Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

IT WAS EMOTIONAL edging.

Cade sprawled in the leather chair behind his desk, legs stretched out in front of him. Most of his attention, 90 percent, was on the contract to provide personal security for a Russian politician’s family when they came to California. So far, they had agreed to Cade’s moderately inflated quote with no haggling but refused to discuss the reason they thought they needed protection. So either they just wanted bodyguards for the bragging rights, or they owed money to the Russian mob. One or the other. It didn’t make much difference, the operatives would be briefed to expect the worst and enjoy the uneventful, but Cade wanted to cover all eventualities in the Client Responsibilities rider.

The rest of Cade’s attention was on the fact that he could, at any moment, call Marlow and agree to that date. He would—soon enough—but for now, he enjoyed the pleasant, restless itch of anticipation. The breathless excitement of it felt like one of those kids in Christmas movies, ready to tear into a stack of presents for the one they knew Santa had brought.

So far, he’d kept himself on the hook for a week.

It wasn’t better than reality. The reality was Marlow’s mouth on his throat and his hand on Cade’s cock. It would take a lot to beat that. That didn’t mean that Cade couldn’t savor the satisfying knowledge that all he had to do to get what he wanted was say “Yes.”

Cade had played out a few scenarios in the back of his mind during slow meetings over the last couple of days, but he hadn’t quite decided on any of them. Maybe he’d just toss a coin… or decide what felt right in the moment.

Despite his efforts, he was still as infatuated as a teenager who’d had his first kiss.

The door to the office opened, and Lem came in. Halfway in, anyhow. Lem stopped on the threshold, one foot in and one foot out, and eyed Cade suspiciously.

“You look like the cat that saw the sunrise,” he said. “What happened?”

Cade pulled his attention back to the here and now. He saved and docked the file to keep it out of a mis-mashed keystroke’s way.

“Maybe I’m just in a good mood,” he said, “for no particular reason.”

“Yeah,” Lem said, the word dragged out over his tongue. “That is not how we were raised, and you know it.”

True. Cade leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. The cuffs on his shirt rode up and flashed the heavy steel band of his watch around his wrist. “Fair enough,” he said. “Maybe it’s none of your business.”

Lem laughed and came the rest of the way into the office.

“Yeah, that sounds more like you,” he said as he threw himself down on the couch. There was a chair in front of Cade’s desk, but Lem liked to have room to sprawl. He slung his arms over the back of the couch and stretched his legs out in front of him. “It looks like the hospital finally brought Rilkes around this morning. The cops haven’t been let in to see him yet, but if I were them, I wouldn’t hold my breath that he’s going to be useful. Between the trauma and the induced coma, he’ll be lucky if he knows his own name.”

Maybe.

From the story he’d told in the club, Rilkes had come back from worse.

“Keep an eye on the situation,” Cade said. “If he does talk to someone, I want to know about it.”

Lem grinned, a wicked slant of his mouth, and put his hand over his heart. “For Cold Winds? I’ll go and charm the nurses myself.”

“Try to catch a surgeon,” Cade suggested. “They make more money, and you have expensive tastes.”

“Oh, and Night Shift officers are rolling in money?” Lem asked.

Cade felt himself blush. He scowled at Lem and tried to ignore it. It was one thing to be infatuated, another to act like he was fifteen again. Worse. At fifteen he’d had more sense and too big a chip on his shoulder to admit he wanted anyone to like him.

“Was there anything else?” he asked in a clipped voice.

Lem grinned at him but had the good sense to drop it. He sat up and pulled his phone out of his pocket so he could swipe his thumb over the screen.

“Yeah, I pulled what I could on Rilkes’s comings and goings over the last year,” he said. “Quick and dirty, but I grabbed his text messages and pulled location data from his cellular plan. Most of it is pretty mundane. He dated a woman for a while, but they broke up amicably enough, and he hasn’t left town this year. The Mexican place near him is going to get worried when his orders stop coming in, and he owes bits and pieces of money to a variety of people.”

“So that’s most of it,” Cade said. “What did you leave out?”

Lem looked smug. “Once a week, he texts the same mobile number. It looks like updates on a to-do list.” He glanced down at his phone and started to read from the screen as he swiped the screen up. “So he says stuff like, ‘Left the package where you asked,’ and ‘J is dating a redhead from work,’ and… drumroll please… ‘Went to Rankins. They said they paid your new guy.’ Rankins, by the way, is a car shop over in Mesa Verde that is a front for Joe Gazaryan, the Russian mob’s point man for drugs run up over the border.”

