by Mia Miles
“Hey, how do you feel about going in this afternoon? Or do you just want me to take you back to the house?” I asked, trying to distract her.
“Take me to the office. I need work to help me get my mind off all this,” she told me, wiping her eyes. If she’d been crying, she never would have admitted it. Missy just didn’t cry, according to her.
“Are you sure?” I asked her.
“Of course I’m sure. If I thought I needed to go home and eat ice cream in front of the TV, I’d tell you that’s what I need to do. No, I need to go to work. I need to be productive,” she snapped. Then, she took a breath. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to take it out on you. I’ll be fine at work. It’ll give me something else to focus on.”
“Great,” I said, and I took her to the office. I told her to call me if she needed anything, and I called Jay as I was leaving the yard to let him know she was there but that he needed to call me if she needed anything.
He agreed and told me he’d have her home after work. He already knew she was living with me again. He asked how things went with her folks, and I told him what I knew, that she’d told me she’d burned that particular bridge. Or maybe her father had, knowing him.
He expressed his sympathy for her and said he’d keep an eye on her at work for me. After we hung up, I drove over to the club. I needed to get my mind off of things, too. I couldn’t help but worry about Missy, but I needed to get my mind off of it. I needed to stop worrying about every little detail of her life. She could handle it. She had handled everything else pretty well so far.
I pulled up and parked around back. As I walked inside, I nodded at the unmarked cop car sitting across the street. They’d been watching me pretty steadily since they’d heard about those girls trying to run drugs and prostitution through the club. I had tried to tell them that I was cleaning up, but they didn’t seem to want to believe me.
I walked in to find Lex setting up behind the bar and a couple of girls dancing on the stage, practicing their routines. The music was down low. I tapped the bar as I walked by.
“Hey, Cutter,” Lex said as I passed by.
I walked into my office and checked to see if I had anything important coming up. I didn’t have any new messages, and there wasn’t anything on my desk for the day.
Then, I heard a bunch of shouting in the main room. The girls were shouting at a few male voices. I couldn’t clearly make out what was being said, but it wasn’t good. I grabbed the crowbar leaning against the wall next to my desk and headed out with it in my hand, ready to strike anyone with it. There was a machete behind the bar, and a gun tucked under my belt in case things really got real in there.
“Is there a problem, gentlemen?” I called as I walked out of the back room.
“Freeze!” a cop shouted. They were in what looked like riot gear, like a SWAT team. What the hell was a SWAT team doing in my fucking club?
I threw my hands up and dropped the crowbar onto the floor.
“Officers, what seems to be the problem?” I asked as one of them came behind me and pulled my hands down. He cuffed me while the rest of them led the girls outside.
“Walk,” he said, pushing me at my wrists.
“What for? What’s going on? Why am I being arrested?” I asked.
He didn’t say anything, but as I got outside, I saw that they were un-cuffing the girls and sending them on their way. They weren’t allowing them back into the club, but a few officers did walk in as the rest of us were kept on the sidewalk.
“Can’t anyone tell me what’s going on?” I shouted.
I was thrown in the back of a regular cop car, and the officer read me my rights from the door, informing me that I was being arrested. He slammed the door and tapped the roof of the car. The officer in the driver seat pulled off, leaving the rest of them swarming around my club while the girls were being forced to leave. I could see Lex protesting as we pulled off.
“Is there any reason why no one will tell me what the charges are?” I asked the driver.
“You’ll find out down at the station. They’ll tell your lawyer, and the two of you can discuss how you’re going to handle it. Other than that, I’ve got nothing for you,” the officer said.
“Of course not,” I said under my breath, watching my words closely, knowing that anything I said was going to end up being used against me in court. I shifted my weight so that the cuffs were a little less uncomfortable and waited to get to the station, where they were going to process me, let me make a phone call, and throw me in the slammer, all without telling me anything about why I was down there.
I knew the drill.
The police station looked a lot like the emergency room at the hospital downtown, just replacing the paramedics with cops. All the same characters came and went, most of whom all had the same stories. I walked in, and they had me ready to go. They knew me. It wasn’t my first rodeo, not my any means.
“Go ahead and let him use the phone,” a large black lady cop said when I walked in. I couldn’t remember her name. I always called her Officer Marge, or Large Marge because she was a big woman. We’d had a couple of run-ins over the years.
“Thanks, Officer Marge,” I called out to her as I was led away to the phone.
She shook her head and laughed. “We got you, Mr. Holmes,” she said.
Despite being on opposite sides of the law most of the time, I liked Large Marge. She didn’t take any shit. Seeing her made the pointless raid on my strip club a little less aggravating. It was more of an inconvenience now.
