The Low Between by Vivien Dean

Author:Vivien Dean [Dean, Vivien]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Carlo had seen Joe when he was in savior mode more than once, that calm assurance he managed to convey to the people he helped. He’d been privy to flashes of it in the last eighteen hours, too, so hearing him discuss helping this Copper wasn’t a shock.

Seeing how broken and bent he was after he put down the phone was.

Joe stayed on the couch, forearms resting on his knees, his distant gaze locked on some unknown spot on the floor. The lines around his mouth were deeper than normal, his eyes dark. Whatever the policeman had said to him had chipped away the veneer he’d been wearing when he opened to Carlo. The man left behind looked lost. Carlo had the irrational urge to call the cop back and give him hell.

He had to do something, though. Joe had taken the high road with Carlo’s behavior. Carlo owed him for that and so much more.

“Copper’s lucky to have you on his side,” he tried.

Joe snorted. “If I’d done right by Copper from the start, he wouldn’t need me bailing him out of his problems.”

Carlo inched closer. “So…he’s your old partner’s brother?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t really think he killed that guy, do you?”

“I don’t know.”

The sheer anguish in the confession compelled Carlo to venture forward the rest of the way, finding a spot on the other end of the couch so he wasn’t standing over Joe anymore. What he really wanted to do was reach out and touch Joe, pat him on the back, console him in some way, but that was a step too far for now. It might always be a step too far.

“If Emmett was still alive, this never would’ve happened,” Joe murmured. “He would’ve knocked some sense into Copper years ago.”

“It sounds like you’ve been doing everything you can.”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s not enough. I don’t know who I was fooling to ever think it would be.” His head came up, his haggard gaze now on Carlo. “Did you read the letters?”

The question caught him off-guard, the first real confrontation regarding what he’d done and seemingly nothing to do with the matter at hand. Except it was connected, he realized a second later, because they’d been addressed to Emmett, and Joe’s self-recriminations were all wrapped up in that awful night over a decade ago.

“No,” Carlo replied. “They were sealed. I wouldn’t have imposed like that.”

“But you looked through the box. You saw the pictures.”

Pictures? Now that he thought about it, there had been more scattered in the bottom, but as soon as he’d read the clipping, that was it. He hadn’t wanted to see anymore. “Just the one of you two in your uniforms. I swear to God.” His brain hitched onto Joe’s earlier question, skipping a second as he tried to make sense of it. “Wait. Didn’t you go check to see what I’d got into after I left?”

Though he turned immediately away, there was no missing the way Joe’s face crumpled. “I haven’t looked at anything in that box since I bought the store.

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