by Callie Hart
It’s a smartphone, not the kind of phone you can remove the back from. How Charlie would have gotten a bug inside, I don’t know, but if anyone was going to do it then it’s definitely him. I open the security lock and then have the forethought to hit the contacts button to retrieve the one single, important number that I haven’t memorized just yet: Sloane’s. I scrawl the digits onto the back of my hand and then I take the thing and I smash it against the dashboard. Small shards of glass shatter everywhere, into the footwell and all over the leather bench seat. I pry apart the metal casing and catch my breath. There it is—a small, square chip, soldered into place on the main processor. It obviously doesn’t belong. The other circuitry is a work of art, neat and meticulously created. This alien chip, this listening device, this act of betrayal, was probably put in place by a very talented hacker indeed. They couldn’t replicate the precision of something machine made, though. I open the window on the driver’s side of the car and I hurl the phone out of it, roaring with anger.
I can’t believe he’s done this.
Actually, I can totally believe he’s fucking done this. I just can’t believe I was stupid enough not to expect it from him. Who’s the fool here, me or him?
God knows what the old man has heard me talking about on that cell. It doesn’t even bear thinking about right now. The car engine screams as I gun it, charging in the direction of home.
I’ll do this one last thing for Charlie, but not to help him. I’ll do it to find out what’s going on with Rick. I’ll do it to find out what the hell is going on around here, and then I’m gonna start making some arrangements.
The deal goes down just as Charlie said it would: on the wharf, Rick—built like a tank, every square inch of skin below the neck tattooed and tagged—meeting with three bikers from a crew I don’t recognize. Their top rockers read Wreckers. I arrived early and set myself up on the second floor of the burned-out warehouse Charlie sometimes uses for meets like this, not really believing Rick would be dumb enough to use this place, but the guy shows up like clockwork. The bikers roar up ten minutes late, cursing and swearing about a police tail they had to shake. These Wreckers must be high-end fuckers to warrant that kind of heat. Rick hugs the first guy, a huge piece of work that would tower over me even, and bumps fists with the other two guys.
“What you sayin’, Caleb? How much longer?” Rick says, addressing the guy he hugged.
The massive guy leans back against his bike, hooking his thumbs into the pockets of his washed-out Wranglers. “Three, four days max. Our guy’s ready to move.”
“And you’ve got what we talked about?”
“Yeah, four. Although you could get six on the container. Don’t know why you wouldn’t wanna maximize your profit.”
Rick shakes his head. “You get greedy, you get caught. Four’s perfect. And they’re all virgins?”
Caleb nods his head. “So our doc says. “
“Good.”
“More than good, brother. You’re gonna wanna fuck this pussy yourself, believe me. They are some fine, grade-A ass.”
Rick grins, scratching at his jaw. “Yeah, well if I stick it to ’em then I get the feeling they won’t be worth quite as much after. And I get pussy just fine, anyway. Better to save these whores for Rebel. Guy has more money than fucking sense.”
Rebel.
I’m not even all that surprised. I haven’t heard the man’s name in a while, maybe not since that bent P.I. nearly sold Sloane to him two years ago. Seems around about time the fucker reared his ugly head. Rick’s right—he does have more money than sense…and a very nasty habit of buying pretty girls and using them up until there’s nothing really left.
“Okay, time to pay up, Holmes,” Caleb advises Rick. “And this time we need more than dates and times. We need something solid. Something that’ll make the old man happy.”
I make a mental note to find out who this old man is, presumably the MC’s president. I know every bike club there is to know in Seattle—they don’t like it, but they all pay homage to Charlie, be that in cold, hard cash or in muscle. The Wreckers are definitely trouble from out of town.
“One Twenty One South Street,” Rick tells him. “Cutting shop. Just getting started. ’Bout half a million bucks worth of coke gonna go through that place in the next month. Gonna get turned into two mil by the time they’ve bulked it up with talcum powder.”
“How many people working the joint?” one of Caleb’s associates asks. Caleb casts him a stern look over his shoulder; it’s clear the guys are there for backup and not much else. Certainly not allowed to speak. The guy clenches down on his jaw, exhaling sharply.
