Take Me Down (Riggs Brothers #2) Read online

A cold sweat broke out on the back of my neck and I felt bile in my throat. “You have got to be fucking kidding me,” I said, my voice a croak.

  Set deep inside the wheel well were six neatly wrapped packages of white powder.

  I was an ex-con, I’d just finished parole two days ago, and I had six kilos of coke in my car.

  We were silent for a minute while I quietly tried not to throw up.

  “Okay,” Ryan said, running a hand through his hair. “We can fix this. We can.”

  “It’s six kilos of coke,” I said. “You don’t fucking fix it, Ryan. You get rid of it. Now.”

  “You have to get rid of it right,” Luke pointed out. He looked pretty green too, since he was the one who’d bought the car, and he co-owned the shop where this shit was currently sitting. “You don’t just throw it in the trash or something. And where the fuck did it come from? What if someone is looking for it?”

  I scrubbed both hands over my face. “Jesus. Okay. Okay. I’m not panicking. What do we do?”

  Ryan sighed. “I hate to say it, but there’s one guy who will know exactly what to do with this. And I mean exactly.”

  I groaned. I knew exactly who Ryan meant. “He’s a loose cannon. Who knows what the fuck he’ll do?”

  “Ryan is right,” Luke said. “He can fix this. He’s the only one we know who can do it right. So who’s going to call him?”

  I dropped my hands and pulled my phone from my pocket. “Fine,” I said. “Jesus Christ, what a mess. I’ll do it. I’ll be the one to call Dex.”

  Seventeen

  Jace

  Dex stared into the wheel well of my car for a long time, his expression unreadable.

  “Okay, Jace,” he said at last. “You have a fucking problem.”

  Dex was the oldest of us, which wasn’t saying much—Dex and Ryan had different mothers, so they were only four months apart. Dex had spent time as a cop on the Detroit PD before he’d resigned—some rumors said he’d had a nervous breakdown and couldn’t hack the job, while other rumors said there were corruption charges coming down the pipeline, so Dex had gotten out while the getting was good. No one knew the truth, and Dex wasn’t saying anything because Dex was batshit crazy.

  He’d always been crazy. He was the brother who took jumps off the side of the quarry into the shallow water or tried to flip his bike off a ramp. As an adult, he still had the same mentality. No one ever knew what Dex would do. Which, I had to admit, made him almost perfect for this situation.

  He stood up straight right now and took a joint from his pocket. “Helps me think,” he said when Ryan glared at him. We let him light up because Dylan wasn’t in the shop anymore. Luke had called in Emily, and she’d taken Dylan to the movies, a worried look on her face. I knew exactly how she felt.

  Dex puffed the joint, thinking. “Okay,” he said through the smoke. “First off, where the fuck did this car come from?”

  “A guy sold it to me,” Luke said.

  “This guy have a name?”

  “He said his name was Richard Wagner. He said the paperwork would come next week.”

  “So a fake name, then,” Dex said. “Well done. If he’d said his name was Chuck Norris, would you have believed him?”

  “Bite me, Dex,” Luke said.

  “Noted.” Dex took another draw on the joint. He needed a haircut, and his dark hair was haphazardly shoved back from his forehead, tousled. His flannel shirt was rumpled and his well-worn jeans hung low on his hips. Dex was a poster boy for the sort-of-homeless look; for all I knew, he actually was homeless, since I didn’t know where he lived. How he’d ever gotten through the police academy was a mystery to us all, but his disintegration afterward was pretty much total.

  “That’s definitely coke,” Dex said, “in case there was any doubt. The packages have cartel stamps on them. That’s bad fucking news. Was this Richard Wagner Hispanic?”

  “No, he was a white guy,” Luke said. “He said it was his dad’s car, and his dad just died. He didn’t want it, so he sold it to me.”

  “I’ve been working on it,” I said. “I can vouch that it hasn’t been driven in months. The tires were flat, the shocks were shot. Rust everywhere.”

  “So it wasn’t driven over the border and all the way to Michigan,” Dex said. “At least, not recently. Which means the coke was stuffed in there from somewhere else.”

  “Or it was driven over the border a long time ago,” I pointed out.

