It’s well past closing time but I’m still trying to find more information. I could have known one of these women.
“Boss, I want to talk to you about this case. I don’t think we can close it,” I say as I barge into his office.
He looks at me like he is annoyed probably because I barged in, it’s not like I give a fuck. This shit needs to be looked into.
“You found some discrepancies then? Something we missed?”
“No.”
“You found a new lead then?”
I sigh and clench my free hand. “No.”
“Then that case is closed,” he said, trying to dismiss me.
“No, it’s not. The local PD ruled it a suicide but they have yet to find the woman’s family or baby. Not to mention this is the fourth woman they have found around the forest with the same circumstance.” I try to force my case.
“Djinn, those women could have come from several different states. People kill themselves all the time. Unless you are telling me you have something to do with this?” This was enough for him to turn and finally give me his undivided attention.
The ignorant fuck.
There are so many pieces of shit that thought just because you were in a motorcycle club you were thugs or felons. Ever since that shit went down with Liam Jr. and the Wings of Diablo a while back, my boss refused to believe that the Boys of Djinn weren’t doing something underhanded all the time.
Yeah, when we were riding under Liam Jr., we did some underhanded shit but nothing that could ever be traced back. Of course, Lynch knew though he couldn’t prove it. He never will let me live it down though. It’s one of the reasons that I’ve been demoted to desk duty.
Now that I’ve taken over the president patch, the most underhanded shit we have done is break the fucking speed limit.
Not everyone in a motorcycle club is a fucking felon.
“No, boss, I don’t know anyone who has anything to do with this and I have nothing to do with it.”
“Good, now unless you have new information, archive this file and get on with your business.”
I nod and walk back to my desk. I make it look like I put the file down but instead, I pull out a few sheets and put them in my inside pocket. If he wants to assume everything we fucking do is illegal let me do some illegal shit.
4
I ride fast toward the clubhouse. I called ahead of time and let Cody know that I wanted to have church as soon as I got there. If the FBI wasn’t going to look into this then we could. For fuck’s sake that was the fucking reason we started the club back up. To make sure that the people in the town and our families were safe. We could’ve let it die after Liam went off the deep end and killed our father. Wire gave us the out. We didn’t want that, we wanted to help. It was the right thing to do.
I park my black Kawasaki Vulcan right in the front of the clubhouse and make my way inside. Of course, no one but the patched in members are there.
“What’s wrong? Something went down with the Wings?” Brendan asks. Out of all my brothers, he might have to be the most broken. He lost his fiancée, who was also an FBI agent, while they were on a mission. He came home retired from the bureau but he hasn’t been the same since. I’ve found him on more than one occasion sitting at the edge of the pier just staring at the water as if he were thinking of jumping in.
“No, let’s get inside. I’ll fill you in.”
We all make it into the small room we designated for church. The walls are all a deep oak color, and the table has the head of a genie inscribed in it. There are photos of all the members from the past that have been in our club and have either lost their lives or can no longer wear the patch. My father is the newest member on the wall who lost his life. At the hand of another member and his own fucking son to boot.
I call order to church and everyone is looking at me waiting for me to tell them what’s happened. Recently the only time we have had to call church was when Wire, the president of the Wings of Diablo, and our ally, needed our help. This time the problem is our own.
“This file came across my desk today.” I pull the pages out of my pocket and spread them across the table.
“You swiped this from the office?” Cody asked completely in shock at what he was seeing. Me, Mr. straight and narrow, swiped confidential information. Something I could lose my job over for sure.
“Yeah, shut up about it,” I say, trying to move on.
“I’m not saying anything but I’m proud of you, bro.” He laughed and leaned back.
“What’s this?” Spark asks.
“This woman was found right at the border of New Hampshire and Maine. She was at the bottom of one of the mountain ranges. She had an umbilical cord still attached and the baby is missing.” I pulled out a few more sheets. “She is the fourth woman in the area that this has happened to. Lynch is trying to close the case but I think we need to look into it.”
“Wyatt, what do you think we can do about it? I mean if there is nothing that the FBI can find what do you think we are going to find?” Winnie asks.
“I don’t know but I know that we aren’t going to sit around here and just let this shit happen. This could be someone we know, this is our fucking backyard. If the bureau doesn’t want to look further into this shit, then we should. No, in fact we will be looking into this.” I look around and wait for anyone to say something against what I had just ordered.
“You got it, boss, if you want us to look into it. We will,” Cody says, taking his VP tag seriously.
“No, sorry, Wyatt. I don’t know who that is. I don’t think I have ever worked on her either. I would have remembered a pretty one like that.” Snow, the local tattoo artist joked around, until he saw the serious look on my face. I wasn’t fucking joking and it was about time that he figured it the fuck out.
“Seriously, I don’t know her. You know that I would tell you if I did.” Snow might have gotten into a bit of trouble when he was younger but he was on the up and up now. We called him Snow because he was as pale as a fucking ghost and his hair was so blond it almost looked white. Not to mention the light blue eyes. First glance you would think he was albino but that wasn’t the case. He just was very fair skinned.