Rick responds anyway, choosing to ignore the silent chastisement taking place within the men’s group. “Four guys. Armed but pretty entry-level. Kids from the local gangs, mostly. Subcontractors. Charlie don’t want his regular guys anywhere near the stuff.”
I haven’t heard of this cutting shop. Charlie’s a dirty crook, sure, but he always proclaims to sell a pure product, guns that work, drugs that don’t fry a person’s insides. What fucking use is a dead customer to me? he always says. If I fucking kill ’em, then they ain’t gonna be around to give me more of their cash, are they, Zeth, my boy? Apparently his motto’s changed, though. To be quadrupling the weight of the product, some nasty shit must be getting thrown into the mix. With each and every new piece of information I learn about Charlie, the girls, the cell phone tap, now this, I become more and more unnerved. I wasn’t under the illusion that he told me everything, that’s for sure, but I thought I at least knew the lay of the land with him. And now it seems as though I didn’t know the lay of the land at all. I didn’t even know what fucking country we were in.
“So the fifteenth’s all set?” Caleb asks.
“Sure is,” Rick replies.
“Sweet. We’ll see you at the Coal House. Tell your old man Petey says hello, you hear?” Caleb draws Rick into a loose hug, slapping his back before swinging his leg over his bike and grabbing hold of his ape hangers. The snarl of bike engine fills the warehouse. With a deafening rumble the three men lap around Rick and then burn out of the building, leaving the lone man standing below.
This is where I’m supposed to make my presence known. This is where I’m supposed to make Rick hurt, and then kill the man. I don’t do that, though. I attempt to gather my thoughts as I watch him collect his leather jacket from where he’d slung it over a rusting handrail and put it on. Why the fuck do those guys want to know about Charlie’s business operations? Especially if they haven’t actually hit any of the places yet? It makes no sense, although they’re obviously planning on hitting this cutting shop at some point. They wouldn’t want to know how many men are patrolling the place otherwise. And why the fuck is Charlie hiring gangbangers?
There are a million questions swirling around my head as I let Rick walk outside. By the time I’ve decided I want to question the fucker he’s already reached his car, a flashy Mitsubishi Evo with blacked-out windows. His body is bent, half in, half out of the machine.
“What’s up, Rick?”
The guy shits his pants. His body jolts, his hand automatically reaching around his back: gun. He sees the Desert Eagle in my hand before he manages to clasp hold of his own weapon, though. I’m not pointing it at him, just holding it by my side, but he knows me. Knows I don’t play with my dick unless I intend to fuck with it. Our eyes lock. “Zeth, man! What you doing out here?” The question he’s posing is really a different one, though. How much did you see? How much did you hear?
“Oh, you know. Same as you, I guess. Just getting a breath of fresh air.” I heard enough, motherfucker.
Rick exhales, sitting down on the edge of the driver’s seat. He knows he’s fucked. “Charlie sent you along with a message, right?” he says, though by the tone of his voice he knows his fate from here on out. Charlie’s not a man to mess around—he likes to make an example, and he likes people to know about it. Rick’s heard about the other guys
who were stupid enough to go behind Charlie’s back; he knows what comes next.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “I got a message. But I’m interested in what you gotta say before I deliver.”
Rick looks up at me, a glimmer of hope sparking in eyes that held only resignation a second ago. “What, you wanna know why you’re being exed out, right?”
What? I scrutinize the eager look on his face. He’s not just saying random shit. He’s speaking the truth. “I’m being exed out?” This hadn’t even occurred to me, but it makes a lot of sense now that he’s said it. When Charlie doesn’t trust a man, when he’s getting ready to kill him, he’ll ex him out. Exclude him from all his dealings, keep him at a distance, and watch him like a hawk. It all fits into place.
“Charlie found out something about you, man,” Rick says. “Something he didn’t like. Not one bit. Said you were compromised now, no good to him. He wants you gone. Told the boys to get ready—that he was gonna need a new right hand. The old one was about to get cut off. That’s what I heard.”
