Total pages in book: 147
Estimated words: 137176 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 686(@200wpm)___ 549(@250wpm)___ 457(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 137176 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 686(@200wpm)___ 549(@250wpm)___ 457(@300wpm)
As okay as I was going to be, at least for a while. A long while.
Despite everything JJ had seen and heard when we’d visited my grandmother, we still had no facts, no proof of anything. His observations, while all true, didn’t mean my grandmother was doing anything illegal. For all I knew, she’d wanted to find an easy way to get out of needing to explain why she’d left me locked up without even one word.
The last two days had been a mental nightmare and my breakdowns at the houseboat and in Sully’s office had been the first of many, though they’d been more of spats with JJ as I’d tried to make excuses for my grandmother. Anything to not have to face the reality that she’d lied to me and that the way she’d treated me as a child, the way she was treating Charles, had nothing to do with love.
JJ had remained patient with me throughout all of my outbursts. We hadn’t returned to the houseboat or Sully and JJ’s house because we’d been too concerned about both places being compromised. That had left us with only the Targes headquarters to call home. Between the feeling of being confined and the knowledge that several of Sully’s most trusted men were within hearing distance of us every minute of every day, I’d been teetering on the edge of control. JJ had always brought me back and when I’d calmed down long enough to talk things through, he’d patiently listened.
The one thing he hadn’t done was let me cover for my grandmother when my mind tried to do exactly that. At best, he’d reminded me that we didn’t have enough information to know either way what role, if any, my grandmother or any of the rest of my family members had played in JJ’s shooting and my imprisonment two years earlier.
On the one hand, it felt like we were back at having nothing, but we had more than the day I’d walked out of that police station only to find Sully waiting for me. Between Sully’s men and ourselves, we’d pored through the information Sully had collected a dozen times over, but nothing new had stood out. JJ had told me and Sully about the mystery police report he’d been handed at some point before he’d been shot but he couldn’t say when he’d seen the file or even be completely certain it had been my father’s name on it. The file had been taken by his superior with a half-assed explanation that the file had been meant to go to a different officer. It was all JJ could remember and it frustrated him to no end.
Sully had asked a friend to hack the LAPD databases to see what kind of complaints had been lodged against my father, but there’d been fewer than expected and they’d all been minor offenses. He’d never been officially charged with any of crimes.
It’d been Michael, Sully’s assistant, who’d surprised us with data that none of us had thought to look for. JJ, Sully, and I had automatically assumed any complaints in the system would be against my father. We hadn’t thought to look into any that had been filed by my father. Michael’s hunch, along with his yet to be explained hacking abilities, had pulled up a single piece of information that hadn’t given us much, but it’d been the kick in the ass, or rather, my ass, that we needed to act sooner rather than later.
My goal had been to gather proof that my father had been behind JJ’s shooting from the beginning, but the information Michael had found had been a harsh reminder of where jumping to conclusions had gotten us.
Nowhere.
They’d been my conclusions and ironically, my argument had been the same one I’d challenged JJ with when we’d been at the cabin. I’d asked him that as a cop, would he have relied on information from others to make a decision about a suspect or would he have found evidence to confirm that the person even counted as a suspect?
I’d already judged my father and found him guilty before even talking to him. Just like with my grandmother, JJ had pointed out that as horrendous as what my father had done to me growing up was, he hadn’t done anything illegal.
The bottom line was that if I wanted answers, I needed to go to the source—to the one place, or rather person, I’d been hoping I could somehow condemn without needing a face-to-face confrontation. Thus the reason the SUV JJ and I were sitting in the back seat of was hurtling toward downtown LA on a Saturday afternoon. A couple of Sully’s guys had followed my father from his penthouse to his office a few hours earlier, so that part was easy.