THAT WASN’T GOING to happen, not with the big gun deal in the offing, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. “What about Nicky Rivers?” She was the deputy DA who was also with us on 10th Street, the day of the shooting.
“She left the DA’s office and went to work for the feds. She’s an AUSA now working out of Vegas. I got Vegas Metro watching over her. Well, Metro and U.S. Marshals.”
“What happened to her marriage?”
“They ended up splitting after all.”
This had been a sore spot with Wicks. He was friends with Nicky’s husband, John Lau, when I’d been dating her. Wicks thought that I had violated the unwritten rule about stepping out with another cop’s wife. And I had, in a way. She’d never told me she was married, let alone to whom, until I’d developed a crush on her, one difficult to walk away from. She’d been separated pending divorce, but they had gotten back together to try and make a go of it. I was sorry about Nicky’s marriage, that I might’ve had a hand in its dissolution, and needed to change the subject so I wouldn’t dwell on a past misstep. “What happened with Sams?”
“Derek?” Dad asked. He came over the rest of the way and sat down at the table, his eyes anxious, pleading with Wicks to tell him. “What about Derek?”
I shouldn’t have brought it up around Dad, but he would’ve heard about it sooner or later.
“Yeah, you were right about that, too. He’s in the wind. I put out a BOLO on him. It won’t take long. I’ll find his ass, and he’ll wish he never crossed me.”
For the first time after all the years of working with him, I heard the real meaning of Wicks’ words, a tone, the manner in which he regularly spoke. The way he so cavalierly talked about running a criminal down and shooting him, how easy it was for him to put the boot to someone, to take a human life. Had I been similarly cold and callous while running with him? I didn’t think so at the time but maybe now looking back … well, I liked myself a little less.
“BOLO?” Dad asked. “In the wind?”
I translated. “Derek was released from his trial with a promise of a lighter sentence if he helped find the person or persons responsible for the killing of the judge and his wife. He signed a contract and it was approved by the DA and a judge.”
“That’s wrong, Son. I can’t tell you how wrong that is. It shouldn’t happen that way. That boy needs to pay for what he did. One way or another, that boy needs to pay. He killed that poor man and admitted to it.”
Dad said it with an edge I wasn’t used to hearing from him. He had a strong understanding of how the world worked, or used to. In the last six months after the loss of Albert and Olivia, he’d stepped out of the everyday rat race and let it run him over. Not his fault. That had never happened to him before, and now he was acting out of character.
Dad said, “Bruno, how is that possible? Our justice system is broken.” I cringed when he called me by name; it meant his anger had ratcheted up one more level and I had become the focus of that anger.
Wicks said, “It’s called ‘in the interest of justice,’ old man.”
“Shut up,” I yelled at Wicks. “You have no right to talk to him like that.”
I wanted to tell Dad it was Wicks who’d made the blunder and unleashed Derek back on the streets to prey on the unsuspecting, but I didn’t. Not to save Wicks from the embarrassment but to keep peace in our little kitchen. I didn’t want Dad to grab Wicks around the neck and throttle him. At that moment, the way I felt about Wicks, I might have let Dad do it. Maybe helped him.
“What else do you have on Twyla’s murder? Anything linking it to La Vonn?”
“Bruno, we’re talking about Derek here,” Dad said. “You drop everything and go after him. I mean it. I’m not messing around here—get after him and put him back where he belongs, in a cage.”
“We’ll get to him.” I couldn’t tell Dad that if I went after Derek Sams, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself, that I would catch up to him and this time the outcome would be more than three crushed fingers.
Wicks waited to see if we’d finished discussing something that was of no interest to him. He saw his opening and said, “La Vonn is off the grid. He dropped out of sight three years ago, right after the judge did that shooting on 10th. I have the entire task force looking for him, and they’ve come up with nothing, nada, zip. Have you checked the gyms like you said you would?”
“I got tied up. That’s next on the agenda.”
Without a word, Dad got up and left. I worried about him. Maybe he would get dressed, have breakfast, and go over and see Albert. That would take his mind off Sams. I had the gun deal and La Vonn to keep my mind off Derek.
My big problem would be breaking away from Wicks long enough to make the “noonish” meeting with Jumbo and Johnny Sin at his auto parts shop in Norwalk. Wicks wouldn’t be fooled too easily, not this time, especially if he thought of me as bait for La Vonn. In Wicks’ skewed perception of life, there was nothing more fun than a hunt that involved a staked goat. And as it turned out this time, I was the goat.