A Debut Unpaid (San Amaro Investigations)

Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO

I grunted, rolling forward and away, trying to give myself some space, but whoever had hit me knew their stuff and had my arms pulled behind my back before I could manage anything. I heard a metallic sound and felt cuffs around my wrists.

“You’re under arrest for breaking and entering,” a familiar voice said behind me. “You have the right to remain silent, anything you say and do —”

“ King?”

I hadn’t seen the cop since our adventure in a haunted house together. I’d meant to call him, but every time I got up the courage I remembered he was probably too good for me and mixing my business with police business was going to be bad news. The sort of news that got me either arrested or carted off to some secret government lab.

On the other hand, he hadn’t called me either, so I supposed we were even.

“Ferro?” He rolled me over, and while the feeling wasn’t comfortable with my arms pinned behind my back, it allowed me a pretty clear view of his face hovering over mine.

In the ambient light of the house, I could just barely make him out. High cheekbones, a slight stubble, and the sort of mouth that gave me ideas. The pale light stained his amber skin blue. His eyes were dark and impossible for me to read. I doubted even if he was excited for our second meeting that it would change the fact that he had arrested me.

“What are you doing here?” King asked.

“Well, you’re going to feel really dumb when I tell you,” I said, stalling for a moment. He was still hovering over me, and he smelled like warm spices. “This house is for lease, and my real estate agent gave me a key so I could check it out. See if I wanted to rent it.”

“I saw you break in,” King said. “You didn’t have a key. You used a rock.”

“They said they left a spare key under the rock.”

“And then you used the rock to smash the window.”

“I wanted to check the security,” I said. “They told me the windows were unbreakable.”

“You decided to check on this place at night?” King helped me up, tugging my arm so I was sitting more comfortably. “Really. Where’s your real estate agent?”

“Last minute cancellation. She said to go in by myself.”

“Really.” King’s voice was dry. “You know this is Derek McCallum’s house?”

“It is?” I said, feigning surprise. “You’re kidding. I should fire my agent. McCallum would kill me if he found out I broke his window.”

“Yeah,” King agreed. “He would.”

His tone made it clear that he didn’t believe a word I was saying, but he did know that McCallum was going to be furious at me. Crouching in front of me, he said, “What happened, Ferro?”

“I guess my real estate agent made a mistake,” I said. “If this is McCallum’s house.”

I felt something in my chest go tight and hot as I realized that no matter what the outcome here — even if King let me go — I wasn’t going to get my revenge tonight. If McCallum came home while I was still here, he would know I was alive and the element of surprise would be gone.

I tried to reassure myself that revenge was a dish best served when your dinner guests knew it was poisoned, but it was the sort of pep talk you had to give yourself when you were a second string basketball player who had just lost the game by passing the ball to the opposing team.

Helping me to my feet, King seemed to be checking me for injuries and stopped when he got to my head. He pulled out a flashlight and aimed it directly at my face. I winced back, the light so bright it blinded me. King’s free hand was on my face and he touched the edges of the bruise carefully.

“Did you hit your head when you fell?” He brought the light closer, and his touch was gentle as he seemed to be mapping the injury. “Any loss of consciousness? Any problems with your vision?”

“You mean other than the giant bright light I see? Should I go into the light? I’m not ready to die.” My tone was so dry it could grow succulents.

King immediately clicked the light off and walked over to the switch on the wall. When he flicked it on, I saw something that I hadn’t noticed when I’d initially cased the house. Things were missing.

It was obvious to me now, because I had just walked through the house five hours prior, and I had been so anxious, that I’d automatically cataloged everything. With the lights on, I could tell that there were knickknacks missing from the hallway table. A painting at the end of the hall had been removed. Glancing at King to see if he’d stop me, I strode towards the back office where I’d last met Derek McCallum.

“Ferro…” But King didn’t move to stop me, trailing behind as I sped down the hallway, my movements only slightly awkward because of the handcuffs. “You know, I wasn’t kidding. You are under arrest.”

Reaching the office, the door was slightly ajar, and I nudged it open with my shoulder. My vision swam as I realized that all the papers on McCallum’s desk were gone. There was nothing there.

“Open his desk,” I said.

King raised an eyebrow and I jerked with my chin towards the massive wooden desk.

“The thing is, I’m arresting you for breaking and entering. If you start opening things and taking anything, then it’s upgraded to burglary which comes with a different set of mandatory minimums.”

“ I’m not opening his desk, you are.”

King held up his hand. “You want me to burglarize Derek McCallum?”

“I think that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

Half-concussed, I’d been slightly confused when King magically appeared out of the shadows to tackle me, but now I was beginning to get a better shape of it. He wasn’t in the blue uniform of a cop walking the beat. In fact, he was wearing a suit with a tie and his badge displayed from the front pocket in the jacket. I was sure that it pained him to wear a badge there instead of a tasteful handkerchief.

“I think the reason you caught me was because you were already here. You saw what I was going to do and you watched me do it so that you and your partner and whoever else is on the way would have an excuse to enter Derek McCallum’s house. After all, you are allowed to go onto private property if you’re stopping a crime. You were staking out McCallum, and I’m your golden ticket into his place. How my doing so far, Officer King?”

“It’s actually Detective King now,” he corrected. “Pretty good, though. We’ve been staking him out all night, but he hasn’t been home in a few hours.”

“Ohhh, fancy. Where did the detective’s badge come from?” He didn’t seem like the type who would have stayed a beat cop for long, anyway.

“After the haunted house, Paranormal Crimes had me transfer over and gave me the new rank.” He raised his chin, almost a challenge.

“So, it sounds like you should thank me, then,” I said. “How about you start by getting these cuffs off me?”

