“Oh no,” I murmur, “what are we gonna do?”
“Listen,” Genn whispers, holding up one finger. We hear the approaching squeal of tires and manage to pull the Focus off the road into a clearing behind a patch of trees just before a cavalcade of black sedans come thundering up to the gate.
“The feds,” I whisper, feeling nauseous. They’ve beaten us here. If they see me or Genn, they’ll immediately suspect something’s off. All they know is that Leon is innocent and that Doyle is not. Genn and I are still just trespassing citizens, and it doesn’t help that we’re both associated with the Club. These guys won’t recognize us on sight, I’m sure, but if they arrest us, our identities will inevitably come up. Even if the feds can’t pin this particular crime on us, they’ll never really be on our side — they’ll lock us up without a second thought.
“Look, the gate’s opening. What if we just…?” Genn trails off, raising an eyebrow questioningly. I catch his drift. We both shrug and jump out of the car, bolting after the sedans through the fence just before it closes again, my heart racing.
God, I hope they don’t arrest us, too!
“Genn, hide,” I hiss, waving my hand to shoo him off. He nods and wordlessly darts off the path into the shade of some trees and underbrush while I walk confidently up the driveway, even though I’m not sure if the plan I’m formulating on the way there is going to blow up in my face. Part of me wants to just tell them why I’m here, but I can’t risk muddying up their case against Doyle.
Still, I’ve got to try something. Fake it till you make it, I urge myself as I strut up through the rows of black sedans. The feds are pouring out now, holding up their hands to stop me, shouting at me to get back and stay back.
I simply hold my hands up in surrender and announce, “I’m a journalist! The people have a right to know about what Leon Volkov has done! I’m here to collect the truth and by God I am going to get it even if I have to spend the night in a cell to do so!”
“Ma’am, the press is not allowed beyond that gate!” bellows one of the agents, his shiny aviator sunglasses reflecting my own passionate face as he storms up to me.
“This is public property! I am a tax-paying citizen who just wants to share information with other upstanding citizens about what’s going on here today!” Deciding it can’t hurt to lay it on thick, I continue, “Leon Volkov is a career criminal with no soul and I am here to make sure the world knows that our police are bringing him to justice!”
I can see some of the feds relaxing a bit, believing I’m just some ignorant media peon. At least they’re less likely to arrest me now, even if they’re still not willing to let me inside the building.
“Miss, I apologize, but you can’t go in there with us, as much as we’d like to let you in,” says another agent, removing his sunglasses to wink at me.
I bat my eyelashes and twirl a loose lock of hair around my finger, trying my best to look demure and innocuous. “It’s just that… I have a real passion for seeing bad guys nailed to the wall for their crimes and, well, it would really make my year to catch a scoop like this one.”
I can tell a couple of the feds want to let me in, but the first guy who approached me is still standing his ground, his mouth set in a hard line. He clearly doesn’t want a reporter finding out that one of the FBI’s own is really the big baddie behind the crime. I’m starting to see the flaws in my last-minute plan now.
Not looking away from me for a second, he orders, “All of you inside. I’ll deal with this.”
Reluctantly, the other agents file into the building and fear floods my veins as I’m left all alone with the big bad fed. He takes my arm and starts pulling me away, back toward the gate. “You’ve got to leave immediately, ma’am. I don’t know how you got in here or why you thought you have any right to just show up like this, but — ”
Just then, Genn leaps out of the bushes and cocks a gun I didn’t know he had, pointing it straight at Mr. Special Agent beside me. “Let go of the bitch!” he shouts, and I instantly realize that Genn is trying to create a distraction.
A very, very dangerous one.
He’s aiming a gun at a federal agent! Within two seconds, the fed releases me and pulls out his own gun to point it at Genn. “Drop the weapon!” commands the agent.
Before I can think twice, I’m bolting toward the county lockup.
“If you make one move toward her I will fire!” Genn is shouting behind me, and I know he’s got the agent stuck there.
