Tempered Steel (Steel Riders MC Book 2)

by Carmen Faye

  “Derrick had a partner four years ago,” she told him.

  “Yeah, kind of a stupid guy back then. I remember him well,” Hank told her.

  “What’s he like now?” she asked.

  “Older, wiser, slowing down, choosing friends more carefully. You might like him, but would probably not want to, since you’re a cop and all.”

  “He’s still a criminal?”

  “Well, yes and no, but from your point of view, right now? Yes. He did a lot of diplomacy work, though, spent a lot of time on the road. You could have liked him then without feeling all weird about it.”

  She was quiet for a moment and then asked softly, “Did he ever tell you why he didn’t take the shot?”

  Hank turned and looked her in the eye. “Yes, because he’s not a murderer. And that would have been murder. You have two kids, probably a single mom, at least statistics suggest it is likely. So, really, how could he take the shot?”

  She looked away, trying to blink away tears that were threatening to fall. “He must have caught hell from his club, though. I hear that it’s like one of the worst things a guy can do, to leave his partner like that.”

  “He thought so. That’s why it took him so long to decide. As it turned out, when he showed up to quit his club, he was told that if he had taken the shot, he would have been asked to leave.”

  Hank looked over at the dark spot that was Derrick’s blood. “If Derrick would have just kept his mouth shut, he would have been out that day and never seen prison. That’s all he had to do, was shut his mouth.”

  He met her eyes again. “It was a defining moment for him, because he really did believe that — what you said about not leaving your partner. You cops have that too, though, right? Back each other, never leave him if things get heavy?”

  She nodded and looked at her shoes. “Yes. We do.”

  “What would you have done?” he asked.

  She looked up at him and thought about it. “I would have rode away. I’m not a murderer, either, though Derrick, well, he certainly brought the capacity to the surface.” Her face cracked a smile, just a little.

  Hank smiled. “That makes you a member of a very large club.”

  “You in that club?”

  “Me? No. That’s why Derrick was able to remain in the MC so long after he got out. He changed in there, in prison. He was much worse. Something broke in him, and his partner, well, for years, he couldn’t get past the guilt of leaving him.”

  “You make it sound like Derrick wasn’t in the Riders any longer,” she observed.

  “He wasn’t. This isn’t a club thing. I know whose truck that is. But I’m not sure that he killed him either. Though, it would be easy to set him up for it.” Hank grimaced.

  “Who?” she said, all cop now.

  He looked her over. She was quite good looking. “I’m not going to tell you, because then you’ll have to write my name down to say where you got the information, and for the next few weeks, I have to be a ghost in this. A lot of good lives are at stake. So, I can’t. But…”

  “Yes?” she asked, watching him walk back over to the tracks.

  “If you called around, and asked, perhaps in the El Cajon area, or nearby, you’d find someone who knows who drives a pickup truck — see the wide base and distance between the marks? — a truck with racing slick tires on it. You’ll find it’s a very short list. Not many are wealthy enough, stupid enough, and so hooked on themselves that they use racing slicks as day-to-day driving tires. They cost something like five hundred each and they wear out really fast.”

  She pulled out her pad of paper and wrote that down. “Can you tell … what kind of truck that is? I mean, from looking at the tracks, of course.”

  “Not really into cars that much, but it looks like it might be a silver ’67 Chevy with a modified chassis, Dart Pro-1 header with Crane rockers, custom stainless headers, a Tremec, T56 Magnum transmission, and some custom three-inch stainless exhaust pipes, with a 730hp, 434ci Chevrolet Gen1, 4.155-inch bore / 4-inch stroke engine — but that’s just a guess.”

  She smiled that time and didn’t try to hide it. “That’s pretty good. I mean, from just tire tracks.”

  “Well, with the turn radius and tire depth and all that stuff,” he said, and then shrugged. “But while it is fun to think about the hassle I can envision coming his way, he’s not the killer. He would have been, I’m sure of it. But … he didn’t get here first.”

  “So you think Derrick was going to meet the guy in the truck.”

  “Yes, and I’ll bet my Lowrider that the box Derrick had was gone when the guy in the truck showed up, and what was in that box was what the guy in the truck came to buy. He never would have bought it. Derrick would be just as dead, only his body would have fallen backwards, not forwards.”

  Hank looked around again, memorizing what he could, and then he spotted a broken branch. “So that’s what that is,” he said, walking over to the branch, which had dirty but fresh cotton wool leaves.

  “What’s that?”

  “In movies and stuff, you see the cowboys cover up their tracks with a makeshift broom. See over here, these scratching, smearing marks back and forth. That’s your killer, who watches TV, covering his tracks with this. Except, he only wiped out his tracks, he didn’t blanket the area, so he makes a path for us that comes around the back of the car here and right up behind Derrick. Just walked up and shot him.”

