He lashed out like a three-year-old – in blind fury, without a thought in his head other than I hate you.
As soon as he pulled the trigger, though, he was immediately horrified.
There was the BANG of the gunshot, and she went down face-first on the pavement with a sickening thud.
I’m sure he stared down at her body, not wanting to believe he had just done it, hoping it was all just a dream.
“Ali?” he whimpered.
Then he saw the pool of blood seeping out from under her head, shiny and black in the moonlight.
“Nooo – no, no, no, no – no no no no – ” he whispered, then whimpered, then screeched. He started running down the alleyway, back towards his ride.
He was long gone before the first barflies came to gawk.
So was she.
Hell, she was probably dead by the time she hit the ground.
It couldn’t have gone better, as far as I was concerned.
122
“I did it, Lou,” he whispered as he stared off into the darkness. “I did it.”
“And I’m real proud of you, Benjy. You did good.”
“I don’t feel good, Lou,” he whined, and broke down in tears. “I feel real bad.”
“That’ll pass. Here, take another drink – ”
“I killed her, Lou! I killed her!” he wailed, then doubled over and started bawling like a baby again.
“Hey – HEY,” I said, shaking him roughly. “You did what had to be done. She was going to destroy the Midnight Riders. You saved the club.”
He hiccupped and rubbed his eyes. “What did she mean, Lou?”
“What do you mean, what’d she mean?”
“She said I was a traitor.”
“That’s ‘cause she was a lying bitch. She was the traitor, not you. She was going to destroy the club, not you.”
He looked at me dubiously. “How’d she know I told you stuff, Lou?”
“I don’t know, Benjy,” I lied. “Maybe she overheard me talkin’ to you. Maybe you talk in your sleep. I don’t know – we’ll never know. But it doesn’t matter, ‘cause you saved the club. You did the right thing.”
He looked up at me blearily. “Can I be in the Riders now?”
“Eventually. I’m going to get you in. But you can’t ever tell anybody what you did, you understand? You can’t tell Jack, you can’t tell Kade, you can’t tell anybody, you understand?”
“Why not?” he whined.
“Because a cop might find out, just like Venus found out you and I talked. Maybe somebody like Eyeball who doesn’t like you will go and tell the cops, and then they’ll put you in jail, and I don’t want that to happen. You understand?”
“But – ”
“You can never talk about this again, EVER. You understand?”
“…okay, Lou.” He sounded suicidally depressed.
“In fact, I think it’s best if we just pretend this never happened. You hear me? It DID NOT HAPPEN.”
“But – ”
“IT DID NOT HAPPEN. Say it.”
“It didn’t happen,” he repeated.
“Say it again.”
“It didn’t happen.”
I made him say it ten more times before I was satisfied.
123
Before I drove his drunk ass home in my Charger, I had Benjy tell me where he’d left his bike. Then I went out and confirmed it. No fuckin’ way I wanted the getaway vehicle on my property and not be able to find it.
Once I dropped him off, I came back and called Eyeball, who was still up.
“Lou? What’s up?”
“You got a truck, right?”
“Yeah?”
“Meet me at the gas station on Vermont and Hodge in thirty minutes.”
“Okay,” he said without question.
He knew I wouldn’t be calling at 3AM in the morning asking for a ride without a damn good reason, and one I probably didn’t want to discuss over the phone.
I rode Benjy’s bike back to his shitty apartment complex, left it out in the parking lot in plain sight, then walked the half a mile to the gas station.
Eyeball was waiting for me in his piece of shit pickup.
“Anything I should know?” he asked as I got in.
“Nope,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, then drove me back home without another word.
I poured myself a drink, smoked myself a cigar, then went to bed and slept like a baby.
124
I woke up the next morning to the sound of somebody banging on my front door.
I blearily grabbed the gun under my pillow – not the one Benjy used, but a Glock – and stumbled out to the hallway.
“Who the fuck is it?” I shouted.
“Jack,” the voice called out from my front porch.
Shit.
I jacked the slide on the gun and made sure I had a bullet in the chamber.
“Who’m I talking to?” I yelled. “The hothead from last night, or the coolheaded president of the Midnight Riders?”
“The president.”
Yeah, right.
I unlocked the door and pulled it back a few inches. Jack stood there, looking pissed but calm.
“Couldn’t you have just fuckin’ called?” I asked.
“This is a conversation that needs to happen face to face.”
I opened the door a little wider. “Your pet Viking out there?”
“No, Kade’s holding down the shop.”
“In that case, come on in,” I said, and opened the door.
He noticed the gun at my side as he entered. He looked at me and cocked an eyebrow.
“I didn’t know who the fuck you were when you woke me up with all that fuckin’ noise.”
He grunted. “You got any coffee?”
I yawned. “Do I look like I got any fuckin’ coffee?”
“I meant, you got a fuckin’ coffee maker?”
“In the kitchen. Make some for me while I go get dressed,” I said, and shuffled back to the bedroom.
When I walked back in the kitchen five minutes later, I still had the Glock tucked in the back of my pants. Just in case.
