by Nikki Wild
I waited for a follow up knock but it never came. The blankets were begging me to pull them up over my head and ignore the rest of the world. That’s exactly what I would have done if the curiosity hadn’t been clawing at me.
My toes sunk into the plush bedroom carpet. Leaving the warmth of the bed was more difficult than I’d anticipated. I grabbed a hoodie off the floor and wrapped it around my waist. It wasn’t ideal, but it worked well enough to keep my legs warm. I’d worry about finding pants if someone were still at the door.
A cool breeze from through the cracked kitchen window chilled my bare shoulders.
I crept up next to the street-side window. I figured out shortly after moving in that it was easy to see whoever was at the door from the side. If you knew just the right angle, you could see through without having to move anything. It was a helpful little trick when Jared’s crazy ex-girlfriend decided she wanted to come by at all hours of the day and night.
There was no one standing at the door. Could it have been a salesman? Not likely this early in the morning. Maybe it was an early rising Jehovah’s Witness. But that didn’t seem right either.
Cautiously making my way toward the door, I wondered if it was even worth a second look. What if someone was out there? Maybe walking back to their car… if they saw the door open, I’d have to stay and talk to them.
There was nothing to gain. I don’t know why, but I opened the door anyway. I peeked around the corner to see… nobody. What was I expecting?
Just as I was about to let the door swing shut, something caught the corner of my eye. A brown paper bag, sitting square in the middle of the generic door mat that Jared bought for me when we moved in.
I poked my head further outside and cast a suspicious glance in either direction. Not a soul was around.
The paper bag was rolled tightly shut. On closer inspection, there appeared to be some kind of note taped to the outside.
I’m not sure what was scaring me. It’s not like someone would leave a bomb outside my front door. And if so, this certainly wasn’t the type of delivery system you would expect.
In one swift motion, I snatched it off the ground and pulled it inside. When the door pushed shut I snapped the deadbolt into place.
It was lighter than I expected it to be. The note was on a small folded over piece of paper. It looked like it had been torn from a flyer, like one you might find stuck under your car’s windshield wiper.
“Use this for whatever you need. Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine.”
It wasn’t signed, but it didn’t need to be. The note was scrawled in Jared’s unmistakable sloppy handwriting.
My heart was beating in my throat.
The bag tore down the middle under the tug of my fingers. A wad of rolled up cash tumbled out, falling at my feet.
Whoa.
I picked it up and bounced it in my open palm while I re-read the note.
…Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.
What did he mean by that? Was he in trouble?
I wasn’t naïve enough to believe it didn’t have something to do with this money. I unrolled the stack and fanned it out in front of me. All one hundred dollar bills.
I felt a little dirty counting it while still not knowing if my brother was safe. But I had to see how much was there.
Nine thousand seven hundred dollars. Oh shit.
The money brought with it a mixed bag of emotions. I’m not ashamed to admit that at first, it was a wave of relief. All of my problems were gone thanks to the tightly rolled bundle of bills. But that immediately gave way to concern… concern about where, and more importantly how, he got it. That concern quickly morphed into dread when I considered the note.
One thing was for certain. Somebody down at that bar would know what was going on with my brother. If had to take a guess, it would be the one with the blue eyes. The one who’d been fucking me every night in my dreams… Damn him for getting Jared into this and damn me for letting it happen.
I waited until late in the afternoon to make my way down there. I had a funny feeling I wouldn’t find him at bar before five.
In the meantime, I swung by the bank and got a safe deposit box. I wasn’t about to keep all that cash at my house, and there was no way I was going to be dumb enough to spend it yet. It was the best place to keep it safe that I could come up with.
Also, I decided to officially go on vacation. When I went into the bar to tell Todd I wouldn’t be in for at least a few days, he didn’t bat an eye. I just hoped this whole situation would blow over in a few days so I could go back to my normal life…
“Good,” he’d said. “Get out of here before you work yourself to death. I’ll take care of covering your shifts.”
I made up some excuse about a family emergency but it didn’t matter. Todd had been begging me to take some vacation anyway. He was one of the good ones.
This time, as I sat in the parking lot, waiting for him to arrive, I didn’t feel afraid at all. I was pissed. This was probably his fault… whatever was going on. If he wasn’t directly involved with whatever Jared had gotten himself into, he was still a guilty party. I was determined to get any information from him that I could.
There was only one motorcycle in the parking lot so far. I knew it didn’t belong to him because I saw an older biker sitting on it as I drove in. He probably got there just before I did.
He wore an impressive beard that had some grey streaks in it. The tattoos on his arms had long since faded by the sun. For an older guy, he clearly stayed fit. Regardless, he’d gotten off the bike and unlocked the front door with a key he had hanging from his neck. There was no one else inside yet.
Over the next hour, several more motorcycles rolled in. Each guy had the familiar patch on the back, but none of them were the one I was looking for. My nerves were wrecked. I hated waiting for things. Especially when it had to do with information about my brother.
