by Cassia Leo
I’m sorry to see him go. I would have been more comfortable doing this job with someone like him at my back—I know he would have been there for me no matter what—but it is what it is. I’ll have to make do.
“Have you told Tony and your mother yet?” I asked.
“My mother knows. She’s helped me pack my things. She’s afraid of what Tony’s reaction will be though. You know he had big plans for me—like getting the college education he always dreamed of getting. He gave me a pass when we ran off to join the Army, and that used up all my credit with him. Since we came back, he’s tried to make peace with the idea that I would make my own choices, but I think it only worked because he approved of me becoming a policeman…”
“He’s gonna have a fit when you tell him!”
“That’s why I’m getting my shit out of the house and into my room at the club house.”
“It’ll be tough on your mother, but I trust Nancy will find a way to make him come around.”
“Somehow I doubt that,” Brian says. “I told her not to fight with him about it. I’ll come see her when he’s away at work, and we’ll give him time to cool off.”
“How’s Cracker doing?”
“He’s taking it surprisingly well. You know what’s the weirdest thing? Seeing him with no hair. All my life, my father had this fabulous head of hair, and now he’s a regular Kojak. He says chemo is like a bad acid trip. He’s so weak when he gets out of there that he can hardly walk.”
I’m about to ask Brian if that means he can’t ride anymore, but that’s such a stupid question that I keep it to myself. If he can’t ride, he needs to resign, and Brian will never say that out loud.
“The interesting thing is that he’s coming around to some ideas I have,” Brian says. “He liked my idea of starting a private investigation firm. The MC paid for the license, and he came up with the name—Friendly Persuasion. How cool is that?”
I can’t help but laugh. Brian loves the chase so much. He just can’t help himself. He’s found a way to be an investigator. One without a badge.
“What’s funny?” he asks.
“I just had this vision of you being hired by the wife of a cheating husband and following him to one of the dens of inequity that the MC runs.”
When we were kids,“den of inequity” was the expression used by the fathers at All Saints School to designate any place they didn’t want us to go.
Brian smiles when he hears the expression. He tilts his head and looks away. Maybe the idea that he could have a conflict of interest had never occurred to him, and yet it was the first thing that had come to my mind. The MC runs a few striptease bars and a very private sex club called the Styx.
I’ve never been, but it’s not for lack of invitations. Brian says I’m a natural Dom and all I need is to take the few classes he and his brother give. Right, as if I could ever want to spank a woman!
“I’ll cross that bridge when I’ll get to it,” he says and shrugs. “Gotta get going. We have a meeting at the club.” He gets up and stretches.
I follow him to his bike, and we hug. I don’t tell him how much I’m going to miss him because that’s not who we are. But he knows. We’ve been like brothers since my uncle Tony married his mother. We were both five at the time. It was just about when Lisa was born.
Oh shit, Lisa. I forgot to call her. I usually call her up after she works the lunch shift. Too late now. I have to remember it tomorrow. I haven’t spoken to her in a while. I need to call her and figure out how she’s doing.
“Stay vertical,” I say as he rides away. I wonder how long it’ll be before we have a chance to sit down together again and share a drink. Fuck, I miss him already.
***
CHAPTER TWO
I’m fifteen minutes early for the briefing. I like getting places with some extra time to get my bearings. I run into Michael Mayfair at the reception desk. We did part of our training together, and we were often on the same team when work was assigned by alphabetical order. He’s very sharp and really good at technological stuff. That made us a good team, yet strangely, we never hit it off. I don’t know whether that’s because I was always hanging out with Brian or because Mike’s a shy guy.
“It’s nice to see a familiar face,” I tell him.
“Sure is,” he says with a warm smile. “Are you joining us?”
“Yeah, I asked to be assigned to Point Lookout ’cause it’s my hometown, and I got it. How cool is that? I’m supposed to meet with Captain Black.”
