“Gwen told us at least a little of the truth, then,” Candy said, frowning down at the photocopied missing persons’ reports. The girls were of all races and body types, but none were older than twenty-five. One, he saw with a curdling of his breakfast, was only fifteen.
“They’ve all been reported missing in the past month, and we found all of them in that workshop.” She sighed. “Except for these four.” She separated four files out. Four girls, one eighteen, one twenty, two who were twenty-two, all big-eyed, and fresh-faced, and smiling broadly in the pictures their family had provided to the police. “Two were from Amarillo, and the others were from Phoenix. They weren’t in the workshop, and the girls I spoke with couldn’t say for sure when they disappeared. A few formed some friendships in confinement, but most don’t even know one another’s names.”
“Where are the girls we can account for now?” Candy asked.
“They’re in federal custody,” Maddox said. He’d overnighted at the clubhouse, and someone – Jenny, Candy figured – had found some old threadbare jeans and a flannel shirt that would fit him. Dressed-down in normal clothes, his hair still slicked back from the shower, he looked far less preppy and clean-cut. He rubbed at the stubble along his jaw and met Candy’s gaze, his eyes puffy and smudged with sleepless shadows. “So is Cantrell,” he added with a dark scowl. “The girls will be looked over by a doctor, set up with therapists, and sent back to their families. Cantrell’s going to serve the maximum for everything. The department’s furious.”
“And you, too, I take it.”
He made a face, and bobbed a quick nod, his jaw tight. “The missing girls – the way all of them were taken. This isn’t the first time the FBI’s seen something like this.”
Blue cleared his throat expectantly.
Candy lifted his brows.
Maddox put his hands in his borrowed pockets, shoulders slightly rounded like a kid offering up bad news to a parent. My how quickly things changed.
“There was a case last year in Pennsylvania,” he said. “Girls – young women were being reported missing all across the state. No pattern; none of them were friends, not even on social media, none of them went to the same schools or worked together. All different races, hair colors, body types, just like these.” He nodded toward Eden’s printouts. “And then one of them turned up in Manhattan. It was a fluke – she’d gotten loose. Some goon got careless, and she slipped out a back door. Barefoot, and dirty, and she fucking ran right into an Italian restaurant and started screaming for help.” He shook his head. “She told the cops everything, described a warehouse full of other girls, and buyers coming in to look them over: guys in suits, rich old guys, pimps, gang leaders. I’m gonna bet some cartel bosses, too. NYPD got the FBI involved, and she led them right back to the place where she’d gotten loose. The place had been cleared out. Forensics found a shit-ton of evidence, but nothing that could lead us definitively to any one organization.”
“So you have no idea who did it,” Candy said, disappointment heavy in his gut.
Maddox bristled. “Oh, we have an idea. The ES-8 cartel, for one. The Russo family. There’s a Russian crime syndicate that leaves Cyrillic tags all over everything. But you can’t go around arresting people on gut feelings and likelihoods.”
Candy flashed his teeth in a semblance of a grin. “Did I say anything about arresting anyone?”
Maddox glared at him a moment, then swore and glanced away.
“You aren’t thinking Luis was working cooperatively with other crime families, are you?” Eden asked, one skeptical brow raised. “It’s a big leap from Texas to the East Coast scene.”
“He was fascinated with the club, though,” Michelle spoke up, frowning contemplatively. “And I do mean fascinated. He said he’d been studying us. It was like…like he didn’t understand, but he wanted to.” Her frown deepened. “There was a lot of bollocks about power. He’s obsessed with it.”
“Traumatized by his father’s abandonment,” Fox said. “And trying to both please him with his performance, and challenge him. His father’s a cop, so he decided to become a criminal – a rich and successful one.”
“And childhood trauma can make a person do that?” Candy asked.
Fox sent him a level look. “Childhood trauma can make you do all sorts of things.” Case in point: the assassins sitting at this table currently. Case in point: Mercy and Michael, on their way home now with Walsh.
