A Matter of Time 07 - Parting Shot (MM) (7 page)

“So,” Esau said, striding forward. “The only person who has said nothing at all is you, Mr. Ross. Why do you think that is?”

It took me a second to find my voice, since I hadn’t used it in however many days. “Because I’ve only been here a month,” I answered him.

“And what have you seen or heard from Benny or Andre?”

Both men were looking at me.

“Nothing,” I answered. “Absolutely nothing.”

“Unfortunately,” Esau Modella said, removing his gun from the holster under his Armani suit jacket and maneuvering around behind Benny and Andre, “that’s not the case.”

“No!” Benny screamed, and it was high-pitched and fractured before Modella pulled the trigger.

The blast splattered me and Andre before Joaquin moved behind us.

“Oh God.” Andre was trembling and looked over at me. “I’m so sorry.”

Which was basically a confession.

I gazed up at Joaquin as he pulled the trigger, and I was splattered with more blood the second time since I was closer. Both men were dead beside me.

“And now what?” Joaquin asked Esau.

He tipped his head at me. “Your man saw me. We don’t leave loose ends.”

“Sure,” my fake boss answered and lifted his gun and pointed it at me. “I am sorry.”

My eyes fluttered shut. I heard the gunshot, the sound followed by lancing pressure, heat. It felt like it tore open my left shoulder. Maybe all the blood was leaking out of my heart and that’s what the draining felt like. Too much to know. Too much to care about.

One regret was not bad, and it was all I had. I wondered if Aaron would track down the truth or just ponder for the rest of his life what happened to me. I really hoped I was worth looking for.

“Shoot him in the head!” The command came, dark and murderous.

“I’m so sorry,” Joaquin whispered under his breath.

I couldn’t speak anymore. He really needed to just aim. Wounded and bleeding to death was not a good time. Better to just be done.

The bomb going off couldn’t even get me to open my eyes and look.

I
ALWAYS
had a strange way of processing trauma. Like when I was eight, my stepfather came at me again. He used to beat the holy crap out of me all the time, but unfortunately, this time, my brother Ian was home from military school where my stepfather had sent him—I wasn’t old enough to go yet—and got in the way. I had thought, we both had, that Philip Calloway was letting it go, but he came back with a bat and bludgeoned my brother to death.

He missed me by inches as I bolted out the front door. My mother had covered for the man since I was six and Ian was eleven. But my brother was murdered at thirteen, and in court, when I testified and cried, showed how my stepfather had held me down and punched me, and when the district attorney showed the huge 18x24 blowups of my bruises, it was done. He was charged, found guilty of murdering Ian and attempting to do the same to me. The sentence handed down came to thirty years. He never made it to the execution chamber at Utah State Prison; he had a heart attack and died in his sleep a year after his incarceration. The papers reported it was much too good for him. People who left letters and signs at the prison said it was far too easy an end for him. I, of course, could not have agreed more.

My mother was charged with child abuse, neglect, endangerment, the whole gamut, and sentenced to ten years. The death of any child is horrendous. For a mother to allow the murder of her child and still support the killer was completely beyond the comprehension of the jury. I was informed when she killed herself three years into her sentence. She never apologized or, as far as I knew, expressed even a moment of regret. I did not mourn her passing.

My juvenile records were sealed, and afterward, I went to live with my father and his new family in Detroit, Michigan. My old man was a mechanic and had his own shop. My stepmother, Susan, was a secretary at one of the largest Baptist churches downtown. Both she and my father were extremely religious, but whereas when she caught me doing something wrong, I got a lecture, when my father caught me, he got out his belt.

Henry Stiel’s punishments were nothing like my stepfather’s had been, and so I simply took them, dealt with them, and moved on. He only beat me when I did something wrong, not for sport. By the time I was the same age as Ian had been when he died, my father had put his belt up for good and simply roared at me and took things away. I had to sleep on the fire escape or go without dinner. The punishments seemed fair.

I learned to be sneaky and lie, and soon, once my two younger sisters hit fourteen and sixteen respectively, everyone forgot about me. I was wild in private; Lydia and Karen were wild out in public. As soon as I could, I signed up for the Army and was off to boot camp a week after graduation.

With my father and stepmother being ultraconservative, having grown up with faggot jokes under Henry Stiel’s breath and Leviticus from Susan, I did not come out to them. They sent Christmas cards; I sent one of those Hickory Farms cheese and meat baskets every year. It was the extent of our interaction.

Mostly during the holidays, when I was alone at night after dinners with friends, I thought about my brother and what our relationship would have been like. And while I knew I over-romanticized it a bit, we had been close as kids, even though separated by five years. It was why he had rushed to my defense the night he died. He wasn’t about to let me get hurt again.

So, because of losing Ian and all the events that went along with it, because of growing up hiding who I really was, hiding in the Army, losing friends in Iraq and Afghanistan, being a homicide detective and hiding who I was yet again, having two men I knew killed in front of me didn’t send me over the edge or spiraling down a rabbit hole. I just went still.

An anonymous tip lead the feds to the warehouse in Hoboken, New Jersey, where they found me alive and Benny Aruellio and Andre Franks both shot in the head. They arrested Joaquin Hierra but Esau Modella got away. I didn’t care. The fact of the matter was, through trauma, I was golden. Nothing else mattered.

T
HE
second night in the hospital, I nearly passed out from shock. A man I had not seen in three years came breezing into my room.

“Oh shit.” I grinned even though my lips cracked and my nose hurt along with the rest of my body. I felt like I’d been run over by a truck.

He moved fluidly to the side of my bed and took hold of my left hand.

