Page 143 of Bloodlines
“War’s started. That’s what happened.” Cal shoved his plate of picked-at pancakes aside. “So, what now?”
“I’ll follow up on leads and figure out what happened at that warehouse. You know the game, though. It’s their jurisdiction, so the sheriff’s office will call us in if they need assistance.”
Cal huffed a derisive laugh, bitter for having witnessed bureaucracy in all its stunning ineptitude.
“They won’t,” he said. “It’ll get reported as a dust-up between rival organizations. No one will bat an eye or remember in a few weeks. No leads and no one to claim the bodies. I’ve been in this business a long time. That’s how this goes, and it’s how they slip through our fingers.”
“How do we bring them down then?”
Kingsley shifted forward in his seat. His chest rested against the edge of the table with no concern for how his dress shirt might sop up bacon grease.
A lifetime ago, Cal would’ve been flattered to indulge a young gun like Kingsley with enough career ahead of him to run with the time and opportunity he had left. Sitting in a diner booth in a rundown town, far from home and with nothing much to his name, Cal wasn’t the man he used to be and probably never would be again. Shit out of luck, he had no good answers.
“We don’t,” he said. “We never will.”
Thunder rumbled outside, and lightning cracked the sky. A few booths over, an old couple rubber-necked out the window.
“You talk about them as if they’re a supernatural force we can’t vanquish.”
“I never said they couldn’t fall. Just that it wouldn’t happen from the outside. My brother Mitch pounded his head against that wall his entire career. He tried everything to bring the Moriartys to their knees, and I do mean everything. You know what it got him?”
Kingsley shook his head.
“An early grave.”
When Cal saw his brother last, Mitch had gained years on his face he hadn’t yet lived. On a warm spring day, he stood on Cal’s deck in his church clothes, the khaki and pastels so at odds with the darkness that’d followed him by then.
“Betrayal is the only thing that’s going to break the Moriartys apart,” Mitch had said. “It’ll be someone on the inside who does them in. By the time anyone notices, it’ll be too late.”
The scent of fresh mowed grass and Easter ham had lingered in the air. With Helen and Amelia, barely a teenager then, dying eggs at the breakfast table, life was sweet, but Mitch was haunted, and Cal was at a loss for how to chase away the demons.
He’d assumed his brother was only eulogizing a long career. Mitch had talked about hanging up the hat for years, only waiting to watch the Moriartys fall so he could rest easy in retirement.
“Our world is no different, Cal,” his brother had said. “There are enemies on the inside too. Be careful who you trust. The only thing I’ve ever respected about the Moriartys is that they don’t hide their evil behind a badge.”
At brunch, Mitch had picked at his food and responded mostly in hums or distracted grumbles. When he left, he’d hugged Cal long and hard, as if some part of him knew it was the last time.
Kingsley stared at Cal and looked just as thunderstruck as Cal had felt standing on his deck that Easter Sunday with fresh death on the horizon. Cal motioned to the steak knife next to Kingsley’s plate.
“Let’s say someone cuts me with that knife. I stuff it with gauze, stop the bleeding, and wait for it to heal. When it does, I move on and don’t make the same mistake twice. But let’s say I get knocked down hard, the kind of fall that tears up my insides. I get back up and go about my life unaware of the trauma until it’s too late. I’m bleeding out on the inside and don’t even know it.”
Cal dropped his voice and prodded the table with one finger. The silverware rattled with each jab.
“Let’s cut the shit. We both know Emory has Amelia. We hemorrhage the Moriartys from the inside and watch them crumble. When they do, I’ll be there to get my daughter back.”
“Hemorrhage from the inside,” Kingsley repeated and took a swig of tomato juice. “An informant?”
“No. Informants are like thorns. The Moriartys will pluck them out, one after the next. We get someone close to the top, someone in Emory’s inner circle. A personal betrayal will make him question everyone and everything around him. He’ll set fire to his own organization and watch it burn just to drive out the treachery, and, when he’s done, he’ll have nothing left but an empire of ashes.”
The vinyl crackled as Kingsley slumped in the booth with a sigh. “Jack?”
“Closer than that.”
Understanding bloomed on Kingsley’s face. He nodded slowly and whispered, “Blood’s thicker than water.”
“Precisely.”
With his appetite returning, Cal reclaimed his plate of pancakes. Though cold and soggy, he savored them more than when they were hot off the griddle. Kingsley seemed to have lost his appetite and surrendered his half-eaten meal to the waitress when she fluttered by.
Some things were sacred and Cal would know. One balmy June night, a storm scattered his family to the four winds and across the great divide. Family was sacred, but Emory crossed the Rubicon first, and it was only fair that he should suffer the same storm.
With an enemy inside—and family, no less—the tower would fall.
