Price of Angels (Dartmoor Book 2)

by Lauren Gilley

  To the dog, he said, “Caesar, stay. Watch.” And then he leapt down off the porch and took off at a dead run for the guest cabin, shotgun swinging as he moved. He was amazingly swift for a man who wore overalls and saggy jeans all the time. He flew across the grass, and his white t-shirt floated up the steps of the other cabin, disappearing through the door like a ghost.

  Michael curled his fingers tight around Caesar’s collar, but the dog never moved, just made a high whimpering sound. Michael leaned into his sleek, warm side, feeling like he might faint, breath pluming in the cold night air. He rested his head against the great beast’s face, felt the slickness of the short black coat on his skin.

  And then he heard the shotgun go off, ripping explosions of sound that shattered the night.

  Michael woke and knew that he’d been dreaming. His eyes snapped open and with a jolt, he felt himself returning from his very worst nightmare – the one that had actually taken place. He lay in his own bed, in his grown man’s body, and the ceiling was dark and grainy above him. He felt the familiar softness of his sheets against his naked skin. Smelled the familiar tang of lemon Pine-Sol.

  He hadn’t dreamed of his mother in a long time; it had been years since he’d returned to that awful night in his sleep, reliving the horror in aching detail. Why had he tonight?

  He knew the answer, but he wasn’t going to acknowledge it. There was no sense comparing tiny frightened Holly to his long-dead, tiny frightened mother when he didn’t know the whole story there, and wasn’t likely to get it.

  Extending an arm through the dark, he found his smokes and lighter on the nightstand, where he always left them. Lit one by feel, the momentary spark of the lighter illuminating the cigarette and his deeply callused hands as he cupped them around the flame. Then it was dark again, and the nicotine was going down into his lungs. It was a nasty habit, smoking, one he hadn’t picked up until he’d joined the MC. There’d been a tremor in his hands, at first, because it hadn’t mattered that he was willing to do certain things; his body betrayed some sort of untouchable inner nerves. He’d turned to cigarettes, and they’d become habit, though the tremors had long since faded into nothingness.

  He smoked in the dark, eyes tracing his bedroom from memory. Through the shadows, he knew just where the mirror stood in its floor-length frame, where the lamp was on the desk, the angle of the chair at the desk, the one where he draped his cut every night. He knew both nightstands, one on either side, and the old plate he used as an ash tray – he reached for it now. The shadows were deeper in the places where the en suite bath and closet doors stood open. All the old furniture from the house his parents had shared, the first nine years of his life. The bed where he’d been conceived, not out of love, but out of animal need and marital obligation.

  He couldn’t see much sense in buying a whole house full of new furniture when this stuff had been sitting in storage for years, waiting for him to grow up. And so it didn’t matter where he lived; the ghost of his parents awful, wrong life together was a spirit he couldn’t exorcise.

  The alarm went off with a screech. Six. Time to start the day. He set the burning cigarette on the edge of the makeshift ashtray and sat up. Maybe if he found out what was bothering Holly, dreams of his mother would stop bothering him.

  **

  The blinds were open in the chapel at nine a.m., and fresh stripes of sunlight lay like bright ribs across the ornate table, lighting everyone’s face from beneath in a way that made them all look younger. Ghost held a lot of morning church meetings like this, unlike his predecessor, James, who’d preferred late afternoon and evening. Ghost didn’t dick around; he got stuff done.

  “Alright,” the Lean Dogs president said, once he’d taken a deep drag off his cigarette, “I’m going to see Collier today. They’re finally letting him have visitors, and there’s things I need to know from him, so we can lay this whole rat thing to rest in a permanent way.”

  Across the table from Michael, in the VP chair, Walsh said, “The PD dragged the river,” his light eyes glittering faintly in the sunlight, his features inscrutable as always. The Englishman played his cards tight to the vest, and Michael approved of that. He’d voted “yea” a couple of weeks ago, when it came time to choose a new VP.

  “Yeah, well…” Ghost gestured to the air and smiled wryly, an expression reflected by some of the others.

  They all knew what the cops had found when they’d dragged the river: nothing. Mason Stephens and Ronnie Archer’s bodies weren’t there, not even in little pieces, because Collier hadn’t been the one to kill them and dump them.

