by Nicole Fox
“Alexei.” A faint accent colored his words. He seemed reluctant to say anything else, which Chopper noted before proceeding.
“And where do you guys fall, in the grand scheme of things?” he asked. The boys looked at him dumbly for a second.
Snow spoke up. He was starting to emerge as the brains of the operation. “If you mean like, chain of command, we’re as close to the damn bottom as you ever wanna get.” His face clouded bitterly as he said the words. “The only reason we were ever allowed to look at Spike is because he has no one left. That should tell you all you need to know.”
“I find it hard to believe that Spike Lawler is alone in the world,” Chopper answered patiently. “A little while ago, he was at the top of the second-biggest club in the city. You telling me it all went downhill that fast?”
Snow and Alexei exchanged a worried glance. There was something below the surface, but neither of them wanted to bring it into the light. Snow licked his lips. He scratched his nose again. “Look man, I don’t know what you heard, but after our place got raided, Spike was …” He trailed off as he attempted to choose the right word. “He was different.”
Alexei scoffed. “Crazy, you mean.”
They’d thrown around that allegation before. Chopper was interested. “I’ve heard people say a lot of things about Spike, but no one’s ever called him outright crazy before.”
“Yeah, well, maybe no one’s seen him like this.” Alexei grabbed a napkin and began to tear at the corners, piling the shreds neatly in front of him. As he talked, he avoided Chopper’s gaze. “He had us bring him back to that shitty house, and for probably the first week, he was normal. Talking all kinds of shit, saying he was going to get you back, whatever. He acted real pissed that he lost the girl, but I think it was more that you beat his ass, you know?”
Chopper smirked. He couldn’t help it. “Sorry.”
“No, you ain’t,” Alexei retorted without looking up. He paused to rearrange his pile of napkin bits. “There was a doc who came around pretty regular, doping him up. No clue what he was givin’ him, but after a while he stopped making sense.” For the first time, he looked to Snow for validation. “Right?” Chopper heard the unspoken sentiment. Back me up.
Snow chewed his lip. His eyes darted around the room as he weighed his options. Soon, he let out a heavy sigh. “Yeah. He’d be lying on the bed upstairs, staring at the ceiling, ranting to himself about who fucking knew what. When he needed more drugs, he’d holler for one of us and we’d go up and give it to him, and sometimes he’d make us stay and listen to him. It was okay until …” He trailed off again, his face uncertain.
Chopper sensed that he was right on the precipice of something very important. “Until what?” he prompted, like a dad coaxing the truth out of his surly teenage son. “Trust me man, no matter what you’re about to say, Spike can’t get to you now. Maybe we’re not friends yet, but for now, you belong to us, and he is never gonna get his hands on Outlaw property again.”
It wasn’t exactly comforting, but it did the job. Snow nodded slightly. When he spoke, his voice was very low. “He started talking about killing us instead of killing you.”
At first, Chopper thought he heard wrong. “He what?” he said automatically. “Why would he want to kill his own men?” Nothing about it made sense in his head. He’d heard of mutinies before, but not self-inflicted extermination. From Spike especially, it seemed counterintuitive. Thinning his own ranks was the last thing he needed to do to get the Mongols back on their feet.
Snow moved his shoulders up and down, slumping in his chair. “He thought the Mongols betrayed him somehow, and that was why we lost. He said all his best men turned out to be nothin’ more than cowards. So, he wanted to burn everything to the ground and start over.”
Chopper whistled. “Jesus.”
“We thought it was the drugs talking.” Snow, empowered by his own voice, pushed on before Chopper could get any more of a word in edgewise. “We just kind of sat through it and agreed with him, y’know? Like, we didn’t know what would happen if we challenged him. He was high as hell, but he still coulda gotten rid of us.” He shook his head. “Then he started getting better, and the doc started weaning him off of that shit. We thought he’d stop talking about killing everyone, but he didn’t.”
“He talked about it more,” Alexei interjected. “Fuckin’ psycho.” Chopper could see that finally relating this story was getting them both worked up. Alexei’s eyes glinted with barely-suppressed rage.
“So then what?” Chopper asked, hoping that his even tone would stabilize the atmosphere somewhat. He knew their anger was directed almost entirely toward Spike at this point, but the three of them remained on opposite sides of the fence, technically speaking. He still had to tread carefully, in case things went south.
“So then he started to leave.” Snow folded his arms and narrowed his eyes. “We had to stay in that shithole, of course, but he started leaving all the time. First it was only for an hour or two at a time, while he was still on the drugs. Then we wouldn’t see him for days.”
Alexei cleared his throat and spat into a new napkin, folding it up in an oddly fastidious manner. “He’d be AWOL, but he called us a ton, and he made us keep our phones on so he could track them. It was like bein’ on house arrest.”
“Why didn’t he want you to leave?”
“Paranoia.” Alexei said the word in a tone that implied he didn’t believe the condition even existed. “He said we had to lay low until he told us it was okay, because he had some work to do and he couldn’t risk getting found out before it was over. He snorted derisively. “Whole lot of good that did us, huh?”
