“What do we do now?”
“The chief won’t play along, so we’ll find someone that will.” He turned from the house.
I stared back at the door and wanted to kick it open. It was guys like Chief James that ran this city and profited on the backs of all his hard-working cops, all the folks that were just trying to get by that he and his rich asshole buddies exploited over and over again. He was a corrupt dickhead that slept with hookers and probably arrested them afterward for kicks, and I wanted to hurt him, wanted to bring him down. Men like him didn’t deserve to live in a beautiful house like this.
And yet I couldn’t do a thing. If he didn’t want to play along with our blackmail then I was stuck. I hated feeling powerless, and hated even more that this guy might just turn his back and walk away, and never face any consequences.
I followed Luke back to the car. He drove off and we didn’t speak on the way home.
19
Luke
Chief James wasn’t my only option. He was only the best of the bunch.
But there were other crooked cops.
I sat up late in the living room paging through the dossier, arranging potential blackmail victims. If Chief James wouldn’t listen to me, then maybe he’d listen to one of the several captains and lieutenants I had lying before me like a deck of fucked-up cards.
Cara lounged on the couch. She hadn’t been talkative since the chief’s house, and I figured she wasn’t happy with the way he spoke to her like she was some worthless nothing. It was bad enough getting that treatment from her own father, but hearing it from the chief of police probably set her teeth on edge, and I wanted to get at that bastard just for making her uncomfortable.
A knock at the door pulled me from the table. Yuri stood on the stoop, hopping from foot to foot. “Hey, boss,” he said. “I’m on duty tonight.”
“I appreciate that. Is German out there with you?”
“Yeah, he’s somewhere.” Yuri glanced past me. “Hey, Cara, how you doing?”
She waved lazily. “Fine. It’s late, aren’t you tired?”
“I don’t sleep.” Yuri grinned up at me. “And you pay really well, so hey, I can do a little guard duty, why not?”
“Shout if you need anything, Yuri. And don’t fall asleep on me.”
He saluted and walked off. I watched him go, lingering on the stoop. Ever since I realized how important the dossier was, I had my guys playing guard duty on the house to make sure Cara was okay, and to give me some warning in case the Lionettis rolled up. It hadn’t been necessary so far, but I didn’t know how long I could press my luck.
I shut the door then sat down on the couch. Cara put her feet in my lap and gave me a sly look. I started to massage them nice and hard until she stretched out and purred like a cat.
“That feels good,” she said. “Where’d you learn to do that?”
“The boys line up and I give them all massages as a thanks for a job well done.”
She snorted. “That’s super gross.”
“I know.” I dug my thumbs into her heel and she gasped in delight. “I used to do this for my mom, back in the day. Guess I never forgot how.”
“Were you close?”
“Not really.” I closed my eyes, a heavy exhaustion suddenly weighing me down. “She wasn’t sober much. But yeah, we got along when she wasn’t nodding off from dope or drunk out of her skull or whatever.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Everyone’s got a story, Cara. We’re all fucked up here.”
She laughed then sighed. “That’s almost comforting. God, I was so pissed earlier at the chief’s place.”
“I could tell. You want to talk about it?”
She groaned as I switched to her other foot. “It’s stupid, I guess. I mean, I don’t think of myself as his daughter, you know? I’m nothing like that asshole, and the chief’s right, it was hard growing up with him. But I guess I don’t like people looking down on me just because of who my dad was, like they know a damn thing about me.”
“You should be pissed about it,” I said softly. “Nobody gets to judge you, especially people like him. I bet he’s never had a day of hardship in his life, not a guy like that.”
“Makes me wonder how he got any power at all.”
“Does it though? Guys like him are snakes, they slither their way into every institution in the damn world and take it over. I’d root them all out and kill them all if I could.”
“Listen to you, practically a revolutionary.”
“Call me Comrade Luke. All us Russians are revolutionaries at heart, we all want to be Lenin, although some of us want to be Stalin, and those are the ones you’ve got to look out for.”