“Do you even know how to play good cop, Detective?”
the man drawled.
“I don’t know, no one’s ever let me do it.” Nick put his shoulder against the door and pushed into the room. JD’s head shot up. He’d been dozing. Nick smiled gently for him.
“Doing okay?”
“I guess so.” He pushed the notepad across the table. “I wrote down everything I could think of.”
Nick took the notepad and flipped it over. JD had written bullet points in a neat block print. Nick snorted. It was the type of handwriting that was hard as hell to analyze. The kind that people who worked black ops often had a habit of using.
Nick wrote in the same neat block print. “You always write like that?” he asked JD.
“I guess. Why?”
Nick shrugged one shoulder and stuck the notepad back in his pocket. “Muscle memory. It can be interesting. I’ll look over this in a bit. Right now I’m going to take you to get something to eat, then to a hotel so you can get some rest.”
JD stood hesitantly. “You’re taking me?”
“Yeah, my partner has some things to tie up before he can meet us there. Is that a problem?”
“No. No, I just assumed it’d be someone . . . lower on the rung.”
“I’m going to take you out there and get you settled, but Detective Hagan and a uniform are going to stay with you tonight,” Nick answered as he led JD out of the room.
“Is this going to be your case, Detective? I mean . . . you’re the one who’ll be working it?”
“That’s right, me and my partner.” Nick stopped and turned to face JD. They were almost the same height, but JD was thinner and more compact. He took a tiny step back when Nick faced him, like he was intimidated. Nick tried to give him a reassuring smile, but he knew himself well enough to know that when he smiled, it rarely reassured anyone. “I’ll figure this out, man. I promise.”
JD sat with his hands on the table, folded over each other.
He played with his fingers as he took in his surroundings.
Nick got the feeling that he was used to having something on or in his hands to mess with. A ring, maybe. There was no mark, though, no cal uses to give evidence of anything being worn there recently.
JD’s eyes strayed to the memorabilia along the brick walls of the pub as he continued to fidget. Nick tried not to watch him too closely. He knew the scrutiny would make him nervous, and JD already had enough nervous energy to power a small appliance.
Nick supposed he couldn’t blame the guy, though. He looked away, trying to find something else to focus on for a while.
His eyes followed a waitress as she walked by, and his gaze landed right back on JD once she was gone. He had stopped moving, and his narrowed eyes were raking over the wall next to him. The lines around his mouth had relaxed.
Nick straightened. JD had the look of a man who might have recognized something. Nick glanced up at the reproduction plaque on the wal . He had sat under it many times, gazing at it idly as he waited for his food, reading the words when his dinner mate went to the bathroom, staring at it listlessly as he ordered for that last drink that would send him into taxi territory.
It was a common fake wood plaque, roughly two feet tall and one wide, featuring a frieze of a nameless baseball player in pinstripes—something many people had defaced over the years because those pinstripes looked far too much like Yankee pinstripes and this was Boston, baby. It was also covered in Red Sox stickers and graffiti.
Nick looked up at it dubiously, then back at JD. “Are you remembering something?”
JD was still scowling. He shook his head minutely, still examining the plaque. “I just . . . looking at that gives me a feeling I think is familiar.”
“Have you seen it before?”
“I don’t know. I think . . . I think maybe I hate the Yankees,” JD answered with a shrug.
Nick snorted and couldn’t help but smile as he took a drink.
“I guess that’s nothing spectacular, huh?”
“Well. It’s not going to help narrow you down from the crowd any.”
The amusement faded from JD’s eyes and he returned his attention to his hands, twisting his fingers together and shifting uneasily in the chair. Nick watched him in sympathy. He couldn’t begin to imagine what was going through his mind.
“Are you okay?”
JD was already shaking his head. He turned his head toward the bar as he leaned back in his seat. “I remember that Greg Maddux is the greatest pitcher ever to play the game and that Stan Musial had 3,630 hits in his career. I remember that Darth Vader is a bad guy and that vampires are suddenly good guys who sparkle. I remember that I like spinach and artichoke dip, but not when it comes with tortillas. I know that tequila will make me sick and just the thought of a worm at the bottom of a bottle will make me want to hurl. I know that the tattoo on your forearm means you were a Recon Marine and that makes you a Grade A badass, even if you kind of try to hide it. Probably because you like to go under the radar so you can have the advantage in a fight. But I don’t know my own name. I don’t know where I come from, how old I am.”
He lowered his head. His eyes were misting over, whether from frustration, sorrow, or merely exhaustion was anyone’s guess. Nick was shocked by how observant the man was even in the midst of this ordeal, though, and the realization made him uneasy. Only one person had ever called him out for trying to appear less dangerous than he was, and Ty Grady was the most observant man Nick knew.
Then there was the tattoo. Nick had a lot of tattoos, including the Celtic cross that traced his spine from the nape of his neck to the small of his back; and the eagle, globe, and anchor that dominated his left shoulder. He also had one on each forearm, and while he usually hid them with dress shirts and suits, he’d rolled his sleeves up when he’d sat down at the pub.
On the right was an ornate Celtic knotwork gauntlet that covered his entire forearm from just below his wrist to an inch or so from his elbow. On the inside of his other forearm was the Force Recon Jack, one that usually got lost amidst the flashier work he had. It was a skull with breathing gear, with a spade and knife crossed behind it, and wings fluttering out from either side. The skull had thirteen bullet holes in it.
The knotwork gauntlet was far more impressive, but JD had zeroed in on the Jack in particular—the one with special meaning. Nick hadn’t met many people who actually knew what a Recon Jack even was, so the fact that JD did meant he might be associated with the military somehow. Closely associated.