by Nikki Wild
I was the son of a Phoenix detective.
Had I not already been sitting, I would have been floored at the fucking words.
“Your father wasn’t a fan of leadership,” Jack recalled. “He liked playing it easy, keeping out of the spotlight. After we started rising up the ranks, the sly bastard started turning down any major promotion that gave him more power. Our superiors were throwing their hands up in disgust. But when they had the bright idea to offer him that, well…”
“You said you two were partners?”
“Yes,” Jack nodded. “We worked so well as a team that we were made official from the start. I spent a decade chasing down perps with Gabriel at my side until they put me behind a desk.”
“And my dad?”
“They put him through more coursework, and he passed his exams. Flying colors. So they made him a detective. But when he was done, we still worked under the same building, and we still saw each other almost every day.”
Our glasses were empty.
I poured us both more whiskey.
Jack studied my face, one eye narrowing. “You’re trying to figure out what all of this has to do with you… and with Sarah…”
I gruffly nodded.
The retired sheriff gazed off again.
“I can remember it so clearly,” he groaned in recollection, “because that was the week I was made the newest deputy…”
My eyebrow rose.
“Remember what, clearly?”
His gaunt eyes flicked to mine again, filling with a quiet, tranquil anger. I could see something stirring within his hardening glare.
“When the truth about him came out.”
I leaned a little closer.
“For a couple of years up until then, Gabriel Hargreaves had been following the trail of a local motorcycle club. They were some old-school guys, ran by the name of the Obsidian Riders…”
The name struck a bell.
In the days that I was reunited with Sarah, I was hunting down an old Mexican cartel that had interfered with my family’s past. In a moment of desperation, I reached out through my extensive network of thugs and rival clubs, the Outlaws, to all the nearest motorcycle gangs…
The Obsidian Riders MC answered the call, ruled by a crotchety old fucker. Pulling them was a gamble, but it was a gamble that kept Sarah, my club, and even me from being dug early graves…
Their biker president had allegedly led the club with an iron fist for decades. I wondered if he was running the show at the time that my father investigated them, but something told me I’d never know for sure…
Jack’s voice cut through memory lane.
“You’re not listening.”
I blinked the past away. “Sorry. Go on.”
The retired sheriff studied me sternly and very carefully, as if he were reconsidering even telling me this tale.
“…My old partner had been investigating leads on the club for years,” he continued curtly, “slowly building up a vault of evidence. By the time that he proposed going undercover with them, he had enough to paint a damning picture of their criminal activities…”
I took a deep sip of my liquor.
“I tried to tell them to send someone else… someone we could plant. But Gabriel wanted to do this himself, and he was one of the smartest and most capable we had…”
“So your superiors agreed.”
“That’s right.” Jack swished his half-empty glass. “Your father went under the tattoo gun, grizzled himself up, and slipped into the Phoenix underworld under our indirect supervision…”
“You said the truth came out about him?”
Jack stopped moving his glass. His eyes were furiously locked onto something behind me, in the debris of his kitchen.
“He’d fooled us all.”
I let him linger on that thought.
“Gabriel Hargreaves had been working with them the entire time, or at least from the start of his investigation. He was protecting the Obsidian Riders, always giving us enough to go on but keeping us from vital operations.”
I dwelled on that information.
So, my father was a renegade after all…
“Our stings failed to stop them because he had already been one of them for year, taking a solid cut of their profits. All we had done was accidentally let him make it fucking official.”
Jack locked his eyes onto mine.
“In fact, he was so committed to the goddamn club that he took one of their women as his own. We had no idea. But when everything came out, Gabriel Hargreaves disappeared into thin air with that woman and a fat stack of cash…
“Leaving behind only a young boy…”
Everything came to a standstill. My mind was racing faster than ever before.
No…
It can’t be…
Jack leaned forward menacingly.
“It took us almost a year to find the boy. But by the time we did, he had been long left in the arms of a deeply troubled young woman with a young girl, not much older than him. All this young lady wanted was her very own boy to raise, and when her old ex-boyfriend showed up…”
I was so stunned that I couldn’t move.
Jack poured himself another glass of whiskey before topping off mine. His eyes were calm and calculated, a sinister glint to their shine.
“She had family high up in the legal system. An uncle, I think. Either way, the relevant parties made that official too, and she got to keep him. As some sort of twisted favor to her old flame, she wouldn’t even consent to renaming the boy, choosing to preserve the legacy. So twisted, she was, that she even had her own daughter’s last name changed to match – tying the children both together at a glance as brother and sister, forever.”
If this was true…
Then everything had changed.
Everything I knew about my life…
Everything I knew about my lost sister…
All of it had been built upon a stack of lies. That entire goddamn stack had just been ripped out from beneath me, and I felt something inside plummeting into the abyss…
At the very start of this conversation, I had been the angry one. My anger had been righteous, knowing no bounds. But this time, when we made eye contact once more… it was Jack Buchanan’s eyes that were full of bitter hatred.