  “A partner?”

  “I would start there,” he agreed. “You know? You are going to make a great detective someday.” Hank smiled and started walking back to his thumper.

  “If you run into that partner of his, again, tell him thanks. I mean that,” she told him.

  He gave her a thin smile and then got on the bike. He put his helmet back on and started the engine. He gave her a long look, then a nod, and gunned the motor, rocketing out and down the road.

  She had no idea why she was crying, but she was glad she was alone for the next hour.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Close to 7pm, Cynthia coasted her bike up her drive and cut the engine. She was halfway to the door when Hank called her cellphone.

  “You tired, or would you like some company?”

  “Yes, please,” she sighed.

  “I don’t know if I ever told you this, but I have an amazingly large bath tub. One of those monstrosities with the lion’s feet and everything.”

  She was already starting her bike back up. “No, you didn’t. You have been withholding vital information, mister! I don’t mind all the other secret squirrel stuff, but this? You withheld this?” She closed the connection and didn’t bother with her helmet.

  Gunning across the road and down his lane, she pulled up beside his bike in the covered area beside the house and then, laptop in hand, she ran up the stairs and through the porch.

  “Hank!” she called as she came in the house.

  “Upstairs,” he answered.

  After dropping her stuff on the couch, she ran up the stairs. She could running bath water as she climbed.

  Hank met her at the top landing. “I figured the sooner I got water in the tub, the sooner I would get you naked.”

  “Got that right,” she said, and started stripping.

  Shirt off and reaching for her bra strap, she spied a pastel colored box. “What’s that?”

  “I picked up some oils and stuff this afternoon. I didn’t really know what to get, or how involved you got into the whole bath experience thing, but the girl at the counter was very helpful.”

  “Was she now,” Cyn said, with mock jealousy.

  “Yes, and quite cute, actually, with the little nose and the dash of freckles on her cheeks—”

  Cyn punched him playfully in the gut. “Back to the whole ‘bath experience’ question, I was kind of hoping you would join me, and it might not be so good for you to be smelling like lilies in the morning. But on my own, I’m a serious witch’s brew bather.”

  “They won’t g
o to waste, then. I’ll be right back up. I’ve got a roast going in the slow cooker,” he told her, and he started for the stairs.

  “You cook?” she asked, slightly amazed.

  “Well, yeah,” he said as if that was sort of a silly question. “How can you eat well if you don’t know how to cook well?”

  “Take out,” she answered without hesitation.

  “Ah, so you’re one of those liberated types who see the kitchen as the next thing to a symbol of servitude.”

  “No. It was just dad and me through my teens, and we did a lot of take out and pizzas, and frozen things. Food was never really a priority with us. After I started college, I was introduced to the whole food experience thing and found that eating well was preferable to frozen burritos, but I didn’t have time to learn.”

  “And now?” he asked.

  “I’ve thought of taking classes several times, but never went. On my own, I revert back to frozen burritos and take out rather rapidly,” she told him with a shrug.

  “Hmmm. You’re like one of those swirly ice cream things. You have this amazing biker thing going on with swirls of random girly in you,” he observed.

  “Thank you, I think,” she said with an amused smile.

  “Be right back,” he told her.

  “I’ll be in your tub, and if you don’t hurry, I’ll start brewing potions,” she warned.

  Cynthia had never met a man who really understood the bath. They simply couldn’t comprehend that sitting in a bath, soaking in the heat, was doing something. Or that the goal of the bath was the bath itself; that it was its own fulfillment. Of course, with oils and essences, rubbing one out was always a fine way to enhance the experience as well, but not a necessary one.

  On his return, he was naked and looked at his chin in the mirror. He decided to shave first. She didn’t mind this at all, because until this moment, she hadn’t really had a chance to simply enjoy looking at him. She had certainly enjoyed his embrace and his strength and the hard sensuousness of his body, but this was a rare moment. What better place to enjoy such a moment than in a bath of hot water, soaking up the heat?

  One thing she noticed was that he had several scars on his lower back. There were two others on his right side, near the tattoo of a dragon which she had enjoyed looking at before. On his other side, in the same place and nearly the same pose, was a tiger. Those and the black widow crawling up his jugular vein were his only tats.

  She didn’t want to ask questions, however, not right now. She just wanted to take him in.

  After his shave, he slid into the bath behind her. She leaned back against his chest and found the position very comfortable.

  “How is Daphne doing?”

  “Good, I suppose, considering. She was with Derrick a long time, twelve years, she told me. Hell, they were just kids when they got together. I have no reference point for empathy. My father, I suppose, but that would only be imagining, since he’s still alive.”

