HORIZON MC

by Clara Kendrick

  She swept her free hand, the one that didn’t have a gun trained on me, around the room. “Rio Seco is about as far away as you can get from things in New Mexico. You assumed an alias. You grew out your beard and hair.”

  “I like Rio Seco. My friends gave me that nickname, and it’s not an alias. I just haven’t had any time lately to get myself to the salon.” Maybe it wasn’t exactly advisable to be a smartass to someone pointing a deadly weapon at me, but that’s about where I was in life. Not doing anything that was advisable.

  “Are you really going to make me call your local police department does this town even have a police department? No? Jesus Christ.”

  “We fall under the jurisdiction of the county police,” I said with some dignity.

  “Well, don’t make me call them to get you to stay and face the music.”

  “What do you mean, face the music?”

  “I mean you’re going to pay for what you did.”

  “I haven’t confessed to anything, Katie. And last I checked, I can’t pay for a crime I didn’t commit.” God, what a laughable thing to say. I had been paying and paying in ways I’d never considered for all manners of things, whether I did them or not.

  “You’re coming to Albuquerque with me,” she said, her voice shaking but resolute. “You can come quietly, under your own power because you’re still a good person, deep down, and you want to do right by me, or you can come in the back of a police car.”

  “Here’s the thing, Katie.” I didn’t care that my voice was as tightly wound as it was she’d have to forgive me, after all, since she was the one who was pointing a deadly weapon in my direction. I was so done with this, done with all of this, done with my past and my current stupidity, done, most of all, perhaps, with the fantasy that I could build a life away from the person I used to be, pretending that there was some shred of normalcy left that I had in my grasp. “I don’t want to go back to that life, so I’m not going to. I left for a reason.”

  “The reason being that you killed a cop,” she said, her voice so flat that it made my insides twist.

  I didn’t say anything to that. She believed what she believed.

  “Well, guess what?” She took my silence as an admission of guilt. “You did a lot more than kill a cop. You killed Joe Clayton. He was my partner.”

  I gritted my teeth. There it was. There was the connection. Because that’s all life really was a network of connections, some thin as the silk in a spider’s web, branching outward. Others you might not see until it was too late.

  “He was also my lover,” Katie continued, as if that wasn’t the most important connection. “Which is why all of this is so fucked up.”

  “I’m sorry…sorry to hear that,” I said, my voice halting. They were stupid words to say. I didn’t have the words to describe how I really felt. Shattered might do it. Guilty. Horrified. But sorry seemed insufficient.

  Perhaps most stupid of all was the fact that I hated the idea of Katie with someone else. That was idiotic. I was sure she had been with other people before me. I wasn’t naive. I had certainly been with plenty of women before Katie had come along. But the knowledge that she and Joe Clayton had been intimate did things to me I didn’t think would ever happen. I wasn’t a jealous person by nature. But from what I knew of Joe, I had my reasons for hating the idea of him pawing at Katie, even if she’d wanted it.

  “You’re coming back to Albuquerque with me,” she said, rubbing at one of her eyes. “You’re going to confess. And you’re going to pay for what you did.”

  “I’m not going back to Albuquerque.” Not for Katie. Not for anyone.

  “I thought you were an honorable man, Ace,” she said. “I don’t know why I thought that, but I did. Maybe you’ve been getting away with this thus far, but no more. It’s time for you to face the music.”

  “That case is closed,” I said. “Even I know that.”

  “But I know that something else happened, something that’s not in his file,” she said. “You know it, too. And you can clear his name.”

  “He’s dead, Katie. I’m sure he doesn’t give a shit about his name anymore.”

  Her lips paled as she pressed them together, fury etching her beautiful features in sharp relief. “I give a shit, Ace. That has to mean something.”

  I’d made a mistake, saying that. One I couldn’t take back, even if I was about to try. “I’m not trying to minimize your feelings. I know that…well, I didn’t, but now I know that you cared for him. You had to, if he was your partner, and if you loved him.”

  “Then if I mean anything to you, you’ll come to Albuquerque to set things right.”

  Ouch. She had really gone all out there. “You do mean something to me. You mean everything. But I’m not going back to Albuquerque again.”

  “I must not mean very much to you if you won’t confess to a murder you committed against a man…a man I had strong feelings for.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” I said with a harsh laugh. “I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone. I think I even love you now, more, if that’s possible. It doesn’t make sense. You obviously think I’ve hurt you, that I’ve killed someone close to you.”

  “There’s a security tape,” she said. “Something that wasn’t entered into evidence.”

  “What?” I blinked at her. This was the first I was hearing about this. I thought that night only existed in my twisted memories, but there was apparently a recap I could watch, if I so chose.

  A grim smile tightened the corners of her mouth. “You thought there weren’t any witnesses that night? Someone saw, even if it was only a security camera everyone forgot about.”

  If there really was footage of that night, and if Katie had really seen it, then she would know exactly what happened. Why was she here accusing me? She’d know the truth.

