by Hazel Parker
What the fuck are you even talking about, being attracted to her? Bro, get a grip on yourself. The stress is killing you. Get some sleep and get Richard back here.
“I appreciate you coming to get me so we could talk,” Jenna said. “I know you could have just refused to see me again, and that would have been all right. But it took guts, especially since I know how you feel about me.”
I bit my lip. I wanted to say, “I know. And thank you for telling me these things.” I wanted to say, “I’m not sure how I feel about you anymore.”
But I said none of those. I just nodded to her, revved the engine, and drove off before I could say anything else. Before I could do anything that would confuse myself further.
I was supposed to hate Jenna Saunders. I was supposed to hate her for having been responsible for the death of Danica. Maybe she hadn’t pulled the trigger. Fine. She’d left the gun out for someone to pull the trigger. She was responsible in that regard.
I was finding it hard to do that when I could believe her more than I could believe the founder of my club.
I got back to The Red Door, but I didn’t immediately go back inside. Instead, I returned to the rooftop post I’d assumed earlier, but this time, instead of facing toward the Strip, I faced toward the police academy.
It was a chilly night, at least by Las Vegas standards. The wind was blowing unusually hard, and the resulting wind chill made it feel like it was fifteen degrees colder than it really was. Anything below seventy-five degrees in Las Vegas was grounds for jackets, but aside from my cut, I didn’t have anything else on.
Though one could never hear the parties on the Strip, the bright neon lights had a way of invading your view even when you weren’t looking at them. It was like the stars in the night sky were not allowed to be the brightest thing while you were in this city; in that sense, it was literally like being in a bubble.
Being in a bubble, though, was supposed to be the kind of thing that left you closed off from the troubles of the world, not suffocated by them. And right now, the bubble didn’t feel like a bubble; it felt like the ocean closing in from every conceivable angle, taking away my pockets of air with a merciless flood of problems.
“Fucking hell,” I murmured to myself, almost laughing.
It was, indeed, a strange, strange world.
I went back downstairs, shaking hands with Walker as I entered through the main entrance. He didn’t seem to have any idea of what was going on, though to be fair, he was a doorman, not an emotional barometer for the club. I stood in the lobby, looking closely at everything around me—the red and black color scheme, the curtains, the general luxurious vibe created to give people an immediate sense of what they were walking into.
I parted the curtain and watched the show on stage. With the lights pouring onto the girls, they couldn’t see anyone in the audience, save for maybe the front row and the legs of the second row. I could see all of them—including Cindy—but they could see none of me.
I’ve probably slept with everyone on stage right now, I thought. And yet, none of them can stir the kind of emotions that Jenna Saunders can. What kind of crazy shit is that?
I looked over at Mama. She was watching the show with some sort of nervous energy. With her belly protruding as much as it was now, it was kind of hard not to feel nervous energy from her all the time, but this seemed especially pronounced, like she had three layers of it instead of just one.
I went over to her, elbowed her, and she nodded to me as she gave a silent hug. We watched the show in silence until applause broke out, at which point she grabbed my arm and pulled me in close.
“Richard’s not here,” she said. “I’ve tried reaching out to him; he’s not answering.”
I almost replied, “He’s in California,” but at the last second, I bit my lip.
“He’s out of town.”
It felt like a truthful enough answer without actually revealing the ugly part of the truth. The last thing this club needed was another Krispy-Pork situation, especially since Richard had been honest with me about where he was. Also, I didn’t want Richard to want to kill me. That seemed reasonable enough.
But just because it was the last thing the club needed didn’t mean that it wasn’t something that might be necessary at some point. Richard’s absence hadn’t prevented the show from going on as normal. In some respects, he was redundant—Mama had the girls, Walker had the door, Barber, Pork, and I greeted the clients, and Katerina had the bar. Richard just oversaw everything, but when the machine practically ran on autopilot, what did he have to oversee?
No, that wasn’t reason enough to start a coup. But him keeping things silent, him letting California Saints run over us, him letting these things happen…
You can’t start a coup. No one wins. Even if you win, people remember. Same for Richard.
You need to hash it out in private.
As I watched the show on stage with mild interest, my thoughts kept turning to Richard. He and I needed to have this conversation in private. We couldn’t be doing it in meetings, and I couldn’t be staging coups. I had to be thinking long-term.
I had no choice if I wanted to avoid having the Savage Saints accomplish what the Degenerate Sinners could not.
When the show went to intermission, I made it a point to seek out various members of the club. All of them expressed concern, but not fear, about Richard being gone. I did my best to assure everyone that nothing dramatic was going on, that he just had some personal business to take care of.
I mean, Trace’s wife was family. So that wasn’t exactly wrong.
The show ended at four. By that point, I would have typically made my way back to the dressing room, made a few moves, scored a girl, and taken her back on my bike. Some days, I went to the back and actually got no one. It was rare, but even Michael Jordan missed shots.
But Michael Jordan always took his shot. Tonight, I couldn’t even bring myself to do that.
