Body Rocks [The Andersons 3] (Siren Publishing Classic) (17 page)

Rafferty must have heard the longing within the tone because he then faced him. “She’s Mrs. Jess Anderson, and has been for the past twenty-nine years.”

“She’ll always be Foxy to me,” Carrick retorted sharply. Abruptly, he felt a wave of guilt. He hadn’t meant to sound harsh to his friend. “I’m sorry, Scott.” He picked up his half-empty mug. “You want a coffee? I have milk and sugar. I know you don’t like coffee strong enough to stand your spoon up in.”

“Sure.” Rafferty turned back to the window for a moment. He lifted the same blind slat. “Curtain twitcher at one o’clock.”

“That would be the lovely Miss Parker,” Carrick informed him with a smile.

“As in nosy?”

“Yeah. If I can forget about that long nose of hers that she pokes everywhere, I’m gonna poke her with my prick.”

Rafferty shook his head. “A walking hormone. Is sex all you can think of?”

“You’re one to talk. Laura may be a ghost, but that hasn’t stopped you from fucking her. I bet Charlie’s pissed,” Carrick added, referring to a man that he knew his friend despised. Senator Charles Williamson had been Laura’s soon-to-be ex-husband, but he’d put a bullet in her head to prevent her from making a new life with Rafferty. Williamson was a pompous prick and a sore loser to boot. Rafferty was worth a million of him and would have made Laura very happy. He should have been the husband she truly deserved.

Then again, Carrick would bet that Rafferty would still make Laura his wife. He just didn’t know what the Federation’s policy was on mortals marrying ghosts. He’d have to look that up in the handbook later. It would have to be a Federation member conducting the ceremony—he was certain they had priests as members—otherwise it would look mighty odd with Rafferty seemingly standing at the altar without a bride and saying “I do” to himself.

“Good. But I’m not fucking Laura to piss Williamson off. I’m fucking her because I love her. And she loves me.”

Carrick grinned and followed Rafferty to the kitchen, situated at the rear of the house. The java in the percolator was still hot, so he didn’t bother making more. Taking a mug from an overhead cupboard, he half-filled it with coffee, the other half milk, added a heaped teaspoon of sugar, and slid it across the counter to Rafferty. “Have you seen my sister lately?” he asked breezily and really wanting to know.

“Do you want my advice, Sam?”

The meaningful tone was as clear as glass. Rafferty was pulling rank. If they weren’t on the subject of his family, Carrick would have listened, but since they were, he was never going to budge. He’d made his mind up. He’d made a mistake thirty years ago, and he was going to rectify it. “No. But c’mon, let’s have it. You’re gonna give it to me anyway.”

Rafferty unbuttoned and removed his suit jacket and draped it over the back of one of the kitchen chairs at the table. He took his coffee and then sat down. “Leave it alone, Sam. Let the past go.”

Carrick took the chair opposite. “Sorry, no can do. You being an orphan, Scott, you can probably understand a little of what I’m feeling. I miss my family. My father. Daniel. Jessica. I’ve missed out on so much. I don’t want to miss out on any more.”

“Understandable, I suppose,” Rafferty remarked. “In a perverse sort of way.” He drank some coffee and then asked, “Why do it, then?”

“Why do what?”

“Why fake your death?”

Carrick pushed his coffee aside and steepled his fingers. “You know why. Mickey Sanchez.” Even after thirty years, the name still left a bitter taste in his mouth.

“Yeah, you’ve given me the highlighted version, Sam. That this Sanchez, a big-time crack dealer, was always one step ahead. Always taunting you and Jess Anderson—sorry, Fox as she was then,” he corrected at Carrick’s scowl. “Sanchez was untouchable until he put a bullet in your back and went down for your”—he used his fingers as air quotes—“‘murder.’”

Rafferty picked up his coffee mug again and tipped it Carrick’s way. “I want the full version. You’d only just been reunited with your father, Ray Ferris, after eighteen years. But more than that, you’ve always professed your deep love for Mrs. Anderson. That life wouldn’t be worth living without her. So why leave her? Why fake your own death…”

Rafferty trailed off and a light lit up in his black eyes, as though a thought had just struck him. Knowing his friend, Carrick would bet that whatever Rafferty was thinking, it was bang on target.

