Groaning, Garrett rubbed his face with both hands. “Yeah, there’ve been some cutbacks, so things were already stretched thinly. Even bringing in teams from other areas was going to be delayed by traffic jams and the rush hour, which was made worse by a ton of roadworks and maintenance that they had going on. Basically, the whole thing was a nightmare from the very beginning.”
“So was it just your dad?”
“No, some other officers were able to attend to help him out, but the chief told him that he was to go up there and assist because they had high profile situations with multiple persons at risk in other locations across the city at that time.”
“Jesus,” he winced.
“Dad’s been doing the job long enough that he’s been in situations like that before, so he went up and used his training to talk to the man and find out what was going on. He was just your average Joe, Garrett, but he’d invested all of his savings and income in some sort of hedge fund run by a businessman called Cevdet Gjorka. The man was about to lose the home his family was in because he’d been so set on gaining money that he’d missed mortgage payments.”
Groaning, he tipped his head back. “I know this case. He lost his footing as they were walking back up the roof tiles, and they went over, didn’t they?”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “Cevdet had just arrived at the scene to talk to the man. They landed on his car.”
“Fuuuuck,” he drawled, rubbing both eyes with the palms of his hands. “Yeah, it was being broadcast live.”
It had been. A news crew had set up five minutes previously to report live on what was going on as it involved such a high profile businessman. One of the apartment block’s residents had heard the shouting and the guy’s name and had been Tweeting about it the whole time, alerting a news crew to what was going on. The reporter was in the middle of telling viewers about what they were being told by the resident about the situation when the man slipped. They cut the feed as soon as it happened, but it’d been seen by tens of thousands of people.
“After it was all investigated and the inquest was over, people associated with it started either going missing, or they ended up dead. Then it turned to the police, and Dad was advised to take precautions as they believed—but couldn’t confirm—that he was involved and getting revenge on the people he felt, and still feels, played a part in his daughter’s death.”
Garrett’s eyes almost drilled into me with their intensity. “Including you.”
The smile that I plastered on my face was brittle. “As a way to get back at my dad.”
Leaning forward, he rested his forearms on his knees and stared at me. “What happened?”
“I was walking along Hudson River Waterfront Walk with my friend after we’d watched a charity golf game at Liberty National Golf Course when we heard bangs. I don’t know if it was a warning or if the person was a really shitty shooter, but he kept missing us and hit three other people instead. We had to run to get to where I’d parked, and on the way home, someone tried to run us off the road. I drove straight to Dad, and when we got there, we saw someone had scratched into the paint are you afraid of heights. Dad also had swords stabbed into all four of his tires with his name engraved in them.”
He was staring at me in shock when I finished, absorbing this. “Why didn’t this ever make the news or become public knowledge.”
“Because then photos of me would have been broadcasted, or my social media would’ve been. That’s what always happens nowadays, and any hope of disappearing would’ve been gone because I’d have had no anonymity.”
Nodding slowly again, he murmured, “Makes sense.”
“I left a couple of days later in the trunk of my neighbor’s car, and I kept changing vehicles every eight hours because we didn’t know what kind of intel Cevdet had. Dad knows Alex, so he spoke to him, and he recommended Piersville. Dave and Tabby came to meet me, and I relocated here.”
He didn’t say a word when I finished, and my palms started to get sweaty as the silence dragged on. Finally—effing finally—he dropped his head and sighed.
“What in the fuck is wrong with people? I spent years involved in shit overseas with terrorists and stains on the souls of society, and all the time we’ve got assholes like this here?” His head snapped up, and he glared at the wall behind me. “Do people even watch international news and take it in? Do they even think that with that shit going on somewhere else, it’d be nice to keep their home country clean and fresh?”