He was sitting at the kitchen table sipping on a cup. I poured myself a mug and sat across from him.
“Well?” I asked.
“Did you have anything to do with her murder?” he asked me, point blank.
“No, I did not,” I said, staring him dead in the eyes.
I’m a good liar. I don’t know if he bought it, but I sure as hell didn’t give him any reason not to.
“Can you think of anyone who might have had something to do with it?”
I sat back in my chair and pretended to ponder the question. “I seriously doubt it was the Feds, so… could’ve been a coke dealer. Somebody she owed money to.”
“Why would he kill her if he wanted money?”
“I know you’ve forgotten how this works, since the Riders have gone legit and all,” I said sarcastically, “but sometimes you write off a bad debt to send a message to all the other deadbeats.”
“How’d he know she’d be there?”
I shrugged. “Maybe he followed her.”
Jack glared. “That’s quite a coincidence, him following her to the exact place we were meeting.”
“Not really. If he couldn’t pop her at her place or the Veils, it might’ve been the first time he had the opportunity.”
Jack thought about that for a second. “Did you tell anybody else she was snitching?”
“No.”
“Do you think anybody could have overheard you at the Seven Veils?”
“Who, Peanut?” When Jack didn’t look amused, I sighed. “It’s possible, I suppose – but somebody could have just as easily overheard you at your shop and taken it upon themselves to remedy the situation. You got way more Midnight Riders workin’ for you than I got workin’ for me.”
He looked off in the distance. “I think we should tell Dan Peters our suspicions.”
“Wha
t the fuck for?!”
“Maybe it’ll give him a lead on who killed her.”
I wanted to say What the fuck for? again, but I didn’t think he’d take that very well.
Instead, I scoffed. “NO. If we’re gonna handle this shit, let’s do it internally. You get Dan Peters involved, he’ll have his sticky little fingers all over your wallet before you know it.”
“How are we going to handle it internally?”
“We make a list of the guys and find out where they were last night. Do our own investigation.”
Jack shook his head dolefully. “I still think we should tell Dan Peters.”
“Tell him WHAT, exactly? That we think she was snitching for the DEA? Do you have a fuckin’ death wish? We tell him that, he’ll ask, ‘Why was she snitching?’ Then what do we say? ‘Duuuuh, I don’t know’? Our only source of revenue at the moment is smuggling pot, or did you forget that already?”
“I thought Peters was your boy,” Jack sneered.
“When I buy him off, he’s my boy,” I snapped. “If I don’t, then he’s a fuckin’ wild card. If you want to involve Dan Peters, I say we pay him a little something to make this shit go away.”
“Jesus – ”
“The last thing we need is for the MC to get extra scrutiny, which is exactly what a full-scale investigation by the cops would bring. You’re the one who’s worried about our lily-white reputation – is this what you want, extra heat?”
Jack narrowed his eyes. I could tell he was taking me seriously. “What about the DEA?”
“We’re gonna have to wait and see.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, if she was talking to the DEA again – ”
“What do you mean ‘if’?” he asked angrily.
“Well, she kind of kicked the bucket before we could find out for sure, didn’t she?”
Jack looked like he was about to strangle me.
“Say she was,” I said, trying to calm him down. “Then either they’ll come after us with what they’ve got so far, or they’ll try to pin the shooting on us, or… shit, I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t give ‘em much. Maybe they don’t know about the pot, and maybe they’ll just go the fuck away.”
“That’s a lot of maybes.”
“What do you want from me? Neither one of us can do shit about it now. It’s out of our hands. But there’s no need to go involving Dan. If he thought he could profit from the situation, he’d sell us out to the DEA lickety-split.”
“How would he profit from the situation?”
“He hasn’t exactly been making a shit-ton off us the last couple of years,” I pointed out. “If he could wipe out the Midnight Riders with one blow, and replace us with an operation slightly more amenable to paying off the local authorities – ”
“Like the Santa Muertes,” Jack said sourly.
I nodded. “There’d be a lot more money in it for him if they took over our territory.”
“But we could bring him down just as easily as he could bust us,” Jack complained. “He took bribes from the club for years.”
“Maybe. But it’s our word against his. Besides, there’s fuckin’ corrupt cops everywhere. You think the DEA has the time or inclination to bring down every police department on the take? You think the Feds want that kind of headache or bad press? Especially when a biker gang makes a way easier target?”
Jack stewed in his rage. “FUCK…”
“All I’m sayin’ is, it doesn’t do us any good to have Dan pokin’ around in who that girl was talking to. In fact, it might behoove us to pay him a little to make sure he doesn’t, that’s all.”
Jack gritted his teeth. After a long pause, he relented.
“…alright. Can you talk to him?”
“Of course.”
Said the spider to the fly.
“I fuckin’ hate that guy,” Jack muttered.
“I know,” I said sympathetically. “I’ll handle it.”
“Somebody needs to tell Benjy, too,” Jack said.
Shit.
“Maybe it shouldn’t be you, seein’ as how you threw him against the wall when you broke into the Ridgeway that one time,” I suggested.
