Rhett walked outside the boathouse, and Wolfe followed him. The lieutenant flipped the cards in front of him to a new set, but didn’t play any. Instead, he walked over to a man lying dead on the ground on his back, arms almost comically akimbo. He moved one arm across the man’s chest and then rolled him over.

Rhett reached inside the man’s back pocket.

“I’ve fondled plenty of things in my day,” Wolfe drawled, “but dead bodies isn’t one of them.”

“Har har,” Rhett said drily, and then pulled a phone from the man’s pocket. He dialed 9-1-1. “Hello, there’s been a shooting at the Noimoire docks, the”—Rhett glances up at a sign—“Gavin’s Boathouse.”

“Like the card selling company?” Wolfe asked.

Rhett glanced over. “Or another unrelated guy named Gavin.”

Rhett flipped the cards still in front of his chest again, then summoned his Veteran EMT, healing himself.

Wolfe snorted. That made more sense.

Rhett pulled a key fob from the man’s front right pocket, and pointed it at a dark green jeep wrangler. The car’s lights flashed, and Rhett opened the driver’s side door. “Let’s go.”

Wolfe got into the opposite side. He was feeling a lot less damaged after Rhett’s card, but now the adrenaline was leaving him. If he hadn’t been so worried about the cops at his house, he would likely have tried to sleep, but he was a bit keyed up for that.

In fact… “You have a cigarette?”

“Shel told me you quit.”

Wolfe ground his teeth. Of course they had talked about it. Now he would probably hear something from Shel and also not get a cigarette.

“I don’t have any.”

And part one comes true.

Wolfe sighed and kicked one foot up onto the dashboard.

“Sit normally, please. It’s dangerous to position yourself like that.”

Wolfe kicked his other leg up out of sheer orneriness, and hooked his ankles. “Life’s short. I don’t give a shit.”

Rhett cornered hard, keeping his speed high, and Wolfe had to grab the bar. He glanced over, expecting to see Rhett mocking him, but he saw nothing of the sort. Instead, Rhett was driving intensely and with focus. Cutting seconds competently.

Wolfe would have complimented the man, but at this point, he assumed Rhett hated him so much that all he could think was—why bother?

“Why are you relaxing anyway?” Rhett asked. “Shouldn’t you be more—ready, or something?”

“Being too tense can kill you on things like this. You’ve gotta relax. It’s going to be almost half an hour before we’re there. I have no idea what happened, anyway, and no way to find out.”

Rhett was silent. For a few minutes, the road sped by beneath them as he drove with focused determination.

But after a moment, Wolfe glanced over at him. “Hey, I have a question. Do cops get any say over which prisons inmates are housed at?”

“No,” Rhett said. “There’s a prison designation board that determines your facility based on your security rating, criminal record, area code of residence, and availability of space in the different facilities. Sometimes a judge can make a recommendation on your behalf, but that’s rare.”

Wolfe thought about it, but there was nothing really to say.

“Why?” Rhett asked.

“I wanna be placed as far away from Shel as possible.”

Rhett turned and stared at Wolfe for a second before going back to focusing on the road. “Why? I thought you were going to be there for her for life, or something.”

“I’d planned on it. But we both know I’m gonna go away for a long, long time. I can’t take care of her, can’t provide her with the family and support she so desperately wants. Shel won’t leave her siblings and family, I think, and I’d rather she not visit. She’s got better things to do with her time.”

Wolfe was frustrated, but he knew that he had chosen his path when he didn’t kill Rhett. He probably should have, but what Shel had said to him all those months ago, after Big Man Grimm had died, was still true—he had done the right thing the wrong way his whole life, and it hadn’t worked out. Wolfe was tired of it.

If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

And even then, he had never really killed just to make things easier for himself, and never a true innocent, which Rhett was.

Wolfe continued. “Truth is, at the end of the day, I have to do what’s right for Shel. I can’t let my past mistakes be what makes her unhappy. She needs to move on from me... No matter how much I fucking hate it.”

Rhett didn’t answer for a bit, and they drove again in silence for a few moments.

Finally, he spoke. “Humor me. Hypothetically speaking, let’s say you are who I think you are. Some gangster lowlife. Now let’s pretend that you didn’t hire someone to kill Emmett. Why would they say you had?”

“Hypothetically speaking?” Wolfe asked.

“Yeah. Pretend. We’re pretending this is reality.”

“Then I would tell you that no one leaves a gang without consequences. I would also tell you that some of my hypothetical old associates would be displeased with my current occupation and consider it traitorous. I don’t think we need to imagine what happens to traitors, right? I’d say they would go to great lengths, hypothetically, to make sure I was taken out of the picture.”

“Some guy would be willing to go to prison to bring you in?”

“You’d be surprised at how far certain influences go. It’s always nice to have a middleman in prison. If he was headed there anyway, why not make it as good a life as possible? Like a sideways promotion.”

