by Sophia Gray
“If you could load the bedroom first so that it is at the front when you finish unloading, that would be great. The order of the rest of it won’t matter.”
“Any appliances? Washer, dryer, stove?”
“No. Small appliances are packed into boxes and the large ones stay with the property.”
“Good enough. We’ll get you taken care of and on your way in no time.”
“Thank you. I’ll try to stay out of the way so I don’t interfere with your progress. I’m anxious to get out of here as quickly as I can.”
“We’ve got you, Miss Cabri,” he said with a wink, turning to bark orders at a couple of guys standing just outside on the front stoop.
Sitting in the kitchen with a book, I tried to focus on reading while they packed up my things. I was shocked at how quickly they were finished and ready to go, but also relieved. I really did want out of here. I found myself wanting to put this whole episode of my life far behind me. It wouldn’t be entirely possible with having to sit down with Jeremiah, and then there would be the trial for my father’s death, but at least I wouldn’t be in this place where everything reminded me of D, of his touch, his smell.
“We’re ready, Miss Marquis,” Solomon said from the kitchen doorway.
“Very good. You have the address of the storage building?”
“Yes, we’re about to head there now.”
“I’ll be right behind you. Unit twenty-three. It is unlocked if you get there before me and need to get started unloading. I’ll lock it when you are done.”
“Perfect. See you in a bit.”
“Thank you.”
“Hey, it’s what we do.”
He flashed a broad smile at me, displaying a large set of dimples that seemed to take over his entire face. I guessed that he was once a good-looking guy, but he had a worn look about him that gave him a haunted appearance. It made me wonder what had happened in his life that had made him who he was. I suspected this was something I would now wonder about every stranger I might meet. I knew what had changed me, and now, what was changing me again. Everyone had a story.
Taking one final look around to be sure I didn’t miss anything in the house, I gathered my purse and book, stepping outside and locking the door behind me. I would mail the keys back to the landlord later on as I didn’t want to give anyone a heads up that I was leaving until I was long gone. He would be happy. My rent was paid well in advance, and I had no doubt I wouldn’t be getting it back so he’d have ample time to find a new tenant.
Turning to make my way to the rental car that had been delivered to me earlier, I stopped in my tracks. Sitting in the street on the other side was D. He was perched on his bike, watching the moving truck head down the street. When he turned and saw me, he put his helmet back on his head and headed off wordlessly in the opposite direction. It felt like I had been shot and just hadn’t realized it yet. After a moment or two, I found my footing and walked to the car, slipping behind the wheel and heading off toward the storage unit. I couldn’t decide if I was relieved that he had no intention of following me or if I was hurt that he was just going to let me go without a fight.
I wiped at the tears falling down my face and reached for my phone, now ringing in the seat beside me. It was Jeremiah checking in on me again.
“Where are you?”
“I’m on my way to the storage unit. The movers have everything packed and are headed there with it.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear it. I’ve got some big news for you, but I can’t tell you on the phone. When are you able to come in?”
“I need to get this stuff sorted and then get settled back into my place. It’s been closed up for months except for being checked on here and there, so it’ll need some airing out and such I’m sure.”
“How about first thing in the morning? You think that is doable?”
“Sure. No problem. I’ll be there at eight.”
“Sounds good. Feel free to bring a low paid public servant some decent coffee from one of those places where the women all wear yoga pants and drink with their pinky out.”
“Yeah, I’ll get you a nice skinny pumpkin spice mocha latte that will make you grin like a school girl.”
“Let’s not get carried away now.”
“Okay. I’ll bring you a cup of coffee as black as your soul, then.”
“Now you’re making sense.”
“See you at eight.”
“See you then.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Walking into my old place felt almost foreign to me. It had been so long since I’d been home. I stood at the edge of the mantle and pulled down a photo, looking down at it and smiling. It was my father and I standing in front of a fountain here in town. It was one of the last photos we had ever taken together. We were both smiling at a neighbor who I had handed my phone to take a snapshot of us. After my father’s death, I had printed and framed it for the mantle, a reminder of better days.
“We’ve got him, Dad. Jeremiah is going to put the guy who did this to you away for the rest of his miserable life.”
Letting out a loud sigh, I sat the picture back down and busied myself with getting the place aired out, dusted and vacuumed before removing the slip covers and opening the windows to freshen up the place. The warm afternoon quickly turned to a chilled evening as I lost myself in getting everything back in order. Closing the windows, I poured myself a glass of wine and kicked back on my sofa. Melancholy flowed through me, but somehow I was glad to be home.
