Page 26 of Under Cover
“No, don’t put me off here. Don’t get shot. I’m not screwing around. You scared the shit out of me a few months ago.”
Crosby grimaced. “Yeah, but that was an anomaly—”
Without warning, Garcia pulled him into a hard, masculine hug, thumping him twice on the back before letting him go and disappearing into the closest stand of trees.
Crosby watched him go, surprised, before turning toward the small path that led to the Island. He’d just started jogging along the path when he heard a high-pitched child’s scream.
His jog turned into a sprint.
The path led him to a small enclosed triangle plot of earth with privacy walls on two sides. In the center of the triangle was the nightmare scenario he and the others had anticipated.
A portly middle-aged white man stood with his daughters at his feet, shaking hands aiming the Berretta at them.
“I said,” he screamed, “you two need to get on your knees like good girls and pray!”
“But Daddy,” wailed the oldest one, a green-eyed princess with tangled hair past her hips. “Why do you have a gun? I want Mommy. Why can’t we see Mommy?”
“In a few minutes, baby,” her father promised, tears washing his face. “I promise—”
“But can you really promise that?” Crosby asked, walking through the stone entrance passage with his hands relaxed at his sides. “I mean, I get as a Catholic you’d like tothinkthey can see Mommy, but will they really be able to? Is that how the whole thing works?”
Their suspect—Tyler James “T.J.” Kennedy—stared at Crosby blankly, his gun wobbling in front of him.
“What? You ask me thathere?”
Crosby casually reached for the holster on his right hip, keeping eye contact with Kennedy and trying to be as nonthreatening as possible.
“Well, I’m asking you because your daughters are kneeling in the snow over infant graves, and it looks really uncomfortable and sort of scary. I wanted to make sure you were absolutely certain you were doing what God intended.”
Kennedy gaped at him, and in the stillness all Crosby could hear was the muffled suppressed sobs of Kennedy’s daughters.
“Of course I am,” he said, his voice broken. He held the Beretta up, not tensely, but still he could fire at Crosby in a heartbeat. “I… I believe in the sanctity of life. Their mother—their mother didn’t. She… she was going to commit murder!” His voice broke. “Our son. She was going to kill our son.”
Crosby breathed out carefully through his nose. “But your son wasn’t even born yet. Were there complications?”
“They said he had no brain,” the man gasped wretchedly. “And she was going to kill him when that’s God’s job. How could they kill him when that’s God’s job?”
“Well, those babies go through a lot of pain when they’re born, and they die within a week,” Crosby said, remembering everything he could about the last reproductive health pamphlet he’d read while bored at his GP’s office. “Do you really think God wants them to be in pain if he’s given us the power to spare them? Your daughters—they’re freezing in the snow, Mr. Kennedy. Can’t you see that?”
“But they’re supposed to join their mother,” he said, staring at Crosby in confusion. One of the girls whimpered, and his confusion seemed to end. “And you can’t stop me from sending them there!” he snarled. But as the gun rose to Crosby’s chest, suddenly Kennedy’s entire body stiffened, and he gaped in surprise.
Blood trickled from his mouth as his knees buckled, and Crosby turned toward the little girls and said, “Come on, guys, come over here. Your daddy needs to lie down for a little. Come on. Come toward me. Don’t turn around, okay? Look at me. Just, you know, you don’t want to make him mad.”
He hunkered down to a squat, and Gail, Manny, Harding, and Natalia appeared from nowhere, forming a wall between the girls and their dead father as the girls rushed into Crosby’s arms.
CROSBY SNUCKin a quick look before the ME arrived and after he’d handed the girls off to the social worker, after making promises to visit. Joey Carlyle had shot one crossbow bolt, silent as a shadow, a little to the left of Kennedy’s spine.
Straight through his heart from behind.
Like he’d said—no big boom, no blood, less trauma.
“Chilling as fuck,” Garcia said, coming alongside him as he checked out the body.
“Yeah, but I’m glad he’s got my back and not the bad guy’s,” Crosby conceded. They both looked up to where Carlyle was getting congratulations and “I’m sorry, you have to do desk duty next, you know that, right?” from Harding and Denison.
“I had your back,” Garcia said, sounding wounded.
Crosby threw a companionable arm around his shoulders, feeling like a fraud. It looked very good-ole-boy being a buddy, but that’s not why he did it.
