by Zoey Parker
Keith had been shot in the back, on a street in the neighborhood of his house and the Red Trick Pony. No one had ever been caught, there were no witnesses found, no trace of the gun, nothing. Just a late-night senseless shooting that had led to the death of a man.
Steph’s eyes had narrowed, and his body was leaned in toward me, his attention on full blast. “Grath has filled me in on what happened here the other day. I gotta say, you should have called the cops. You know that, right? That was your first mistake—this week. Hell, your first mistake was in not coming to the cops way back last year, when Keith went down. Why the fuck didn’t…”
“Yo, babe, go easy on her. Tone it down a notch. You’re freaking her out.” I was pretty sure Grath was observing my near-hyperventilating.
They got into it. “She should be freaked out! If what she’s saying is true, then we’ve got a known armed and dangerous killer out there with someone in his sights, and it doesn’t take too much thinking to figure out that that target is Jack. Beyond that, who knows who else…maybe the baby?”—and here Steph looked back at me, and my stomach about dropped out again. “But this stalker—Brian—I’m gonna need more info on him, by the way, honey,”—that was to me again—“if he did gun down Keith—and we will find out, because no way does his case stay open my entire fucking life—“
“McAfee goes down. Hard. Regardless. But especially so, yes, if what she’s sayin’ is true, if he’s the one what took down our man. Just, easy on the girl today.” Grath turned back to me. “Ellie hon, you gotta breathe. You need a paper bag?”
I shook my head, getting a handle on myself. Now that I was no longer the only person who had these thoughts haunting my mind, I felt somehow relieved. Not better—it was a living nightmare. I don’t know how, when, or even if it could ever get better—but by sharing it, at least I wasn’t alone with it.
“Okay, let’s start at the top. What do you know? What can you tell us?”
“Well, you know already about Brian, right? Jack explained all that happened in Portland, and how he’d followed me here last year?”
Steph piped in, ever the interrogator. “Yeah, sweetie, we got that part. But about Keith and Brian—and the note says that you made him do it once…”
“Steph! Stop.” They couldn’t think I would ever have asked for this, for Keith, or for anyone, could they? “Brian is crazy. You get that, right? I never asked for his crazy. Hell, I was trying to get away from him all this time. If he’s the one who shot Keith, he did it of his own volition. My God! Keith and I were friends. I liked him. He was awesome. I never wanted him to get hurt, to even be involved in the crazy that was Brian. I never wanted any of this.” Cue: tears. Damnit.
“Okay, honey. You’re right, it doesn’t make sense that you would have been behind Keith’s going down.”
“Except that I was, when you boil it down, right? It was my fault. Brian would never have targeted Keith if Keith hadn’t gotten in his face that night at the bar, defending me, putting Brian in his place. Humiliated him. Keith would never have been on Brian’s radar. Keith would still be alive…”
“Ellie, you can’t go re-writing history. From what Jack told me, that night that Keith gave McAfee what he had coming to him was the same night you and he…” Grath wiggled his brows at me with a funny sly smile, trying to lighten the mood. “So if Keith had never been involved, had never been on McAfee’s radar, then you might not even be alive—no telling what McAfee might have done to you—Aaand also, you wouldn’t have Peter. You wanna change that?”
The thought of not having Peter, who had so completely taken over my heart, was devastating. It was either Keith or Peter, but it was no choice at all. It had all played out the way it did, and now I had my beautiful son, and there was nothing any of us could do to rewind the clock for Keith’s sake. So I took a deep breath and smiled shyly back at Grath.
“You’re right. I could never choose not to have Peter. Never. But it doesn’t make me feel less guilty about Keith…It’s my fault, my fault, that Peter will never know his father. That Jack—and all of you—have to live without a great man whom you all loved—”
He cut me off. “Don’t go there, Ellie. You gotta let it drop. It makes sense, now, that we have a bead on Keith’s killer. Before now, we had nothing. So this is progress. We’ll find him, we’ll take him down. On that, you can be damn sure. One hundred percent.”
Steph, Mister Logic, got back in the ring. “You said the other day that the gun you saw in McAfee’s hands, that it looked like…?”
I repeated what I had seen. “Like a gun a cop would carry. At least, a cop on TV. I guess they look like real cop guns? I don’t know the make and model, but it was black, kind of square-ish looking, all business, no frills. Handgun. Not small, but not outrageously big, either. Does that help?”
“Yeah, it helps a lot, actually. Fits with the bullets that were found in Keith’s back.”
I flinched. Poor Keith! I hated to think of what he must have gone through, those last hours and minutes of his life, and what he might have thought about. I sent a prayer up for him, a message of love and gratitude and of sorrow at the untimely end to his sojourn here. I would regret and grieve his passing forever; it was something that I would carry in my heart for eternity.
