by Brook Wilder
He had no reason to even want to trust me.
Pushing off the bed, I walked back over to the desk and sat down in front of my laptop, my jaw clenched. I couldn’t rely on Keith to just spoon-feed me what the club wanted me to know. They weren’t going to give me the nuggets I needed to take on Julian, especially not the bits of information he had been shoveling my way.
I was a journalist, dammit, and a journalist didn’t wait for someone to make her a sensation.
She did it herself, which was what I needed to do. I needed to remember what I was here for and that Keith was just an added bonus right now.
Still, my body shivered as I thought about us together and how he made me feel inside. I really liked Keith and if he wasn’t a Rough Jester, then I would be thinking about a future with him.
A future with Keith. Was there a possibility? Probably not. I still didn’t know where my leads were going to point me toward and if it ended with the Rough Jesters going to prison, I doubted Keith would be up to continuing our romance from behind bars.
Nor did I want to picture Keith in jail because of something I caused. He was a good guy, one that should be on the outside and not behind bars.
Biting my lip, I stared at the blinking cursor on the search engine I had pulled up. I really, really didn’t want Keith to go to jail. If I pulled up stakes now and dropped the story, left without seeing him again, all would be well.
I wouldn’t be the reason for him getting into trouble if something broke loose.
Unfortunately, if I did that, I was back at square one. I had nothing save a few loose threads that I couldn’t tie together. This entire trip and the money I had spent staying here would be a wash. I would go back to my crummy apartment, to my crummy job behind the scenes, and Julian would still win.
But if I stayed on this track, I could achieve my goals. Wasn’t I tired of being second rate to a man?
“You’re an idiot, Anders,” I whispered to myself, unable to bring my hands to the keyboard. Keith was nothing like Julian, which made it ten times harder to continue tearing apart everything he loved. He hadn’t done anything wrong to me specifically, only clouded my judgment and made me wonder what else there was that I was missing.
What if he had been put in my path to throw me off theirs?
Shaking my head, I forced the thoughts out of my head. No, I didn’t want to think like that. Keith was genuine, the sort of guy that every girl wanted to meet.
He wouldn’t set me up like that. He wasn’t the type of guy that would set someone up like that.
Was he?
Ugh. I didn’t want to have these thoughts about Keith. I wanted to keep my relationship with him and this job separate, but they kept intertwining.
They were related, no matter how much I didn’t want them to be.
Which meant I had to be on my A game. I couldn’t afford to put this investigation off any longer nor could I just lie around in Keith’s bed and hope that my life would come back to me.
It wasn’t going to. I was the only person that could change the trajectory of my future and Keith wasn’t going to do it for me.
Cracking my knuckles, I started back to work.
There were secrets to be found and I was going to be the one to find them.
***
Two hours later, I finished sucking down my water as I clicked through a particular website, reading each line with interest. It was a very well put together site of articles about the cartel and their long list of sinful deeds.
But it wasn’t the cartel that had me reading along. At first, I didn’t really know what I was looking for, but the mention of a former chief of police for Castillo had me digging into information I didn’t know was there.
Turned out, Castillo used to be under the watch of one Brad Walker. Walker was corrupt, given the way these articles about him were written. There were complaints about the way he policed the town and how he allowed those that were known associates or businesses of the cartel to get off on some pretty serious crimes, while snuffing out those that were against the cartel.
There were lists of people that had ‘gone missing’ under his watch, their bodies never found. It was frightening to think that someone in his position of power could be responsible for something as serious as murder.
What the heck had gone on here?
Finally, I found a small piece, one that hadn’t been corroborated but was believed by everyone that had commented on the article. While most of the words written were hailing the bikers as heroes, there were some that wondered if Walker hadn’t been set up to be killed by the clubs that hated him.
The clubs as in the Rough Jesters and Hell’s Bitches.
The more I read, the worse it got. There were rumors of a schoolteacher that had been Walker’s girlfriend at the time who had been kidnapped, though she had been found and released by Widow Maker herself. A quick search told me that Leigh Greene was still in Castillo, still teaching.
Interesting.
Quickly I wrote down her name and the school she was teaching at, wondering if I dared to ask her about her past. Based on what I was reading, she had been an abused woman and I was not in the business of bringing up some bad memories for her.
But I desperately needed to talk to anyone who could tell me what the hell was going on in Castillo.
I clicked on a few more of the articles, feeling my stomach churn as I read more. Walker was just the beginning. There had been someone else, an ATF agent, Jon Branch, who had also been investigating the relationship between the cartel and the club.
