by Hazel Parker
“You think I need to keep telling Dom about this?” I asked.
I wasn’t sure what answer I really wanted. On the one hand, Dom’s words were so cruel, so vicious that to go back to him and try to talk to him more just seemed more masochistic than cutting myself.
But on the other hand… well, I felt a certain way being near him. It was hard to describe, or rather, it was hard to admit how it felt, but it was a feeling that, if you took away the cruel words, was one worth revisiting.
“If you do, you had better exercise extreme caution,” he said. “I can’t take sides in whatever is going on there. For one, if I do, it’s with Richard, but even then, if Richard is doing things to cause trouble that spills out to the streets of Vegas, my duty is to this city, not to a group of bikers. No matter how much they’ve done for us.”
“Sir?”
“Never mind that,” he said. “The point is, what’s good for the Saints has often also been what’s good for Las Vegas. But…”
He sighed.
“You have nothing else to work on today, right, Saunders?”
“No, sir.”
“If you can, track down Dom or Mama,” he said. “Both of them are high enough up that they can handle this maturely. But exercise caution. They know me. They don’t know you.”
Wrong, sir. Dom knows me well. He knows me too well. He just doesn’t know me well enough.
“They’re not going to hurt you. A female cop getting hit would end them instantly. But that doesn’t mean they’ll just bend over and let you have your way.”
“I understand, sir,” I said.
I already knew who I needed to go see. And it wasn’t Mama.
“Very good, then.”
With that, I departed, heading straight back for my squad car.
It would have been easy enough to see Mama. She probably would have spoken more to me, would have had greater knowledge about what was going on in the club, and certainly wouldn’t have called me a murderer. She would have at least put a pretty face on for me, if not been nice to me.
But Dom… my obligation to Dom went beyond my duty as a police officer. It was an obligation to tell him the truth.
It was an obligation, that, really, I’d known I’d had since I first saw him at the Savage Saints party six months ago. It was just one I hadn’t had the courage to face before.
I still didn’t have the courage, really, but I probably had the foolishness to pursue it and see what would happen.
I drove my personal car back to Panorama. The parking garage attendant looked at me in confusion as I went back in, but I just flashed my badge. He let me right through without further questions.
Dom had not yet returned, but I remembered very well where he was parked. He was around spot number 2115-B. I pulled up to the spot, wondering if what I was doing was necessary but dangerous or just downright stupid. I had never taken this much risk as a cop before, especially when it came to warning someone. We weren’t even handling an actual crime, just—
I heard his bike roaring down the parking deck. I parked my car just to the side, got out, and leaned against the trunk. Dom showed up seconds later. He didn’t stop in surprise when he saw me; if anything, he seemed more aggressive than usual in parking, swerving around me in a very tight circle, just barely missing me. I tried not to flinch, but it was pretty damn hard not to.
“You,” he said when he killed the engine, “are now stalking me.”
“Dom, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry for—”
“You can’t change shit,” he said. “So don’t bother.”
I hesitated. I needed to tell him about everything going on at the club, but he wasn’t going to give me the chance. If I asked him to stop, he wouldn’t.
“Dom, I know, but do you know what’s going on at your own club? Do you know that Richard went to California today? Do you know how often he’s been in California recently?”
Dom’s anger subsided just briefly enough that it was obvious he was surprised. The reaction was brief, but years of being a cop helped me realize he didn’t know. Well, Mario is going to be happy to hear about this one.
“I know everything going on in the club,” he said, an obvious lie. “I don’t need some pig cop telling me what is going on to know about it.”
“Dom, look, I know it’s bad, but we just thought—”
“Don’t,” he said.
This time, though, he at least paused at the glass door before going in for the elevators.
“You say you’re sorry for what happened? You’re actually sorry? Then leave me alone. If you’re sorry, stop coming to me, stop apologizing, and stop going to Savage Saints parties.”
“That’s something Mario—”
“Then tell Mario to send some other whore I can bang that won’t give me PTSD nightmares.”
You can’t be serious, Dom.
“Dom, you know that’s not healthy,” I said. “You know that not addressing it isn’t going to do any good.”
Dom just shrugged as the elevator doors dinged.
“Maybe not,” he said. “But I’m having plenty of fun not being healthy right now.”
Chapter 5: Dom
“Dom, you know that’s not healthy.”
I cocked my fist back to punch the elevator again. Seeing Jenna felt like an infection for which there were no antibiotics, no medicine that could get rid of it. I just had to wait it out until it disappeared, and in the interim, it would suck.
If there were anything that wasn’t healthy for my well-being, it was having to come across her on a daily basis.
“You know that not addressing it isn’t going to do any good.”
It…
It being the day she died…
It being the day that I swore off being hurt ever again…
No, fuck her. She didn’t know any better. She didn’t know what I had lived with for the last decade. She didn’t know what it was like to have to see the face of your former lover on the faces of the girls you had in your bed.
