Gathering Dark Candice Fox (e reader TXT) 📖

“You just gonna sit there?” she shouted at me. I scrambled off the chair and ran numbly to the car door as Sneak backed the vehicle awkwardly out of the hole she’d made in the hangar.

JESSICA

Wallert wasn’t at his desk. Jessica made like she was just swinging by to pick up some papers, shuffled things around the keyboard while the few officers at their desks got over the shock of her presence. She took the boxed bar of soap from her pocket, unpacked it, and set it on the desk. Jessica took Wallert’s keys from the little tin cigar box he kept beside his monitor and selected a gold key with a black rubber rim from the collection. She pressed the gold key into the soap bar, making a careful impression, then reboxed the bar of soap and returned it to her pocket, the keys to their rightful place. She ran a finger down the sheet of printed paper taped to the back of the cubicle that read Roster. Jessica was almost at the elevators when someone hooked a finger into the back of her shirt, tugging her to a stop.

She smelled the bourbon before she saw him. Jessica turned and stood chest-to-chest with the sour-breathed man, so close she could see the pockmarks on the end of his nose.

“Have you got the call yet?” Wallert smiled.

“From who?”

“Justin Helger from LA Magazine rang here, trying to reach you. They put him through to me. He’s running a story about the video, wanted you to comment.” Wallert’s smile had grown into a wide grin. “I gave him your cell number.”

“A psychic once told me I’d make the national news one day,” Jessica said. “I bet she didn’t see this in her crystal ball, though.”

“Take the house,” Wallert said. He glanced around the cubicles, his voice low and threatening. “Take the Brentwood house. Sell it. Give me half. Say you’ll do it now, and I’ll stop.”

“Your breath smells like a fucking dumpster, you know that?” Jessica spat.

“If you think the video was a low blow, you’ve got no idea what else I have in store.” Wallert’s eyes were wet, pale, desperate. “I’ve shown you that I’ll use cops to get to you.”

Jessica sighed.

“I’ll use other people, too,” Wallert said.

“Wally”—Jessica edged closer to him—“I’ll burn that house to the ground before I give you a dime of what it’s worth.”

Jessica spied Vizchen making his way toward them along the aisles. She backed off. Two of them were more than she had the energy for. She punched the elevator button and slipped inside, watching the doors close on the two men with relief. At the first floor, the doors opened on Captain Whitton, standing with his arms folded, obviously having known she was in the building. Jessica tried to punch the “door close” button but he stuck his long arm through the gap.

“How many times did I call you?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” Jessica exited the elevator. “Twenty?”

“Thirty-one,” he said. They stood by a poster of a patrol cop cleaning his gun on a spotless gray tabletop. Never trust a badly maintained weapon! “You don’t ignore calls from your superior officer. Ever. That’s policy.”

“Give it to IAG. They can add it to my file.”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“I came looking for you. I figured you’d called so many times it would be rude to just suddenly answer. You deserved a face-to-face.”

“That’s a pile of horse shit,” Whitton snapped. “This thing between you and Wallert has got to stop. It’s reflecting poorly on the department now.” He leaned in a little, glanced down the hall. “I don’t care what your sexual proclivities are, Sanchez. That sort of thing between consenting adults is … well, it’s unusual. Untraditional. Unconventional. But it’s fine. It’s really fine.”

“I don’t need you to rubber stamp it for me, Captain,” Jessica said.

“I had this girlfriend in college—”

“Please don’t.”

“Anyway, look, that video appears to capture you engaging in solicitation, which is a crime. A fireable offense.”

“It was solicitation,” Jessica said. She looked the tall man right in the eyes. “I’ve been going to Goren for years. I like what we do together. I need it. It takes me away from the troubles in my personal life, and it’s a hell of a lot less emotionally taxing than maintaining a real relationship.”

“Would you keep your goddamn voice down?”

“But convicting me on solicitation is going to rely on a conviction of Goren for prostitution, and you won’t get that,” she continued. “He’s been dodging that charge for more than a decade. The man has friends, clients, in high places. Much higher than you, boss.”

Whitton shook his head, looked distant, as if he was trying to see reason approaching on the horizon, a cavalry of cooperation and sense.

“You and Wallert leave each other alone.” He pointed a finger in her face. “Make a decision about the house so we can all move on from this.”

Jessica walked off, waving as she went, ending the meeting with what she hoped was a noncommittal but friendly goodbye.

The first-floor bullpen seemed less personalized than the third floor. There were few if any photographs in frames on desks, novelty posters stuck at the back of cubicles, cut-out comic strips pinned to dividers. While she was used to the coffee station on the third floor, with its leaning towers of coffee mugs and snack plates, and wet huddles of spoons at the bottom of the sink, the station here was spotlessly clean and didn’t seem to require the tattered printed signs about clearing up. Through large, tinted windows at the end of the space she could see patrol officers coming and going to squad cars with their go-bags of weapons, logs, personal equipment. She saw Al Tasik at the end of a row of desks, looking at his phone as he slowly rose from his swivel chair.

“Tasik,” Jessica called. The man hardly glanced at her, heaving a backpack onto the