“Bruno who?”

I didn’t answer.

“Have a seat.” He turned, picked up the phone, dialed a number, and he watched me as he spoke. The person on the other end said something, the cop turned to reply, as if I could read his lips. I fought the urge to bolt.

He put the phone down and stared at me. My heart raced. He came over to the counter, slowly moved his hand to the edge out of view. Behind me, over at the front door a solenoid bolt shot home. He’d locked me in.

The door that led to the back of the station opened. The woman in uniform did not smile. It took a long second to realize Barbara had aged a great deal since our last meeting. I tried to remember how long ago and knew not enough time had passed to warrant the quick degradation of youth. She’d lost weight. Where the curves on her hips used to beckon a man, they now showed too much bone, her uniform pants cinched up with a black basket weave belt. Gray sprouted in the part of her once lustrous brown hair.

“What are you doing here, Bruno?”

I looked at the desk officer, then back at her.

“All right, come on back.” She held the door open. She wore a black automatic in a pancake holster on her side, her oval badge shiny and new. I followed her into her office. She walked behind her desk and turned, “You shouldn’t be here. You’re putting me in a bad position.”

I sat down to stop the quaking knees. “Congratulations on your promotion. Lieutenant. That’s great.”

She came around her desk and closed the watch commander’s door. “Let’s can the bullshit, huh? What do you want?”

It hurt for her to talk to me this way. I didn’t know how much she knew, how much Robby told her about me, but we’d been good friends not all that long ago. I said nothing.

She went back around and sat at her desk. The only sound in the room the radio. She monitored her shift beat units answering calls for service.

I spoke first. “I thought we were friends.”

“We were until you went over to the other team. What do you want, Bruno? You have thirty seconds.”

“I’m looking for Robby.”

“Funny, he’s looking for you.”

“When’s the last time you saw him?”

Her hard expression cracked, it softened. “We’re through. We split a couple of weeks ago.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.” They were the perfect couple. Although, I always thought she loved him more than he loved her. Now, standing on the outside looking in, seeing the past from a different perspective, I realized he may have been in love more with himself with nothing left over for her, at least not enough to hold the relationship together.

Her eyes misted. She turned, slid open the window that accessed the dispatch area, spoke to people I couldn’t see, “Tell Four Paul Three, not to take code seven until he handles that missing person and then tell Four Sam One I want him to call me ASAP.” She slid the window closed. The conscientious supervisor, she’d been monitoring the cop talk on the radio all the while conversing with me.

I wanted to go around and hug her to help quell her emotional pain. “What happened?”

“What always happens? He met someone else.” She looked away, her chin quivered. “It’s my fault.”

“No it’s not, Barb.”

She looked back her eyes aflame. “You don’t know shit. You have no idea how I respected you, the both of you. I envied you going to work with him everyday, all the overtime, seeing him more than I did. Then you went bad, you made him shoot you. It ruined him. That’s when it really started, three years ago.”

Derek Sams ruined more lives than he would’ve ever known; my daughter, my grandson, my father, and now Wicks and his wife, Barbara. The insidious tentacles of narcotics burrow deep into the fabric of society.

I wanted to lay it all at his door, but couldn’t. I had to own up to my own actions, my own choices.

Shame rose up and heated my face. I wanted to tell her I didn’t ask Wicks to shoot. He didn’t have to. I was going to give up. He didn’t give me a chance. He never gave me the chance.

She continued her rant. “You went bad, then he followed right along behind you.”

I moved to the edge of my chair. “He went bad? What happened? What’re you talking about?”

“The FBI popped him, civil-rights violation. A bad shoot by one of his men. They told him they were going to go back five years to investigate his team and their cases. Look into the culture, the tattoos, a real full-court press.”

“He’s too good. They’d never make him on any of it.”

“I told him that. He was okay for a while, until the pressure got to him. He said he was too old to start over. Even if he beat it, the department, the same people he made all those sensational cases for, demoted him to work in the jail, the watch commander at MCJ while they conducted an internal investigation. It killed him, Bruno. One week in that smelly hole and he was ready to sell out his mother.”

The shame left and in sauntered fear, cold with a knife-hard edge. I saw where this was going.

“They flipped him,” she said, “They flipped the great Robby Wicks. The man who knew the game better than the FBI. The FBI told him all his problems would all go away if he did one thing. Just one. Something they couldn’t do themselves in eighteen months of trying with all their assets. You would have thought with all their satellites, high-tech surveillance devices, the relaxed constitution for terrorism they’d be able to follow one ex-con. Something he refused to get involved in until they played dirty pool.”

She waited for me to say it.

I couldn’t. I said nothing.

“Yeah,” she said, “you know, it’s your fault. That’s why I can’t believe you had the balls to come here. Say it, Bruno. You know what they want. You didn’t need to come here for me to tell you. Say it.”

I loved and respected her too much, I said it. My voice cracked. “Wally Kim. They want Wally Kim.” The Korean kid, the diplomat’s son.

Chapter Forty-Eight

She said, “That’s right. Kim put a lot of pressure on the State Department, who in turn pressured the Justice Department.”

“I’m sorry, Barbara; it’s no longer about that. It’s Robby, he—”

She turned pale, sat down, “What? What’s happened?”

Of course, she still loved him and cared what happened to him. They had been together too many years. I didn’t know how to say it, so I used Mack’s words, “He’s gone off the reservation.”

“How bad?”

I couldn’t answer that one. I couldn’t say the words to her. She stood on the fringe about to be pulled into the vortex of this awful shit storm, one initiated by my actions. Her eyes bore right into me. The phone rang.

It rang some more.

She picked it up. “Yeah, I wanted you to call. Are you paying attention out there? Four Paul Three was about to go to dinner with a missing-person report hanging. Yeah, I know. Yeah, I understand. Just keep your crew straight, all right? That’s not asking too much. Yeah. Thanks.” She hung up.

She said to me, “It’s the million dollars, isn’t it? He killed someone for all that damn money.”

She saw my expression, my jaw drop.

“What’re you talking about?” My thoughts went to Jumbo and the millions wrapped up in the computer chips. He must have killed Crazy Ned Bressler, did it for money. It had not crossed my mind until that moment. If I didn’t kill Bressler, then who did?

Now she mirrored my expression. She closed her mouth, stood up. She’d made a mistake, violated a cardinal rule in interrogation, she gave away more information then she received. “Time for you to leave, Bruno.”

“No, this is important. What are you talking about?” She had the missing piece, the motivation. A million dollars and I needed to hear it.

“No, go. Now.” She shifted her gaze to the window that opened to the hall. The uniformed desk officer appeared outside her door awaiting orders, an obedient watchdog anxious to impress his master with a thirty-inch mahogany nightstick.