“Bye, Kade,” I called out after him.
“Bye, Old Man.”
“You’re payin’ to clean my fuckin’ upholstery,” Sid said.
Kade actually chuckled as they wheeled him out of the room.
First time I’d ever heard that sound. Even Jack looked shocked.
137
Once they’d all left, Fordham pointed at the door – and by extension, Kade. “You know that every new person you tell is another violation, right? Your prison sentence is getting to be like rabbits multiplying – every time I look around there’s another ten years tacked on.”
“He was helping us catch Lou,” I insisted.
Fordham looked around. “Really? Where is he? I think I missed that part.”
“We saw Lou commit a murder,” I insisted.
I suddenly felt sick as I remembered Benjy’s sad, tear-streaked face.
“And you say this guy was the one who killed your cousin?” Fordham asked.
“Yes. Although I think Lou manipulated him into doing it.”
“Oh, well, I’m so happy to have such a magnitude of proof to present in court. Speaking of which, what the fuck did you do to that meth lab?”
“It was a trap,” Jack said. “They had a sniper around the corner set to blow our brains out.”
Fordham pointed at Sid. “But then you shot him,” Fordham said, as though trying to get clear on our story.
“Yup.”
Fordham turned to Jack. “And then you blew up the fuckin’ lab – our main piece of evidence – for… what, exactly?”
“It was supposed to look like revenge, but I did it to make Lou desperate.”
“Desperate to do what? Tear his hair out, like I’m about to do with what little I got left?”
“To rebuild the lab he needs a huge influx of cash. We figure he’s going to sell whatever meth he has left so he can get his bankroll going again. Once he gets his money, then he can start up again. He’s already got his cook back – ”
“Yeah, great work on that one. Destroy the evidence, lose the witness… it was really quite masterful.”
“It’s coming together,” Jack insisted.
“Oh, you got a plan, do you?” Fordham asked sarcastically.
“Goddamn right we do.”
“Well, far be it from me to step on your plan, no matter how ass-backwards and illegal it happens to be.”
“You seem relatively calm for us destroying evidence and losing a witness,” I said.
“Our potential star witness, I might add.”
“So why aren’t you arresting us?”
Fordham grimaced. “Because word came down from the top that they’re closing the investigation.”
I stared at him. “What?”
“Since Eddie’s disappearance, we have nobody on the inside. We have no new intel coming through. We’re basically dead in the water.”
I tried to put it as delicately as I could. “Aren’t you… investigating his disappearance?”
“We’re doing what we can, but that isn’t much at the moment. The trail’s gone cold and we got no leads – and now the money’s run out. We’re supposed to wrap things up and charge whoever we’ve got shit on, which means Lou will go down for a long time… but we don’t have anything worthwhile on the Richards PD, and the Santa Muertes are way the fuck out of our reach.”
“How long do we have to wrap up?” Jack asked.
“A week.”
“It won’t take a week. Couple of days at most. And you’ll get the Santa Muertes and the Richards PD.”
“You better be right,” Fordham said with an unfriendly smile. “Because if the top brass comes gunning for me, I’m going to lay out a couple of sacrificial lambs. Four, to be exact.”
“Great,” Sid grumbled.
“We’re on it,” Jack reassured Fordham. “We’ve got this.”
“Did you find out anything about Eddie?” Fordham asked.
“No,” I said. “Although it was veeeery interesting that the whole time at the meth lab, Lou avoided mentioning the DEA even once. And he told Benjy that Ali betrayed the Riders by working with another gang.”
Fordham shrugged. “Maybe he really believes that.”
“No,” Jack said. “I was there when it all went down. Lou was convinced you guys were breathing down our necks. That’s why he had Ali killed. He’s not suddenly chilled out and relaxed about it.”
Fordham looked down at the floor. “And if he had your cousin killed for snitching…”
He didn’t have to include the second part of the sentence: God knows what he’d do to an actual DEA agent.
Fordham suddenly looked older. Tired.
“We’ve got this,” Jack reassured him. “Just a little more time.”
“It’s good all you need is just a little more time, because that’s all you’ve got,” Fordham said. “After that, I wrap up all loose ends – and you, my friends, are some of the loosest ends I’ve ever had the misfortune of knowing. Use your time wisely before you all wind up in a federal penitentiary.”
“Unless we get Lou, Peters, and the Santa Muertes,” I said.
Fordham laughed darkly. “While you’re at it, get Keyser Soze, too. That guy’s a real bitch to catch.”
138
Lou
Capone, Doc, Gunner, and a half-dozen other Riders dug holes near the burned-out hulk of the barn. I smoked a cigar and watched as the sun started to go down over the hills.
These fuckers were strictly the B-team. Unfortunately, all my starters had died at Jack’s the other night, or were pretty much smeared across the ground a hundred yards away.
Gunner’s shovel hit something. Thunk.
“I think we got somethin’ here, Lou,” he yelled.
“Well haul it out, asshole,” I barked.