“Oh, you’re in the task force.” Mike’s face lights up like a kid talking about his favorite toy. “Good for you! They’re on the second floor, double door on the right. You better hurry. I hear she’s quite the stickler for punctuality.”
“Thanks for the heads up.” I start to climb the steps and turn around. “Let’s grab a beer soon and catch up.”
He nods, and I finish climbing to the second floor. I push open the double door to enter a large, windowless room. About a dozen people are present already, and the only one I recognize is the captain in charge of the station. His name is Steven Williams. He’s a big guy, about six feet tall—so not as tall as me—and massive. If someone told me he went to college on a wrestling scholarship, I’d have no problem believing it. Today he appears more relaxed than when I first saw him in a suit at one of the interviews conducted at the academy just before graduation. I’m sure he’s a jeans-and-T-shirt kind of man.
Half the room has been furnished like a conference room with chairs facing a blackboard. The other one is filled like a regular office with a couple of partners desks that look really battered compared to the brand-new faux-brown-leather chairs on each side.
I look around and sit next to a woman in civilian clothes. She’s arguing in hushed tones with a man about my age on her other side. He’s wearing an amused smile, as if her scolding is the funniest thing. She stops badgering him and turns toward me. She seems ready to bite and curse the person who has interrupted her, but she doesn’t. She merely frowns. I’m pretty sure she’s trying to figure out if we’ve met, and when she decides that we haven’t, she smiles.
Wow, she’s a drop-dead beauty.
“Hey, I’m Catherine.” Leaning back a bit, she adds, “And this asshole is my partner, Thomas.”
“Nice to meet you both. I’m David, David Mayfield.”
I shake their hands and notice that as soon as Catherine smiled at me, Thomas rested his left hand on the small of Catherine’s back. The gesture is subtle, but I get it as clearly as if he had said, “Back off, this one’s mine.” That’s fine because no matter how stunning she is, she’s way too skinny for me. I like to have something to hold on to, and she’s just skin and bones. Also, she has blood-red nails pointy enough to scare the erection out of any prudent male. I smile at Thomas and shake my head. Message sent loud and clear. You won’t get any trouble from me. He smiles back and relaxes.
“Welcome to Point Lookout,” Thomas says. “Where are you from?”
“This is my first assignment. I’m fresh out of the academy, but this is my hometown.”
A large hand lands on my shoulder, and both my neighbors turn to look at the newcomer.
Catherine seems genuinely happy to see him. Her smile is more spontaneous than the one she gave me. “Good to have you in the team, Everest.”
I turn and look up into another familiar face. Everest is Brian’s half brother, one of the kids the president of the Iron Tornadoes had with his old lady. Brian’s mum—that’s my aunt Nancy—was just a sweet butt he knocked up by accident. Everest’s real name is Ernest, but he’s so tall and spectacular that the MC picked an impregnable mountain name for his road name, and it suits him so well that even his fellow cops adopted it.
Before I have a chance to say anything, I hear a hissing sound from the other side of the room. A woman standing by the blackboard is making a white board slide down from the ceiling, and the mechanism needs a bit of oiling. She’s a chubby, middle-aged woman
with an Angela Davis sort of afro cut and a no-nonsense look. The room becomes silent.
“Everest, the door, please,” she says.
He turns around and locks it. While he comes back to sit on the bench behind me, the white board finishes descending from the ceiling. It’s covered with pictures of people connected by arrows that I understand to indicate some type of hierarchy in the group.
“Good morning, everyone. I’m Captain Martha Black, and I’ll be heading this unit from now on.” She looks at each of us in turn, as if challenging us to question her authority.
I follow her gaze and notice only three women in our group: Catherine, Captain Black, and a mousy little creature holding a pen and pad in the corner. When she notices me staring at her, she shakes her head as if to direct me to concentrate on Captain Black. Not that mousy after all.