I did a quick search of his name and the picture that I found floored me, nearly knocking me out of the chair. It was of a smiling man and a woman, a woman who looked all too familiar to me.
It was the current chief of police in Castillo, the same one who was hooking up with a Rough Jester. Alisha Owens.
My fingers were flying over the keyboard now. I tried to find the current location of this Jon Branch. He would be a perfect one to talk to and give me the lowdown on the clubs.
I found nothing, which gave me pause as well. Normally I could find something on anyone, but Jon Branch seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth.
First a former chief of police and now an ATF agent, not including the one that was now the current chief of police, all tied to the same two clubs. Two of them were missing and the last one standing was keeping her secrets close to her person.
I wondered how much of this story Keith knew. Being relatively new to the club, I imagined he hadn’t been part of these scenarios, but surely someone had told him about the danger he was walking into.
I didn’t like any of it.
Rubbing the ache in my chest, I tried to make the pain go away. I was far too close to this, closer than I should be. If only I had kept my damn hands off Keith, kept myself distanced from the temptation, I would be attacking this like there was no tomorrow.
My relationship with Keith was holding back that woman. I could taste some sort of clarity that was so close to the surface, just waiting for me to do what I did best. I had told Keith I would get the information from him and him only, but he wasn’t giving me what I needed.
In fact, this search today had given me a hell of a lot more than he had been offering up.
I had broken that promise to him.
Pushing away from the desk, I paced the dirty motel floor, attempting to come up with a good game plan. I needed to talk to a credible source and if I didn’t know she already had me on her radar, Alisha Owens would have been perfect.
So that left Leigh Greene. I didn’t even know how I would spin it to her to get her talking, but I had to try. She likely knew about the cartel and the Rough Jester connection, especially since her ex-boyfriend was touted as being an honorary member of the Rough Jesters hater club.
Surely, she had heard something.
This had to work. I needed it to work because I had no idea where I would go next if it didn’t.
I did
n’t contact Keith that night or the next morning. I felt guilty for doing the research on the clubs and what I had found, not sure what I would say to him if he did reach out to me.
It hurt, oh it hurt badly. I had grown so accustomed to seeing him, spending the night in his bed, that I really didn’t know what to do other than to get drunk to drive him out of my mind.
Was this what it was going to feel like once I broke this story wide open? He would hate me. He would have no choice not to.
Which meant I would be alone again.
So, when I woke up with a nasty hangover, I told myself it was for the best. I had survived a night without Keith, and this was part of distancing myself in case it blew up in my face.
But by all that was holy, I missed him something fierce.
After a hot shower and some fast food, I drove to the school that Leigh Greene was supposedly teaching at. It was a nice-looking school, one that I would want to send my kid to, and I found myself mesmerized by the kids milling around.
I hadn’t given much thought to kids in my life. Sure, they were cute, but they were also a lot of work and for a serious journalist, the need to be able to follow a story at a moment’s notice was paramount.
One couldn’t do that with children, not without a very understanding husband.
Keith’s face flitted through my mind and I sighed, resting my aching head on my hand as I propped my elbow on the car door. Would he want kids? We hadn’t done a lot of talking about our future ambitions, but Keith would be an awesome father one day.
He was kind and caring and, ugh, the man that had likely stolen my heart in a very short period of time. No amount of alcohol was going to drown those memories, those feelings.
Finally, the kids went back inside, and I busied myself for the next hour, using nearly all of my cell-phone data listening to an audiobook. It was a little past two in the afternoon when the first of the soccer moms started lining up in front of the school, chatting with each other as they waited for their kids to finish their day.
When the kids did come pouring out of the school, I couldn’t help but smile at their eager little faces, glad that I wasn’t doing a piece that would target the innocent ones. No matter what I felt about Keith, the Rough Jesters had done some things that were questionable, which put them in the same category as the cartel in some instances.
Leigh Greene also made an appearance and I felt the nervousness creep up on me as I thought about how I would approach her.
New mom?
Nah, she wouldn’t believe that.
Battered women’s charity?
That made me feel dirty for preying on her like that.
Maybe I could just tell her I was doing a piece on Brad Walker and wanted a statement from her. That wouldn’t be stretching the truth too much and it might actually get me something from her.
I started to step out of the car when I caught sight of a man waiting at the bottom of the stairs, a man wearing a Rough Jesters vest.
Shit.
I scrambled back into my car, my heart pounding in my chest. Had Keith tipped them off? He wouldn’t have known I would come here, would he?
