by Zoey Parker
The upstairs was carpeted, so my steps were silent. There were tables and sets of drawers in the upstairs hallway with plants and little statues on them. It was the kind of shit my brother, Shift, had in his house. All it did was create clutter and make it hard to walk around.
“What the hell are you doing here?” an angry voice snapped at me. I froze, as if I had become one of the little statuettes standing on the shelves and tables in the hallway.
“I figured I’d come see you,” I said, trying not to laugh as I turned my head from one of the Buddha statues.
“I told you to stay away while I did this, didn’t I?” Her voice sounded angry, but I couldn’t figure out why.
“I tried that, but it didn’t work. I’m going to take you back with me,” I told her.
“No, Brawn. I’m not finished. I’m so close,” she said, walking back into her room and closing the laptop sitting on her desk.
“Then grab your laptop and come with me. You can finish whatever it is you’re working on back at the house,” I told her. “I’m not taking no for an answer, Maria. You’re coming with me.”
She surprised me by actually obeying the order. She grabbed her laptop and stuffed it in a backpack. She also grabbed her new phone and put it in her pocket.
“Okay. But I’ve got to be back here before my father gets home. He’s taking care of some other business, but he’ll be back later tonight. I’ve got some information to give you anyway,” she said as she put the backpack over her shoulder.
I put and arm around her and pulled her to me, kissing her. Her fingers touched my cheek tenderly. Nothing had changed other than distance.
“Let’s go,” I told her, running downstairs with her behind me.
“Wait.” She put out a hand when we reached the door, holding me back while she peered outside.
“What?” I asked, eager to go. I didn’t want to wait.
“My father might have people watching the house. I can’t have you running around out in the yard in case anyone sees you. You know?” She stepped outside and looked around some more before waving me out through the door.
“All right, come on,” I said as I took her hand and started to pull her with me to the driveway.
“Where’s the…?” she started to ask, but she stopped herself when she saw the Harley. “We’re riding your motorcycle? You know how loud that thing is right?”
“I know,” I assured her. “I just don’t care.” I tossed her my helmet as she put the backpack over both shoulders.
She slid the helmet on and climbed onto the bike behind me. She slid her arms around my waist to hold on as I cranked the bike up. I walked her in a circle in the driveway so we were facing out. I revved the engine a few times, listening to the power in it. Then I gunned it, and we launched out of the driveway onto her street. Her grip tightened as we sped away from her house.
We pulled up to my house and parked next to the car. She cautiously hopped off the bike and pulled off her helmet. Her hair spilled down out of it as she pulled it off. The golden light of the afternoon caught it and created a glow around her head. She was radiant, but I could see she wasn’t pleased.
“When we go home, I’m going to need you to drive your car,” she said.
“But we are home,” I reminded her. “This is where you’ve been calling home for a while now, right?”
“Yeah, but you know what I mean. I’m going to need you to drive something that will draw a little less attention to yourself. Do you want my father figuring out that you came by to get me? I don’t think you understand what all is on the line at this point,” she explained, standing next to the motorcycle.
“Okay, you got me. I don’t understand what’s going on. I was sort of hoping that was why you came back with me, so you could explain to me what you’re doing. All you did was pack your shit and tell me you were going home because you were trying to do something so we could get rid of your dad. What is that supposed to mean?”
She looked around, like she was checking to make sure we weren’t followed. “We need to talk inside,” she said.
“Whatever it takes to get you to talk. Come on.” I put a hand on her back and walked toward the door with her. I almost expected her to recoil from my touch because of how she was acting, but she didn’t. All was not lost. Not yet.
I opened the door and let her walk through ahead of me. Then, I caught myself looking around the property, checking for anyone who might have been watching us, just as she had done. I laughed at myself. I would have liked to have believed that I would have known if someone had been following us, but the fact was I hadn’t paid any attention as we left her father’s house. I didn’t know.
“Make yourself at home,” I announced as I closed the door and followed her into the living room, pleased by my joke. But I found she wasn’t amused by my humor.
“We have a little while before my father gets home, so I figured we could talk about what I’ve been doing and what I’ve learned so far,” Maria said as she set up her laptop on my coffee table.
“Would you like a drink?” I asked, heading to the kitchen instead of the couch. I grabbed a glass from the cabinet.
“Water would be fine,” she called back.
I grabbed another glass and poured two glasses of water, saving the bourbon on my kitchen counter for another time. I walked back into the living room and sat down, handing her a glass. Even sitting on my couch, leaning forward over the keyboard of her laptop, she was beautiful and sexy.