  “Maybe dear old Pops did it. Stole cartel coke and had to stash it.” Dex looked thoughtful. He took another toke, then ground out his joint. “Then he croaked. Inconvenient, but the theory works. It’s possible the cartel doesn’t even know where their coke is.” He looked at me. “You have four options, Jace. One, you can sell this. Two, you can snort it. Three, you call the cops. And four, you dump it. Let’s start with number one. This shit is worth a lot of money—enough to set you up. I probably know guys who can move it. But it will get you arrested if you’re lucky, killed if you aren’t.”

  I stared at him. “Are you fucking kidding me? Dex, you were a cop.”

  “Who do you think cops meet all day every day, Jace? I was vice. You think I was arresting jaywalkers? The guys I dealt with were the guys who move stuff like this.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. “I am not selling coke.”

  “Fine then, option two. It goes up your nose. It would take a while, this much. Nifty way to dispose of it.”

  “Fuck off. No. Next.”

  “Just checking. Next, you call the Westlake PD and tell them the truth. That some guy sold you this car with coke in it. That you’re totally innocent, and you are in no way dealing drugs through Riggs Auto, where Dad ran a stolen car ring for years and probably dealt whatever he could get his hands on.”

  I felt my stomach twist, and I dropped my hand. “You’re saying they won’t believe me.”

  “You’re a con, Jace,” Dex said. “You think they’re going to believe you?”

  Luke broke in. “Emily’s mother is a cop. She’s not evil, and she’s not stupid. She’d hear you out, investigate it the right way.”

  “With what outcome?” Dex looked around at us. “Sure, she’d listen, but what would the cops decide? Riggs Auto is dirty. It’s been dirty for years. Dad is dirty, and everyone thinks we are too.”

  “Bullshit,” Luke argued. “Emily’s mother doesn’t think that.”

  “She changed her mind, what, a month ago?” Ryan said. “When you and Emily got together? Before that she thought we were scum, just like everyone else does.”

  “Besides,” I said, “Emily’s mother doesn’t have the final say. There will be an investigation with me in the middle of it. This”—I pointed to the trunk of my car—“is hard time. Federal time. If I go down, I go all the way down and I never come up again. I’m supposed to risk that because you’ve been to Sunday dinner at Emily’s a few times?”

  “You bought the car, Luke,” Ryan added. “It’s sitting in Riggs Auto right now. If Riggs Auto gets shut down, what do we do then?”

  Dex held up a hand. “I think we can all agree that we are all royally fucked, Jace especially, if the cops take this. So that leaves option four. We ghost this shit. If it’s gone, it never happened.”

  I scrubbed a hand through my hair. The sooner the stuff was gone, the better. “Do we dump it in the sewer?” I asked.

  “Too risky,” Dex said.

  “Toss it in the quarry?” Ryan said.

  Dex tutted. “Jesus, Mickey Mantle. Come up with something better than that.”

  “Take it to the dump,” Luke suggested.

  Dex pointed at him. “Close. But not quite. I’m going to need a few supplies. At dusk, we get this done.”

  Casey Simpson ran a junkyard outside the Westlake city limits, a few acres of scrubby land he’d put a fence around. People paid him to dump their shit in there, and in return for asking no questions, Casey reserved the right to scavenge whatever he decided was worthwhile.
>
  Casey lived in a shack fifty feet from the yard’s gated entrance, where he mostly spent his days drinking himself into oblivion. He started around ten a.m., and by five or six he was usually passed out, at which point getting into the junkyard was fair game. You just had to know the tricks.

  Dex knew the tricks, of course. Why would a Riggs boy go to school when he could learn this stuff instead?

  At six o’clock, Ryan did a circuit of Casey’s house on foot, checking through the window that Casey was out cold. When he gave the signal, I climbed the fence at the yard’s southwest corner, where one of the overgrown trees blocked the view of the security camera. I balanced myself on top of the fence and unhooked the wires from the blocked camera, which shut down the feed through every camera on the circuit. It was a stupid way to wire it, but Casey had done the wiring himself, and he was a shitty electrician.

