by Naomi West
“Check the next room,” she whispered to Hawk. “I’ll search in here. Don’t forget the gloves.”
She put on her own gloves and started going through drawers. Most of them contained more clothing. One had some loose change, a lighter, and a few condoms. After a thorough search, she had nothing. She went to find Hawk. He had finished in the next room, which was just an office of some sort. Not a very organized one, but there was a desk and a computer. A few stacks of papers. The last room was also a bedroom. She entered and Hawk turned to face her. He held up the diaper bag.
“Did you search it?” she asked.
“Not yet.” He took items out one by one and laid them on the bed as she searched the rest of the room. She found a gun and a knife in the bedside table, but it wasn’t the gun she was looking for. It wasn’t the one that had been used to kill Hugh.
She moved to the closet and pushed aside clothing and shoes. In the corner of the closet, under some more clothing, was another gun. And this one matched the caliber of the bullet that the coroner had taken from Hugh’s body and apartment.
“Score!” she whispered. She pointed to the gun and Hawk nodded at her.
“Come look at this,” he said.
She set the gun down and covered it with a shirt. The cops would need to check it for prints and to match the bullet to make sure it was the murder weapon. She went to the side of the bed where Hawk was holding open the diaper bag. He pointed to a spot at the seam that was sewn in a crooked hand-stitched line. Someone had opened the seam and then sewn it closed.
“Where’s your knife?” he asked.
She handed it to him and he used it to open the seam. He gave the knife back, then stuck his hand inside and pulled out a small velvet bag. Hawk pulled open the bag, loosened its drawstring, and dumped the contents into his hand. It was a pile of glittering diamonds. There had to be hundreds of them. Worth thousands upon thousands. She wondered why Hugh had decided to keep them and not hand them over. He had to have known what the danger would be if he didn’t deliver something like this.
Hawk poured the gems back into the bag and tied it shut. He tucked it carefully into his pants.
“That explains why they wanted the diaper bag so badly,” she said.
“Hey!” Alexa spun and saw a very pissed of Rucker Marshall coming at them. “What are you doing in here?!”
She pointed her gun directly at his face. “I suggest you stop right there.”
“Yeah, or what?”
She pulled back the slide to load a bullet into the chamber. “I was a cop until very recently. I will not hesitate to shoot you.”
He held up his hands. “I’m unarmed. You can’t shoot me.”
“Oh, but you missed the part where I said I was a cop. Now I’m just a civilian protecting herself against a man coming at her.”
Rucker glared at her and then at Hawk. “Who are you?”
“Your worst nightmare,” she said.
She wanted to hold him there until she could call Joe and get him to come but Hawk had other plans. He rushed at Rucker and tackled him to the ground before she could intervene and she saw Rucker’s head hit the floor hard as the other man loomed over him and punched him several times.
“What the hell?” It was the woman, the same woman who had claimed to be Jessica. She came to the doorway of the bedroom, holding Damian.
As soon as Damian saw Alexa he reached for her and started crying again. The woman saw looked up and recognized her with a startled expression. She gave another frantic look at Hawk and Rucker fighting on the floor and ran.
Alexa took off after her, hopping over the men on the ground. Hawk could certainly hold his own in a fight. She ran down the hall, following the woman. As she did, Blade and Dugout stepped into the hall to block her. The woman screamed and clutched Damian close to her.
“Let me by! You’re scaring my baby!” she cried out.
“That’s not your baby,” Dugout said. He pulled out a knife and flipped the blade open with one hand. “Now hand him over and no one gets hurt.”
“Rucker!” she shouted.
Alexa caught up and pressed her gun to the back of the woman’s head.
“Listen to me, Jessica, or whoever you really are,” she said. “You’re going to hand over that baby, or you won’t live to see another day.”
“If you shoot me, you’ll hit the baby.”
This woman didn’t have a clue. “I have real good aim,” Alexa said. “Want to see?”
“No!” She turned and thrust Damian at Alexa. “Here. Just let me go and you can have him.”
Alexa put the gun back in its holster and grabbed hold of Damian. The woman tuned and ran, pushing past Dugout and Blade but she didn’t get far. Ace was there, and another of the Kings who Alexa didn’t know. They grabbed her and held her tight. She struggled hard and tried to break free of their grip, but she was no match for the two huge men holding her.
“Where’s Hawk?” Blade asked.
Alexa nodded toward the bedroom. She checked Damian over quickly. He didn’t seem to have any scratches or injuries. They’d take him to the hospital later to have him looked at, but for now he seemed okay. Silent tears ran down his cheeks and he looked at Alexa like he hadn’t seen her in years.