“Fine, if you hear anything let me know.” I turn to walk away.
“When are you going to come back to finish that piece that you’ve been dragging your ass on?” He picks up one of his tattoo guns and begins fiddling with the barrel.
I run my hand over my arm and the half-finished tattoo on my shoulder. He did the outline and some of the shading but I had to leave on a case before it was done. I had yet to come back and finish it. “Soon, for sure. I’m thinking about getting a full back piece too. Winnie gave me an idea.”
“Ah, the genie?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m with it. I think all of you guys should get it.”
I chuckle, “Of course you do, you’re the one that’s going to get paid.”
The roar of motorcycles catches my attention as I step out of the tattoo shop. Cody and Brendan roll up. Scowls on both of their faces.
“What’s up, any news?”
“Nothing. All of a sudden no one knows shit about shit,” Brendan replies.
I fix my gaze on my brother, if there is anyone besides me who hates to be given the run around it’s him. “You think there’s more that we aren’t seeing, don’t you?”
Cody shoves his lid on the back of his bike and looks over to us. “No shit, there is something that we aren’t seeing. There is no way that no one knows anything. I mean these girls were found right here in the area and no one even knew they were missing. Shit doesn’t smell right. It smells like bureaucracy bullshit.”
I roll my eyes and try to keep my cool. Cody is a hothead and strongly believes that everything is a conspiracy. Unfortunately, with him being an ex-FBI agent most of the things that he says are pretty accurate.
“I don’t see why they would try to keep something like this away from
everyone. I mean it doesn’t make sense.” I run my hand through my hair, tugging slightly on the way through. Why would the bureau hide the disappearance of these girls?
“If you have an open case that you can’t seem to find any clues on don’t you think they would have told the public that they did all that they could instead of admitting that they failed? Of course, they would hide it. If they push it to the front of the news now, folks might actually expect them to do something.” Cody shrugs his shoulders.
I don’t want to admit it but he’s right. No one was asking any questions about it right now so there was no reason for them to admit that they had fucked up.
“Shit, fine. Let’s see if Winnie found anything.”
We all hop on our bikes and ride toward the clubhouse. Winnie is already there when we roll up.
“Hey, did you hit a dead-end too?” I activate the kickstand on my bike and make sure that it can’t fall over. The outside of the clubhouse is all dirt but that doesn’t mean it’s less damaging to the bike.
“Actually, yeah but not in the way I would have liked.” Winnie walks up to us and shows us a photo on his phone. It was a woman with bright green hair. She had three rings in her nose and two in her eyebrow. The photo shows her with her tongue sticking out and the rock on hand gesture. She looks happy.
“Who is this?” I ask, handing the phone back to Winnie.
“This is Stella. She was here on vacation before she went back home to Canada. She’s a complete free spirit which is why no one really looked into her. She’s been missing for over a month now.”
Dread seized my stomach. “What the fuck! What do you mean she’s been missing for more than a month?”
I spoke with a girl named Lisa, she works in town at Roasted as a barista. She said that Stella came down to party with her and her boyfriend. She was supposed to be back home a month ago but she never showed up. The only problem is she is known for doing things like this, so the local PD hasn’t really done much to find her. The girl’s parents aren’t even that particularly worried.” Winnie shrugs his shoulder.
“That’s fucking crazy,” Brendan growls out. “She’s gone for a month and no one bothered to raise the fucking alarm? What the hell is going on around here.”
“I haven’t the slightest idea but I don’t think it’s over.” I look over to the horizon and can see the acres upon acres of forest. Something is going on and everyone seems to want to take a blind eye to it.
5
I inhale deeply trying to fill my lungs with the mountain air. We have been searching for answers about what is going down for more than a week but still no one seems to know anything. To say it’s fucking frustrating is an understatement. I tried once again to get my boss to look into the case but he basically told me in no uncertain terms that if I continued to look into it I was itching for a suspension.
Like that shit was going to stop me. The shit was wrong and if I had to find my own proof and go over his head that is exactly what I would do. The problem is there is no fucking proof.
Besides the dead women and the missing babies. Unfortunately, that isn’t enough.
I am so wound up that I decided to take a ride up to Hastings. It’s a few hours away from the clubhouse but sometimes I need to just get away from everything. I’m hoping this weekend of R&R is just what I need to relax. I bought this cabin a few years back and though it doesn’t have all the amenities as some of the more expensive cabins it’s more than enough for me. It has only one floor, it has two bedrooms, a small general area, and a kitchenette. There is an outhouse and a small space designated for a firepit. The wildlife is plenty, I have to worry about bears and wolves all the time. Still, I wouldn’t give it up for the world. Something about this fresh air always seems to help me figure out what the hell is bothering me.
