KELLY SAT ON the back of one of the booths near the front windows, craning her neck to peer out at the darkness, watching for a familiar car to pull up.
“What kind of interference did you arrange for, Elgin?” she asked out loud. Even though she was alone in the bar, she knew he could hear her through the tiny microphone he had personally placed inside the right cup of her brassiere. “He should have been here ages ago.”
In order to get a sound man over to the bar with a listening device before Tommy arrived, Elgin had made arrangements for Tommy to be waylaid a few minutes. It hadn’t gone over too well when Kelly discovered that her friend was under twenty-four-hour surveillance, and that a call to the men watching him was all it had taken for the distraction to occur.
“You didn’t have him hit by a bus, did you?”
She was silent as she watched a car slow down. It continued up the street, and she went on. “I hope you like crow, Baker, because I’m not going to let you forget this. I’ve never felt so sleazy or dishonest in my life. If Tommy doesn’t forgive me for doing this to him, I may never forgive you. Can you hear me?”
The swinging door at the back of the bar squeaked as Elgin popped his head into the room.
“Will you shut up? He may try to sneak in the back way and there you’ll be talking to yourself.” His head disappeared, then quickly reappeared. “And I’ll eat crow every day for the rest of my life, so long as I know you’re safe. Now, shut up. He’s on his way.”
“Hey, Elgin?” she called.
“What?” he said, back in the doorway, exasperated.
“You’re wrong this time, but I love you, anyway.”
“I love you too. Now, will you please shut up.”
Five minutes, then ten minutes went by before one of the new cars that had gotten Tommy into so much trouble pulled up in front of the bar. Kelly scooted off her perch and deactivated the alarm on the front door.
“Hi,” he said, stepping past her into the bar. “Sorry it took me so long. I got held up by a taxi driver.”
“You were robbed?” she asked nervously, finding it hard to believe that Elgin would go so far.
“No, no. He was from the city and got lost. I kept trying to explain to him how to get back, but he had to be the dumbest driver ever. Completely disoriented. Didn’t know east from west.” Tommy slid onto a bar stool as he had a thousand times before. “He begged me to drive to the bridge and let him follow me. He was so weird, I figured it was either that or he’d follow me here. There ought to be a law against them coming over here.”
Kelly laughed, but only to ease some of his tension. He looked ready to break loose at the seams with worry and stress. “You want something to drink? I made coffee.”
“No. Thanks. I’m sorry about all this. I just didn’t know who else to talk to about it. I don’t want Angie to know yet, and I thought maybe you could help.”
“I will if I can,” she said, smiling her encouragement as she perched on the stool next to his.
“You might not want to.” His eyelids lowered, as if he needed to hide himself from her gaze.
“We might not ever know, if you don’t tell me pretty soon.”
After several fleeting glances in her direction, a sigh, and some difficulty swallowing, he finally admitted, “I’ve been…taking money. During drug busts. A few hundred here, a couple there. Never enough for anyone to miss at the time, but over the past few years, it’s added up to thousands.”
Kelly felt salt and bile accumulating at the back of her throat. She was physically ill and numb. She’d heard every word he’d uttered, knew what each meant, and didn’t believe a single one.
When no comment was forthcoming, he hurried to fill the silence between them.
“At first, it was to pay off a couple of hospital bills, the kids’ doctor bills, then to pay off a couple of credit cards. Only enough to get us back on track so we weren’t constantly in debt, ya know? But then, it seemed like it was one thing after another and I was taking more and more money. The schools, the house, the cars. I didn’t want to have to wait or make Angie and the kids wait another ten or fifteen years before we could afford it all. Not when it was so easy for us to have it now.”
“Aw, Tommy,” she said in misery, fully conscious that she had led him into a trap and that he had confessed his crimes to a police tape recorder. “Why are you telling me this now?”
“Because it’s coming back at me now, that’s why!” he shouted, losing the tenuous control he’d had on his emotions. “Del Rio says there’s been somebody snooping around the station house and that I.A.D. is asking a lot of questions about him and me, and Benson and Crowly and a few others.”
He stepped off the stool and began to pace. Kelly watched him helplessly, acutely aware of his future. Inside, she felt shredded, yet, as disappointed and disillusioned as she was in him, she couldn’t remember ever having loved him more.
“You said you thought I might be able to help,” she said quietly. “How?”
He stopped and looked at her in amazement. “You don’t hate me?”
She searched her soul for anything that even resembled hate, then shook her head.
“I thought for sure you’d show me the door,” he said with a wry smile. “You’ve always been so idealistic about cops, even when we were kids. I know how you feel about bad cops. Hell, you’d praise a crook before you’d offer a kind word to a bad cop.”