“You get one call,” the cop said as he sat me down and took off my cuffs.
“Thanks,” I said, spitting the word at him. I made a show of rubbing my wrists, even though the cuffs hadn’t really bothered me. He seemed like the kind of kid who let people in under his skin easily and I definitely wanted to play on that if I could.
I picked up the phone and dialed Jay’s cell phone.
“What the hell, Cutter?” he asked when we were connected.
“They raided the club. I don’t know if they found anything or what they were even looking for, but the place is clean. Listen, I’m going to be in here until someone can post bail for me. It might take a night or two. Make sure Missy is taken care of. Keep her at the clubhouse. I don’t want her at my house in case this is more than some overzealous cops, okay? I think someone’s behind it, so she definitely doesn’t need to be alone,” I told him.
“I’m on it. And I’ll go ahead and give Johnson a call for you, see if we can’t get him down there right away, money in hand,” he said. Craig Johnson was our attorney, the best in town, possibly the best in the state. He handled everything for us. Money wasn’t a thing. He was on our payroll, so he was always getting cash even when we weren’t in trouble. We took care of our own.
“Great. I’ll be here,” I told him, hanging up the phone and signaling to the officer to come get me.
They threw me in a holding cell for the night. I had my own, which was a little concerning. Usually, I just ended up in the cell with all the other punks and delinquents. I rarely got special treatment. It made me wonder what they thought they had on me. There was nothing in the club that could have landed me behind bars. If so, they would have found it any of the millions of other times they ransacked the place.
I was being set up, and I knew who was behind it. It was obvious. It had to have been Missy’s dad. But if he was that fast, it meant he really was as powerful as she said he was. And that meant the MC was about to have to go up against a very worthy foe. All he had was money, though. Someone like him couldn’t afford to meet us on the street and fight it out. He had to take us down like this, through law enforcement connections.
If he was connected enough to get me in jail that fast, though, I wondered if he was connected enough to keep my lawyer from showing up. I shook my head and laughed at the idea. We paid Johnson very well. There was no way his loyalty could have been shifted.
I yawned. I was in my home away
from home, and contrary to popular belief, the jail cells were usually really quiet. Occasionally, some punk ass kid would show up and start running his mouth. They were handled quickly by the other guys in the cells. We didn’t like all that racket.
I kicked back on the metal bench and put my arms under my head. I knew there was a good chance I was going to be in for a while, for at least a night, before they were ready to release me on bail.
I tried not to run over all the questions I had while I lay on the bench. I wondered why they let the girls go and only arrested me. I wondered what the charges were going to be. I wondered if Missy’s father was going to make an appearance before my lawyer had a chance to show up.
I yawned again, mostly to quiet the thoughts in my head, but they kept coming. I wondered if someone was going to drag me back to an interrogation room to tell me what the charges were and see if they could get any additional information out of me for Mr. Jones.
Missy didn’t know it, but I knew who her father was. Alec Jones was a prominent businessman. Every thug on the street knew his name. We couldn’t tell anyone how, but he wasn’t exactly a mystery. I was sure there was someone out there who had worked for him in the past, and that was probably how the rest of us had come to know who he was.
I sighed. It was obvious my mind wasn’t going to let me rest. It wasn’t going to give me a break. There was nothing else I could do other than rest, though, so I stayed on my back on the hard bench. I stared at the ceiling and waited – for sleep, for my lawyer or Mr. Jones to show up, for something.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Missy
I sat at the office and tried to distract myself with phone calls and conversation with the girls, but my mind just kept going back to my parents.
“Is everything alright?” Emily asked, noticing the tears welling up in my eyes.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I lied. I wiped my face. My stomach was starting to hurt, like, really hurt. I put an arm across it.
“No, you don’t seem like everything’s alright,” Candace said, getting up from her desk and walking over to me just in time to catch me as I doubled over, falling out of my chair.
“Oh my god,” Emily gasped.
“Call Jay,” Candace said, and I could hear it in her voice. She was experienced in dealing with emergencies through him. If anyone else in the office was connected to the MC, she was the most likely candidate.
I gripped her arm and gritted my teeth. My stomach was killing me. It felt like someone was stabbing me and twisting the knife. But the blade was hot.
“My baby,” I gasped.
“Did you call Jay?” Candace yelled at the other two girls.
I could hear one of them talking in a hurried, hushed voice. I assumed she was talking to Jay on the phone.
“Yeah, Amy called.”
“He’s on his way.”
“Hey, hang in there,” Candace said. “You’re just under a lot of stress, and that’s upsetting your baby.” She stroked my hair and rubbed my back.