  “My mother, for me, but my father is still alive as well. My grandparents died when I was small, and the concept of just how great a loss death was hadn’t really sunken in yet.”

  “Sally and Kimber are with her now. Kimber is going to spend the night, and I’ll come back over in the morning. They still haven’t given a release date for his body, but we’ve call a funeral service and paid for a cremation service to be held as soon as we know when we can.”

  She glanced up at him. “The rumors of the killer being you are circulating.”

  “Kind of wish it was me right now,” he said, which shocked her.

  “Why?”

  “So I would know what was in that damn box he had with him that was so valuable he risked dealing with Ruiz over it,” he told her. Then he looked down at her. “That can’t get out. I just fucked up big time.”

  She nodded. “Safe zone. You trusted me this far. Can you trust me enough to tell me how you knew about the file boxes?”

  “File boxes?” he mused. “I didn’t know what kind of box it was, only an approximate size. Files, records, secrets, that makes sense.”

  “Can I ask if you are just guessing about Ruiz?”

  “I’m not,” he told her, and then described his visit to the crime scene. “It was a long shot. I heard from you that it happened in a clearing, and that was the clearing we used. I had the feeling then that he had used that spot before, several times. When I got there, I ran into that same deputy, too. What a mind-blower that was.”

  She listened to him talk about the conversation he had had with the deputy he once refused to kill. Cyn felt a pang of jealousy because she could hear the connection they had with one another. It was there in the deputy’s questions, which could only have been answered by him, and there was something like a feeling of gratitude in his description, which was strange. Cyn knew she didn’t have that kind of connection with Hank, and it would be a bit insane to wish for that type of connection. But knowing another woman had it with him bothered her a great deal.

  “So,” she asked, interrupting his monologue about the good-looking blond deputy, “I still don’t get the Ruiz connection.”

  Hank sighed.

  “Pushing too far?” she asked.

  “We’ve already been too far, and it needs to quit having its way. It is too important.”

  “So,” she asked and then bit her lip. “Hank? Just tell me. I’ll believe you. Tell me that it wasn’t you.”

  “It wasn’t me,” he told her. “And again, I was serious, especially with what I know now, when I said I wish it was.”

  She let that process. “If everyone could safely know what you know now, how would they feel about you being the trigger man?”

  “Overwhelming relief,” he told her with only the briefest of pauses.

  “Not happy or sad?”

  “No, not at first. Hence the term overwhelming.”

  “Even Daphne?”

  That stopped him, and he was thoughtful for a long time, “No, no I don’t think so. She would understand, and even at some point admit it had to be done, but I don’t think she would ever allow me in her house, no matter how many years passed.”

  After a time, she said, “It sounds like I should be glad it was done, but I’m very glad that it wasn’t you who did it.”

  “It poses several problems, though,” he murmured. “Since it wasn’t me, who the fuck was it? And if he was part of the club, somehow realizing what was going on, then why hasn’t he come to Knight? There would be no reprisal against him, not after he showed them what was in that box. I’m sure of it.”

  “Maybe he isn’t sure of it,” she offered.

  “Hmm,” he thrummed. “Maybe what’s the box isn’t as clear as Derrick believed it was?”

  “Daphne told us that he messed with the filling and stuff in that box when he tweaked. Like some tweak out on TV’s or stereos or computers, he tweaked out on his filing shit. That’s what she called it, anyway, like it was nearly a daily occurrence with him.”

  “Daphne never looked into the boxes?”

  “She treated it like her diary, which he never invaded. Since the boxes were in the closets with other things, she noticed magazine pages, newspaper clippings and hand written notes, but nothing specific,” Cyn told him.

  “I suppose that with enough tweaking, he could have rendered the information fairly useless to anyone but himself. Perhaps just bits and pieces are in there which his mind filled in the blanks for,” he said in deep thought.

  “Writers do that without tweak,” she told him. “They get so into the story, so wrapped in the visual and sensual aspects, that they think they wrote all of that down. Even when they read back through it, it’s like their mind conjures it up so they see it. But when I get there, whole paragraphs are missing. Not just words or sentences. I had one writer who missed a whole chapter. I knew it was missing because one of the main characters died in that chapter, and all of the other characters were referring to and talking about the event, but it wasn’t
there.”

  “Caught up in their own world bubble,” he said, much lighter than he was before. “Interesting. I sometimes think most people are like that anyway. We get so wrapped up in what we are thinking about, or worried about, that we don’t notice or remember ninety percent of what is going on around us.

  “For example,” he added, “I told Boston today that I knew his age, and that he had a birthday coming up soon. He was astounded that I knew that. He obviously doesn’t remember me being at his party last year, or his conversation with Larry about his sister, who he adores.”