“Well, I guess that’s good news.” She took a bite of food that she barely tasted.
“It is. But this Army officer is a highly decorated general with all kinds of political connections. Who the hell knows what kind of resources someone like that might have. Shit’s about to get real.”
God, if it wasn’t real already, Jess didn’t want to know what real looked like. After all, two Ravens died when the roof at Hard Ink collapsed last weekend. And it didn’t get any more real than that.
“You know,” she said, the words getting all tangled in her mouth. She rarely talked about her dad to anyone because his memory was all caught up in the worst mistake of her life. But this whole crisis had her thinking about him more and more recently.
“What?” Ike said, studying her.
She shrugged. “Was just thinking that I wish my dad was still around. He would’ve been able to help Jeremy and Nick. I know he would. And then they would’ve had someone in the police department they could trust for sure.” Early in the team’s investigation, they’d found solid evidence that the people they were fighting had at least some BPD in their pockets. “Dad is probably rolling in his grave knowing there are dirty cops working in the department he loved.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you talk about your father before,” Ike said as he took a bite of bread. “Were you close?”
Jess smiled. “We were. My mom split when I was eight, so it was just the two of us.”
“Probably explains why you eat like a guy.”
She laughed. “Probably. He wasn’t much of a cook either.” She pushed a piece of noodle around on her plate, then she took a deep breath and let the words fly. “I don’t talk about him that much because…it’s my fault he’s dead.”
Ike froze with his fork halfway to his mouth. His gaze narrowed. “I don’t believe that.”
She dropped her fork and sagged against the back of her chair. “It’s true,” she said, twisting her paper napkin in her fingers. In her mind’s eye, scenes from that night took form like some macabre silent-era movie. “I’d fallen in with a bad crowd. I didn’t realize how bad at the time. I just thought they liked to party. They seemed cool, fun, like they didn’t have a care in the world. After living at home with my super serious, everything-by-the-book dad—even while I went to college part time, I was itching to be more independent. I made every wrong choice you could—loser guys, getting drunk, trying drugs. I was working all day at the tattoo parlor where I first met Jeremy and partying all night. My dad and I fought all the time. I was actually planning to move out of the house.” Jess shook her head.
“What happened?” Ike asked in a quiet voice.
“I came home one night after work and walked in on two of my so-called friends robbing my house. They’d broken into my dad’s gun closet. They had my mother’s jewelry and her rare coin collection, and a bunch of rare comic books I’d picked up over the years.”
Jess rubbed her hand over her left forearm, where her rose-and-vine tattoo surrounded a tattoo of Harley Quinn, a comic book villainess with red and black hair who wore a red and black costume. She’d been driven mad by the Joker and fallen in love with him, and then devoted her life to making him happy. It was one of Jess’s earliest tattoos, one inspired by her love of comics and this dark character in particular.
“I was arguing with them and threatening them. I felt so betrayed because I’d told them about these things in casual conversation, never thinking twice about it or that they’d violate my trust like that. Hell, if I hadn’t come home then, I never would’ve known it was them who’d done it. This guy named Marx pulled one of Dad’s guns on me and threatened to shoot me. He said they needed the money or someone would hurt them. I learned later that they’d been dealing drugs and someone had double-crossed them and stolen some, which put them in debt to the dealer above them. I had no idea they were dealing.” She looked at Ike. “I mean, I get it, using is bad enough. But I didn’t know that.”
Ike nodded. “And…your dad walked into the middle of this fight.” He didn’t phrase it as a question.
“Yeah,” she said, her gut clenching. “I didn’t even hear him come home over all the commotion. Marx shot first, and Dad dove in front of me, taking the bullet. He knocked me down in the process and managed to get off a shot and hit Burton. When Marx raised the gun to shoot again, my dad threw himself on top of me.”