by Hazel Parker
“Look, let’s get a unit tonight,” Biggie said. “OK? We can scour the town. But then, Niner, honestly, you should take Sunday off and go somewhere.”
“No,” I spat back. “I am not taking any time off until then.”
“What about that girl, the one at the BBQ shop?”
Oh, fuck no. Do not bring her up.
“She is exactly why I am going to go and kill Damon right now. So that he can’t do anything to her. I’ll bet you he’s already finding his next target as we speak.”
“So let’s do a foot patrol now and then look around on bike this evening,” Biggie suggested. “It’ll allow us to see if he’s around without making it too obvious.”
“And we’ll make sure this goddamn place is more fortified than Fort Knox,” Uncle said, the rest of the club now cautiously approaching. “We’re not going to let this motherfucker get away with anything, Niner. Rest assured, I’ll make sure I use my contacts to put pressure on him. Someone like him isn’t going to be wandering the streets without a lot of eyes on him.”
I closed my eyes as I took several semi-calming breaths. I guess it was true that if we rode out on our bikes now and tried to kill Damon, even if we succeeded, it would come at the cost of everything. If we waited until night, conversely, we could use the cover of darkness to move a little more swiftly and aggressively.
Still, it was almost worth sacrificing everything to kill this asshole. After all, I’d already sacrificed everything once, only to see him walk away. Things could only go up in that regard.
Just…not right now. Not yet.
“Listen, Niner—”
“Alright,” I said, hopping off the bike. “Here’s my request. Everyone, including prospects, gets a pistol, not just the officers.”
“Done.”
“We make nightly sweeps of the area, starting tonight.”
“Done.”
“And we roll out right now and examine the area.”
* * *
Unfortunately, the next several hours of searching for Damon, which started as us walking around Brooklyn on foot and ended with us patrolling the streets on our motorcycles, did little for finding the sneaky bastard.
I just knew, as I examined the area, that he would wind up going for someone like Carrie. Even if Carrie wasn’t his exact target, she was his type of target. Attractive, innocent.
Granted, Carrie had a little more spunk to her than my third-grade mind would give her credit for, but she was still at serious risk. I couldn’t recall any of his victims who were described as combative or tough, but I had a feeling that that wasn’t a case of selection on his part; I suspected that it was just random and that if Damon ever came across a woman who got in his face, he wouldn’t see it as a problem. He’d see it as some sick opportunity.
What a sick fuck. I couldn’t wait to shoot his fucking brains out. I couldn’t wait to get revenge on the bastard.
When midnight rolled around, Biggie told me we needed to head back to the shop. I didn’t have a ton of interest in that; somewhere, the Bloodhounds were riding around, causing trouble. Even if they were laying low-key for the night, they were laying somewhere. They were in a position in which we could annihilate them all and ruin them.
“Niner,” Biggie repeated. “Prospects will be coming to take over. It’s OK. We can let it be for now and come back to it later. I promise.”
“No,” I shot back. “I won’t. I can’t. For the sake of—”
“Carrie?”
I wanted to punch Biggie, even though—or perhaps especially because—he knew me better than anyone in the club. He knew that when I got angry, I didn’t want anything getting in the way of me and the mission.
“Don’t you dare fucking mention her name,” I snapped. “Do that shit again, and I’ll show you what I’ll do to Damon.”
“Niner,” Biggie said. “I get it. But you’re starting to fall apart. You’ve been going on full alert now for hours. Maybe you need a rest.”
That’s what I did on the force. This is nothing new to me. In fact, it’s pretty much practice.
But Biggie was perhaps the only person, despite his jovial and jocular nature, who wasn’t afraid to get in my face and tell me to back down. Marcel feared me; Uncle didn’t know me; Fitz admired me. But Biggie, the good friend that he was, would not back down when he believed something.
“Niner,” he said again. “You’re not going to do any good when you’re trying to hunt down Damon like this. You become a mess of a man. OK?”
I nodded, though I wasn’t particularly happy about it.
“We’ll take it from here,” he said. “We’ll get someone else to patrol tonight. You should take off tomorrow.”
“No.”
“I’m serious, Niner,” Biggie said. “You’re having your mind fucked because of this guy. You need to be able to detach. Otherwise, he’s going to wear you down without ever saying hello. Maybe get out of the city. Maybe take…her somewhere. I don’t know. Just don’t stay here and obsess over him. Take a day off, and you’ll be more charged and more energized. OK?”
I really hated this thought of leaving the hunt behind. But I guess that made me sound a little like Damon, didn’t it?
At least my hunt was to better society and not to prey on innocent women.
“OK,” I finally said. “Let’s head back to the shop.”
“Good man.”
I made sure that we had two prospects out in the area before we had so much as started our engines back from the direction we had come from. It disappointed me to know we had failed to find the asshole tonight. It disappointed me more to know that I would take tomorrow off.
But Biggie had been right about one thing, albeit not in the way that he had probably expected. If I was going to take tomorrow off, there was only one thing I could do that made sense.
I would have to move up my date with Carrie a couple days.
