Murder Corporation Read online

  “I wasn’t in Juarez, brother. You got me twisted.”

  “You know that’s the second time I heard that today. The proper expression, Remy, is that I’ve misunderstood you. You do speak English, don’t you?”

  Remy turned and stared at the ceiling. “I ain’t got nothin’ else to say to you. I want my lawyer.”

  “Yeah? Who’s your lawyer?”

  “Harry Flint.”

  “No shit? I know Harry. He still tippin’ the scales at three fifty? How’s he get around a courtroom with that much weight on him?”

  Remy didn’t respond and instead closed his eyes.

  Ty nodded and stood up. “All right. Well, suit yourself.” He looked to Dax who raised his boot and brought it down with so much force on Remy’s stomach that half-digested food from breakfast shot out of his mouth.

  “That’s enough,” I said. Dax and Ty both looked at me. “He’s had enough.”

  They were both silent a moment and then Dax was about to say something but Ty cut him off.

  “Baby Boy’s right,” Ty said. “That’s enough. Pick him up and put him on the couch. Call his lawyer and an ambulance.” He looked to me. “Take his girl home, Baby Boy. I’ll catch up with you later.”

  I looked to both men and then to Remy who was sitting on the couch, staring straight ahead, vomit drizzling off his chin and into his lap. I turned and walked out of the apartment. The woman was on the ground, her hands locked behind her. Trevor and Caleb stood near her, talking as if they were in a coffee shop.

  I leaned down and softly touched her shoulder before I uncuffed her. She looked up at me. Tears were crusted on her cheeks and her eyes were red.

  “Come on, I’ll take you home.”

  CHAPTER 6

  I went outside the apartments into the courtyard and the woman followed me with her arms folded, not looking up from the ground. I felt bad that she was so terrified but I wasn’t sure what to tell her.

  “What’s your name?” I said.

  “Maria.”

  “I’m Tommy. Nice to meet you.”

  She glanced at me like I was crazy and then away, back to the ground.

  “What’re they gonna do with Remy?”

  “Interrogate him and then arrest him I would guess.”

  “Arrest him for what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She stopped and looked at me. “You broke in to his house and beat the shit outta him and you don’t even know what he’s being arrested for.”

  “I’m here as backup. I don’t know the details.”

  She rolled her eyes and started walking again. We got into the street and I pointed out my Jeep. I opened the door for her as she climbed in and then I checked down both sides of the street before getting in and starting the engine.

  “Where do you live?”

  “California Avenue. Right past Fifty-Four Hundred.”

  I pulled out into the road and began driving. I remained quiet and turned the music down. The air was so hot that though the air conditioning was up full blast, it didn’t even touch us, and I could feel the sweat beginning to soak through my shirt.

  Maria would glance at me occasionally. After five or so minutes, she unfolded her arms and seemed to relax a little.

  “How come you’re not arresting me for nothing?” she said.

  “Did you do anything wrong?”

  “No, but that don’t matter around here. Cops come bust people when they wanna bust people.”

  “We need evidence. Otherwise your case’ll get dismissed at the first court hearing.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t see that too much.”

  I looked to her and then back out to the road. “Can I ask you something?”

  “What?”

  “Remy’s clearly a drug dealer. You don’t have to deny it, I get that. But you’re young and, excuse me for saying so, beautiful. Why would you hook up with a guy like that?”

  “Not that it’s any of your business, but I didn’t hook up with anyone. Remy’s my cousin. And why do you think he’s a drug dealer? Someone in the ghetto has some nice things and they gotta be a drug dealer?”

  “So how does he get his money?”

  She was quiet a beat and then said, “He’s a drug dealer.” She glanced out to an elementary school we were passing, the kids outside at recess playing soccer and four square or just walking around the yard. “But he’s still my cousin. He took care of my grandma when she wasn’t working. He’s not a bad guy. He’s not smart so he could never do anything in school. It’s either this or flip burgers.” She looked to me. “Or become a cop.”