  With the cameras out, I gave the signal to Luke and climbed off the fence again. Luke climbed the fence near the front guardhouse, which was empty, and jumped onto the roof. He slid down, went into the guardhouse, and shut off the alarm. He also opened the electronic lock for the front gate, which left only the gate’s huge padlock in effect.

  I jogged down Route Seven a quarter mile away from Casey’s place and got in the tow truck we’d left parked there. By the time I got to the yard’s gate, Dex had finished picking the padlock and was swinging the gate open. I got out of the tow, unhooked the Thunderbird, and Ryan got behind the wheel of the car as I pushed it.

  Dex and Luke joined me. We pushed the car—my car—into the yard in silence as dark fell, the lights off, the engine dead. No one said anything. Maybe I was emotional, but to me it felt like a funeral.

  We kept pushing as Ryan steered, heading for the north section of the yard. Sweat was trickling down my back beneath my black hoodie.

  “You couldn’t have fixed the engine?” Luke grunted to me as we pushed.

  “It would have made too much noise, dickface,” Dex grunted back.

  “Casey’s out cold,” Luke said, his arms straining. “He wouldn’t hear if we drove a monster truck through here.”

  “Shut up, both of you,” I said as sweat rolled down my temples. “We’re almost there.”

  The north part of the yard had other cars in it—junkers that didn’t run, dropped off to Casey over the years. They were in various states of rust, from an old pickup that looked like it was disintegrating to a wheelless Volvo that looked relatively new. We grunted and pushed the Thunderbird toward them.

  When we finally got there, we stopped pushing and Ryan got out of the car. “Nice work, suckers,” he said, grinning at us. “Too bad I have this bum shoulder or I totally would have helped.”

  “You’re an asshole,” I said, using my sleeve to mop my brow.

  “We couldn’t have left it in another part of the lot?” Luke asked Dex, stretching his back.

  “No. Jesus. It’s like I didn’t teach you guys a fucking thing,” Dex said, popping the Thunderbird’s trunk and taking his supplies out.

  “You didn’t,” I said.

  “Well, I’m teaching you now. Watch the master at work.” He pulled out a wad of rags and tossed us each one. “Wipe,” he told us. “Don’t miss an inch.”

  We wiped the car down—every surface, everywhere any one of us might have touched. I even opened the hood and wiped down the engine, since I’d worked on it, while Luke got on his back under the car and wiped the undercarriage. Dex snapped rubber gloves on, lifted a sharp piece of metal from a nearby junk pile, and used it to cut careful slits into each of the kilos of coke, letting them fall open.

  Next he pulled out gas cans. “Luke,” he said, tossing him one. “Over there.” He pointed to the cars on the left. “Ryan, over there.” He tossed Ryan a can and pointed to the cars on the right.

  “We’re torching everything?” Ryan said.

  “This seems like overkill,” I pointed out.

  Dex looked at me. “Jace, the car has to go. It was used to either transport the coke, store it, or both. We don’t know who’s looking for it, who’s marked it. It has to go.”

  I closed my eyes. “I know.”

  “If we burn one car—just one—what are the cops going to look at?” Dex said. “That one car. If we burn five or six cars in the back of a junkyard and make a big-ass fire, the cops have to look at the whole thing, which takes days, and it looks more like an accident or a couple of asshole kids fooling around. Believe me, no PD is going to waste a lot of resources sifting through the burned-out junk in Casey’s yard, trying to figure out if there’s something important in it.”

  “You’re sure the coke will burn?” I asked him.

  Dex held up his own gas can and poured gasoline into the wheel well. “Trust me, it will fucking burn.”

  So we did it. I sprinted back through the yard toward the gate and the tow truck as Dex pulled out his matches and Ryan and Luke ran for the back fence. I had just gone through the gate when the fire went up behind me in a big whoosh of heat and flame. I swung into the tow truck and drove it down a back road, out of sight of Casey’s shack when he inevitably woke up in the next few minutes. By the time Casey looked groggily out his window, wondering what the commotion was, there would be nothing but fire and no sign of a Riggs brother anywhere.

  It was wrong. We were damaging property, covering up a crime, destroying evidence, and torching my car. As an ex-con, I should have been doing exactly none of those things. Every single one of them was a risk.