  “They haven’t been knocking around here anymore,” Ghost continued, “and that’s a good thing.” He cast a look down the table. “Ratchet, what else have we got?”

  The secretary flipped through his notes, tapping a handwritten line with a finger. The sun was blinding where it struck the shiny lotioned sides of his shaved head. “A dealer reached out a couple days ago, called in on the hotline” – the prepaid cellphone Ratchet kept to manage all their drug business – “and wants to move the area. He heard he’d have to set that up with us, so this was just a reaching out. Wants to meet, sometime soon. Thought I’d handle the initial before I bring him to sit down with you,” he offered, helpfully.

  Ghost nodded. “That’s fine. When you doing it?”

  “Today. This afternoon at two.”

  Another nod. “Take Merc for backup.”

  At the foot of the table, Ghost’s son-in-law gave a little salute of acknowledgement.

  Michael felt his stomach sour just at the sight of the guy. Mercy Lécuyer was a big man, and rather than compensate for that by serving his president with grace and dignity, he allowed himself to become the center of attention. He put his own wants and needs above those of the club – his specific want being Ghost’s twenty-two-year-old daughter. Mercy had stirred up too much drama. He was too cocky. Twice he’d caused his president grief of a variety that Michael would have died before bringing to the club table. He had no discretion, that’s what it was. Mercy liked what he did – the torturing; it was fun for him. He was loud and Cajun and long-haired and just…annoying.

  “Anything else?” Ghost asked, and Ratchet shook his head.

  “Just the usual maintenance stuff.”

  “Okay, then. I’m all about keeping the burden light for right now. The longer we can lay low, the faster the shit will blow over. I don’t want to start anything or stir shit up. Nice and quiet, for the time being. Everybody good with that?”

  There were choruses of “yes.”

  Ghost nodded, smacking a hand down on the tabletop before he pushed his chair back. “Good. I’ll let everyone know what Collier says.”

  As the rest of the Dogs got to their feet, small conversations broke out, mundane little inquiries and bits of gossip. Ghost’s son, Aidan, and his best friend, Tango, dove right back into their pre-church discussion about what to do with a difficult bike they had over at the shop. RJ called something to Mercy that made him laugh. Rottie helped the aging Hound up from his chair with a quick, deft touch under the arm that everyone else probably missed.

  The club had gone back to normal. With the war with the Carpathians at a rest, the rats in the ground, and Collier in jail and trying, willingly, to take the fall for four murders to keep the heat off the club, the Dogs were returning to a calmer routine, the energy at a sustainable, everyday level.

  And just like normal, there wasn’t any chitchat aimed Michael’s way as church broke up. What did he need any of that for? If he wanted to chew the fat, he’d make a trip out to see Uncle Wynn. It wasn’t in his nature to be talkative. People never really cared what he had to say; so why try? He’d spent too many years learning how to be so perfectly silent, that he wasn’t sure he even knew how to have a conversation anymore.

  He left the chapel silently, and went down the hall to the sprawling bar and lounge atmosphere of the common room, catching Ghost alone as he dug a soda from the coo
ler at the bar. Michael drew up before him and waited, because that was what polite sergeants did, for his president to acknowledge him.

  Ghost didn’t startle, but there was a moment when his face blanked over, and Michael knew that a lesser man would have jumped.

  “Oh, hey,” Ghost said, popping the tab on his Coke, shaking little droplets off his thumb. “You took care of it?”

  He nodded. “Yes. But there was something else.” Quickly, with sparse detail, Michael relayed the murder of Carly the Bell Bar waitress.

  “I saw that on the news,” Ghost said, frowning. “Shit, you were there? Why the hell didn’t you bring that up in there?” Gesture toward the chapel.

  For the first time since patching into this chapter, Michael felt a shred of doubt. Why hadn’t he brought it up? He wasn’t mute, after all. “It just didn’t seem like club business,” he said with a shrug.

  Ghost kept frowning. “Yeah. Probably it’s not.” He made a little face that Michael took to mean that was no excuse, bring that sort of thing up next time. “I’ll talk to Ratchet about it, see if he can find anything out. What were you doing there that late?” When you were dumping bodies and shit, his gaze added.