  I turned right onto California Ave and came to a stop in front of a stop sign. She pointed to a house just down the block on the right. It was beige with ugly, brown trim and had an unkempt lawn with a rusted chain-link fence. I drove toward it and she said, “Stop.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t let anyone see me being dropped off by a cop. They’ll think I’m a snitch.”

  “We’re in a Jeep.”

  “Yeah but you look like a cop. And you definitely don’t look like you live in this neighborhood.” She got out and looked at me. “Thanks for the ride.”

  “I’m sorry about what happened,” I said. I took out one of my cards and wrote my cell number on it. I handed it to her. “Your cousin’s gonna be fine, though.”

  She took the card, nodded, and walked away.

  After dropping Maria off I headed back to Command and went inside. I went to the locker rooms and sat on a couch. A Sports Illustrated sat on the coffee table and I picked it up and flipped through a few articles. I put it back and then leaned my head on the cushions, closing my eyes.

  The place stunk and it reminded me of the gym at the high school I went to in Missouri. We had only one janitor and he was disabled so he could never get around to cleaning everything as quickly as it needed to be. The wrestlers got ringworm and the football players got fungal infections on their feet and hands. I used to go sit with the janitor at lunch because no one else would sit with him and he looked so lonely.

  We would talk about his wife who had passed away and his mother who had died when he was a boy; something we shared in common. His father remarried and had other children, so he never called him anymore.

  Eventually, a few of the girls complained about him because they thought he was creepy and they let him go.

  A few days after he was fired, his neighbors heard a loud pop coming out of his apartment. They went to check on him and saw through the open windows that he’d blown his brains out in his favorite lounge chair with a pistol he’d kept at home protection.

  “What’re you doin’ here?”

  I opened my eyes to see Gus Antonsen standing over me. His badge was clipped to his belt and looked so dirty I almost didn’t recognize what it was at first. It was covered in crusted food and grease stains and was chipped and faded. It looked like a toy badge a child might buy.

  “Me? What’re you doing here?” I said.

  “This is where the magic happens. Performance reviews. When you make detective you’ll have to haul your ass up here too. So how come you’re not with your crew?”

  “What crew?”

  “SIS, man. You stoned or something?”

  “I had to drive a perp’s girl home.”

  “Were you there for the shooting?”

  I was quiet a moment and then said, “What shooting?” But I already knew the answer.

  “Some distributor tried to wrestle Ty’s twelve gauge away from him. Dax and Caleb saw the whole thing. Said it was a good shoot.”

  I jumped off the couch and ran for the door.

  CHAPTER 7

  By the time I got to Remy’s apartment, Internal Affairs had Ty and Dax on the couch. The body had been cleared out, and forensics was there, running a grid pattern search and calculating the buckshot trajectory.

  The IAD detectives always came in twos. Probably because they were so hated they didn�
�t trust themselves alone in a room full of cops. The two in the apartment were tall and bald and looked like they could’ve been replicas of each other. They glanced to me and turned their attention back to Ty. One of them, the one sitting on a chair across the room, looked back to me once before pulling out an iPad and clicking around on it.

  Ty and Dax had clipboards on their laps and were using pens to write something on lined paper. Dax was done first and handed the clipboard to the detective that was standing in front of him. Ty finished a few seconds later and did the same.

  The IAD detective looked the papers over and said, “Are these the official statements you want as part of the file for OIS?”

  “Yeah,” Ty said.

  The man on the chair closed his iPad and walked over. He was looking at the floor, his lips contorting in odd shapes with thought. He took out a piece of gum and put it in his mouth before standing in front of Ty. The two men stared at each other but didn’t say anything for what seemed like a long time.

  “Seems weird,” the man said.

  “What seems weird, Brennan?”

  “Seems weird that your whole team would be in here and he’d go for your gun. Doesn’t seem like a smart move.”