I didn’t want to talk about her father. I wanted to push her back on that couch and pull her clothes off. I wanted to see that delicious body laid out before me again. I wanted to make her forget about her old life and leave it behind for good. I didn’t need her to get her dad to drop any charges. I had a vicious lawyer who did in the courtroom what some of our guys did on the streets— what I wanted to do to Maria in bed.
I sat down next to her and put an arm across the cushions behind her. She sipped from her glass and set it on the coffee table. I held mine in my hand, thinking I should have grabbed some of that bourbon to help me focus on the information she had for me instead of on her warm body next to mine.
Chapter 21
Maria
“Are you paying attention?” I asked, turning my head back and cocking an eyebrow at him.
“I’m all ears,” Brawn said, pulling his hand away from my back, where his fingers had just been drawing circles distractedly. He was paying attention all right, but not to the right thing.
“All right, listen up. I want you to see this.” I pulled up a photo of Carlisle.
“That’s Carlisle. So, Bobby was telling the truth,” he mused, looking at the picture.
“Yes. And no. Bobby saw what he saw, but he’s starting to think he was supposed to see it so he’d go running to you. We both think my dad hired him because he used to work for us, like us.” I gestured my hand between us to emphasize that I was talking about our company.
“Gotcha.” He rubbed the stubble on his face. His furrowed brow told me he was already starting to put the pieces together.
“So it’s pretty much common knowledge that The Twisted Ghosts helped break up Carlisle’s gambling ring. He did some time behind bars because of it, and now he’s out. By all accounts, he’s connected to the mob, and that hasn’t changed. Now, he owns several properties my father’s company has built. He’s gone from gambling to real estate,” I explained.
Brawn nodded. “What’s he doing? Why does he own so much commercial real estate?”
“Brawn. Come on, man. You’re smarter than this,” I said. “Why would someone like Carlisle want to own commercial real estate? He’s got to have some way to launder his mob money, or a way to help others by giving them a safe place to set up shell businesses. These places pop up overnight and are gone in a few months. At the same time, he can put some legitimate businesses in his office buildings to make himself look straight.”
“He must be pushing a lot o
f money through if he’s going through all this trouble,” Brawn remarked.
“You think? Where do you think my father’s money comes from?” I raised my eyebrows.
“Okay, so you’ve uncovered some information. What do you plan on doing with it? Do you think that’s enough to bring them both down?” he asked me with a sigh, as if to say he was done with what I had to show him.
“Don’t get snippy with me, Brawn. If I had allowed you and the MC to get involved right away, you guys would have rolled in there like a bunch of cowboys, destroying any opportunity I had to get useful information on my dad. I’ve got enough information to show his connection to known mobsters. It’s all right out in the open, like there’s nothing to hide,” I argued my case to him.
“But that’s the thing. Everything that’s public only points at the connection. None of it is actually illegal.”
“But it’s enough to raise suspicion. My father has been working almost exclusively for Carlisle or men connected to him,” I argued.
“So why are you showing me this now?”
“So you’ll chill out. You drove your motorcycle into my father’s neighborhood to essentially kidnap me again from his house. What were you planning on doing? Were you planning on bringing me back here and forcing me to give up on what I’m doing?” My eyes searched his face for the answer before he could give it. I knew he had a way of telling half-truths. I had started doing the same thing since I’d started living with him.
“Okay, fine, what’s next?” he asked, turning his attention back to my computer screen.
“Tomorrow I’m taking this information to him. I’m going to try to get him to come clean and turn himself in,” I explained.
“What’s your leverage? Like, what are you going to use as a threat? If he doesn’t turn himself in, what are you going to do?” Brawn asked.
“I’m going to turn all the information over to someone myself if he doesn’t agree to do it,” I answered, sort of off-the-cuff. I hadn’t given too much thought to any other option.
“Do you have anyone on standby just in case something goes wrong? Do you have law enforcement waiting to hear from one of you who will come in if they don’t?” he followed up.
My plan was starting to crumble. I wondered if this was how Brawn had felt when he tried to kidnap me the first time. I stared in his face and blinked dumbly.
“You haven’t thought that far ahead, have you? Man, I’m glad I went by and picked you up,” he said, getting up with his glass and walking back into the kitchen. I hear him pour something into his glass, and he came back with a rich amber liquid.
I stared at the computer screen and tabbed through the windows I had open, full of incriminating business connections my father held. I was realizing Brawn was right. Alone, that information merely raised suspicion. It wasn’t enough to get my father locked up, but I hoped it was enough to force him to confess to me.
“All right, look, before you try to blackmail someone, you have to have a plan of action. If he doesn’t do what you want him to, you have to have a backup, an action you can take to make him feel sorry for not going along with the initial offer. You could always just turn him over to us and let us put him out of business,” Brawn suggested with a smile on his face and his eyebrows raised.
