“Nice boss,” he said.
“No, you have no idea,” he whispered. He shook his head, laid back down, and stared up at the cops. “Just shoot me, please.”
“No, I can’t do that,” Ansel said mildly. “But you can bet we’ll take you to prison and will let everybody know where you are.”
“I won’t last a night,” he said. “And that’s a fact.”
Ansel looked at the intruder intently.
“Of course, he already has several of the guards in his palm,” Caleb said.
“Interesting,” Ansel murmured.
“You guys have no idea how much corruption there is,” the intruder said.
“Well, we have a good idea. We’re getting a handle on it,” he said.
“He grabs brothers, daughters, sisters, friends,” he said. “He takes whoever you care about and holds them until he’s got you where he wants you. Then and only then he releases them, if you’re lucky. And, if you’re lucky, he releases them alive. Otherwise, he just keeps them as a threat over your head.”
“Is that what happened to you?”
“Yeah, my kid brother a long time ago,” he said. “He was really sick and couldn’t pay for the treatments he needed as he didn’t have no insurance. So my agreement was, I work for Huevo and do his dirty jobs to keep my brother alive.”
“And how long did that last?”
“My brother died about a year and a half later,” he said, “but, by then, I was already in so deep.”
“Did you ever wonder if he didn’t kill your brother anyway?”
“I did wonder, and I have no proof,” he said, “but it’s something that eats away at me.”
“How did your brother die?”
He looked at him. “A drive-by bullet.”
“Well, that’s pretty obvious.”
“And still I can do nothing about it. He doesn’t accept anything but blind loyalty. And no screw-ups.”
“Can you identify the guys he’s killed?” Ansel asked him.
“Some of them,” he said. “Well, most of them probably.”
“We’ll need a list of those names,” he said, “because, if nothing else, families are out there, looking for their loved ones.”
“Won’t even be anything left,” he said. “Those dogs are so damn vicious.”
“And, of course, they are more vicious because he keeps them half-starved.”
“That’s the only saving grace,” the gunman said quietly. “At least for the people still alive when they go in. They die quickly.”
“Well, the dogs will have to be put down. You know that.”
“I do,” he said, “and I, for one, would like to see it. I know that they didn’t deserve it and all that jazz,” he said, “but they’re too far gone now.”
“Good to know,” Ansel said, as he looked at Caleb.
“There still could be a chance to save the dogs,” Caleb said.
“You know what happens when you are after killer dogs.”
He nodded. “I know. It just breaks my heart because it wasn’t their fault.”
“It isn’t, but it is,” the gunman said. “God, I’m so tired of this life. Good to know it will be over soon.”
“Well, you could also do something right for a change, before it’s over,” the detective said.
He looked at him, smiled, and said, “If it takes down that asshole, fine, but I’m telling you that I won’t live until tomorrow. So anything you want to know, you need to know tonight.”
Chapter 15
Laysha watched as the detective marched the intruder outside onto the porch, where she stood with the other dogs. Graynor walked over, put his heavily grayed muzzle into her palm. She gently stroked his face and whispered, “Thank you, boy.”
His tail wagged, as he sat beside her, the other dogs milling around. They didn’t have the same guard-dog instinct that he did. They were family pets. They would bark if there was something to bark at, but they wouldn’t see it ahead of time. At least the guy from her horrible being-followed incident earlier today was now safely caught. At that, she looked up to see Caleb make his way slowly down the stairs. She winced as she saw how stiff he was. “Too bad I don’t have a hot tub,” she murmured, as he came close, wrapped an arm around her shoulders. He dropped a kiss on her forehead.
“I have to admit that sounds about right for tonight,” he said. He watched with her as the intruder was loaded into Ansel’s vehicle.
“Is he connected to the one who abused Beowulf?”
“Not only connected but he’s also the one who shot the guy at the rental house.”
She looked up at him in surprise. “Seriously? He admitted that?”
“More or less. He said it was his cousin, and he didn’t have a whole lot of choice, according to him.”
“Well, it depends,” she said. “Sometimes you just get in so deep that there’s no way out.”
“And that’s partly what this was. Apparently that Huevo guy has kept a grip on this area for a long time, making them do things that nobody was comfortable doing.”
“I can believe it.”
“So can I,” he said. “I saw it with my own eyes today.”
“That just makes it way worse,” she said. “I’m sorry you had to see it.” Gently she wrapped her arms around him and held him carefully. She knew how sore he had to be after that long run. They had only spoken about his injuries once and not so much about his recovery, but she knew that he had both because she’d seen the scars when he took off his shirt at night before sleeping.
And she’d seen the soreness as he tried to move sometimes and didn’t quite make it the way he thought he would. Anything that hurt him hurt her. To think about all the suffering he’d already gone through choked her up. And knowing those risks just made it that much harder to let him go off and do whatever he felt he needed to do. But she also knew that to hold the warrior back, like Graynor, she couldn’t do that to them. They
