by Naomi West
Chopper was quiet for a while, studying her face. When he finally spoke, his words were soft and deliberate. “I have one more bad thing I need to do.” He brushed the hair back from her face.
“You know what.” She nodded.
“After that, this town is gonna get a whole lot safer. It’ll just be you and me, baby, and we don’t have to run it the same as it’s been run. We can make things better. We’ll make it quieter.” He touched her lips. “But I need your help to do that, because I’m always gonna be a Savage at heart.”
Kelsey rolled her eyes. She sighed. “Fine.” Then she shook her head. “Jesse Slater, you lucky son of a bitch.”
Chopper grinned. He palmed her left breast through her shirt, drawing a circle around her nipple with his thumb. “How lucky?” he whispered in her ear.
Kelsey got to her feet and started to back toward the stairs, pulling him along by the hand. “I’m about to show you.”
They fell into bed laughing, already pulling at each other’s clothes. Chopper took a moment just to admire the perfection of her body underneath him. He ran his fingers over her stomach and couldn’t keep himself from remembering when it was rounded, her navel pushed out like a button. Faint lines on her hips were all that remained of the little life that had been growing inside her for so long. He glanced up at her face and knew she was thinking the same thing. Chopper pressed his lips against her skin. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Do you want me to stop?”
She stroked the back of his neck. “No. Keep going.”
# # #
Kelsey woke up naked, her body pressed warmly against Chopper’s in the bed. She could feel him breathing, his heartbeat steady as a drum in her ear. When she moved his first instinct was to pull her closer, and so she stayed still for an extra few minutes, until her need for the bathroom drove her out of his arms. She thought about returning to sleep afterward, but at some point before she got back into the bed, her brain began to think about the call Brittany had promised to her today, first thing in the morning.
And then she knew she couldn’t sleep, even if she wanted to. She slipped into some clothes and went downstairs, making sure not to disturb Chopper on her way out. The clock read quarter to eight—probably still too early for Brittany to call. Kelsey put her phone on the counter and went about the business of making coffee, trying to distract her hyperactive mind. She had to keep telling herself not to get her hopes up, to prepare for more disappointment. The most likely scenario was that no progress had been made at all, and the police were still unwilling to justify pouring resources into a cold case. Kelsey knew that in her heart, but it was almost impossible to fight the rising swell of hope.
At five minutes after nine, as she sat staring at a copy of the day’s paper spread out before her on the kitchen table, her phone went off, shattering the undisturbed stillness of the room. Kelsey jumped out of her seat and snatched the phone off the counter. She answered without even looking at the screen. “Hello?”
“Kelsey? It’s Brittany. I hope I didn’t wake you up.”
Kelsey twined a lock of hair around her finger. “Nope. I’ve been up for a little bit.” It was something of an understatement. She felt like she was going to burst out of her skin.
“Ah, good. Well, I tracked down your sister’s file.” Papers shuffled in the background as Brittany transferred the phone. “Guess what?”
“What?” Kelsey didn’t guess. She couldn’t. She could barely even think straight.
“I’m going to petition them to reopen the case.” Brittany paused. “There’s just too much that wasn’t looked into here. I don’t think I can tell you specifics, but I mean … let’s just say that this was closed preemptively, at best.”
“I …” Kelsey grasped frantically for a way to convey her thanks. She didn’t find one.
“I know it’s probably not what you were hoping to hear,” Brittany said quickly. “And I’m sorry I don’t have better news for you right away. But I know a very good detective in the homicide unit who wasn’t on this before, and I bet I could convince him to take it. If there’s anyone who can solve this, it’s him.”
“It’s amazing,” Kelsey said softly. She blinked back tears. “Thank you so, so much. I thought …”
“I’ll push this through to him today, okay? And I’ll tell him to let me know as soon as possible. Either way, I swear we’ll find a way to get this done.” Brittany sighed. “Kelsey, your sister was beautiful. She looked so much like you.”
Kelsey’s voice trembled when she said, “I know.”
# # #
Forty-five minutes later, Chopper came down to find her crying into a tea towel, the pages of her forgotten newspaper splashed with tears. “Kels?” he asked, his voice heavy with concern. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?” He expected her to be inconsolable, but she had a smile on her face as she turned to him. She spoke, and the smile turned fierce.
“You find Spike,” she told him. “I’m going to find the asshole who killed my sister.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chopper
Dahlia was a good worker. Once Chopper laid out his expectations, she seemed perfectly happy to come into the Outlaw compound, subject herself to a security search, and then sit down at the table in the war room and pore over the binder full of Spike’s financial transactions. Many names and dates had been left intact, but great sections of the book were blacked out by charring, or simply missing altogether. Dahlia used her incredible memory, and sometimes her own journals, to fill in the blanks. When Chopper asked why she kept such detailed records of her time with Spike, she answered nonchalantly, “I guess I never really trusted him.” Then she added, “And I thought some of this money would be mine someday. Little did I know, right?”