She held him tight, swaying him slowly back and forth, while pulling out her phone. She held it with one hand and dialed Joe.
“We got him,” she said. “I’m holding Damian, and we have Rucker and the woman. We found the diamonds he was after and a few guns. One matches the weapon we’ve been searching for in connection with Hugh’s murder.”
“Good work, Detective Reynolds. We’re on our way.”
“It’s PI Reynolds now, and it always will be.” She hung up and slid her phone back into her pocket.
There was no way she could go back to the force. Operating like this, without all the rules that cops had to follow, was much better. She could work for the police indirectly, as a citizen, helping them out like this.
Chapter 24
It took several seconds for Hawk to realize it was the police who were pulling Rucker away from him. He’d had him in a choke hold, keeping him under his control so he could continue to punch him. For such a badass drug dealer, the guy was a pansy. He’d gotten his gun away from him easily enough and punched him enough times that Rucker had simply crumpled.
Hawk’s jaw hurt and his eye was swelling a little, but he felt good. He’d heard Alexa say she had Damian, he knew what Rucker had been after, and as long as one of the guns was the weapon that killed his brother it meant that bastard would finally pay.
Hawk let go of the other man and heard the cuffs close over Rucker’s wrists. He half expected cuffs to close around his next. He looked at the cops, watching them read Rucker his rights. One turned to him.
“You must be Hawk,” he said. “I’m Joe, Alexa’s former partner.”
Hawk nodded once and shook the guy’s hand.
“Thanks for all your help today,” Joe said. “We’ve been trying hard to nail this guy, but didn’t have what we needed until you and Alexa stepped in. I hope you can help us out again in the future.”
Hawk knew somewhere deep inside that the guy was genuine but he couldn’t stop his lip from pulling into a snarl and his eyes from narrowing. Because of guys like him Hugh had been put in a position to be in extreme danger as an informant. And clearly the police didn’t do much to protect their informants. Still, he was glad they’d finally got the guy, but he had no reason to help them again.
“Oh right,” Joe said. “I forgot. You don’t like cops.”
“Can you blame me?”
“Alexa said you were wrongfully accused.”
“Served years for it, too.”
“That’s what they all say, you know.” Joe gave him a challenging look. “No one ever did it.”
Hawk fought the urge to punch the guy. “I don’t care if you believe me or not. Just because everyone claims innocence doesn’t make the rea
l innocents any less a victim of the system.”
“Fair enough.” Joe stuck out his hand.
Hawk glared at him for a moment, then relented and shook his hand.
“Can I get a formal statement from you? The more we have, the better we can nail this guy, and since you’re one of his victims, we’ll need your testimony.”
“Whatever I can do to help. I want this guy away for life. He’s hurt way too many members of my family.”
“I understand.”
Hawk’s attention went across the room for a moment. He watched several officers drag Rucker out in cuffs and load him into a cruiser. He had a limited view from inside the house, but he watched as they drove out of sight. Though he was happy he’d been caught, there was still a slight disappointment. His plan all along had been to find a way to kill him and make it look like self defense. He figured with Alexa on his side and his MC as witnesses there’d be no chance he’d do time. But the cops had come faster than he expected, and Rucker fought harder than he thought he would. He’d almost strangled him a few times but the asshole had somehow stayed conscious.
It was probably better this way. For all his distrust of the system and the police, he probably would have ended up getting himself in trouble. And Alexa was right. Damian needed him. If he went away, the kid would probably end up in foster care and bounce around from place to place for the rest of his life. That would be horrible. But there was still the small pang of regret that came with watching Rucker get up and walk, even if he was walking in cuffs with cops pulling him along.
Rucker’s old lady was also taken out. He didn’t have the same sort of beef with her. He didn’t want her dead at least, but he figured that’s because he had always felt sorry for the real Jessica, even though she’d been less than a suitable mother.
And then there was Alexa.
“Hawk?”
He jerked his attention back to Joe, who stood in front of him with a waiting pen and notepad.
“Yeah?”
“Are you ready?”
“Sure.”
“Start at the beginning. Tell me everything that lead up to this moment.”
Hawk took a deep breath. “I guess it started with Hugh’s murder.”
In the end, it felt like he talked for hours outlining everything he saw the night of the murder, then the night he saw the car, including everything Alexa had found out and up to his encounter with ‘Jessica’. When the topic swerved around to the diamonds he smirked.
“They belonged to my brother and they were meant for Damian,” Hawk said. “I need to make sure they remain his property.”
“So long as we don’t find out that they’re stolen or part of a crime,” Joe said. “We know he received them from somewhere.”