We’d buried the plastic barrels with ropes tied in a net around them. Once my guys found the ropes, they were able to lift it fairly easily – if you call four grown-ass men struggling to pull a 400-pound barrel out of a hole in the ground ‘fairly easily.’
One down, two more to go.
I’d told Peters I had a couple hundred pounds buried out here, but it was closer to a thousand. Didn’t want him thinking it would be more lucrative to double-cross me.
Einstein had said that a pound of meth wholesale in LA or San Francisco would go for around eight or nine grand. The deal I’d cut with Rodrigo only gave me $3000 a pound – but that meant I didn’t have to have my own distribution network, my own manpower, and best of all, I didn’t have to fuck with the Santa Muertes over territory.
So roughly three and a half million in one transaction. Not too fuckin’ shabby.
With that much dough, I could pay Peters enough to shut him the fuck up, build ten new labs, hire a shitload of help for Einstein, and live like a king until the next batch was ready.
Richards, California would be the new meth capital of the USA. Hell, maybe even the world.
If Jack Pollari and the DEA didn’t fuck with my plans first.
The DEA.
Goddamn those assholes. Of course Jack had turned traitor. I should have seen it comin’.
Oh well. I’d dealt with one DEA agent already.
I could deal with another.
139
After the whole thing went down with Jack at the Roadhouse last month and I’d tossed the bum out on his ass, there was only one thing still sticking in my craw:
What the fuck had happened to Roach?
I’d sent him to the motel to ‘question’ Fiona, and he’d said there was somebody else in the room with her.
At the time, I’d figured it was that Abrams motherfucker, her boss back in LA. That was the most logical assumption.
Or maybe it was a local PI. There were only a couple in Richards, so it’d be easy enough to check. But unless she was throwing a shit-ton of money at them, I didn’t see why any local private investigator would risk helping her. They knew better. Crossing the Midnight Rider
s – crossing me – was a good way to end up as coyote chow.
The night I’d sent Roach, I’d gone on and on to Jack about how maybe Fiona was a Fed – but I was totally bullshitting the entire time. It was a smokescreen to cover my real plans. I mean, no little private investigator bitch was going to be able to put the DEA or the FBI on our tails that fast. No way in hell.
Part of me thought back to a year ago, when Venus got gunned down in the alleyway.
Was I right back then? Was she talking to the DEA?
I hadn’t seen a hint of them for the last year.
Had it all been some stupid misunderstanding?
If so… oh well. Spilt milk and all that.
But what the fuck had happened to Roach?
It’s possible he’d actually tossed the room, then left and gone on a bender… but that didn’t fit. Roach wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but he knew how to follow instructions. And he was smart enough to know never, ever to fuck with me.
Did that Abrams guy kidnap Roach? Maybe kill him? What the hell was I dealing with here?
After kicking Jack out of the club, finding Roach was my first priority.
140
I sent Eyeball to Roach’s place. No dice. I had him canvas all Roach’s normal spots – Decker’s Gun and Knife shop, local dives, the other titty bars besides the Veils – but nobody’d seen him.
That wasn’t good.
If that Abrams PI asshole had popped him, there was no telling where he was now.
I didn’t have a ton of other options, so I went with my old standby: Dan Peters.
“I gotta find my guy, Dan,” I said once I was sitting in his office.
“It’s been a busy month for you and the Riders, hasn’t it?” Dan asked. “Attempted murder at the strip club… a self-defense shooting, and another suspect missing… then we had to pick up Kade and that Fiona girl for you…”
I sighed. “How much?”
“I’m thinkin’… twenty-five. That’s for everything.”
I smiled tightly. “Another kid goin’ to college, Dan?”
“Kids are expensive, Lou.”
“I’ll bet they are. So are boats and lakefront properties.”
He laughed. “So you heard about that, huh?”
“I did.”
“Well, a man in my position has to blow off steam somehow, Lou. All that stress on the job.”
Yeah, covering up murders and shilling for biker gangs was stressful, I’ll bet.
We haggled a bit and settled on eighteen grand. I wasn’t happy about it, but now that Jack was out of the picture, I could ramp up the meth operation. Money would be flowing like water soon enough.
Dan got one of his techies to run a triangulation something or other on Roach’s phone. Nothing came back.
“What does that mean?” I asked angrily.
“Most likely, the phone’s off.”
“I thought you guys could track that shit even when it’s off.”
“Maybe somebody took the battery out.”
Goddamn it.
“Can you keep looking for it 24/7?” I asked. “In case they turn it back on?”
“That’s expensive, Lou,” Dan said. “Resource intensive, you know…”
I rolled my eyes. “Twenty grand instead of eighteen.”
Dan smiled. “…but I think we can do it.”
141
I figured if somebody had Roach’s phone, it might make it more interesting for them if they had a message to check – so I left one.
“Yo, Roach, where are you? The shipment is ready to go, and we need the money NOW. Get off your fuckin’ ass and call me.”
There was no shipment – well, not that Roach was involved in, anyway. And he didn’t have any money, either. But I figured it might be some nice bait.
