“Maybe you should have done that first,” Margot told him.
“I told him the same thing,” Mr. Oliver said as he tried to stand up. Mal pushed him back down and started putting handcuffs on him.
Steve ran and got behind Margot.
“You sold out your own kid?” Margot asked Mr. Oliver.
“They said they just wanted to talk to him.”
“And you believed them?” Mal asked.
“Keep your mouth shut, old man,” the shooter said.
Ames asked, “This isn’t about video games, is it?”
“I want my lawyer.”
After he had bracelets on the shooter, Ames turned to Steven. “Tell me about the storage unit.”
“You’d better keep your mouth shut, kid,” the shooter told him.
“You know if I shot you, I’d get away with it,” Ames informed the shooter coldly. He looked back to Steven. “Don’t listen to this asshole. He was already going to kill you and your brother, what else can he threaten you with? Is he going to kill you twice?”
“It’s the one on Market Street. Unit 53A.”
“You shouldn’t have done that!” the shooter yelled.
“This might be a good time to confess, otherwise I’d start taking that right to remain silent a bit more seriously if I was you.”
“You can’t go in there without a warrant.”
“I can ask the owner to let me in,” Ames told him.
“Go ahead and ask. I’ll say no.”
“Did everybody else hear this idiot tell me he owns the storage unit?” Ames asked.
Mal laughed. “Next time a cop tells you to take your right to remain silent a bit more seriously, you should listen.”
Chapter 7
“Roland Tenner.”
“What?”
“That was the body in the storage unit,” Mal told Margot before taking a drink of his Margarita. She’d agreed to meet him at Lefty’s Beach Bar and Grill for drinks and tacos.
Margot wasn’t sure if she should ask what happened after that night at the shot house. Always talking about work could get dull; plus, it might be the last thing he wanted to talk about. She was glad he brought it up though. She’d been on paid leave while they investigated her shooting the guy at Ms. Oliver’s house. From what she could tell, it wasn’t going to be a problem, as it was clearly self-defense. It helped that the guy had lived.
“Who was Roland Tenner and what did he do to end up dead with a room full of gaming systems and televisions?”
Mal shrugged. “Hard to say, though he did have an unusual amount of electronic goods in his garage and had a lot of nice stuff for an unemployed bartender.”
“A fence?”
“That would be my guess. Probably some kind of dispute with our suspects led to him catching a bullet.”
“Why’d they leave him in storage? He was going to start to smell.”
“Start to my ass—he was already ripe when I got there. I’d guess they had other plans, but the kids breaking in made them decide to put them off until they had a few more bodies to dispose of. Of course, it’s all guesswork, our boys aren’t talking much. Both of them lawyered up pretty quickly. Not that it’s going to matter since the D.A. can take a pick of crimes to prosecute that we caught them in red-handed. It looks like they moved a lot of stolen goods. They’d had the unit plus a couple others. Looks like the storage facility was in on it. They let them see the video surveillance of Darin and Steve breaking in. Steve says they had no idea there was a body inside.”
“They were just stealing televisions and gaming systems.”
“It looks like they stole from the wrong guys.”
“That’s the truth. Oliver mentioned Harry Lee. Was there anything to that?”
“Nothing we could find. It doesn’t mean he wasn’t involved—he’s into a lot of shit—trust me, I know better than most. Of course, because he’s into a lot of shit, he’s an easy name to drop too.”
“Even Oliver won’t say anything?”
“No, but that’s less about him being a hardened con like the other two and more about him just not knowing anything. The two punks approached him when they figured out it was his kid on video. It’s too bad, he’s going to do some time. If he had something to trade, he might have got himself a few more years of freedom.”
“I hate to say it, but him getting locked up will be good for the family.”
“Don’t hate saying it, he’s a piece of shit. I feel for the kids having their dad turn on them like that. It looks like Steve was scared enough when they got to the shot house that he called his dad for help.”
“And dad sold him out?”
“Yep. It’s tough knowing your dad is a total scumbag.”
“You don’t have to tell me about it,” Margot muttered. Her mom was out of the hospital, but the man who put her was still sharing her bed.
“That sounds like you have some experience.”
Margot thought about telling him the whole story. It might be therapeutic to say the whole thing out loud, but she wasn’t ready to open up quite yet. Instead, she just said, “You could say that.”
“There’s a reason you’re going above and beyond for the likes of Ms. Oliver, isn’t there?”
“Other than she needed help?”
“Lots of people need help for lots of things.”
Margot drank some of her own Margarita before replying, “You’re not wrong.”
“It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it. If you want, we can just sit here and drink.”
Margot drank some more. “Maybe someday, but not today.”
“No problem, everybody is entitled to secrets.”
“You say that like a man with secrets.”
“You're not wrong.”
Margot thought about what Ames had told her and asked, “Is one of those secrets concerning Harry Lee?”
“Seems you’ve heard some rumors.”
“It happens.”
“You know they say that kind of thing about every undercover who’s worth a damn. If you’re good enough to fool the bad guys, you’re bound to fool some good guys along the way.”
“Yeah, I get that, but sometimes
