Nash: Great Wolves MC

by Jayne Blue

  “You can’t change the zoning for an existing business, Mr. Mayor. You can only review it legally if they were trying to sell to new owners.”

  He took in a long breath and hooked his fingers behind his head. Looking up at Chris, he nodded. “That’s what I told you.”

  Chris clutched his tablet to his chest. “Well, you have ties with powerful investors, Mr. Mayor. Surely someone might be willing to make an offer on the property.”

  The mayor’s eyes flicked to me then back to Chris. “How did your meeting with Mr. Tillman go, Harper? I never asked for a full debriefing.”

  I got a sour taste in my mouth. Chris’s smile turned my stomach. We were back to pimp territory, it seemed. “What I do in my personal life is none of your business. I’m here to do my job, nothing more. Here’s my research on the zoning issue. I’ve just given you the bottom line but I’ve made some notes. There’s an electronic copy in your email. Print it or distribute it however you’d like. You asked me for your legal footing. I’ve given it to you. Will there be anything else tonight?”

  He shook his head and raised a single brow. “I guess not. I look forward to reading what you’ve come up with.”

  I stood up and nodded. Then I put my research memorandum in the mayor’s outstretched hand. His finger brushed mine and sent a cold chill down to my toes. “Good night,” I said.

  “Good night. Say hello to Mr. Tillman and offer my condolences the next time you see him.” I froze for an instant as I gripped the doorknob, then I plastered on a smile as I headed out. I couldn’t get out of the damn building fast enough. Throwing my heavy purse over my shoulder, I headed for the parking lot at almost a run. Most of the protestors had disbursed for the evening so at least I wasn’t forced to have the club’s name screamed in my ear. Still, one of the protestors held a picture printed from the internet of Nash’s face with a red target painted over it. Squeezing my eyes shut, I marched past the sign and got to my car.

  I should have gone straight home. Again, those two halves of myself warred with each other. I craved Nash like a drug. Since I’d let him back into my life my body cried out for his. As I drove along the coast the remembered echo of his touch drew me straight back to that stretch of beach where everything started. Part of me hoped he’d be there, pulled by the same invisible urge I felt. We made Wyatt here. We reconnected here. I got out of the car and walked to the edge of the road where the sand met the pavement. Kicking off my heels, I carried them in one hand as I stepped onto the sugary powder barefoot.

  Three seagulls flew overhead, squawking out their anger at my disruption of their evening feast. The wind kicked my skirt up nearly to my waist so I clutched it with my free hand as I headed down to the water’s edge.

  Inhaling the fresh, salty air, I threw my shoes on the ground and stepped into the surf. Tiny white crabs dove underground as the tide rolled out, leaving bits of seaweed behind.

  I wanted him. It was simple. For all his faults and all the danger, I couldn’t imagine letting any man but Nash touch me ever again. Hell, in the six years since I left Emerald Point, I hadn’t. But could I trust him? Could I believe what he’d told me about the club changing its ways? The mayor was a scumbag. That was obvious. But was he wrong about the element the GWMC could stir up in this town? If it were only me, I wouldn't have cared. Hell, I might have come back to Florida years ago, to hell with Nash’s warning.

  It wasn’t though. There was Wyatt. His baby face seemed to hover over the horizon, grounding me, reminding me why I was here. I saw D’Angelo too. Two days ago, I went back to the coffee shop to check on him. Andre was better, but his face was still swollen and fear clouded his eyes. There was Sadie’s face too. His mother’s eyes hung heavy with worry and she couldn’t mask the anger she felt when she looked at her husband. She didn’t have to say it. I knew what she thought. For all of his promises, D’Angelo’s past reached out and shook their family to its foundation.

  If Nash forgave me, if I let him into Wyatt’s life and mine, how could I ever be certain the same demons wouldn’t find us someday. Then I saw Ghost’s aunt as she stood over his casket as they lowered it to the ground. I hugged myself, staving off a chill as a strong ocean wind blew in with the tide. Reaching into my bag, I searched for my phone. This stretch of beach wasn’t too much of a detour, but I’d be home at least a half an hour later than I’d told Wyatt and my mom. The deal was, we always called.