“At least crooks are honest about what they’re doing. They don’t hide behind badges.”
His shoulders were low enough to touch the floor. “You won’t ever be able to see past this and forgive me, will you?” he said, unable to look at her.
“I’m disappointed, Tommy, and I think you’re pretty stupid. But I don’t hate you. And it’s not up to me to forgive you.” She touched his face and waited for his gaze to meet hers. “I’m your friend and I love you. What can I do to help?”
He studied her for a long, thoughtful moment, but didn’t question her feelings again.
“Del Rio says our friend Baker is a Fed. Is that true?” he asked point-blank.
What am I supposed to say now? she wondered, though she knew what Elgin would want her to say. Was she to lie to her oldest friend or betray the man she loved?
“Does it make a difference?” she said. “You know I won’t do anything illegal for you.”
“I know. And I wouldn’t ask you to,” he said, undaunted. “But if he is a Fed, you could go to him and tell him that I want to make a deal.”
“What kind of deal?”
“Information for a clean slate.”
Oh. The conversation was getting more curious all the time. This wasn’t the Tommy Shaw she’d known all her life. This was a stranger she was talking to. All along she’d suspected Tommy probably was aware of the skimming, but she knew as well as she knew her own name that he’d never rat on another cop. Now she found out that he not only knew about the thefts, but he’d been participating in them and he wanted to give up his comrades to save his own skin.
She was floored and Tommy saw it.
“I can’t go to prison, Kelly. Who’d take care of Angie and the kids?”
“What a family man.” Tommy and Kelly jerked their heads around to see Del Rio holding the swinging door open with one hand and a gun in the other. “Too bad little Angie isn’t oriented the same way.”
“Shut up, Del Rio,” Tommy hissed angrily. “You leave her out of this.”
“No way, man. If it weren’t for her, we wouldn’t be in this mess. And we are in a mess together, aren’t we, partner?”
“If that’s the way you want it—but leave Angie out of it.”
Kelly’s mind was confused and wandering. Where was Elgin? How long was he going to let Del Rio wave that gun around in her presence, before he came charging in with the cavalry? How had Del Rio gotten in? And what did Angie have to do with all of this?
“Oh, I don’t know,” Del Rio said in a deceptively pleasant voice. He let the door swing closed and took slow, deliberate steps in their direction. “As long as we’re broadcasting, we might as well tell the whole story, huh, pal? That way your oldest and dearest friend here can get her cut and she and your wife can go to Jamaica together.”
“What are you talking about?” Tommy asked, casting a quick glance in Kelly’s direction.
“Well, I gotta admit, Kelly’s smarter than Angie. She’s getting evidence, while your wife only threatened to tattle on us.”
“What?”
Del Rio had come to within a foot of Kelly, and the gun was now nestled securely in her ribs. He jabbed her once, twice, saying, “Show him, sweetheart. Show him what a good friend you are.”
She wasn’t brave enough to pretend she didn’t know what he was talking about. She slipped her hand up inside her loose-fitting T-shirt and withdrew the thin metal disk Elgin had placed inside her bra.
“You’re wired?” Tommy gasped. “You set me up?”
“You called me, remember?”
“You always thought you were so smart, didn’t you, Shaw?” Del Rio sneered. “You always thought you were so much better than the rest of us. And now here you are, knee-deep in the garbage. Pretty ironic, wouldn’t you say?” He turned to Kelly again. “By the way, I turned off the tape recorder upstairs. I’m sorry, but I’m a little tired of doing all the work and splitting the profits with blackmailers.”
“Blackmailers?” she asked, wondering if Del Rio had gone off the deep end. She’d always thought he was a little strange.
“Aw. Poor baby. I’ll bet you thought your idea was original. I’ll bet you listened to that boyfriend of yours and put two and two together, then decided to make a little killing before they could gather enough evidence to put us behind bars. I’ll bet you thought you were real clever. But I bet you never dreamed that innocent little Angie beat you to the punch, now did you?”
“Angie?” She looked to Tommy for verification.
He nodded dejectedly and slumped onto the stool next to hers, seeming not to care whether she had planned to blackmail him or not. He was a man without hope.
“When I found out Del Rio and some of the others were pocketing money at the sites,” he said in a monotone, “I told them that I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I didn’t want to see it, know about it, or find evidence of it, or I’d turn ’em in. Then one night Angie and I were doing the bills, wondering where the hell we were going to get enough money to pay for the baby’s hospital bill and the braces.” He sighed. “I made the mistake of telling Angie about the guys and what they were doing.”
He covered his face with his hands and pushed the skin on his forehead up and down several times before continuing.