  “If they were smart, they wouldn’t be criminals. And my whole team wasn’t here. Officer Boyd was drivin’ an innocent bystander home and Trevor was out talkin’ to the neighbors.”

  The man looked over to me. “Officer Boyd?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  The man nodded and looked back to Ty. “Seems like a suicidal move to me.”

  “Death by cop rather than prison. If you came out from behind your desk sometime, you’d see more of it.”

  Brennan shrugged and raised his eyebrows, almost comically. He turned away and walked over to the massive bloodstain that took up half the carpet in the living room. He bent down and observed it up close, running two fingers along it even though it was still wet. He looked at the blood on his fingers then wiped it on his pants.

  “We’ll be in touch,” he said without looking back to Ty as he walked out of the apartment. He glanced at me on the way out but didn’t say anything.

  When IAD was gone I went toward Ty. “What the hell happened?”

  Dax stood up and stretched his back. “Fucker went for Ty outta nowhere. Ty fired and blew his guts out over the carpet.”

  “He was calm. He didn’t want a fight. He asked for a lawyer.”

  Ty stood and picked up his 12 gauge. “What’re you with IAD too? It went down how we said.”

  I didn’t say anything as I heard Caleb and Trevor come in behind me. They walked around the apartment and said a few things to the forensic techs that were still here. When they were done, Ty looked to them and said, “Ready?”

  “Ready,” Caleb said.

  We left the apartment, me following behind the four of them as they talked about a basketball game that was on tonight. I was used to death; I’d seen plenty of it in the streets of Fallujah. But it still shook me every time. These guys had already forgotten about it.

  We got outside and Ty told the men we had some things to follow up on and we’d meet them later. We went out to my Jeep.

  “You’re starin’ at me,” he said. “Somethin’ you wanna ask, Officer Boyd?”

  “Is that really what happened?”

  He turned to me, his brow furrowing, his lips going straight like strips of dead flesh on his face. “It happened like we said. You were expectin’ this unit to write parkin’ tickets at the mall, Baby Boy? That ain’t what we do. If you can’t hack it, I’ll sign off on a transfer anytime. And if you question me one more time like you’re my captain, you and I are gonna have a problem.”

  In a flash, as quickly as it had come, his face went back to normal and his eyes brightened. “Now we gonna go catch us some bad guys or what?”

  CHAPTER 8

  We drove to an address looking for this man Phillipe that Ty wanted to talk to. He wouldn’t go into much detail about it other than he was a big-time coke dealer. There were just two old ladies at that address so we went to another one, to look for another perp, and no one was home.

  We went back to the farm and Ty told me to be there at seven in the morning sharp. I took off my Kevlar and weapons, keeping my Desert Eagle, and walked out. I checked the time on my iPhone. It was five in the afternoon and I debated whether to go grab some dinner and then remembered something I had thought to do.

  I sat in the driver’s seat of my Jeep a long time and then started it, taking off toward California Avenue.

  It took longer to get to the house this time, or at least seemed like it did, and I listened to Metallica’s black album while I drove, turned up loud enough that I couldn’t hear the traffic around me.

  When I got to the house, I left the Jeep running and just sat there.

  After what I guessed was fifteen minutes, I walked up to the front and went to ring the doorbell, then stopped midair. I knocked instead. After a few moments an old woman came to the door.

  “Hi,” I said, “I’m looking for Maria.”

  “That’s for me, Abuelita,” I heard Maria say. She walked to the door and the old lady went back into the house. “Hey.”

  “Hey,” I said. “I just…I don’t even know what I came out here to say. Just, I’m sorry.” She looked at me, puzzled, and it hit me that she hadn’t heard yet. “This was a bad idea. I’m sorry, I’ll go.”

  “Wait, Tommy.” She stepped out and shut the door behind her. “What’s going on?” Her eyes suddenly grew wide. “Where’s Remy?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Oh no,” she gasped as tears began to flow, “no, no…Remy.”