  The truth itself, of course, was a little trickier than black and white. It was pretty open to interpretation, actually, just how directly I’d seen to Joe’s death, from pulling the trigger to orchestrating the entire thing. If Katie wanted me to return to Albuquerque to volunteer for some handcuffs or an orange suit to try and redeem her memories of the man she’d loved, she seemed to be operating off a pretty literal interpretation of my role in Joe’s death.

  And I didn’t quite know what to make of that.

  “Where’d you get this tape?” I asked. There were a lot of things going through my mind right now, like the possibility of the tape being doctored in some way, or forged, but that was ridiculous. Who would take the time to do something like that?

  “I kept investigating, long after the official inquiry ended,” she said. “I kept pushing, because I cared about Joe more than anyone else. I kept going back to the crime scene, over and over again, combing it, looking for something I knew had to be there. Everyone else…they gave up so soon. They didn’t even give Joe the benefit of the doubt. I saw the security camera and kept pushing until I found you.”

  “You need to stop. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Because there were details she’d left out, things she couldn’t have known about, and I wasn’t about to break her heart with them now.

  She leveled the gun at me. “I don’t like doing this, Ace…”

  “Then don’t do this,” I offered. “Easy as that.”

  “It’s not that easy,” she said, and her voice broke. “Nothing about this is easy. You probably think I’m some kind of heartless bitch…”

  “I don’t think that. I absolutely don’t.”

  “I have feelings for you, too,” she said almost angrily. I wondered who she was angry with, though. “I didn’t want to have them, but I do. I care about you. But I care about Joe’s reputation, and his legacy. You’re going to come to Albuquerque with me, and you’re going to set the record straight about what happened.”

  “That’s just the thing though, Katie,” I said slowly. “I don’t think you want me to really set the record straight about anything, because I’m not ce
rtain you completely understand what happened.”

  “I saw what happened on the tape.”

  “There’s a lot more.”

  “Then come to Albuquerque and tell someone about it.”

  “Everyone who needs to know about it already knows,” I said. “I didn’t kill Joe Clayton. And I’m going to walk away from you, because you don’t know what you’re doing here.”

  “Don’t you dare walk away from me. Don’t. I will shoot you, Ace, so help me God.”

  “Do whatever you need to do,” I said. “I’m not going to do this with you, though.”

  I walked out of the door, and she didn’t put a bullet in me to try and stop me, and I had to wonder at that. Maybe she really did love me.

  That was even harder to stomach, because I still loved her, too.

  Chapter 9

  I’d been a good cop, when it came down to it, and I hadn’t always disparaged being one. Maybe it would’ve been helpful to tell Katie that, when she brought everything up, but I just couldn’t bear to. Her springing all that on me, her partnership God, her relationship with Joe Clayton had sent me into something of a defensive shock.

  Maybe I’d even handled everything incorrectly, which would’ve gone against everything I used to do while I was working for the force.

  I’d done well, risen in the ranks, and had been recruited well, snatched up, really to start working on cases undercover. I understood why my supervisor, Cora Slade, did it. I was honest about my past when I applied to become a police officer. I really was no angel, growing up, in trouble just as much as I was out of it. I had connections in an underworld that I hadn’t been proud of, but Cora had seen the value in being able to smoothly navigate both worlds.

  Plus, it helped that I looked a little scruffy, long hair, beard, and all.

  It started with prostitution. I was part of a team that was tasked to find out who was behind a surprisingly sophisticated prostitution ring operating in the city, but the deeper I went, the more shit started floating to the surface. I finally reached a juncture of the investigation that was less a revelation than a crossroads of different directions in which we could proceed. I rarely contacted Cora over the course of that time, but I arranged a clandestine meeting to let her know what was going on.

  “You can take down the ring,” I said. “There’s enough evidence to do so.”

  I was cleaned up well, beard oiled and combed, hair kept back under a nice cap, my table located immediately adjacent behind hers. She was sitting just behind me, and each of us had other people at our tables who we appeared to be talking to when we were really just talking to each other. It wouldn’t look good if I was recognized, even if this restaurant was a little too nice by the standards of the social circles I was operating in, dining with a known member of the police force.

  “That’s what this case is about, isn’t it?” Cora asked, and I could see out of the corner of my eye her dining partner laughing and nodding as if she’d made a clever joke. “If we have them, then we have them.”

  “What if we could have something bigger?”

  A pause. “Explain.”

  “I’ve been following the money. It just keeps going.”

  “Going where, exactly?”

  “South of the border, if that gives you any idea.”

  “You’re talking cartels?”

  “I’m talking drugs, and, by extension, cartels.”

  Cora was silent for a little while, and I took a big bite of a sandwich I’d been neglecting. It would be bad for me to come to this restaurant, be recognized, and not even do what I had come there to do, which was eat.

  “You speak Spanish, Black?”

  “Just what I learned in high school. Plus the curses.”

  “Leave the cartels to the feds.”

  “Even if they’re operating within our jurisdiction? Even if their influence runs a lot deeper than any could imagine?”

  “You’re telling me that a cartel is fully active here?”

  “Not a cartel. Multiple cartels.”

