by Eve R. Hart
“Lulee!” he yelled out with almost a piercing shriek. I had no idea where he’d gotten that nickname for me. He seemed to love it, so I just rolled with it.
Tristan was the head secretary for one of the Ashburn Security groups’ locations. The only one I really dealt with. No real reason behind that other than they had been the first group that I’d set up a connection with. I often contacted them when I had something I needed help with. Or when it was something I knew they’d want to handle themselves. They were first a foremost a security and recovery group. They got paid top dollar for what they did. And because they were good—the best, really, it didn’t come as a surprise that they pulled in the big bucks. Sometimes they took side cases and those were usually ones that I sent their way. On rare occasions, they worked with a few government agencies. They sometimes didn’t handle things one hundred percent legally, but usually only when it was called for.
“How are things?” I asked trying to keep the shakiness and urgency out of my tone.
Yeah, so Tristan was one person I could talk to. Maybe I should add him to my list of three and change it to four. But then again we weren’t on any kind of real friend level though. We didn’t talk when I wasn’t calling with something so-called work-related. But when I did call, we could chat as if we were best friends. I think that was mostly how Tristan was. Everyone was a BFF to him. He had no personal boundaries either. Nothing was off the table when it came to conversations and sharing.
“Single again. Surprise, surprise, right?” he answered, his tone like whatever. “Apparently I work too much and the fact that I get called in at hours—and I quote— ‘when not even prostitutes are out working’ is just unacceptable. And all of that is just too much for some people to handle.”
“I’m sorry,” I said trying to hold back my chuckle.
“Who cares,” he said flippantly. “I’ll get my hands on another one soon enough. You know I don’t stay single for long.”
And it was true.
“Who’s around?” I asked knowing that there was a handful of operatives that worked there and usually at least half of them were out on a long job at any given time.
“Burke. Everyone else is out. We got a little slammed with cases. This another kidnapping?”
“No…” I said with a sigh. “This is personal.”
While it did have to do with a kidnapping this was something I needed to see through myself. This was very personal and I wasn’t beyond making sure that they knew that. I needed the best and that was why I’d called them.
“Okay,” Tristan said sounding more professional and serious. “I’ll track him down for you. Hold on, Lulee.”
“Thanks,” I managed to say before he clicked me over to the hold music.
“Lucy,” Burke said in a way of a greeting as he picked up the phone like five minutes later. “What have you got this time?”
“I need to hire you. I don’t know how long it will take and there might be more to it than what I need.”
Yeah, that was pretty cryptic. I was tripping all over myself. I hated talking on the phone and to be honest, Jason Burke scared the shit out of me. It wasn’t anything that he’d done and though I’d never met the man in person, he came off as rather intimidating on the phone. I didn’t know how he was outside of the job—if there even was such a thing in his line of work—but he was very much get-down-to-business every time I’d talked to him. But then again, it was the only reason he’d be talking to me anyway.
“I’m going to need more than that, Lucy. Specifics. How long do you think? Is it a one man job? And most importantly, what is the job?” I could almost hear a sigh at the fact that he’d had to say all of that. Especially since we’d done this numerous times before.
Yeah, I knew better.
But I was still a little rattled.
“I need you to get close to the head of a motorcycle club. He has a connection to a missing girl.” Well, woman. She was older than I still pictured her in my mind, I knew that, but it still always came out that way. “Allison Whittemore.”
Even as I was talking I could hear him typing away, more than likely looking for anything on who Allison was.
“These reports say she ran away almost five years ago. How do you even know if she is still alive? And what does this have to do with going undercover in a motorcycle club?” I wouldn’t have said he sounded irritated, but there was definitely something around the edge of his tone.
“She didn’t run away,” I snapped. It had been years but the fact that nothing was done when she’d been taken still pissed me right the fuck off. There was so much cover-up of the whole thing that always made me question just how much pull Mr. Whittemore had.