Just when I was about to bite the bullet and start asking around with some of the other guys, I heard the rumble of another motorcycle.
Through my rear view mirror, I could see him coming. He rode high on the seat, not bothered by the hot evening air. There was no helmet to keep his dark locks from blowing back in the wind. A dark pair of sunglasses rested on his nose.
I wanted to hate him. The spreading warmth between my legs wanted otherwise.
I craned my neck to watch. He made a smooth turn into the lot. I didn’t think he noticed me but I was wrong. Instead of aiming his bike for the end of the line as I expected, he made a sweeping left that brought him directly to my driver’s side window.
My throat grew tight. The mirrors in my car vibrated from the power of his engine. The prick smiled.
“Turn it off,” I yelled through my cracked window. “It’s too loud.”
He took his time, first loosening the bands around his wrists, then shaking out his hair before turning the key to the “off” position.
“What brings you to this neck of the woods, babe?”
“I’m not your babe, asshole. In fact, if you call me that again, I’ll slap those sunglasses off your face. Believe me, you don’t want to mess with me. Especially after what you did to my brother.”
I was huffing and puffing in anger. I was afraid he was going to laugh when I yelled at him, but I noticed his face change at the mention of Jared.
“The kid? I didn’t do a damn thing to him. What are you talking about?”
“I have a feeling you know exactly what I’m talking about. You’re the one who said he’s family, right? Well where I come from, family looks out for one another.”
“Just calm yourself down, Adeline,” he said, slowly.
“Don’t tell me to calm down, Hale. What, you think that because you know my name I should be worried?”
“Not in the least,” he said, smoothly. “I’m only looking to get to the bottom of this thing.”
“Well, you can get to the bottom of it by telling me why the hell I
can’t get him on his cellphone. And…”
I took another look around, lowering my voice so that only he could hear.
“...And, why he dropped off almost ten thousand dollars on my front door step this morning.”
Hale slowly lifted himself off his motorcycle seat and made his way around to the passenger side of my car. I started to squirm.
When he got in, I couldn’t help but be struck by how awkward he looked in my car. The big, broad shouldered biker with the lean body and long limbs crammed into an economical foreign car… it was almost too perfect. Despite all of my fears and anger, I let out a little nervous laughter.
“You want to talk about this, or not?”
“Sorry, but I’ve never seen someone clash with a car. You look ridiculous…”
“Guess you could say I’m not big on sitting in a cage… Now tell me about that money.”
“It was there… around six thirty this morning, I guess. There was a knock on the door and then…”
“Did you talk to him?”
“No. I told you it was just a bag of money with a note attached to it saying not to worry about him.”
“Shit.” Hale pushed his feet into the floorboards and arched his back in a tired stretch. My poor car seat creaked under the pressure.
“So you do know what’s going on…”
“Yeah,” he said finally. “I hate to tell you this, but your little brother isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed.”
I wanted to defend him but I really didn’t have much ammunition.
“It’s not that he’s dumb,” I offered up. “He just makes a lot of bad decisions. He needs some discipline, that’s all.”
“What he needs is a good kick in the ass.”
I decided not to belabor the point any further.
“Can you please just tell me what is going on?”
“Cool your jets, darlin’, I’ll fill you in. But you need to do a little bit better job of keeping your mouth closed than little brother does. Can you do that for me?”
“Darlin’” was treading dangerously close to “babe” but I decided to let it slide.
“All I care about is finding him. I won’t say anything about your business.”
He seemed satisfied.
“Here’s the situation,” he said. “We’ve been having a little bit of trouble with some of our guys lately. Internal stuff… that part doesn’t concern you or your brother. However, Ace did…”
“Jared,” I corrected.
“Sorry. Jared. It’s probably best to start thinkin’ of him as “Jared” because he doesn’t have much of a future around here anymore.”
That sounded like music to my ears.
“Anyway,” he continued, “Jared went and got himself mixed up with some guys who were doing the wrong shit and-”
“What was he doing?”
“That part doesn’t matter. What does matter is that things went sideways and now there’s a whole lot of bad people looking for him.”
“Was it drugs? Is that drug money he brought to my house?”
Hale didn’t answer but he let the expression on his face tell me that I was right.
“So let me get this straight… Jared was a part of some kind of drug deal, something went wrong, and somehow he ended up with all the money. And he probably stole it.”
“No probably about it. He did steal it.”
I wanted to punch a hole through the top of my car.
“But there’s more to it,” said Hale.
“You might as well tell me,” I said. “There’s not a lot more you could say that would surprise me at this point.”
He was messing with the controls on the door. I turned the key in the ignition to the right a click so he could work the windows.
“You might be wrong about that, too,” he said.
“Great. What else did he do? Kill somebody?”
“Maybe…”
It took me a minute to process the word. Did he really just say that? This couldn’t be real. Now, I didn’t have to worry about Jared doing a few months in county jail because he’d be spending the rest of his life in federal prison.