“So not quite as innocent as he claimed.”

Lem shrugged. “He was an errand boy,” he said. “And a good one. Never asked any questions. Except once.”

“Oh?”

“A week ago,” Lem said.

He unfolded himself from the couch and walked over to the desk. He handed the phone to Cade so he could read the captured text. Cade scanned it quickly and repeated it aloud.

“Did you send them?” he said.

“And the only time the other mobile messaged back,” Lem said. He flicked up to the one-word reply. “They told him ‘No.’ Not that it did him much good. The sender was in New Mexico.”

Piper had a burner phone. That was unsurprising but useful. Cade tossed the phone back to Lem, who nearly fumbled the catch. It didn’t wipe the smug look off his face.

“Nice work,” he said. “And the surveillance footage?”

Lem looked disappointed at the abrupt shift in topic. He scowled and shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “Nothing useful,” he said. “Plates were treated so they couldn’t be picked up, and they ditched the car in a blind spot a few streets over, so that made it harder to track them.”

“It was a long shot,” Cade admitted. “They’re Night Shift. They’re not known for making mistakes. Good work.”

Lem gave him an amused look at the compliment. “You need to marry that guy,” he said firmly, a finger pointed at Cade’s nose. “Lock him down. I don’t think you’ve been in this good a mood since….”

He trailed off and blew his cheeks out as he tried to think of an example. Finally, he gave up with a shrug.

“It’s not like he’s my first boyfriend,” Cade said defensively. “I’ve been happy.”

Lem shrugged. “You enjoy stuff,” he said. “But happy? I don’t know.”

“Don’t you have any other work to do?” Cade asked.

“Lunch,” Lem said. He checked the time on his phone. “For another two minutes. So you’re my brother, not my boss. Seriously, call the man. Before he gets a better offer.”

Cade shook his head and pulled the contract back up. “Go eat a sandwich,” he told Lem. “Stay out of my private life. We’ll both be happier.”

He finalized the wording of the contract and sent it on to the legal department to process and send. There were three other non-urgent but time-sensitive emails in his inbox to answer and an invitation to attend a dinner party at The Reserve from one of the board members. Cade grimaced. That had always been Justin’s role to play. It always put Cade’s back up, because no matter how nice his suit or how impeccable his manners, he was there as the hired help. It didn’t bother Justin. He’d smile as they talked down to him—and take their money as an apology.

Unfortunately, Justin wasn’t on deck anymore, and after the bad press around Haley’s murder, someone needed to go to keep them onside. Since Lem would probably sleep with a board member’s wife, or son, to get out of ever having to do it again, that left Cade.

He supposed he could ask Marlow. It wasn’t an unpleasant idea—although Marlow probably wouldn’t turn up in full Night Shift gear… despite Cade’s brief fantasy of exactly that—and it wasn’t a bad one either. People respected the Night Shift.

If he hadn’t changed his mind. The snide voice of his inferiority complex wormed through Cade’s brain. You would have by now, it pointed out, if you’d asked him out and he left you hanging.

His inferiority complex had a point. And it was a smug bastard.

Cade reached for his phone again. This time he hesitated, fingers just above the case, as he tried to convince himself it would be better to ghost Marlow now than risk being rejected. If Marlow chased him, then he’d get what he wanted without having to admit he wanted it.

Or he’d not get anything.

Cade grimaced to himself at that old craven impulse. He wasn’t the school reject anymore. If Marlow turned him down, he’d survive. And he was successful now, so he could find someone new easily enough—someone better.

There was something satisfying in the bitterness of that. It lingered on Cade’s tongue like sour candy, even though he couldn’t quite come up with any idea of who would be better.

He grabbed the phone. It buzzed to life the minute he touched it, and he thought, for a second, that Marlow had caved first. Which would still mean Cade won. The screen claimed it was an Unknown Number. He didn’t get cold calls, so that didn’t leave a lot of options.

There was only one way to find out.

He answered the call.

“You wanted to talk to me,” a man said. “So talk.”

Ned Piper had been born and raised in Phelan, California. He’d not kept that accent. In the various bits and pieces of footage that Cade had found—news interviews, a single appeal for witnesses, a feature on his work breaking the local packs, and one ironic PSA where he told kids to stay indoors and trust the Night Shift—Piper had acquired a convincing coastal drawl. Not perfect, but most people would have believed he came from La Jolla or even up past LA.

