by Deja Voss
“That sucks. You want us to order for you?” he asks.
“Sure. That’d be nice,” I say. I hate lying to him, even if it’s not outright lying. I need to protect him, though. I don’t know how deep this shit goes, and Gene already said he knew about Brooks. “I miss you,” I say softly.
“Well, hurry up,” he says. “See ya soon?”
“Yeah,” I mutter, hanging up the phone and putting my car in drive.
What the hell did I get myself into?
CHAPTER 23
BROOKS:
“C ome on, Brooks!” Josie shouts from the hallway, trying to get my attention. “If you’re not ready in five minutes, I’m calling Austin to come get me.”
“What in the fuck are you and your sister’s fixation with that guy?” I yell. I know I’m being ridiculous, I know it’s out of character for a guy like me, but I feel like tonight is going to be a special one. I finally get to take my girl out on a date, even if we’re bringing her sister along.
I trim my beard, slap on some aftershave, put on a fresh t-shirt. Ever since she’s come around, I’m starting to feel like myself again, and my eyes don’t look nearly as dark. I’m starting to get back to my normal weight. I’m not nearly as scary looking, just tough. I think Esther would approve.
She’d approve of all of this. She always wanted a dog, but didn’t want to go to the shelter because she couldn’t pick just one. She wanted a kid, but she didn’t want to give birth to one, or quit working to raise a baby. She wanted me to be happy.
And now I am.
“We know it pisses you off,” Josie says, “and that’s kind of fun.”
Josie puts Rocky in his crate, and Mr. Gingerbread struts around, taunting the poor guy. She tosses me the keys to my truck and we start down the dirt road while she plays with the radio, putting on something that sounds like we used to play at the strip club, chicks rapping about the size of their asses.
I shoot her a look as she raps along.
“It’s my birthday, Brooks,” she says. “Besides, it’s better than the murder music you listen to.”
My phone rings, and it’s Helena. She’s going to be late. It sucks, but I get it. Josie’s a little miffed, but it is what it is. She just started. She doesn’t make the rules. Besides, the faster she climbs the ladder, the sooner she can quit and we can put this police bullshit behind us. I don’t like her being a cop, but I need to put aside my petty insecurities and know she’s being true. She’s just doing right by me and the club, trying to get some answers for Esther.
“What’s all that?” Josie asks as we round the corner down the long winding country road. I hate driving past this spot, even a year later, but it’s one way in, one way out to Moe’s. The little cove on the side of the road has turned into somewhat of a shrine to Esther, littered with flowers, motorcycle helmets, a giant wooden cross with her name written across it. It was the place they found her bike, riddled with bullets. It was the place where she died. I slow the truck down to a crawl and look. “Oh my god, Brooks. I’m sorry,” she whispers.
“Why are you sorry?” I ask. It sucks seeing the wreckage. It takes me back to that day, the saddest day of my whole life, when Sloan called me and told me to get to the hospital, that there’d been an accident. Identifying her dead body. Coming to this very spot and seeing her motorcycle full of holes. Going numb.
Going numb for over a year. Making bad choices for my club. Killing. Fighting. Fucking strangers and chasing ghosts. This place might be a shrine to my late wife, but it’s also a shrine to the place where I thought I died, too.
I put the truck in park, and Josie just watches me nervously, tapping her fingernails on the center console.
“You have nothing to be sorry about, Jo,” I say. “You didn’t kill her. Come on.”
I unlock the truck and get out. She follows behind me, keeping her distance, as I step over the ditch and stand next to the makeshift shrine in the grass.
“Normally when I come here, I feel sick,” I tell her. “I feel like if I just would’ve told her not to go, or just would’ve been a better husband, none of this would’ve happened. Like it was all my fault.” I don’t like talking about this stuff, especially not with my brothers, but Josie is just a kid. She doesn’t understand loss and love. Talking about this stuff with her is easier. She doesn’t see life through the jaded vision everyone I know does.
