Fables & Felonies

by Nellie K Neves

  The next page was not even about the club, but notes from an interview with one of the owners, Javier Balcazar. I read over the transcription of Andrew’s interview.

  Andrew: Where were you the night in question?

  Javier: I can’t answer that.

  Andrew: The prosecution is going to ask, it’s pretty commonplace, Javier.

  Javier: Not if we don’t go to trial. You pay them off, just like normal. Isn’t that what I pay you for, hermano? You make it all go away.

  Andrew: The family won’t take money this time. You know that. We tried. The girl was only sixteen when she was killed. They want a trial.

  Javier: Should have taught their little nina better manners then. Don’t worry. They won’t after their business goes up in flames. Or Mama gets shot in a drive-by. Maybe their other kids aren’t so safe at school anymore, eh, amigo? Es la vida, things happen, ya sabes? You understand?

  Andrew: I can’t hear any of this. You know that. My only job is to—

  Javier: You can’t hear, or you won’t? I see how you squirm. Cobarde, you coward. Be a man.

  Andrew: I need to know your alibi. We have to have witnesses and hard proof that you were nowhere near that murder scene.

  Javier: I’m not worried. My family is deeper than blood. An alibi won’t be difficult. We pay allegiance to powerful men. I have cops, I have FBI, DEA. I have men with guns and knives, hidden men who strike from shadows then fade, como demenios. We’ll drain them all before the week is through. If they’re all dead, no one can come after us.

  Andrew: I can’t hear any of this. You don’t understand. If I hear any of this, it’s all admissible in court.

  Javier: What? You’ll talk? To the cops? You think you’re safe because you’re on my payroll? I’ll gut you just as easy, amigo. Then your niñera, Alice. Yeah I know her. Then Mama can watch while I slice your father open, and you watch him choke on the blood as she screams for you to help him.

  Andrew: Stop, please stop.

  Javier: Then the girl you talked to at the bus stop. Your third-grade teacher. The grocer down the street. All of them. We will eliminate all of them, and save you for last. And then you’ll disappear just like every other problem we have ever faced.

  Andrew: No, please. I get it. I’ll make it all go away.

  Javier: See? We understand each other, compadre. You’re Hermidad Demonio, one of us now.

  My blood chilled at the words on the page. Family deeper than blood clung to me. It referred to gang ties, possibly even Cartel ties. The next page listed details from the case Javier had been interviewed for. A sixteen-year-old girl had been found near the club. Police had decided she’d likely gotten turned around on her way home and had ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time, which happened to be an alley near the club. Witnesses saw someone matching Javier’s description leaving the area. The girl was assaulted, stabbed three times, and her throat was cut. Overkill at its best. She was a perfect student, volleyball team, no gang affiliations, and yet no mercy was shown. I hadn’t heard the transcript, and yet I still heard the words rolling around in my mind. The evil dripped from the pages, as if the threats had been issued for me instead. What had Amos stumbled into? How had he gotten mixed up in gangs and cartels?

  The last pages consisted of pictures. Saliva pooled in my mouth. My stomach churned. The first was the sixteen-year-old girl, not obtained by the police. No, it was a trophy taken by the killer. The second was a photo of two more bodies slumped against a wall, shots through the head. Page after page, photo after photo, testaments of their cruelty and reach. Endless lines of bodies they’d mangled and tortured without repercussion or fear of reprisal.

  Untouchable.

  The final picture shook in my grip, a body charred, mouth open in a silent scream. Burned alive. Bile rose in my throat. My face flushed. Sweat pricked across my forehead.

  I flipped the page to rid myself of the visual, but on the back were the words “It could be you next.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I barely made it out to my car before the scream burbled up from my chest. This was beyond my nightmares. Their connections were endless, people involved that no one would suspect. A hit from the shadows that left no trace. If what I read was correct and the gang had connections to government, as well as cartels like Mexican Mafia, Cali Cartel, or Sinaloa Cartel, then my problems were exponentially worse.