Five years in New Mexico had worn the edges off that. He sounded like he came from nowhere now. But he still sounded like someone who could talk you into doing anything without asking any questions until it was too late.

“How’s Rilkes?”

“Dead,” he lied.

“If you want anything from me, I need to trust you.”

Cade stood in front of the long glass windows and stared out over the marina and the flat gray strip of ocean.

“You’re a convict, a crooked cop, and you called me on a contraband phone to ask about the man you paid to do your dirty work while you were locked up,” he said. “I don’t think I’m the one whose character is in doubt.”

Piper snorted. “You don’t get to be where you are without breaking some rules, Mr. Deacon,” he said. “How far would I have to dig to find the bodies?”

“See, that’s the difference,” Cade said. “In my line of work, the bodies go on my CV. Not in shallow graves.”

“They weren’t that shallow,” Piper said. “And don’t bother with the bleeding heart routine. I might have made money from it, but no one I… dealt with… was innocent.”

“Even Marlow?”

It was a genuine question. Cade guessed he hadn’t dismissed those initial doubts about how deep Marlow’s involvement in Piper’s gang had gone.

“Yeah, well,” Piper said. “There’s an exception to every rule. I’d not go so far as to call him innocent, but that was the only call I regret. Not just because it put me in here. Maria said he was with you. Is he still a stubborn little bastard?”

There was a flicker of something in Piper’s voice. It wasn’t quite affection, but it was close enough to put Cade’s hackles up. Admiration, maybe, or pride. As if he was still Marlow’s commanding officer and could take credit for anything Marlow was.

He wasn’t wrong, though.

“Yeah,” Cade said. “He is.”

“So telling you both to stay out of this and let me handle it, that’s going to work?”

Cade smiled thinly. He could see the dim reflection of it in the glass, sharp and unhappy. It was over a week until the next full moon. He couldn’t blame the wolf for how feral it was.

“He won’t,” Cade said. “And they tried to use me as a murder weapon on the full moon, so I have my reasons too. Who is it?”

Silence for a second. Cade could hear the low background noise of the prison, the sound of hundreds of people breathing in concrete boxes. It made him feel claustrophobic by proxy.

“How’s Rilkes?” Piper repeated the question.

This time Cade answered. “In hospital,” he said. “Still critical. They didn’t want to kill him, but they weren’t too worried if they did.”

“Poor bastard was always in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Piper said wearily. Then he cleared his throat. “I don’t name names. That’s what kept me alive. As long as they trust me to keep my mouth shut, it’s not worth risking any fail-safes I might have set up in case I met an unfortunate end. Once I start talking to the authorities, killing me is worth the risk.”

“You think whoever is out there, taking over what’s left of your empire, is going to let you live?” Cade asked. “Whatever deal you had with them before, it’s obviously been broken. They found Rilkes. How long before they find Maria? Once they find her, they get everything, and then what good are you?”

Piper laughed. It was a short huff of sound, bitter but genuine. Apparently, he could still see the funny side.

“Sorry to tell you, but there’s not much left for them to find,” he said. “Back when I was first sent away, sure. I still had fingers in pies and debts to call in. But attrition is a terrible thing. People retired, got caught. Died. Fuck, one woman I could have hung a dozen… bad things… on got religion and joined a nunnery. These days? I could make some mid-level gangsters’ lives uncomfortable. Maybe. People still think I have juice, but… five years is a long time in a high-risk profession.”

“And the people in Night Shift who were still loyal to you?”

Piper sucked his teeth. “I know my legacy is going to be this,” he said. Cade imagined the gesture that took in his cell, the cot, and whatever luxuries his reputation had kept him in. “But even if I wasn’t a good cop, I was good at being a cop. My people knew that I’d take care of them—that what I did was to make our job easier. Make people safer—”

“Line your pockets,” Cade corrected him. He had no control over what Piper told himself, but he didn’t have any reason to go along with the revisionist history lesson.

“Every month, we go out and put our lives on the line,” Piper snapped. “You’re a wolf, Mr. Deacon. You don’t know what it’s like to see your family, your friends, the fucking plumber become a killing machine that won’t even remember murdering you the next day. New York pays Night Shift a stipend and a bonus if they are hurt on the job. We get basic pay. Night Shift can’t even claim overtime during the full moon. So what if I found a way to make enough money that it was worth our while? No one got hurt. No one who mattered.”