She kneels down in front of the wooden cross and folds her hands.
“I don’t really know how to pray,” she says. “I know it’s just talking to God, but how do you know he can hear you? Does he care about what you do every day? Like what you had for lunch or what grades you’re getting in school? Or does he only care about the more important stuff?”
I don’t have much to offer her. I believe in God, if only because of the way I feel when I’m standing in the middle of the woods: everywhere I look perfection. Or the way I feel when I’m riding my motorcycle: the wind, the sun, the pavement, the freedom. The love of a good, solid, woman, like Helena, the way her body is put together like it was definitely by some perfectly designed plan just for me.
“I think you can pray however you want, kid. Whatever makes you feel good.”
“You think Esther can hear us?” she asks, squeezing her eyes tighter, like she’s trying to telepathically shoot a message to the stars.
“I don’t know,” I shrug. “I do know that if she could see us right now, she’d be cracking up. I don’t think she hangs around here much, though. If you were a ghost and you could go anywhere you wanted, you really think you’d hang out at the place you were killed?”
She lets out a sad laugh and looks up at me with watery eyes. “I love you, Brooks” she says. “Not like that. Just, you gave me the family I never had before. You gave me a home, and you brought my sister back. I always felt like a piece of garbage that nobody cared about. I didn’t know if I was going to die because my dad killed me or if I was going to kill myself.” This little redhead in a field of fake flowers and tributes to my dead wife is going to make me cry, and not because Esther is dead and this place is nothing but a reminder of that.
She’s going to make me cry because I know I’m finally doing the right thing. It’s time to move on. I just wish Helena was here with us, too.
“Come on,” I say, slapping at a mosquito who’s trying to feast on the back of my neck. “I’m hungry.”
“Do your eyes always water when you’re hungry?” she teases, poking me in the ribs.
“Get in the truck,” I growl.
CHAPTER 24
BROOKS:
We wait a half hour for Helena to show before ordering our food. The place is pretty dead, fortunately. I don’t need to try and explain why I’m out on a date with a teenager to any other biker crew, and I definitely don’t need to kill a man for looking at her sideways. She’s a good kid, keeps to herself for the most part, and really hasn’t expressed any interest in partying or dating, but I’m sure there’s plenty of guys out there who would be more than happy to try and change that. As her ‘guardian’, or whatever the fuck we want to call this arrangement, I’m perfectly content not letting that happen.
I shoot Helena a couple texts, trying to get an idea of her timeframe. I know she wouldn’t bail on us unless it was really an emergency, but I can tell Josie’s getting impatient, and if I drink any more beer, she’s probably going to have to drive us home. I try to set my insecurities aside, try to remind myself that it’s Helena, but a part of me can’t let go of the fact that she’s choosing the police force over us. What’s she doing with them?
She’s doing you a favor. She’s doing this for you, I remind myself.
“Let’s just order,” I say, and I motion the waitress over to our table. I’m impressed that this skinny little broad thinks she’s going to eat three dozen wings, but watching her eat is painful to me on the other hand, knowing that she came from a place of not having anything. My little stray dog child, pounding down whatever yo
u put in front of her like it’s about to be her last meal.
We’re waiting for our food, and my cell phone rings. “What do you want, brother?” I say, answering the call from Micah. I’m assuming it has something to do with Josie’s birthday party at the club later tonight. Instead, he’s stuttering into the phone like he’s choking on his words.
“What the hell?” I ask, getting up from the table and stepping outside.
“I don’t know how to tell you this,” he says. “It’s probably nothing.”
“Spit it out, dude,” I say.
His sigh on the other line is disgusted. My mind goes in a million directions. With the shit the club gets into, it could be anything. “It’s just, I’m doing a private investigator job for a woman, and I’m staking out the Belmont right now. I just saw a girl that looked like Helena go into a room.”
“A girl that looked like Helena, or actually Helena?”
“Her car is here,” he says.