“What, you didn’t like the pizza?” Chopper feigned offense, and the kid laughed grudgingly. “Don’t worry about it,” Chopper added. “We would have found you anyway. I got people.”
“No kidding,” Alexei said. “That’s why you won.” He took a deep breath and shoved his hands in his pockets for a split second. “Fuck it,” he said suddenly. “You wanna know what Spike’s been doing since he got good enough to walk again?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Chopper noticed Snow’s whole body tense up. He glanced at him, and Snow looked away. There were vestiges of loyalty there, even though they meant nothing now. Mentally, Spike Lawler was a one-man show. The rest of the Mongols could be damned.
“What?” Chopper steeled himself for the answer he thought was coming.
Alexei looked him in the eye. “He’s been killing every Mongol he can find.”
There it was. Chopper felt curiously deflated, as if Spike’s own cruelty had lessened the impact of any vengeance against him. Chopper had been wrong before — it wasn’t a game of chess. It was just an all-out hunt for a madman. But either way, Spike had to be stopped.
“Except you?” he said now, his eyes moving between them.
Snow grinned fiercely. “Maybe. Or maybe he was saving us for last.”
A silence fell inside the war room, hanging thickly over the table like fog. Chopper sliced through it with the all-important question.
“Do you know where he is now?”
“He thinks we don’t,” said Snow. He threw his phone down on the table. “But that tracking thing goes both ways. That’s how we figured out what he was doing while he was out. We know where he sent the survivors of the fight, and that’s where he was going. It’s taking him longer now because he has to travel farther.” He pushed the phone in Chopper’s direction. “Go ahead. No point in stopping you.”
Chopper picked up the device and unlocked it. He navigated to the tracking app, and stared at the screen as it loaded, trying to stifle the adrenaline that was beginning to pound through his veins. If Snow was telling the truth, he was holding a map that would literally lead him straight to Spike—or at least, straight to Spike’s phone.
The image pulled up. Chopper’s eye settled on a pulsing blue dot, zipping down the highway at vehicle speed. Spike Lawler was heading out of t
own.
Chapter Thirty
Kelsey
Kelsey was working late on the night Hannah died, scrambling to get a sudden new project in under the wire. She’d left her phone on silent in her bag, and so it wasn’t until almost eleven that she finally checked it and realized she had missed several calls from her mother. Somewhat reluctant, but feeling that it was just about quitting time anyway, Kelsey packed up her things and called her mom back on her way out of the building. For some reason, she always remembered that the phone rang four times before anyone answered.
Then her mother was there, half screaming, half sobbing into the receiver, inarticulate, frightening sounds.
“Mom?” Kelsey asked as the blood drained from her face. She didn’t have to be told that something was horribly wrong. An icy hand gripped her spine. “What is it? What happened?” Her mother tried to form words, but nothing intelligible came out. At last, someone took the phone from her and her crying faded into the background.
“Kelsey?” Aunt Marian, her mother’s sister. There was something peculiar about her tone. It took Kelsey a second to recognize that she had been crying. “I’m so sorry, sweetie.”
“What? What’s going on?” Kelsey made a beeline for her car in the office parking lot. Her heart beat in her throat.
Aunt Marian took a deep, shaky breath. “Your sister is dead,” she said softly. Behind her, a piercing wail broke through.
Kelsey froze with her hand on the car door handle. “What?” she whispered. The world began to waver around her, and she leaned on the door so that she wouldn’t faint. “What do you mean, she’s dead? I just talked to her this morning.” Nothing made sense. She was reeling.
“The police just left,” Marian said. “She was murdered.”
Kelsey’s knees buckled before she could get into the car. She struck the pavement hard, nearly fumbling her phone. The pain from impact was negligible compared to the searing ache in her chest. She could barely breathe.
“Murdered?” was what she tried to say, but it came out as only a whimpering gasp. She wanted to lay down on the asphalt and stay there until the nightmare was over, until things had returned to normal. Surely, this was some kind of horrific prank. Or maybe she was having a psychotic break, and none of it was real. “Are you at Mom’s house?” she finally managed, her voice a weak caricature of itself.
“Yes.” Marian hesitated. “You should come.”
“I am.” Neither woman spent the time to say goodbye—it was implicit. Kelsey clambered awkwardly to her feet, brushing invisible dirt off the hem of her jacket. Her legs still felt like Jell-O, but she was determined to reach her family. She barely remembered the drive, except that her windshield seemed to be streaked with misty rain.
“What time was this?” Detective Wilde’s voice, though gentle, jolted Kelsey out of her memories. “You left work at eleven, you said? How long did the phone call last?”
“Oh …” Kelsey thought back. “I’m not exactly sure, but it was probably less than a minute. My perception of time got kind of screwed up between that and driving, but I can tell you that it’s a fifteen-minute trip from the office to my mom’s house. So, I got there at about 11:20.”
“How fast were you driving?”
Kelsey shrugged apologetically. “I’m sorry. I really don’t know.” She laughed a little, wryly. “I was probably speeding. We’ll say it was 11:15.” Wilde nodded and marked something down on his yellow legal pad. He gestured for her to continue.