Was he spying on me through my computer?
The thought wasn’t that crazy. Keith was a whiz at computers.
“No! No! No!” I slammed my hand on the steering wheel, feeling the burn of tears in my eyes. I had been so close, so fucking close.
Chapter 20
Wires
She was upset about something.
I watched as Jill’s knee jiggled nervously, wondering what the hell she had gotten into now. When she had ghosted me last night, I hadn’t let it bother me too much. After all, she hadn’t come here to be hooking up with a sworn enemy and we both deserved our alone time.
It didn’t mean that I hadn’t fucking missed her every waking second of that night. My bed had seemed too damn lonely, her scent clinging to the sheets and taunting me every time I turned over.
So, when I picked her up this evening, I had half hoped she would say she had missed me too.
Instead, Jill hadn’t said two words to me, seemingly distracted by something.
Ignoring the flash of concern in my chest, I drove her to one of the drive-in diners on the outskirts of town, parking in the spot that would get us some food.
“What do you want?” I asked, my voice harsher than I had planned.
“Whatever you want to order,” she answered, leaning back on the seat.
Yeah, something was wrong. I stretched out my legs the best I could in the driver’s seat, attempting to think of how I would ask her to tell me. What if she had done something I couldn’t fix?
What if she had done something that would hurt the club? “You haven’t said a word. What’s up?”
Jill’s eyes met mine. “You are going to be mad at me.”
Shit. “Just tell me,” I pleaded, hoping it wouldn’t be so bad that Sabs and I couldn’t fix it. There wasn’t much we couldn’t fix.
“I did some researching,” she started, swallowing. “And found some information about Brad Walker.”
My jaw clenched at the name. Though it had been prior to me joining the Jesters, I knew who Walker was. He had been a corrupt police chief that didn’t give a shit about the community he served. Innocent people had lost their families, their friends, and some even their lives because of his connection with the cartel and I was fucking glad that he was dead. “What did you do?” I forced out, thinking the worst.
She turned away from me, her gaze back out of the window. “I tried to meet with Leigh Greene.”
Well hell, that was even worse and not because of what Walker had done to Leigh. No, she was married to Two Tone, and they had the damned cutest kid together. Jill bringing up Leigh’s past would put all that in jeopardy all over again. Leigh had worked her ass off to move on.
“Did you?”
“No,” she bit out. “There was a Jester there and I didn’t know if he had been sent so I drove away.”
I loosened the breath in my chest. Thank God. The last thing I needed was a pissed-off Jester husband after my ass because I couldn’t control my shit, meaning Jill. “Leave Leigh alone,” I said firmly. “She’s off- limits.”
Jill rounded on me, her eyes flashing. “She’s my best lead, Keith.”
“She’s off-limits, Jill,” I repeated, pissed off that she couldn’t see the pain she would cause if she brought Walker up to Leigh. “Don’t do that to her.”
Her jaw clenched. I knew she was pissed. But it wasn’t right, digging into people’s dark pasts, ones that they wanted to get rid of. “You don’t understand.”
“I understand all too goddamn well,” I bit out, resting my arm on the steering wheel, the food ordering forgotten. “You want to dig dirt up on the club. I told you to trust me, yet you went out and tried to find it anyway. Don’t you fucking care about people?”
Her nostrils flared. “Of course I do! I’m not out to hurt anyone.”
I let out a harsh laugh. “You could have fooled me.”
“That was low,” she said softly before climbing out of the car.
Swearing, I followed her, catching her by the arm and swinging her around to face me. “You’re right, it was low, but you need to understand that some things don’t need to be resurrected. This is one of them.”
Her gaze narrowed. “Why? Because it will prove that the Jesters killed Brad Walker? That it will give me ammunition to take to the Feds? I read the information, Keith, and there’s a hell of a lot of people who believe that your precious club killed him in cold blood.”
I knew the story and that was far from the truth. Brad Walker had been killed because he had kidnapped two little kids and Widow Maker, attempting to use them in his own sadistic way.
But I wasn’t about to explain that to Jill. “Keep your nose out of shit you don’t understand, Jill.”
She broke free from my grasp, taking a few steps backward to keep distance between us. “I’ve been pati
ent, but all you have done is feed me bullshit, Keith! I need to break this story. I need to get it done before Julian does. Don’t you understand that?”
It was always about Julian. Didn’t she know she was so much better than that asshole? “Your fucking life doesn’t revolve around him.”
Crossing her arms over her chest, Jill glared at me. “And yours shouldn’t revolve around the club.”