The look that King gave me was a mix of amused and genuinely offended. Yeah, I hadn’t thought that he was the kind of cop who would let someone go because he thought that he owed them. He’d probably arrest his own mother if he caught her jaywalking.

“Why is Paranormal Crimes interested in Derek McCallum? Is he doing something magically illegal?”

King hesitated, clearly unwilling to give away police secrets. After a pause, he shrugged. “I’m just here temporarily. It’s actually Organized Crime who’s in charge of the case. If you have any information on him…”

“I’m no snitch,” I said mostly out of habit. Then again, I couldn’t think of a better way to screw with McCallum than to tell everything I knew to the police. That might get me a very quick trip to the bottom of the ocean without any diving gear, but it would be worth it if the snake spent even a few minutes behind bars.

The look that King sent me was like someone who had thrown a life preserver to a drowning man, only to have the victim ask for it in a different color.

“Either way, it’s going to be up to OC and the DA if you get charged,” King said.

“Mandatory minimums,” I muttered. I walked around the desk, keeping my back to it so I could use my hands. Blindly, I fumbled for the drawers, pulling a few open before turning around to check inside.

Empty. There wasn’t anything inside the desk that might hurt McCallum if it got discovered by the police. That was to be expected, but the fact that they were entirely empty…

“Well, it looks like your time has been wasted. McCallum skipped town.”

“ What? ” King came around the desk and glanced inside. Then, pausing to pull out a pair of rubber gloves from his pocket, he opened a few more drawers. Everything had been cleaned out.

He pulled a radio off his belt and brought it to his lips. “Smith, do you copy? Over.”

Static hissed back at us, but no response from his partner. King frowned and glanced at me. “He should have been right behind me. He was checking to make sure there wasn’t anyone else in the house.”

For a moment, we both stared at each other, and I could tell we were both thinking the same thing. What were the chances that McCallum’s house was haunted, too?

The last time we’d met, King had been a ghost skeptic, but these days, if he was working with Paranormal Crimes, in all likelihood he’d seen a few more of the dead floating among us. I listened to the house, the spirits quiet and still. Nothing was being disturbed by heavy footsteps from a cop searching the house.

“Is Smith with Paranormal Crimes or Organized Crimes?” I asked.

“OC,” King said. “He’s the one who’s actually working this case, I’m just loaned out for back up.”

“Then he’s probably searching the house for evidence,” I said. “Me being here is a great excuse for him to be able to enter anything he wants to into evidence. Anything he finds that McCallum isn’t supposed to have…”

My mind immediately flashed to the fae artifact I had given McCallum. It had been a beautiful circlet, something about it strange even for fae artifacts. Something about it…

“That would be inappropriate,” King interrupted my line of thought. “Technically, he should only be taking things related to your crime.”

I smirked. “Let me guess. When you saw me about to break in, you wanted to stop me before I actually got inside the house, but Smith wanted you to wait until I was inside. Until you had to come inside after me.”

Nick’s eyes narrowed.

“Don’t feel too bad, Detective By-the-Book. I’m sure he has good reasons. McCallum is a nasty piece of work, and anything you can do to get him off the streets is only a good thing.” I gave him a sympathetic look, though. King seemed like the type who didn’t appreciate the grayer sides of policing.

Or maybe he was right, and I was the one who was being too sympathetic to tainted cops. Maybe if all cops were like King, McCallum wouldn’t have as many informants on the force, and he would’ve been caught years ago before he could hire me and then leave me for dead in the hills outside of town.

“Let’s go.” King grabbed my arm and guided me around the desk, careful of the drawers I’d opened.

“So, is burglary going to go on my arrest report, too?”

“Technically,” King said. “You didn’t take anything.”

“Because there was nothing there to take,” I pointed out. “Because you guys have been staking out a house that McCallum abandoned. Didn’t the cops who were on the shift before you let you know?”

King shook his head and I made a sympathetic sound. “McCallum probably gave them a nice bonus for looking the other way.”

There was no way that McCallum had left without a few trucks behind him. With the amount of items he’d taken with him, it would have been pretty obvious that he was bugging out. I would bet that one of his security guys had come out to the cops he clearly knew were staking him out and handed over some envelopes with a lot of dead presidents in them.

Since there was no way that the cops on duty could know Smith was going to use my breaking and entering as an excuse to get inside the house, they probably thought it would take the police a few days to realize that McCallum was missing. At that point, no one would be able to pin it on them for having missed his exit.

King’s hand tightened on my arm. For all my joking, I had a very serious problem. Aside from the head injury, the bruising from when King tackled me, and the fact that I wanted to rip Derek McCallum’s head off, I was going to be arrested. I’d never been arrested before, despite a colorful school history, and a job that always took me a little bit too close to the edge of the law.

“So, how sold are we on this breaking and entering thing, given that the house is abandoned?”

The look that King sent me was amused and annoyed at the same time. “Even an abandoned house belongs to someone.”

“But what if that someone is a very bad guy?” I asked. “So bad that the cops are staking him out?”

“You just said that my partner is going to use this as an excuse to enter some of McCallum’s things into evidence. He can’t do that if there’s no arrest,” King said. “You’re getting arrested for this, Ferro.”

“Okay, okay,” I said. King guided me towards the back of the house where I’d broken the door to get in. “What if we just called it trespassing?”

“That’s for the DA to decide,” King said. Passing through the entryway, King frowned. “Smith should be here.”

Loosening his grip on my arm, he pulled out his radio again. Pressing down the button to speak, he said, “Smith, do you copy?”

We both looked up when we heard the echo of King’s words above us, somewhere in the cavernous vaulted ceiling of McCallum’s entryway.