“What? Are you kidding me?” Caroline saw that he was dead serious and glared at him. “How about I just close my eyes and promise not to peek?”
Reed opened his door and got out without replying. By the time he reached her door, she was already all but certain that she knew what he had decided, and recognized, too, that it was the simplest and probably the safest choice.
Didn’t mean she had to like it. Or him.
Which she expressed to him in no uncertain terms as he pulled her out of the car.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
“Y
OU GOTTA GET ANT OUT SAFE.
” Holly couldn’t stand still. He rocked back and forth on the AF1 high-top sneakers that were his pride and joy. His face looked haggard beneath the hazy glow of the halogen lamps that illuminated the parking lot. His arms crossed and uncrossed. He licked his lips. His eyes darted everywhere, touching on the nearby Dumpster, on the nearly impenetrable darkness of the field stretching off behind it, on the unlit golden arches of the closed-for-Christmas McDonald’s next door. He was scared, and it showed.
Hell, Reed knew the feeling. Only he hoped that in his case it
didn’t
show.
“I will,” he promised. He’d almost said
, I’ll do my best,
but he figured that there was too much truth in that for Holly to handle at the moment.
The two of them were at the truck stop, standing in the shadow of the eighteen-wheeler that was getting ready to take Holly all the way down to Tampico, Mexico, an eighteen-hour drive. Corbell Trucking Company was the name painted across its trailer. Tonight the rig was hauling farm machinery, but it just so happened to come equipped with a compartment in which, say, something that the border agents didn’t need to know about could be tucked away. On this run, that something was going to be Holly. When Reed had made the arrangements, he’d thought he would be going down to Mexico in the truck tonight, too. That was after he’d come up with his plan for getting Holly out of jail and saving his own sorry ass, but before he’d heard about Ant. Since then, he’d been making it up as he went along. What it had come down to was, he needed to get Holly the hell out of there, but he couldn’t just abandon Ant to his fate. So he was sending Holly alone, and going back for Ant.
After that, everything was on the table.
He’d thought that if he got Holly out, Ant, left behind, would be safe. He’d gotten the younger Bayard squared away, hidden in plain sight with Father Grayson’s Kids at Risk shelter program at St. Anna’s. It was one of the last things he had done before heading for the Winfield mansion. It had been hard saying good-bye to the kid for what he’d known might be a long time, if not forever, due to needing to get Holly out of jail before they killed him. Which Reed was as sure as it was possible to be would have happened before the sun rose. If they (and he still wasn’t precisely sure who they were) had taken Holly, it was because they knew he had been at the cemetery, and leaving alive an eyewitness to four homicides just wasn’t smart. Knowing that Holly wouldn’t want to leave his brother behind and that Ant would be lost without Holly, Reed had even thought about bringing the thirteen-year-old with him to the mansion. But at the time, he hadn’t been sure he wasn’t going on a suicide mission. And even if he survived and succeeded in getting Holly out, involving Ant in the crimes he was preparing to commit just wasn’t something he could do.
Reuniting the brothers at a later date had been a vague part of the plan. Nothing concrete, just an intention lurking in the back of his mind to be acted on later if circumstances permitted. What he hadn’t considered was that the bastards, whoever they were, would know enough to go after Ant.
Miscalculation. But then, he hadn’t had a lot of time to think things through. After finishing up at the crime scene at the cemetery, going home, and rigorously quizzing Holly and Ant, then enlarging the photos from Elizabeth Townes’ stolen phone on his laptop so he could get a better look, he’d been intrigued enough to launch his own private investigation just as soon as he had snagged a few hours of sleep. The pictures were too dark and the angles were wrong: none of the faces were identifiable. But what he could see had been electrifying. To protect Holly and Ant, he’d kept things on the down low, telling no one what he was working on as he talked to his tapestry of street contacts, checked surveillance cameras from establishments near the cemetery—which meant a couple of hours spent speeding through middle-of-the-night video from at least twenty cameras—and pulled the files of recent murders with the same MO.