Her mother though, she never gave up the fight. Never believed that Allison would just run away. She knew but she was powerless to do anything. No matter how hard she tried, she just kept getting turned away. Eventually, people started to see her as going crazy. Which, in a way she was. Maybe, so was I. We just went in different directions with the whole trying to find Allison thing. I went dark, closed myself off, made a silent vow that I would figure out a way, and then began to find ways around everything.
“She was—is my best friend. We grew up together. She was taken. Or rather, her father gave her to a man named James Craig in order to pay off a debt. I’m pretty sure about that. All I know is that I was there, I saw her father stand to the side while James Craig dragged her away, tossed her in a blacked-out SUV, and drove away. I never saw her again.”
The tears were there, stinging my eyes and making me feel like I was about to sneeze. I held them back. Not because I didn’t like to cry, but because I promised I wouldn’t anymore. I wouldn’t shed any tears over this until they were happy ones. Happy because I’d found her, I’d gotten her back.
“Ah, I see,” he said in a tone that suggested he’d figured out the meaning of life. “This is where it all started. This is why…”
“Yeah,” I said, my brows pinched together in frustration. “Now you get me. Good for you, dude. Now, will you help me?” It may have come out a little more snarky than I meant for it to.
There was a pause, the still air almost ringing in my ears. Then a long, drawn-out sigh.
“Yeah, Lucy,” he said like he’d resigned himself to his fate. “You know I will. Now, I need names. Everything you have on this guy.”
As we talked and I filled him in with more detail, I was sending him everything that I had on the whole situation. Which wasn’t as much as I wished I had. That was why I’d taken so long to even get this far. I had luck to thank that he’d walked into the Dogs of Wrath compound, but then again, most of them were dead, so it wasn’t all that great.
I even had FBI files from a long, ongoing investigation. Burke knew better than to ask how I’d gotten my hands on them. I had to know everything and if they had even a whiff of where he might be, then I wanted that information. But sadly, they had about as much as I did.
I explained that James Craig went by the road name Savage and had at one point been the President of a club named The Devil’s Kings. I was pretty sure he still held that position but I couldn’t have been sure. He got that position by ending the life of the former President and promising great things to the rest of the club. A club that was already filled with disgustingly evil men. It hadn’t taken them long to bow down to their new leader. Especially after he jumped right in and fulfilled those promises. Back when he’d taken Allison, he’d had many things under his belt. Drugs. Guns. Prostitution. And even trafficking. He somehow managed to fly under the FBI’s radar because he kept his ring small and didn’t expand too greatly. But then, like most people, he got greedy. He messed with the wrong person and began to catch the eye of the wrong people. Well, wrong for him.
When the heat got too hot and too close, he disappeared. Gone. Like dust in the wind. Killing half the men in his club before he took off. I couldn’t tell you why, but if I had to speculate, I bet he thought he had a mole
in his group. Maybe he did, but I couldn’t find anything out about one in the FBI reports. But it did show me that he was beyond crazy paranoid. Which was why this was going to be not only hard for Burke, but super dangerous. To get close to Savage…well, it would most likely require some things that he wouldn’t exactly be willing to do.
I was asking a lot of him.
But I couldn’t feel bad about it because Allison was still out there, and that meant that I wouldn’t hesitate to do anything to save her.
I told Burke that I wasn’t sure, but I had a pretty good feeling that he was going to try and set up there in Wilmington, NC. He and I both seemed to agree that Savage wouldn’t have taken out the motorcycle club if he hadn’t had some sort of plan to take over.
“I’ve got to run this by the boss,” he said as I wrapped up everything. “I’m honestly not so sure he’ll be on board for it.”
“Yeah, I know it’s asking a lot.”
But really, was it?
I was going to pay like any normal person. And I knew about some of their operations. Some of the things they’d done, all in the name of bringing the bad guy down at the end of the day, though. Sure, it was red-level danger but I had one hundred percent faith that Burke could handle it. No problem. Like a pro. And all that shit.