My heart is pounding in my ears as I throw open the doors to the building and yell, “Rogue agent is about to shoot a civilian out there!”
A stampede of agents go thundering toward the door and I use the momentary mayhem to slip past the security stop and bolt down the hallway to what I hope to be the interrogation room. I only have a minute or so before anyone catches on and realizes what I’m doing back here, so I pick the very first door and swing it open.
I gasp and cover my mouth at the sight of Leon standing up in the middle of the room, his back facing me. The wooden table and rickety chairs have been flipped over and kicked aside and Leon is pointing a gun at the officer in the corner…
It’s Doyle!
Leon must have somehow grappled the gun away from the bastard during a scuffle. I can’t let Leon make the mistake of murdering a federal agent just when everything is finally about to be resolved.
“Stop!” I cry out, my voice shaking.
I hear voices and heavy footsteps pounding up the hallway toward this room, one of them possibly belonging to Genn. I wonder if he managed to convince the feds he’s on their side, after all. God, we should have just told them who we were!
Leon doesn’t look back at me, but he struggles to keep his voice even when he replies softly, “Cherry, you have to go. I won’t let you see this.”
“I’m not going anywhere!” I shout. “Don’t shoot him!”
“This bastard deserves everything he gets! He killed your dad, Cherry!” Leon yells, flicking the trigger.
Doyle flinches, but he says, “Listen to your girlfriend, Volkov. It’s all over. You’re going away for a very, very long time.”
“No, Charlie. You are,” says a deep voice behind me. The agent who grabbed me earlier pushes me aside, walking into the room with his own gun raised — at Leon. “Drop the gun, Volkov. You’re free to go.”
“Is this some kind of trick?” Leon demands, not daring to look away from Doyle.
“No, Leon! They’re here to arrest Doyle. I talked to the FBI and told them everything. I gave them evidence. I — I came here to tell you so you wouldn’t do anything stupid,” I ramble quickly, tears pulsing down my cheeks. I can’t stand to see Leon like this, pushed to the edge of desperation, thinking he would have to kill Doyle himself to get justice for all those poor people.
“Lower the weapon, son,” says the agent.
“Don’t let him shoot me!” Doyle wails.
“Shut your mouth,” the agent barks. Doyle goes pale, finally realizing he’s actually going down for good. This isn’t a game.
Reluctantly, Leon bends down and sets the gun on the floor.
“Good man,” the agent says, walking past him to jerk Doyle up by the collar. Two more agents file into the room to wrest Doyle’s hands behind his back and cuff him.
Leon finally turns around and looks at me, his green eyes bright even under the dim lighting of a single, flickering lightbulb above us. He’s got a black eye, as well as bruises and lacerations up and down his arm and neck. They really beat the hell out of him here.
“Cherry,” he murmurs, saying my name like a prayer.
I rush into his arms and press my face into his chest, my tears staining his shirt. He embraces me and kisses the top of my head, stroking my hair. “I’m so sorry we took so long,” I whimper, clinging to him.
“No, no, I’m sorry you had to see me that way.”
“Well, if you aren’t a sight for sore eyes,” Genn says jovially, standing in th
e doorway.
“Genn! What the hell did you say to them to get out of that mess I caused?” I ask incredulously, utterly relieved to see him alive and in one piece. After all, I did inadvertently sic a pack of armed federal agents on him out there.
He shrugs. “I told them the truth. Turns out it really does set you free. Oh, and the gun wasn’t loaded.”
The three of us walk out of the building, Genn running ahead to catch up with the feds and talk to them. Battered and broken as he is, Leon smiles as the sun hits his face. He wraps an arm around me and spins me to face him. Then he leans down and kisses me hard on the lips, his fingers tangling in my hair. We stand this way for awhile, wrapped up in each other, all too relieved and elated to be together once again — alive and free at last.