Rick’s being so helpful right now, as most men who are about to die are, in the vain hope that his helpfulness buys him a little leverage. He doesn’t know that I actually don’t plan on killing him, though. I take full advantage of the situation.
“What has he suddenly found out about me?”
Rick shakes his head, shrugging. “Didn’t say. Something about your past, though.”
Well that’s hardly useful information. Everything up until this very moment where I’m talking with Rick, is technically my fucking past. Could be something from last week or ten years ago that’s turned Charlie’s eye against me, but whatever this thing is that’s soured his favoritism of me, I’m just finding it hard a little to believe. With Charlie’s amplified paranoia being what it is, the guy would have fucking killed me the moment he suspected me. He knows everything I know. All of the things he’s asked me to do. All of the dangerous things I could let slip should I feel the need.
“I did time in Chino for Charlie,” I point out. “He wouldn’t cut me off without some colossal fucking reason.” No one rides out time in Chino without it costing them greatly. To do it for someone else is more than a declaration of loyalty—it’s a sacrifice beyond any comprehension.
Rick gapes at me, mouth open at that. “Aw, Zee, man. You mean you don’t know? None of us knew for sure but we figured you’d found out…” He smiles cruelly. “We were all there. I watched Charlie slit Murphy’s throat just like everyone else, and yet you were the one who went down for it. You never wonder why?”
The memory of that night flashes through my mind in a series of still-frame images, blood splattered and blistered like old film. Murphy O’Shannessy on his knees, Charlie’s twisted mask of insanity as he dragged his straight razor across the other man’s throat. The whole thing had begun over nothing—Murphy making some sly remark about the length of Sophie’s dress. The comment had passed everyone by, eliciting nothing more than a slight narrowing of the eyes from our boss, but then hours later, when the old man had snorted a grand’s worth of blow, it was a different story. I don’t think about that night too much. Try not to. I’ve killed, yeah, but always quickly. Knife to the heart, lungs, whatever. Gunshot to the head. Charlie slit Murphy’s throat from ear to ear and watched, refusing to let anyone put the man out of his misery as he slowly bled to death.
“I know why,” I tell Rick. “Cops found the knife in my car. Blood on my shirt. One of my hairs on Murphy’s clothes.”
Rick nods through this impatiently, hurriedly, as though the information he wants to impart is gravely important. “Yeah, but how did they know to look for the knife in your car in the first place, Zee? How did they know to come knocking on your door?”
I’ve thought about this. Endlessly, in prison, where there’s little else to do but jerk off, exercise and stew over the past. “I picked Murphy up from his place before we went to the mansion. His father saw us together. Last time Murphy was seen alive by anyone.”
“Bullshit.” He leans forward, face emerging from the shadows. The expression he wears is one of disgust. “Charlie fucking threw you under the bus, man. How the hell have you not worked that out by now?”
A spiteful and sharp burst of laughter erupts inside my head. Of course, the voice says. Father O’Shannessy wouldn’t finger you for killing his son. Never. You were best friends for years.
And then another voice.
‘Get rid of that fucking mess, Zeth. I’m sick of looking at it.’ A fractured image blazes through me—Charlie’s savage, wild face, smiling dazedly, unfazed by the fact that he had just brutally murdered a man I called brother right in front of me. Never once had he apologized for doing it, or for the resulting time I spent rotting in a cell for the ruthless crime he had committed.
“He wouldn’t.” I growl the words out, but even as I do I feel stupid. The dawning acceptance that Charlie may have pinned that shit on me makes me feel sick. I literally want to bend over and throw my guts up onto the concrete.
“He would. He did,” Rick insists. “We all know it. He barely fucking hid the fact. When you got released, he threatened to kill anyone caught breathing a single word about the whole thing. Him killing Murph. You going away. Him putting you away.”
Fucking hell. I can’t wrap my head around any of this. I keep my face blank—no sense in showing Rick he’s riled me. “Doesn’t explain why you’re selling intel to the bikers.”