It was fucking easy for her to say when she had not known Jenna nearly as well as I had. What fucking right…
“Not addressing it isn’t… any good.”
The elevator doors dinged for my floor. They slowly slid open, and in a mirror motion, my mind seemed to open up to that fateful night…
* * *
Ten Years Ago
“Happy New Year, baby.”
I leaned forward and kissed Danica, once my girlfriend, now my fiancée. I’d just risen from one knee after she’d said yes to my marriage proposal. This was not just going to be a new decade. It was going to be a new life, with new possibilities, new adventures, and the same love forever.
There was no other way I wanted it.
Around us, the crowd at the house party with Danica’s friends grew rowdier and louder by the moment. Some of them screamed to do shots, while others of them yelled for Danica and me to come back in. At this point, though, I could have said fuck them all. Some of the characters weren’t exactly of my desire, anyway.
And even if they had been a house full of saints, I just wanted to spend the first hours of January first with my future wife.
“Happy New Year to you too, Dominick,” she said, kissing me gently.
“Let’s say we go home and celebrate, huh?”
“Oh, honey,” she said in that usual high-pitched voice that suggested she wasn’t going to agree with me. “I promised Clara that I’d stay until at least two. You know—”
“Ugh, I know she doesn’t like me,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I don’t think any of your friends or the friends of your friends like me. Clara, Jenna, Sarah—”
“Relax, you’re fine,” she said, kissing me on the lips in affirmation. “I could just stay here for a little bit and then get a cab home? That way, you can go home, I can make Clara happy, and then, when I get home, I can make you especially happy.”
“Is that a promise?”
“It’s a guar
antee.”
“Oh, oh, well, in that case,” I said with a smirk. “Just be careful and call me when you’re in the cab. I’m not going to bed until I hear your pretty voice. Fiancée.”
Danica giggled, tossing her long brown hair back as she kissed me with those soft, lipstick-covered lips. It was a kiss I’d experienced many times in the past three years, but this one felt like the sweetest of them all. It was like I could finally taste the entirety of her then, knowing she was never going to leave me.
“I like the sound of that,” she said. “But I’m going to like the sound of wife even more.”
“You know, we could role-play when you get home,” I said. “And that could happen, I don’t know, in ten minutes? You just hop on the back of my bike, and—”
“Why are you so convincing?” she said with a laugh. “One hour, OK? One hour and then I’ll come home.”
“Half an hour.”
“Forty-five.
“Twenty.”
“That’s not how negotiation works!”
“It is when you’re engaged.”
“Oh, good grief,” she said, pulling me in for a brief kiss. “I’ll stay no longer than one hour, but if Clara disappears with someone or the party gets lame, I’ll call a cab. OK?”
“Fine,” I said. “Don’t keep me waiting.”
“Never,” she said. “Love you, Dominick.”
“Love you, Danica.”
We were the touchiest couple I had ever encountered. Truth be told, I normally hated PDA.
But with this girl, I would do anything and everything for her. The world needed more Dominick-Danica sightings. I wanted not just to profess my love from the top of the Stratosphere, but from the top of every casino, from the peak of Mt. Charleston and Red Rock Canyon, and even all the way out in the Grand Canyon and Mt. Zion.
I left with one last kiss before quickly turning around. I wanted the last thing I saw of her that night to be her enormous grin when I kissed her. And, just before I finished turning around, her holding her hand up.
A few seconds later, I heard screams of “congratulations!” from the house. I wasn’t a fan of those—I suspected a decent chunk of those congratulatory screams were fake or not based on actual support, but that wasn’t my problem. I’d found my woman for life.
I didn’t need anything else.
I drove very slowly home, cognizant of all of the drunks on the road. It was so unlike me to go this slow, but it was so unlike life to give a truly special day like this.
When I got home, I prepared the bed for some of the best sex of our lives. I put out rose petals, lit candles—even knowing she wouldn’t be home for at least half an hour—and put on some of our favorite love-making songs.
I waited.
And I waited.
And I waited some more.
One a.m. came. No phone call. She just got swept up in the moment with Clara. You know how difficult it is for her to tear herself away. She has to please everyone she comes across.
One-ten came. Nothing. What was going on? I grabbed my phone and made sure I somehow hadn’t missed anything. It wasn’t impossible. But in this case, no, I had not.
One-fifteen came. No sign—
The phone rang. Danica’s name flashed on the screen. I picked it up.
“Hey, baby,” I said.
* * *
“No! Stop!” I roared in fury as I slammed both of my fists down on the kitchen table of my apartment.
I could not—could fucking not—go back to that!
Why the fuck did Jenna have to return to my life and ruin everything? Why the fuck did she have to return and remind me of everything? At least I’d gotten out of my head before the memory got truly dark, but still. Fucking hell!
She had to fucking go. I had to fucking…
No, I couldn’t hurt her. That was fucking stupid. Hurting a female cop, let alone doing something else, was a good way to get the club in serious trouble. And in any case, I wasn’t a violent person by nature. I was the one that brought the club good looks and a sense of style, not danger and deadly force.
