“Everything. We can trust him.”
“If you trust him, I trust him. He definitely seemed like a good guy when I worked with him. But we’re putting him in a hell of a difficult position. He’s still a Deputy Chief Marshal.” He swung his feet down to the floor. His gaze was intent on hers. “And you’re still a Marshal, Gretchen. You’re even more of a Marshal than you are a shifter. I can’t let you give that up.”
“I’m not giving that up.” She wasn’t one hundred percent sure that was true, but it felt like the right morning for being hopeful. “I’m too much of a workaholic to just shrug off my life and say we should head to South America and try living on a beach somewhere in a country that doesn’t have extradition. Besides, I have nieces and nephews who are going to be expecting birthday presents from Cool Aunt Gretchen, and there’s no way I’m not going to be around to see Theo and Jillian have their baby. We’re not going to throw my career away. We’re going to get yours back.”
“How?” he said, sitting up even straighter. His face was shining.
She deflated a little. “Okay, admittedly I haven’t figured that out yet. But I’m not giving up, and neither should you.”
“As long as I’m with you,” Cooper said, “it’s pretty easy to be hopeful.”
*
So she called Martin. The landlines were still down, but she at least had some spotty cell phone signal.
He answered at once. “Gretchen, thank God. The storm hit so fast last night that I was worried.”
“I’m fine, and so is Cooper. He tore some of his stitches last night, but he’s doing a lot better now. How’s Keith?”
“Out of the woods. He signed out of the hospital about an hour ago, so he got out of there before
they noticed how much he was on the mend. We’re looking after him, but he’s more or less back on his feet.”
“Good. Tell him I’m glad. He wasn’t bad in the field, you know, not when it came right down to it. I think he’ll shake out okay.”
“Mm,” Martin said.
“You sound skeptical.”
“Not about Keith. I’ve been saying that all along. I sound skeptical because you sound like you’re about to drop another problem on my lap now that you know Keith’s is safely off it. I’m just trying to prepare myself.”
“Nobody likes people who are right about everything, Chief.” She reached over and took Cooper’s hand, intertwining their fingers. She needed to hold onto him. “People are probably going to ask you later what I said in this phone call, and whatever you tell them, I don’t think it should be the truth.”
She heard a staticky silence on the other end of the line, and then Martin said gently, “Tell me.”
“Cooper’s innocent. You already knew I thought that.”
“I think that too. I trust your instincts.”
“I can’t take him to Bergen. Or any other prison.”
“Gretchen—”
“Prison is killing him, Martin. His griffin was wasting away—”
“Wait, his what? Dawes is a shifter?”
“Yeah. A griffin.”
Martin sighed. “Long-term confinement is hard on anybody, but especially when you know in your heart that you’re supposed to be off somewhere flying. Tell him I understand that much. I couldn’t get along without the sky either.”
“So prison is bad for him,” Gretchen said. “And even if it wasn’t, being cooped up there just makes him an easy target. I think the people who are after us now are the same ones who framed him.”
“Law of conservation of suspects,” Martin agreed. “Why have two different groups of bad guys when you could just have one?”
She nodded, forgetting that he couldn’t see her, and then slowly worked her way back through it, thinking out loud. “They framed him, and once everyone blamed him and it was all in the past, they tried to have him killed. We think it’s the mob trying to tie off loose ends. They hacked the records and framed him, but they screwed up by leaving him alive to maybe poke around in their business, and now they’re trying to correct that little mistake.”
It didn’t sound wrong, but it didn’t sound entirely right, either, and she didn’t know if Martin was completely convinced.