“It is,” he said and I imagined him sitting at his desk nodding his head absentmindedly as he thought over how he was going to present it. “I’ll take care of it. Can I reach you at this number?” he asked because he knew I changed numbers so often.
Actually, I never called them from my main phone. Instead, choosing to work my finger magic and make it seem like I was calling from a location miles, and states, away from where I really was. Ha! Like I was really using the phone at Pete’s Diner in the middle of nowhere fucking Texas. And when it was needed, using burner phones for short periods of time before I destroyed them, but even then, I would lock that shit down so they wouldn’t be able to locate me.
“No,” I said trying to hide my chuckle. I was pretty sure he was aware of what I did but neither of us would say it out loud. “I’ll call you back.”
I had a few spare burner phones that I used when I really needed to. I’d done that with them before, when there were cases that I sent them and was still gathering information on. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t think of that before I’d called. But then again, I was still in shock from the whole thing.
We ended the call, him hanging up before me.
Then I got to work. Combing over street cameras, looking for anything that would show me where he went and what happened. Then I went over the feed from the Dogs’ compound over and over again, trying to keep my stomach from kicking up my breakfast as I looked for the smallest clues. By the end of the day, I had a headache and nothing else. Nothing telling me where Savage and his men had gone.
Weeks went by. I had somewhat neglected everything else. I hadn’t so much as helped Clean out at all. And I hadn’t even stopped long enough to wonder if he might have noticed.
This wasn’t like me. I was always a step ahead as much as I could be. Not just for the Clean situation, but for other things as well. But with Savage, I was in a tango and didn’t even know the steps.
Burke took the case. He was on my side. But this meant that he’d have to go in, become one of them, and do his best to prove his worth as quickly as possible. It also meant that once he found Savage and The Devil’s Kings, he’d be going dark. I’d have little to no contact with him. Which only made me more jittery and anxious. He was where I couldn’t be. He was down on the coast, searching and listening. I had complete faith that he’d find Savage in due time.
I took a break, standing to stretch my sore back. It was then that I realized my eyes were tired and dry. I couldn’t remember the last time I really slept versus falling asleep with my head on my desk. I was afraid I’d miss something, but the only thing all this watching and searching was doing was wearing me down. I couldn’t afford to get sloppy. Especially not now.
I woke to the sound of my phone ringing.
Nadya, I said in my head as I wiped my eyes and sat up. I honestly didn’t remember making it to my bed, but somehow I had.
“Hey,” I said trying to sound awake, alert, and cheerful.
“You’ve been distant,” she said but her tone was flat as usual. She wasn’t hurt by it. She wasn’t trying to make me feel bad. She wasn’t even trying to say that she was worried about me. “I can’t stand this not having a job thing.”
“Well,” I said completely ignoring her first statement. She wasn’t asking for details and I wasn’t even sure I wanted to give them if she had been. “It’s going to take a while to get back to the top. Or, you know, even a call or something.”
We didn’t talk about the job that had gone wrong. Though, I would say wrong wasn’t the right word to use. She didn’t pull the trigger. Somehow she had a heart in that stone exterior. Which honestly did surprise me just a little. She had the shot and she had been ready to take it. I’d known all this though we hadn’t talked about it.
See that job was a big one. Not just for her, either. The FBI also happened to be working it too and they had brought in one of the Ashburn groups in. I knew a bit about it. Big, huge, gigantic case that ended with Nadya not taking the shot and the FBI taking him down instead.
From what I’d read in the reports there was a kid involved. I sort of put two-and-two together and figured that was the reason she didn’t take the shot. Nadya wanted to save the kid from having to see that. All things that I really shouldn’t have known. Things I didn’t want her to know that I knew. As far as she was concerned, she had a job that went south and she had no control over it. And now her name was on the shit list. It was hard for her, especially since she used to be number one. But what could you do?