“Like her police car?” I ask. I’m trying to keep myself from thinking the worst. For all I know, she got called to investigate another overdose. Those tend to happen there pretty much on the weekly.
“No,” he says. “What do you want me to do? You want me to check it out?”
“No,” I say. What the hell would she be doing off duty hanging out at the Belmont? Why would she blow off her sister’s birthday for something like that? More importantly, what is she trying to do to me?
“Is there anybody else there?” I ask.
There’s a long pause on the other end of the line. He doesn’t have to answer. I feel like I’m being stabbed by a million knives right through my heart. I feel like a fucking idiot. This woman who I let infiltrate my home, my bed, my heart, she’s fucking playing me.
There’s gotta be an explanation for this, I try to remind myself.
“What do you want me to do?” he asks.
“Can you come to Moe’s? Take care of Josie for me? I want to handle this myself.” I need to handle this myself. I need to see it for myself. I don’t want to believe anything until I see it with my own two eyes, even though I trust Micah and our brotherhood more than anything.
I sit back down at the booth with Josie and try and act like everything’s okay. She didn’t have anything to do with this. I pick at my food and she destroys her wings. I’m surprised that she doesn’t eat the bones, too. I keep quiet, getting more anxious as the moments drag on.
When Micah walks through the door, I’m already on my way out.
“I’m sorry, Josie,” I say. “I’ll see you at your party later.” I don’t know if that’s the truth, but it’s easier to just bail on her than tell her what’s actually going on. I hand Micah some money.
“Room 209,” he says. He’s looking at me like I’m pathetic, like he has all this pity for me, the way that everyone has spent the last year looking at me until recently. That look alone makes me want to deck him. I’ll keep my shit together at least for the kid.
I almost chuckle to myself as I speed down the road, a man on a mission. No cops are going to pull me over today, they’re all hanging out in some shitty motel sneaking around on their old man.
Maybe I’m the only one who can take the blame for this. I never really did lay it down to her that we were together. I just assumed we were on the same page. Still doesn’t excuse any of it. She’s gotta know by now I don’t play games.
I don’t see her car anywhere in the parking lot. Maybe Micah was bullshitting. Maybe he’s setting me up or something. I guess she could’ve already left, but she hasn’t called me to tell me she was on her way. My heart sinks when I notice her car parked out back beside the dumpster, as if she’s trying to hide from something.
Or somebody.
Like me.
I park next to her car, and think about my next move. Do I just let it go? Go home and throw all her shit in the yard and call it a day? Do I go in there guns blazing and make a scene? Or do I go in there and do what I should’ve done all along? Tell her how it is. Make her mine once and for all, no matter what she’s currently up to?
I take a couple deep breaths. I’m just going to have to play it by ear.
I walk up to room 209, pressing my ear to the door to try and hear what’s going on inside. I hear a man’s voice talking. I don’t think they’re screwing, but then again, maybe she’s into that shit. Maybe she likes being pounded from behind in the middle of casual conversation. Guess I never really asked.
The more I think about it, the madder I get. I don’t even bother knocking. I throw my body into the door, busting clean through the deadbolt chain with one solid shoulder thrust. When I get to the other side, I reach for my pistol without giving it a second thought.
“What the fuck is going on here?” I shout, trying to make sense of the surroundings. Helena drops her coffee to the ground and runs to me, her hands in the air.
“Put the gun down, babe,” she says with a certain calmness that only a person used to dealing with crisis situations could muster. “And close the door.”
“This is a nice surprise,” the tall man who I’ve never seen before in my life says to me. I don’t like his tone. He sounds condescending, and looks like a cop by the way he’s standing there, his hand on his waist. I let my suspicions down when it came to Helena, but I’m not going to make that mistake twice. I point my pistol at him and he backs up slowly.
“Who are you?” I bark. “What are you doing with my woman?”
Helena grabs for my arm, pushing my gun down until it’s pointing at the ground. “What the hell, Brooks!?” she says. “You don’t trust me? You following me or something?”
