Page 61 of Chief

With Eddie, I don’t want to add to my guilt. I already carry enough where he’s concerned.

“What’d you tell them?” he asks. “Your wife and your friend?”

I know what he means. “The truth, basically. That I stupidly got a vasectomy for a woman I was in love with, and it didn’t work out.”

He softly snorts and drains his glass before setting it on the coffee table. Then he pockets the key and the business card and stands, heads for what I assume is the bedroom.

When he returns a moment later he’s wearing latex gloves. He’s carrying a nine millimeter with a magazine in it and an extra magazine, both fully loaded. He sets them on the coffee table in front of me, as well as a cheap-ass, battered switchblade that’s seen better days, and an unlabeled bottle of oxy tablets. Probably fifty in the bottle.

He’s done damn good with only a day’s notice.

Then again, this kind of request, to someone like Eddie and the work he’s done over the years, is probably akin to asking the average person to grab a quart of milk and a loaf of bread from the store on their way home.

“Gun’s untraceable,” he says as he strips off the gloves. “I cleaned and wiped down the gun and all the rounds myself, and both mags, before I loaded them. I wore gloves the whole time. When you’re finished with it, break it down, if you can, then drop it. The knife, too.”

“I’m hoping I don’t need either of them,” I lie as I stare at the bottle of pills.

“Well, just in case. You don’t know what you’re going to be walking into withher.” He points to the pills. “I wiped the outside of the bottle, and the cap. Don’t be stupid.”

“I won’t.”

He sits back in his chair. “When you see Elsa, give that cunt an extra little ‘fuck you’ from me, too, huh? Remind her I told her karma’s a bitch.”

“I will,” I swear.

And I will.

His smirk holds no humor and a lot ofreallyold pain.

That’s how I know I can trust him—he hates her even more than I do, but for different reasons.

Related reasons, but different ones.

Which is why I can never admit to him how much I enjoyed a majority of the things I had to do to and with him during our time with her, before I realized the truth of what was going on.

It’s also why Idefinitelycan’t reveal to him the deeper truths about me and Owen.

And it’s why I know that while Eddie would stillabsolutelycomply—and enjoy it—if I grabbed him by the throat, slammed him against the wall, kissed him, and ordered him to his knees, I won’t.

Ican’t.

Not just because of the two pets I love awaiting my return, and the promises I’ve made them, but because Eddiewouldcomply and play with me and…I’d enjoy it too damn much. There’s a dark side of me I willneverlet Susa or Owen see, no matter how well Susa mistakenly thinks she knows it.

A side of me that Eddie knows well.

Better than Susa does.

I’m amabsolutelya bastard, but the older, wiser bastard knows some secrets are best left lost to time, and that darkest side of me needs to be one of them. I can never again allow it to see daylight. Which is why I went so far as to rename the positions.

One less tie to that darkness.

All Eddie knows is I’m protecting my wife, our two sons.

Susa’s fledgling political career.

My best friend and his career.

My own career.