I’d long figured out the issue of Richard. Meet him in person, hash out everything with no filter, promise not to start a coup as long as the dialogue could continue, and keep the sparring to the verbal level.
But something else about Jenna was bugging me—just how damn truthful she had been.
I drove home in something of a daze, never once gunning the bike to faster than a few miles per hour over the speed limit. I knew what awaited me on my laptop. I knew what I could access at any point—something that I had avoided for years, but was right there, just waiting for me to access it. Jenna’s conversation with me tonight had resurfaced the desire to look at that document.
I got home at the same time as Pork did, but I made it a point to go to my room before any serious conversation could begin. I ignored Pork asking if I was OK, reached for my laptop, and turned it on.
I went to the folder “Personal,” clicked on “Old School,” clicked on “Older School,” clicked on “Be Careful,” and stared at the file name.
“Murder of Danica Robinson, 1/1/10.”
Though I had witnessed many murders—hell, I’d killed some men myself—and though I had seen some grotesque, awful shit in my time in the MC, this was something that was guaranteed to make my stomach flip and turn away in revulsion. The file had photos of Danica’s body throughout, marking bullet wounds; if I could skip that…
I’d never read the report in full. The few times I’d tried to read it, the images had been too much. But now, with the benefit of Jenna’s words and some time, maybe this would be different.
I opened the file. I gulped.
I first saw the cover page.
And then I scrolled down and saw her eyes.
I didn’t scroll any further. It wasn’t even a bad image. She’d been shot in the chest, not the head; there was no blood, no hole, no wound on her head.
But her eyes were wide open. Her eyes were staring at me across the screen. It was like her eyes were reaching out to me, asking me what I was doing interacting with a woman partially
responsible for her murder.
I slammed my computer shut and did something many in the club would believe was impossible.
I started to sob.
I loved that girl so much. I fucking loved her, goddamnit. We were going to be married… we’d still be fucking married…
She was the one who had waited for me to come back from overseas tours. She was the one who unequivocally supported me in everything that I did. She was the one who loved me, made me believe anything was possible, and made me believe I could make a great husband and father someday.
And now?
She was nothing more than either a haunting image in a report, or a body that was decomposed several feet beneath the surface at a graveyard in south Las Vegas.
She was a body; it felt weird to even call the body “she.” Danica was gone. The body wasn’t, but the body wasn’t what I’d fallen in love with. It was her soul.
And now, the person I’d long thought was her murderer was… not?
Maybe she was lying. Maybe if I read the report, I’d see the police had suspected her but had not had enough to charge her. I knew immediately that wasn’t the case, given her fingerprints were on the fucking gun. That was, quite literally, the smoking gun of evidence.
But…
I needed to know what was in that report. Goddamnit, I needed something to be certain in my life.
I just didn’t have the strength to look myself right now.
Chapter 8: Jenna
Morning always seemed to come too early in Las Vegas.
There were very few people who worked the standard nine-to-five in Las Vegas. Well, that was a bit of an exaggeration, but it wasn’t an exaggeration to say the percentage of the population working odd hours in Las Vegas was probably higher here than anywhere else. It also probably wasn’t an exaggeration to say the percentage of the population working flexible hours, prone to changing at any point, was higher here than anywhere else.
And I was one of those people. “Morning” was just the term for when I was told to set my alarm the night before or for whenever I got called in, roused out of bed not by a peaceful alarm or a morning sunrise but by the harsh ringing of my phone. One of these days, I’m going to wake up at the same time seven days in a row. And it is going to feel amazing.
But today, it was seven on a Saturday morning and Chief Gutierrez had asked me to come in at seven-thirty. That was not unfathomably early for college Jenna or young adult Jenna. But for Officer Saunders, who had been out late last night, meeting with the man who most hated her and the man who most misunderstood her, it felt like a punishment. I just wanted to cozy back up in that bed, get back to my dream about surfing in California, and then go about my day around ten.
Such was life as a cop, though.
I got up, went to the bathroom, went through the world’s quickest shower—seriously, I think I was in there one minute tops—pulled my hair into a ponytail, got some gym clothes on, and drove to the station. I got there around seven-twenty and started to head to the locker rooms to change.
And then, just before I got in, Chief Gutierrez appeared, stopping me in my tracks.
“Saunders,” he said. “Are you hungry?”
It seemed like an odd request. The chief usually just brought us donuts or other snacks in the morning, but I couldn’t remember the last time he had actually gone out of his way to ask one of us.
“Um, well, I could eat, why?”
“Would you care to join me for breakfast?”
This isn’t just about breakfast, is it?
“Sure,” I said. “Just let me get dressed.”
“Please be quick,” he said. “I can’t be spending all day in the cafes. I wouldn’t want to disappoint my supervisors.”
He seemed to speak with almost a resigned chuckle as if the statement was supposed to carry some irony. I had an idea of what he might have been referencing, but I did my best not to make any presumptions.