“Our mission is to shake down this organization,” Captain Black says, pointing at the board. “Our targets call themselves the ‘Unrepentant Southern White Wizards.’ They’re a very well-organized bunch of prejudiced neo-Nazi dicks. They’re well connected, and so far they’ve been able to short-circuit all our attempts to take them down.”
While she speaks, I study the portraits of our targets. Unsurprisingly—since it’s an obvious prerequisite to become a member of a white supremacist group—all our targets are Caucasian. So are all the members of our group except our boss and Miss Not-So-Mousy.
“Some of their activities are perfectly legitimate,” Captain Black continues. “That’s how they clean the money they earn through their other enterprises. They’re so well connected and cautious that we haven’t had a chance to infiltrate them. Now we have an opportunity though, because the White Wizards have associated with a motorcycle club in which we already have a man. They use the MC to run some bars and a couple of strip joints.” She studies her audience to make sure she has our attention. “We’re going to infiltrate them through the MC. We’re lucky to have one motorcycle club expert with us. For those of you who don’t know him, Ernest Hatcher was born and raised in a MC.”
All heads turn toward Everest, who shakes his head and smiles.
“Everest—that’s his nickname—is the closest thing we have to a profiler in this unit. He’s got a master’s in psychology, and he’s very good at reading people.” There’s an unspoken threat in Captain Black’s words, as though she’s trying to tell us not to bullshit her. “The man we’re putting inside is David Mayfield.” She points in my direction, and all eyes land on me. “He’s just out of the academy, but he’s experienced. He was a MP for a few years.”
I put two fingers to my forehead in a mock salute and smile. I’m not sure whether I was picked for this task because of my experience or because my being from Point Lookout will make my cover stick, but when they offered the job during placement, I was glad they did.
“But as of today, David’s never been enlisted. That’s just the story his mother spun for the neighbors because he was actually doing time. He’s going in under his real name as a bad boy with a serious record. If anyone is to check, while he was in, he even managed to get his sentence extended by getting into fights because he hates ‘faggots, niggers, and spicks.’”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see the young woman with the pad cringe. Yeah, the N-word will do it every time.
Captain Black continues. “Access to this room will be restricted. The only keys to this door will be kept by Captain Steven Williams, Wilma Stone, our administrative assistant, and myself. Anytime you’re not working on the white board, I want it rolled up and hidden. You’re not to talk to anyone about the purpose of our task force. I understand that some of you may have nosy spouses or partners, so just tell them we’re going after a branch of organized crime and that you’ll lose your job if you talk. That is not an idle threat. I will fire your sorry asses if anything slips.”
***
CHAPTER THREE
“At least it’s nice that they’ve assigned you to the Point Lookout station,” my mother coos as she cleans up the breakfast table.
“You realize that doesn’t mean I’m going to stay home all day,” I tell her more harshly than I should.
“Of course not, my dear. I may be a little out of sorts, but I’m not totally out of touch with reality,” she answers sweetly, making me feel so guilty I hate myself.
I want to shake her to snap her out of the daze she’s been in since Dad died, but it won’t work. Nothing has worked. Lisa has tried everything but setting the house on fire, but she failed. Our mother is indeed out of touch with reality. She lives in romance-novel land, and the only thing she still has a handle on is taking care of the house.
Living with her has its advantages. I don’t have to pay rent, and I have someone who changes my sheets, takes care of my laundry, fills up the fridge, and always has my favorite food ready when I get home. That’s the way I sold my moving back in to make sure Lisa didn’t give up her dream by staying with Mom. Now Lisa’s in law school in New York, and I’m here. Most of the time, I’m happy to be back, but today is one of those days I wish I lived elsewhere. Since yesterday, Mom’s been focused on the name of the unit…
“If it’s a special task force, darling, it means that you’re assigned a special task. Why won’t you tell me what it is?”
“Mom, I don’t know yet and probably will not be allowed to tell you anything when I do.”
“That’s so silly,” she answered. “I never see anyone. Whom would I leak such precious information to?”