And more than that, I’d have to show her a world that was not the one we lived in, but one very reminiscent of the one that we had come from.
Chapter 8: Carrie
When I woke up on Sunday, I didn’t have any reason to think it would be an unusual day.
Caroline and I usually alternated our Sundays, and today, she was in charge of working at the store. The hours were limited, only about noon to five, but being able to sleep in was a hell of a lot nicer knowing you had nothing else to do. I sat in my apartment, turned on football, and let the TV do the thinking and analysis for me.
And then, just after two in the afternoon, I got an unexpected text—from Lane.
“How would you feel about moving our date up to today?” he wrote. “Let’s just go out. I’ll take you on my motorcycle.”
Motorcycle, eh? Even though Lane had told me that he was part of a motorcycle club now, I had never put it together that he would take me on his bike. I had always just assumed that that was an honor reserved for himself or for emergency situations, not for dates.
But now, considering that I could ride the bike? Considering that I’d get the chance to do something I had never done in my life before?
Consider me sold.
I texted back immediately and told Lane that I would be happy to, I just needed about thirty minutes. I texted him my address and hurried to get ready, doing everything I could to look nice but not so nice as to have the bike ruin me.
I threw on jeans and a red top. I pulled my hair back in a ponytail. I looked at myself in the mirror and decided that a black top was better given my complexion. I brushed my teeth twice, flossed, and cleaned myself up in every other conceivable manner.
Finally, half an hour after two, feeling good, I stepped outside my apartment, waiting for Lane to show up.
I didn’t need to wait long. He pulled up, wearing a black helmet with a black visor and the same jacket the rest of the club had worn when they had first come to my store. He lifted the visor and smiled at me.
“How would you feel about going out of town
a bit?” he said. “Say…to a place that might remind you of home?”
“Oh?”
“It won’t be perfect. Nothing can replicate Georgia. But I figure that we can do something a little more filled with nature and trees than here.”
It was a no brainer.
“Sure!” I said. “Should I get on behind you or in front?”
“Behind,” he said, looking slightly bemused by the question.
As I hopped on, though, across the street, I saw Damon, the creepy man from the day before, standing against a light pole, smoking a cigarette and wearing sunglasses. He saw me looking at him and waved. I shuddered as I got against Lane, who seemed oblivious to the creepy man’s presence.
“Now, it’s going to vibrate quite a bit,” Lane explained. “But just hold on tight to me, and when I lean a certain direction, gradually go with it. Oh, and—”
He had me sit up for just a second. He opened the seat, pulled out a helmet, and handed it to me.
“Wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”
I laughed nervously. I turned around, but Damon had disappeared from view. Had I imagined him being there? Or had he been there and had just vanished, preying on my fear? Now there’s someone that will have a short leash at Southern Comfort.
I made a note to myself to tell Caroline that we needed to consider banning him from the restaurant if he continued to act that way, but for now, I was content to let my head rest on Lane’s back as he revved the engine. As far as I was concerned, no man could possibly disappear that quickly. He hadn’t really been there.
Right?
“Here we go!”
I clenched my thighs tight against the seat. My arms squeezed around Lane’s body—there wasn’t an ounce of fat left on him. My head pressed hard into his body.
And we were off!
At first, I had a delirious mixture of screaming and laughing. I laughed mostly to avoid screaming, not necessarily because I was in some sort of a thrill-induced state. But the more time that went by, the more I was able to relax.
Well, that, and I didn’t have the capacity to scream for the entire time of the bike ride, which took us all the way to New Jersey. There was a small part of me that wondered if, on the heels of Damon, Lane was taking me somewhere remote to do some horrible things to me, but that was merely a voice I needed to tell to shut the hell up. If I couldn’t trust Lane, I couldn’t trust anybody.
We headed into Newark before heading south a bit. We stayed close to the ocean, but when I thought we were going to head straight toward Trenton, he instead veered left.
“Where?”
“Just trust me,” he said. “I think you’d want something a little quieter than the city. It’s not Georgia, but it’s close enough!”
Just being with you reminds me of Georgia enough, Lane.
The ride took far longer than I had anticipated, so much so that by the end, I was pretty thirsty and hungry, but I immediately fell in love with the scenery and the signs that I saw for Holmdel Park in New Jersey. Lane was somewhat right; it wasn’t like Georgia; it was better, and it was all because of the company that I had.
“I figured this was a slightly better alternative than driving all the way down to Georgia,” he joked.
“I mean, I’d do it with you,” I said. “I would just need a little more than a couple hours’ notice.”
“Damn,” he playfully said.
I liked this side of Lane. I suspected most people didn’t get to see it all that much.
“You wanted a chance to get out of the city, right?” he said.
I wouldn’t necessarily say I wanted a chance to get out of New York, but I certainly needed an escape from the lifestyle that I was leading right now. The restaurant world had its ups, but when it was down, it was the kind of thing that could ruin you.
“I’d say I wanted a chance to get back home,” I said. “And this does it pretty good.”
