Page 119 of Sworn to Silence
“If I tell you everything, you’ll have to arrest me.”
“I like Gina already.”
As if remembering, she smiled, then sobered. “I didn’t fit in here, especially after the bishop put me under thebann.” She shrugged. “I was young enough to convince myself it didn’t matter. I was angry and defiant. I saved enough money for a bus ride and moved to Columbus when I turned eighteen.”
“That had to have been a tough transition.”
She gave a self-deprecating laugh. “Talk about a fish out of water. All I had to my name was two hundred dollars. I wore the dresses my mother made. I cut the hem, but...” She shook her head. “You can imagine. Anyway, I was broke. No job. No place to live. Didn’t know a soul. I was basically living on the street when I met Gina.”
“How did you meet her?”
“It wasn’t love at first sight.” Her eyes flicked down, then went back to his. “It was cold. I needed a place to sleep. She didn’t lock her car.”
“You slept in her car?”
“She got in to go to work the next morning and there I was.” Her lips curved into a wry smile. “I’ve never told anyone that before.”
“So did she call the cops, or what?”
“Threatened to. But I must have looked pretty harmless because she took me into her apartment. Fed me. The next thing I know, I have a place to live.” Another smile, amused this time. “Gina did all the bad things I’d been warned about. Smoking. Drinking. Cussing. She seemed very worldly to me. I don’t know how or why, but we hit it off.”
“How did you get into law enforcement?”
“Gina was a dispatcher with the Columbus PD. I finally landed a job waiting tables at a pancake house. At night, she’d come home and tell me about her day. I thought she had the most exciting job in the world. I wanted a job like hers. So I went back to school, earned my GED. A month later, she got me a job as a dispatcher at a substation near downtown. That fall, we enrolled in a criminal justice program at the community college. A year later, we were in the academy.”
He stared at her, realizing he was getting caught up in this. Getting caught up in her. Not a good frame of mind for a man who would be leaving in a few hours.
“What about you, Tomasetti?”
“I came out of the womb corrupted.”
Laughing, she reached for the pack of cigarettes. John wasn’t sure why it pleased him when she lit up. Maybe because it made her more human, a little less perfect and a tad closer to his own tarnished soul.
“So what did you do before you were a cop?” she asked.
“I was always a cop.” He rolled his shoulders to ease some of the tension creeping up the back of his neck. “I think this is where you’re supposed to ask me about what happened in Cleveland.”
“I figured if you wanted to talk about it, you would.”
She didn’t look away. That impressed him. Probably more than he would ever be able to tell her. “How much do you know?” he asked.
“The media version. I know they usually don’t get it right.”
“It’s an ugly story, Kate.”
“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
For the first time in his life, he did. Kate had given him something he hadn’t had for a long time: hope. Made him realize he might not need the alcohol and pills to get through the day. The time had come to lance the boil, let the demons out, start the healing process. “Do you know who Con Vespian is?”
“Every cop in the state knows about Vespian. Cleveland’s version of John Gotti.”
“With a little Charles Manson mixed in.”
“Narcotics. Prostitution. Gambling.”
“He had his fingers in a lot of pies, but he dealt mostly in heroin. Big time stuff, including murder when it was convenient. Worse when he wanted to make a point. Vespian and I go way back to when I was a street cop. I busted him twice. He got off both times. Every narc in the city had a hard-on for him. But he was one lucky son of a bitch. Dangerous, too, because he was half fucking crazy.”
“Bad combination.”
