We wish!”
Jackson and Henry chuckled, and Ellery rolled his eyes.
“So you weren’t going to move into Sacramento. What happened?”
“Ziggy Ivanov and Karina Schroeder.” Alex shuddered. “And her husband, Dietrich. God, especially Dietrich, the sick fuck. Anyway, Dietrich and Ziggy were Dima’s guys, fresh off the fuckin’ boat. They were in dance school together, and they’d done their time in the brothels, you know? So they know sex trade inside and out. But Dietrich, he’s got a head for numbers, and he’s thinking they can up their gambling operation, and Ziggy wants to start kidnapping little kids and shit, because, hello, they’re both sick fucks, and they were used like meat and they want to share the pain.”
Schroeder—the name was definitely familiar. “Any relationship to Baldwin and Klaus?” Jackson asked, getting right on that.
“Uncle—why?”
“’Cause we took Baldwin out a couple days after you went to sleep, and we were wondering how they got sucked into this mess.”
Avi groaned. “Sick fucking family—Schroeder can’t even speak decent fucking English, man, has an accent you can cut with a knife. Anyway, Dietrich and Ziggy want to expand the operation to more trafficking ’cause that’s their fucking kink.”
“I take it Dima wasn’t on board for this?” Ellery asked.
“No,” Avi said shortly. “Alexei wasn’t either, frankly, but then Ziggy and Dietrich started showing up with shipments of girls. Alexei did girls—can’t lie. And then they showed up with shipments of kids, and buyers lined up, and Alexei, well, there was money to be made, and all Ziggy and Dietrich needed was muscle.”
“And then all they needed was to take over Dima’s operation,” Ellery supplied coldly.
Avi sighed sadly. “It was more complicated than that. Ziggy and Dietrich supplied us with traffic, and Alexei, he gave them drugs to sell, and at first, it didn’t seem like we were so much as taking over Dima’s shit as we were just doing the jobs he didn’t want.”
“Human. Trafficking,” Jackson said, his voice also cold, and Avi shrugged.
“We are not good people,” he said candidly. “You think saints take a snort full of bathtub meth and haul ass into a PD office with a semiauto?”
“No,” Jackson replied, voice still arctic. “But I didn’t think reasonable guys with a modicum of self-awareness did either.”
Avi’s gray eyes met Jackson’s without flinching. “When your brother puts a gun in your hand when you’re twelve years old and tells you to kill the guy who tried to knife him in a drug deal, you lose your high-fucking-morality really quick. Doesn’t mean I like it. That’s just how the world works.”
But it wasn’t. Not for Jackson.
“My mother sold me to her boyfriend for a hit of crank when I was eleven,” Jackson said. “I became a cop so it didn’t happen to someone else. You only lose it when you want to lose it.”
Avi’s face went blank. “Yeah, well, I did want to lose it. Life’s easier when that part of your soul is empty.”
Jackson hadn’t wanted to lose his humanity, though, Ellery thought. He remembered that moment when they were bracing for impact and he realized Jackson would be the one to suffer the worst if the Tank didn’t hold up. There hadn’t been a moment’s hesitation in his eyes, and not a moment’s regret.
There’d been children in that school bus, and if they had to throw themselves in front of the SUV to save them, that’s what Jackson would do.
He would have done it without the Tank. He would have stood in the road and laid down his life if he hadn’t been able to think of a better way.
Any pity Ellery might have felt for Avi abruptly vanished.
“Easier,” he said softly, thinking of his colleagues who would have defended Avi without question or qualm. “But not good. So, why did you end up hauling into the PD’s office with a semiautomatic weapon?”
Avi crossed his eyes. “Because Ziggy screwed up. He assumed that Tage Dobrevk would be just another kid lost to the system. Same thing for Ty Townsend, actually, but it didn’t matter so much if Townsend got off. Townsend didn’t know anything. Ziggy’s sources in the courthouse told us Dobrevk’s case was going to someone good, Ziggy told Alexei someone needed to make sure that didn’t happen, and that—that—was his plan.”
Avi swallowed, his face carefully blank. “I know what you think of me, and it’s all true. I’m a murderer. I’m a trafficker and a drug dealer. But I’ve never—and you probably don’t care about this, but it meant something to