The Knoxville Dogs had left before first light, save Fox and Albie. In his lengthy phone conversation with Jaffrey this morning – no doubt smoothed by Eden’s competent sweet-talk when she’d visited the precinct – Candy had pinned the theft of the police van and roughing-up and binding of four officers on Cantrell’s cartel contacts. Jaffrey had made noises, but with Mercy and Michael unknown in the area – and gone, now – all prints carefully wiped-down, and bigger fish to fry, Candy felt confident the club would skate out of reach of the law on this one.
There was still the problem of Luis, though. Of the threat he could still pose in the future.
Candy took a sip of coffee and shifted his gaze away from Fox’s – still and cold. “Where does that leave us with the Chupacabras?”
“Back where you started,” Maddox chimed in again. “The cartel was shattered the last time they were in Amarillo. Luis revived them – but only a portion, and with him in the wind there’s nothing left to hold it together.”
“Twelve are dead,” Eden said, “and fifteen were arrested. Officer Jaffrey tells me they’ll be coming down hard on anyone who was involved, like Sandoval and Gilliard.”
Maddox nodded.
“The Chupacabras are no more.”
But he didn’t feel relieved, not really. “I guess…that’s that, then.”
Eden, face carefully blank, shared a look with Michelle, then gathered her paperwork together again. “I suppose so. The club isn’t a law enforcement agency.”
Candy wondered what that look had meant.
“We’ll keep ears to the ground,” Fox said. “All chapters on high alert for specific activity.”
“Yeah.” Candy knew it would be a while before he felt safe letting Michelle go off somewhere on her own. She would buck at that, but he’d be damned if he let her get captured again, by anyone.
He glanced toward her now, and watched her lean over and say something quietly to Axelle, who nodded. How could he keep them safe, he wondered, when they were just as stubborn as him?
~*~
He went to see Jinx after breakfast. His friend sat propped up with pillows, paging listlessly through a bike magazine, wearing a Lean Dogs t-shirt, his hair in wild disarray, his beard in need of combing. Someone had brought him breakfast, and an empty, grease-shiny plate rested on the nightstand beside an array of pill bottles.
He glanced up when Candy entered, and Candy hated the way – for a fleeting moment – he saw fear, doubt, and guilt flash in his best friend’s eyes. He thought about Blue lamenting Jinx’s absence last night, and his own terse, cold response. A regrettable response on his part.
He offered a smile. “They keeping you in the good stuff?” he asked, nodding toward the nightstand.
Jinx closed the magazine and set it aside, expression going careful; a manufactured sternness that seemed prepared for the worst. “Gringo had some oxy left over he said I could have. Catcher gave me an edible.” His mouth twitched, a near-smile. “Cletus is doing okay?”
“Yep. Awake and everything. He’ll be pulling his weight in their little Shining bit in no time.”
Jinx nodded. “I’m just taking Tylenol, though.”
Candy walked deeper into the room. “If you need some more morphine–”
“Nah. I’m sick of that stuff.”
A chair stood in the corner, a pair of jeans tossed over it. Candy moved them to the dresser and then dragged the chair over closer to the bed and sat. “You fucked yourself up, brother,” he said. “It’s okay to need a little help out of a bottle while y
ou’re getting back on your feet.”
Jinx looked down at his hands, linked together in his lap, on top of the blankets. His fingers looked delicate, somehow, without his usual assortment of rings. “No. Morphine and that other stuff – it’s hard to think straight when you’re taking that.”
“You’ve got a big crack in your pelvis,” Candy said, gently. “I don’t think anybody expects you to be thinking straight. The important thing is to get better.”
Jinx took a deep breath. When he lifted his head, his expression seemed resigned. “The important thing woulda been to do my job, and not give you a buncha shit. Not get myself all shot up.” To Candy’s surprise, color rose along his cheekbones, a dusting of pink – a flush of unmistakable shame. “I was wrong,” he said. “And I’m sorry. I let the club down – I let you down, brother.”
