Nightfire: A Protectors Novel: Marine Force Recon

  “A—a little. Nothing serious.”

  “Yeah?” Kelly had been writing in his notebook but at Mike’s words he looked up, face clenched like a fist. “I don’t know what your definition of ‘a little rough’ is, Keillor, but it’s not mine.”

  He reached into an envelope and pulled out some glossy 8 x 10s and tossed them down onto the coffee table. Mike leaned forward, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. Red and black, misshapen flesh . . . then the image resolved itself into the shocking images of a badly beaten woman.

  He narrowed his eyes. Something about the badly beaten face was familiar . . . Oh God. The woman he’d fucked last night.

  Shocked, he looked up into Kelly’s angry eyes.

  “Shattered jaw, concussion, broken forearm, three broken ribs, internal hemorrhaging it took surgery to stop, and a crushed spleen. That’s not what I call ‘a little roughness,’ Keillor.”

  “Christ. I didn’t do that to her.” Mike stood, unable to sit still. “I couldn’t do that to any woman. The only thing I did was hold her down when she asked for it.” And well, fuck her harder. But she’d asked for that, too.

  Kelly made an angry gesture at the spill of horrific photographs. “That looks like someone who was just held down? She was beaten half to death.”

  “Christ, Bill.” A sudden shudder of fear struck Mike. He wasn’t used to fear, but this was a new type of fear he’d never encountered before. If Bill Kelly, who knew him, thought he was capable of doing this, what about other officers in the Violent Crimes Squad? All his dealings had been mainly in SWAT. But the SDPD was big. There were plenty of officers who didn’t know him and weren’t willing to take anyone’s word that Mike simply wasn’t capable of this kind of violence against a woman.

  Against an enemy who attacked him, sure. But a woman? Never.

  It was beginning to sink in that he was going to have to convince skeptical officers he wasn’t the one. And the D.A. And—God—maybe eventually a jury.

  Kelly gave him a hard look. “So you’re telling me you didn’t have sex with this woman? And be careful what you say because we found a used condom in the bathroom.” He snorted. “Used, not filled. You didn’t even come, you poor bastard. So—what’s the DNA test gonna show? And remember your DNA is on file.”

  Every police officer had donated DNA via a cheek swab to establish a data file.

  “Yeah, okay, we had sex.”

  “Uh-huh,” Kelly said. “And?”

  “And . . . I didn’t come. She was . . . asking me to be rough with her. Couldn’t do it.”

  Now Kelly looked at him in pity. Kelly was a straight and narrow kind of guy who probably only got laid on St. Patrick’s Day. Mike used to feel sorry for him but he suddenly realized the truth. Kelly was right and he was wrong. Fucking around was not good.

  Kelly sighed. “The, um, lady in question used crack. We found it everywhere. You’re a former police officer. Former Marine. Marines and crack. That’s not a good mix, Keillor. You should have kept it in your pants.”

  Mike closed his eyes. Kelly was right. He should have kept it in his pants.

  “So . . . what’s your version? Tell me what went down.”

  Mike clenched his jaw. Christ, he didn’t want to talk about it. Any of it.

  Silence. Mike could hear his own teeth grinding.

  Kelly sighed and stood. “Okay, if you’re not talking, we need to take it downtown, Keillor.”

  Sam and Harry rose together.

  Mike unclenched his jaw. It took effort. “Stand down, guys. Sit back down.” Man, he wished his brothers weren’t here, but they were and they weren’t leaving. For the first time since he’d walked into Old Man Hughes’ house of horror and discovered that he’d landed in another shithole of a foster home, but that there were two other boys who immediately had his back, Mike wished Sam and Harry were less loyal. What he wanted was to quietly clear this up with Kelly and not have his brothers involved.

  But Sam and Harry were hard-wired for loyalty. They weren’t about to let him face this alone.

  Shit.

  “Down, everyone,” he repeated, and Sam and Harry sat back down, on the edges of the couch. Kelly stood for another long moment, grim-faced, then finally sat back down. He pulled out a notebook and waited.