“Hunter Hargreaves…” he snarled my name. “The day we first met, you were a toddler. Even then, I could see fire and darkness in your eyes…”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
Everything around us was fading…
“Your father betrayed us all,” Jack growled. “The bastard was intelligent and resourceful enough to spend years on the inside, deceiving the finest goddamn team of professional criminal investigators Phoenix had to offer, tricking our superiors into giving him exactly what he wanted and escaping justice in the end…
“Better yet, through both of your parents, your stained bloodline ties you directly into one of the vilest, most heinous biker clubs Arizona has ever seen…
“And I watched you follow in his footsteps at every turn, growing ever rebellious even before finding your own goddamn motorcycle…”
His expression filled with hellfire.
He rose from his seat, his voice roaring.
“Is there any wonder, then, why I wouldn’t let you anywhere near my fucking daughter?”
I stared him in the eyes.
“I’m not my fucking father. I was never going to be my fucking father until you pushed me, over and over…”
Jack scoffed loudly.
“That’s right, boy,” he sneered at me. “Blame me for your choices.”
“I don’t blame you for my choices,” I told him in no uncertain terms. “I make my own decisions. I build my own destiny. My choices and my luck are mine alone, and I earn them by rising up in spite of people like you…
“…That’s how, despite your best goddamn efforts, Sarah and I came back together again. It’s how we rekindled our love. It’s how
I put a ring on her finger and our child in her womb.”
Jack sat back down, livid.
“You’ve tricked her somehow…”
“Tricked her? No,” I shook my head. “I was the better man. All this time, you’ve been pushing her away… what did you think was going to happen? Why do you think you’re only just finding out about me now? We’ve been back together for over a year, Jack…
“Who knows Sarah better now?” I crossed my arms, staring him down. “Not the Sarah from the last decade, because you took that away from me, but the one that exists right now. The only one that matters anymore…” For emphasis, I repeated the question: “Jack, who do you honestly think knows her better now…?
“You?”
I pointed at him, then myself.
“Or me?”
Jack stayed silent, simmering away in his head, but I could see those old cogs turning... and what was working its way through his head was not making him happy.
“You, a former man of the law, pulled a goddamn shotgun on us earlier. I need you to walk me through what was going on in that thick skull of yours.”
“I pulled a gun on you,” he clarified.
“No, Sarah was in my arms,” I reminded him. “We were standing together. Mince words all you fucking want, but that means you pulled a gun on both of us.”
Jack swallowed.
His anger slowly turned to remorse.
But it didn’t strike me as the kind of sadness that came from the action itself. There seemed to be something else there, hanging behind it. If I could just get him to bring it out…
“I don’t have time to drive you away from her anymore,” Jack shook his head. “It was a stupid reaction, one that might have cost me everything, but I panicked.”
“What do you mean, you ‘don’t have time’?”
He looked me square in the eyes. The room went quiet as he let the question hang in the air, as if summoning up the strength to tell me some vital piece of inform–
“I’m a dying man, Hunter.”
I studied his expression.
He was probably a decent liar…
“Dying, huh?”
“Believe me or not. I don’t care.” he haggardly shook his head. “Your opinion means nothing to me. The only thing left in this world for me to care about is the safety of my daughter…”
I leaned back in my chair.
His expression was blank as he gazed off.
Maybe it was true. It was definitely true that I didn’t remember him needing a cane before, and he certainly seemed weaker than memory served, but a decade can do a lot to an older man…
“Say I believe you. What’s killing you?”
“Cancer,” he told me. “Throat cancer.”
“Your voice,” I realized.
“Yeah,” he chuckled gravely. “Always had a bit of a cough. Been choking on the damned dust out here all my life in the line of duty, so… I guess it just snuck up on me.”
“What kind of treatment plan do you have?”
“Treatment plan?” He smiled. “None.”
I shook my head.
“You’re not taking drugs? You’re not doing chemo?” I could feel my temper rising by the goddamn second…
“The diagnosis was two weeks ago,” Jack mentioned nonchalantly. “Haven’t had much time to get my ducks in a row, but I’ve had plenty of time to think. The doc wants me to come in to talk about a treatment plan, but I’ve seen what cancer does to people. Ain’t going through that bullshit, boy. I’d rather let this thing run its course…and when I’m gone, I’m gone.”
“What about Sarah?” I started to snap. “What about your grandson? Do they not mean anything to you, old man?”
Jack smirked.
“Don’t forget, I’m fairly new to this ‘grandson’ business,” he quickly reminded me. “As for my daughter, well…I knew that she could take care of herself. When she made detective, I was so goddamn proud of her. Wish her mother could have seen it with me. Then, that case of hers went crazy and she was let go from the force, pulled herself back together as a private eye…”
“You didn’t think she needed you?”