“Unless…unless you were forced into making a choice. Jess Anderson or Mickey Sanchez.”

Carrick couldn’t be bothered to remind his friend he would always know Jess Anderson as Foxy. Since Rafferty was correct in his thinking, he decided to give him the full version, something he hadn’t spoken of for a long, long time. “I never told Foxy, but I was getting fed up with life in the PD,” he began. “All shit and no results.”

Rafferty finished his coffee. “Particularly with Sanchez.”

“Particularly with Sanchez,” Carrick repeated. “I was like you, Scott. I wanted out of the PD and into the Federation full time. I wanted to tell Foxy, too, about the Federation. I knew she believed in ghosts. With some of the weird crap we dealt with at the station sometimes, it was hard not to take that one step further and believe in the unbelievable. But, shit, Scott, you know what it’s like. When we joined we made a vow to the Federation to keep it and its work a secret at all costs. We’re duty-bound to keep our mouths buttoned.”

“Mmm, yes we are.” Rafferty’s smile was slightly on the sardonic side. “So what exactly are you going to tell Mrs. Anderson when you see her again?”

“I ain’t got a fucking clue. But I’m working on it.” Carrick blew out a breath and continued. “Sanchez didn’t care who he hurt with his crack. Shit, Scott, that stuff was bad. Yeah, the users might have been crackheads, but they were still victims, still someone’s son or daughter.”

Carrick fisted his hands. “Sanchez was also a loan shark. One of his regular scorers, a boy called Billy, borrowed one hundred dollars from him. His girlfriend, Shelley, was sixteen, and he wanted to buy something nice for her birthday. The interest rate was a thousand percent, but I s’pose Billy was too stoned to realize. Billy was a good kid, really. He just fell in with the wrong crowd.

“When he couldn’t make the payments on his trifle loan, Sanchez told him he either coughed up the money or he’d screw it out of his girlfriend. Billy pleaded with Sanchez that he didn’t have the money, and when Sanchez let him go, he thought everything was going to be okay. Sanchez would forget about the money, and Billy would find another dealer to score from. But Sanchez didn’t forget. He raped Shelley with a knife. Cut her up so bad she was left paralyzed and facing life in a wheelchair.

“When Billy and Shelley came to me and Foxy, we thought that, one, they had guts to report the crime, and two, we’d finally nailed Sanchez’s dirty ass. But after a couple of weeks, they couldn’t deal with the shit they were getting from the gangs on the street. Nobody grassed on Sanchez. They committed suicide. Ironically, it was Sanchez’s crack they jacked up on. And no further action was taken against him.”

“But you took action,” Rafferty guessed.

“Yeah, I—” Carrick stopped when the floor beneath his feet started to shake. For a moment, he watched the light fixture above his head sway. “Hmm, that’s the third tremor in three days,” he mused. “I think an earthquake is coming. A big one. Maybe the ‘One.’” He shot Rafferty a glance, but his friend remained unruffled.

He shook his head and smiled. “Where was I? Oh, yeah. You’re right, Scott. I had to make a choice, and even though I loved Foxy, loved her so much it actually hurt, I chose Sanchez. I had to make that bastard pay. I came up with a plan and took it to Guy Smith, the North American director at that time.”

“He was before Senator Williamson, wasn’t he?” Rafferty asked, frowning.

Carrick nodded and tried to keep his lips from twitching. Rafferty’s frowns were as every bit as much a part of his persona as the gray tailored suits he always wore. “Yeah. Damned good man. Do you know he died of heart failure brought on by the stress of the Federation? You’d better be careful, Scott. I can see you’re stressed.”

Rafferty pointed to the frown grooving his forehead. “Oh, you mean this. Actually, it’s a smile that went south. I was hung upside down by the balls as a baby.”

Carrick looked startled for a moment, but then he flung his head back and roared with laughter. His mirth was contagious, and Rafferty soon followed. The sound rang around the kitchen, and it was a full thirty seconds before their joviality quieted.

“So what was your plan?” Rafferty asked, returning to their topic of conversation.

“Well, it included a loaded gun—my police-issue service weapon to be precise—with one blank round and a disintegrating jamming pin that the Federation devised so it could only be fired the once and wouldn’t leave evidence of tampering behind. Blood packs and a heart- and lung-suppression pill. Oh, and the ME was a Federation member who insisted he perform my autopsy so he could switch the fired blank round for a live one.”