She told him how, when she entered the familiar house on Crescent Street, the one in which she and Hannah had grown up together side by side, she found her mother sprawled on the living room floor, sobbing inconsolably into one of the couch pillows. She’d been covered with a blanket, and Marian knelt helplessly at her side, clutching onto one of her hands as if for dear life. Marian glanced up at the sound of Kelsey’s entrance, and her eyes filled with a mix of relief and anguish.
“Kels,” she said, stretching out her free arm. “Come here, baby.”
So, Kelsey had gone to her aunt’s side, on her knees on the hardwood floor, and as she was enveloped in the warmest embrace Marian could muster with a single arm, she felt the shock begin to peel away. The tears came quicker than she expected, and the only thing she remembered about the pain was that it took her breath away.
“You didn’t know what happened then?” Wilde asked, in that same gentle voice.
Kelsey shook her head. Recounting the scene inside her mother’s house had caused a lump to grow in the back of her throat, and she had to pause to swallow it down again.
“All I knew,” she said, a little haltingly, “was that Hannah had been killed. At the time, that was enough for me, you know?”
Wilde nodded. He did know. He had seen families resist details for as long as they possibly could, often until the interviews began. Some truths, he had come to understand, were simply too terrible to be faced head-on.
“When did you learn about the incident?” he said now, as a means of carefully pushing Kelsey along. He had judged that she was often at risk of getting bound up in her feelings, and he was committed to making this interview as painless as possible for her. The girl’s eyes were haunted. She’d been through enough.
“Not until the next day,” Kelsey said. Her gaze wandered aimlessly around the room. “An officer called me and asked if I would come downtown to be interviewed about what I knew.” A tiny smile quirked the side of her mouth. “I said I wouldn’t unless he told me exactly what he knew.”
Wilde consulted the file. “This would have been … Officer Berkley?”
Her brow furrowed in concentration. “I think that was his name.” She made a face like she wanted to say something else, but balked at the last second.
“Go ahead,” Wilde prompted her, hiding his amusement. He had a feeling he knew what it was.
“I didn’t like him,” Kelsey admitted. He got the feeling that she was stating it mildly. He waited for her to continue, but that seemed to be the extent of her denouncement. He raised an eyebrow.
“No one did,” he said mildly. “That’s why he got transferred, and why the case fell in my lap.” In fact, Wilde had harbored personal suspicions that Berkley was corrupt, suspicions that only grew as his single murder case remained unsolved. But if that was true, Berkley had one hell of a cleanup crew; there had never been one shred of evidence against him, and in the end, Wilde had to let it go. He contented himself by jumping onto the abandoned cold case, vowing to finish what his colleague had so haphazardly started.
“Short guy?” he said to Kelsey by way of an identification. “Wide? Big, dark mustache?” She nodded. “Yeah, he’s been gone for a few months now. Didn’t leave me much to go on here.”
“I don’t think he cared,” Kelsey muttered bitterly. It still hurt to think of how much time had been wasted by Officer Berkley’s apathy. If he had only put in a little more effort, she and her family could have been spared so much pain. She tried valiantly not to go down that road of thought, but sometimes she couldn’t help it. How different her life could have been, if not for him. Suddenly, she became aware that Detective Wilde was speaking to her, and she immediately snapped back to full attention.
“Well, I do.” The detective was examining her closely. “It’s my job to care, Kelsey. And it’s my job to make sure that whoever did this to Hannah — to your sister — is ultimately held responsible.” He removed Hannah’s picture from the folder and slid it across the table. Kelsey picked it up gingerly by the edges, gazing almost reverently at her sister’s face. “We have to work together,” Wilde told her. “This is an old and frozen case. I need all the help I can get.” He stopped talking then, as he realized whatever words came out of his mouth would be momentarily lost on her. A few tears slid down Kelsey’s face, and then she returned the photo, wiping at them with her sleeve.
“Okay,” she said, “I’ll do whatever I can.”
The interview didn’t last too much longer. So
on, Kelsey found herself standing at the curb in front of the building, waiting for her cab home. On one hand, the meeting was a harsh reminder that after all this time, her understanding of the circumstances surrounding Hannah’s death was still as vague as ever. All she really knew was that somehow Hannah had gotten caught up in the crossfire between some street thugs and a roving band of Mongols. The one cold consolation was that the bullet that pierced her heart killed her instantly, so that she knew no suffering. Kelsey had clung to that knowledge to get her through the hardest days. But it wasn’t enough.
Now, at long last, the gears were moving. Kelsey believed in Detective Wilde. She couldn’t say exactly why, but she trusted him, and when she shook his hand, she’d given him her hope.
Even so, Chopper was on her mind. She still hadn’t told him about possibly cooperating with the police in any capacity, and she certainly hadn’t told him she’d be going for an interview at the station. In her heart, she knew it was none of his business, that he had no authority over whatever she chose to do regarding Hannah’s murder case, but she couldn’t help worrying about him. Was she endangering him by bringing the police so close to her own personal life? Would she come home one day to find their house raided and ransacked, Chopper stuck firmly behind bars?