  My trembling hands cupped my mouth, muffling the next scream that shredded my body. This was bigger than me. One short internet search on Hermidad Demonios had me staring at disfigured bodies, charred business, and murder scenes with suspected connections. The message was clear: cross them, get in their way, and you were dead. Not just you; your family, your neighbors, your children, the man you talked to at the store the day before. No one was safe. No one was invulnerable.

  And I was in the middle of it all.

  I couldn’t keep Elle from my mind, my mother, my father.

  Ryder.

  I’d put them all in the crosshairs of assassins. For the first time in my career, I had to consider walking away.

  Even if it meant Amos’ freedom.

  Chapter 16

  Once home again, no one questioned how withdrawn I’d become. When I was young we’d started a tradition of board game championships, playing nearly every game in the closet the night before Thanksgiving. I felt my family watching me as we played, but maybe it was a sad commentary on my life that they couldn’t tell the difference between a distraught Lindy and a perfectly normal Lindy. I wanted to tell them about the new threat. I wanted to tell Ryder, but it was all so much safer if I kept quiet. I’d figure it out eventually, hopefully before my enemies chopped me into bits.

  My only inclination that my parents thought something might be wrong came after we’d put away the board games, marking the first time I’d ever lost at Clue. My mother asked me to carry ice cream in to the dining table. I tried balancing all four bowls, but I’d never been a waitress, or incredibly coordinated, and I ended up with three. I returned to the kitchen to get my own bowl and heard my dad talking to my mother before I pushed through.

  “Pam, she’s quiet. Something’s wrong.”

  “She’s Lindy, Rich. She retreats into herself, she always has.”

  “This is different,” Dad said. “Do you think something happened with that boy of hers?”

  “No, she’d be worse off. I’m sure she’s frustrated with her case. Our special visitor will cheer her up. I’m sure of it.”

  I disappeared out the back door without returning for my ice cream. I couldn’t stop seeing the pictures I’d found. Dismembered bodies, shallow graves, what had I stumbled into this time? And with my family?

  I had the tendency to run over the case facts in my mind, rearranging pieces to see where they fit. The man’s face kept coming back to me, the one who called me ‘zorra.’ I’d seen him before, but where?

  Knowing I’d never get to sleep, I took one of my mother’s sleeping pills and crawled into bed. It was just as I was falling asleep that I made the connection. I’d run into him before the club, quite literally, just outside the elevator at Russell & Colvin. He knocked me back, and I’d yelled after him. He turned, and I noticed his uniform, but I hadn’t paid as much attention to his face. Sleep closed its fingers around me, chemicals stronger than my will to wake up again.

  The truth paralyzed me. If I remembered him, he could remember me. It was only a matter of time before he recalled where he’d seen that girl from the club and came looking for me.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Thanksgiving. Maybe I was disconnected. Maybe I’d taken on too many difficult cases in one year, or maybe it was still shock over the turns of this case, but Thanksgiving Day didn’t feel like Thanksgiving.

  I opened my eyes, stared at my ceiling, and tried to find the will to get up, but I was stuck. Not stuck in the bed, nothing restrained me, but stuck in life. I couldn’t move forward because anything I did would put not only myself
, but my loved ones in danger. I couldn’t pull back because the monsters who had killed Hallie would find me eventually, and Amos would rot in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. I was stuck.

  “Hey!” Elle shoved open my bedroom door. “Mom made breakfast. She even lifted Dad’s bacon ban for the day. You have to come!”

  The door slammed behind her, and I heard her excited giggle long after she’d left. Had I ever felt that way about life? I’d always been the serious daughter, watching, plotting. I could only remember a handful of times that I’d giggled the way Elle did. Or maybe it was the despair telling me that. Depression has a way of robbing our memories, re-coloring the past so even the brightest colors fade and dull.

  Long ago I’d learned the mechanics of going through the motions. Auto pilot had gotten me through my worst days with MS. Yes, this was different, this monster scared every other monster back to the shadows, but the principle remained as constant as when Newton first penned it.