  “Shit,” I muttered under my breath. I couldn’t find my phone. Either it had fallen out or I’d left it back at the office. I headed back up to the car and searched the front seat. The thing was nowhere. Then I remembered leaving it on my desk and my heart sank. I’d have to go back for it. It was Friday night and I couldn’t be without my phone until Monday.

  Starting the car, I checked the dashboard clock. Shit. I’d be home almost an hour late after circling back and heading out again. I made a mental note to call my mother as soon as I got to the office. Wyatt would be angry, but I’d make it up to him. He never got to see that movie the night I last saw Nash. We’d go together tomorrow and give my mother a break for once.

  Luckily, by the time I pulled back into the City Hall parking lot, the last of the protestors had left for the day. They tended to disappear as soon as the news cameras did. I saw no lights on in any of the exterior offices so chances were good I’d get in and out without having to deal with anyone.

  I keyed myself in and headed to my office. Mine was four doors down from the mayor’s and connected to Chris’s. My phone was sitting right on my desk where I left it, blinking from five missed calls. Three of them were from Wyatt and I felt like a shit so I immediately called him back.

  “Hey, buddy!” I said. “You staying out of trouble?”

  “Gam made tacos. I left one for you.”

  “Just one! Man. You must have been super hungry.”

  “I still am,” he said, his voice muffled from whatever bit of taco he stuffed inside it.

  “I’m on my way home right now,” I said. “It’s gonna be an all-Wyatt all-day kind of weekend. Start thinking about what you wanna do. Movie? Game store? You name it. Just make sure you get your chores done. Old sheets off the bed, room clean. Garbage picked up. And help Gam load the dishwasher if you haven’t already.”

  “Can we get a puppy?”

  I laughed. Wyatt had a way of sticking that one into random conversations thinking I’d forget I told him no.

  “No pets allowed where we live. If you keep that aloe vera plant alive until the end of the month, we can talk about a goldfish.”

  “Nuts,” he said.

  “I’ll see you in about twenty minutes, pal. Tell Gam, okay? I don’t want her to worry.”

  “She always does anyway.”

  “I know. That’s what us moms do. Love you bunches, buddy.”

  “I love you too, Mom.”

  Sighing, I clicked off the phone. One fire put out for the time being. I slipped my phone in my bag and headed for the door. A loud crash shook the wall and shouts came from the direction of the mayor’s office. On instinct, I ducked back into my office and waited.

  A light shone under the mayor’s door and I could make out feet pacing in front of it. The door was ajar about a foot, spilling light into the hallway. I would have left. The last thing I wanted was another run-in with Mayor Dodge to cap off my Friday. But then I heard something that made me stop cold and press my back against the wall as I tried to inch closer to the sound.

  “It was never supposed to go this far. Russell wasn’t just some thug. He was family.”

  Russell. Ghost’s real name was Russell McGill. Jesus. Who the hell was the mayor talking with? I dared to creep a little closer, keeping to the shadows. If I could crane my neck and the person inside kept pacing, I might be able to see who it was. I leaned as far forward as I dared, but ducked low so I’d be under the line of sight if anyone took a casual look in my direction.

  What I saw next made the breath leave my body. I didn’t
know his name. I’d never met him. But I recognized his bald head and portly physique. Plus, he kept calling Russell his family. Mayor Dodge was talking to the man I’d seen beside Ghost’s aunt at the cemetery in the news coverage of Ghost’s funeral.

  “Paul, listen, you are on very thin ice. You have no right to question anything I do. This decision wasn’t up to me.”

  “He’s dead. Jesus Christ. They shot him! In the street like some dog. How the hell do things get out of hand like that?”

  “You’re the one that’s out of hand and out of line, Paul. Now, I’m willing to overlook your actions just this once because I understand you’re operating from a place of grief. I sympathize with that. But nothing has changed. Do you hear me? Nothing. Not your role. Not mine. Not the end result.”