“What the fuck, T?” I breathed out, gazing up at Terrence Moss, who I had been friends with from fifth grade until we graduated. We had even joined the Army together, but he had gone off and become God knew what else, while I had just stayed a grunt.

“You weren’t where I left you.” The man smiled at me; his eyes glowing. The contrasts were beautiful on him: his dark skin, white teeth, and the bright spring-green eyes. I always mentioned to him he could have done something on a runway instead of shooting people in whatever third-world hellhole he found himself. I knew he had become a mercenary, but there was no record of him anywhere, not even in the Army. I gave up looking, and just accepted I would see him when I saw him.

“You check on me a lot, do you?”

“I do,” he said frankly, squeezing my hand and as his gaze ran over me, I got the feeling I looked like absolute crap.

“Oh, it’s not that bad.”

“Yes, it is,” he said, and I saw the furrow of his dark brows.

That fast it clicked. “Anonymous tip, my ass.”

He shrugged. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save your friends, but the only way to do that was to kill everyone, and that would have meant them as well. Either way… it was a done deal for them.”

“They weren’t my friends; we worked together. But thank you for my life.”

“’Course.”

It was his way. He came, imparted some information, normally we had dinner, I got a hug good-bye, and that would be it for another year or four. It was no different this time. He had come to check on me for whatever reason, maybe even a hunch, not found me, and so had searched like only he could. I owed him my life, but he was not there to get an award or be thanked by anyone but me.

“How long was I there?”

“You mean how long did those thugs have you?”

“Yeah.”

“Five days.”

Huh. “Seemed longer.”

“No doubt.”

He stayed an hour; walked around the hospital room in that fluid, almost predatory way he had, and finally gave me a number where I could leave a message if I needed him. I laughed because it was so out of character.

“You going soft?”

“What?”

“I mean, really? An actual number?”

He flipped me off, didn’t explain how he’d gotten by the police guard at the door, and then left without even a word. It was always like that. I could turn a corner and there he’d be; turn another and be alone. Funny we’d ever even become friends, as different as we were.

He was a soccer star in high school, a track star as well. I played football—defensive lineman—but only well enough to stay on the team, not enough to be drafted. He’d had his own drama at home: his father gambled, couldn’t keep a job, and his mother drank. We had gone to his place one day and found his father on the front steps with a note in his hand. T never saw his mother again. What was good, though, was that after his mother left, Terrence’s father stepped up and changed. He eventually became a bus driver, until he was killed trying to stop a robbery at the bodega close to their home. It was why Terrence joined the Army with me instead of going to school. He didn’t want to be him anymore.

I was not a guy who questioned, and I didn’t ask him to stay when he walked out the same way he’d come. I’d see him when he was ready; it wasn’t my place to pin him down. He was my friend. It was really the only thing that mattered.

“Detective?”

The officer who leaned into the room, who had not checked with me to see if Terrence Moss could come in, was apparently back from his break—or the bathroom or wherever he had been—and ready to ask me if I wanted to see a Mr. Sutter.

“Please.” I swallowed hard, wondering what I was going to say and what all Aaron had been told. Had he dispatched men to check on me, look for me, find out what was going on with me, or not? We were supposed to have kept in touch, but I had been held for five days. As far as he knew, I was just not taking his calls. Or had he been briefed on everything that had happened to me? There was no way of knowing what kind of information money like his could buy.

The question was answered when a version of Aaron, but not Aaron, walked into the room.

“You’re the brother?”

“Yes. I’m Maxwell Sutter.”

He was beautiful, too, golden like the original. But while Aaron had laugh lines in the corners of his eyes, a swagger to his walk, and a slow, sexy grin, Max resembled a model. Everything was perfect, not a hair out of place. His jacket and tie were perfectly creased, his manicure was shiny, and so were his teeth when he smiled. Really, he belonged in the Hamptons or on a yacht, welcoming guests aboard. Even if you didn’t know who he was, you knew he was rich. His very presence screamed good breeding and money.

“Detective Stiel?”

My eyes narrowed as I wondered what in the world he was doing there.

He reached the end of my bed and stared at me, taking all of me in for a moment before he took a breath and began. “I don’t know if you know, but my brother is fighting my father for control of Sutter Inc.”

I was quiet a minute, sizing up Max before I spoke. “Yeah, I heard.”

He cleared his throat and came around the bed. “Well, what started out as something very ordinary, just our father sort of throwing his weight around, has become much bigger.”

“Okay.”

He moved closer, and between the worry in his eyes, the furrowed brows, and the way he was crossing his arms, I got that whatever he was talking about was a really big deal.

“What did your father do?”

“He got a lot of people to vote their proxy shares.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means, that votes Aaron thought he had, because they would vote the way they always have in the past, are suddenly alive and need to be courted.”

“And you’re here why?”

“Because there can’t be any reason for someone not to be swayed by Aaron,” he answered. “It’s vital that he not be involved in any impropriety or scandal.”

I was tired and hurt, but my brain still functioned. “Your brother could lose the company to your father if anyone finds out about me and him.”

“Yes,” he said softly.

“Does he know you’re here?”

Slowly, he nodded. “Yes, he does. He really wanted to come, but he simply can’t. He’s doing a charity fundraiser tonight with the mayor and then flying to Brussels tomorrow morning. I’m going with him.”

I coughed, which hurt my broken ribs quite a bit. “So when will you two be back in Chicago?”

“I’m not sure,” he said and sounded almost sad.

I understood, I did. Me more than most people. Aaron Sutter couldn’t be gay any more than I could. It didn’t go with the image, with the job, and now there was no reason for me to rock the boat. He was stepping away from me because he had to.