  And damn it, I thought as I bumped the truck over the service road, it was fun.

  I cut the engine on the tow in the dark, looking at the glow of the fire half a mile away. Dex was the first one to reach the truck, opening the passenger door and climbing in next to me. He already had a lit joint between his lips.

  He gave me a Dex grin, the corner of his mouth twisting up over the joint. His face was mood-lit in the dark, his hair mussed, his jaw unshaven. Dex was good-looking, but the girls who went for him were always a little suicidal. “You really are a Riggs after all,” he said to me.

  “You had a doubt?” I asked him.

  “All those years stealing cars and informing on Dad at the same time,” Dex said. “I could look at you all day and still not know what’s in your fucking head.”

  I stared at him, ice cold creeping up the back of my neck.

  Dex shook his head, took the joint between his fingers. “Come on, Jace,” he said. “I’m a cop.”

  “Not anymore.” The words came out harsh because I was shocked and horrified. Dex knew. He knew.

  “I’m cop enough to figure out a few simple things,” Dex said. “Like you hate Dad as much as I do, so there was no way you were spending your life as his little bitch. Which meant you were lying.”

  My body was clammy with panic. I looked at Dex and wondered if he was thinking about the time I’d asked for a bike—if he even remembered that day. “Dex,” I said, “no one can know. I mean no one. If—”

  “I’ve known almost from the beginning, and I didn’t spill,” Dex said. “You think I’m going to spill on you now and get you killed? Here comes Ryan.”

  I tried to unclench my jaw, dig my fingernails out of my icy palms. The entire escapade tonight—the break-in, the fire, the coke—didn’t scare me as much as what Dex had just told me. The information I’d passed had taken down some very powerful people—people who thought nothing of killing not only me, but everyone around me. My brothers. Tara. If the men I’d informed on knew who I was, they would kill Tara in a heartbeat.

  The back door opened and Ryan swung into the truck. “Whoee,” he said, “we haven’t done anything like that since high school. Remember the time we took down all the basketball hoops in the park and put them on the freeway?”

  I did. That had been fun. You should never leave basketball hoops that aren’t cemented down when there are Riggs brothers around. It’s your own fault, really.

  The other back door opened and Luke got
in. “Let’s move,” he said. “Emily just texted me. She took Dylan for a movie and a snack, but now they’re both curious about what we’re doing.”

  I turned the key in the ignition as Dex said, “Luke, you have an old lady now. What are you going to tell her?”

  “I’ll tell her the truth,” Luke said. “I’ll just tell her after we’ve already gotten away with it, so she can yell all she wants. Also, if I want to keep my balls I’ll never refer to her as an old lady.”

  “I’m not telling Dylan,” Ryan said. “He’s only seven. I’m supposed to be normal dad. I don’t want him getting ideas.”

  “Role model, huh?” Dex said, laughing.

  “Fuck you, Dex,” Ryan said. “Someday you’ll have a kid, and all you’ll want is to be boring.” He sighed and looked out the window, running a hand through his perfect hair. “Damn, though, that was fun.”

  He sounded sad about it. I knew exactly how he felt.

  Eighteen

  Tara

  I hadn’t told Jace what I was doing on my Saturday off, and he hadn’t asked. For once, was glad for his stubborn sealed-off ways. There was no one in the world who was less nosy than Jace Riggs, and today it worked to my benefit.

  I took a cab to get my car and headed to Westlake’s north end, where they were building the new subdivisions. Maybe it was hopeful of the town to develop them, but Westlake had a nice middle-class population if you were on the right side of the tracks. That population was growing, and some of them were buying the new houses in town.

  I left streets that had big old trees and drove down brand-new roads, the houses with no grass or fresh sod laid down, some of the sites still piled with machinery and dirt. These weren’t going to be mansions; they were small, modest places, mostly townhouses, for young couples to live in as they moved their way up. I knew, because until eight months ago I was going to live in one myself.

  Kyle still lived in the house we’d bought. It was his house now—he’d paid me my half of the down payment and taken over the mortgage. He said he liked the place, he could afford it, and he didn’t want to leave. That was fine with me, so I’d packed my things and moved into my little rental.