Chapter Thirty
A sense of dread filled me as I got dressed for my meeting with Jeremiah the following morning. It was good to be home, though I had to realize that I was still not that far out of Damian’s reach. It wasn’t as if I lived in another city, just a part of it that I doubted he ever had reason to be in. My house was situated in a quiet cul-de-sac in a neighborhood that was about as upper middle-class suburbia as one could get. It wasn’t exactly the kind of place you’d find the leader of a notorious motorcycle gang hanging out for a fun weekend.
Looking at myself in the mirror, I saw someone I hardly recognized. I reached up and pulled the cosmetic lenses I had purchased for my time at the casino from my eyes. The dark brown veil that had covered my pale blue eyes went into the waste basket nearby as I frowned at my dark locks. Those would need to go too. In the meantime, I pinned them up and retrieved a hat to cover them.
Sitting down at my computer, I took a quick inventory of my bank account. I was happy to see that it was still fairly well in the black since I had been living off my income from the casino while working there and had only had to utilize my account to pay my mortgage and utilities while away from the house. Of course, I would have to buy my neighbor, Mrs. Peaches, something nice to thank her for checking on the house and plants for me in my absence.
I dreaded getting acclimated again with my neighbors. There would be questions. I had told Mrs. Peaches that I’d be traveling abroad. They would want to see pictures of my travels, hear tales of my adventures. Then, there would be those who had not seen me to give their condolences regarding my father. During his last days, he had stayed here with me, having been tossed out of yet another shitty little apartment in the city slums.
Despite his usual company and habits, my father had been a charming man, capable of fitting in with any crowd, and my neighbors had been quite taken with him. I suspected that he may have even been romantically involved with one of them, a widow who mostly kept to herself, but seemed to always make a point of coming out of her yard to speak to him when he went out for walks. Whether it was a mild flirtation or something more, I was uncertain and I had never seen fit to delve into it further.
Remembering that I had promised Jeremiah coffee, I gathered myself up and headed out to the rental car to take to his office. I would need to drop it off and grab a cab back. I had forgotten to even check on my own car in the garage. Mrs. Peaches had agreed to start it for me and drive it around the block every once in a
while to keep it in good order, so hopefully it was fine. I was grateful not to encounter any neighbors as I climbed into the driver’s seat and headed into the city.
“Good morning, Janessa. It’s good to see you again. You’ve done something different with your hair. I like it.”
“Thanks. Don’t get used to it.”
“Is that for me?” he asked with a big smile, noting the Grounds for Life cup in my hand.
“Yes. Yoga pant coffee from the local dispensary, per your request.”
“You’re a peach. Thanks for that. Come on, let’s go into my office and we’ll talk.”
I followed him down the long corridor that led to his cramped little corner of the large organization in which he worked. He sat across from me, pulling out a file and laying it on the desk in front of him.
“Do you want to see the tape?” he asked solemnly.
“No.”
“I didn’t think you would, but I thought I would give you the opportunity. It will be played in court and if you choose to attend the trial, you will see it there. I didn’t want it to be the first time you were watching it in the front of a lot of people.”
“I don’t want to see it until I have to,” I replied.
“I understand.”
“So, what do we need to talk about? I’m anxious just to get life back on track and would like to get this as much behind me as I can.”
“Well, nothing formal, since you went in as an agreement between the two of us rather than as a witness for the department, but I do need to go over with you anything that you’ve found out that might benefit our investigation. That was our agreement. You give me what you can, and I would support you in your efforts and help you as much as I could to find out who killed your father.”
“Yes.”
“You should know that I’m aware that you developed a relationship with Damian Diaz while you were working in the casino.”
“I have no relationship with D. It was all only ever a part of my attempt to unearth my father’s killer. Now that you’ve done that, there is no need for me to be there or associate with him any longer.”
“I’m relieved to hear that. I was concerned that you might have been compromised. Damian Diaz isn’t the sort you’d ever want to be so closely associated with. I can assure you of that. It is well known that he killed his own brother to step into the role he holds now.”
“Brother? I don’t recall reading anything in the files you gave me about a brother.”
“It isn’t something you would find there, as they weren’t blood related. Damian’s mother had a string of boyfriends. One had a son named Zach Sharpe. He and Damian were about the same age. They ran together as teens, got into trouble with petty theft, drugs, vandalism. It was Zach who first joined the Black Aces when they were seventeen. Damian followed right behind him.”
“He never mentioned him.”
“I would guess not. Probably a hard pill to swallow when you kill your brother.”
“What can you tell me about him?”