Sure enough, Dan Peters called me three hours later. “Whoever has the phone turned it on for a couple of minutes, and we were able to get a location.”
“Where?”
He gave me an address I didn’t recognize.
“What is that, a bar or something?”
“No, it’s residential… owned by some woman named Rose Shriver.”
“What the fuck? Who’s Rose Shriver?”
“According to what we’ve got on file, nobody we know. Nothing on record for the address, either – no visits from us, anyway, any time in the last ten years.”
This made less and less sense.
“Alright – I’ll go check it out.”
I thought about going on my Harley, but if Abrams had stolen Roach’s phone, then I didn’t need to advertise my presence from half a mile away. So I swung by my house and got my ’73 Barracuda instead.
The address was in a rundown neighborhood with a bunch of homes from the 40’s or 50’s. Looked like paper mill company houses, even though there wasn’t a mill in Richards. The house was right on the verge of looking like shit, with peeling paint and a lawn with more brown patches in it than green.
It had something else, too: a Harley in the driveway.
The fuck?!
It was one I recognized, too, though I couldn’t put my finger on it. Only thing I knew was that it wasn’t Roach’s. He had a Bonneville he’d let go to shit.
Whoever was inside probably wasn’t the goddamn PI, then.
I parked my car a couple hundred feet away and watched in my rearview mirror.
I thought about going up to the front door and banging on it, but if this was some sort of Santa Muerte hideout… unh-unh.
My mind began to work out other options.
What if it’s just a Midnight Rider, and Roach is here passed out on his couch?
I was going to ream both of them a new asshole if that was the case.
Or… what if it was a Midnight Rider… and Roach WASN’T passed out on his couch?
From there my paranoia kicked into high gear.
What if I was actually right without knowing it? What if that fantasy situation I’d concocted for Jack was true?
What if we did have a DEA mole in our midst?
Impossible.
But…
I had to get in there and look around. And whoever lived there couldn’t know about it.
I could wait five or six hours…
Or, if they really were a Midnight Rider, I could flush them out easily enough.
I called Eyeball. “Text everybody in the club – emergency meeting at the Roadhouse in 20 minutes.”
He was understandably alarmed. “What’s goin’ on, Lou?”
“Can’t talk about it right now – just do it.”
I hung up.
Sixty seconds later, a group text came in: Lou says emergency meeting at the Roadhouse 3PM.
I sat there in the car and waited.
Two minutes later, somebody walked out of the house’s front door.
Eddie Deacon.
Then he got on his Harley and drove away.
142
Eddie fuckin’ Deacon?!
This was a misunderstanding. Had to be.
Eddie had been patched in for almost three years now. He was a good soldier. Not in my inner group, exactly, but he was one of the guys I trusted to get shit done.
What the fuck was he doing with Roach’s cell phone at his house?
Time to find out.
I got out of the car and walked over to the house. Nobody else was on the street, so I snuck around to the rear.
I tried the back door – locked. Tried all the windows, too. Same.
Now wasn’t the time for subtlety, so I rammed my elbow through a pane of glass in the back door, reached my hand through, and unlocked it from the inside.
Place was fairly neat and clean – unusual for a biker pad. Old, too. Creaky hardwood floors that had been painted white to cover up their age. Hanging on the wall was one of those spiral cord telephones you never see anymore. The refrigerator and gas stove looked like they’d come with the house when it was built.
I cased all the
rooms, didn’t find anything. No cell phone, that was for damn sure.
I went to the bedroom and started searching – under the bed, between the mattress and the box spring, in the dresser drawers. Found a shotgun and a Beretta with several boxes of shells and bullets – but that was about it.
I looked under the tables to see if anything was taped there, but came up clean.
I did the same search in the kitchen, the den, the spare bedroom, the bathroom. Nothing.
Fuck.
I thought for a second. I could try calling Roach. It would be a long shot if the phone was still on, but I tried it anyway.
Went right to voicemail. No sound from the house, though.
I thought about calling Dan Peters back and telling him the address was bullshit, but my gut was telling me otherwise.
It was too big of a coincidence for the police to accidentally guess the house of one of my club members.
I got to thinking.
Say he is DEA…
Was he the one Venus was talking to?
I remembered something: the fake bust I’d set up that Venus called in, the one she found on the post-it note.
I’d sent Eddie out on that.
Son of a bitch… that’s why the DEA didn’t raid us that night – because Eddie knew it was bullshit from the get-go.
GOD DAMN IT.
But that made me think of something else.
Venus called two numbers – that 213 area code, and then that 310 number from the phone company records.
What if those numbers were to cell phones that Eddie had? Cell phones that might be somewhere in this house?
They’d been disconnected when I’d called them before. I doubted anything would come of it, but what did I have to lose?
I scrolled through my Contact list and found the number I’d saved almost a year ago under ‘DEA?’
I was about to hit dial when I realized that maybe it wasn’t the best idea to call the DEA directly while I was standing inside one of their undercover agents’ house.
Midnight Obsession: A Midnight Riders Motorcycle Club Romance Part 4 Page 31