Candy sat still a moment, shocked. His friendship with Jinx had always been built on a mutual – but largely unspoken – understanding. They usually thought the same, followed logic along the same lines. They rarely disagreed, and never like they had this time. They’d never distrusted one another.
And that wasn’t all on Jinx.
He leaned forward, and placed a hand on Jinx’s blanket-covered knee. “I’m sorry. I was wrong, too.”
“No, you–”
“No, I was.”
Jinx swallowed. “You’re my president.” His jaw set. Shame, but determination, too. A manful willingness to swallow pride – to acknowledge that, within this club, they held different ranks.
They did, but it wasn’t something they ever pointed out to each other, and it broke Candy’s heart a little to have it happen now.
“No,” he said again, even more gently, his voice soft. Not a president’s voice; a friend’s. “You had misgivings going in. I know what happened with Cade” – Jinx flinched, slightly, just a lowering of his lashes – “made you hate Pacer. And it was easy for me to think that was the reason you didn’t want to help the Road Runners in general, and Pacer in particular. But the whole thing with Melanie, the way she was involved with the cartel…if I’d listened to you from the start, maybe I would have realized sooner that something was really wrong with the whole situation. Maybe Chelle wouldn’t have…” His breath caught. He swallowed and pushed on. “I didn’t trust my sergeant, is what I’m getting at. I should have. And I’m damn sorry I didn’t. It won’t happen again.”
They regarded one another a long moment. Then Jinx stuck out his hand. “We both fucked up and we won’t do it again?” he asked, another smile plucking at his mouth.
Candy took his hand gladly, with a sense that another piece of his universe was righting itself. “Amen.”
~*~
Jenny was helping Darla with breakfast clean-up when someone cleared his throat behind her in a not-at-all-subtle way. She turned to find Maddox standing on the other side of the island, tense and awkward.
“I was wondering if I could have a word,” he said, oddly formal.
She traded a look with Darla, who lifted her brows.
“Sure,” Jenny said, reaching to dry her wet hands. Please don’t let him be asking me out. God. “You wanna go outside?”
“Please.”
He held the door for her, and when they were standing in the bright, cold morning sunshine, he folded his arms right across his middle and seemed to shrink down into himself.
“Gotta say I’m curious,” she prompted.
He let out a deep breath and stared out across the parking lot. “I haven’t told my superiors yet, but I’m quitting the Bureau.”
“Okay.”
He glanced over, frowning. “Okay?”
“I can act like I’m surprise if you want me to, but I’m really not.”
His frown deepened.
“I might not know you personally” – though she felt confident she’d figured out more about him than he knew about himself; men were so easy that way – “but I know a little something about your kind and our kind. The law enforcers and the law breakers. There’s a very thin line between them, actually. Someone who wanted to stay on the enforcement side would have killed Reese at the hospital. Or at the very least arrested him. When you showed up here with him instead, I figured your badge-carrying days were numbered.”
His frown smoothed, and he stared at her, blinking, dumbfounded.
Better not to gloat, she decided.
“What are you gonna do now?”
He shrugged and looked away again. “I’ll figure it out.”
“Can I ask why you told me this?” And not Candy, she didn’t say.
Another shrug. “I guess I just wanted them all to know” – a tilt of his head back toward the clubhouse and its inhabitants – “that I’m not interested in trying to arrest anyone. I won’t be a problem for you guys anymore.”
Jenny grinned. “You sure about that?”
He frowned again. “What? Yeah, no, I won’t.” Resentful, now.
She chuckled, and patted him on the shoulder as she turned to head back inside. “That wasn’t the kind of problem I was talking about.” She reached the door, and paused. “Being a prospect involves a lot of mopping and drink-fixing,” she offered over her shoulder, “but it’s only a year. And sometimes they even let you sit at table.”
