Takeover - Lisa Black [45]
He hadn’t worked with Paul even a full year yet, and they probably wouldn’t even socialize if they didn’t have to work together—the kid was too damn virtuous. He’d have the chief’s slot in an instant if he asked for it. The department’s golden boy. And why his cousin didn’t want more of a…well, a man’s man…it was beyond him.
Maybe it wasn’t. Theresa just wanted the opposite of her asshole ex-husband, that was all. And Paul was a good cop. Frank would work like hell to get him out of there in one piece.
But still.
At the back of the luggage sorting room, the employees had a corner that doubled as a lounge, with some beat-up armchairs and a pop machine. It was out of everything except Mountain Dew, which Patrick loathed but drank anyway.
The air-conditioning worked. Well.
“Everyone keeps asking me how I catch a cold when it’s ninety-five freakin’ degrees outside,” Eric Moyers groused. “This is how. The tarmac is like a blast furnace, and then in here it’s a refrigerator. In, out, in, out. Then you have people flying in with germs from everywhere in the world. I’m sick all the time, working here.”
Patrick nodded, feigning sympathy but watching the moving belts instead. He decided to invest in a sturdier set of luggage and one of those locks that only TSA could open. “Bobby is the youngest?”
“Yeah. I’m thirty, he’s twenty-seven.”
“How many kids are there?”
“Just the two of us, and Mom. I guess it’s the old ‘growing up without a father’ thing. Our dad split just after Bobby was born. We had my mother’s brother and his wife around for a while, up the street from us for…I don’t know, at least ten years. Then the steel mill cut back. My uncle went to Gary to work, and Bobby didn’t have anyone to follow around. I was working by then, just trying to keep the rent paid.” Eric Moyers stared at the floor, hands hanging loose between his knees. “First he started coming home from school early. Then he started getting sent home from school early. Then he started getting sent home from school in a police car.”
“How did your mother react?”
“She did her best. She tried understanding, she tried tough love. At first he stole from our neighbors, friends, people who knew our situation and wouldn’t press charges, at least not heavy ones. But Bobby never had the sense to stay where he was safe. Let me describe my brother to you, Officer. He’s never had a job. Ever. Not flipping burgers or delivering the damn paper. The only thing he’s ever done is steal, and he can’t even do that right. I’d understand if he were dumb, but he reads books, he’s a whiz at math. He’d just rather die than work for a living.”
No surprises so far. Frank said the cop’s prayer to himself: Please, God, let me find out something useful. “So he went to jail.”
“He robbed a check-cashing place on Lorain, him and this guy he knew from his high school gym class. Unfortunately, the clerk was the kid they both used to toss into the locker-room trash can, and he sent the cops their way. Bobby got one break—the surveillance tape sucked so bad that you couldn’t tell if he had a gun or a bag in his hand. He got a decent sentence.”
“Where’s the other guy now?” Could this be Lucas?
“Tried to cozy up to a gang of skinheads, thinkin’ they’d protect him inside. They killed him within a week.”
Patrick looked around for a place to dump his empty pop can. The only wastebasket in sight was filled to the brim. “That’s Bobby’s only conviction?”
“That’s the only felony. He’s got all sorts of juvie stuff.”
“Then he went back for the parole violation.”
“My mother’s hair