“Well, I did see it coming as soon as I recognized you three coming up my lane. Jonny confirmed it by insulting Beverly. But for future reference, you don’t attack a man like me in his own home.” Leo bent down and pulled the 9mm from the holster he had nailed to the bottom of the table. He showed it to Austin.
“I have twelve of these in various areas of the house. Twelve, Austin. I have twenty knives hidden in the same manner. To top it off, there are five grenades. I’ve ridden a lot of trails and seen a lot of things, and some of those things were really scary. So, yeah, this is probably paranoid, but, hell, sometimes people are really out to get me. So, again. Never on the man’s home turf. And it is never going to be simple.”
“You could have taken your shot and then shot all three of us. Fuck, we were in your home. No one would have said shit,” Austin said with nervous laugh. “Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t like killing. Never have. That’s why I got out of the military. I did it, served my time. But … this will probably sound kind of dorky, but it really felt like part of me was getting ripped away with every bullet. By the time I got out and back State-side, whole chunks of me were gone.”
Jonny started to stir, making questioning moaning sounds. Austin kicked him in the head and the moaning stopped. “No, I get that. I felt the same way. Exactly like that.”
“You were in?”
“Recon,” Austin nodded.
“So, like, what’s the deal?” Leo asked, looking him over.
“It just felt pointless. What was I exercising for? I didn’t want to be a killing machine any longer,” Austin said.
“Then do it for your son,” Leo told him.
“I don’t have a son,” Austin said with a laugh.
“Yeah, right now you don’t, but you will. Probably within five years. And you’re going to want to play with him, and ride with him, and do shit with him. Seriously,” Leo told him.
“You’re kind of strange,” Austin said with a smirk.
“Think so? You’re from Arkansas. The reason you have the name Austin is from the band, not the city. You’re twenty-eight years old and going to have a birthday within two months. You have a little sister, and you look after her. Steak is alright, but really you prefer a good hamburger with a beer. Your mother still writes you letters, not emails, even though she knows how and has a computer.”
“Holy shit!” Austin gasped, “What the fuck — how can you possibly know all of that?”
“Five years Austin, five years. Now, get Jonny out of my house, and let’s get them awake.”
Leo used the hose to wake Jonny and Wesley from their state. Both of them looked like hell had ridden over them. Leo tossed the hose down and walked up to their bikes. “I want you two to remember that I could have shot you in there, and neither the cops nor the club would have batted an eye at me for it. I could have shot you, but I didn’t, just like I didn’t shoot a defenseless fucking deputy.” Then he fired his gun, and with two shots, left wicked burning scars across each of their fenders.
“Fix that before a year is up, and I’ll kick the living crap out of you again. Only this time, I’ll go for bone breaking. I swear to god. Now, get the fuck off my land before I decide shooting you in the leg isn’t really going to kill you.”
The three of them rode off, and Leo watched them go.
“Arkansas license plate. Club is famous for steak, but I only see you eating hamburgers. Letter from your mother is in your back pocket…” he murmured to himself with a smile as he walked back into his house to put away his gun.
Chapter Eighteen
Leo slowed the 450 thumper down as he came up on the clearing that he and Crash used long ago as staging area. He knew it was the place, after a few more yards, because of the yellow police tape all over the place.
Then he saw her, sitting against her deputy car, on the other side of the street. She was looking at him with searching eyes. She hadn’t changed much in four years, either.
She motioned with her hand to come to her. Leo thought about running for it, but he decided that just sounded like a lot of energy wasted. So he got of the bike, turned off the motor, and took off his dirt helmet.
She was walking toward him by the time he had the helmet on the seat.
“I think I know you,” she said.
“Nope, you don’t,” he lied.
“I’m not often wrong with that,” she told him.
“Well, you’re probably wrong this time, at least a little,” he told her.
“His body was found in there. Near the middle of the clearing. Do you want to take a look?” she asked.
“If that would be alright,” Leo said.
“CSI is done, and so is everyone else, so you can’t hurt anything,” she said. “He was involved in a robbery about four years ago,” she added.
Leo went under the tape and began to scan the area with practiced eyes. “I think I might have read something about that,” Leo said. “Looks like his car came in, circled, and parked there. He gets out, waits about fifteen minutes. He’s nervous. Then he’s shot here and falls flat, his head hitting here. The attacker takes something from him. A box, maybe. It was sitting here, but it was gone before the cops show up.
“After that, another car comes in — oh.” He stopped, looking at the tire tracks of the second car.
“How can you tell all that?” she asked.
“Tire tracks and foot prints, obviously. One and a half cigarettes. Chain smoked. He didn’t smoke unless he was really nervous or seriously up on meth. Which he was probably both. The box print is there, but I don’t see one of those marker prints, so it was gone before you guys showed up or you would have marked it for photos.”