  “They’re not stupid, Dennis. Whoever your guy was, he didn’t do his homework. The Red Brigands don’t shoot people in the street like that. Sure, a couple of the guys were out for blood right off the bat, but Nash is in charge now. He knows something isn’t right about what happened.”

  Dodge came into view and I pressed my back against the wall. I couldn’t breathe. God, I could barely think.

  “It only matters that it got the FBI’s attention. Now you just hold up your end of this and it’ll be over by the end of the month. Everything’s still a go.”

  Paul plopped down into one of the mayor’s chairs. I could see Mayor Dodge in profile. He stood behind Paul and his expression was hard.

  “Paul. That was a question, not a statement. Is everything still a go?”

  Paul leaned forward, holding his head in his hands. “Hell if I know. They lost one of their own. He was one of my own! Shit is scrambled.”

  “Cut the shit, Paul. You don’t give the slightest damn about your thug cousin. Don’t forget, you came to me, not the other way around. Now it was messier than I liked, but I did you a favor. Your aunt has one heir now, not two.”

  “How can you say that?” Paul threw his hands up. “How can you fucking say that? That woman is a saint. This shit is killing her.”

  The mayor laughed. “Well, now, that’ll work out well for you too. Save the acting job for someone who doesn’t know you as well as I do.”

  “I didn’t sign up for this. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “And Ghost McGill got what he had coming to him. If you want what’s coming to you, you’re going to need to buck up and do your job. Don’t do anything careless like marching into my goddamn office during broad daylight again. I need one thing from you. You need to make sure that liquor shipment is still set for delivery at the pier in two days. If there are any changes, I need to know. You got it? I don’t like surprises. You get your ass over to that clubhouse and you stay there. Tillman likes to fancy himself a man of honor. He was by your side at the morgue, at your cousin’s gravesite, and he’ll keep his door open to you in your and your aunt’s hour of need. So be needy. Get over there. Watch. Listen. Report. I have everything set up on my end for the shipment intercept. That presumes there’s going to be a damn shipment. So go make sure. I don’t want to hear from you again until you are.”

  “You are a coldhearted bastard,” Paul said, rising. He turned to face Mayor Dodge. My heart pounded like a jackhammer behind my ribcage. I dropped low and slipped into the nearest office.

  “Spare me your family names, Paul.”

  Paul shook his head. “Fine. But the terms need to change. I want double what we agreed on. Call it indemnification for my family’s loss. Say what you will, but Russell provided for my aunt.”

  “Right. And I’m sure she’s the beneficiary of any life insurance policy that punk had. She’ll make out just fine.”

  “He sent me work!” Paul shrieked. “Goddammit! The bulk of my PI clients came from referrals from Russell. There’s no guarantee the club will keep sending business my way now. Plus, if you do succeed in this bullshit, they won’t be in a position to do anything for me anymore. They’ll all be in the penitentiary serving twenty to life.”

  My heart turned to stone. Paul stormed out of the mayor’s office and walked right in front of my hiding spot. I held my breath and closed my eyes as if I could hide like a child. But Paul was too focused on his heated exchange with Dennis Dodge to bother to look into the shadows of an empty office. He stormed out the back door leaving me stuck in a crouch, waiting and praying Dodge would walk out right after him.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Nash

  * * *

  King brought me news. It wasn’t what I hoped for, but it was news. His contact at the Emerald Point PD came through with the phone forensics on Ghost’s cell. There wasn’t much to it though.

  “Hammy remembers talking to him about six o’clock that evening,” King said. “They were looking to see if they could get one of the local rock bands booked for Labor Day weekend.”

  I flipped through the printout. Most of it didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense to me. I had to cross check numbers with my own list of contacts. Fucking funny how fast you forget phone numbers. Hell, I barely remembered my own. We just punched people’s names in nowadays.

  “He talked to Paul,” I said. “That’s this 525 number?”

  King nodded. “Yeah. And Paul confirmed that. I called him this morning. You asked Ghost to follow up with him about executing what he was calling the Carleen Plan where the mayor was concerned. Ghost was gonna head out to meet with her in the morning. I already called her too. She’s pretty busted up about all of this. Most of her girls too.”

