Better When He's Brave (Welcome to the Point #3)(10)

There was a security code on the phone that I couldn’t figure out, so I called one of the tech guys up and asked him if he could look at it. I was known as kind of a hard-ass around the station, but I also got the job done, so generally when I called in a favor it got bumped to the front of the line. It only took twenty minutes for the tech guy to show up and another five for him to get me into the phone. By the time he left to go back to his own part of the station, I had already been through ten messages that had my teeth clenching so hard I was lucky they didn’t crack.

It was all there. Words upon words that told a tale of revenge and destruction. There were messages back and forth between Roark and someone that had a standing date with one of Nassir’s working girls arranging the setup so that the Irishman could get to Roxie, one of the Point’s most well-known hookers and a personal friend of Bax’s from back in the day.

There were exchanges with someone simply called Zero setting up the entry of explosives through customs. The explosives that had to have been used to annihilate Nassir’s club. The fire was intended to punish not only Nassir and Race but also the people that flocked to the heart of the Point in search of bad things. The rage the dirty fed had toward the city was unreal and I couldn’t figure out what was behind it. It wasn’t like he lived here or had been a victim of the streets like the rest of us that called the Point home had been. His fury and the vengeance it wreaked felt so displaced. I knew there had to be more to it but the phone wasn’t giving me that much.

There was another flurry of back-and-forth messages chronicling the plan to grab one of the kids that owed Race money on a football bet and dumping his body as a message to the new criminal elite. More bodies had followed and so had money into the hands of desperate men so they would do ugly things to make sure that everyone knew the Point was never going to be safe, no matter who was in charge. That it was never going to be anything but a forgotten place filled with forgotten people that no one would miss when it was gone.

There was even a picture of Race’s classic Mustang as it burned to nothing but a twisted scrap heap of melted metal and rubber.

The guy was vengeful and liked to witness the effects of his handiwork up close and personal. Unfortunately he knew how the good guys worked, so while there was plenty of evidence that he had been present for all these dirty deeds on his end, there was nothing on ours that showed him. Roark knew how to avoid cameras, knew how to blend into the background, and knew enough to keep from getting caught while he pulled strings in the background like a demented puppet master.

I flipped through the hundreds of messages that he had exchanged with Reeve over the last few months. There was nothing unusual in the exchanges. They were flirty and fun. She seemed to really like the dirty fed. She told him she missed him when he had to go back into the city during the week. She thanked him profusely for not judging her by her past actions. She told him that he made her feel special and safe.

He responded with flip answers and easy reassurances. He told her she was beautiful, that she was gorgeous, that she was a prize. While Reeve spoke to him like a woman in the first stages of falling in love, Roark replied like a man with a trophy he was eager to show off and flaunt. His title and his badge had done a lot to win her over, her looks had done everything to convince him to break protocol and take her to bed. I understood the temptation.

It was the newer messages, the ones leading up to the fire at the club, that were the most interesting. Reeve had grown up in the Point and had lost a sister to the vicious and unforgiving ways of the streets. She was not only street-smart but also had keen instincts for danger. She started texting him about where he was going on the weekends and why he wouldn’t talk to her about what he was up to. She asked why he was in the Point for reasons that had nothing to do with work. She asked him why his phone was going off at weird times during the night. It wasn’t uncommon for a cop but she seemed to know something wasn’t tracking. She asked him who Zero was and why had he shown up at her place in the secure location looking for him. It was clear she knew something was off and that Roark wasn’t who he claimed to be.

He tried to put her off. He texted that he was in the middle of a top-secret case, that it was high profile, and he smoothly apologized for all the secrecy and double talk. He promised to take her somewhere tropical and warm as soon as the trial for the rest of Novak’s crew was over, and when none of that seemed to pacify her he broke out the big guns and told her that he loved her. That shut her down for exactly one day. She told him she loved him back and then went silent.

After the declaration there were no more messages between the two of them but there were several between Zero and Roark. He had his goons watching Brysen and Dovie. He also had eyes on Spanky’s, the strip club that was now the de facto operating headquarters for Nassir since the Pit was gone. Spanky’s was also where a stripper named Honor danced, and if anyone cared to watch closely enough, they would see that if Nassir had any kind of weakness, it was her. The texts indicated that whatever was driving Roark was amping up to bring the fight right to the heart of those willing to stand sentinel between him and his revenge, and all that could mean was that things were going to get uglier and bloodier before I could put a stop to it.

The texts stopped because it was apparent that the next time Roark saw Reeve she snagged his phone and headed back to the city in order to hand it over to me. She saw his profession of love for what it was, a smoke screen, and had done what she had done since the first time I had met her. She was covering her own ass and I bet Roark was smart enough to know that his cover as a good guy, as a member of law enforcement, was blown as soon as the phone came up missing. I would wager my left nut that the fed had gone into hiding and that I wasn’t the only one that would be looking for him. I made a mental note to put a call in to the marshals to see just how much they knew about their dirty agent.