  An object in motion remains in motion.

  All I had to do was kick off the covers and set my feet to the floor, after that I could fight through the rest. Besides, if I was destined to find myself on the other end of a sniper’s scope or a butcher’s blade, I certainly wasn’t going to give them an easy target by staying in bed.

  The dew dampened my feet as I walked to the house in flip flops. Once a California girl, always a California girl, I suppose. The smell of bacon seeped from the house, and everything was more hopeful if bacon was involved. I thought of the last time I’d eaten bacon, a little over a month ago, sitting by a pond about a mile from the compound. Ryder had smuggled it out for me. Nothing had ever tasted so good. But even bacon paled in comparison to him, to his arms around me, to the safety of his embrace. My feet faltered as I considered what my enemies could do to him if they learned what he meant to me.

  “You can’t think about that,” I whispered to myself. I pulled open the back door. “You can’t think about that.”

  The bang of the screen door jolted my senses. I jumped in fear. I was pulled tight as barbed wire on the back fences. Every corner made me tense for fear of what waited for me. Every window had me peering through it because I needed to know if a hit man was on the other side. Even the laughter from the dining room was jarring—too loud, too happy, too much to process. They didn’t know what I’d brought on the family. They didn’t know my sins.

  I began to doubt Newton’s law, began to wonder if I was strong enough to fight through this time. Panic welled in my chest. I moved down the hallway toward my family. Could I tell them? Could I look into my mother’s eyes and tell her that I might have inadvertently ordered the execution of our entire family? An object in motion only stays in motion if it is without or has greater force than the resistance working upon it. Maybe this time I wasn’t strong enough.

  I stopped short of the dining room entryway. My legs failed me. My motion had ceased.

  “Hey, Slugger, ’bout time you woke up.”

  My heart swelled. I couldn’t help the tears from my eyes. I nearly tackled my uncle Shane to the ground. The visitor, the cryptic message between my parents that I hadn’t bothered to try to decode.

  “You’re here?” I squeezed him tight to prove he wasn’t a hallucination brought on by the onslaught of stress and paranoia. “You’re actually here?”

  “Well, it is Thanksgiving, Lindy,” Eleanor said as if I were crazy.

  Maybe I was. But if I had Uncle Shane, then I stood a chance. He’d been my rock and foundation more times than I could count.

  Once more I was in motion again.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I let breakfast stay normal, let my family be my family and laugh and tease, but after breakfast, when my uncle tugged at the back of my arm and motioned to the back door, I followed, because I needed his help.

  We sat on the back porch, feet in the grass, wind and clouds thickening as the day pushed on. It didn’t bother us, because as much as I was a California girl at heart, I was used to Washington rainstorms, and California couldn’t pack the same punch. Shane listened as I ran through the details of the case. The circumstances of Hallie’s death, her paranoia, the threats, her fight with Amos and the mysterious B she referenced in her journal. I told him about the closet, my findings at Club Feugo, Ranger’s strange behavior, and then of course, the ties to the drug cartel.

  He didn’t interrupt, not even for questions. Gray had started to fill in thick at his temples. Wrinkles creased around his eyes. His skin was tougher in his old age than it had been when I was young. Scars dappled the back of his hands, and I still saw the burn on his neck from the time in his rookie years that a bullet had grazed him in a fire fight. But through the entire length of my story, I never saw fear.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I admitted. “I don’t want to get anyone hurt. I keep thinking, maybe I should walk away.”

  His laugh was only a puff of air from his nose. “I figured you’d get tired eventually. I remember when you first started taking on cases, Stella would say how amazing you were, and how it finally gave you purpose. She figured you’d never wear out, but I said, just you wait, Stell, she’s gonna get tired, and I’ll have to pull her up by her bootstraps.”

  “I’m not tired,” I said. “I’m scared. No, I’m terrified.”