  “Maybe…” I wasn’t sure how to finish that sentence so I didn’t. I just turned and started walking back to my Jeep.

  “You fucking pigs killed him!” she shouted from behind me.

  She continued to yell as I got in and drove away.

  I didn’t feel like going home so I went to Doug’s Shooting instead. I rented out a few pistols and bought some paper targets. The targets had faces of people superimposed on them; Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and the Queen of England for some reason. I looked to the clerk when I saw that one and he shrugged and said, “Friends can’t last forever.”

  I took the targets, except the Queen’s, and went downstairs to the shooting range. The loud pop of gunfire and the smell of burnt casings and gunpowder permeated the air and enveloped me. I felt comfortable here.

  I took a lane by the end and set up my targets before putting on my goggles and ear protection. My hearing wasn’t great to begin with. An IED had gone off near our location once, causing permanent hearing damage. Occasionally, I would get a ringing so loud it would wake me in the middle of the night.

  I picked up a Ruger and pushed the button on the wall, making the target fly backwards to the end of the lane. I aimed, and fired. I fired again and again and again until I heard the dry click of the gun.

  I put the Ruger down and picked up the Smith & Wesson .40. I fired multiple rounds, getting headshots, and then refilled the clip and did it again.

  “That’s some nice shootin’,” the man in the lane next to me said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Where you learn to shoot like that?”

  I lifted my weapon and fired three more rounds. “Growing up on a farm.”

  He chuckled. “Takes one to know one, son. You’re service if I ever saw it. Them Special Forces guys, whenever I ask ‘em what they do they always say truck driver or mechanic or some shit. You guys don’t like nobody askin’ questions, do ya?”

  I reloaded the clip. “I grew up on a farm.”

  He shrugged. “Suit yourself. See I was in Nam. I was a sniper. Crazy time, brother. But then again, we in crazy times now.”

  I packed up my weapons and left even though I had several boxes of ammunition left. I went upstairs and got back my driver’s license, returned the guns, and went outside and sat in the Jee
p for a minute, listening to Pink Floyd as the sun was going down and twilight was coming over the city. I watched cars come and go, some people hauling in massive machine guns and rifles to try out on the range. I started the Jeep and got outta there.

  When I got home it still wasn’t dark yet and there were children playing outside in the neighborhood. I walked up my lawn and sat on the porch and watched them. Pain was radiating through my body again and my leg was throbbing since I wasn’t using my cane. I went inside, took a Percocet, and came back out.

  That’s when I noticed the car that had stopped just down the block. It was a black sedan and looked like it was at least twenty years old, but it was immaculately taken care of. The windows were tinted and I even saw some tint in the windshield so I couldn’t make out the driver. They sat in the car for a long while and then stepped out. It was Elis Brennan.

  He had his hands in his pockets as he walked over to me and his eyes were glued on the children, a grin on his face until he got in front of my porch. We were silent a few moments and watched the children playing.

  “You got any kids?” he said.

  “No. You?”

  “No. My biggest regret. I have two ex-wives and several nieces and nephews though so, maybe that’s enough family.” He came and sat down on the step below me. “How you liking your new unit?”

  “It’s fine.”

  He glanced back at me and then forward again. “How do you like Ty?”

  “He’s intense.”

  “That he is. But I mean how do you like him on a personal level? You guys get along?”

  “Sure. Can I ask you something now? What the hell are you doing at my house?”

  He turned and faced me. “Thomas, I need your help.”

  “With what?”

  “With Ty.”

  I looked back to the children. “Forget it. I’m no rat. Find someone else.”

  “I’m not looking for a rat. I’m looking for cops with guts.” He sighed. “I’ve had this same conversation three other times in the past two years. And three other times I’ve been turned down.”

  “Maybe it’s time to stop trying?”

  “I looked at your record,” he said without missing a beat. “You’re a good cop, Thomas. You’ve got a huge future in front of you. Don’t throw it all away for…him.”