That was easier said than done, though, when everything in my life wasn’t going upside down. I was a go-between for the Saints and the department, but the Saints could soon become our enemy. I was suddenly talking—actually talking, not just being shouted at—to the person who hated my guts the most.
Was it any wonder that as soon as Chief Gutierrez asked me for breakfast, I had several questions?
Nevertheless, being the good cop that I tried to be, I got dressed quickly, letting my thoughts encourage me to dress faster, not slow down. I was fully ready to go within two minutes, and I met the chief in the lobby. He smiled.
“I’d allow you to pick, but you’ll forgive me if I take the reins this time,” he said.
As if there’s any other time. But if we’re playing to appearances, I get it.
“No worries, you are the chief,” I said with a deliberately low-key smile. “I’m happy to go wherever you want to go.”
“That’s the spirit,” he said with an old man chuckle, the slow, satisfied laugh of a man who didn’t seem that concerned with what happened. That left me feeling a little better, until I remembered that for all his rumblings around retiring, maybe he wasn’t as worried as he would have been under normal circumstances.
We headed for the car, trading more small talk about what was going on this weekend, how the city was finally cooling down from its summer blaze, and some hiking trails that I could recommend to his wife. It was all the light-hearted sort of dialogue that most coworkers would have.
But as soon as we got in the car, the kind of conversation that we had seemed very much unlike what almost any coworker would have.
“So, Saunders,” he said. “I’m just going to cut right to the point.”
He pulled his squad car out of the lot, driving east toward downtown.
“Last night, we got reports that you, after work, went on the rooftop of The Red Door with Dominick Browning. Is this true?”
Shit.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
I never thought about lying. The best case with lying was that I could deflect but never remove the suspicion of doubt. The worst case was getting caught lying to my superior.
“I don’t need to remind you how strongly the mayor’s office is leaning on us right now and looking into removing the Saints from this town,” he said. “I don’t want to turn this into a patronizing discussion. You’ve been here five years, and you know the deal. But you have got to be more careful.”
More private. More hidden from view. More one on one with Dom…
I’m sure he’ll love that.
“The mayor and the city council’s attempts to figure out ways to get the Saints out don’t just extend to the club itself, you know,” he continued as we pulled into the parking lot of one of the better-known breakfast spots, Eat. “They’re also looking to take out anyone who is found to have ties to the club of any kind.”
He deliberately let the words linger for a bit as he opened his door. We couldn’t carry on the conversation with anyone in eavesdropping range outside for obvious reasons. What it did though, perhaps as he had intended all along, was to make me think about his words.
And it didn’t take a professional cop to realize what he was implying. It didn’t take a professional of any kind to get the hint. We are both in the crosshairs. I’m not helping matters by being out in public.
“Hi there, young lady,” Chief Gutierrez said to the waitress at the front. “Just two, please. In the back, if you can.”
It was a request easily fulfilled. There were maybe three other patrons in the restaurant, both of them close to the front. The young gal moved with ease and put us in the back, blissfully unaware of the trouble roiling between the Saints and us. To be fair, though, I had to imagine most people would feel some trepidation if they knew just how much trouble some city units dealt with on a regular basis. It wasn’t all speeding tickets and teenagers drinking.
“Think it’s quiet enough here?” I asked.
“Oh, we’re fine,” he said. “Just don’t s
tand on the table and profess everything.”
I snorted a laugh. I was a little too stressed and worried to come up with a witty retort, so I just let the silence speak for me.
“It should come as no surprise to you that I’m being monitored very closely,” he said. “And, frankly, I don’t blame them. This town wasn’t any more dangerous than the stereotype would have you believe, certainly a lot less dangerous than the days of the gangsters and the mafia. But the explosion of club violence, as I’m sure you saw, made headlines. There are reports of imposter clubs popping up in different cities, including San Francisco and New York.”
“I thought those were just wannabes.”
“Somewhat. But depending on the effectiveness of certain people to lead, those clubs can form anywhere. In any case, all of this is to say that if I resist any probe into what I do, I’ll be on the golf course and at the beach a hell of a lot faster than I ever intended to be.”
He sighed.
“Even if Richard comes back and this whole thing about being out of town turns out to be nothing more than a vacation, it’ll be hard for us to meet. Someone knows that I’m with you right now at Eat, you know.”
I didn’t bother to ask how. I suspected the “privileges of the office” included having someone watch him close to twenty-four-seven, or at least all of the time he was on duty.
“So then, what exactly are we trying to accomplish?” I said. “I know you say I’m the one to get it done. I understood the need to be on good terms when they were just running The Red Door and liked to ride bikes. But if they’re violent, shouldn’t we welcome this oversight?”
“We’ve been over this already, Saunders,” he said with a hint of exacerbation. “There’s a place for outlaws in every society, whether we like to admit it or not. We arrest them if we have to, but there are all sorts of loopholes. Oops, I didn’t read you your rights. Oops, I’ve held you too long without formally charging you of a crime. You get it, right?”
I did. I had gotten it for some time now. I guess I was just feeling a little too frustrated, a little too upset over my stupidity in getting caught last night.
