Wrecked (Josie Gray Mysteries #3)(65)

She held his stare for a long moment, feeling the intensity of it all, and it was almost more than she could take. He squeezed her shoulders, continuing to stare, then placed a hand on her cheek for a moment, just as quickly removing it, and walked out the front door.

*

As they drove to Otto’s, Josie felt the road pass by her in a ribbon of gray, her head numb. Nick took a call from the head of the Department of Kidnapping and Ransom in Mexico, but did not elaborate once it ended. Josie wanted to grill him for information, but she felt stuck. And without Dillon, she didn’t know where to turn for strength. She wondered at the effect that seeing this kind of human tragedy had on Nick.

She drove for quite some time before finally breaking the silence. “So, how does someone with a Bronx accent end up negotiating kidnappings in Mexico?”

He was quiet so long that Josie thought he wasn’t going to answer. “I was born in South Texas. My parents were working class. My dad came to the U.S. through the Bracero program in 1963.”

Nick looked over at Josie and she nodded, vaguely familiar with the long-ended program to allow Mexican laborers a day pass across the border.

“He was just a kid. But he eventually got his green card and legal residency. My mom was a loud-mouthed, tough-talking kid who lived in his neighborhood. He used to joke that he brought her along as protection. But the truth was they were both outsiders, second-class citizens, and it ate my dad up inside. He wanted his kids to succeed in this country, but then would feel threatened when we came too close to passing him up. He’d get angry and rant in his broken English, I am the boss of everything! It’s funny thinking about it now, but as kids, that dictator rule was tough. We hated and respected and loved him like—”

Nick paused, lifting his hand in the air as if to indicate he was at a loss for words. He cracked the window and took a minute to continue. “I remember him sitting at the dinner table, wanting seconds of something at the other end. There were eight of us in this toolshed-sized house. He’d sit there, not saying a word, his eyes hard and black. The talk around the table would fade, heads turning one by one down to the head of the table as my mother tried to determine what he was lacking on his plate. We’d pass the potatoes, or whatever, and once he started forking the food back into his mouth, the talk would start again.” Nick smiled and shook his head. “That’s the effect he had on people. He was a real son of a bitch.”

“So, you didn’t get along with him growing up?”

“That’s an understatement. But I watched him sit by my mother’s deathbed for a month, whispering to her, stroking her hair, holding her hand. Praying. We all went to church as a family, except him. He always said we went for him, so he didn’t have to. I didn’t even know he knew how to pray. Still, the way he took care of my mother in her final month, that was enough for me.”

“Did he encourage you to go into law enforcement?”

Nick laughed. “He didn’t encourage. That just wasn’t part of the culture I grew up in. I joined the military after high school because I didn’t know what else to do. I wanted away from home. My brothers joined the family business. We were hired labor by that time, but we were a construction crew with a good name. My family was making decent money, but I wanted out.”

“A good move?”

“The military was just a bigger version of my father. After that I worked as a city cop in New Jersey for eight years. By the time I hit thirty I knew I had to be my own boss. Then a friend from Texas was kidnapped, ransomed for fifteen hundred dollars. I negotiated a deal for his wife. That’s how this all started.”

They drove on in silence, Josie thinking about the events that could shape a person’s life, some genetic, some chance, and she wondered if they all added up to a master plan, or just a dark path with no end in sight.

“What about you? How’s an attractive young lady end up chief of police on the Mexican border?”

She smiled at his assessment of her and pondered his question for a moment, wondering how to sum up her past to a stranger. But, like Nick, she knew many of her adult decisions were a direct result of her father’s influence. “I was eight when my dad died. At that age, your dad hasn’t had time to screw you up or let you down like most of us do to those we care about. You know what I mean?”

Nick frowned and shifted in his seat to better face her. “I don’t know. I think my dad shaped me into the person I am, but I guess I never thought that he screwed any of us up. He was always black-and-white. He was good and he was bad, to the extreme, but I wouldn’t say he screwed us up.”

“No, I don’t mean it that way.” She struggled to find the words that would explain what her father had meant to her as a child. “I didn’t have any concept of him as being anything but brave and honorable. When he died, in my eyes, he was a hero. It sounds trite, but that’s it. He was a cop. When he got out of his cop car at the end of a shift, wearing his uniform, hand on the butt of his gun as he slammed the car door, I would run outside to meet him. The neighborhood people looked at him different, like from a distance, but in a good way. They’d drink a beer with him on the weekend and treat him like any other guy. But when he was a cop, he was different. And he was my dad.”

“He’s the reason you became a cop?”

She nodded. “Our next-door neighbor was a son of a bitch. A hard-edged drinker who was pissed at the world. He would take on anybody on any topic and win, by sheer force of will. But when Dad was in uniform, Mike would raise a hand and wave from a distance. He wouldn’t even talk to Dad until after he’d changed.” Josie grinned at the memory. “Maybe that respect for law is gone now, I don’t know. Too many cop shows on TV. But I have this vision of my dad that will never die. And I wanted to be that person.”