“Liar,” Cade threw Piper’s accusation back in his teeth. “And I don’t care, so why are you telling me this shit?”

“People were loyal to me because I kept them alive and kept a roof over their head,” Piper said. “And I looked the part doing it. Been a while since I did anything other than pass the time between waking up and going to sleep. Hard to inspire much loyalty that way. Not when there’s someone else on the scene pulling their asses out of the fire and putting cash in their pockets.”

“And who’s that?” He didn’t get an answer. “Piper, whoever it is put the closest thing you have to a friend in the hospital. You and them? You aren’t working together anymore. They’ve left you behind.”

“I left them behind,” Piper corrected him. “That mess in The Reserve, with the traps? That wasn’t my style. It wasn’t business;it was personal. That was always their problem. Me, I like to keep things… transactional.”

Cade clenched his free fist in frustration and thumped it against the window a couple of times.

“What do you want?”

“My life back.”

The glass was cold against Cade’s knuckles as he leaned on it. “Try again.”

“I’m not here to bargain.”

“No, you’re there to pay,” Cade said. “You did what you did, and you didn’t do it well enough to get away with it. Now you expect me to fix that for you? This is the hole you dug for yourself.”

“Yeah, well, now I’m in that hole, it’s full of shit,” Piper said. “I want out. Out of prison, out of the system, and out of fucking New Mexico.”

“I can’t get you that.”

“If I were you, I’d try,” Piper said. “I talk to you, I end up dead. I don’t talk to you, same endgame. So you better have an ace in the hole to change the course of this game.”

Cade stepped away from the window before he tried to put his fist through it. The glass wouldn’t break, it was bulletproof and reinforced, and he’d just look stupid.

“The funny thing is, Piper, that Marlow is probably the only person in San Diego who still remembers when you were a good cop.”

“That’s his problem. I tried to kill him; he should know better.”

Resentment tasted like iron on Cade’s tongue, like the apples his stepmother pierced with nails to let the metal leech out into the flesh. Growing up in Alaska meant being short of some sort of vitamin or mineral during the year—unless it was one that came from game meat and beer.

“Yeah, I’d have learned my lesson,” Cade said. “Marlow, he likes to think the best of people.”

“Yeah?” Piper said. The background noise got louder as the prisoners shouted abuse at the guards on their rounds. The lazy drawl left Piper’s voice, and his words came out clipped and deliberate. “Well, get me what I want or real soon Marlow’s going to be disappointed in someone else. One thing my… associate… told me before he left? Third time’s the charm on killing a cat. Marlow isn’t going to see another full moon out without my help.”

He hung up.

Cade gave in to the urge and punched the window. He split the skin over his knuckles and dripped blood on the wooden floor as he called down to the legal department.

“Two?” the guy behind the counter asked, two fingers held up to check the order. When Cade nodded his agreement, the man turned and yelled it back into the kitchen, voice pitched to carry over the din of service. Then he gestured for Cade to move along to the other end of the shop, where he joined the short queue of people ready to pay.

Cade rolled his eyes in annoyance at the wait and checked his phone. His last message to Marlow was still unread, without even a flickering row of dots to show willing. Doubt made the back of Cade’s neck itch as he considered the unpleasant prospect of having to choke down two bowls of shrimp noodles on his own. Just in case anyone thought he’d been stood up.

The woman ahead of him handed her money over and took her tray in exchange. Cade stepped back to give her room to get by, and a lean black-clad arm reached past him to pay. Two crisp twenties and a “Keep the change” from Marlow won a quick nod of thanks from the woman behind the counter before she turned her attention to the next in the queue.

“I had it,” he said, his voice stiff in his throat as he lifted his carton from the tray. “You didn’t need to pay.”

Cade could have bought the restaurant, if he wanted, and made the staff make him mac and cheese. With the cash in his wallet, he could have paid for the next two hours of customers to eat on his tab. Yet he could still feel the dull ache of kicked pride in his chest and a weird sort of panic clutch at his throat.

If Marlow didn’t want his money, wasn’t seduced by the lifestyle, then what the hell did Cade have to offer him?

Nothing.

That answer came from the scrawny seventeen-year-old he’d been, who’d too much pride and not much else. Cade had come a long way from then, but he’d need to think about it for a while before he could come up with a better one.

“I asked you out,” Marlow reminded him. “My shout. I did expect you to pick somewhere fancier. With seats, maybe?”

Cade considered that for a second and decided he could live with it.