Having uncovered enough to make him deeply concerned that the big bad that seemed to be going down involved at least one if not more NOPD officers, he’d done what he thought was in the best interests of the department and taken his suspicions straight to Col. Martin Wallace, the police superintendent. The one thing he’d been careful to do was keep Holly and Ant totally out of it: he hadn’t mentioned their names, hadn’t revealed their involvement to anyone, not even the superintendent. His discretion hadn’t helped: somehow they’d smoked out Holly and, later, Ant. If he could do it over again—hell, he would have just left the whole damned case alone, whether it was the right thing to do or not. Then he thought of the bodies in the cemetery and sighed: averting his eyes and pretending the lives of four people hadn’t been violently taken just wasn’t something he could do. He was a cop, damn it.
Once Holly had finally succeeded in rousing Reed’s suspicions that one or more individuals in the department might have been involved, there’d been no going back. Where he’d made his mistake was in going straight to the superintendent and revealing what he knew before he had nailed down the names, dates, and places, so at least he’d know who the key players were. As it was, all he knew was that he’d gone to Wallace and two hours later his whole life had blown up in his face. He should have waited, he should have made sure of what he was dealing with, and he should have gotten Holly and Ant safely out of the way. But then, hindsight was always twenty-twenty.
All he could do now was play the hand he had dealt himself.
“I can’t just up and go. Ant don’t have nobody but me.” There was real anguish in Holly’s eyes. He uncrossed his arms long enough to chew a ragged fingernail.
“He has me, too.” Reed heard the grimness in his own voice. It was there because much as he hated to face it, he was telling the truth: sometime over the course of the last few hours, he’d mentally shouldered the full mantle of responsibility for Ant, and Holly, too. Whether he liked it or not, they were his problem now.
“I should’ve left it alone. If I hadn’t gone poking around in things, this wouldn’t be happening. It’s all my fault,” Holly said, his voice thick with remorse.
“Yeah, well, maybe next time I tell you to mind your own damned business you’ll listen,” Reed replied. Then he relented. “It’s not your fault. Hell, if it’d been my mama got killed, I’d have done the same thing.”
“Somebody must’ve seen me following those dudes to the cemetery. That’s all I can figure out, ’cause I swear I never told nobody nothing about being there.”
Walking over to the truck stop from the car, Reed had grilled Holly pretty hard on that point. After witnessing the killings in the cemetery, Holly had stayed the night at Reed’s house and told him everything he knew, including every rumor he’d ever heard that might have the slightest bearing on what was going on. The only thing Holly left out, Reed had thought at the time with an inward roll of his eyes, was the possibility that a UFO had descended over the city to drop off alien assassins. Holly insisted that he and Ant had kept quiet as clams and gone about their lives as usual.
He’d still been reeling with shock when they’d arrested Holly on that trumped-up charge. Reed had known then, if he’d still been harboring any doubts at all, that what Holly had been saying all along had at least some basis in fact: it was the cops (some cops? a rogue few? Couldn’t be the whole damned department out there killing people, or else he’d been totally left out of the loop). The most conservative read on the situation said that somebody on the police force was involved in killing the four victims in the cemetery. According to Holly, cops had killed Magnolia as well. From what Reed had uncovered in his own very quick, very cursory investigation, within the last six months there had been at least four other murder cases involving at least thirteen victims with the exact same MO as Magnolia’s and the one in the cemetery. Meaning that whoever had killed the four in the cemetery had probably killed Magnolia, her dealer, and the thirteen other victims as well. In other words, a cop or cops had been involved in the murders of at least nineteen victims. That he knew of so far. Why? Who the hell knew? Who exactly was involved? Who the hell knew that, either? Although Superintendent Wallace’s reaction to what Reed had told him made it a pretty sure bet that he at least knew what was going on, which meant that this thing was more widespread, and went a lot higher up, than he would ever have believed possible.
He hadn’t foreseen it, any of it. He’d been caught flat-footed, unable to do anything but watch and try to stay one jump ahead of the fallout as his life, and Holly’s and Ant’s, too, got blown to shit.
Reed said, “You sure you didn’t catch a name on those cops who arrested you?”