But now, knowing—or thinking I knew the culprit behind his takedown, and the evil and madness that drove Brian to do it, I was getting angry. Red-hot angry. Because: how dare Brian play God with Keith’s life, with my life, with Peter’s life, and Jack’s life? Brian had to be all-out crazy—no, psychopathic—to have gone through with any of this. And I was done. I was pissed. I wanted to bring him down personally.
Apparently, in my raging thoughts, I had at some point gotten to my feet and started treading the carpets with vengeance, because I suddenly had two very strong arms around me, holding me from behind, and Grath’s voice began whispering in my ear, “Shhh, shhh, it’s okay, girl. We’re gonna get him. Breathe, Ellie. You have the cops, you have Steph and his team, you have me, and Jack, and the whole MC with you now. We’re all on this together. And we will hunt that bastard down. Do not worry. You just take care of that precious baby of yours, yeah? That is your number one. We will take care of the psycho. Okay? Are you breathing? In and out, honey. In and out.” And then we were basically doing Lamaze together, on our feet. It wasn’t even weird; it helped.
After a few minutes, he let me go, and we were all a bit calmer. The room was full of the tension of too much knowledge and too little action, but there was a new element, too: we were part of a team. I felt like a part of the team, even though they had relegated me to playing a bystander role in the hunt for the psycho killer. I had trouble with that image, a little bit. It was discomfiting—hi, understatement!—to think that all this time, Brian was actually capable and guilty of murder, and that he did it effectively for me. Gross. Repugnant. Sickening. Sick.
Eventually, Grath looked me over, seeing I was doing much better, had taken a few sips of iced tea and appeared fairly normal again. So he figured I was ready for the next hard hitter. “One last thing before we go, Ells. Gotta know, why didn’t you tell Jack about these suspicions of yours, about Brian maybe being Keith’s killer? Why didn’t you ever go to the cops, way back when? Seems like a lot of this could have been dealt with last year. What could possibly have held you back?”
Was this the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question? I didn’t have a good, easy answer. All I had was my truth, which I gave him, best as I could.
“Keith told me about his brother one night at the bar when we were just shooting the shit back and forth. Said Jack was the best. He talked about the MC a little—didn’t go into any detail, just about how he loved to ride, got involved with an MC, that you were all like family. He was a big, tough guy, but he got a happy look on his face when he talked about you all.
“But Jack—he said he worried about Jack, that Jack took business and family things dead seriously, and believed in an eye for an eye,
everything in black and white. Even though Keith was younger, he said he felt really protective of Jack—funny, because he also said that Jack would say exactly the same thing, being protective of Keith. But that when he was a kid, growing up, Jack had always had his back, and always went after anyone who was even thinking about giving Keith a rough time.
“When I heard about what happened to Keith, I was horrified. I was scared. I didn’t want to believe that what I thought might be…I didn’t want to believe it to be true. I didn’t want to know it to be true. I just wanted to get as far away from all of it as possible, as fast as I could.
“I knew there was no point in going to another new place—Brian had already followed me to the one place that was so opposite of Portland, I thought he never would have come down here. But he did, and then Keith was gone, and I was pregnant and I had no one else, there didn’t seem any point in my staying here.
“I packed up right quick and went back to Portland. I have a friends there, and my mom and a bunch of ‘uncles’…” I shrugged, hoping that was enough of an explanation.
Steph wasn’t buying it. “There’s more to it, Ellie. Spit it out.”
He was right. “I guess, in my way, I wanted to protect Jack, too. Keith can’t anymore. But I didn’t want to tell Jack about my suspicions about Brian, then have Jack go off half-cocked to take out Brian and end up behind bars for the rest of his life after exacting some kind of eye-for-an-eye revenge. I mean, who could blame him? But for his own life’s sake, and for Peter…I want Jack around. I don’t want him behind bars. That’s why I didn’t say anything, earlier. That’s why I still don’t want to tell him. I don’t know how to do that. How do I stop him from killing Brian? Because I’m pretty sure that’s what he’s going to want to do.”
“Honey, we all want to kill McAfee,” Grath averred. Steph made a quick, sharp tsss sound and shot his big man a look that might kill, just by itself.
“Do not ever say that in front of me again, you ass. You know better. No matter how true it is.”
Grath grinned at Steph, then beamed it at me. “I love it when he gets all formal cop on me. Turns me on.”
Steph leaned over and swatted at Grath’s ass, and we all cracked up. The tension had finally broken.
Grath got up, pulled me to my feet, and bear hugged me one more time. “I get why you didn’t tell him, but Jack, more than anyone, deserves to know all of this. He’ll be really hurt it didn’t come from you. You know that, right? But I gotta agree, he’s gonna be so pissed off, it might take three or four of us to hold him down until he processes it and slows himself down.
“Tell you what. I’ll get the MC to call church—what we call our meetings, for all the brothers—and I’ll tell him and everyone else there, together. Might be safest.”
“Thank you, Grath. You don’t know how grateful I am.”