“She did it for me, Kel. I was going to take a second job for a while, until we could get caught up. Then one day, she told me not to. She said I worked too hard as it was, I was hardly ever home. She thought she’d figured out a way to pay off the bills. I didn’t question her,” he said, as if to do so would never enter his head. “She’s always taken care of the finances and managed things at home. I just figured, that she’d…figured something out.”
“She went to Del Rio and blackmailed him?” Kelly was again stunned. Who were these people? she marveled, wondering if she’d ever really known any of them.
Tommy could only nod his head. Del Rio answered for him.
“Imagine my surprise when Wife-of-the-Year calls me to the old apartment and tells me that she’ll blow the whistle on me if I don’t cut her in for a full share, Shaw’s share, of the profits. Why, you could have pushed me over with a feather.”
“Tell her the rest, you bastard,” Tommy said, glaring at his partner.
“Is there more?” Del Rio pulled a guileless expression.
“You know damned well there is.” Tommy turned to Kelly. “It was like I told you before, she was only going to take enough to get us caught up. But when she tried to stop taking the money, he was afraid she’d carry through on her threat. But if he kept giving her money, she was as guilty as he was and couldn’t turn him in without going down herself.”
“That’s when she started getting stupid,” Del Rio tacked on.
A half-smile quivered across Tommy’s lips. “I think she wanted to get caught, to tell you the truth. She feels like hell.”
“She should. She’s the one who brought I.A.D. down on us. Buying that damned house and then the cars, spending money like there was no tomorrow. I told her to knock it off, that someone would get suspicious, but she wouldn’t listen to me.”
“Didn’t you wonder where all the money was coming from?” Kelly asked Tommy.
“Sure I did. She said we were using time payments and I…Well, hell, she’s the one who’s always been tight with money, not me. I figured she knew what she was doing. If we couldn’t afford something, we went without it. It never occurred to me that she was spending anything other than my paychecks. You know her. Can you picture her doing something that she knows is illegal?”
“No.” Kelly had to admit she was finding it all hard to believe.
“I didn’t even question it until this afternoon, when you were asking about investments and how we’d managed to accumulate enough money for down payments on the house and the cars. I didn’t exactly forget about down payments, I just assumed…Hell, I don’t know what I assumed. If I’d questioned her sooner, none of this would have happened. One question and she confessed the whole thing like I was her priest.”
Several seconds of silence passed as the three of them evaluated the situation from their different perspectives.
“You know,” Del Rio said in a philosophical tone, “when you think about it, I’m the one who’s getting the dirty end of the stick in all this. Here I do all the work, take all the risks, and all I’ve got to show for it are two blackmailers and a stoolie. What do you think I ought to do about that?”
“I don’t care what you do, man. Just leave Angie and the kids out of it,” was Tommy’s suggestion. Kelly didn’t offer one. She was too busy wondering where Elgin and the army were.
No sooner had the question crossed her mind than the kitchen door flew open, startling them all.
“Hellfire!” shouted Mike Branigan at the top of his lungs, racing through the bar in his T-shirt and boxers, his knobby knees moving at an incredible speed. “It’s like old times out in the street. There are cops crawling all over this neighborhood and I can’t see a damn thing from my windows.”
Del Rio exchanged glances with Kelly and Tommy Shaw, narrowing his eyes suspiciously.
“You two set me up,” he muttered, poking Kelly’s ribs with the gun again.
Tommy saw the motion and said, “Not her. Me. I’m the one, to get back at you for what you did to Angie.”
“Don’t, Tommy,” Kelly said, realizing he was trying to take the blame for everything. She reached up and took a uniquely unimpressive barrette from her hair, then handed it to Del Rio. “You were supposed to find the other bug. But this is the one Elgin’s been listening to.”
“This reminds me,” her grandfather was going on, “of the times old Dewey used to cross the river looking for anything he could nail to little Jimmy Hines’s backside. The cops used to run up and down the streets, breaking down doors…It was a sight. Never came to much, but it was good to see them boys out doing their jobs.” He strained his old neck to look up and down the dark street, then asked, “Who do you suppose they’re lookin’ for tonight, huh?”
“Get away from the door, old man,” Del Rio shouted, not as calm as he had been.
Mike Branigan waved him off without turning to look at him. “They ain’t interested in me. ’Course, Bailey’s the lucky one. He can prowl around outside and never be seen. He’s the best shadow man I ever met. That’s why they had such a hard time catching him, you know. He’d rob a place, or when he was doin’ collections he’d break somebody’s legs, and then he’d disappear into the shadows. Amazin’.”
“Get away from the door.”
Mike shielded his face with his hands against the door. “Turn out them lights, Kelly girl, then come on over here and tell me if that ain’t Keith Farber over there across the street with a rifle aimed at this very window.”
