“I heard the vigilante struck again.” He reclines back, relaxed as a fucking lizard on a warm rock, and createsOs with smoke. “Got Fentone.”
“That’s not worth my time or money. In fact, the vigilante’s involvement is widely speculated on, including on the six o’clock news.”
“Right.” Slowly, his sun-marked lips lift into a smirk. “But I got someone who reckons they saw the first murder go down. And someone else who says they saw a figure walk out of Fentone’s safehouse the other night.”
“So… you have third and fourth-hand information on people who may or may not have been walking the street one time?”
“Both eyewitnesses gave the same description. Independently. And I’ve got something else for you.” He leans to his right, rifles around in his pocket, then comes out with a small parcel wrapped in cloth.
Holding his cigarette between his lips, he carefully unwraps what’s in his hands.
Smoke fills our space, and the windows are so dark, light barely manages to break through. But when Garz pulls back to reveal, sitting on a square of stained white cloth, a switchblade just like one of Torres’ guesses today, he grins when my eyes widen.
“You know what that is, dontcha, Detective?”
“How’d you get it?” I finger the corner of the cloth and drag the lot closer to get a look at the etchings on the side of the knife. “We canvassed every trashcan, gutter, and hidey-hole for a six-block radius of our crime scene. It wasn’t there.”
“‘Cos the guy who gave me a description grabbed it out of a trash about a block up. He heard it go clang and thought it might be worth something. So when no one was around to see him, he jumped in and grabbed it.”