Holly had already told him his version (sanitized, Reed was sure) of how it had gone down: he’d been hanging with a group of friends on Dumaine just after dark on Christmas Eve when a squad car had pulled over and ordered them all to the ground. They’d been searched, and one of the cops had held up a plastic bag with two crack rocks in it that he claimed to have found in Holly’s pocket. That was just a straight-up, fucking-ass lie, Holly had indignantly told Reed, which he believed, knowing Holly’s proclivities didn’t run to crack. The cops had been rough and menacing, and by the time he’d wound up in The Swamp, Holly had been convinced that he was being set up to die.
Reed believed that, too. If he hadn’t, he would have gone the lawyer route that Caroline had suggested.
“I guess they forgot to introduce themselves.” Even under the circumstances, Holly’s sarcasm made a corner of Reed’s mouth twitch up into the briefest of unexpected smiles. “I told you: they was cops. Blue uniforms. One big, burly dude with dark hair. One big, burly dude who was bald.” He shrugged. “That’s all I know.”
“They must have been looking for you.” Reed had come to that conclusion the minute he’d heard what had happened, and Holly had further reinforced it by reporting that they’d let the others go. The names of the arresting officers should be in a number of places, including the arrest report and the jail admissions file. Reed vowed to find them: identifying those officers would at least be a place to start.
Holly tugged nervously on one of the silver hoops in his ears. His voice was full of remorse. “I should’ve stayed out of it. I should’ve listened to you.”
“That’s a first,” Reed said, responding to the uncharacteristic admission. His eyes ran over Holly. The kid looked like he was on the verge of coming unglued. “Quit beating yourself up. You witnessed a crime. The fault lies with the people who committed it.”
“Sounds real good, except you notice we’re the ones out here running for our lives.”
That acerbic observation left Reed with no counterargument to make. “You got me there.”
“What if they kill Ant?”
“Like I said, the only way they’re going to kill Ant is if they catch you and me and kill us first. Right now he’s their ticket to keeping us quiet.” Reed didn’t share the thought that was worrying him most: if whoever had set the dogs on him and Holly had taken Ant—which he was all but 100 percent sure was the case—and they found out that Ant had been at that cemetery, too, Ant would become a target just as much as he and Holly now were. Never mind that he was a thirteen-year-old kid and as far as Reed knew hadn’t even witnessed the actual murders. He assumed that their purpose in taking Ant had been to make sure he and Holly kept their mouths shut, but in the end it would be stupid to let Ant live. Ant might not have seen everything, but he had seen enough to serve as a corroborating witness for Holly. The thought made Reed’s hands curl into fists. It was not, however, something he needed to share with Holly. “Which is why you’re getting on this damned truck and getting the hell out of here. Now.”
The big rig was parked between him and Holly and the back of the building, its position designed to block the security camera mounted on the corner of the convenience-store-cum-diner-cum-shower-facility from seeing anyone climbing into the passenger side, as Holly was about to do. The truck’s driver, Julio Perez, was already behind the wheel, waiting for Holly to get in. Its engine was running, the sound a low-grade rumble. The smell of diesel exhaust tainted the air. Elsa Casta, the manager of the truck stop, waited nearby, staring off toward the McDonald’s, absorbed in her own thoughts. Like a lot of people Reed came across in the course of his job, she had an elasticized view of what was against the law. Mostly, Reed had learned to leave the little fish alone and concentrate on the big transgressors. Elsa was one of those little fish, with her finger in many illegal pies but no violence or viciousness to her. Short, plump, and fiftyish, her black hair streaked with gray and pulled back into a bun, Elsa thought the sun rose and set on Reed since he had saved her idiot nineteen-year-old son from being murdered by the gang of drug smugglers he’d ripped off, then arranged for him to testify against the ringleaders in return for probation. Now twenty-five, the son was the manager of a grocery store in Houston and had never, as far as Reed knew, stepped outside the boundaries of the law since. A lot of criminal types—drug smugglers, gun smugglers, illegal immigrant smugglers, just to name a few—came through the truck stop, and Elsa knew them all. She had made the arrangements to have Perez and his truck waiting to pick them up after Reed, knowing that he and Holly were going to need a fast, anonymous way out of the country once he’d gotten Holly out of The Swamp, had contacted her earlier.