I wanted Cutter, but I didn’t know if it was alright for me to call out his name in the office around the girls. I felt like they weren’t supposed to know about the MC, or that I was involved. Jay would know to call him, I told myself, if he didn’t call him on the way to get me.
The door to the office opened, and Jay’s voice asked in a concerned tone, “Where is she?” It wasn’t panic I heard. It was urgency.
A moment later I was in his arms. My body shook as he stepped down from the trailer and hurried me to his truck. Then, I felt the cushions of the seat around me.
“Hold it down. If anyone calls for me, tell them I’m on a job site and I’ll call them back,” I heard him tell the other girls.
The doors closed on the truck, and we were moving.
“Just breathe, honey,” he said. Just like his girls, I knew Jay was used to handling emergencies. There was no telling what all he’d seen over the years.
“It hurts,” I told him as the pain was starting to subside.
“Probably just stress. Cutter told me about going to talk to your parents today.”
I tried to sit up.
“No, stay down,” he told me. “If you sit up, it’ll probably get bad again. We’re almost there.”
A moment later, the truck was stopping, and Jay was carrying me into the ER. “She’s a few months pregnant and in pain,” he told the nurse behind the desk, and I was admitted immediately.
I lost track of time after that. I didn’t know if I blacked out from the pain or if they gave me something to sedate me, but the next thing I knew, I was waking up in a room. I was hooked up to several machines to monitor my body. I was sore, and I was cold. The room was freezing. They had several thin blankets on me, and I pulled them up as far as I could before getting them in the way of the wires and monitors.
I looked around the room. It was a private room with a large window looking out over the streets downtown. I had a beautiful view of the gray parking deck next to the building I was in. I watched the cars come and go.
“How do you feel?” Jay asked.
“Good, where’s Cutter?” I asked.
“He’s in jail, Missy,” Jay said with a hand on my ankle.
“No. What happened?” I asked. Something started beeping faster as I got upset, reminding me to calm down.
“The cops raided the club right after he got there after dropping you off at the office,” he said. “We don’t know anything yet. Apparently they let the girls go. I talked to Lex a little while ago. She called trying to figure out what happened. They won’t let anyone back in.”
“What the actual fuck?” I asked.
“We don’t know,” he said with a chuckle.
“Oh, we know,” I said. “We know exactly what happened. My father happened,” I told him, listening to the beeping increasing on the machines around me.
“Well, calm down. There’s nothing we can do until we can get his lawyer in there and get him out,” Jay told me.
I took a deep breath. “Okay, I’ll try. Have the doctors said anything?” I asked.
“Not to me. I think they’re waiting on you to wake up. If you’re okay, I’ll go get them and make a few phone calls. I should have heard back from Cutter or his lawyer by now. I need to see what’s going on.”
“Hurry back,” I told him as he walked out of the room. I knew why he hadn’t heard back from the lawyer. Their lawyer wasn’t going to be able to make it to see Cutter. My father had already gotten to him, I was sure. He’d already convinced him not to go see Cutter in jail and not to represent him. I was willing to put money on it, but it wasn’t really my place to do that.
A moment later, after Jay left the room, the door opened. I expected the doctor to come in, but the face that came around the corner was someone else. It was a young banker I hadn’t seen in months, but I would have recognized that brown hair and those brown eyes anywhere.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. The beeping started to pick up again as I scooted back on the back, trying to get away from the man approaching me.
“I’ve come to talk to you about us,” Eddie said.
I narrowed my eyes at him. My father had been busy after I left the house just a couple of hours ago, I guess.
“What about us?” I snapped at him. “There is no us. You turned your back on me.”
“Well, not about us, really.” He sat on the edge of the bed, and I could see that he wasn’t wearing a wedding band anymore. There was a light spot on his ring finger where it should have been.
My heart skipped a beat. I had wanted to see that for so long. I wondered what had happened in the meantime to make them actually split. Knowing how cowardly he was, she’d probably left him, not the other way around.
“I want custody of our child when it’s born,” he said without looking at me. He was still too chicken shit to own up to anything. He couldn’t even look me in the eye while demanding custody of our baby.
“Not a chance,
” I told him. “He’s already going to be adopted by my fiancée.”
“Oh, that biker? Cutter,” he said, spitting his name out. “I’m willing to fight you in court if need be, Missy, and you know I’ll win. No one is going to side with a single woman living with a thug who has a history of gang violence and drugs. Oh, and he’s in jail again, from what I hear. I can’t wait to see what it’s for this time. The suspense is killing me.”
While I watched him, I wondered what I’d ever seen in him. And, honestly, watching his mannerisms, it was a miracle he’d even had sex with me to begin with. I was starting to wonder if I had even been his type or if he’d just been faking it for so long he didn’t know how to stop at the time.
