by Hazel Parker
“No,” I said. “No.”
I didn’t expect her to write me an email about her thoughts, but she was usually pretty good about responding to her messages, anyways. It was just after ten, and she answered her messages at the top of the hour. I had sent mine just a few minutes before ten, right in the window when I knew she would be the most communicative.
Things weren’t sitting right.
“I have to go,” I said.
“Woah, hold up,” Trace said. “To where?”
“Her office.”
“You want everyone to know that you’re in cahoots with her?”
I hesitated. It was a damn good point, unfortunately, that if I just waltzed into her office, a lot more questions than answers would come. I had a terrible feeling someone from the Mercs had gotten to her, but I had no proof of that—no texts, no hurried phone calls, nothing of that nature.
“If you just drive up, park your bike… first of all, they have a police presence there, and they aren’t Wiggins’ people,” Trace said. “Second of all, that’s not like meeting her at a gas station. That’s a white-collar business; you’ll stick out like the black-jacket wearing dude that you are.”
“OK, but I have to go!” I said.
“Let’s pause,” Sensei said from behind the bar. “She was working with Jose Gonzalez, right? Diablo’s brother?”
“Yeah,” I growled.
“So if she is in danger, he would know or he would be the one putting her in danger,” he said. “And we know that he’s the CEO of Sea Sailor Whiskey, right?”
“The point, Sensei!” I shouted, getting uncomfortably on edge.
“The point is that if we know he’s not at the whiskey headquarters, there’s a chance that he’s gone to see Megan, and if that’s the case, yeah, we can be concerned,” he said. “We know Jose has met her in person, so it would make sense that he would do it again. But if he’s in his office, then we can say that she’s just working at her desk extra hard and just hasn’t checked her phone recently.”
It was a good, rational point. I just wasn’t thinking rationally right now.
“It’s probably filled with Mercs,” Trace said. “If all the employees there aren’t members of the Mercs, a significant portion are.”
“So someone not with the Saints,” I said.
Splitter looked up with a long sigh.
“I know who can help.”
* * *
“Splitter, you have no idea how much appreciate you doing this.”
Splitter and I sat at a coffee shop one block away from the whiskey place, our bikes parked comfortably out of sight of anyone walking to and from the whiskey headquarters.
“You owe Amber big time,” he said. “Lucky as hell she agreed to this too.”
I didn’t respond to that. I was well aware the risk that a high-profile legal lawyer was taking by walking in and asking for a tour of the place under a fake name. The problem was, no one else was willing to risk it—probably for their own sanity—and no one else was available who might have been able to risk it.
I hadn’t had to bribe Splitter, per se, but it was heavily implied and understood that at a later point and time, I would owe him big time. The bill always came due, if not today, if not tomorrow, if not this year, then at some point, but for right now, with the clock we were operating on—it was already thirty minutes past ten, and time was ticking—I didn’t have time to haggle over the size of the bill.
“Really think she’s not well, huh?” Splitter said.
I nodded to that. I had assumed the gruff, tough demeanor that couldn’t be bothered by anything but my task at the moment right now. Splitter nodded, sighed, and shook his head.
“Sorry,” he said.
I looked up at him and took off my sunglasses.
“If Amber were in this same spot, I’d be doing the same thing,” he said. “Hell, I dragged all of North Hollywood into an ugly shootout for her. Love is making the Saints do some crazy shit, man. But you know what? I fucking think it’s worth it.”
“Yeah,” I finally said.
“Look how much more stable and sure of himself Trace is. Look at how much more stable I am! And shit, you know how hard that is! And look at you, man. You used to be Mr. Badass, Mr. Tough, but that also meant no one knew you. You were like this object of mystery, man, but now… shit man, I kind of like you, BK.”
I snorted and gave a slight smirk.
“Although sometimes you’re still too goddamn quiet.”
I chuckled at that.
“Force of habit,” I said, which was the most I would give him at that moment.
“Fair enough. I—”
At that moment, wearing sunglasses, jeans, and a baseball hat, Amber walked in.
“He’s not there right now,” she said.
“Shit!” I growled, loud enough that I drew eyeballs from some of the other coffee drinkers. Not that I really gave a shit.
I stood up and left my half-drunk coffee on the table, hurrying to where my bike was.
“BK!” Splitter yelled. “You don’t even know for sure, he could be anywhere!”
“No,” Amber said. “I heard someone say it. He went to Megan. Said he wanted to get some advice on next steps.”
That only picked up my pace as I started to run toward my bike. The panic and dread running through me were similar to that incident in Iraq. If I lost her like I lost Jess…
North Hollywood was going to look like a fucking peace summit in comparison.
“BK!” Splitter shouted. “I’ll call the others!”
I wasn’t listening by this point, though. Splitter and Amber could do whatever they needed to do. If the rest of the club wanted to show up and help me, cool. If not, tough shit. I wasn’t going to wait for anyone to assist me.
I was back in combat, back in a rescue mission, back with a chance to make amends for what happened when I was in Iraq.
