by Blair Grey
God, how could I have been so stupid? All the signs had been there all along. I should have put two and two together and realized that this wasn’t just a coincidence.
As angry as I was, though, there was still a part of me that had liked Holly. A part of me that had envisioned a family with her sometime in the future. And that part of me was having a harder time with all of this. That part of me couldn’t help feeling like if she called me right now, I’d meet up with her anyway. Just to hear what the real story was. Just to hear if she was really from Montana and if Vera really was her sister and if everything that she had told me was a lie.
I was sure it was a lie. She was an undercover cop after all. But it just felt like I had touched a very real side of her. Maybe I only felt like that because she had been playing me all along.
34
Holly
On Friday, I was shocked to find that Grant was the one tailing me. He pulled up behind me as I drove up to my house. I glanced at my phone, but he hadn’t tried to call. I wondered how he had happened to find me as I drove back from doing the grocery shopping, a peace offering for Vera after I’d spent the previous night crying on her shoulder.
Me doing the grocery shopping had also meant that I was free to grab all the junk food that I wanted, without having to give Vera a list. I loved Vera’s cooking, but when I was wallowing, I just really wanted frozen burritos and cherry cheesecake.
Not that I was wallowing. Vera said that I was wallowing. But really, I was just waiting for the confrontation with Grant, which would be inevitable now. I had to tell him that I was an undercover cop who had been assigned to him. There was no reason not to come clean now. It wasn’t like it would jeopardize my job, not now that I was fired. And the guilt was beginning to eat me alive.
I needed to tell him the truth.
So it was a relief to see him pull up behind me. At least, until I saw the angry look on his face. “What’s wrong?” I asked immediately, wondering what I had done to warrant that look. Or had Vera maybe done something? Called him up after the other day and told him never to come near me again?
I didn’t think she would do that, but I couldn’t imagine what had Grant so worked up right now.
I tried reaching for him as he got close, needing to fold myself into the warmth of his arms. This whole thing felt like a nightmare, one that I had been unable to pull myself out of. I needed him. But Grant sidestepped my reaching arms, folding his own arms across his chest to dissuade me from trying again.
“Are you an undercover cop?” he snapped before I could say anything.
It felt like my entire world was shattering. Somehow, he had found out. Had Ryan told him? One last attempt to ruin my life? Or maybe the new cop who was assigned to him had been too obvious, and Grant had put two and two together?
I hurried to explain. “Please, you have to believe me, I never wanted to hurt you,” I said. “In fact, I—”
But Grant didn’t let me finish. “Are you or are you not?” he asked again.
I ducked my head. The truth was that I wasn’t, not anymore, but I knew that wasn’t what he was asking. I nodded my head, almost fearing his response. For a long moment, he was silent. I finally risked a glance up, hoping that he was just trying to process it. That maybe I could reason with him.
But when I looked up, I could tell how pissed he was. No, there would be no reasoning with him. I was sure of that. I had truly fucked up, and there was no way to make things right, even though I hadn’t realized how terrible the unit was until later on.
I knew that didn’t make things right anyway. Just because I hadn’t realized how terrible the unit was, it didn’t make it right for me to try to seduce Grant, to sleep with him, all so that I could try to get information out of him. There was no world in which that was a moral thing to do, even if he was a criminal.
Add in the fact that I had fallen in love with him as well, and here we were. I swallowed hard, feeling sick to my stomach.
“So what, everything we had was just a job?” Grant asked bitterly. “I was your target, and you were just using me to try to get information? What did you tell your boss? Did you give him a list of all the businesses that you knew were loyal to Red Eyes? Are you the reason Linda’s business burned down?”
I could see the accusation in his eyes, and the truth was that I was, and that just made everything worse. I tried again to explain, but he cut me off before I could even get a word out.
“I cared about you!” he said, and I could hear the raw pain in his voice. I had hurt him, and I hated it. What’s more, with the way that he said it, it was like he didn’t realize that I liked him equally as much. Like he thought it had all been an act.
I wasn’t that good at acting; didn’t he realize that? If I had been, maybe I would have been able to stay in character. Maybe I wouldn’t have found myself seduced by him. Maybe I wouldn’t have these terribly overwhelming feelings for him.
“I trusted you,” Grant said. He shook his head. “But never again. I never want to see you again. Do you hear me? I can’t make any promises for what I will or won’t do if you get in my way.”
I felt a shiver run down my spine, and I glanced toward the house, hoping beyond hope that I wouldn’t see Vera’s face peeping out. It seemed that she was right all along. That just because I wanted Grant to be a good guy, it didn’t mean that he actually was. When it came down to his survival, he didn’t care who he had to hurt to make sure that nothing happened to him. If that meant hurting me, then so be it.
At that moment, I actually trusted that he might hurt me if he needed to. I realized that he really was part of Red Eyes, as much as I wanted to deny it.
I felt like I could crumple to the sidewalk at any point. My tears were flowing freely by now, but he didn’t seem to care at all.
“Your unit is in trouble,” Grant snapped, a parting shot. “I shouldn’t even be telling you that, but why don’t you go ahead and pass on the word to your boss, Ryan? We know exactly who’s been threatening our local businesses, and we’re not going to stand by and let you fuckers get away with it.”
