Jaka bounded down the path and came to a full stop next to him. Aleksei dropped to one knee, the ground damp and cold on his leg. His pants, unlike his jacket, weren’t water-resistant, but they were almost to the truck. It didn’t matter if he got a little wet. He buried his fingers in the dog’s long thick fur. Jaka’sdark, intelligent eyes seemed to assess him before she nudged her forehead into his face. He let his cheek rest there, feeling the tickle of whiskers and warm breath, regaining the inner calm the ringing phone had ripped away.
“Sometimes, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Jaka barked softly.
It was crazy, but sometimes he thought Jaka actually understood him. Maybe not his words, but it was as if the Australian shepherd sensed what he needed. Comfort. Distraction. Play. A good long hike. His mother kept telling him that a dog wasn’t a substitute for a human, but, on this one thing, his usually correct mother was dead wrong.
Jaka was better than a human. She was reliable and predictable. With her, there were no surprises. People, on the other hand, were an entirely different story. No matter how well you knew somebody, they could still do something completely unpredictable.
Like end up with a .40-caliber bullet in the back of their head.
The image dug into his mind like a falcon’s talons. Phillipe, face down on the blood-soaked sidewalk. Flesh and bone torn open by the force of the shot. Pink-gray brain matter speckling his hair. Then the medical examiner flipping him over. The money in his mouth. The missing hands.
He gulped in air as the protein bar he’d had for breakfast threatened to come up.
Fuuuuuuuck.
No matter what he did, he couldn’t escape that scene.
Alcohol. The FBI psychologist. Time.
They hadn’t helped. Hiking and Jaka were the only things that made him forget. But they were temporary reprieves. The overwhelming sense of gut-wrenching loss always clawed its way back in. Aleksei shifted so his forehead was pressed to Jaka’s, and he let out a long slow breath, trying to clear his mind. Oncethat image invaded his mind, it was so goddamn hard to wipe it away.
Without warning, Jaka jumped. Muddy paws pressed into his shoulders, pushing him off balance. He flailed his arms outward but gripped only air as he flopped backward onto the trail with Jaka’s paws on his chest and her rough, wet tongue on his cheek. He tried to push himself up, but the ground was too slick to get much purchase. His heavy hiking pack had turned him into a flipped turtle.
A smile pulled on his lips. If his sister were here, she’d be laughing her ass off. She’d love seeing him floundering and unbalanced. She was always teasing him about being a military science project, saying he was too fit to be a normal human. After seeingCaptain America: The First Avenger, she started calling him Cap, and Phillipe had picked right up on it, ribbing him mercilessly. Phillipe even bought him a Captain America backpack for Christmas one year. The backpack was hidden under a blanket on a shelf in Aleksei’s closet. He couldn’t bear to look at it.
The memories were sharper than his favorite knife.
Jaka resumed her enthusiastic tongue bath, pulling Aleksei back to the present. He gently pushed the dog down and shifted his weight to the side so he could stand.
“All right. All right. I get it. You don’t like it when I’m sad. But you didn’t need to knock me over. I’m a muddy mess. I’m going to have to change out of these clothes before we get into the truck, and the bathrooms don’t open until ten. I’ll be lucky if I don’t get arrested for indecent exposure for changing in the parking lot.”
Jaka’s response was to bark and trot ahead down the trail. He shook his head and followed.
The world really would be so much better if people were like dogs.
He’d taken only a few steps when the phone started vibrating again. Whoever was calling was persistent. His mouth turned dry. He should answer. What if something had happened to his mom? Or his sister? He pulled the phone out of his pocket, glanced at the screen, and spit whatever moisture was left in his mouth to the ground.
Kemper.
Gary—ass-kissing, by-the-book, relentless as a dog with a bone—Kemper.
If he didn’t answer the phone, Kemper would just keep calling. And if he turned the goddamn thing off, Kemper would probably have some white-collared, buttoned-up lackey standing at his front door by the time he got home. When that man wanted something, he was tenacious. Rumor was he’d spent nineteen straight days on a stakeout pissing into a Gatorade bottle and leaving the car only when he had to take a shit.
Too bad Kemper was too much of a company man to have used that same fire to speak up when the FBI pushed Phillipe’s murder under the rug. Instead, Kemper had chosen to follow orders and look the other way. When the shit hit the fan, Kemper had saved himself.
Asshole.
Aleksei had tried investigating himself, but that had gone over like bringing a preacher to a bachelor party. The bigwigs had gotten pissed, and Kemper said they’d threatened to fire Aleksei for insubordination if he didn’t back off. He hadn’t cared about the job, so he kept on digging. Then, one morning, he came to work and found a picture of Phillipe’s dead body on his desk, with a confidential internal affairs memo theorizing that Phillipe was taking bribes. There’d also been a printed copy of aWall Street Journalarticle about his mom’s recently announced decision to run for Virginia Attorney General. Someone hadstruck out the headline and written “Son of Rising Star Judge Involved in Bribery Scandal.”
The implication was clear. It didn’t matter that Aleksei was squeaky clean and the evidence against Phillipe was flimsy. He was Phillipe’s partner and best friend. If someone leaked that Phillipe was an FBI agent and claimed Aleksei was involved with whatever Phillipe was into, the facts would be irrelevant. The media wouldn’t be looking for proof. They wanted only a sensational story. If he didn’t back off, someone was going to feed lies to the media, and his mom’s political career would be over before it even started.
He couldn’t do that to her. Not when she’d worked so hard and come so far. Her story was an impossible one. She was a Romani-Serbian immigrant who’d been the victim of human trafficking. She had nothing when his dad got her out. She worked to pay her own way through college and law school, her gender and accent making every step three times harder than it should have been. She’d dedicated her life to fighting oppression, to protecting those with no one to fight for them.
She wouldn’t have cared if he’d continued to stir the pot. She would tell him to run every lead into the ground and damn the consequences. She would tell him to find out what happened to Phillipe no matter how long it took or who he angered. She had his back. Always. He shivered, thinking of the lecture he’d get if she ever found out he’d backed down because he hadn’t wanted to put her career in jeopardy.
His mother was like a riptide. It was impossible to swim against her.