I bristled. I both liked and, more importantly, respected my boss. I opened my mouth to annihilate him, but Cho beat me to the punch.
“Fuck you, Brodie,”she said, her voice thick with disgust.“Just because your last partner did everything for you is no reason to bad-mouth Kage. If Standish had found out that Patel did all the paperwork and follow-up, he would have never transferred you up here.”
“Listen,”he began.“You don’t know what you’re—”
“Oh, the hell she doesn’t,”Lopez said, talking over him. I could tell she didn’t like him any more than Cho did.“We all know the way you treated Patel was fucked up, but it was her place to say and nobody else’s. But don’t sit there and tell us this isn’t about following procedure, because that’s crap and we both fuckin’ know you.”
The way Lopez had finished, daring him to say anything, her dark-brown eyes narrowing as she stared him down, had told me exactly what she thought of him—not much.
Brodie had scoffed, drained his beer, and left us, not bothering to cough up any cash for his drink.
“Tell me,”I’d prodded Lopez and Cho, and they explained how Deputy US Marshal Meera Patel had been under the mistaken notion that she was in love with her old partner. As a result, she’d been devoted to Brodie, covering for him, doing his paperwork, and inadvertently giving him a record he didn’t deserve. When she was recuperating after being shot in the line of duty, he’d put in for a transfer, and since we were short, they’d moved him.
“Meera was all broken up,”Cho explained sadly, her hazel eyes softening as she thought about her colleague, who might have been a friend, but it wasn’t my place to ask.“I mean there she was, in the hospital, and he was gone.”
Lopez had shaken her head, her long ponytail swishing with emphasis.“We all knew he was a waste of space, but to break up with her when she was in the hospital was bad even for him.”
Cho’s disgusted grunt turned my attention to her.“He gutted her, but…”She’d suddenly brightened, smiling at me.“Over time, she got strong again, inside and out.”
“Yeah,”Lopez agreed with a grin, and I was betting the men around me must have thought I was a very lucky man to have two beautiful women smiling at me. “She met this superhot ATF agent, and now they’re married with their first kid on the way.”
“Oh my God, so hot,”Cho seconded Lopez’s words.“I asked her if he had brothers.”
Lopez nodded.“Same.”
“So what you’re saying is that misery was avoided on Patel’s part because she got over Brodie,”I summarized with a chuckle.
“Yes,”Lopez agreed.“Though that leaves us stuck with probably the biggest douche to ever wear the star.”
When Miro Jones, my friend and fellow marshal, joined us, both women wanted to chat with him about Custodial WITSEC, which he headed.
“Why do you look like you ate a bad burrito?”he’d asked me, grinning like crazy.
“I think we got a lemon in Brodie.”
Miro shrugged.“If that’s true, he won’t survive Ian. C’mon. You know that.”
And he wouldn’t. He’d been on thin ice for a while, and now Shawn Pelham was the final nail in his coffin. Because yes, fugitives remained cuffed on flights, many were shackled as well, but not witnesses. The people we protected didn’t want to leave us or hurt us; they wanted to be safe. There was no reason Shawn Pelham should have spent his flight from Sacramento to Chicago in handcuffs.
Ian and I walked Shawn back to the house he’d been visiting—next door to the place swarming with police. As soon as we were halfway up the driveway, just to find out what was going on, nine girls—all minors, not one appeared older than sixteen—came flying up to Shawn, each trying to hug him at once.
“What’re you doing back here?” he asked worriedly as he tried to get them all in his arms. “What if those assholes see you?”
I was so confused. I wasn’t the only one.
It was a bad day, one of the worst ones, because we soon discovered, the way the girls were talking over each other, trying to deliver information to him at once, that another house, close to the first, had a similar scenario. Days like this, I was deeply concerned with the state of the human race. This was also why I had very few friends outside of law enforcement. I tended to rant about the state of affairs, and people in my field forgave me when I got emotional. Everyone else found my getting up and down from my soapbox tiring.
We were standing with Shawn and his ducklings—none of them wanted to leave him—as an FBI special agent from the second house came and spoke to us. It turned out that the people around the corner from the couple we’d just arrested for trafficking women were Serbian mobsters running a brothel.
“The fuck!” Ian was flabbergasted. “This is Schaumberg!”
Special Agent Tala Santos was as surprised as Ian, and she gave him the rundown as to why they were there.
“Your friend,” she said dryly, shooting both me and Ian a look like we weren’t doing our jobs, “took all these girls to a hospital close by last night and told the attending that he thought they might have been hurt.”
“Wait,” Ian said, sounding tired, “he loaded nine girls into a car and no one saw him take them away?”
“Apparently, from what Katarina there told us”—she pointed at a tall redhead—“when he was taking out the trash, he saw her in the window in the basement and went to check on her…as you do.” She rolled her eyes. “And since he couldn’t speak to her through the window, he pried it open with a crowbar he got from his friend’s car so they could chat.”