22
Leon
With Doyle in jail, the police are reeling from lack of support up top. The rest of the club that was arrested gets released along with me, given that Doyle’s entire operations in Bayonne were invalidated in light of his corruption. Besides, pressing charges now for the stuff they might actually have on the club would only bring more heat down on them. They want to take care of this as quietly as possible.
I get news from Mikhail that Marty Chandler died silently around the same time Doyle was smugly arresting me in the warehouse office. By all rights, it looked like a car accident, and neither Doyle nor the county sheriffs knew anything about it as it pertained to us. With that information, we don’t waste any time in busting up all the illicit rings Doyle spent so long raking in profits from.
We start where it all began, at the dockyards in Bayonne. While the police who’ve been on the take for years watching their superior officers get away with murder get to finally arrest all the dock bosses who’ve been taking part in the human trafficking ring, the club and I team up with some medical personnel to free the immigrants locked up in the freighter.
Me, Cherry, and the rest of the club personally help unload them all as the medical staff on hand start tending to their injuries—the healthiest of them are dehydrated, but catching this when we did has saved a lot of lives, one of the paramedics informs us.
A few hours into the rescue, Cherry makes her way over to me as Genn and I help lift an older man onto a gurney with one of the paramedics.
“One of the nurses who speaks Spanish was able to talk to one of the victims,” she explains as we finish and turn to her. “Between the two of us, we were able to interpret that Doyle’s had a hand in facilitating these operations all up and down the seaboard. There’s a ton of operations like this one taking place.”
“Shit,” Genn says, “so what, there’s a string of Agent Doyles keeping these rings up and running?”
“On the contrary,” Cherry says, and I see a spark of investigative fire in her eyes that makes me want to kiss her, “with Doyle’s arrest, any other corrupt federal support is going to go into hiding, fast. This could be the one moment in a long time all those trafficking rings are vulnerable to being busted, hard.”
A smile crosses my face, and I fold my arms, looking out over the Bayonne public servants working together with the club to make a real difference in these people’s lives. I exchange glances with Genn, whose expression tells me he’s thinking the same thing I am.
“If that’s the case,” I say to Cherry, “then there’s no time to lose, is there?”
“Think you’re right, Prez,” Genn answers with a grin. “I’ll go look for Eva and get the club riled up. Think it might be time for us to expand out?”
“We’re not the only town that’s been hurting because of Doyle’s trafficking, and without the club, this would’ve been a lot worse. I think it’s time.”
Cherry watches him go with a satisfied look in her eye at the prospect of the club taking action again, but there’s something in that gorgeous face of hers that’s bothering her.
“What’s the matter, something up?”
“Hm? Oh, no,” she gives her head a shake. “I mean...if you and the Union are headed out to ride, that means ‘goodbye’ again, doesn’t it?”
I laugh out loud, throwing my arm around her and yanking her into my side to her surprise before pressing a deep kiss into her. She yelps, but then her body relaxes and gives a soft moan at my kiss.
“Are you kidding?” I finally whisper when we break apart, but I keep her in my grip. “You’ve done more investigative work for us than anyone has been able to in all the years we’ve been protecting this town. We’ll need you to help us bust up these fuckers. And besides,” I add with a wink, “I think it’s about time you really saw the States from the back of a motorcycle anyway, and I don’t have any intention of letting you leave my side. And hey, should make one hell of a story: reporter travels up and down the coast, busting human trafficking rings and rallying the underdogs.”
Her mouth starts to spread into a smile as I speak, and she bites her lip to try and hold it back, but by the end of it, she just puts her hands on my face and pulls herself up into another deep kiss while Genn explains the situation to the rest of the club not far from us.
We ride the very next day.
The wind whips across my face, my knuckles are bitten by the dust of the road, and my kutte flaps around me as I lead our pack of bikes down the interstate, heading south. Men and women I can trust with my life are behind me, the open road is ahead of me, and if that weren’t enough, the most brilliant and gorgeous woman I’ve ever met has her arms wrapped around my waist, her heart beating furiously at the first taste of real freedom out here.