“I’m as fucked as you are, man,” he says, spitting onto the ground. “Cops rolled up on me last month, found drugs I was running for Charlie. Said I could either help them put the old man away or I was gonna land myself inside for twenty. They told me to feed this stuff to the Wreckers.”
“And you agreed?” I may hate Charlie right now—it’s a living, cold thing inside me, a pit viper, coiled and tightening with each new piece of damning information, readying to explode in a lightning fork of vengeance—but I hate the cops even more. Call it conditioning from spending so much time with the fuckers after Murphy’s body turned up.
Unburied.
And after I had buried him in the one place only Charlie knew about.
Fuck!
“Would you do twenty for Charlie, knowing what you know now?” Rick asks the question like the answer is fucking obvious. And it is now. No fucking way. I crook an eyebrow at him in return—fair comment.
“You’re going to do something for me,” I tell him.
He rocks back in his seat, surprise flitting across his face. He really had resigned himself to the idea that I was going to kill him. That his revelations about Charlie were going to fall on deaf ears. And maybe they would have if we’d had this conversation six weeks ago. But not after the confirmation that Charlie probably had something to do with Sloane’s sister. Not after the cell phone tap. “What d’you need?” he asks, equally stunned, relieved and dubious.
“Get in your car. Close the door. Drive to Anaheim and wait there for me.”
His eyebrows bank together in a perplexed frown. “Anaheim? What the fuck you want me to go to L.A. for?”
“Because I said so. And give me the name of the officer you’re reporting to as well.” It’s safer to know the name of the bastard who’s going to be sticking their nose into Charlie’s, and therefore my business over the coming weeks after Rick disappears.
“Ain’t just no cop,” Rick warns. “Detective Lowell. Denise Lowell. DEA.”
That acronym is the worst possible fucking news ever. The DEA looking into Charlie’s shit? Might as well write my own personal dossier of crimes committed and hand it over personally if what Rick’s telling me is true. If the old man’s sold me out once to save his own hide, he’ll do it again. Especially with a department as ferociously determined as the drug enforcement agency. Power hungry sons of bitches, the lot of them. A big bust, the takedown of a crime lord the size of Charlie is a career maker. Promotion for sure. I need to know everything there is to know about this Denise Lowe
ll. And yesterday.
“Give me your cell phone,” I snarl. The man scowls, offering it out. I toss it on the floor and stomp down on it hard. Rick just nods, staring remorsefully at the shattered debris left behind on the blacktop. “When you arrive in Anaheim, Michael will come find you. Stay out of the way. Keep your fucking head down. Otherwise you’re gonna lose it for real.” I turn and walk away. Rick and I have never gotten on, never seen eye to eye, but he will obey me now. Even if he has no idea what I have in mind. The bared teeth, the wrestling over the Alpha position, the competition only he ever perceived between us—he never stood a chance—is over.
I held his life in my hands, and I let it go.
With Rick about to hit the freeway, it’s time for me to get out of town, too. Time for a lot of things. It’s beyond time to free Alexis Romera from the cartel; time for her to be reunited with Sloane and the rest of her family. And I may have somehow made Charlie Holsan’s shit list, but the old man’s made a big fucking mistake, too. I’m going to show him just how big a mistake he has made. He’s gonna wish that he’d left me to rot in the back room of my uncle’s shit-infested house all those years ago.
It’s been fifteen days. Fifteen days, and I haven’t heard a peep out of Zeth. I don’t know what I was expecting—him camped out on my lawn, stalking me from my place to the hospital and back every day—but it isn’t this: total radio silence. The worst part of it all is that I’m majorly on edge, constantly on the lookout for him. I’ve played the part of the unhappy victim in our strange relationship for a while now, but the reality of it is…I want to know where he is. What he’s doing. And why he hasn’t been to see me. I have officially lost my mind. I know why he’s disappeared off the face of the planet, and I’m aware that it’s my own stupid fault. The kiss. I realize now that there’s little more personal than kissing someone when they’re inside you. And as far as I can tell, personal is the very last thing Zeth wants this thing between us to be.