I rubbed my eyes and made my way over to my chair, pulling one leg up and resting my chin on my knee.
“I keep moving, but it feels like I’m going nowhere. Which, shouldn’t be a big deal,” she said and I could almost hear a slight tone of aggravation there. “But when I know I’m not going to have anything to do for a while until all this shit blows over and someone else fucks up worse than I did, it fucking feels more like I’m just being stagnant.”
“I know. Cheer up. I’m sure they will be begging for you to take their jobs soon enough.” That was as much of a pep talk as I could muster at the moment.
Something caught my attention on the left screen. I made the feed bigger and instantly knew what I needed to do.
“Gotta go,” I said, hating that I was rushing her off the phone so quickly. “I promise I will call you very soon.”
“Yeah, I get it.”
Then she was gone. She wasn’t mad, I knew that. She knew when I said I gotta go then I wasn’t messing around. Which was good because I didn’t have time to spare in those moments.
Like right now. It was time to make that call. The one that I usually got excited over. To the very person that I couldn’t even really talk to.
After I ended the call, I sat there in slight shock. I’d said too much. I hadn’t even realized that witnessing and knowing that the Dogs of Wrath were mostly dead had gotten to me. But it had. I couldn’t explain it because it wasn’t like I really knew these people. I’d never once stood in front of them or carried on a conversation with them. But somehow, I knew them. And they were just…gone. I sat there. I watched it. And yet there wasn’t a damn thing I could do. These people that had been a thread unknowingly woven into my world had just been cut. Stranger still, it was also tangled up in Clean as well. I had no idea if he knew or not. He didn’t seem like the kind of person that kept in touch between jobs. But it didn’t mean that it wouldn’t affect him in some way, too. I really had no idea why it hit me so hard while I was on the phone with him. And when his calm voice sounded almost worried as he asked me if I was alright, I broke.
Which was not good.
I couldn’t afford to break.
Especially not with him.
I couldn’t allow anyone to be that one person. That one thing that cracked me and then wiggled its way into that crack as well. I’d only break and crack further, until I was nothing but a pile of broken pieces scattered on the floor…with no one to help me put myself back together.
-6-
What Now?
Lucy
A week went by. Then another. Then a month. Then another. I talked to Clean off and on. Well, not really talked. Just called him with locations and hung up as quickly as possible. I didn’t let him linger though I got the feeling like he wanted to. I had turned into a huge stressed-out mess, even more so than normal. I had been close again and like water through my fingers, Savage had managed to slip from my grasp.
I hadn’t had much contact with Burke. Like none, really. I’d even called and bugged Tristan more times that I really should admit to. I begged and pleaded but he gave me nothing.
Then finally, one day, I got the call.
Burke was in. Well, not like in, in. But he had somehow turned heads enough to get a trial period or whatever. So he was somewhere between being an outsider and being a full-on member. I took it as a win. He’d somehow proven his worth enough for Savage to want to see more. He didn’t say how and I didn’t dare ask. But he did it and I was one step closer to finding Allison. It had been months since I’d heard from him. I was starting to go crazy from wondering what the hell was going on.
I hadn’t been able to find much on my own. Savage may have been in a new town, setting up a new compound or whatever, but he was still evasive as hell. I couldn’t find shit and I hated it.
But Burke was in so that was something. That was about as much as I knew and I had a feeling all I was going to know for a while. I understood that they had to go dark for safety reasons. I wasn’t an idiot. And there was no way that I’d try and force myself around that. It still didn’t help to calm the anxiety that I had, you know, being so close but not really getting anywhere. It was so frustrating. I also had trouble giving up control. Knowing that I was right there yet not really, was tiresome and extremely hard for me. It was seriously wearing me down. And on top of that, having to let go while someone else handled it. No. I wasn’t good with that. But it wasn’t like I had a choice in the matter. And just like Burke had reminded me several times, I was the one that had called him in to handle it.