And…oh my God…he killed someone? It didn’t seem possible. He’d always been a mess, but he never did any harm to anyone other than himself. Jared couldn’t hurt a soul.
“Who… who did he kill?”
I couldn’t stop the tears any longer. They were flowing freely down my cheeks.
“Everybody has been pretty tight lipped about how things went down. Nobody is sayin’ who pulled the trigger. Or why.”
No.
“And as far as who… take a look at the newspaper.”
The newspaper?
I scrambled for my phone so I could pull up the local news site. It was the top headline on the page.
“Father of Four in critical condition after being hit by Stray Bullet. Gang Violence Likely Culprit.”
I didn’t feel the scream coming until it was too late. My brother killed an innocent man.
“Whoa. Get a hold of yourself girl. The man’s not dead. He’s in bad shape but he might make it… And we don’t know if your brother pulled the trigger. You need to start thinking because crying and carrying on isn’t gonna get you anywhere.”
I was starting to hyperventilate.
“Listen. I told you, we don’t know exactly what the hell happened. And I know I haven’t spent nearly as much time around your brother as you have, but he doesn’t strike me as the type to just up and shoot a citizen for no good reason.”
“I… what do I do?”
“We have to find him.” He said. “If we find him before anyone else does, we have a chance to figure out what is going on.”
“We?”
“Damn right, ‘we.’ He owes me almost as many answers as he owes you.”
“Where do we look? When?” This was all happening so fast.
“We start looking right now, and we don’t stop until we find him. As far as where… your guess is as good as mine. Let’s go.”
“Wha- huh?”
“C’mon. We’ll take my bike. We can cover ground a lot faster that way. Speed matters.”
“I’ve never ridden before.”
“You can hold on right? Because that’s all you have to worry about.”
Hale threw the door open and nimbly unpacked himself from the seat. The car lifted a few inches when it no longer had to support his weight. As the door slammed shut, he leaned back in through the open window.
“You just gonna sit there, or are you gonna get your sexy ass on my bike?”
We checked the hospitals. We checked the jails. We checked every bar and strip club in town. Jared was a ghost.
As I held on for dear life, I couldn’t help but remember back to when we were kids. This was typical “Jared” behavior. When he messed up bad enough, he would run away. Usually he’d come wandering home with his tail between his legs when he got cold or hungry. But this time I didn’t expect him back on his own. We were going to have to track him down.
Hale leaned into a hard turn and accelerated through it. The first few minutes on the motorcycle, I saw my life flash before my eyes a hundred different times. But I was getting used to the feel of it now. I wouldn’t tell him, but I was starting to like it.
The smell of his leather jacket sent a shiver down my spine.
He stopped where the road came to a “T.”
“Where are we?” I yelled over his shoulder.
“There’s a place I wanna check out that’s a little bit west of here. It’s a restaurant owned by an old biker. A lot of the guys hang out at their bar.”
“Okay!”
He lingered for a minute longer at the stop. I think he knew the vibrations from the bike were working in tandem with the fact that I had a death grip on his stomach, to make me horny as hell.
The engine revved and sent us off like a rocket. He worked the motorcycle like a magician works his act. In and out of traffic we went, the smel
l of fresh rubber lingering behind us.
We pulled in to the parking lot of a newer red building. Just like Hale said, there were a couple of motorcycles that looked just like his parked near the entrance.
“This won’t take long,” he said.
“I’m going in this time.”
He cocked his head, but didn’t say anything.
“You keep leaving me out here. I want to go in and ask around too.”
“Fine. You can go in, but leave the talking to me. You’re not gonna get any answers in a place like this.”
“Deal.”
I followed him up the short set of stairs to the large double doors. He caught me off guard when he held one open for me to walk through.
“I’m a biker, doll. Not an ingrate with no manners,” he said, recognizing the surprise on my face.
The room was dark. It definitely had a different feeling from the place where I first crossed paths with Hale. On the back wall was a jukebox and it was playing an old Hank Williams tune. The walls were bare, save for a few cheap pieces of framed art work. If I had to guess, the place probably didn’t have too big of a dinner rush. Most likely it was some kind of a front for laundering money.
“Hell, if it isn’t old Dirtneck!”
It was a drunk at the last bar stool in the row. Occupying the two seats to his right were his keepers.
Hale ignored the jab and said something quietly to the man working behind the bar.
“What’s the matter, Dirtneck? Too good to say hello to an old friend?”
Something about the way he said friend made a shiver run down my spine.
The bartender handed Hale a slip of paper. He carefully read over it.
“I guess bein’ out on those oil rigs for so long fried your brain. You know you’re not supposed to be showing your face ‘round here.”
Without looking up, Hale issued a quiet warning to the man’s friends.
“It’s probably in all three of your best interests if he shuts up.”
The tone in his voice never wavered.
The two other men laughed, but they took to the task. When the drunk opened his mouth to speak again, one of them jabbed him in the ribs, cutting him off before he could say anymore damning words.