That was what really did it: getting lumped in with Ryan by someone like Grant. I had never deserved Grant in the first place. All along, he’d been too good for me, rather than the other way around. I was crying, and Grant was turning away from me, heading back to his car.
I wanted to run after him, to tell him to wait, to try to explain. But I could tell that he wasn’t going to listen to me.
I had fucked it all up. I never should have lied to him.
I stumbled up the front walk, forgetting all about the groceries, and barely made it inside before I sank down to the ground. Vera was there in an instant. “Hey, are you—? Jeez, what happened?” Vera asked, switching questions midway through, clearly able to tell that I wasn’t doing okay.
I shook my head, huddling into a ball and wrapping my arms around myself. “I fucked up,” I whispered.
“What did you fuck up?” Vera asked sharply.
I looked up at her with tears streaming down my cheeks. “I lost the only thing that matters,” I said.
35
Grant
I knew that I shouldn’t be following Braxton’s lead on something like this, but there was a limit to how much time I was willing to sit around and do nothing. And when nobody had been able to come up with a solid plan for the whole weekend, it was starting to eat at me.
Especially since I hadn’t seen Holly for the whole weekend. That, of course, had been by design. I really meant it when I said that I never wanted to see her again. It had been difficult to see her crying like that, but I knew that I had done the right thing in distancing myself from her. I didn’t even know who the hell she was. But the more digging I did, the more disgusted I became. According to the information that Ray had handed out, she hadn’t just moved here from Montana after all. She had done her early police work in California, but she was from Las Cruces to begin with. I had to wonder how much
of the rest of it were lies.
I didn’t even want to talk to her about it, though. Who knew if she would even tell me the truth?
I headed over to Braxton’s house on Monday because I needed to do something. Because sitting around thinking about Holly was getting me nowhere. I couldn’t help it. I almost wanted to go back and confront her again. But I had said enough ugly things that last time, and I knew it was better that I pretend I had never known her in the first place.
“I don’t care about his mob connections,” Braxton said when I arrived. “I want to put that fucker’s ass in the dirt.”
There was no question of who he meant. Ryan. He was the one behind all of this. He wasn’t only the one behind Candy burning down, but also the one behind Holly’s job of espionage. And as much as I did worry about Ryan’s potential mob connections, there was only so much that a man could take.
Usually, I’d be the voice of reason, but right now, I couldn’t agree more. I wanted to murder Ryan and dump his body in a goddamned lake. Maybe that would be enough to get that stupid unit to realize that they weren’t master puppeteers, manipulating the community at will. We could only hope so.
“So what’s the plan?” I asked Braxton, and I could see from the gleeful look on his face that he was glad to have me on board.
“I have the guy’s address,” he said. “And I was thinking that maybe we should pay him a visit.”
“You know, I think that you’re exactly right,” I said. “Let’s go.”
In the back of my mind, I knew that this was the wrong way to be going about it. I knew that Ray would never sanction something like this. Hell, Cameron wouldn’t even like the idea of this. But I had all this restless energy from the weekend, all these thoughts about Holly coursing through me, and I needed to do something with it. So I went along with him.
The ride over to Ryan’s place was quiet. Terse. We were both preparing for the fight ahead of us.
Again, I found myself thinking about Holly. Apparently, this guy had been her boss. What did she think of him? Did she request to work with him? Did she agree with him?
Did she know about his potential ties to the mafia? Did she have potential ties to the mafia?
When we got to Ryan’s house, we busted down the door. Ryan was waiting for us, standing there in the hallway with his gun out. His lips pulled back into a sarcastic grin. “Ah, Red Eyes goons. I was wondering when you’d show up,” he said. He looked down at the door on the ground. “You could have knocked, you know. That would have been the polite thing to do.” His eyes narrowed. “But I guess criminals don’t know the first thing about politeness, do they?”
Braxton spit at his feet. “Assholes like you don’t deserve politeness,” he said.
Ryan laughed.
I wanted more information. “Why are you doing this?” I asked him. “What do the police stand to gain by burning down local businesses? This can’t be all in the name of cleaning up the streets.”
Ryan snorted derisively. “It isn’t,” he said. “Haven’t you figured it out yet? You’re supposed to be the smart one. Or is that Cameron?” He shrugged like it didn’t matter to him one way or the other. “The mob has been watching Red Eyes. For quite some time now, actually. And they’ve seen what you’ve been doing and the way that you’re growing. Not just here but all across the board.”
“And what, they’re scared?” Braxton taunted, and I almost wanted to elbow him and remind him that taunting a clearly-unstable lunatic holding a gun was maybe not the smartest thing to do.
Ryan just laughed again, though. “Oh no, they’re not scared. But they have decided that it’s probably better to be rid of you. You’re a nuisance, and you could draw the police’s eye in a way that the mob wouldn’t like very much. They want to get rid of you, and it all starts with me.”
“A fake police officer with a grudge?” Again, Braxton. I gave him a dirty look, but Ryan still wasn’t done talking about his special mission.