  “Christ.”

  I let her absorb that information, taking a sip of my water. “We could take down the prostitution ring. It would be good press. A case closed. But if we dig deeper, maybe we can get the cartel players living the life and working here, north of the border, to ensure the various interests of their organizations are pursued. Maybe we keep following that thread and come up with a really big fish.”

  “You’re not talking about the head of a cartel.”

  “No. But someone definitely higher up. A second-in-command, maybe. Or a son or brother.”

  “You’re not sure who’s here?”

  “No. But from the way people talk, they’re afraid.”

  “Wouldn’t someone just move up and replace them, if you remove the person in charge here? I hate to break it to you, Black, but you’re not going to single-handedly end crime within the city.”

  I smiled. “I know that. But I’m going to do what I can.”

  “You think that you can find something big and actually reel it in?”

  “I think I can.” What could I say? I was young and dumb and full of dangerous things, hope chief among them.

  “Then keep following the money. Keep me informed.”

  The thing about working a case undercover was that you never really understood how far you were going to go until you broke. It wasn’t my first time at the rodeo, the one that broke me. I’d been around a while, had been good at what I did. I got the case I was working on because I was good at handling things like this, good at submerging the things I actually was in order to become someone else, something that people expected me to be.

  I followed the money, followed it from prostitution and straight into drugs, tapped contacts from my past who welcomed me with open arms, and was tracking some of the worst people in the city, skirting around them like shadows, when the unthinkable happened.

  I thought a lot about how it had gone down, and what I could’ve done differently to ensure a better outcome. I spent a lot of time thinking about it. Too much time, even. But I could never come up with anything better than what had actually happened. Never anything that would’ve saved everything and everyone involved.

  I had been with one my contacts, Miles, who was a mid-level drug dealer, and we were meeting his contact. It was just another piece of the puzzle for me, though I knew that there would probably be more pieces than I would ever understand how to deal with. I never knew, though, when the right piece would come through, the one that linked the whole thing from top to bottom. That’s why I had to take all of it, every single tip, every single name I learned, seriously. I never knew when I was going to crack the thing.

  “Seriously?” I sighed as we pulled up to an alleyway filled with overflowing dumpsters.

  “This guy likes his privacy,” Miles said.

  “If he likes his privacy, we could’ve gotten a hotel room, or hidden in plain sight, like a bar,” I said. “A fucking alley?”

  “It was his call,” Miles said. “Now, come on, or we’re going to be late.”

  “It’s not even midnight.”

  “One minute late, and he gets spooked. Do you want to meet the guy, or not?”

  I did, and I didn’t care about the alley. I was just trying to keep in character. “I guess. Let’s do this.”

  Introductions were made, and I didn’t think anything of it. Joe Clayton was just like any other guy, just another cog in this big machine, proving my point when he asked if we had any cocaine on us.

  “If you’ve got money, we’ve got cocaine,” Miles said.

  “What, no bump for an old friend?” Joe asked, his eyes bloodshot.

  “Business doesn’t work that way,” Miles told him. “You, of all people, should know that.”

  “I just thought I’d try,” Joe said, getting his wallet out and slitting it open.

  To this day, I wasn’t sure if Joe had meant to flash me his badge, or if I had just
been suspicious that he wasn’t handling his wallet naturally. Whatever it was, I was surprised enough to give a knee-jerk reaction of shock that changed everything.

  “You’re a cop,” I’d blurted out, pretty much dumbfounded when I saw that flash of silver in Joe’s wallet as he reached for cash. I’d been surprised, and that had been the downfall of everything.

  “You have a law enforcement officers’ discount?” he joked, slipping the bills from the fold.

  But as soon as Miles had heard the word “cop,” he swung into action, firing four shots directly into Joe’s chest before I could even get my gun from the waistband of my jeans.

  “Miles, stop!” I shouted, swearing a blue streak as Joe went down hard. He gaped at me, like he couldn’t believe this was happening, and I couldn’t believe it, either. My idiocy had caused violence to someone on the same side of the law I was on.

  I stared at the blood blossoming like roses beneath his white shirt, the darker pool of it spreading on the pavement beneath him. He died right in front of my disbelieving eyes, drowning in his own blood. The look in Joe’s eyes stayed with me longer than I cared to dwell on. It was accusation, and confusion. It had all happened so quickly that he probably didn’t have it figured out that he was dying before his heart gave out. For me, though, it was one of those moments when everything slowed down, every detail becoming crystal clear. The blood blossoms on the shirt. The wallet falling open, tumbling from his fingers, the badge flashing upward in the orange security light flooding the alley. The smell of the gunfire, hot and acrid, the sounds of the shots still ringing around in my head, amplified by shock and the acoustics of the brick walls around us. It felt like it was going to rain, of all things. Unseasonable rain I could practically taste the humidity in the air even as the hairs on my arms raised in horror and response to the electricity when a clap of thunder rattled my bones nearly directly above me. That was what jolted me out of the stupor I’d sunken into. Only seconds had passed, though it had felt like ages, watching a life trail out over dirty asphalt.