Being president of a motorcycle club may sound like a grand old fucking time but most of the time it was just responsibility after fucking responsibility dumped on me. Then add in the fact that the majority of my club were my actual little brothers and it just became more fucking stressful.
After Liam Jr. basically used his ties into the FBI to bully the Wings of Diablo, I promised myself and Wire that once I took the seat of president, I wouldn’t let shit like that happen again. Yeah, we would help out where we could. Get information where we could, but we would mostly be on the straight and narrow. It’s almost impossible to keep completely clean with all the dirt that goes on behind the scenes. It would be so much easier to force people to tell us what we wanted to know with a fucking gun to their heads. Shit always gets done that way.
I grab a beer out of the portable cooler that I have and sit back to drink it. My property is near Wild River but the next neighbor I have isn’t for miles. I’m pretty sure I could run outside buck ass naked and the only things I would disturb are a few opossums. I close my eyes and let the sounds of the area lull me into a state of peace. Only to have a braying cry snap my serenity.
“What the fuck is that?” I sit up quickly and look over to the window but I don’t see anything.
There is no way that I’m going to be able to be at one with nature when whatever the fuck that is, was screaming like that. It would be one thing if it sounded like it was being killed. Animals kill animals all the fucking time but this sounds like something is trapped. I don’t hunt, though I fish from time to time but I know the sound of a tortured animal when I hear one.
“Fucking hell.” I grab my sidearm and put it in the waist of my pants. I would either have to find a way to let the animal free or put it out of its misery. I throw my jacket on and step out, trying to let my ears zero in on the sound of the wounded animal. After a few seconds the animal wails out again and I follow the sound.
I have to hike up a steep mountain, making sure that I move slowly. It’s possible that the animal is some other animal’s meal and they just haven’t come back to kill it yet. I step to the side and something hard and metal springs up. I move my legs just in time as a huge trap springs closed.
“Motherfuckers,” I growl out as I look at the contraption. That shit would have broken my fucking ankle for sure “What fucking part of private fucking property do these fucks not understand?”
Poachers used inhumane traps to capture the animals that roamed through the forest. I don’t know how many damn signs I have up that say that hunting isn’t allowed on my fucking property yet every damn time I come over here I find at least half a dozen traps set out. I wish I could come one day and see one of the bastards laying them out. I would knock them the fuck out for trespassing and also for not at least properly labeling where the fuck they are laying their traps. My own land is like a fucking maze of mines. One day I was going to get fucking stuck and be shit out of luck. No one would come looking for me for days.
I pick up the sprung trap and pick up a long stick as I make my way to the still crying animal. I poke at the area around my feet before I take another step just to make sure that there are no traps there. I mean it wouldn’t make sense to put them so close together but then again, some of these poachers aren’t the smartest fucking people in town.
In fact, before I even make it to the crying animal, I find three more traps, all of them seem to look fairly old. They must have been here all through the winter season. It was nearly summertime now. I need to do a better job of sweeping for these things, unfortunately I don’t spend much time out here.
The crying gets louder and I look down into a small gorge to see a full-grown male deer stuck in one of the traps. He is actually quite far away from my cabin but the gorge just amplified the sound of him crying. I had to be careful when getting close to him, his antlers were full grown and one fucking swipe of them could take me out. How fucking fitting would that shit be, I die stabbed to death by Bambi.
“Easy boy,” I say as I make my way closer to him. The trap is on his back leg and seems to be chained to the ground. There is no way that he would be able to get out of it on his own. I wasn’t go
ing to leave him there either. I tried to get close to him but every time I did, he just swung his head around in my direction.
“Come on, big fella. I’m trying to help you here,” I say, trying to keep my voice calm. Deer were skittish animals as it was. I know he must be super uncomfortable with me getting this close to him. The trap that is around his leg seems to have a press latch, maybe if I try to press it using the stick from a distance it would be enough to release him. That way I could stay my distance and he wouldn’t be able to rush me.
It takes a while and by the fiftieth time I’m about to just call it quits and put the majestic animal out of his misery.
“For fuck’s sake. Just stay fucking still,” I grunt out at him as he moves his leg again.
I can tell that he is tired, the crying has turned to a low whimper and his movements though still making it hard for me to remove the trap have become less frequent.
I push the branch out again and make direct contact with the lever. “Oh shit, don’t move. Stay still, boy.” I basically beg him. I know that if I don’t get it this time that there may be no way for me to get it another time. I push a little harder and with a metallic clank the trap springs back open.
I move back as quickly as possible, fearful that now once he is free, he is going to turn and run straight for me, instead he kicks the trap off his leg and bolts in the opposite direction.
I feel a sense of relief when I see him trotting away.
Now I should be able to get some relaxing done. I can’t climb out of the gorge the same way I descended so I’m just going to have to go around the back side. It’s no problem I can look for more traps. All of it was my land anyway.
Twisted Steel: An MC Anthology: Second Edition Page 30