“According to Piper, you guys don’t get paid that much,” he said as he popped the styrofoam lid. Savory fishy steam rose from the sauce-covered shrimp piled on top of the bed of sticky noodles. Cade grabbed a pair of chopsticks from the small table at the door and stripped the paper off with his teeth. “So I thought I’d cut you a break.”

Marlow paused mid-reach for his utensils.

“You spoke to him?”

“He called me.” Cade glanced at the cluster of people by the counter. They all had their attention, one way or another, on the food. He gestured with the sticky chopsticks for Marlow to follow him outside. There still weren’t any seats, but there was a wall to lean on. “Bit of an asshole, isn’t he?”

“That’s one word for him,” Marlow said. He poked absently at the food until the shrimp was half-buried under the noodles. “What does he want?”

Cade raised his eyebrows. “What makes you think he wants anything?”

“If he’d told you anything, you would have led with that. So, what does he want?”

On the street, a cop car drove slowly by. Cade watched it pass and only relaxed when it turned the corner. His spats with the local LEOs were a game. They might not have thought so, but Cade knew just how far to push it. He was a thorn in their side they couldn’t afford to touch.

This was different. Whoever had taken over from Piper in the Night Shift wasn’t constrained by the SDPD’s rule book.

“Let me worry about that,” he said.

Marlow gave a humorless bark of laughter. “Easier said than done. Whatever it is, however he wants out of prison, tell him no.”

“I’ve not promised him anything,” Cade dodged around the truth. “And you’re wrong, he did tell me something.”

“What?”

“He wouldn’t give me their name, but he said whoever it was planned to kill you.”

Both of them made a living out of violence one way or another, so Cade didn’t expect Marlow to faint. But he had expected more reaction than the shrimp’s brief pause in midair, dangled from cheap chopsticks, before Marlow popped it into his mouth.

“We knew that.”

Cade jabbed a chopstick in Marlow’s direction. “During the next full moon. In a week. You need to fail your next physical. Give us time to find more leverage on Piper.”

“No.”

“He thinks he has the upper—” Cade stopped as he realized what Marlow had just said. “What?”

“I’m Night Shift,” Marlow said. “I can take care of myself. Besides, I wasn’t on duty the first time someone tried to kill me. I’d rather be armed and combat-ready if anyone is going to try something. Not balls-out naked and half-asleep.”

It sort of sounded like it made sense. It didn’t feel that way, though.

“Stay at mine,” he said. “Out in the sticks. No one around but wolves.”

Marlow ate the last shrimp tangled in thick, ribbony noodles, and neatly boxed up what was left.

“If they try and kill me, we’ll know who they are,” he said as he walked away to toss his leftovers in the bin. “Then Piper won’t have anything to trade, will he?”

“Or you’ll be dead,” Cade pointed out.

Marlow considered that as he wiped his hands on a napkin on the way back.

“Well, then you can talk to Piper,” he said after a moment. “I won’t care anymore.”

Cade growled under his breath. He could feel the itch along the nape of his neck where it wanted to be hackles. The moon wasn’t full enough to turn him inside out and let the wolf out, but he could feel it turn under his skin.

“I’ll be careful,” Marlow promised. “Besides, if you couldn’t kill me, what hope do they have?”

Cade swallowed, the taste of spicy shrimp gone rancid on his tongue as he remembered the greasy puke he’d thought was Marlow.

“That’s not funny.” Cade caught Marlow’s waist and pulled him closer. He leaned down until their foreheads touched, his mouth not quite against Marlow’s lips. “If you get killed, I’m going to make O’Hara’s life a misery. The whole SDPD is going to regret that I ever moved here.”

Marlow kissed him. It was rough and desperate, the only break in Marlow’s cool composure, and his hand dug into the back of Cade’s neck. Cade held his food clumsily to the side, the sauce hot enough to sting his fingers through the styrofoam.

“They already do,” Marlow said as he finally stepped back. “And I’m not going anywhere. Next date’s on you, remember? I want to see if you can actually ask me out without insulting me somehow.”

He grinned at Cade’s glare and left.

Cade watched him go for a heartbeat; then he tossed the remnants of his meal away. Sauce and shrimp splattered the sides of the bin and soaked down through the trash and discarded objects. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and called back into the office.

“Get Maria Cafolla off the streets,” he said as he headed away from the restaurant. “I want her safe, and I want her out of communication. It doesn’t matter how.”

He hung up before Lem could protest. It was time to turn the heat up on Piper.