“You skipped your sister’s birthday dinner to come to a hotel with a strange man, what am I supposed to think?”
“I’m Dean Morris,” the man says, flashing me his badge. “They know me as Gene here on the force. I’m with the FBI. Helena is here trying to help me figure out how we’re going to get the man who killed your wife behind bars for the rest of his life.”
I don’t know what to say. I don’t know if I should believe him or if this is some sort of setup. I do know that Helena isn’t messing around on me though. She wraps her arms around me, staring up at me with a smile.
“Everything is going to be alright, babe,” she says. “Now let’s get you caught up.”
CHAPTER 25
HELENA
I could’ve died when he busted through that door. I don’t know how he found us here, and I can’t imagine what was possibly going through his mind, but at least I could say with utmost confidence, ‘it’s not what it looks like.’
“You want a beer? Water? Coffee?” Brooks is tracing his fingers over the white board set up in the corner of the hotel room, the picture of Esther front and center, surrounded by lines of string. There are pictures of Mountain Misfits themselves off to one side, along with a few other rival gangs. Though those people have all been ruled out as suspects, Dean has done an amazing job of walking me through the process of the investigation, and boy has it been a long one.
“Why do you care about Esther?” Brooks asks, still sizing Dean up.
“Here,” he says, handing Brooks a bottle of beer. “You might want to sit down.” Brooks stares at him defiantly, and I have to admit it’s kind of hot. I always appreciated his outlaw demeanor, and watching him go toe-to-toe with an FBI agent only makes him that much more attractive to me.
“Can we speed this up?” I ask. “I wasn’t lying when I said I was missing my sister’s birthday. It’s kind of important. Besides, there’s not much more we can do tonight.” She’s probably mad as hell by now, thinking I ran off on her again.
“Absolutely,” Dean says. “And I’m really sorry about that. Brooks, Esther has been working with us for a long time. Longer than you’ve been married, even.”
“She would never,” Brooks shouts. “She’s not a narc. She protected the MC more fiercely than most of the men I know.”
“You’re correct,” D
ean says. “She wasn’t a narc, and everything she did was to protect the club. The kind of men she helped us put behind bars, the very men her father was pimping her out to, sex traffickers, dark web murderers, really really terrible twisted people made your little biker gang look like a convent of nuns.”
“Little biker gang?” Brooks snarls.
“He didn’t mean it that way,” I say. “What he meant was, Esther dedicated her life not only to keeping you guys safe, but to saving countless women and children, people she never even met. She was a hero, Brooks.”
I can almost see the smoke coming out of his ears, like the wheels in his head are turning through stacks and stacks of old memories. The woman he knew his whole life, the woman he loved and married, was actually working for the other side of the law.
“When we heard about her passing, it was obvious it wasn’t going to be a cut-and-dry situation. When we started poking around and found out how mishandled the investigation into her death was… that’s when I had the pleasure of going undercover. Helena might be trying to enact some vigilante justice here, but I have the resources to really make sure we see this all the way through with little to no blowback on the club or any of you folks.”
I’m having a hard time trying to read Brooks.
“All I ever wanted to do was save her,” he says. “I couldn’t even do right by her even after she died. What the fuck kind of man does that make me?” I know this is a lot for him to swallow. Esther’s web of secrets obviously ran deep, and knowing that she had ties to the FBI was probably not something he ever imagined. I had no idea.
“Come on,” I say for the sake of his pride, “let’s get out of here. That’s enough for now, Dean.”
“Who did it?” Brooks asks. “Who killed my wife?”
“Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” I say. I know exactly what he’s going to do if he finds out that Chief Sanderson is looking like the prime suspect. We don’t need irrational right now, especially if we want to make sure this case goes exactly as planned. He shoots me a glare like he’s about to start turning the hotel room upside down if we don’t tell him. I guess I don’t blame him. All this time in the dark, and this stranger holds the key to everything he’s been searching for.