“Well, they needed someone who could take you out without it looking like it was another MC out to get you,” Ryan said. “You know as well as I do that when the Unknowns came after you guys, it was easy enough to get the sheriff to clean them up. But the sheriff would never do that with me. He trusts me. When I told him that I was going to clean you lot off the face of the earth, he gave me permission to do whatever I needed to do.”
Permission that had clearly gone to his head, but I didn’t say that out loud and, thankfully, neither did Braxton.
“We’re going to kill you. Then what happens?” Braxton said.
Ryan snorted. “You’re going to kill me?” he echoed. “That is not going to happen.” He paused. “No, I’m going to get you put behind bars, and then I’m going to get paid for services rendered. I’m also going to become one of the most powerful men in town. I could have any job I wanted after that.”
I was starting to realize a lot of who Ryan really was. Sleazy didn’t even begin to cover it. He was a total con man. And somehow, Holly had been working for him.
But right now, I couldn’t help thinking that we needed to get out of there. We didn’t have a gun, and even though we outnumbered Ryan, it would be easy enough for him to take us out. Even though I was sure that he was mostly a con man, I also felt pretty sure that he had trained with the police at least at some point in his life. He probably knew how to use that gun and knew how to use it well. Especially if he had ties with the mob.
This was exactly the kind of thing that I didn’t want to get tangled up with. Mobsters. Life in Las Cruces had been pretty easy since I’d joined the MC, but it wasn’t going to stay that way if the mob was intent on wiping us out, on eliminating us as a threat.
Already, here was this guy, Ryan, brandishing a gun at us. And from the way that he said it, he wasn’t even one of the mobsters. He was just some guy that they had hired. He could shoot us at any minute, and we could be dead by dinnertime.
I had done away with a lot of the fears that I’d had when I first joined the MC. I no longer minded, really, when Braxton and I had to rough somebody up when we went to collect dues and the guys tried not to pay us. That sort of thing just didn’t bother me anymore.
But there was something very visceral about seeing a gun pointed at you and knowing that there was nothing that you could do to get out of the way of that bullet quickly enough. Not at this range. If he shot, he was likely to hit exactly where he wanted to.
“Braxton, we should get out of here,” I said in a low voice.
Braxton rolled his eyes. “Why?” he asked. “You don’t actually think that he’s going to shoot us, do you? You just heard him. He needs us behind bars, not dead. That’s probably stipulated in his contract. He won’t get paid unless he follows it.” Braxton paused. “He probably wants us to testify against everyone else. Turn in Ray and all of them.”
God, the idea of Ray in jail with his cancer as bad as it was was just brutal. If nothing else, we needed to take this fucker down just so he couldn’t do that to Ray. Of course, Ray knew the risks of leading a life like this. And I was sure that they would take care of him in jail, at least as much as they could. But both those things were beside the point.
“Don’t worry about that,” Ryan said, shaking his head. “We have compelling cases on all of you scum, some of it fabricated of course. But the jury will hear exactly what the jury wants to hear. All those terrible things you’ve been doing in our community, stealing money, dealing drugs, and black-market weapons sales? It’s all going to stop the minute we can throw the lot of you in jail.”
I stared at him for a long moment, hardly able to believe my ears. Was he really threatening to make up evidence, just so that he could get us put away behind bars? I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me since I could tell that he had reasons for wanting us in jail. But I also liked to think that sort of thing wouldn’t fly with the police force.
Again, I had to remember that Holly was part of all of this. That she was probably just as te
rrible as this guy Ryan. Or if not so terrible now, she might one day be.
For now, though, we were at an impasse. He wouldn’t shoot us, but we also couldn’t fight him. I grabbed Braxton’s arm and yanked him backward out of there and then back to his car. “Come on,” I muttered under my breath. “You know there’s nothing that we can do.”
Braxton growled and yanked his arm out of my grasp. “We have to do something,” he snapped.
“He’s going to get what’s coming to him, I promise you,” I told him, pushing him toward the car. I hadn’t realized that I was stronger than Braxton, but apparently, all my gym work had paid off. I didn’t have time to feel proud of it now, though. Instead, I just wanted to get out of there as fast as possible.
We were going to have to tell Ray that we had come here looking for a fight. The information that we had learned was too important for us to keep to ourselves. But I had no doubt that Ray was going to be both annoyed and disappointed that we had done this. He would have expected more. Especially from me.
He might have expected that Braxton would want to go out looking for trouble, but Ray would be disappointed that I hadn’t kept him from going, that instead I had gone along with him. This from the guy that Ray wanted to take over as leader of the MC once he could no longer run things.
I had let my emotions get the better of me. I should have known not to come here. Braxton had been so sure that the guy couldn’t actually have mob ties, but it sounded like they were worse than what we could have imagined. The mafia was paying him to take us out.
Holly was still working her seduction on me, even when I hadn’t seen her in days. She was still impacting my life with the MC. She was still making me do brash things, things that ended up being the wrong thing in the end. I wondered if that was why Ryan had planted her in my life. If she was meant to be a distraction rather than a rat. Not that it really mattered either way. Either way, I was compromised.
