David Ellis - Breach of Trust

I trained the gun on him and let it all consume me. This, I now realized, was why I’d been on this quest from the beginning. Someone had to pay for what had happened to Talia and Emily, and I was tired of it being me.

“Why?” he said.

“Why?” I nodded at him. “How many people you kill?”

He was watching the gun more than me. “Not one,” he said, “that didn’t have it comin’.”

I moved closer. Then I lowered the gun and delivered a kick into the center of his chest. He didn’t take it well, his mouth popping open, his hands off the floor, his body falling to his right side. Something unleashed in me and I tossed the gun on the couch, then dropped my knees down on him, swinging wildly with my fists, missing more than landing, hitting his hands as they shielded his skull. I was doing plenty of damage anyway, slamming his head into the floor from my blows. When I took a brief pause, he surprised me with a surge upward, trying with his legs and arms to toss me off-balance. For one brief moment he almost succeeded, then I brought my full force down on him. He was now turned over on his back, facing up at me. He swung at me with both hands but he had nothing behind the blows, lacking the advantages of gravity or momentum. It was all me, and now that I had him square on his back, I made his face pay. He tried to run interference but it was raining down on him. I landed about a dozen solid blows before his defenses subsided.

I caught my breath and reached for my gun, which luckily I was able to do without compromising my position. I didn’t know what I was thinking, giving up that gun, except that I hadn’t been thinking at all.

Kiko made a low burst of noise, blood coming from his mouth in the process. I didn’t recognize the sound at first but then I got it. He was laughing.

“You gonna kill me, you’d a done it.”

That would make it all the more satisfying. I placed the gun against his forehead. The cymbals clashed inside my head, the hatred and anger poisoning everything inside me. Everything about this made sense. This guy had killed so many people. Maybe some of them not so innocent, but I could count a number of them that didn’t have it coming. I didn’t really know my God anymore but I couldn’t comprehend a world where taking this guy out wasn’t a good thing.

“Don’t, Jason.”

I stifled the instinct to turn, because I knew the voice hadn’t come from behind me. Or next to me or in front of me. I imprinted the barrel of my gun into Kiko’s forehead. He started mumbling something in Spanish. I thought he was praying.

“Don’t ask God for help,” I said. Then I raised the gun off his forehead. I pushed myself off him and stood over him. He wasn’t moving, the only sign of life his soft moans and a bubble of blood enlarging and contracting from his mouth.

I opened the glass door, rather than work my way through the jagged glass, and walked through the yard. A couple of lights were on in the neighborhood, maybe even some people looking out. They might be able to identify me but I doubted it. Some white guy in a suit and long coat, walking through a dark backyard. Anyone living close by knew who resided at this particular address, and odds were they wouldn’t be in a hurry to involve themselves in this affair.

I made it to the car and drove through the alley. When I got onto a main thoroughfare, I let out a long breath. The post-event adrenaline flooded me; it was all I could do to keep my hands on the wheel. I was confused, or at least incapable of rational thought, so I focused on getting myself home, on getting the car in the garage and myself into bed.

I would sleep tonight, I decided, at least for the few remaining hours of night afforded me. Like the flip of a switch, I was utterly exhausted. I fell onto the bed and closed my eyes. It was true, I’d been blaming Ernesto’s killer for the death of my family. Maybe I’d done so to transfer culpability from where I thought it really belonged, at my own feet. But I now realized it had been something different altogether.

Don’t, Jason .

She’d meant so much more with those two words, I thought, than just sparing Kiko’s life. I’d assigned blame for her death everywhere I could find-myself, Hector, Kiko, whomever-to avoid the more plausible and, therefore excruciating truth, that what happened to my wife and daughter was nobody’s fault.

The next thing I remembered was her hand in mine, our fingers interlocked, gripped so tightly that one hand ceased being independent of the other. Then, slowly, a release, our fingers straightening, our palms separating, nothing but our fingertips in contact.

And then my hand reached for hers and there was nothing. I opened my eyes and it was morning.

I needed some extra time to get ready this morning, having discovered a number of cuts along my hairline from shards of glass last night. My hands were swollen and sore, but I didn’t think I’d broken any fingers. I had plenty of reminders of what had happened last night but it still felt more like a dream than anything else.

Lee Tucker and Chris Moody were waiting for me when I walked into Suite 410 at eight in the morning. They’d been deliberating quietly and hadn’t heard me enter. They popped to attention when I showed my face.

“Cut myself shaving,” I said when Tucker asked.

“Shaving your forehead?”

“I wasn’t paying attention.”

Moody leaned back in his chair. He didn’t look good. His eyes were set deeply and shaded dark. He usually had a bright-and-eager look about him, but these were long days he was spending.

“Do you think you’ll be having more conversations with Snow?” Moody asked. “I mean, after the incident last night. Is he too embarrassed now? Or do you think you’ll still be on the inside?”

“Hard to say,” I said. “My guess, I’m still in.”

“Good. Because we need more,” he told me. “Snow’s a slippery one.”

The same word Tucker had used. Slippery, as in, we know he’s guilty but he doesn’t quite admit it.

“You mean, you need more,” I said.

“You need to pin him down,” he said. “When he gets on a topic, you have to keep pushing it. You just let him move on.”

“It’s not cross-examination,” I said. “It’s conversation. I can’t force it.”

“You’re being too cautious, Jason. You already passed their test. You passed. Greg failed.”

“Whose test? Charlie’s test? Yeah, I passed his test.”

“Oh, and what happened to ‘Charlie wasn’t calling the shots’? You think Snow doesn’t know anything about what happened to you and Greg Connolly that night?”

These guys had listened to every word of the F-Bird from last night. They’d heard what both Madison and the governor had said about Greg Connolly. They’d heard Charlie Cimino say that he hadn’t told Madison anything about it.

Chris Moody did one of his patented chuckles, filled not with humor but condescension. “You think because Madison Koehler and Governor Snow played dumb last night, it means they don’t know anything?”

“You weren’t there,” I said.

“No, but I know these people. I know them and I know a hundred people like them. They aren’t going to admit it to you, Jason. Don’t be so damn naive. These people are programmed to lie. They’re smart enough not to admit anything out loud.”

Their skepticism wasn’t surprising, nor was it unfounded. I was as cynical as the next person. But I was there last night. I saw both of them, Madison and the governor, when they talked about Greg Connolly. I didn’t trust anyone in this room or anyone working for the governor, but I trusted my instinct, and it told me that neither of them had anything to do with Greg’s murder.