“Zach, they called him Cash Sharpe, was the original leader of the club’s right hand after a bit of time. He acted as an enforcer, a collector. The club had agreements all over town, money paid to them in order for protection from other clubs and gangs. Cash got greedy. He upped their pay outs without club sanction and kept the difference in what the club expected and what he was actually skimming from the business owners.”
“He stole from the club, then,” Janessa replied, the dollar sign on Damian’s chest and what he had said surfacing in the back of her mind.
“Yes. The leader found out and decided to make an example of him. He offered Damian a position of authority in the club, but only if Damian was willing to do what was asked of him.”
“And D did.”
“That’s how the story goes. It’s never been proven, of course. Things rarely can be with a lot like that, but we do manage to get people in here and there or to get people to talk. They say that Damian and Zach were taken out to a field, along with some of the higher ranking club members. Neither knew what was coming. The leader had only told Damian that something would be expected of him, and he would know what that was when the time came.”
“They made him kill someone he considered a best friend, a brother even.”
“A witness says that once they reached the field, Zach was put on his knees and questioned about the money he had taken with a gun to his head. There was another put to Damian’s head. He confessed that he had taken the money, but claimed that Damian had nothing to do with it. Whether he did or didn’t is unknown, but the gun at Damian’s head was pulled away and handed to him. He was ordered to shoot Zach, and he did.”
“He had no choice, then. If he hadn’t, they would have shot him.”
“Perhaps. Kill or be killed, but the witness said that he never hesitated. Never even looked like it bothered him as he pointed the gun and shot a man he saw as family in the head at point blank range.”
“I think you’d be surprised to know that it did bother him.”
“How so?”
“He has a dollar sign, a symbol of money, tattooed on his chest.”
“Perhaps it is just a souvenir, a reminder of what was most likely his first kill.”
“No. It is regret.”
“And you know this how? Did he tell you he killed Zach?”
“No. He merely told me that he hadn’t had his back and because of that, he had died, but he didn’t refer to him as his brother or call him by name. He called him his best friend. It was obvious that he was important to him.”
“So important to him that he killed him in order to impress the leader enough for a promotion.”
“You said yourself that you can’t prove it. How reliable is your witness? How do you know that he isn’t the one who shot Cash and just laid it off on Damian?”
“Because my witness was undercover DEA with no reason to lie about it. His name is Samuel Robinson. You might know him as Jack Knife.”
“What? Jack Knife was DEA?”
“Yes. He went in fresh out of the academy and was in there for years undetected.”
“That’s why he was off to places that D knew nothing about. He was making contact with the DEA.”
“Most likely. I already knew about the cabin you told me about. He used it as a meeting place from time to time. It never drew suspicion for one of our female agents to meet him at a bar and then go home with him, or so it would seem to the casual observer.”
“And the BDSM chamber?”
“Well, Samuel did have the place at his disposal for whatever he chose to do with it. I don’t know if that was just there for show to keep people from nosing about too much. You know, setting it up to look like he was a real freak show, and it was best no one bother him too much when he was there.”
“He made videos of some of the things he did there with women and showed them to people.”
“Did he? Don’t believe all that you hear or that what people see is really what is going on. You’d be surprised how clever we DEA agents can be when we want to paint a picture of someone.”
“A picture vivid enough to get him tortured and killed.”
“Are you sure about that?”
I watched as he pushed a button on his phone and spoke into the speaker, asking someone to come down to his office. I looked at him blankly and he smiled, holding up a single finger as if to tell me to just wait. A knock at the door behind me sounded.
“Come in,” Jeremiah said and I turned to find myself looking up at the tall, hulking figure of a man in a suit. He looked familiar, but it took a moment to realize that he had only changed cosmetic things about his appearance. I was looking at Samuel Robinson.
“Nice to see you again, Janessa,” he said with a smile.
“How? You’re dead.”
“I don’t feel dead.”
“I don’t understand. They found you. They said you had been brutalized.”
“All
set up with the right people. I’m very much alive, though I do feel a bit like a ghost with the limitations on how much I can go out in public.”
“Samuel is being relocated soon. He has some loose ends to tie up before he goes. A lot of the information he has provided us over the years has had to be kept quiet and can only now be brought out. Once they find out he is alive, he will have a huge target on his head.”
“Why now? Why did you pull him out after so long?” I asked Jeremiah, but Samuel answered.
“My position was compromised by the group of members that is trying to overthrow D. They wanted me to choose sides. I had to choose Damian in order to maintain my trust with him and keep doing the work I had been sent in to do. When I did, they threatened me. Some of them were tailing me everywhere. They had me in a corner that I couldn’t get out of. The DEA decided to kill me off before they did a more permanent job of it.”