I nearly spun off the wall in front of me I was hurrying so badly to get the bike out of the parking lot. I knew where Sunset Boulevard was from here, and at this point, I didn’t need anything else to guide me there. I roared down the highway, moving at speeds well above the seventy miles per hour posted on the road. I don’t know what I hit—I just went fast enough that I didn’t die, but at the highest speed otherwise.
I was not going to fail. I had to do whatever it took. I had a pistol that I carried with me at all times, and I had also packed a knife right before Splitter and I had left the club just in case I ran out of ammo.
And then her building came into view faster than even I had thought. Thank God. There may still be a chance.
I parked my bike at the front entrance, ignoring the “Do Not Park” signs—if it got towed, fine, but if I took too long and Megan got hurt, that would have been the worst thing ever—and hurrying to the front.
It took someone special, after all, to make me believe in being Burke Kyle more than BK.
However, as soon as I walked in, two security guys stood at the entrance, stopping me.
“Can we help you, son?” the first one said.
They were both shorter than me and a little plump, too. There wouldn’t be any struggle to get by them.
“I need to get to Megan Walker; she’s in grave danger,” I said.
“I’m pretty sure that’s our job,” the second one said with a laugh.
I didn’t have time. I rushed past them, sprinting for the stairs.
“Dispatch! We’ve got an intruder in the building!”
I ignored the guys. There would be a whole mess of authorities and law enforcement here any minute now; but if I didn’t get there first, I had no faith in justice being served. Jose would weasel his way out of it somehow, I knew.
And even if he didn’t, well, Megan didn’t need some random stupid cop to be the one to rescue her. It needed to be me.
I sprinted the stairs three at a time as security behind me wheezed, out of breath and too short to get up three stairs at once.
They yelled for me to stop, but I ignored them. What was I going to do, turn around and suddenly ask for them to realize what was going on?
I busted down the door to the third floor, saw the hallway leading to Megan’s office, and sprinted, pulling my pistol out. Her secretary saw me, screamed, and ducked.
“Get out of here!” I shouted.
And then, with barely a chance to catch my breath, I lifted my foot and kicked open the door.
Inside, Megan screamed. She had her shirt torn off, her pants down, and only her undergarments on. Next to her, keeping her in a headlock, was goddamn Jose fucking Gonzalez.
“Step the fuck away from her!” I shouted.
I should’ve just shot him right there, but I couldn’t get a clean angle on Jose. Even with all my military training, the window was so small, and the risk wasn’t worth it. It was a shot I could have converted maybe ninety percent of the time, but if the one in ten came up and I was now more actively responsible than I had been with Jess…
Making matters even worse, I quickly realized, was that Jose had a gun pressed up against her skull.
“I don’t think so, buddy!” Jose said. “You fucking killed my brother! You killed family! Now your little lady here dies!”
“Is that what you want?” I snapped. “You want to walk out of here with two dead bodies and a gun with your fingerprints all over it? You think you’ll be going anywhere but jail for the rest of your life? You’re fucked, Jose. Maybe if you turn yourself in, you’ll see daylight again, but I don’t think so!”
I was shocked at the words that flowed easily from my mouth, but for Megan, no words could be enough. I had to get them all out until she was safe.
“What the fuck did you do to her, anyway?” I said. “Megan! Did he touch you?”
She was in tears, nearly in hysterics. She shook her head no. She hadn’t been raped yet, but…
She’d already had her innocence ripped from her. Maybe that was a dumb thing to say about a woman in her thirties, but there was a certain purity to her that I had never had a chance to have. The military and then the Saints had stained me, darkened me, turned me into a man capable of being a full-on monster.
And now, Jose was threatening to do the same to Megan.
“I know you have, buddy,” Jose said.
At that moment, the two security guys who had chased me up the stairs appeared, yelling “Freeze!”
It was immediately followed by, “What the fuck?” when they saw that Jose had Megan wrapped in a headlock, trying to rape her and then maybe even kill her.
“The cops are going to be here any moment, Jose,” I said. “We know the Mercs set up the Saints. The Saints haven’t done anything. It’s all you, isn’t it?”
“That doesn’t matter now!” he said, but it was enough.
Jose’s confession would get out eventually. “Eventually” probably meant this evening, or at most in a couple of days.
But right now, that didn’t mean shit if I didn’t rescue Megan.
“Dispatch, we have a hostage situation here, we—”
And then it all went down so quickly that my military mind took over. I could barely describe myself as thinking or conscious in these moments—it wasn’t until it all finished that I had any chance to recall what had happened.
Jose pointed the gun forward, I thought at me, and fired. The bang of the gun produced screams downstairs as employees evacuated the building, but it didn’t hit me. It instead hit one of the security guards behind me in the arm, leading to a loud scream.
Megan screamed. Jose shook, holding out his gun.
But in doing so, he had taken the gun away from Megan’s head. I fired quickly at him, hitting him in the shoulder.
The wound wasn’t fatal. But it did cause him to drop the gun. It was only after the fact that I realized if I’d been thinking about it when I shot, I wouldn’t have. I was lucky that the ninety percent accuracy was true to form.
Megan escaped his arm and shoved him away. It wasn’t enough to knock him down, but he stopped paying attention to me. I sprinted forward.