We carve a path from city to city, county to county, state to state, starting south in Delaware and Maryland before whipping around north across New York and onward to Connecticut. With each stop, Cherry gets more shrewd at gathering information for the club to use, identifying crooked cops, bought judges, and fat-cat bosses after each lead.
The immigrants rescued from Bayonne didn’t know much, but a laptop Mikhail confiscated from Marty Chandler’s house provided more than a few leads for us to go on. The nearest connection the slimeball had was just a few towns over, and that proved to be only the beginning of a long string of rings. Every local crime lord had tangential connections nearby just like Marty, and once Cherry was able to establish a pattern to fill in the blanks left by Mikhail’s evidence, the rest was just a matter of the Union Club doing what it does best.
The first bust goes down just a few towns south of Bayonne. After Cherry’s secured a solid lead to a warehouse down by the docks, our bikes roar out to the site on a night a shipment’s supposed to be made, according to a dock worker with a conscience. The moment our headlights shine on the armed men bringing in living cargo around midnight, shots start going off.
As it turns out, most of the goons hired to ship the immigrants in aren’t paid well enough to stick around once we’ve turned up the heat. Our club knows how to handle itself in a firefight, and it isn’t long before most of the creeps go running for the hills, leaving us to take the law into our own hands with the dock owners who make it all happen. But not before we put down a few of their men, and they give us a few injuries in return. Anya’s going to have her work cut out for her over the next few weeks.
The situation is dealt with, and just as expected, when we call the hospital in to tend to the immigrants, there’s no voice up top telling them to hold back; the feds are in hiding, and we’ve struck while the iron is hot.
One of the locals tips us off about a brothel a few towns further south, and we’re off again. It’s an even simpler job—our bikes come roaring off the interstate, surround the house where the sex slavery ring is operating, and before the pimps know what’s pulled up on their front porch, we’re kicking down the doors and taking over the place.
It doesn’t take long for us to get a reputation. After a few more towns, bosses and crime lords alike start getting nervous at the news of our kutte being spotted on the roads nearby. The sounds of our engines tearing into a dock or a warehouse district sen
ds the slavers running, and the ones that put up a tough fight quickly find themselves outmatched.
Part of that is because as news of our work starts to spread, other bikers start paying attention. A few trustworthy guns for hire start snowballing into our ragtag pack of ex-dock workers, and as we fan out north, we’ve nearly doubled our numbers.
The whole ride takes over a month. By the end of it, we have a reputation as one of the most feared clubs on the eastern seaboard, but the only ones cowering are the human traffickers. Just like the crooked opportunists took advantage of the FBI’s presence in town, word of our vigilantism emboldens the workers from town to town, and before long, we start hearing about miners and factory laborers and dock workers organizing themselves and pushing out internal corruption on their own, before we even hit the town.
But after a long and hard streak across New England, the time comes for us to head back to where it all got started—back to Bayonne, where the townspeople greet our ride into the city with a celebration.
Eva heads off to lead one of the branches of the Union Club that’s cropped up in upstate New York, and I give her all the best as she does. Genn sticks by my side, despite having the chance to do the same, but he just laughs the offer off and says his place is right here in Bayonne. Since Eva will take up the rank of President at her own branch, I give Genn her old spot as Vice-Prez, and Vasily takes his place as my Sergeant. Anya will have an officer’s rank with her name on it too, if she can keep her hands off Officer Samuels long enough. Well, it isn’t ‘officer’ anymore since he quit the force to join the Club, but the boys seem to like it as a nickname for him.
But I’m most impressed of all with Cherry. She’s a natural at this, to the point that she loses herself talking about leads and new connections even during our downtime. Now that we’re back in Bayonne, though, I’m forcing all of us to take a little downtime in our own ways.
And my downtime with Cherry is what I’m looking forward to more than anything.
Saved by the Outlaw: A Bad Boy Romance Page 17