Back in Black (McGinnis Investigations #1) - Rhys Ford Page 0,68

here soon,” Jae murmured, helping me up.

My legs were numb, too rubbery to stand on, but I did my best. My fingers were cramped around the phone, and Jae had to pry them up, the rotary falling to the floor with a loud clatter. I didn’t hear any sirens, but the heavy tread of running boots and shoes beat up the sidewalk and onto the stoop. My hands were wet, and I looked down at them, not surprised to see them coated in blood and sweat.

“I want to know who sent him. I want to know who brought him to my front door and put Jae in his crosshairs,” I growled at O’Byrne as she came through the front door, her gun up and sweeping the room while a uniformed cop followed close behind her, covering her blind side. “And I want to be there when you start asking him those questions, because I’ll be damned if some asshole like him sits a couple hundred feet away from my husband and threatens him. I don’t care who started this. I’m going to fucking finish it, and they’re going to wish they got off as lightly as he did. I’m done playing, O’Byrne. It’s time we got some answers.”

THE CITY of Los Angeles didn’t put a lot of money into their interview rooms. The paint scheme ran to baby-puke green, and the metal tables and chairs looked like they’d gone through a few wars in a middle school before finally ending up providing a seat for the asses of cops and criminals alike. They were hard and mean, digging into the back of my screwed-up knee and angled so straight it was a guarantee I wouldn’t be able to walk right once I left.

Assuming they would let me leave.

O’Byrne herself deposited me into the room, telling me to sit down and wait without much more than a backward glance as she closed the door. It was either a courtesy to me because I was an ex-cop or it was a subtle form of torture because there was no way I could ask somebody to use the bathroom. A fresh-faced young kid in blue wearing a badge so new it blinded me when the lights hit it came by to give me a bottle of water.

That was nearly two hours ago.

People paid a lot of money for time in a sensory deprivation tank, yet they could save themselves the expense by being dragged into questioning and thrown into an LAPD interview room. Providing they could get past the subtle stink of burnt coffee and unwashed skin—a perfume unique to police stations everywhere—the outside world stayed firmly that… outside. There was not even a murmur of sound, and the frosted, chicken-wire-embedded window set into the door gave no glimpse of anyone passing by. Even the one-way mirror set into the long wall across of where I sat seemed strangely empty of life. During interrogation there were usually one or two cops sitting behind that glass, either taking notes or waiting for things to go south, ready to provide backup for the cops in the room.

The silence didn’t even hold an echo. I screeched my chair back, and the high-pitched whining of the rubber feet against the thick industrial tile was swallowed up nearly as soon as it broke loose. Tapping at the table helped a little bit, but soon my fingertips began to throb.

Of course the residual stinging along my extremities could possibly have been from gripping Claudia’s phone too tight as I used it to hammer the gunman’s hands into mincemeat.

I was about to check the door for the fifth time to see if it was still locked when O’Byrne came in with Detective Dante Montoya shadowing her. It was odd seeing him dressed in clothes other than shorts and a tank top, because I’d spent more than a few hours trying to beat his face in at JoJo’s, but the Hispanic cop gave no indication we knew each other when he leaned against the one-way mirror, his arms crossed over his chest. O’Byrne had the haunted, tired look of a cop who was reaching the end of her patience with a case. Her jacket was gone, her shoulder holster exposed and fit tight across her lean torso. There was a bit of dirt on her jeans, and either she had been rooting around in my front yard or I was going to have to have a serious talk with the cleaning