  “I was on my way home, and I saw the ambulance.”

  “And the squad cars?” Ghost said. “Damn. Please tell me you’d already gotten rid of the girl.”

  “Of course.” But the question stung, worse than he would have expected. Ghost had always relied on him, and never had to second guess anything he’d ever done for the club. To be doubted…when he’d stopped at the bar for personal reasons, no less…that was like getting rapped across the knuckles.

  Ghost was staring at him, eyes narrowing, expression contemplative. “You alright? You look tired.”

  “I’m fine.”

  But Ghost wasn’t buying it. “Things have been crazy around here the last couple of months. If you wanna take some time off, stay home a few days, maybe you ought to.”

  Another insult, this one worse than the first. “I don’t need any time off.”

  Ghost made a face like he disagreed. “Everybody needs some time off. Take it if you want it. All this killing will kill you.”

  Four

  Matt touched the end of the match to the candle wick, and a soft glow welled and pooled across the top of the bar. Three seconds into burning, the candle began to give off the scent of vanilla. It was a tall, white pillar candle, stately in its makeshift candelabra of an overturned ash tray. They all stood around it, hands clasped, silent. A moment of respect and remembrance for Carly. Several of the girls were crying into tissues, cheeks streaked with mascara.

  Holly’s eyes were dry, but she shivered on the inside, chilled down to her bones. She’d had relentless nightmares, dreaming of the ropes again, and she’d awakened with fear in her veins, a fear that refused to abate. She grieved for her friend, but the grief couldn’t quite touch her heart, because the fear was so great. She knew, knew, that this couldn’t have anything to do with her. Just a random act of violence. A stroke of evil against their bar; a chance killing, the life taken Carly’s, instead of hers, just because of timing.

  She didn’t want to think that Carly had been killed because of her. That she’d finally been found, and that from behind, small and dark-haired Carly had been mistaken for her. That was too awful to contemplate. She wanted to believe Michael; wanted to feel sure that this wasn’t her fault. How could she live with herself if it was?

  Vanessa broke the silence. Sniffling, she said, “Weren’t you supposed to close last night?” And lifted her tear-brightened eyes to Holly with an accusatory twist to her trembling mouth.

  “I was,” Holly said. “I wasn’t feeling well and Carly offered to cover for me.”

  Every pair of eyes came to her. Matt seemed sympathetic, but all the girls had something dark and angry lingering in their gazes. Holly was the newest waitress at Bell Bar, the one without local connections, without friends. She was the outsider anyway, and now she felt the chasm opening up between herself and the others. She could feel their blame, their anger and resentment.

  “It could have happened to any of us,” Matt said, consolingly.

  “But it happened to Carly,” Meg said.

  Holly bowed her head, staring down at the toes of the little wedge-heeled sneakers she wore with her work uniform. “I wish I’d stayed,” she said. “I wish it had been me instead.”

  There were no comments, but someone gasped softly, like she couldn’t believe Holly would say such a thing.

  A hand landed on her shoulder and squeezed: Matt. “It was an awful thing that happened, but it was nobody’s fault. We’ll have to be more careful, from now on.”

  Yes, they would.

  “And you do this all the time?” Mercy asked, with a considerable amount of doubt, as he scanned the familiar environs of Bell Bar. The place was evening-dark, even in the middle of the day, and that made him feel fractionally better, but not a lot. “Just…in the bar like this?”

  Ratchet gave him a blank look, like he didn’t see what the problem was. “Yeah.” He’d ordered a damn Jaeger bomb and took a sip of it like it wasn’t the nastiest shit anyone had ever tasted. “So?”

  Mercy lowered his voice a fraction, reaching for his water. Water. Ugh. Ava was pestering him about drinking during the day. He was relenting…when she wasn’t around to see him. “So you meet drug dealers in public. In bars.”

  Ratchet nodded.

  Mercy shrugged. Whatever. This wasn’t his usual sort of gig. If Ratchet did this routinely, who was he to judge? He was just the muscle.