  “Okay,” Mike said. He closed his eyes for a moment, almost tasting the cold steel in his mouth as he bit the bullet. “I was feeling restless last night. Went out around eleven. I wasn’t in the mood for trendy bars, martinis, picking up investment bankers.” No, he’d felt like going to a place as shitty as he felt. But he couldn’t say that in front of Sam and Harry because they’d beat themselves up over not recognizing that he felt shitty and busting their asses to make him feel better.

  Sometimes Mike wished his brothers weren’t such stand-up guys. Wished they were worse friends. Wished they didn’t care so much about him.

  “I, ah, tooled around a little. Ended up in Logan Heights, in a place called The Cave.”

  Kelly held up a hand, spoke quietly in his cell, flipped it closed. Bent back over his notebook. “Okay. Get on with it.”

  “I . . . drank. A lot.” Mike looked over at Sam and Harry. Both had poker faces. When Harry came back a human wreck from Afghanistan, essentially wanting to die, he’d tried the drinking-himself-to-death thing for a while, night after night. Mike and Sam had let him, because it’s not easy to drink yourself to death, though God knows Harry tried. Mike and Sam had taken away his guns, wouldn’t let him swim out to where he couldn’t come back, and for a very bad month there had put up unbreakable screens around Harry’s balcony.

  But they let him try to drink himself to death because it was really hard to do and Harry wasn’t managing it.

  Mike had his drinking moments, too, only not with Harry’s good reasons. It had been touch-and-go whether Harry would ever walk again, ever spend a minute of his life without excruciating pain, would ever have anything resembling a normal life.

  And Mike’s excuse? Nothing. Which was precisely what he felt sometimes—absolutely nothing inside.

  It shamed him, but there it was. He didn’t even have Sam and Harry’s tragic childhoods as an excuse. He’d been securely wrapped in the strong embrace of a loving family until scumbags shot his mother and father and two brothers in a botched robbery and his childhood ended. That was on the twelfth of March twenty-five years ago when Michael Patrick Keillor was ten years old. On the thirteenth of March of that year, he was already an old man of ten, broken in two by grief.

  But until that day, his life had been charmed.

  And he drank to forget his life from that March 13 on.

  “Get shit-faced?” Kelly asked.

  It was sort of a technical term. Drunkenness had its own taxonomy and “shit-faced” was what he’d been.

  “Yeah,” Mike answered quietly.

  Kelly sat and looked at him, pen hovering over paper. “And?”

  “I picked up this—” This what? Girl wasn’t the right term. Lady wasn’t right, either. “Woman.”

  Actually, she’d picked him up.

  “Name?” Kelly was staring at his notebook and Mike had a sudden flash that Kelly didn’t want to watch his face as he recounted something depressing.

  Mike didn’t answer, and Kelly finally looked up.

  “I told you. Don’t know her name,” Mike said quietly, and the three men winced. Man, not getting a chick’s name was bad. He’d fucked her, at least partially, but he didn’t know her name. There was really no excuse and he didn’t offer one.

  Kelly was staring at him now, as if trying to get inside his head. Kelly was an alpha male, too, and Mike didn’t ordinarily let men stare at him. He’d have bristled except he knew that Kelly was only doing his job. Mike had forfeited his right to indignation.

  “I gave you a name,” Kelly finally said. “Mila Koravich. Ring a bell?”

  Mike shook his head. He doubted they’d exchanged ten words together.

  “Working
girl?” Kelly asked casually, and this time Mike winced.

  “No.” Though she might have been. Cokehead, filthy hovel of a place. She might have been. “Not that I knew of, anyway. She didn’t ask for money.” If she had, he’d have refused. Part of his no-go list. No married ladies, no addicts—though he’d sandbagged on that one—no working girls.

  No, siree. Mike Keillor had standards. High ones, too.

  Another long silence. Mike couldn’t meet Sam’s and Harry’s eyes. You wouldn’t catch them puking the bourbon out of their guts at 2 A.M. in a miserable hole. No, at 2 A.M. they were with their wives, where you could find them every night of their lives they weren’t on the road for work. And both of them made real efforts to come home as quickly as possible because what waited for them at home was something pretty damned wonderful.

  “So,” Kelly said the words in a level voice, one by one, without any inflection, “you got rough.”

  Mike stared at the floor.