“Papa, get away,” Kelly cried out.
Del Rio turned his gun on her grandfather and yelled, “Move it, old man, or I’ll move it for you.”
A dark shadow swept over the bar and landed on Del Rio’s back, at the same time Mike Branigan swung open the front door. A quarter of a second later the kitchen door banged open and it was over.
Bailey had leapt up from behind the bar and landed on Del Rio, taking him down to the floor. Six or seven armed police officers entered through the front door as Elgin raced in from the rear. All had their weapons beaded to Del Rio’s head before Bailey could draw a second breath.
Elgin bent to help Bailey up off the floor and sent an assessing glance in Mike’s direction.
“This calls for a drink,” Mike hollered back in good cheer. “I haven’t had this much fun in sixty years. I swear!”
Elgin saluted the old man and turned his attention first to Kelly, then to Tommy Shaw, who was being handcuffed by a uniformed officer.
“I’m sorry, Tommy,” Kelly was saying, offering no excuses for her part in the deception.
He looked up and tendered her a sad little smile. “We all have to do what we think is right, Kel. It’s what I’ve always admired most about you, and I wouldn’t want you to be any other way.”
“Is there anything I can do? Do you want me to call Angie?”
He shook his head. “I’ll do it. You could take the kids over to her mother’s place, though.” She agreed, then fell silent as his gaze shifted to Elgin. “Is there any way we can leave her out of this?”
Elgin knew the man was dying inside, his life shattered and crumbling down around him. He knew he was being asked to destroy the tape recording, which was the only evidence of his wife’s misdeeds. He also knew he’d make the same illegal suggestion if the tables were turned.
“I’m sorry, man. It’s not up to me anymore.” He placed an arm around Kelly’s shoulders as they watched Tommy being led from the room. “Are you okay, babe?”
“Yes.” Her mind was on the past: A time when friendship between her and Tommy was taken for granted, as something that simply was and would always be. Then her thoughts flashed back to the present. “What took you so long?” she asked, only mildly annoyed now that the danger had passed. “Del Rio had a gun in my ribs.”
“I know,” he said, quickly placing a gentle kiss of love and relief to her furrowed brow. “And I had a sharpshooter on the roof across the street who couldn’t get a clear shot at him because you were in the way. I had to create a diversion to draw him away from you.”
“That’s something else I want to talk to you about. What’s the big idea of using my grandfather as a decoy? You shouldn’t have dragged him in on all this. He could have been hurt.”
“Are you kidding me? Those two old coots can smell a good fight brewing thirty miles away. From the moment Del Rio entered the bar, I was on the other side of the door holding the two of them off.”
“Ah. It was exciting, Kelly girl,” Mike said from the serving side of the bar. He plunked a glass of whiskey down in front of each of them, then held up a glass of his own brand of bourbon. “Here’s to the force…even though it ain’t what it used to be.” He downed his tea in one gulp and continued talking. “Hell, in my day we’da shot the bugger comin’ through the window. There’s always time later to figure out answers to all the questions.”
“Is that how he got in then? Through a window?” Kelly asked.
“Your bedroom window,” Elgin said, sipping on his whiskey, hoping it would settle his nerves. Coming so close to losing her a third time had him frazzled. “My guess is that he came back to finish what he started in the stairwell, heard the recording, and came down here. We saw him go in. I thought you’d be safe enough with Shaw, even if he did discover the first wire, but Del Rio was a whole other story.”
“Shoulda shot him,” Mike grumbled, moving down the bar to toast the night with Bailey. “Bet you never thought to see the day when you’d be helpin’ cops instead of runnin’ from ’em.”
Bailey displayed a rare toothy grin and lowered his eyes in mock chagrin.
Elgin smiled at the two old men, but there was a sober, concerned expression in his eyes when he turned to look at Kelly.
“Del Rio tried to kill me?” she asked, as if she were finding it hard to believe, even of Del Rio.
“He was identified as the same man seen running from here the other night.”
She shook her head dazedly, overwhelmed by the night’s events and revelations.
“I have to go,” he said, knowing it wasn’t necessary to tell her why. “Will you be able to get some sleep? There’s a paramedic on standby outside. He might have something you can take.”
“No, I’m okay, really. I want to do whatever I can for Angie and the kids, but once they’re settled…” Her voice trailed off as she thought of the Shaw family, split up and in pain.
“You were right about Tommy,” Elgin said.
“That’s small consolation considering that he’ll have to go to jail, anyway, for concealing evidence. And Angie…” She couldn’t speak aloud her fears for Angie.
“I’m sorry, babe,” he said, a comforting arm around her shoulders. He kissed her lightly and gave her a small, encouraging smile. Then he followed Del Rio and the other officers out of the bar.