On her first day, she’d brought in a list of locations where Spike could potentially be found, ordered from most to least likely. The first few were outposts belonging to allies; he could expect to meet resistance if he went there. Those further down were family homes, places he would seek refuge as a last resort. Depending on how many Mongols Chopper and his men had killed, Spike’s favored hideouts might already be defenseless or severely weakened. This was both good news and bad news. Good news, because it meant that he had fewer places to go. Bad news, because Chopper knew he’d prefer not to deal with family members at all. He knew Kelsey wouldn’t like the involvement of potential innocents. He wasn’t too sure how he felt about it himself.
Needing time to think, he retreated into his personal quarters and lay on the bed, staring at Dahlia’s list like a teenage boy with a picture of his first girlfriend. Many of these places were shockingly close by, but he supposed that made sense. Spike had to have expected a violent confrontation with him sooner or later, and his contingency plan needed to mesh with the possibility of severe injuries—which, Chopper noted, Spike had indeed suffered. There was no way he could get very far at all without the use of an airlift, and that would’ve attracted too much attention. So, it stood to reason that Lawler the rat was hiding more or less in plain sight.
Chopper went through the list yet again, mapping each address on his laptop and striking off the ones he judged to be too far for Spike to reach in his injured state. Then he marked out the area encompassing those that were left and sent his altered map to Dean. Thirty seconds later, a call came through.
“What am I lookin’ at, Chop?” Dean asked. “New drug route?”
“Better,” Chopper said. “You see those pins in there?”
“Yeah.”
“I got it from a real good source that those are all the places where Spike Lawler might be. I need you to get some boys together and ride on by. See if you can catch anything, you know what I mean?”
“How good is this source?” Dean said. “No disrespect, but we haven’t seen a hair of Lawler in weeks.”
Chopper grinned. “Did Red teach you how to backtalk, too? The girl was Spike’s old lady before he got fixated on Kelsey. She knows everything.”
>
Dean whistled. “I guess he really fucked up, huh?”
“Yeah,” Chopper said. “I guess he did.”
From his seat at the workbench in the garage at Bike Out of Hell, Chopper heard his boys peel out onto the road. He got up and wandered out just to watch them ride away, their outlines shrinking into the distance. It felt just like old times, except that in old times, he’d be the one at the front, not Dean. And he was always flanked by Red and Hoss. Chopper stood quietly in the early afternoon sun, hands shoved in his pockets, squinting into the light.
His chest felt tight. There was something lodged in his throat. He swallowed, blinked, ran his hand across his face. All of a sudden, emotion had leapt upon him like a tiger in the night. He didn’t know what to do. The losses he had suffered before were understandable, justifiable even. But this time, Spike took two of the greatest friends he had ever known, two men he’d naively considered among the ranks of immortals. Never had he thought to envision a future without them. Now, that future was his reality, and the weight was so great that he needed to be alone.
He went back into the garage, told the mechanic on duty that he was taking off for a bit, and walked back out. On any other day, he wouldn’t have thought twice about taking his beloved bike for a spin, but on this afternoon, Chopper Slater decided to walk. He knew he made an awkward, perhaps even suspicious figure ambling down the side of the street, but he didn’t care. For once, he needed to separate himself from the identity that had defined him since he was a young man. He had to take a step back and see what Kelsey saw — a vicious cycle that only claimed lives.
Would it be enough to keep him away forever, or even for more than a few hours? No, that was too much to ask. Chopper knew himself better than he knew anyone or anything else. He was set in his ways now, too far gone to ever really come back from the choices he’d made. Sometimes, late at night, he tried to imagine himself doing other work, and he couldn’t. Even the shop would seem hollow if he gutted it of its true nature, and what would happen to the money? He could not deny that most of his living came from activities that were not legal. Did he know how to make an honest living? Chopper’s guess was as good as anyone else’s, and that was not something he wanted to discover as he began to sneak up into middle age.
Some people were just bad apples for life. Chopper supposed he was one of them — even if he wasn’t rotten to the core, even if Kelsey had picked him up and polished him a little bit. She was the best thing that had ever happened to him, but she could only do so much. He hoped she knew that.
As he walked toward town, kicking rocks on the side of the road like a surly teen, cars flew by him without a second glance. He, Chopper Slater, who had long been notorious within the city limits, was no more than a rough-looking man with grease on his shirt and hands, tattoos splashed across his arms and crawling up into his rolled sleeves. How many passing motorists would even know who he was if they stopped to look at his face? How many would care? Maybe that number was less than he might have previously believed. The thought was oddly freeing. Chopper found himself smiling, walking slower, listening to the crush of his boots on the graveled shoulder. In that moment, he was no one except the person he wanted to be. And who he wanted to be was a friend in mourning.
His feet eventually took him to the cemetery, a serene but badly overgrown plot of land hovering on the outskirts of downtown. It had grown some in the years since Chopper took his place at the head of the Outlaws’ table, and vast tracts of it still stood empty, waiting to receive the dead. Some parts, the richer ones with tombs and mausoleums, were meticulously cared for by families whose loved ones lay in the ground, but most of it grew fairly wild. Off the path, the grass came up to the middle of Chopper’s shin. He wondered idly if the caretaker’s old mower would even work on grass that long, or if the machine would simply choke and die.