The frown lifted a fraction. “I’m intrigued. The ME and disintegrating jamming pin aside—I have every faith in Federation tactics and technology—how in hell did you get Sanchez to shoot you with your own gun?”

“Easy. I had a fight with him.”

Rafferty’s frown almost disappeared through his laughter. “Sam, I’ve seen photos of Mickey Sanchez,” he said once he’d composed himself. “He wasn’t exactly built like a brick outhouse. You could have laid him out with one punch.” He swept his gaze down Carrick’s muscular physique. “Still could. If he were still alive, that is.”

Carrick grinned. “Did you just eye me up?”

“Funny.”

His grin and mood sobered. “Me, Foxy, Joe Richards, and a couple more from our team had set up recon on Sanchez. He had to make a mistake some time. We saw him do a deal. He must have spotted us, because he then took off. I chased after him. We fought, or rather, he did. I just put up an act. I made sure I lost my gun. He picked it up and shot me just as Foxy appeared.

“It wasn’t until I woke up in the morgue that I knew I’d made the biggest mistake of my life. My only defense is that at the time I wasn’t thinking straight.” He gestured to Rafferty’s empty mug. “You want another?”

Rafferty shook his head. “No. Just for you to carry on.”

“As you already know, the week before my ‘murder,’” Carrick began, using his fingers as air quotes, “I arrested my father for being drunk. He was in a bad way, but I didn’t give a fuck. I was so angry with him. Wanted to beat the crap out of him for what he did to Mom all those years ago. Then the very next day, the cancer that had eaten away at Mom for six months took her. On her deathbed, she confessed that everything she’d told me about my father was a big, fat pack of lies. He never raped her. Never hit her. Never did anything to her apart from love her.”

“Ouch,” Rafferty winced. “Did she tell you why she did it?”

“Yeah, she was in love with another man. And because my father was an FBI agent, making false accusations was the only thing she could think of to stop him having access rights to me. She failed, though, and Dad was cleared of all charges. That’s when Mom took me, and we skipped Hollywood to El Paso in Texas, on the US-Mexican border. I vaguely remember the man who came with us. Mom was with him for all of five days before she dumped him.

“Anyway, we stayed in El Paso until I finished school, by which time Mom thought enough time had passed, and we returned to LA. I joined the police academy soon after. After graduation, I ironically was posted to Hollywood. Of course I realized I might cross paths with my father. The only grain of truth Mom told me about Dad was that he was a drunk. She’d heard that he’d hit the bottle after he was cleared and we’d left. He couldn’t cope and turned to drink. He was kicked out of the Bureau for being drunk on duty all the time.”

Carrick gave a short, somber chuckle. “During my last week, I got close to Dad again. We had so much to talk about. Yeah, he was still three sheets to the wind and smelt like shit, but underneath I saw the father and the FBI agent that I remembered. The father who built me a tree house and played cops and robbers with me. The FBI agent who’d go to any lengths to put dirty bastards like Sanchez behind bars. The man he used to be was the reason why I became a cop.”

He cleared his suddenly thick throat and straightened his shoulders. “I wanted more time, but it wasn’t on my side. The Federation had agreed to my plan, and I couldn’t back out. I didn’t want to back out. Sanchez was gloating about what he did to Shelley. I had to shut him up once and for all.”

“And you did. For the first-degree murder of a cop, Sanchez got life with no chance of parole. Either the judge was in a good mood that day or his lawyer argued a sound case, because he narrowly missed out on rotting on death row at San Quentin for a couple of decades waiting for the needle.”

Carrick smirked. “But a year into his sentence, he escaped from prison and went after Foxy. I was powerless to act. I was dead. I can’t tell you how thankful I am that Dad pulled his life out of the Dumpster just in time. He saved Foxy’s life and put a bullet right between that bastard’s eyes. I persuaded the Federation to deposit one million dollars into Dad’s bank account and to wipe out his rap sheet. They went one further and altered his Bureau files, too. The rest is history.”

Carrick glanced at his watch. Enough of the past. It was the future he should be concentrating on. And time for some curtain twitching of his own. He got to his feet and wandered through to his bedroom. Rafferty was close behind him. Movement outside immediately drew him to the window. Daniel and Samantha were leaving the house.