Hawk thought about how he could separate them. Keep at least one or two for himself and hand over the rest if he needed to. It would be enough to take care of Damian for life, maybe even give him a good college fund, and it’d let him the chance to cut back on his repo job in order to take care of his nephew more.
Hawk finished his testimony with the full detail of the fight with Rucker. How he’d come in threatening them and wouldn’t back down when Alexa aimed her gun at him. He finally got to the moment that the cops had shown up.
“I think we have everything for now,” Joe said. “I’m sure as things come up in the investigation, we’ll have more questions for you. You will be willing to testify?”
“Of course,” Hawk said. He would love nothing more than to stare that asshole in the face in a court room and tell them all what he’d done to his brother and nephew. “I’ll help however I can to make sure that guy is put away.”
“Glad to hear it.” Joe smiled at him and shook his hand. “And you know, it’s the funniest thing. Seems like during the fight the diamonds got lost somehow. And we just haven’t been able to find them. I suspect that Rucker hid them somewhere during the altercation.”
Hawk pulled his eyebrows together for a moment. Was Joe really doing what he thought he was doing?
“Look.” Joe leaned in close and whispered. “Those diamonds will just sit in our evidence locker for months and months. There’s no other case that I know of that they’re part of. We’ll just chalk it up to missing evidence. You can still testify that you saw them, and that’s enough. They’ll do you far more good than they will anyone else.”
Hawk’s mouth fell open. He could hardly believe the officer was going out on a limb like this, especially given his own history, regardless of whether or not the charges were false. He couldn’t help but think that Alexa had something to do with this. “Thanks,” he muttered.
Outside the interrogation room in the main bullpen he found Alexa talking to another cop, but she didn’t have Damian. He looked around and saw an EMT holding him down the hall near an idling ambulance. “Is he okay?”
Damian heard Hawk’s voice and twisted in her arms, whining until she let him go so Hawk could hold him.
“I’d say he is now,” the EMT said, smiling. “We checked him over. He seems just fine. Might need a new diaper, but that’s about it.”
“Thank you.”
Hawk bounced Damian in his arms, then held him close. He felt the tears in his eyes, but blinked them away. Too many people around, too many of his guys still there. But it was good to feel his nephew’s weight in his arms again. He hadn’t realized the depth of his worry until he’d seen Alexa holding him earlier and knew he was okay.
He went back inside and found the diaper bag. He pulled out a fresh diaper and laid Damian down on the bed. The baby watched him and cooed at him as Hawk got to work taking off his pants and wiping him clean. He got a fresh diaper on, got him dressed, and stood there for a long moment, just looking at him.
What would he have done if something had happened to him? He’d never have forgiven himself. But here he was, safe and sound. And a lot of it was due to Alexa. A pang of pain hit his chest again. He picked Damian up and cradled him against his chest. It was time to get home. They could both use a nice long nap. After all that had happened, he was exhausted.
Hawk slung the bag over his shoulder and walked out to his car. Blade was there on his bike. He held out a fist to him, and Blade bumped it back with his own.
“Thanks for all your help,” Hawk said.
“Any time. Glad to see the little guy is okay.”
“Me too. I’ll be in to headquarters in a few days.”
“Take your time.”
Hawk got Damian tucked safely into his car seat and drove home, glancing in the mirror constantly to make sure he was still there and still okay.
Chapter 25
When the police were done collecting evidence and taking statements, it was time for them all to go home, including Alexa. The ambulance had left after checking everyone and cleaning a few cuts here and there. They’d all been lucky. Things could have been so much worse.
She walked through the house, looking for Hawk. He wasn’t there. She went out to see if he was with his MC members and saw that his car gone. Blade was still there with one other King.
“Have you seen Hawk?” she asked.
“He left a while ago with Damian.”
“Oh. Thanks. And thanks for your help.”
Blade nodded. “You’re alright, Miss Reynolds. You stop by headquarters with Hawk anytime you want, okay?”
She smiled. She knew enough about MCs from Hawk to know that the invitation for someone like her was a big deal. “I’d love that. Thank you.” Even if it would never happen because Hawk wanted nothing to do with her, she appreciated the offer.
She went back inside to find Joe and get a ride. She tried not to be stung by Hawk’s leaving her there. Maybe he’d forgotten that he’d driven her there and she had no way to get home. Maybe he’d just been so focused on getting Damian home that he hadn’t thought about it. Or maybe he was just done with her and that’s how things were going to be from now on.
All the same, she bit her lip a
s she pulled out her phone and quickly texted him. “You guys make it home okay?”
It took several minutes before he responded. Just a single confirmation. “Yup.”
Her heart twisted a little.
“Hey, can I get a ride for old time’s sake?” she asked Joe.
“Not unless you agree to come back. I don’t have a new partner.”