  “Real rough.” Something in Kelly’s voice made Mike raise his head and frown.

  He was nauseated at the memory. “I, ah, I held her down. My hands were, yeah, a—a little rough. She asked me to hold her down, do her hard. But I hated that. Her wrists were a little red when I lifted my hands.”

  “And?” Kelly asked, his voice harsh.

  Mike shrugged. “It wasn’t that bad.”

  Kelly leaned forward, got in his face. “I don’t know what your definition of bad is, Keillor. But mine includes the kind of violence that was done to that woman. No one deserves that kind of treatment. She was under the knife for four hours.”

  Mike’s head snapped up. “Whoa. I held her wrists, that’s it. They were red and a little swollen when I lifted my hands, I told you. But that was absolutely it. There wasn’t anything that would require—God!—surgery. Nothing even remotely like that.”

  “Let me remind you.” Kelly flipped back to the beginning of his notebook but he had it all memorized. He barely glanced at his own notes. “The woman was brought into the hospital with a shattered jaw, concussion, broken bones, crushed spleen.”

  “No, man.” Just hearing the list made him sick. “That wasn’t me. Jesus, I could never do that to a woman. Listen, this is what went down. I picked up this woman at a bar, The Cave. We went to her house and had sex. Some sex, anyway. She wanted me to get rough with her and it just turned me off. I went into her bathroom and took off my condom, which won’t have sperm DNA, and puked in her toilet. I left her mad at me and screaming, so if anyone reported noise, that was it. I thought I might still have alcohol in my system and I needed air and exercise, so I left my vehicle there and ran to the ferry, ran down to Coronado Shores.”

  “What time did you get home?”

  “I don’t—wait. I got home around five. Yeah. When I got out of the shower my digital alarm clock read 5:17. I stood on my balcony and watched the sun come up and went in to work.”

  Kelly’s jaw muscles worked as he stared at Mike, eyes cold.

  “Well, let me tell you what we’ve got, Keillor. We’ve got a 911 call clocked at 4:02. Screaming and the sounds of a violent beating in room 321 at 445 Alameda Street, the home of one Mila Koravich. The cops found her unconscious and EMS took her to E and A, where she was in surgery by 5:15. We dusted for prints, found some good ones on the iron bedstead and on the tiles over the toilet.”

  God. Mike flashed on a vision of pumping into the woman while holding on to the bedstead because he’d suddenly had an aversion to touching her anywhere except with his cock. He’d held her down only when she insisted. And he remembered bracing himself against the wall over the toilet while puking.

  “We ran the prints.” Kelly huffed out air through his nose like an enraged bull. “Prints pinged with a lot of lowlifes, but all of us were astonished when your prints came up. Fresh prints. We ran it twice.”

  Mike had been in the armed services and had been a law enforcement officer. Of course his prints were on file. He had a sick feeling in his stomach.

  “So we took your SDPD ID to all the bars in the area, and at The Cave we struck gold. You left with Mila Koravich, who by the way has had two arrests for prostitution and possession, at a quarter past midnight. The bartender confirmed the ID. He said he saw you leave with Koravich. This morning at eight, when she came out of anesthesia, Koravich ID’d you as the man who beat her up.”

  Sam and Harry rose again as one unit, big tough men, presenting a united front. “That’s ridiculous,” Sam growled. “You heard Mike, he was home by five A.M.”

  The four men stared at one another. Mike could feel the aggression bristling from Sam and Harry but Kelly stood his ground. He wasn’t the kind of man to be intimidated. He’d been a Marine, he was now a very good cop. Not the kind of man who bent when pressure was applied.

  Kelly ignored Sam and Harry and fixed Mike with a glare.

  If he looked carefully, though, Mike could see pain behind the cold gray stare. He didn’t like suspecting Mike. And he didn’t like investigating him. But it was his duty, so he was going to do it.

  Like that old SEAL saying. You don’t have to like it, you just have to do it.

  Kelly stuck his notebook in the saggy pocket of his jacket, which looked like he’d slept in it for the past month. “Gonna have to take this downtown, Keillor. No other way around it.” He held up a big hand, palm out, when Sam and Harry took a step forward. “Guys. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. Your choice.”