Red and Hoss were buried beside each other, their graves marked with simple stones that stood out only because of their newness. Chopper sat down between them. He looked for a long time at the way the granite gleamed. Over time, it would become dusty and dull just like all the other markers around them, but for now, the stone was as fresh and bright as the wound in Chopper’s heart. He turned his eyes away.
Hoss had a flower on top of his grave, a long-stemmed thing with a yellow blossom. Chopper thought maybe it was a daffodil, but he couldn’t say for sure; he’d never been good with that sort of thing. Kelsey would know. He almost took a picture to send to her, but the very action seemed somehow sacrilegious. Instead, he just sat in the grass and wondered who left it there, who was missing Hoss besides him. The only family Chopper had ever known him to have was the one he’d spoken of in their last phone call — his estranged wife and their lost baby. Chopper smiled mirthlessly at the parallels he drew between them now. But he was alive, and he still had Kelsey’s love. He had not died a quick, yet brutal death.
“I’m sorry, Hoss,” he said. “I don’t know what you deserved, but it was better than this.” He wasn’t surprised to feel a tear tracking its way down his cheek. This was, after all, the first time he had taken to grieve for real, possibly in his entire life. So much of Chopper’s existence had been treated as a given, a gift that could not be taken away. The dead were inferior, the living either lucky or skilled. It was a view that could be charitably described as ignorant. He was paying for it now. This much, Chopper understood, was not Spike Lawler’s fault.
But that didn’t mean that the Mongol was absolved of all his debts. Chopper just needed a minute to get his shit together, and then he’d take the walk back to the shop and wait for his scouting posse to give him the news. A vengeful fire still burned inside him. He was still the same man he’d always been.
Spike Lawler would never be safe from him. Not even in hell.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Kelsey
Brittany’s second call came in later afternoon, jolting Kelsey out of a restless nap. As soon as she realized who was calling, Kelsey felt the anxiety come rushing in. She took a useless moment to check her reflection in the screen of the shut-off television, fixing her hair as if it mattered. Finally, she took in a huge deep breath and answered her phone just before it went to voicemail. “Hello?” She hoped that she didn’t sound sleep-addled.
“Hi, it’s Brittany again. Do you have a second?”
Kelsey’s heart skipped. “Of course.” Nervously, she pulled her feet back up underneath her body, hugging her legs like a child. She faked a smile even though Brittany couldn’t see her, just to try and make her voice sound a little more natural. “What’s up?”
“I have some really good news!” Brittany said brightly. Kelsey could almost see her perfect white smile, the smile of a should-be anchorwoman. She continued on before Kelsey could say anything, perhaps sensing her nerves. “I spoke with the detective I mentioned earlier — his name is Emmett Wilde — and we are going to confer with the chief tomorrow about reopening Hannah’s case.”
Kelsey thought she was all cried out, but the sound of those words sparked another upwelling of tears. “Okay,” was what she managed to get out without sounding like she was about to bawl.
“I wish I could expedite this for you,” Brittany answered apologetically. “I really, really do. It drives me crazy sometimes that it can take so long.” She sighed softly. “But especially for cold cases, they tend to want to make sure it’s going to be worth it, you know? Allocation of resources and all that.” The tone of her voice made it clear that Brittany had some opinions about police resources, but she didn’t elaborate.
“So, I might have more for you tomorrow, or it might be a little while. We will definitely be on them about it, though. I can promise you that much.”
Kelsey laughed a little. “That’s all I ask,” she said. The tears in her eyes shimmered on the edge of her eyelashes, but somehow, miraculously, they did not fall. “I’ve been trying to get this done for over a year, so … it’s almost surreal that it’s even starting to mo
ve again at all.”
“Yeah. I’ve seen these kinds of things stay put for decades,” Brittany said sadly. “I’ll do everything I possibly can to make sure that doesn’t happen here.”
“Thanks, Brittany.” Kelsey didn’t know how to articulate the bottomless depth of gratitude she felt toward this woman whom she’d only known for a matter of weeks, but who was now going out of her way to find the answers that had eluded Kelsey for so long. “I owe you one. Or two. Or a hundred.”
The other woman laughed. “You’re sweet, but this is my job. I’m so happy that I can do this for you.” She paused. “I should tell you that if and when the case is reopened, they’re probably going to want to redo some interviews, see if anything’s changed, re-examine some evidence. So be prepared for that.”
“Yes.” Kelsey agreed automatically, but a cold fist of apprehension had clenched hard around her spine. Stupidly, she hadn’t really thought about what reopening the case might mean for the rest of her family, or for her relationship with them. Would she have to go back and face the people she’d systematically cut out of her life months before? Would she have to explain herself? Her head spun until she felt faint and had to lie back against the arm of the sofa.
