Page 92 of Sean's Sunshine

“Yeah,” Roberto whispered. “Like, word for word.”

“That’s how mami’smoney disappeared,” Billy surmised, and Sean could see him trying to swallow the anger, trying to work on the empathy.

“Yeah.” Roberto lost the battle and wiped his face on his shoulder. “And she cried, Ghee. For two days. She almost couldn’t work. It was like… like having that money disappear, it took all the fight out of her.Idid that.”

“And then you called him,” Sean reasoned. “And you yelled at him and tried to get him to give the money back.”

“He’d spent it,” Roberto spat. “Fucker hadspentit, on drugs. On a shitty house that’s falling apart. On a fucking hooker that does more meth than dick. He spent mami’smoney, and then he laughed in my face.”

Sean nodded. “And then he told you how to earn more.”

Roberto shook his head. “I didn’t want to. I told him no. He said, ‘That one house has a sweet bike in it,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, it’s also got a hella big dog.’”

“He let the dog out, didn’t he,” Sean prompted. He’d known this had to be connected.

“Heshotthe dog,” Berto burst out, and then he broke down sobbing, and Sean nodded to Billy, who took his little brother into his arms and held him like a father should have and let him cry himself out.

While they were doing that, Andres and Sean held a quiet conference.

“So the old man got the kid to start robbing houses for a cut,” Andres said quietly.

“Yeah. The kid picked the places without dogs—he didn’t want another dog on his conscience, so he avoided those places. He knew where they were from his dog-walking days.” Poor Berto. Like Billy, he must have really loved working with the animals.

“And dear old dad just keeps blackmailing him. Keep stealing or he’d tell the kid’s mother. Keep stealing or he’d turn the kid over to the cops,” Andres reasoned. “The kid’s the one taking the stuff, right?”

“Yup,” Sean said. “He doesn’t know corruption is a crime.”

“He does not,” Andres agreed. They met each other’s eyes, and Andres nodded. “In fact, it carries a stiffer sentence than the actual crime, doesn’t it?”

Sean nodded grimly. “It does.”

“I’m thinking maybe we have a talk with Senior and he confesses to the robberies, and we leave Roberto out of it?” The question at the end was because Andres wanted to confirm what Sean had been thinking.

“Yeah,” Sean said. Then he grimaced. “And because I’m sort of living with the kid’s brother….”

“Maybe my name should be on all the paperwork,” Andres finished, sighing. “That’s no good, Sean. That gets me the commendation and you the bupkiss.”

Sean shrugged. “Yeah, but otherwise who knows when the next DA is going to jump in and start screaming about cleaning up police corruption, and then this is going to be a whole big thing again. I think we learned from the last DA that sometimes staying outside the system is really what’s best, you know?”

Andres shook his head. That wound on Jackson Rivers’s back and the four cops who would have murdered him and his witness rather than let the truth come to light about their false arrest would haunt the department for a good long time.

“We’re supposed to help people,” Andres said bitterly.

Sean grimaced. “Yeah, but if we keep Roberto out of the system for this one and let his dad go to prison, we’ve helped my boyfriend’s entire family, and we need to count that as a win.”

“Fine,” Andres muttered. “I still say we should put your name on the paperwork—”

Sean put a hand on his wrist. “And I say we don’t take that chance. Now we’ve only got one thing to do.”

Andres growled. “Convince Senior that this is the best course of action for him.”

Sean nodded. “Think we should call Cramer? Maybe explain the sitch to him and have him plead out?”

Andres shook his head. “Normally, I’d say yes. But Cramer and Rivers—they’re going to be calling attention with their big names on this small potatoes. Let’s see if we can maybe be good guys without the training wheels, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

THE BACKof a police cruiser was a really, really shitty place to be. There were bars and bulletproof glass between the front and back seats, and no amount of cleaning could get out the vomit, urine, and feces that had been released there by the previous residents. There was an aura of despair, of anger, back there that would take sage and an exorcist to remove.