Full Black - Brad Thor [68]
As he stepped into the kitchen, he heard a noise from outside. It sounded like the lid of a dumpster had been dropped. When he made it to the alley, he saw two men in the distance, running away. He also found a dumpster. Without opening its lid, he knew what he was going to find inside.
Praying to God, Ralston eventually found the strength to lift the lid. What he saw broke his heart wide open. By the time he dialed 9-1-1, the men he’d seen running from the alley were long gone.
In the days that followed, the cops asked him a lot about Ava’s drug use. They wanted to know who she bought from. Ralston couldn’t help them. He had no idea. Alisa provided the police with a ton of information. Ava had met her dealer through one of the soap opera’s crew members. Alisa even knew the identity of the next person up who supplied her dealer.
The detectives found her depth of knowledge interesting, to say the least, and wanted to know how she knew as much as she did. Alisa was no fool. She was an attorney, after all, and never answered the officer’s questions, at least not truthfully. That didn’t come out until the trial.
Alisa and her father had paid off both the dealer and the supplier to not provide Ava with any more drugs. Both of the subhumans had agreed at first and then tried to extort more money out of the family, threatening to hook Ava on even worse substances. When they refused, the drug pushers had made good on their threat.
Both Alisa and her father were convinced it was the same two men who had been responsible for Ava’s death. Putting them at the scene of the crime would have been all that was necessary to secure a conviction. But as much as Ralston wanted to see the people responsible for Ava’s death pay, he hadn’t seen the faces of the men in the alley. He couldn’t ID the two drug dealers as the figures he’d seen running away from the dumpster.
Even the district attorney tried privately to convince Ralston to testify against the two men. They were career criminals with horrific records. It didn’t matter if they were really the ones who were responsible. They had been responsible for untold suffering, and if they didn’t kill Ava, they were going to wind up killing someone else’s son or daughter.
The arguments were not lost on Ralston. At the very least, these were the men who had gotten Ava hooked on drugs and continued to feed her addiction. But Ralston had only one thing that truly belonged to him in life: his honor. As much as he wanted to kill both the pushers with his bare hands, he couldn’t lie. He could not positively identify them as the two men from the scene.
Without his testimony, the case had fallen apart and so had his relationship with Ava’s family. They had needed him, and in their minds, he had let them down.
Now, several years later, he needed them. “I understand why you’re still angry,” he said.
“Are you patronizing me? Boy, do you have balls. You know, I should have had you drummed out of the business.”
“Alisa, I need your help.”
The woman laughed. “You want my help with something? Let me rephrase my prior statement. You have colossal balls.”
Ralston considered telling her that not a day went by that he didn’t think about Ava; that he didn’t wish for some sort of penance he could perform for letting Ava down. Though he knew Ava’s addiction was just that—Ava’s addiction—he still felt incredibly guilty for her death. He tortured himself wondering whether, if he had quit the movie he’d been working on, he could have gotten Ava up to that cabin and gotten her sober. He wondered what would have happened if he’d chased those men down the alley. Would he have been able to ID them in court? Would he have even survived the altercation? All he had was the tire