David Ellis - Breach of Trust

I nodded.

“So they’re searching through your clothes, and meanwhile it’s sitting in the goon’s pocket.” He shook his head. “Ballsy, Jason. I mean, seriously.”

“Desperation is the mother of invention.”

“No, ballsy is right,” Moody said. It was as close as he could come to a compliment.

Tucker said to me, “Cimino never mentioned Connolly by name. How’d you figure?”

It had to be Connolly. There weren’t that many options. And he’d been upset about being pushed out of the loop when I’d hatched this new plan with Charlie. It also explained why Tucker and Moody were so pissed off when I’d called that audible. You cut out the board, they’d complained. Sure. They’d flipped the chairman of the PCB to be their eyes and ears, and I waltzed in and cut him out of the action.

I explained all of that to him. Moody said, “Connolly wasn’t good at this. He never was.”

“Greg knew about me, didn’t he?” I asked. “I didn’t know about him, but he knew about me.”

Moody nodded. I wasn’t sure if he’d let me in on that piece of information. He probably figured it didn’t matter at this point. “Yeah, he knew.”

That stood to reason. Connolly recorded the conversation with me that the feds used against me, when they first confronted me. I had thought, at the time, that the feds had to go through the extraordinary procedure of bugging his office and tapping his phone without his consent. I’d been wrong. Greg had been working with them all along.

That was a significant point for me, in particular, but now wasn’t the time to raise it.

“Where was Greg headed today?” I asked. “With the F-Bird?”

“He had an assignment,” Moody said.

“Obviously. But where? With who?”

Moody didn’t answer right away. He looked so unusual, wearing a sweatshirt and jeans, like a totally different person tonight. “I can’t reveal that,” he finally said. There was a trace of apology in his voice, which was uncharacteristic. But this was an unusual situation, to say the least. Everyone was tired and strung out. The operation had crash-landed over the last several hours.

I got out of my chair. I had two blankets draped over me and I was chugging coffee, not for the caffeine or the taste but the warmth. I’d spent the better part of two hours, wearing nothing but boxers, in temperatures that were probably just above freezing. It was hard to imagine that there would be a time when I would feel warm again.

I filled another cup, held it in my hands, and watched Tucker and Moody roll their necks and mumble to themselves.

“What’s the verdict?” I asked. “You going to pick up Charlie and his crew?”

Moody shrugged. “Connolly’s dead, so there’s no urgency. Unless we think he’s coming after you.”

“He’s not,” I said. “He had his chance tonight.”

The prosecutor stretched his arms, working out the anxiety. “I don’t know yet.”

“How do you vote?” Tucker asked me. “You’re the big hero tonight. Do we roust Cimino tonight? Do we wait?”

I’d been thinking about that for a long time. I thought about what had happened tonight.

Who said you could do that? Charlie had said, when he walked into the room and saw that Paulie had thrown his first forearm into my face.

We’ll handle this, Leather Jacket had replied.

Give him a coat, Charlie had said.

No, pretty boy’s doing just fine.

“I think we hold off,” I said to Tucker and Moody. “I don’t think we’re done yet.”

And when Leather Jacket and Paulie had turned up the heat at the end, putting the knife against my hand. Stop, that’s enough, Charlie had said.

Nah , Leather Jacket had said. It’s not enough yet.

“The cover’s blown,” said Tucker. “Cimino knows we’re onto him.”

“Maybe yes, maybe no,” I said.

And Charlie’s words when the interrogation was over. Sorry about that. They had to be sure.

I paced around the kitchen, into the living room, my neck stiff and sore, my head throbbing, the eternal chill throughout my body.

Who said you could do that?

We’ll handle this.

Give him a coat.

No, pretty boy’s doing just fine.

“We might be able to put Charlie’s mind at ease,” I said. “If we can do that, we can keep the operation going.”

“What operation?” Tucker said. “Cimino’s been spooked, at the very least. He’s not going to keep up that scheme of yours.”

“He’s not talking about Cimino,” Moody said. “You’re talking about moving up the ladder. You’re talking about accepting Madison Koehler’s offer to work for the governor.”

“Chris wins the prize,” I said.

“Wait a second,” Tucker chimed in. “You tell us no, over and over again, when we want you to go inside the governor’s inner circle. Now, tonight, you come this close to getting your ass killed, and now you want to do this?”

“Lee has a point,” Moody said. “We know for certain that Cimino would kill you if you were ever burned. We have a federal witness lying facedown in the mud on Seagram Hill to tell us that much. And you can figure you’ll be watched more closely than ever. So why now?”

It was a valid question. Like many things, there was more than one answer. Moody was right. We couldn’t be sure what Charlie knew. He definitely knew the federal government was sniffing around, at a minimum. And now we knew, firsthand, that Charlie Cimino did not have a high tolerance for risk. I’d have to watch my back, more than ever. But I thought it was worth the risk. And I was the only person who could do this.

And I still had a murder to solve. I still wasn’t sure I had the answer to that one. Charlie Cimino was looking pretty good as the puppet master behind the murder, but I wasn’t totally convinced. Not after tonight.

Who said you could do that?

We’ll handle this.

Give him a coat.

No, pretty boy’s doing just fine.

Stop. That’s enough.

Nah. It’s not enough yet.

“So?” Tucker asked again. “Why now, all of a sudden, you’re willing to go work for the governor?”

Sorry about that, Charlie had apologized to me . They just needed to be sure .

They .

I looked out the window in the kitchen. Somewhere out there, FBI agents were guarding every exit to my house. This would be risky, no doubt.

“Because Charlie wasn’t calling the shots tonight,” I said. “And I’m going to find out who was.”

I was in my office the next morning at nine. My back, shoulders, and neck were faring the worst after last night. I couldn’t turn my head in any direction-hell, I couldn’t cough without feeling a searing pain all the way down to my ass. My jaw was sore as hell from Paulie’s forearm, and the side of my head was swollen and tender.

I had a deposition scheduled for eleven on one of the cases that had been handed to me courtesy of Charlie’s and my extortion scheme. I was neither prepared nor interested. I would have shoveled it off to Shauna, but I didn’t want to involve her in any way in the stuff I was dealing with.

The city’s newspaper was on my desk. Greg’s death wasn’t on the front page; it was reserved for another obituary, the death of Warren Palendech, one of the justices on the state supreme court. Justice Palendech was dead of a heart attack? It was an article that would typically captivate me, but I had more pressing concerns.

There it was, across the headline of the metro section, the story of one of Governor Carlton Snow’s top aides and oldest friends, Gregory Connolly, found dead near Seagram Hill from a gunshot wound. The reporter was not afraid to speculate on what Mr. Connolly had been up to in that neighborhood, what most people are up to in that neighborhood. She didn’t directly attribute sexual folly to Greg, but anonymous police sources believed that Mr. Connolly’s reason for being in that area was not original.