  Mike felt old, all of a sudden. Old and ashamed. He hadn’t beaten up the woman. He knew he hadn’t and he trusted Kelly to be a good enough cop to follow the evidence. He’d be exonerated. Eventually.

  But it might come to some nasty things before the situation got resolved. He might have to put up bail. RBK was doing real well but they were in the process of making major investments and taking a good chunk out of that would hurt his brothers. Mike knew that Kelly would instinctively try to shield him from the press but if word got out that Michael Keillor of RBK had been arrested for assault, it would be a huge blow to the good name of the company they’d all worked so hard to build.

  It was very possible that Mike was going to watch his brothers, his company, get covered in mud. Not to mention costing money at exactly the wrong time.

  He had no one to blame but himself for this, no one.

  He hadn’t beaten up this woman. He wasn’t guilty of that, but he was guilty of everything else. He was guilty of not being able to spend one night alone, at the age of thirty-five. He was guilty of getting drunk and picking up a woman he knew nothing about and, which two seconds’ worth of thought in his head, as opposed to doing his thinking with his dick, would have told him was bad news, the worst.

  He was guilty of dishonoring his company, his brothers. He was guilty of shaming his brothers’ wives, two women he loved and respected.

  “D.A.’s waiting,” Kelly said and Mike closed his eyes. Yeah, the D.A.’d be waiting and since he was ex-SDPD, they’d throw the book at him on principle. No one could afford to appear to favor a former cop. Kelly’d gone way out on a limb here for him, and he would pay.

  If the press got a whiff of special treatment, Kelly’d be in deepest shit. The tabloids and political websites would bay for blood.

  “We’re coming with Mike.” Sam’s voice was flat. It wasn’t a question. Kelly hesitated. He was a tough guy but getting into a pissing contest with Sam and Harry presenting a united front wasn’t anyone’s idea of fun.

  Christ, no. Mike didn’t want his brothers anywhere near this.

  Mike would have given anything at that moment to have less loyal brothers. He didn’t want them to troop downtown and watch him being treated like a potential felon. There’d be newbies at HQ, men who didn’t know Mike and who for the rest of their days would know him as the ex-cop accused of assaulting a cokehead after sex. Mike’s disastrous misjudgments would be right there, out in the open for all to see and snigger over.

  His brothers would s
ee that. Would suffer for that.

  Mike wanted his brothers safely in their homes, with their families, where they belonged. They deserved that. They didn’t deserve what was about to go down.

  Thank God Merry and Gracie weren’t old enough to understand anything at all about this sordid clusterfuck. Mike couldn’t live with himself if he had to watch the confusion and pain in his nieces’ eyes as they realized that their Unca Mike was accused of something so horrendous.

  Mike turned to pick up his jacket to follow Kelly when he stopped in horror. It was like the entire world paused as he swooped right down into a deeper level of hell. All his previous regrets meant nothing because there was Chloe. Standing in the doorway, staring at him with sadness in her golden eyes.

  Chloe. White-faced, stricken. She’d been there all along, listening. So she’d had an earful of what Mike Keillor was all about. She didn’t know him in any meaningful way. What she did know about him was what she’d learned over the past half hour, and all of it was horrible and all of it was true.

  Mike hadn’t beaten up the woman, of course, but everything else—guilty. He’d drunk too much. As a matter of fact, getting shit-faced on a regular basis was beginning to become a habit with him.

  The one night he was on his own, he got shit-faced and picked up the first woman who came on to him. A woman who turned out to be an addict and was borderline insane.

  Didn’t make any difference. Mike had heard someone back in the SWAT team locker room joke that if it had a vagina, Mike would poke it.

  True.

  He’d been using sex and alcohol for a long, long time as a way to drown out his thoughts. It never worked and he never stopped trying. The very definition of insanity. Doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different outcome.

  That was the Mike Keillor Chloe was seeing. A guy who drank too much, fucked addicts, slapped around the women he fucked.

  That’s not me, he wanted to scream. He’d been a good Marine, a good cop. He worked hard in his company. He loved his brothers, their wives, and above all his little nieces.

  He helped abused women disappear. He fucking gave to fucking charity.