still creased, and I expected him to balk again. But after a moment of thought, he nodded. “Take a day; we can revisit tomorrow if you’re not finding anything.”
We weren’t going to revisit shit, but by a couple of days from now, I was determined to have D.J.’s head on a pike anyway. “What else did you overhear?”
“Dunno. It’s all scattered—think maybe it was nothing I was meant to be able to catch, or there’s no way she’d—he—no way he’d have let me live, right? He kept me pretty loopy after trying to get me to say what I knew about him, who else I’d told, all that sort.”
He was starting to ramble.
“All right. Tell me about where you were being held.”
“Don’t think it’s the place you found me. Real quiet. No traffic sounds, wooden floors, smelled like bleach. They had me under when they brought me both in and out, though. And just the one person almost the whole time, D.J., I guess it was. Thought I heard other footsteps a few times, but no voices. Except there was an Aussie guy in at one point, real brief.”
We knew who that was anyway, didn’t we? We did. We definitely did. I’d check my notes.
“I have to go call Rio,” I said. “He needs to be updated on all this. I’ll be right back.”
“Wait. Russell.”
I stopped in the process of shutting the laptop. “Yeah?”
“You seem … I dunno. We okay?”
I’d thought he’d be too out of it to notice.
I debated just brushing him off—we had more important things to worry about—but … I was so angry with him. I’d been holding on to it this whole time, white-knuckling my resentment and fury to shove it under everything that had needed to be done to get him back.
“You’ve probably figured out I met your kids,” I said slowly.
“Oh.”
“Yes, oh. And Diego.”
His face went carefully neutral. “He’s a good man.”
Star-crossed lovers, Jesus. “Yeah, I gathered. You want to tell me more?”
He pressed his lips together. “Can’t say I do.”
“Were you ever going to tell me about them?”
He was so long responding that I thought he was going to wuss out and pretend to have fallen asleep. But he finally said, very softly, “No.”
Something inside me went heavy and leaden.
“Russell, you gotta understand,” he whispered. “It’s my family. The life you—your life, the people you associate with—you’re a dangerous person to know. If you met my kids, got to know them … doesn’t matter how much I like working with you. No matter what it costs, I got to keep my kids out of harm’s way.”
I hadn’t expected him to try to defend it. I’d expected … I didn’t know.
“Sure. Makes perfect sense,” I said, the syllables like knives. “’Cause you live such a safe and risk-free existence.”
“Don’t think it doesn’t keep me up nights, wondering if some scum criminal will come after my family one day in revenge. But I got to do the good I can. And my life doesn’t hold a candle to yours, sweetheart. Ninety percent of my cases are normal folk running into a string of bad luck, not mob bosses or arms dealers or other … questionable folk. Not to mention, I got a license and a social security card and a California driver’s license—”
“Is that what this is about? Just because I choose not to have the government spying on my every move—”
“No, that’s not even the point!” He was still rasping, but his voice was gaining strength. “All I’m saying is, you choose to live a dangerous life. And I’m going to do everything in my power to have as wide a moat between that kind of danger and my own flesh and blood as I possibly can. That’s it.”
“Flesh and blood? I thought all your kids were adopted,” I said snidely.
“You are way out of line,” Arthur said, so quietly I almost couldn’t hear him. “Get out.”
It was coming up on Roy’s turn to play nursemaid anyway. I took my computer and left.
twenty-five
I GOT Roy from upstairs, then looked at the time, said screw it, and woke up Checker and Pilar.
“’S morning?” Pilar mumbled sleepily.
“No,” I said. “Not even close.”
I prodded them into the kitchen and then got Rio on speakerphone.
“We have a problem,” I announced to them.
“Which one?” Checker asked through a yawn.
“A new one.” I relayed to them everything Arthur had said about possible political bombings. “We’re too connected to this. If we don’t figure it out before the cops do, we’re