“Yeah, well, hold onto that gratitude. I gotta feeling Jack is going to be mighty pissed off about it, and some of that is pretty likely to come flying in your direction. Try to keep in mind that he’s gonna need some time to process, to get to grips with all this. But it will be okay. All right?”
“Yeah, all right. I gotta believe that. Holding onto that.”
“Yeah. Good. So you leave all the worries to us. You just focus on your baby boy.”
They both gave me squeezes, then looked hard at one another, communicating without words, and left the house with purpose in their strides.
I had just witnessed the beginning of what was likely to be one hell of a storm, hitting the streets of Tucson.
Chapter 15
Jack
When I rode into the Iron Bandits’ compound that night, it looked like all my MC brothers had beaten me to it. The place was packed. I parked my bike and strode straight back to church. I knew I wasn’t late, but it felt like I was the last one there for a reason. This did not bode well.
Yep. Sure enough, the room was packed. Everyone in their place. I had no idea what I’d missed, but it was something big, because they all went silent as I made my way to my seat at the table. Then Bull, our president, said, “Good. ’Bout time you made it here. Sit down, Jack-o. We got news, and we got shit to cover.
“First off, damn you for planning a wedding without letting us know you were taking on that sweet mama to be your old lady. No disrespect. You do your brother proud. It’s what he would have wanted, for her, for his son. It’s a good move. When’s the wedding?”
I shot a death-glare at Grath, who grinned back at me with a shift of his shoulders. The asshole had shared.
But he was right: the MC would now be sworn to protect Ellie as much as any other family member, as much as Peter, as much as all the women and children in the chosen circles of our ranks. Maybe it read as archaic or patriarchal bullshit to Ellie—in fact, I knew it did. I knew she didn’t like it. And she would hate being called an ‘old lady.’ Still, it was our way. And like it or not, she would benefit from it, even if our marriage was in name only and only lasted for six months. It would have the mark of legitimacy, it would be recognized. And that was all to the good.
There might even been a part of me that wished it was real: that the marriage would be real, that I could think of and call Ellie mine—and not just for six months, but for good. But that was not the plan, and it wasn’t going to play out like that, so I slapped that thought down and grunted my acceptance of their well-wishes. “Yeah, uh, it’s tomorrow. Keeping it real small, courthouse.”
There were a bunch of nods and I got a few more pats on the back and punches to the arms. Some guys slapped the table in salute. But the subject quickly lost its sparkle, and I knew we were here for a different reason.
Bull hit the gavel once for attention, and got it.
“Jack-o, I can see you’re curious about why we’re all here before you. We need you to listen, now. Do not get up until you have leave, you hear me? I want your ass in that chair until I am done laying this out for you.”
What the fuck? This kind of shit did not happen at our meetings. What the fuck had I done? I knew the answer was nothing—with the exception of the bender I had gone on a couple of weeks past, I’d been doing good. Work was smooth, the shop was earning and busy, clients were happy, books were solid. So this was not disciplinary. I wracked my brain, and came up empty. I must have looked ridiculous—which I hated—looking around me with my eyebrows raised. “One of you assholes wanna enlighten me here? What the fuck is going on? What is this bullshit?”
“It’s about Keith.”
Okay, that got my attention.
“What about Keith?”
“We got a lead now, on what happened that night. On who did it.”
“Name.” That is all I wanted. I sat forward.
“Back down, man.”
I slid back in the chair, looking hard at Bull. “Name.”
“Brian Mc—”
“I fucking knew it! I fucking knew it! That fuck! I’m gonna hunt that motherfucker down—”
“Jack! Sit your ass back down. Right. Now.” A bunch of guys had gotten up around me and circled me, as if that was going to hold me back from heading out the door and onto his trail. Ha!
Still, I looked a few of my brothers in the eye, and they looked at me fiercely, but also with understanding. They knew how hard this was gonna hit me. Well, I guessed that answered my question about the purpose and style of today’s church meeting. It was an intervention, and I was the detainee. Fan-fucking-tastic.
I gave the guys long hard stares right back, then resettled in my chair. If this was the way they wanted to play it, so be it. They’d better have a plan, though—I knew that as soon as church was over, I’d be on the trail, with or without them. I finally had something to go on, to catch my little brother’s murderer, and nothing was going to stop me. Absolutely. Nothing.
But Bull had other ideas. “You still with us? Pay attention, now, Jack, because I’m only going to say this once. You do not go off on your own to get this piece of sh
it. You got me?
“We are an MC, we are your brothers, we work together as a team. We also got help—Steph has more info feeding in, but we don’t know enough yet. We don’t know where this McAfee is, we don’t know where he’s staying, we don’t know where he’s been.
“We do know he’s got a gun, and we know he’s crazy enough to kill. And we know—or, we think we know—that you are the next one in his sights.
“So you are not the one who should be riding around seeking him out. He might find you first. And then what good are you to that woman you’re about to marry, or to that baby boy, your brother’s son?
“You have responsibilities now, son, and you have to think hard and long first, before you can go out and get that revenge I know you need in your blood.”
