Now I know what that metal-clanking sound was.
Silence lingers the few minutes it takes to reach St. Bart’s, Gracie’s mind elsewhere, deep in thought.
Finally, I try again. “So . . . anything important in there?”
“Important enough to hide under the trailer and never tell me about it,” she mutters. After a pause, she asks, “Are you sure your mother didn’t tell you where that money came from?”
“You saw the note she left me.” I frown. “Why? What did you find?”
“The truth, maybe? And things I can’t make sense of.”
The truth.
The truth about what? Abe? My mom?
About what my mom might have done to Abe?
There’s an odd note in Gracie’s voice. She seems too calm for a girl who has a hard time controlling her anger, which makes me believe this isn’t about my mother specifically.
Still, my heart begins pounding hard against my chest wall. “Maybe if you told me, we could make sense of it together.”
“Doubt it.”
“You know, I work for the District Attorney’s office. I spend a lot of time trying to make sense of things for cases. I’m pretty good at it.”
“And humble.”
I pull into the hospital parking lot. “It’s worth a shot. Come on, Gracie. Let’s see it.”
I assume she’s going to blow me off with another snide remark, but finally she flips open the latch. The hinge creaks as the lid falls back. “She made me promise not to open this. But she’s a drug addict. I can’t trust her.”
“You thought there were drugs in there?”
“Or something else she’d want to hide from me.” She swallows hard. “She doesn’t get to keep secrets. Not if she’s going to get better.”
“That’s probably the right call.” I offer her what I hope is an understanding smile, as I wonder how different my mother was from Dina, in her last days. It was a different drug, a different coping mechanism, but in the end . . . what if she hadn’t been clinging so tightly to her own secrets? Would she have had a chance? “So, what’d you find?”
“Birth certificates. My dad’s death certificate. A few pictures and a copy of a newspaper clipping. Nothing earth-shattering, as far as I can tell.”
I ease into a parking spot. “Show me.”
She searches her shirt for a clean spot, only to rub her sooty hands on it. Carefully, she collects the various papers and hands them to me, our fingertips grazing in the process. It’s impossible for me not to be hyperaware of her.
There’s a photograph of the three of them. Abe’s arms are full—Gracie in one, her eyes round like saucers, while his other one wraps around Dina’s waist, pulling her in tight to him. Gracie and Dina are wearing matching blue dresses and cowboy boots, and wide grins.
“You were cute back then.”
“I still am.”
“You still are,” I agree with a smile. “This is at the Houston Rodeo.” The sea of people holding corn dogs and beers behind them confirms it.
Gracie studies the picture with an unreadable gaze. A stray curl falls across her face, and I fight the urge to shift it off her forehead. “I don’t remember.”
“Of course you don’t. Look how small you were.”
She turns to me, her eyes filled with sadness. “No, I mean I don’t remember him. I’ve heard a life’s worth of memories about him from my mom. I remember him existing, but I can’t see him, or hear him.” Her brow furrows deeply. “I can’t remember a single conversation we had.”
As painful as facing the reality of my mom’s death is, at least I have twenty-five years of memories, both good and bad, to keep me going. Hell, I could recall a dozen things about Abe with the snap of my fingers. And that Gracie can’t say the same is a damn travesty.
“He had this booming laugh,” I say, studying the picture. Abe looks exactly how I remember him—tall and broad-chested, his arms ripped from working out, his wide, white smile taking up half his face, the gap between his front teeth only adding to his charm. “He’d laugh and people would stop and stare, but then their faces couldn’t help but crack. He could make the most miserable person smile, just by laughing.”
I feel her heavy gaze on me as I shuffle through the pictures.
I struggle to keep my face calm as I take in the photograph of Abe in shorts and a T-shirt, crouching on a driveway with his arm around me. I’m young—six or seven, young enough to be wearing Velcro-strapped running shoes. And I’m leaning into him, holding up my first basketball trophy with both hands, a proud grin on my lips. That trophy still sits on my shelf in my room. I smile as I recall the day I accidentally knocked it with my elbow and broke it. Abe was over at the time, and he saw me trudging down the stairs, carrying the pieces, on my way to chuck it in the trash. He took it from me and fixed it, and then made me promise never to throw it out. He said that it was my first trophy and no matter how old I was, it would always be the most special.
“That’s you, isn’t it?” Gracie asks softly.
I nod. My hair is a lot darker now than it was back then, but there’s no mistaking my blue eyes. “Your dad loved basketball. He was my coach for years.”
“My mom said he tried to teach me, but all I wanted to do was ride him like a bull. He was going to enter me into some weird sheep-riding competition at the rodeo.”
“Mutton Bustin’.” I chuckle. “Holy shit, I remember you doing that.” A frizzy-haired, wide-eyed Gracie climbing onto Abe’s back, giggling madly as he crawled around an all fours and she held on tight.
She nods at the pictures. “You must have spent a lot of time with him.”
Hours, every week. For years.
I swallow the lump and keep flipping.
There’s a picture of Abe and six guys standing side by side on a basketball court, their hair matted with sweat. When I see the face of the man on Abe’s right—the one with a sloped forehead and deep-set eyes, whose arm hangs lazily over Abe’s shoulder—a chill of recognition runs down my spine.
It’s Dwayne Mantis.
I don’t recognize the others, but maybe I’ve met them; men change so much with age. Mantis hasn’t, though. Even with less hair and an extra twenty or so pounds, he’s impossible to mistake. That gleam in his eyes is just as menacing. The only thing that softens his look is the fact that he’s standing next to Abe, whose smile stretches across his face.
So, Abe and Dwayne Mantis were friends. Or, at least, they knew each other. They obviously played on a team together. “It’s probably the police league basketball team.”
“That would make sense.” She hands me a photocopy of an article, torn from a newspaper. It’s from April 23, 2003. “That’s the same guy, isn’t it?” She points out Mantis in the picture of four cops standing proud over a pile of small white parcels.
“Looks like it.” The picture is grainy, but there’s no mistaking that forehead. I quickly scan the bylines. It’s a major drug bust by Austin’s notorious drug squad at an Austin motel called The Lucky Nine.
The pieces begin clicking together.
These must be the “hounds” that George Canning was raving about.
Dwayne Mantis was one of his hounds.
Mantis, who now heads the Internal Affairs department of the APD, a department that was recently investigated for falsifying evidence to clear police officers, according to Silas.
Mantis, who is likely being investigated by the feds.
Someone marked up the original article, circling the line listing the drugs seized—three kilos of cocaine, marijuana, and meth—along with four guns. And below it, added notes in tidy scrawl.
Harvey Maxwell.
I frown. That’s Maxwell, the ADA I work with. Why did someone write his name down on here?
Below his name is a more concerning note.
$98K.
“Holy shit,” slips out.
“Don’t tell me that’s a coincidence, Noah. You just brought me a bag of ninety-eight thousand dollars. A hundred? I’d believe that was a coincidence. Not ninety-eight thousand dollars.” She jabs the article with her finger, where the date of the bust is clearly printed. “Not when this was ten days before my dad died, at the same motel where he died.”