  “Why?” He took a moment to look me in the eye. “They’re no different, Slugger. These guys are no different than Cyrus or Dallas. They’re evil, and you’ve faced evil before.”

  “I don’t even know where to start.”

  He looked out over the property for a moment. I knew better than to speak, not when he was trying to get his thoughts in order.

  “Seems like we gotta figure out who ‘B’ is. That and this guy you think might have recognized you. If we get those, it seems like we might have a chance.”

  “But the cartel connections,” I said again, “they’re bigger than those two guys.”

  “Yeah, I guess they are, but let me tell you, I used to work in LA back in my early years. I swear every drug dealer I arrested used to threaten me that he was a member of some big bad gang. It gives them street cred.”

  “Because that makes it so much better,” I replied sarcastically.

  “It makes it smaller.” He slapped his palms against his thighs. “I’m gonna call a friend. You work on finding a smile so your parents don’t worry so much. Last thing you need is the two of them poking around your work. They aren’t cut out for it like we are.”

  I sighed and let my head collapse against the step railing. A second later I felt a puff of air, and then a card fell next to my leg. Glancing back, I realized Uncle Shane had dropped it on purpose. He winked, and walked back in the house.

  The envelope was normal, a small maple leaf sketched on the back. My name had been written on the front in a masculine print, but it wasn’t Shane’s. I slipped my finger into the crease at the seal and popped it open with ease. The card inside had a turkey drawn on the front in charcoal pencil. When I flipped the card over there was no company logo.

  Before my suspicion could get the best of me once more, I opened the card and read:

  “Lindy, I’ve been staring at this card for over an hour. Shane said he would see you for the holiday. Well, no, my mom said Shane told her he would see you for the holiday. I still haven’t seen Shane. It’s weird the way people avoid me like I’m diseased. They’re guarded in the way they talk too. Mom will start talking and then stop mid-sentence as if she forgot what she was talking about. I’m not as good as you at reading people, but she’s hiding something. Everyone is hiding something. Most of all, they’re hiding you.

  I’ve been staring at this card for an hour now. I feel like I should have something to say, as if the words should be easy to write, but they’re not, because they’re in the shadows with everything else I can’t find. Has it been like this for you? I know you’ve had problems with your memory. I’m not sure how I know that, but I do. Do you ever stare at a paper and
wonder why you can’t write anything? I’ve seen you struggle with words, maybe that’s my problem. Wouldn’t this be great if everything could be solved with one diagnosis? We could do injections together. Well, you could give me mine because I’m scared of needles.

  Obviously, I don’t know what to say to you. I can’t put labels on what I’m feeling because it’s like chasing a rainbow. I never seem to get there. But I know one thing, and it’s the one thing I can’t seem to let go of.

  I miss you.

  Come home.

  -Ryder

  The tears ignited my throat, burning and searing. The heat spread up into my cheeks, my eyes, down my arms to my hands. He didn’t understand, how could he understand? I heard his voice in my mind, I miss you. Come home, spinning on repeat like a jammed record that wouldn’t give me rest. My strength gave way to the pain, the frustration, and my core collapsed. I fell forward to my knees as I clutched myself to a ball to keep from breaking apart.

  When do you fall apart? He’d asked me that once in Willow’s cabin.

  I heard my answer playing in my memory. I try not to. I never know if I’ll be able to put it back together again.

  The back door slammed, but I refused to let anyone pull me from my refuge, from the place where I still had Ryder and he still had me. Elle slipped in beside me, curled her arm over my back, and pulled the card from my grasp.

  “You’re going to make it,” she whispered. “You’re going to survive, Lindy.”

  “How do you know?” I asked between my gulping sobs and the saliva that pooled and stuck between my lips. “How do you know that this won’t break me once and for all?”

  My baby sister took my face in her hands and cradled me like a tiny bird. “Because you’re the strongest person I know, and you can do hard things.”

  I collapsed onto her shoulder, not one ounce of strength left in me. “He’s supposed to be here,” I said into her dark hair. “We’re supposed to be together.”