“How did it happen with Carlisle?” I asked. “How did you guys get law enforcement on him the way you did?”
“Easy: we caught him red-handed. If Bourbon Jack hadn’t been mixed up with him, we never would have known. At first we were just trying to clear him of debts he’d amassed with people who worked for Carlisle, but we ended up butting heads with the man himself. Once it was all said and done, Shine was in his face and law enforcement was raiding all the gambling houses. But we had a lot of people working on it, and it was right out in the open. With this, it’s going to be in the books somewhere. That’s why money laundering is such big business. If you have any sense whatsoever, it’s pretty easy to do,” Brawn explained.
“So help me out. What do I need to find?”
He sighed. “Unless you can get your hands on documents showing the laundered amounts, or text messages, emails, recorded conversations where they openly discuss what they’re doing, you’re not going to have an open-and-shut case against him. If you want law enforcement in on it, you have to get this information to someone and get them interested in opening an investigation.”
My stomach twisted at the notion of working directly with law enforcement to get rid of my father. I didn’t want to draw attention to the MC. Surely if I became part of an operation against my father and his connections, my connections were going to come under scrutiny, as well.
“How do I do that?” I felt so useless, asking Brawn for help with things that seemed second nature to him.
He cocked an eyebrow and grinned. “Are you sure that’s what you want to do?” he asked.
“I’m not here to play games, Brawn, okay? My father wants me to take over his business, and that means he wants me to maintain the connections he has already created. He feels like they’ve insulated him against any financial harm, including being shut down by law enforcement. If I give in and work for him, he’ll drop the charges against you and leave you alone,” I explained.
“But that means you’ll be stuck working for him, and I’m pretty sure he’ll back out of the deal if you stay connected to me, right? So if you do it the way your father wants you to, you’re gone. No more work. No more school. No more us. Right?” he asked.
“Right,” I answered quietly.
“So why are you doing this exactly? Why didn’t you just tell him no and let my lawyer handle the charges? You don’t know Amanda. There’s a reason she works for MCs,” he assured me.
“I’m doing this because he crossed a line by coming after you to get to me. He crossed a line with his bullshit ultimatum. And why the hell would I want to maintain mob connections when I’ve got my own business and a supportive partner who is helping me continue to better my life legitimately? Why? If he can’t leave me alone, he deserves what he gets,” I argued, admitting some things to myself for the first time as I told them to Brawn. My dad had crossed a line by going after Brawn. I knew Brawn would have protected me if I had been in a similar situation, so I was going to protect him the best I could.
“Fair enough,” he said, laughing. “I’m actually flattered you’d do that for me, but you don’t have to do this alone. If our time together has taught me anything, it’s that you don’t have to do things alone. There are people who can help. Don’t be afraid to let them.”
I laughed. “This coming from the guy who thought kidnapping his boss’s daughter was a viable alternative to accepting a loan from his brother.”
“Hey, it worked out better than I could have planned, right?”
“You got me there. It worked out pretty well for both of us,” I agreed.
“Okay, then. Just like that was a stupid idea and could have gone wrong in so many ways, I think going after your father alone is the same. Especially since there are people who can help you. You’ve got law enforcement and you’ve got us, the MC,” he said.
He’d been talking about the MC more and more lately, I’d noticed. It was like he felt more connected to them since we had people connected to the MC working for us. It was good to see him getting more and more connected to his brothers and the old ladies. If I had attempted to go after my father a few months sooner, he would have been talking to me about how he could have helped me, instead of the MC.
“All right, I agree.” I glanced at my computer screen. “We’re running out of time. If we’re going to come up with a plan, we’ve got to do it now.”
“Awesome.” He pulled out his phone. “I know exactly who to call to get law enforcement interested. Can you save the information you have on your father and his connections in files to send to Amanda?” he asked me.
“Sure.”
“Okay, get started on that. I’ll get her on the phone and let
her know to expect it.” He got up and walked out of the room with the phone to his ear. I heard him talking to someone, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying.
I started downloading the files I’d found online and putting it all into an email to send to his lawyer. All I needed was an email address to send it to.
“Great,” he said when he came back in. “She’s expecting it. She said she’ll get it to one of her connections on the department. They’ll get back in touch with you tonight. It’ll be hard to talk to them while you’re at your dad’s, I know, but trust me on this— all you need to do is tell them to be ready tomorrow.”
“Will they know you’re involved?” I asked.
“Even if Amanda doesn’t tell them outright, they’ll know you’re connected to us somehow. But that’s fine. We’ve always had an interesting relationship with the police. It goes back and forth between support and suspicion. They’re always ready to take someone down, though.” He winked.