“You fucking bi—”
He didn’t get to finish the words as I put a bullet clean through his skull. Megan was reduced to a shrill, hysterical scream as she collapsed to the ground in tears. I went over to Jose, looked him up and down, and confirmed he was dead. There was no coming back from that.
“Fucking DM scum.”
I raised my gun to put a gratuitous bullet in his head.
And that’s when I snapped back into real consciousness, when I realized what the fuck had just happened.
I had killed Jose. I had cut off the DM’s supply of finance and brains. The Mercs wouldn’t die with this, but they would be on life support. At best, they’d operate more as individuals and less as an entity.
But I had done it.
Jose was finished.
I looked down at Megan, still on the ground, bawling her eyes out in terror at what had happened. She was not going to forget this day and the aforementioned purity of her life had been forever erased.
But she was alive.
And, in time, she would heal from this ordeal.
My own purity, if I ever had it, had disappeared in that fateful three-day span in which Jess got murdered in her home and I lost my brothers in combat. I had gone from the man who was joking and playful, Burke Kyle, to BK in a snap. It had taken me over a decade to get over it.
But I had, because I was alive.
“Megan, baby,” I said, pulling at her arm. “It’s OK; it’s over; it’s over.”
She still sniffled and sobbed, but she looked up at me.
“He was going to take me, Burke,” she said between tears. “He was… he was…”
“I know,” I said, hugging her close.
“How…” she said. “How did you know? I wasn’t able to… able to get away…”
I gently brushed her hair as she regained control of her breathing on me.
“When you didn’t respond to me, I knew something was up. Call it a gut feeling. I don’t know. I wanted to come here sooner… Sorry I didn’t.”
“No, don’t say that, you’re here,” she said, even as she continued to sob.
Seconds later, I could hear the rest of the Savage Saints pull up. They weren’t going to get in, because I could hear the police arriving. It would take a long, long time to get all of this mess cleaned up. Even though we’d eventually be able to prove our innocence, this was another public display of ill will that wasn’t helping matters.
Except… maybe it didn’t have to be.
“Megan,” I said. “I know you’re in shock. I know that was very scary. But…”
She sniffled some more, but she was slowly regaining control of herself.
“Can you help the club out?”
Chapter 18: Megan
I was not a religious person by any stretch of the imagination, but I was reduced to calling what had happened that morning a miracle.
I’d managed to push Jose off of me for several minutes, effectively balancing the false promises of future dates with some deft ducking and dodging. But he had eventually lost patience, and he became physical with me. He had ripped my shirt and almost got my pants off when we heard the yelling downstairs.
Immediately, he’d known it was Burke. He lost his mind cussing him out. And then I thought I was going to die when he put me in a headlock and pushed the cold gun against the side of my skull.
I didn’t like how much I cried at that moment. I wailed like a baby. I had no idea how Amber had acted during the shootout in North Hollywood, but I doubted it was as bad as I was. I couldn’t even claim that I had done anything special to help Burke when he finally shot Jose. I was trying to get away as badly as I could—I had hoped that shoving him away would cause me to fall to the ground, where I could just get swallowed up and disappear and not have to deal with any of this.
But as Burke had said right there, I could still help the club. Maybe I co
uldn’t help him kill Jose. The fact that his corpse was still bleeding out right behind me was terrifying.
I could help, though, in other ways.
“Officers,” I said through tears as I approached the two security guards. “Let me explain everything. But let me do it downstairs.”
And so, looking disheveled, with Burke looking on with the rest of the Saints, I held what felt like an impromptu press conference in front of the media and in front of the police.
“If not for the actions of the Savage Saints,” I started, “I would have been raped and possibly be dead. One month ago, I stood before the town hall of North Hollywood to help them combat what I believed was the scourge of the Saints. But in reality, the Devil’s Mercenaries have been working behind the scenes for weeks to try to make the Saints look like villains. I now know, Jose Gonzalez, the CEO of Sea Sailor Whiskey, was the money man behind the club and was using me to get to the Saints.”
I could see the officers look up in shock when I said that. I knew that it would take dozens more interviews away from the cameras to confirm this, but as I always said, that could take care of itself. I wasn’t trying to win the court of the legal system; I was trying to win the court of public opinion.
And, well, put bluntly, there were few things that drew more sympathetic and understanding coverage than a tearful, attractive, disheveled woman who had just nearly had her life ended by a criminal.
“Jose engaged me in a business partnership to try to plant shops in North Hollywood and Green Hills so that he could spy on the Savage Saints and eventually infiltrate their ranks to end them. During this time, I, like so many others, followed the news coverage of the attacks supposedly done by the Saints. At first, like others, I believed these to be the act of the Saints.”
I gulped.
“However, one of the tasks given to me by Jose for our business deal was for me to go to Green Hills, meet the Saints, and ask them to help spread their whiskey. It is true that the Saints are not like most people and they may not be everyone’s cup of tea. However, I can assure you that in my experience with them, they were nothing but kind, honest, and caring. I came to realize this when I was held hostage by Jose, who believed that I was working with one of the Saints.”