“Well, let’s go for a walk then,” he said. “We can pretend it’s the woods of Georgia all over again.”
And that’s exactly what we did. For the next couple of hours, we just went wherever the trail took us. We saw a couple of signs that told us the whole park was about four miles total, but several times, we stopped just to chat. There wasn’t anything of particular drama that we spoke about; we talked about everything from the Atlanta Falcons to our favorite spots within driving distance. I chose Savannah, but Lane surprised by suggesting Charleston, South Carolina.
“So you’re going out of state?” I said in mock surprise. “You traitor!”
“Woah now,” he said with a laugh. “I’m not a traitor to the South. And that’s what Georgia really is, right? Just a big part of the South. Don’t tell me you’re going to hold me to it for that.”
“I can, and I am,” I teased back.
We laughed easily, just as we did on many other subjects.
Several times, I felt myself getting so close to him that I thought I might hold his hand. I certainly wasn’t afraid to make contact with him, the kind that produced fuzzy warm feelings of excitement. He looked like he was trying to decide if this was the right time.
Part of me wanted just to tell him to stop being afraid and take me. I wanted him to understand that I wanted to be desired and touched, not just put on a pedestal. But in perhaps a vain way—I preferred to think of it as a sweet way—I kind of liked Lane’s approach to me. It felt very gentlemanly and Southern to me, not crass and abrupt like most Yankees.
However it went, though, I was sure it would unfold at the proper pace. Lane was not someone to rush the process, and I wasn’t someone who wanted to force Lane to do anything he didn’t want to do.
Not after what he and I had been through, anyway.
During the walk, we grabbed dinner at a nearby food truck, people watched, and held hands. It felt like we were getting closer and closer by the second.
But it also felt like there were some topics that were deliberately not being broached. Things were getting magical, but the magic could only last so long. At some point, true appreciation for each other had to come into play. And that was only going to come in one way.
“Hey, can I ask you a serious question real quick?” I said.
There was no way it was going to be “real quick.” But I had to soften what was to come somehow.
“Of course,” he said. “What’s up?”
I took a deep breath, knowing Lane probably wasn’t going to like what I was about to say.
“Can you tell me what happened with the NYPD?”
Chapter 9: Niner
This was the conversation I’d dreaded all this time.
“OK,” I said. “OK.”
I took a couple of deep breaths. I hadn’t told this story in quite some time, and it wasn’t surprising that I wasn’t very eager to.
“When I was in the NYPD, I wasn’t very much into the politics and games. Our chief, for example, was a bit of a hot-tempered man. My colleagues were a little bit pompous and liked to brag about how they were in the NYPD to get girls. Everyone connected with everyone, but that wasn’t my cup of tea. I just preferred to do my job. But I also wasn’t afraid to do whatever it took to get the job done. I was warned multiple times that I could be a case study in police brutality if I weren’t careful.”
I paused for a second to consider something I hadn’t really pondered before. Maybe every time I arrested someone, I saw it as a chance to get revenge on the bullies who had harmed me as a child. Carrie helped save me from future bullying, but she couldn’t have saved me from my worst side, and maybe that was why I struggled with keeping my emotions in check in the heat of a battle or an arrest.
“This combination always made my job a little tenuous. It wasn’t like I was constantly getting warned about getting fired, but it did mean that other people got promotions or got recognized for their work more than I did. It also meant that I became even more hardened in my ways. If the other cops were going to get rewarded for what I saw as
being more focused on rising the ranks than doing their jobs, then I was more determined to be a cop and nothing but a cop. So the cycle spun out of control.
“It all came to a head a few years ago. There was a criminal in the area, a true sociopath and monster, known for raping and killing women. A modern-day Ted Bundy, if you will, except Ted Bundy at least looked like a half-normal man. This man not only was evil, but he also relished looking the part. We tried like hell to capture him, but he was tricky as hell. Well, one night, I finally got to him.”
I paused to let the memory pass through my mind in full before I described it.
“He was on the run. I caught up to him. Had I just arrested him right then and there, that would have been the end of it. Instead, I let my anger and my rage get a hold. I beat the ever-living shit out of him. And to some extent, I could have gotten away with it. Rapists don’t really have a strong support system in the public sphere, and for damn good reason. But the tape spread. Even though I was in the right, the NYPD got lambasted as being unable to control one of their own.”
“And so that was the end of the line for you, even though you did your job.”
“A hundred percent,” I said. “And, of course, I didn’t apologize for it during hearings. A few of my colleagues begged me to play the game, to say I was sorry and let myself get carried away, but I fought for justice. Justice was served for a time to that man. And then…I was let go.”
I shrugged.
“If they want to play games with me, then so be it. I’m a cop, not a puppet. I understand that they had to defend their public image, but the man raped and killed multiple women, Carrie. I can’t just…I don’t regret it still.”
“So you joined the Savage Saints to get that feeling back?”
“It’s better this way,” I said. “The Saints don’t have to be held to the letter of the law or a public image. If anything, the image being shit in the media gives us more freedom than if we had to act like angels.”
