Lover Unleashed (Black Dagger Brotherhood #9)(45)

Nabbing his cell phone out of his suit jacket, he dialed into HQ. “Hey, it’s de la Cruz. Can you patch me over to Mary Ellen?” The wait was less than a minute. “M.E., how you be? Good . . . good. Listen, I want to hear the call that came in about the body over by the Commodore. Yup. Sure—just play it back. Thanks—and take your time.”

José shoved the key into the slot at the steering wheel. “Great, thanks, M.E.”

He took a deep breath and cranked the engine over—

Yeah, I’d like to rahport a dead bahdy. Nah, I’m not giving my name. It’s in a Dumpstah in an alley off Tenth Street, two blocks ova from th’ Commahdore. Looks to be a Caucasian female, late teens, early twenties . . . Nah, I’m not giving my name. . . . Hey, how ’bout you get down the address and stahp worrying ’bout me. . . .

José gripped his phone and started to shake all over.

The South Boston accent was so clear and so familiar it was like time had gotten into a car wreck and whiplashed backward.

“Detective? You want to hear it again?” he heard Mary Ellen say in his ear.

Closing his eyes, he croaked out, “Yes, please . . .”

When the recording was finished, he listened to himself thank Mary Ellen and felt his thumb hit the end button to terminate the call.

Sure as water down a sink drain, he was sucked into a nightmare from about two years ago . . . when he’d walked into a shitty, run-down apartment that was full of empty Lagavulin bottles and pizza boxes. He remembered his hand reaching out to a closed bathroom door, the damn thing quaking from palm to fingertips.

He’d been convinced he was going to find a dead body on the other side. Hanging from the showerhead by a belt . . . or maybe lying in the tub soaking in blood instead of bubble bath.

Butch O’Neal had made hard living as much of a professional pursuit as his job in the homicide department. He’d been a late-night drinker, and not just a relationship-phobe, but completely incapable of forming attachments.

Except he and José had been tight. As tight as Butch had ever gotten with anyone.

No suicide, though. No body. Nothing. One night he’d been around; the next . . . gone.

For the first month or two, José had expected to hear something—either from the guy himself or because a corpse with a busted nose and a badly capped front tooth turned up somewhere.

Days had slid into weeks, however, and in turn had dumped into seasons of the year. And he supposed he became something like a doctor who had a terminal disease: He finally knew firsthand how the families of missing persons felt. And God, that dreaded, cold stretch of Not Knowing was nothing he’d ever expected to wander down . . . but with his old partner’s disappearance, he didn’t just walk it; he bought a lot, put up a house, and moved the f*ck in.

Now, though, after he’d given up all hope, after he no longer woke up in the middle of the night with the wonders . . . now this recording.

Sure, millions of people had Southie accents. But O’Neal had had a telltale hoarseness in his voice that couldn’t be replicated.

Abruptly, José didn’t feel like going to the twenty-four, and he didn’t want anything to eat. But he put his unmarked in drive and hit the gas.

The moment he’d looked into the Dumpster and seen those missing eyes and that dental job, he’d known that he was going in search of a serial killer. But he couldn’t have guessed he’d be on another search.

Time to find Butch O’Neal.

If he could.





SIXTEEN


Done week later, Manny woke up in his own bed with a stinger of a hangover. The good news was that at least this headache could be explained: When he’d come home, he’d hit the Lag like a punching bag and it had done its job, smacking him back and knocking him flat on his ass.

The first thing he did was reach over and get his phone. With blurry eyes, he called the vet’s cell. The pair of them had a little early-morning ritual going, and he thanked God that the guy was also an insomniac.

The vet answered on the second ring. “Hello?”

“How’s my girl?” The pause told him everything he had to know. “That bad?”

“Well, her vitals remain good, and she remains as comfortable as she can be in her suspension, but I’m worried about the foundering. We’ll see.”

“Keep me posted.”

“Always.”

At that point, hanging up was the only thing he could do. The conversation was over, and it wasn’t like he was a shoot-the-shit kind of guy—although even if he had been, chitchat wasn’t going to get him what he wanted, which was a healthy f*cking horse.

Before his alarm went off at six thirty and put paid on the shot-through-the-head routine, he slapped his radio clock into permasilence and thought, Workout. Coffee. Back to the hospital.

Wait. Coffee, workout, hospital.

He definitely needed caffeine first. He wasn’t fit to run or lift weights in this condition—and shouldn’t be operating heavy machinery like an elevator, either.

As he shifted his feet to the floor and went vertical, his head had a heartbeat of its own, but he revolted against the idea that maybe, just maybe, the pain wasn’t about the liquor: He was not sick, and he wasn’t cooking up a brain tumor—although if he was, he’d still go in to St. Francis. It was in his nature. Hell, when he’d been young, he’d fought to go to school when he was ill—even when he’d had the chicken pox and had looked like a connect-the-dots canvas, he’d insisted on heading for the bus.