  I gave him a tight-lipped nod. Carleen was a good girl. She ran a high-end strip club out on Santa Rosa Island called The Scene. A few years ago, we gave her some financial backing that helped her get out from under the mob. She paid us back with interest within two years. The arrangement was one of the lynchpins for me turning the club totally legit. Now some of Carleen’s girls earned extra cash the old-fashioned way, but I stayed out of it for the most part. Every once in a while, if one of them ran into some trouble, we provided security for them too.

  “Ghost and Carleen had a thing, you know,” King said, dropping his chin. I shook my head. Yeah. I did know. I also knew he broke her heart more than once. Ghost was the jealous type and he pushed a little too hard wanting her to quit the pole before she was ready. Carleen was one of the best at it I’d ever seen and it was a lot of damn money to give up cold turkey. Ghost made things worse later on when he started sniffing around some of the other girls who worked for her.

  “Maybe putting Ghost in charge of that little backup plan was a bad idea,” I said. “God. This just gets worse and worse.”

  King took a seat in front of my desk. “You can’t blame yourself for that part of it. Or maybe for any part of it. Ghost was Ghost. And those two were in a good place lately. That’s why she’s such a wreck. I think she thought he was getting to a point he might be ready to settle down.”

  “Damn. I had no idea. I’ll have to make a point of stopping out there to see her before the week is out. I saw her for a few minutes at the funeral but everybody was just so raw.”

  King nodded. “So we’re nowhere for the time being. Have you had anybody reach out through channels to Des Boudrie?”

  Des was the current president of the Tallahassee chapter of the Red Brigands. If this shit with Ghost was club related, I knew damn well that was our first suspect. I shook my head. “So far nobody from that side is talking.”

  “Don’t you think that’s even a little strange? I mean, if Des was worried you thought his guys were behind this and they weren’t, don’t you think he’d be trying to make that point loud and clear?”

  I shook my head. “I know I would. But Des and I aren’t cut from the same cloth. He’s a generation older than we are. He’s still got both feet in the dark shit.”

  King leaned back in his chair and let out a sigh as he looked toward the ceiling. This was the worst part. I just wanted to fucking hit something or bust something up. So far, we had no solid leads. The pos
sibility remained that what happened to Ghost was random shit or road rage or God knew what else.

  “He still had his wallet on him,” King said, voicing one of the main problems I had with the random crime theory. That more than anything made this look more like a deliberate message to the club.

  A light knock on my office door and Vicky, one of the hostesses, poked her head in and smiled. “Sorry to interrupt, boss, but there’s a call for you on line one. I know you said not to disturb you but she was pretty insistent.”

  “She?”

  Vicky smiled. “Be careful with that one. She sounds pissed. She said her name was Emily Mays and that she’s calling about her daughter.”

  My heart flipped. What the hell would Harper’s mother be doing calling me? I nodded to Vicky and held a finger up to King. I wanted to ask him to step out, but figured that would invite more curiosity and questions than I could handle right now.

  “Professor Mays,” I said. King raised a dark brow.

  “Mr. Tillman, I’m going to be quick and to the point. My daughter didn’t come home from work. She’s more than three hours late and she’s not answering her phone. I have no intention of telling you your business or getting into it, but I need to know if she’s with you or if you’ve heard from her.”

  The air turned to acid and burned my lungs. I squeezed the phone so hard my hand started to tremble. King leaned forward in his chair. He knew me well enough to see the alarm in my expression.

  Emily Mays said a bunch of other shit. Some of it colorful, most of it because she was scared as hell. I wished I could reassure her. The truth was, I had no damn idea where Harper was. I’d told her to stay fucking put, that’s what. I let out a breath and reminded myself that nobody knew who she was to me. Not really. The two closest people to me in the world were King and Paps and I hadn’t even clued them into Harper and Wyatt. Not yet. Not until I knew what to do about it and this current bullshit was managed.

  “Emily,” I finally said during a pause in her speech. “I don’t know where Harper is, but I’m going to make a point of finding out. I’ll send somebody to the mayor’s office right now and check and see if she’s still there. She could have just been working late.”