Page 33 of Nightfire

No, siree. He had standards. High ones, too.

Another long silence. Mike couldn’t meet Sam and Harry’s eyes. You wouldn’t catch them puking the bourbon out of their guts at 2 am in a miserable hole. No, at 2 am they were with their wives, where you could find them every night of their lives they weren’t on the road for work. And both of them made real efforts to come home as quickly as possible because what waited for them at home was something pretty damned wonderful.

“So.” Kelly said the words in a level voice, one by one, without any inflection. “You got rough.”

Mike stared at the floor.

“Real rough.” Something in Kelly’s voice made Mike raise his head and frown.

He was nauseated at the memory. “I, ah, I held her down. My hands were, yeah, a—a little rough. She asked me to hold her down, do her hard. But I hated that. Her wrists were a little red when I lifted my hands.”

“And?” Kelly asked, his voice harsh.

Mike shrugged. “It wasn’t that bad.”

Kelly leaned forward, got in his face. “I don’t know what your definition of bad is, Keillor. But mine includes the kind of violence that was done to that woman. No one deserves that kind of treatment. She was under the knife for four hours.”

Mike’s head snapped up. “Whoa. I held her wrists, that’s it. They were red and a little swollen when I lifted my hands, I told you. But that was absolutely it. There wasn’t anything that would require—God!—surgery. Nothing even remotely like that.”

“Let me remind you.” Kelly flipped back to the beginning of his notebook but he had it all memorized. He barely glanced at his own notes. “The woman was brought into the hospital with a shattered jaw, concussion, broken bones, crushed spleen.”

“No, man.” Just hearing the list made him sick. “That wasn’t me. Jesus, I could never do that to a woman. Listen, this is what went down. I picked up this woman at a bar, The Cave. We went to her house and had sex. Some sex, anyway. She wanted me to get rough with her and it just turned me off. I went into her bathroom and took off my condom, which won’t have sperm DNA and puked in her toilet. I left her mad at me and screaming, so if anyone reported noise, that was it. I thought I might still have alcohol in my system and I needed air and exercise, so I ran to the ferry, ran down to Coronado Shores.”

“What time did you get home?”

“I don’t—wait. I got home around five. Yeah. When I got out of the shower my digital alarm clock read five seventeen. I stood on my balcony and watched the sun come up and went in to work.”

Kelly’s jaw muscles worked as he stared at Mike, eyes cold.

“Well, let me tell you what we’ve got, Keillor. We’ve got a 911 call clocked at 4:02. Screaming and the sounds of a violent beating in room 321 at 445 Alameda Street, the home of one Mila Koravich. The cops find her unconscious and EMS took her to E and A, where she was in surgery by five fifteen. We dusted for prints, found some good ones on the iron bedstead and on the tiles over the toilet.”

God. Mike had a very good vision of pumping into the woman while holding onto the bedstead because he’d suddenly had an aversion to touching her anywhere except with his dick. He’d only held her down when she insisted. And he remembered bracing himself against the wall over the toilet while puking.

“We ran the prints.” Kelly huffed out air through his nose like an enraged bull. “Prints pinged with a lot of low lifes, but all of us were astonished when your prints came up. Fresh prints. We ran it twice.”

Mike had been in the armed services and had been a law enforcement officer. Of course his prints were on file. He had a sick feeling in his stomach.

“So we took your SDPD ID to all the bars in the area, and at The Cave we struck gold. You left with Mila Koravich, who by the way has had two arrests for prostitution and possession, at a quarter past midnight. The bartender confirmed the ID. He said he saw you leave with Koravich. This morning at eight, when she came out of anesthesia, Koravich ID’d you as the man who beat her up.”

Sam and Harry rose again, as one unit, big tough men, presenting a united front. “That’s ridiculous,” Sam growled. “You heard Mike, he was home by five am.”

The four men stood staring at each other. Mike could feel the aggression bristling from Sam and Harry but Kelly stood his ground. He wasn’t the kind of man to be intimidated. He’d been a Marine, he was now a very good cop. Not the kind of man who bent when pressure was applied.

Kelly ignored Sam and Harry and fixed Mike with a glare.

If he looked carefully, though, Mike could see pain behind the cold gray stare. He didn’t like suspecting Mike. And he didn’t like investigating him. But it was his duty, so he was going to do it.

Like that old SEAL saying. You don’t have to like it, you just have to do it.

Kelly stuck his notebook in the saggy pocket of his jacket which looked like he’d slept in it for the past month. “Gonna have to take this downtown, Keillor. No other way around it.” He held up a big hand, palm out, when Sam and Harry took a step forward. “Guys. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. Your choice.”

Mike felt old, all of a sudden. Old and ashamed. He hadn’t beaten the woman up. He knew he hadn’t and he trusted Kelly to be a good enough cop to follow the evidence. He’d be exonerated. Eventually.

But it might come to some nasty things before the situation got resolved. He might have to put up bail. RBK was doing real well but they were in the process of making major investments and taking a good chunk out of that would hurt his brothers. Mike knew that Kelly would instinctively try to shield him from the press but if word got out that Michael Keillor of RBK had been arrested for assault, it would be a huge blow against the good name of the company they’d all worked so hard to build.

It was very possible that Mike was going to watch his brothers, his company, covered in mud. Not to mention costing money at exactly the wrong time.

He had no one to blame but himself for this, no one.