Herrington must see how pissed that makes me, because he raises his trembling hands and repeats, “I swear on my mother’s grave, there’s not a damn thing more I can do! Provisional custody, and you’ll have to go through visits with a CPS worker. That’s the process; I couldn’t change it if I tried.”
I glance at Timofei. He shrugs, as if to say, I guess that’s the best we can get.
Turning back to Herrington, I say, “So be it. Make it happen. Tomorrow.” We turn to leave, but before we go through the door, I look over my shoulder once more and add, “Oh, and Judge? Don’t mention our little nighttime visit to anyone. I would truly hate to have to come back. Like I said before, Lucille and Charlie need all the rest they can get.”
Then I pull the door closed and leave the terrified man alone in his bed.
When we’re back outside, I clench my fist and let loose a long sigh. That felt much better than saying, “Please?”
Matvei
“What do you mean, ‘You don’t know?’” I snap. I look down at the scrawny bastard seated in front of me and grit my teeth.
He shrugs. The man reeks to high heaven, as if he’s allergic to the very idea of a shower, and keeps picking at his yellowed teeth with what looks like a disgusting length of bare wire.
“I dunno,” he repeats.
I look up at Timofei, who is standing in the shadowy corner with his arms crossed. He raises an eyebrow at me as if to say, Now what?
I turn back to the hobo. “You said you had info on the Justice Killer. His real name, his location, his next target. I brought you in here, paid you, let you drink whiskey worth more than your fucking life. And now, when the time comes to answer questions, all you have to say is, ‘I dunno’?”
I’m seething. My fists are clenched tight at my sides, about three seconds away from cracking this smug son of a bitch right across the face. All around me, my lieutenants are standing silent and waiting to see what I’ll do next.
Say it again, motherfucker, I urge in my head. I dare you to say that one more time. I need an excuse to break something.
His eyes meet mine. Brown, deep, inscrutable. Like piles of mud. He spends a long time flipping the toothpick with his tongue. Back and forth, back and forth.
Then he shrugs again. “I dunno.”
I’m on the man like a bolt of lightning. Seizing him with a fistful of his shirt in each hand, I roar and slam him up against the wall of my study. His skull cracks back against the wall with a nasty noise. I head-butt him once in the nose, and that crunches just as sickeningly.
“Where is he?” I’m roaring in his face. “Where the fuck is he?” I slam him against the wall again and again, and by the time I realize he’s unconscious, my men are already pulling me away from him.
I can barely hear them, barely notice them. I’m too hot with unspent fury.
Everything in my life has become a source of frustration. In the three weeks since Niko came to stay with me on what the Welfare hacks called “provisional custody,” I’ve come no closer to finding the man who killed his parents.
The boy has gotten worse, too. At first, I thought he was going to be okay. That he was young enough to pass through this nightmare mostly unscathed.
But I was wrong.
There’s a darkness churning in him. He’s afraid, he’s angry, he’s lashing out at every opportunity with crying tantrums that last hours by day and thrashing terrors that last hours at night. Already, he’s burned through three nannies, each of whom has said they wouldn’t stay with him even if I doubled or tripled their pay. The last one, who left yesterday, didn’t even make it a week.
And the social workers keep asking me how he’s doing. I want to scream at them, He saw his mother dragged out of his house to be murdered right in front of him—how do you think he’s doing?
But I know I’m on thin ice with the law already. My midnight visit to Judge Herrington got the wheels moving, but he wasn’t lying when he said his hands were tied. There are some things money can’t buy, and apparently, cooperation from Child Welfare is on that list. So they keep calling,