“…yeah,” Jack said, then got a strange look on his face. “What about Benjy?”
“What about him?” I asked. I kept my outward appearance calm, but my heart sped up a little.
“You said he came to you for advice, that he thought she was cheating on him… do you think he could have done it?”
I chuckled. “Are you fuckin’ with me?”
“He’s strung out on coke – he thought she was going behind his back – and if he got it into his head that he was helping out the club – ”
“Jack – Jesus, listen to yourself. You know as well as I do that he was so far gone on that chick it was fuckin’ embarrassing. He’s dumb as shit, but Benjy’s a good kid. You think he’s even capable of doing what we saw last night?”
Jack thought for a second, then the look of suspicion left his face entirely.
“…no. Never mind. You’re probably right about me not being the best one to tell him… you mind doing it?”
“Don’t worry about a thing,” I said soothingly. “I’ll handle that, too.”
125
After Jack left, I called up Dan Peters.
“Hey, Lou,” he said, all bright and perky. He could smell the money coming out of his phone.
“That girl you found last night – she at the morgue?”
“Yep. No need for an autopsy – cause of death is pretty clear,” he chuckled.
“Yeah, about that… I need to take a look at somethin’.”
There was a long pause.
“That’s highly irregular, Lou,” he said seriously.
As if anything about our ‘arrangement’ was ‘regular.’ Other than how I had to keep paying him off like clockwork.
“Yeah, well, I still need to check somethin’ out. Besides, we can talk about my next donation to the police charity ball while I’m there.”
He grumbled, then sighed. “I guess I can get you in.”
“How about in an hour?”
Another unhappy silence.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You got a back way in?”
“Why?”
“Let’s just say it’s probably in both our interests for me not to be seen there.”
“Fine. Meet me out back, near that dumpster with the biohazard sign on it.”
126
Dan cleared out the morgue attendant before he brought me in. The room was cold and smelled like Lysol. It looked exactly you seen ‘em on TV cop shows.
There she was, lying naked and pale on a table under a big bright light.
“Damn. What a waste of great tits,” the fine police chief of Richards clucked.
I ignored both him and the tits. I’d seen enough of them when she was alive.
He just couldn’t shut up, though. “Jesus Christ, her face is a mess.”
“That’s what happens when somebody shoots you in the back of the head,” I said as I walked over and took hold of her cold right hand.
“What’re you doing?” Dan asked in alarm.
“Don’t wet your panties.”
I pulled out the rhinestone-covered phone and pressed her dead finger to the button.
Abracadabra –
The main screen appeared. Thank fuck.
“Where the hell’d you get that?” Dan asked, now clearly agitated.
“Not at the scene of the crime, if that’s what you’re worried about,” I said as I checked out her phone calls.
There were the two that had come in last night from ‘No Number,’ along with a couple of others – one from ‘Nana,’ one from ‘Bobby.’ No voicemails from ‘No Number,’ though.
I scrolled down the entire record of her calls. Lots and lots of names – but no more ‘No Numbers.’ Which meant that unless she was hiding her contact in plain sight under ‘Bobby’ or
‘Nana’ or some shit, she’d been deleting every call as she went along.
“Say, Dan,” I spoke up. “You can get her records off the phone company, right? Everybody who called her, or everybody she called?”
“Yeah?”
“That’d be something you’d do in the course of a murder investigation, right?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Why don’t you make that happen?” I suggested, and ignored his sourpuss look.
I checked her texts next. Tons of names from her Contacts list, too – except one, from a phone number with no name. It had come in at 11:27… just 30 minutes before she died.
Where are you? was all it said.
It was a 310 area code. Los Angeles.
Different area code from the last number she’d called, but still Los Angeles.
I took a picture of her screen with my phone, just in case hers went dead or locked up and I couldn’t get it back. I needed that number.
“You think you can hurry this up, Lou?” Dan asked nervously.
“Hold on, I got to fix it so the phone doesn’t lock up on me. I figure you don’t want to keep sneaking me back in here.”
“Better do whatever you need to do now,” Dan said. “They’ll be releasing the body to the family soon.”
“Huh. Think you can cut off a finger for me before you turn her over to ‘em?”
I kept my face serious just long enough to make him look queasy. Then I broke into a grin.
“Kiddin’, Dan. Jesus, lighten up.”
I went into the phone’s settings and fixed it so it wouldn’t turn off to save power. Now I just had to get it home and plug it in before it died on me.
“Alright, I’m good to go,” I said, careful to hold the phone so I didn’t accidentally switch it off.
Once we got back to my car, Dan cleared his throat. “So… about our continued arrangement…”
“Is five thousand good enough?” I asked.
He looked unhappy. “To sneak you into a morgue, unlock a stolen phone, bury a murder investigation, and get you a list of numbers from the phone company? No, it’s not.”
I wanted to roll my eyes, but politely refrained. “Alright, Dan, what were you thinkin’?”
Midnight Obsession: A Midnight Riders Motorcycle Club Romance Part 4 Page 28