Plus… she had mentioned some things about Richard…
Just what the fuck was going on? And why, of all people, did it have to be fucking Jenna Saunders who caused all of these problems for me?
I tried to remember exactly what she had said, but every time I did, my mind returned to the memory of the last day Danica was alive. I’d managed to get my mind away from the worst of it, but…
Well, what’s going on in the club? Richard seems to be doing something with the California Saints. Maybe it’s something to do with that.
With my hands shaking, I pulled out my phone. I tried to unlock it with my thumb, but my hands were so sweaty and shaking so much that it could not recognize the print. I had to manually type it in.
With the phone unlocked, I put it down for a second, went to the window of my apartment, and just tried to breathe. I stared at the back of the Aria and the Bellagio, trying to imagine all of the tourists having a good time there. They weren’t dealing with trouble. They hadn’t come to Las Vegas to be stressed by the return of an old nightmare.
They were there to have fun.
Things weren’t often actually “fun,” but if I could even try to approximate being like them, I could avoid falling into the darkness that Jenna seemed so eager to grab me by the leg on and pull me down.
I let out a very long sigh, groaned, and went back to my phone. Of course, by this point, the phone had already locked, requiring me to go through the whole song and dance again, but at least that was an easy task compared to trying to deal with the thoughts internally.
I found Richard’s name in my contact list, called, and went to the couch, sitting down.
“Dom, what’s going on?”
Richard’s voice sounded very casual, but there was a hint of stress at the beginning. Like he’d had to lower his voice or duck out of somewhere to take the call.
“Where are you right now, Richard?”
A long pause came on the other end that immediately left me feeling very nervous. This was not how my morning and early afternoon was supposed to go. Richard was never hesitant in sharing information.
“California.”
Fuck me. Jenna was right. She was telling the truth.
Richard wasn’t in California to see Disneyland or Hollywood, either.
“You’re striking a deal with the California Saints, aren’t you?”
It was the Krispy-Pork situation all over again. Richard’s refusal to share information with us was leading him to undermine the best interest of its members, and he wasn’t going to pay the price. We were.
“Believe it or not, I’m trying to do something that is for the best of the club.”
His voice sounded hurried and concerned, like he might be worried about people eavesdropping.
“If you think I’m just going to hand it over blindly and with gratitude, then you’re mistaken.”
“I’d like to be,” I said. “But it’s hard when you are disappearing to the Golden State without telling any of us.”
“I hate to say it, Dom, but my balls are kind of being held in a vice grip by these guys.”
“So fight back a little. If someone grabs you by the balls, punch them in the face.”
“Dom… I know you’re smarter than this. You know that these things require a deft political touch that you can’t just scream and force into reality.”
I rolled my eyes. Yes, I was aware he was right. But I was also aware that whatever Richard was doing, he probably was handling it poorly.
“What are they making you do?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Richard said, his voice so low and quiet, it almost sounded like a hiss. “They want to assimilate us and control us. They’re not wrong to want something back. They sacrificed men and time to help us when they didn’t have to.”
“OK, fine,” I said, raising my voice, perhaps in response to his weird silence. “Pay
them a shitload of money, and let’s call it a day.”
“That’s our position, but they’re smart. They know what a cash cow The Red Door is. We can’t just pretend that it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of money; they know.”
I sighed.
“I’m doing what I can, Dom. But I’m not going to let this rise to the point where we have to risk violence. We’ve all dealt with a lot of violence recently, and I don’t think any of us want anymore, most especially when it would be a civil war of violence.”
“There’d be nothing civil about it,” I said. “Come back to Las Vegas and work with us. We can all figure it out.”
“There’s a reason I’m here that is not of my own accord,” Richard said quickly.
Seriously?
Maybe they see him as a weak point. Maybe they know he’s a bad negotiator and are trying to take advantage of it. Wouldn’t be that far out of the blue. He’s a good guy, but he’s not as stern as some of us.
“If they’re pushing back this hard,” I said, “then fuck ‘em. We’re grateful for their help, and we’ll pay them. But you founded this club as a runaway, Richard. You and Mama both. Just because someone comes here demanding you come home—”
“Don’t bring up our pasts like that,” he snapped. “I will do what is best for this club.”
“And I will do what is best for the members of the club,” I shot back. “You founded the club, but we make it up.”
“Are you threatening me, Dom?”
If his voice had been anything other than condescending and judgmental, I probably would have realized what I’d actually said and backed off. I liked Richard, and even now, I still wanted to take his side.
But whether because someone in his room was forcing him to be quiet or just stressing him out in general, his tone came out so caustic and so rude that I couldn’t help but double down on my point.
“I am threatening to stand up for what’s best for the members of the club. I’m the vice president, and if the president is acting against the best interests of the club, then I will call a vote.”