She could hear his little indrawn breath of surprise as she slipped inside, smiling to herself.
~*~
Michelle had awakened that morning expecting exhaustion of all kinds, but had instead found that, while physically sore and tired, her mind was sharp, her wells of mental energy refilled. It was lunchtime now, and she set a plate of cold sandwich triangles down on the sanctuary table with something like eagerness before dropping into her chair.
Jenny reached for a ham and swiss. “You’ve got that look Fox gets.” She smirked.
“Which look?” Michelle feigned innocence.
“The one that heralds lots of work and trouble,” Eden said, not unkindly, and reached for her own sandwich. “Though in this case, I think I already know what you’re going to suggest.”
“Propose,” Michelle corrected. “I want to propose–” The words threatened to dry up in her mouth; a sudden, unexpected shyness. She’d never hesitated to offer an unfiltered opinion when it came to club finances, or anything pertaining to the bar. But this was different – this would be a collaboration, a venture for which she didn’t have all the answers or resources, and which would require participation across multiple chapters of the club.
She glanced around the table, at the three gazes fixed on her, all their own blend of expectant and encouraging.
She took a deep breath, and spoke the words she’d rehearsed in her head while she brushed her teeth this morning. “All that’s happened has got me thinking about the club’s larger role. About its potential, really. We look out for ourselves, take care of each other. We handle threats against the club. In London, we were in the habit of taking jobs that people brought to us, everything from rescue missions, to info gathering, to hits.”
Axelle’s brows jumped once on hits, but she didn’t interrupt.
“But this week…I don’t know. I guess it highlighted just how much good doesn’t get done the legal way. And I was thinking about the good we could do. All these girls – their families reported them missing to the police…but what if they’d reported them to us, too?”
She watched that settle with all of them.
Eden was the first to speak. “You’re talking about the club taking a proactive stance in combatting crime?” She sounded more interested than skeptical.
Jenny was a harder sell. “I’m all for vigilante justice. But there’s such a thing as being too visible.”
“I know,” Michelle said. “And I’m not saying we take out adverts in the paper. But these girls, the four who are missing: I want us to find them. Us.” She circled a finger around the table, indicating the four of them. “Our own project. And then we sic the guys on whoever we need to.”
“Oh,�
�� Axelle said, quietly.
“We start small, and we start careful. We have the girls’ names. We contact the families, ask the sorts of questions, and chase the sorts of leads that the police can’t. There’s nothing in place to stop us; no rules we have to follow.”
“Except not getting caught,” Jenny said.
“Except that. If we start helping people, word will spread. And the next time some great big cartel-level threat starts to rear its head, the FBI won’t be the first ones on the scent: we will. We can stomp out bad actors before the public even knows about them. We preserve the club, preserve our profits and our way of life. And help the poor people who keep getting caught in the crossfire.
“If what Maddox said about different gangs and crime families starting to collaborate is true, then it’s only a matter of time before they challenge the Dogs. Things could get really ugly. I think we’ve all seen that before.”
Jenny had been attached to the Dogs the longest, and she nodded sagely.
Axelle looked a bit nervous, and took a sip of her Coke.
Eden looked eager in a restrained way. “Maddox handed us a boon with that bit of intel.”
“One the enemy won’t expect us to have,” Michelle agreed. “So I say we don’t waste it.”
They all regarded one another a moment, gazes shifting and flicking, assessing.
Jenny shrugged. “I’m in. Be kinda nice to do something besides babysit and wash dishes.”
Michelle nudged her, but offered a supportive grin.
“I have a few contacts here in the States,” Eden said. “I can make phone calls today, before we even get on the road.”
They all looked toward Axelle, then.
She set her Coke can down with a sigh, but her mouth hitched up at the corners in a smile. “I mean, I guess if I’m in then I’m in, huh? Sure. What the hell. Let’s all be biker Robin Hoods.”
Lone Star (Dartmoor Book 7) Page 51
