Part 14 ~ Wednesday 20 April 1994

‘Letting Francesca get away with murder.’ Stan’s words were still haunting Ray in the early hours as his mind churned, battling to take the emotion out of the situation and embrace nothing but the facts.

While caught up in the emotional frenzy of how to move past his father’s death without implicating the real killer, he’d lost sight of something that now was unavoidable: what was happening here and now made him the kind of bent cop he had always despised.

He was absolutely torn. When he recalled Maria’s agonised, tear-stained face as Francesca admitted killing their father there wasn’t a single doubt left in him that he was doing the right thing. But looking back on the man himself, he knew his father would be smug and delighted that his son had turned out to be just another crooked police officer who could be persuaded to look the other way when offered the right motivation.

But then, out of the blue, he had to throw Frankie into the mix. Ray wasn’t the only one thinking that Charlie was getting ready to make a move to take over the Zuko operation, and Frankie was already looking like collateral damage. If Ray hadn’t learnt the truth from people he trusted with his life, he’d have had Charlie in the frame for his father’s death from the moment the brain fog lifted – Charlie had a barrel of reasons to want his main competition for power out of the way.

Realistically they’d never get Charlie to trial over Joey, because a) nobody would dare testify against him, and b) he didn’t do it. Charlie was a certified piece of garbage though and if they could pin this crime on him and put him away, it would make up for all the other damage he’d done that they couldn’t touch him for.

And there it was again. Ray thinking like a bent cop, and…being a bent cop.

He thought it through, kept thinking it through. Surprisingly, the more he analysed and nit-picked and churned over the situation, rather than more fraught, the calmer he became.

The morning light brought an unfamiliar, icy brand of clarity. Whatever label his actions put on him, Ray knew he would do anything to protect his family, and that was that. Done deal.

Maybe regret would come later, and when it truly sunk in about what he’d become he’d be praying for forgiveness to a god he stopped believing in at thirteen, ready to spend the rest of his life being extra good, just trying to make up for being a corrupt piece of shit now.

His father had caused them so much suffering over the years and, if it was within Ray’s power, it ended now, by whatever means it took. If there were further consequences, he’d face them as and when, but in these revelatory dawn moments his temperamental head didn’t give so much as a twinge of protest. Apparently his migraine was as shady as he was.

Francesca, brutal in her honesty, had proclaimed herself her father’s daughter.

Ray, in a moment of uncharacteristically indifferent insight, accepted that he was, after all, his father’s son.

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