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“With pictures,” he went on.
Eek!
“And you are not dragging my cousin into your shit,” he concluded.
“Listen, Jayden—” Luna tried to play it cool.
“Fuck no,” Jayden cut her off. “Are you high?” His eyes went over her head. “Are you high?” he asked again.
We all turned around.
Cap and Gabe were standing there.
They’d followed, but they hadn’t followed close. My guess was, they were close now because we had a tall, angry, fit man in our faces.
“No,” Cap drawled as an answer to his question.
“You know better than to let your woman do this kind of shit,” Jayden declared, aiming this at Cap.
Uh-oh!
Raye’s face went hard, and we all tensed.
But it was Shanti to look out for.
Her voice got soft. “Excuse me?”
Jayden looked down at her. He was married, he had a mother, he obviously had female cousins. I didn’t know what other females were in his orbit as he was growing up until now. What I did know was that he heard Shanti’s tone, took one look at her face and realized he’d just messed up huge.
Thus, he was a whole lot calmer when he said, “Do you know what these women are into?”
“I know they found fourteen missing women when your department wasn’t even looking for them,” Shanti retorted.
Woo.
Zinger!
“I also know they made it so a crew that was rustling up about three gang wars on top of abducting homeless people to use them as forced labor in their drug operation was shut down, and I don’t know if you all were even doing anything about that,” Shanti kept at him.
We’d just met Jayden (kinda), but still, at the expression on his face after she delivered that, we all scooted back a step.
Shanti, however, did not.
“So, you were saying?” she asked.
“They got lucky,” Jayden bit off.
“Do I have to bring up Elsie Fay?” Shanti retorted.
A muscle in his jaw bulged.
“You can get lucky once. Even twice.” Shanti didn’t let up. “But three times? Brother, you’re a cop. You know that isn’t right.”
Jayden didn’t speak.
He knew that wasn’t right.
“Now, a man got dead. Trevor Clampitt,” Shanti continued.