Chapter 18

18

Rob was sweating. No denying that. He’d stopped by Mamaw’s Place tonight simply because the rest of the team was there and he wanted to listen to what was going on. Acardi looked fucking exhausted.

The younger man, a big bruiser who looked more at home in a boxing ring somewhere, was heading up a lot of the investigation into what had happened to Coleson, Erickson, and McKellen. Their division was already seriously shorthanded after so many in Major Crimes were injured in whatever had happened with Coleson’s estranged brother-in-law and everything.

Rumor had it something had even happened up in Wyoming that tied into it. Perps from Texas were killed up there or something. Rob wasn’t privileged enough to get in on those kinds of details. It was just one big clusterfuck.

It never ended—drugs. There was always something: meth, heroin, fentanyl, OPJ. There was always something, and if the stupid idiots couldn’t get illegal shit, they did things like prescriptions they stole or huffed paint or glue. It had been going on for longer than he had been alive, that was for sure. People who tried to clean it up were stupid. It wasn’t ever going away. It just got worse and worse. The only difference was the people hurt by it changed. The ones left behind.

Candy would have been forty today had she lived. Forty. Hell, where had the time gone? She’d been twenty-five when Charlie Fields had let everything first go to shit for her. She hadn’t had any better luck since that day. Now her boys were almost men. Screw-ups, both of them. Just as fucked up as their mother.

The cycle was going to repeat itself, no matter what Rob did to fix it. He’d tried to help those boys for years. To help his sister. But she’d been in and out of the prison system since that day. Since Charlie Fields.

Rob saw it every damned day. Perps in, perps out. System just churning them over and over. Same process, different names. Cops were no better. He’d worked with dozens in his years who were nowhere around now. The ones who had stuck it through were almost unrecognizable from what they once had been.

And now... he had done something stupid. For what? Revenge? What did revenge matter now?

Fields was retiring. Candy was rotting in the grave. A grave paid for by the state, because Candy hadn’t had anything left.

Hell, she hadn’t had a chance once Fields arrested her back then. She hadn’t had a prayer.

And there was nothing Rob could do now to fix it.

His sister was dead. There was no going back.