Leo looked around again. “What I don’t get is how he is shot in the back of the head when he’s looking at the entrance to the clearing.
“This truck,” he offered, “pulls in here, and stops. So, that has him facing Crash when he gets out of the cab. The man arriving in the truck is going to kill him. He knows that already. So, why wait? No witnesses out here, no house close enough to tell were the gun shot came from. He doesn’t put Crash on his knees to execute him, so … it doesn’t make any sense.”
“Crash had a partner four years ago,” she told him.
“Yeah, kind of a stupid guy back then. I remember him well,” Leo told her.
“What’s he like now?” she asked.
“Older, wiser, slowing down, choosing friends more carefully. You might like him, but would probably not want to, since you’re a cop and all.”
“He’s still a criminal?”
“Well, yes and no, but from your point of view, right now? Yes. He did a lot of diplomacy work, though, spent a lot of time on the road. You could have liked him then without feeling all weird about it.”
She was quiet for a moment and then asked softly, “Did he ever tell you why he didn’t take the shot?”
Leo turned and looked her in the eye. “Yes, because he’s not a murderer. And that would have been murder. You have two kids, probably a single mom, at least statistics suggest it is likely. So, really, how could he take the shot?”
She looked away, trying to blink away tears that were threatening to fall. “He must have caught hell from his club, though. I hear that it’s like one of the worst things a guy can do, to leave his partner like that.”
“He thought so. That’s why it took him so long to decide. As it turned out, when he showed up to quit his club, he was told that if he had taken the shot, he would have been asked to leave.”
Leo looked over at the dark spot that was Crash’s blood. “If Crash would have just kept his mouth shut, he would have been out that day and never seen prison. That’s all he had to do, was shut his mouth.”
He met her eyes again. “It was a defining moment for him, because he really did believe that — what you said about not leaving your partner. You cops have that too, though, right? Back each other, never leave him if things get heavy?”
>
She nodded and looked at her shoes. “Yes. We do.”
“What would you have done?” he asked.
She looked up at him and thought about it. “I would have rode away. I’m not a murderer, either, though Crash, well, he certainly brought the capacity to the surface.” Her face cracked a smile, just a little.
Leo smiled. “That makes you a member of a very large club.”
“You in that club?”
“Me? No. That’s why Crash was able to remain in the MC so long after he got out. He changed in there, in prison. He was much worse. Something broke in him, and his partner, well, for years, he couldn’t get past the guilt of leaving him.”
“You make it sound like Crash wasn’t in the Sinners any longer,” she observed.
“He wasn’t. This isn’t a club thing. I know whose truck that is. But I’m not sure that he killed him either. Though, it would be easy to set him up for it.” Leo grimaced.
“Who?” she said, all cop now.
He looked her over. She was quite good looking. “I’m not going to tell you, because then you’ll have to write my name down to say where you got the information, and for the next few weeks, I have to be a ghost in this. A lot of good lives are at stake. So, I can’t. But…”
“Yes?” she asked, watching him walk back over to the tracks.
“If you called around, and asked, perhaps in the El Cajon area, or nearby, you’d find someone who knows who drives a pickup truck — see the wide base and distance between the marks? — a truck with racing slick tires on it. You’ll find it’s a very short list. Not many are wealthy enough, stupid enough, and so hooked on themselves that they use racing slicks as day-to-day driving tires. They cost something like five hundred each and they wear out really fast.”
She pulled out her pad of paper and wrote that down. “Can you tell … what kind of truck that is? I mean, from looking at the tracks, of course.”
“Not really into cars that much, but it looks like it might be a silver ’67 Chevy with a modified chassis, Dart Pro-1 header with Crane rockers, custom stainless headers, a Tremec, T56 Magnum transmission, and some custom three-inch stainless exhaust pipes, with a 730hp, 434ci Chevrolet Gen1, 4.155-inch bore / 4-inch stroke engine — but that’s just a guess.”
She smiled that time and didn’t try to hide it. “That’s pretty good. I mean, from just tire tracks.”
“Well, with the turn radius and tire depth and all that stuff,” he said, and then shrugged. “But while it is fun to think about the hassle I can envision coming his way, he’s not the killer. He would have been, I’m sure of it. But … he didn’t get here first.”
“So you think Crash was going to meet the guy in the truck.”
“Yes, and I’ll bet my Lowrider that the box Crash had was gone when the guy in the truck showed up, and what was in that box was what the guy in the truck came to buy. He never would have bought it. Crash would be just as dead, only his body would have fallen backwards, not forwards.”