  Their waitress today was Holly, the little brunette with the old Hollywood curves and the big green eyes. She breezed around their table and settled with a swishing of her silk uniform shorts – blue, today, with a white shirt – and whipped out her order pad with a certain uncharacteristic quickness. She wasn’t a flirt – unless you counted her talking at Michael as flirting – but she was usually more solicitous than this. Today, she’d been fast and distracted, her smiles slender and false.

  Probably had something to do with one of her coworkers getting murdered last night. When he’d heard, he’d felt the blood drain out of his face. How many times had he and Ava met for dinner here? Granted, never at three-thirty in the morning, but still; they didn’t live far from this place. The idea of a killer running loose made him want to put knives in people.

  Clearly, it made Holly the waitress twitchy.

  “What can I get you?” she asked, voice a ghost of its usual chirp.

  Ratchet ordered the grilled chicken sandwich, veggies instead of fries, because he was a health nut. Mercy thought about the sore places in his bad left leg, the one that had been trapped beneath the bike and been operated on twice, and thought about his weight loss, his need for protein. “Burger,” he told her, “and the soup.” That would give him two servings of beef, and he expected a comment, a laugh, even a twitch of eyebrows from Holly, but she didn’t react at all.

  “Right up,” she told them, and whisked away as quickly as she’d come. She’d always been a frightened-seeming girl, Mercy reflected, and now it was amplified.

  He didn’t get to dwell on it anymore. Ratchet said, “I think that’s them.”

  Mercy glanced up to see two men entering the bar, their mouths set in firm lines, their eyes sweeping back and forth like they were searching for someone.

  Had to be them.

  Mercy leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. “Have at it,” he told Ratchet, and resolved to look terrifying.

  Holly saw them as she was leaving the kitchen, Mercy and Ratchet’s food balanced on the tray perched on her shoulder. Her eyes went to the table where the two Dogs sat, searching for a clear path through the crowd to get to them, and she spotted the two men who’d joined them.

  Her heart came to a full stop, slamming up against her ribs. Nerveless, her hand opened, and the tray began to tilt.

  Abraham looked older than when last s
he’d seen him: more flecks of gray in his hair, deeper lines pressed into the sunburned skin around his eyes and mouth. He looked like a military man, the way he was built and the way he carried himself, but he wasn’t. He was just a man who put on airs, and who had one of those raging metabolisms, that kept all the alcohol from turning into a beer gut.

  At his side, Dewey looked the same: his colorless hair clipped short in a crew cut, his Adam’s apple sticking too far out of his throat, like his neck was bent at a wrong angle. Too skinny and awkward in his own skin. The top button of his red plaid shirt buttoned tight at the throat. His mouth damp and pink enough to make it look like he wore lipstick.

  Holly felt the tray tipping off her shoulder, but was powerless to catch it. It fell, crashing down onto the hardwood, the china breaking with an awful sound, soup bursting across the boards like spattering blood, hitting the baseboards, the walls, her sneakers and bare legs. She felt every eye in the place dart toward her, and the explosion of noise. She dropped to her knees with a gasp, ducking down low over the mess, where the bar would conceal her from the men at the table.

  “Shit!” Vanessa said behind her.

  “You okay?” Matt asked, hurrying from his place beside the taps to stand beside her.

  “I’m fine. Sorry. I’m so sorry,” Holly said, but she was anything but fine. She was close to cardiac arrest.

  She reached for the broken dishes with trembling hands, picked up a shard of the soup bowl, and was burned by the heat it retained. She fumbled it, and the sharp edge sliced across her palm, bright blood welling up in its path.

  “Oh no,” Matt said, crouching down. “Here, did you cut yourself? Damn, it’s bleeding. Doesn’t look deep, though.”

  On her knees, poised above the terrible mess she’d made, Holly stared transfixed at the blood. Her hand burned. Matt was right; the cut was deep. And all she could think about was the time she’d been threatened with a knife, the cool tip of it scratching lightly across her stomach, while the ropes cut into her wrists, and her ankles. That cut, if it had been made, would have been deeper than this one. It might have killed her, and then she wouldn’t have been here now, to spill food and make a big commotion that no one needed.