Jack shook his head. “I raised her to not need me, after a point. By now, she’s got everything she needs to make her way in the world.”
He leaned forward again.
“But then, here you come…riding in, ruining everything again. Imagine, one of the last times I’m probably going to see my daughter again, and she reveals to me that she’s brought you back into her life…I saw all my hard work come undone before my eyes.”
“Why didn’t you tell her?”
“I was going to! I told her over the phone when she first rang that I had wanted to talk to her soon anyway…I was going to tell her over dinner the night she arrived.”
“But then I was there.”
He nodded darkly.
“Yes. But then you were there.”
I could see that there wasn’t anything left to lose now. Jack Buchanan was set in his ways over this entire thing, and I had nothing more to gain. I had failed in my mission.
“You’re a fool,” I shook my head.
“Yes,” he sipped his drink. “I suppose I am.”
We both stared into space for what must have been minutes, but felt like eons. Jack and I were two bitter rivals, fighting over the future of the same woman…
The old man rose to take a leak.
I stayed seated, lost deep in thought until he finally wandered back a few minutes later. His scraping the chair legs against the ground stirred me from my thoughtful haze enough to mutter something that even I thought was ridiculous.
“I wish I could have made you proud.”
He looked over at me.
“What did you say?”
“You heard me,” I replied calmly. “At first, before you ground me down into the gutter, I just wanted to earn your respect. My love for your daughter was so strong that I would have done anything to make you at least tolerate me.”
Jack remained quiet.
“All that sneaking around, trying to steal her away just for a few hours here and there…I didn’t want any part of that. But you wouldn’t listen to us, and you didn’t respect her wishes.”
“I was her father. She was meant to obey me.”
“And where has that gotten you?” I looked him dead in the eye. “Sarah’s due in only a few months, and here you are, with no idea you had a grandchild on the way…”
“I won’t apologize for being stern on her. For making choices for her that she wasn’t equipped to properly make.” He looked away. “There are sterner ways to raise a child, and I’ve spared her a great deal more than you can possibly imagine…so I’ll never apologize for those choices.”
“Not asking you to.”
“Then what are you asking?”
I shook my head, chuckling to myself.
“For your blessing to marry her.”
Jack tilted his head at me, then leaned back and roared with laughter.
“You honestly think I’d let you marry her?”
“There’s no letting Sarah do anything,” I reminded the old bastard. “She’s already said ‘yes’. But I’d like you to stop judging me by the sins of my father, and be okay with it.”
“Over my dead body.”
“Seems like that can be arranged,” I replied callously. “But if you want me to convince her that you’re worth keeping in her life, especially in your condition…if you want to ever meet your grandson…then, if I were you, I’d reconsider how strongly I held that stance…”
Just then, there came a heavy pounding at the front door. It was rough and frenzied enough for me to hear it, all the way back here.
“You expecting more company?”
“As a matter of fact, yes…” Jack’s face turned evil with a grin. “Your hour’s up, boy.”
The door pounded again.
“What is this?” I snarled.
“I was very
clear, Hunter…”
Jack slid his tumbler of whiskey across to me, a triumphant look on his face. He tilted his head and began to laugh.
“I warned you at the beginning…”
The sound of the front door bursting open drew my attention. I narrowed my eyes at the old bastard, sensing danger.
“Jack… what did you do?”
“I told you, one hour, Hunter...”
An authoritative voice bellowed: “Freeze!”
A pack of armed officers burst into the room, handguns pointed my way. I lifted my hands in surrender, just in time to be ripped from the chair and tackled down into the shattered debris, my wrists cuffed tightly behind my back…
Twenty-One
Sarah
Dad drove his truck as I rode shotgun. We were riding in complete silence, refusing to talk to one another after the revelation.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he grunted.
“Like what?” I snapped at him.
He glanced over at me. “Like you think that I’m some despicable human being.”
My eyes narrowed.
“Asshole, you had my fiancé arrested.”
He swallowed dryly.
“I know. And I’m gonna make it all right.”
“Oh yeah?” I grumbled. I tried, in vain, to get more comfortable by shifting position in my seat. “And how are you planning on doing that, huh? Unless the police force here is more corrupt than I remember…”
“I’m going to drop the charges,” he said.
“Well duh. But what else?”
“What do you mean, ‘what else?’”
“Dad… you’ve made it no secret that you’ve had it out for Hunter since he was a teenager,” I pointed out to him. “Don’t you think the precinct is going to find it just a little strange that you’re rolling in and suddenly exonerating him?”
“I’ll have you,” he affirmed patiently. “That’s reason enough. They know you two were close.”
“Close,” I scoffed.
“You know what I mean.”
I rolled my eyes and gazed out the window. It was going to be another ten minutes before we could get to the police station, and I was tired already of being in such small space with him.
His phone rang.