Leo looked around again, memorizing what he could, and then he spotted a broken branch. “So that’s what that is,” he said, walking over to the branch, which had dirty but fresh cotton wool leaves.
“What’s that?”
“In movies and stuff, you see the cowboys cover up their tracks with a makeshift broom. See over here, these scratching, smearing marks back and forth. That’s your killer, who watches TV, covering his tracks with this. Except, he only wiped out his tracks, he didn’t blanket the area, so he makes a path for us that comes around the back of the car here and right up behind Crash. Just walked up and shot him.”
“A partner?”
“I would start there,” he agreed. “You know? You are going to make a great detective someday.” Leo smiled and started walking back to his thumper.
“If you run into that partner of his, again, tell him thanks. I mean that,” she told him.
He gave her a thin smile and then got on the bike. He put his helmet back on and started the engine. He gave her a long look, then a nod, and gunned the motor, rocketing out and down the road.
She had no idea why she was crying, but she was glad she was alone for the next hour.
Chapter Nineteen
Close to 7pm, Beverly coasted her bike up her drive and cut the engine. She was halfway to the door when Leo called her cellphone.
“You tired, or would you like some company?”
“Yes, please,” she sighed.
“I don’t know if I ever told you this, but I have an amazingly large bath tub. One of those monstrosities with the lion’s feet and everything.”
She was already starting her bike back up. “No, you didn’t. You have been withholding vital information, mister! I don’t mind all the other secret squirrel stuff, but this? You withheld this?” She closed the connection and didn’t bother with her helmet.
Gunning across the road and down his lane, she pulled up beside his bike in the covered area beside the house and then, laptop in hand, she ran up the stairs and through the porch.
“Leo!” she called as she came in the house.
“Upstairs,” he answered.
After dropping her stuff on the couch, she ran up the stairs. She could running bath water as she climbed.
Leo met her at the top landing. “I figured the sooner I got water in the tub, the sooner I would get you naked.”
“Got that right,” she said, and started stripping.
Shirt off and reaching for her bra strap, she spied a pastel colored box. “What’s that?”
“I picked up some oils and stuff this afternoon. I didn’t really know what to get, or how involved you got into the whole bath experience thing, but the girl at the counter was very helpful.”
“Was she now,” Bev said, with mock jealousy.
“Yes, and quite cute, actually, with the little nose and the dash of freckles on her cheeks—”
Bev punched him playfully in the gut. “Back to the whole ‘bath experience’ question, I was kind of hoping you would join me, and it might not be so good for you to be smelling like lilies in the morning. But on my own, I’m a serious witch’s brew bather.”
“They won’t go to waste, then. I’ll be right back up. I’ve got a roast going in the slow cooker,” he told her, and he started for the stairs.
“You cook?” she asked, slightly amazed.
“Well, yeah,” he said as if that was sort of a silly question. “How can you eat well if you don’t know how to cook well?”
“Take out,” she answered without hesitation.
“Ah, so you’re one of those liberated types who see the kitchen as the next thing to a symbol of servitude.”
“No. It was just dad and me through my teens, and we did a lot of take out and pizzas, and frozen things. Food was never really a priority with us. After I started college, I was introduced to the whole food experience thing and found that eating well was preferable to frozen burritos, but I didn’t have time to learn.”
“And now?” he asked.
“I’ve thought of taking classes several times, but never went. On my own, I revert back to frozen burritos and take out rather rapidly,” she told him with a shrug.
“Hmmm. You’re like one of those swirly ice cream things. You have this amazing biker thing going on with swirls of random girly in you,” he observed.
“Thank you, I think,” she said with an amused smile.
“Be right back,” he told her.
“I’ll be in your tub, and if you don’t hurry, I’ll start brewing potions,” she warned.
Beverly had never met a man who really understood the bath. They simply couldn’t comprehend that sitting in a bath, soaking in the heat, was doing something. Or that the goal of the bath was the bath itself; that it was its own fulfillment. Of course, with oils and essences, rubbing one out was always a fine way to enhance the experience as well, but not a necessary one.
On his return, he was naked and looked at his chin in the mirror. He decide
d to shave first. She didn’t mind this at all, because until this moment, she hadn’t really had a chance to simply enjoy looking at him. She had certainly enjoyed his embrace and his strength and the hard sensuousness of his body, but this was a rare moment. What better place to enjoy such a moment than in a bath of hot water, soaking up the heat?
One thing she noticed was that he had several scars on his lower back. There were two others on his right side, near the tattoo of a dragon which she had enjoyed looking at before. On his other side, in the same place and nearly the same pose, was a tiger. Those and the black widow crawling up his jugular vein were his only tats.
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