The answer to that one is easy—she would say it to anyone who would listen. I’m sure all the staff at the local supermarket knows that my sister is in law school in New York and that I just came back home, unharmed, after five years in the Army.
I plaster on a smile and ignore her question. If Lisa could put up with Mom during the five years I was away, the least I can do is stay with her as long as Lisa’s in law school. But one thing’s for sure—when Lisa returns, I won’t let her move back and sacrifice herself. Hell, I’d rather she move in with Brian at the MC clubhouse than stay here. That thought brings me a smile. I’d pay good money to see that happen!
I look at my watch. In half an hour, I need to be in a diner next to the Category Five Knights MC clubhouse. I’m meeting with a guy named Slider about a job as a bouncer in a strip club. I bring my coffee cup to the sink and give my mother a kiss.
She smiles and raises an eyebrow. Yeah, my biker’s clothing isn’t what she expected me to wear my second day on the job. She turns around and watches me slide in my favorite battered leather jacket.
“Drive safely,” she says as I walk out of the kitchen.
“Yeah, yeah, I will. Don’t wait up for me. I’ll probably get in late,” I answer before the door slams behind me.
Once in the garage, I look at my two bikes. What I need today is to show that I mean business. This means I don’t want to take the light cross-country machine but my other baby. I pick an old-fashioned helmet and get on my way.
As I ride, I remember what Captain Black said about Slider. He’s been undercover with the Category Five Knights for such a long time that when she met him, she wondered if he remembered he was still law enforcement. His loyalty to his MC scared her a bit, and she doesn’t seem like a woman who scares easily. Funny how that made me see the guy in a favorable light. He’s probably like Brian—conflicted. No one can live with a bunch of guys for years without bonding. It’s enough to make a man end up ripped by torn loyalties.
When I get to the diner, Slider’s outside, pacing by the door.
I recognize him from the picture Captain Black showed me, and I guess he’s seen my picture too, because the second I’m next to him, he says, “We met in a bar. I was hitting on your sister, you stepped in, and I didn’t care for the bitch enough to get into a fight.”
It takes me a couple seconds to understand that he’s not insulting my sister; he’s telling he’s worked on our legend. Should anybody ask, that’s how we met. I p
ull my wallet out and show him a picture of Lisa.
He takes a good look at her. “I would have fought you for a piece of that ass.”
I take a deep breath and remind myself that when you’re undercover, you need to be who you need to be twenty-four, seven. Somehow, I can’t get myself to thank him for what I guess was a compliment! I smile when I think of what Brian’s reaction would have been. The poor guy’s been in love with Lisa forever and has only managed to bang her once. He did it the night before we ran away, and the idiot had waited so long for her that he was done before he even got started. Poor Lisa!
“The bar was the Shamrock in Point Lookout,” I tell him. That’s the one bar where Lisa and I used to hang out to listen to country music.
“Fine, I know the place.” He studies my hands and the visible parts of my arms. “No tats?”
“None. I haven’t found anything that I’m ready to let under my skin yet,” I say.
He shrugs. “Let’s go in.”
We find an empty booth in the back corner, and the waitress magically appears to take our order. She notes what I ask for while staring at Slider. She’s obviously crazy about the man. She’s a plain girl in her thirties who I don’t think would be his type, but who knows? He smiles at her, a big predatory grin, and she blushes.
“The usual, sweetheart,” he tells her.
She takes my order and rushes away. When she returns, the waitress brings my eggs and the largest omelet I’ve ever seen. Slider looks up at her, nods, and grunts.
She hovers next to him until he says, “Thanks, honey.” When she’s gone, he tells me with a boyish grin, “I thought about a pity fuck, but then I’d have to change diners, and I kind of like this place. They make the best omelets.”
I nod and don’t comment.
“Do you like pussy or are you a backdoor kind of guy? No skin off my nose if you are, but it wouldn’t sit well with your new boss.”