“Is our prison system really that bad?”

Wolfe shrugged. “It holds individuals fine, but organizations? Not so much.”

“Why are you and Shel together?” Rhett asks. “I don’t mean, how did you meet, or why did you hook up. I mean why stay together. She’s not like you.”

“This seems really personal and not something lieutenant Rhett should be asking me.”

“Please, humor me.”

“I ask myself the same damn thing all the time. I think Shel thinks she owes me. I saved her once—she’s telling the truth about that. She did something dumb, got in over her head, and nearly died. I saved her, at some risk to myself. Then I helped her with some important stuff at a lot more risk to myself. Found out what happened to her dead brother, although we never truly fixed that situation.”

“What happened?”

“The Cobra street gang killed him—their head enforcer, Nico, specifically did it. But Shel didn’t know that, and so she went and tried to hunt her way up the list of gang lieutenants, at Level One and with a brand-new deck, like an idiot.”

“Oh? She’s an idiot? Let me guess—you’re infinitely smarter.”

Wolfe sighed. “I’m even dumber. Doesn’t change that her thing was retarded too.”

Rhett sighed right back. “You know, this isn’t at all how I imagined arresting you.”

This guy has an odd train of thought. “Sorry to spoil your fantasies.”

Rhett frowned and faced Wolfe. “They aren’t fantasies.”

Wolfe laughed. “Let me guess, you wanted me to resist? Kick my ass?”

“You have to admit, your attitude, comments about me, and comments about my co-workers have earned you at least one ass kicking.”

Rhett said it deadpan, but when Wolfe turned to look at him, a small smile was playing around his face.

Wolfe snorted. “Yeah, probably. My default position is “torque them off.” Although, for the record, I didn’t resist because I didn’t want to kick your ass where Shel might see. She’s soft that way.”

“She wasn’t there in the garage, and she certainly wasn’t there in the boathouse. Why not then?”

Wolfe thought about his life, his patron, and Shel. “Sometimes a man has to follow through with his duty, I guess. You’re carrying out yours, and I’m carrying out mine. That’s all.”

Wolfe wasn’t sure if he owed Shel anything. It could be argued that she owed him. But it didn’t matter—Wolfe wanted her to be happy, deep in his soul. He had taken the responsibility onto himself.

They were now inside the Joliet city limit, and Rhett sped through the city.

Rhett spoke again, his voice thoughtful. “Why did you join the gang in the first place? Hypothetically, I mean.”

“Well, if I am who you think, then my story would go something like this—My dad was a mob lawyer. He beat my mom and raped my older sister. When I was a teenager, I tried to stop him, and he beat me half to death. Two days after I was taken to the hospital, the police that had taken my statement altered records, then testified with a bunch of lies that made me the villain. My dad went free.”

“That’s why you dislike cops?”

“I dislike most people,” Wolfe said.

Rhett laughed. “Continue.”

“Eventually, I killed my dad while trying to stop him from harming my family. It was about a year after the first fight. You can look it up, assuming you can get into sealed juvenile files. Maybe some of the bastard cops are still around, and you can get the true story from them. But the only guy that stuck up for me—hypothetically—was a mob boss. He got me out of juvie, right before they tried to try me as an adult for murder. He took care of me, legit. A man that wasn’t good, but was at least honorable—something those that were sworn to serve and protect me weren’t. Tell me—what would you have done?”

Rhett took a corner hard. “You saved my life, back there.”

This guy jumps topics like a damned jack rabbit.

“It’s fine, you saved mine too,” Wolfe said tiredly.

Rhett spoke musingly. “No… not really. I saved mine. But you could have left, after the first fight. Instead, you tried to save me.”

“I held a gun to your head. Not the same.”

“Only to get me to not arrest you once you had saved me. Leaving me or shooting me would have done everything you needed.”

Wolfe rolled his head over and stared at Rhett. “Rhett… what do you want? Okay, I saved you. You going to not arrest me?”

Rhett didn’t answer. Instead, he touched his chest and pulled his cards out again.

Then he took a pile of cards—twenty—from his pocket, split them in half, and passed ten to Wolfe. “These are the Surgeon’s cards. Half belong to you.”

“Alright…?” Wolfe said, taking them and stuffing them in his pants next to the ones he had gotten from Castor.

“You value Shel’s happiness more than your own?” Rhett asked.

“I… what?” Wolfe asked, briefly baffled. “Yeah. At least, I think so.”

Rhett reached out and touched his companion card. But it didn’t summon—instead, one of the ten cards Rhett had kept from the Surgeon’s deck disappeared, and the companion card appeared in his lap. He picked it up and passed it too Wolfe. “For saving my life.”

Wolfe stared at the card for a moment, then glanced at Rhett. “Are we friends now, or…?”

Rhett pulled into Wolfe’s driveway. “We’re here is what we are.”