by Jayne Blue
Puck dropped his head and slowly nodded. “I got you.”
“I know you do. We’ll check back in an hour. Just pray we know something when we do.”
Puck grabbed my fist and I slapped him on the back. Then it was time to ride. I took the lead with King right behind me. Hammy pulled up the rear and we flew down the highway. This stretch of road took us right past the turnoff to Marlin Road where Ghost died. My heart became a rock inside of my chest as I looked down that narrow turnoff. I swore in my head that before the sun rose, I’d get answers and justice for him if it was the last thing I did.
We passed the probies guarding Paul’s house. I gave them a hand signal, telling them to hang back and keep their eyes and ears open. The house was a small white bungalow with black shutters. It sat on a hill on a stretch of flat land with nothing else around it. There were no cars parked anywhere and no fresh tire tracks leading up the dirt road to the front porch. Unless he’d parked somewhere hidden and came in on foot, it didn’t look like Paul had been here for days. Still, I wasn’t going to take any chances. I drew my piece and we made our way to the front door.
King went ahead of me and pounded on the door then the window. A brown sedan pulled up behind us. A skinny kid wearing a Star Wars t-shirt and thick glasses got out.
“That your guy’s CI?” I said to King. He pulled up his phone and showed me a picture his cop friend must have sent him. It was the same kid smiling back from a security badge photo. “Jesus.” I shook my head. Not for a million fucking dollars did I want to know what this kid was trying to work off with the cops.
He was smoking when he walked up to us and stuck out his hand to King. King shot me a look and shook the kid’s hand. “You Brennan?”
Brennan nodded then ground out his cigarette in the dirt. “I got an hour,” he said. “Then I gotta get back.”
“You got as much time as I need you, Brennan,” I said. “Now hang back here with my friend Hammy until I tell you it’s safe to come in.”
“Okay, but you don’t want to touch anything. I mean, not even a light switch. This guy could have his shit booby trapped. One power surge and poof. He bricks his entire system.”
I raised a brow. “Yeah. I’m not even going to pretend to understand what you just fucking said. But I get it, we’ll watch what we touch.”
Then King curled his leather-gloved fist and punched a hole in the window. He reached around and unlocked the door. We went with guns drawn. The house was tiny with just two bedrooms and one bathroom. Paul had the place decorated like the bachelor he was with mismatched furniture. The drywall had patches all over it and a bowl of soggy cereal rested in the kitchen sink. Wherever Paul was, it didn’t look like he’d been planning to take a long trip.
Once we’d searched the first floor, we headed down to the basement. I saw right away where Paul McGill spent his money. While the main floor was a fucking dump, he had quite a setup down there. He had three large flat screen TVs mounted on the wall and two computers in the corner. I told Hammy to run up and get the kid. Hopefully, he’d be able to make some headway with Paul’s electronic files. I went to a tall metal file cabinet in the corner and opened the top one.
“I told you not to touch anything, man!” Brennan shouted as I started pulling the hanging files. Brennan flailed his arms and took a seat at one of Paul’s computers. He put a flash drive into the tower and muttered something about me under his breath. I resisted the urge to kick the shit out of him and went back to the file cabinet.
“Just do what you’re here for,” I said. “See if you can find anything that might tell us where to find Paul McGill.”
“What are you looking for?” Hammy asked.
I shrugged. “Fuck if I know. A paper trail. Paul wasn’t an idiot, I don’t think. If he was doing dirty work for the mayor, you’d think he’d be smart enough to cover his ass if he outlived his usefulness.”
I leafed through the files and King and Hammy came over to help me. Only the top two drawers had anything in them and we took armfuls of files out and spread them on the pool table Paul kept in the corner. In the other corner, lines of code streamed across the monitor where Brennan worked. The kid was making a disturbing humming sound that I decided to take as a good sign.
“Jesus,” Hammy said as he started opening files. It looked like Paul made most of his bank spying on unfaithful husbands. Sleeve after sleeve we found blown-up, glossy photos of middle-aged men fucking younger women.
“Shit,” King said. “Some of these chicks are Carleen’s girls.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. It wouldn’t surprise me if Carleen herself was in on it. She was nothing if not resourceful. She’d have insisted on a healthy cut of any blackmail earnings. I put the photos away.
Then King’s face fell as he opened another file. His eyes flicked to mine and he took a step back.
“What do you have, man? Some shit on the mayor?”
King blew out a hard breath through puffed cheeks and shook his head. “No, man. This one’s on you.”
My blood turned to ice.
“Well, not just you,” King said as he spread the file out. “Financials on the club, it looks like. But yours too.”
What he had was a stack of bank statements going back years. Some were for club accounts, but a fair number of them were my personal statements.
“Motherfucker,” I said, pawing through the stack. Rows of deposits and withdrawals appeared on every page. I thumbed through them. He had a group of them paper-clipped with notes and circles in red marker. The air went out of the room when I realized what he’d uncovered.
“Nash, what is it?” King asked.
I shook my head. “How the fuck did he track this down?”
“What?”
I pulled one statement out and handed it to King. “I told you what happened when Harper left the last time. She was there when shit came to a head with the Brigands. She was proud. Independent. I was afraid she’d never take anything from me outright. Hell, I tried to give her money and she turned it down. So I did the next best thing. I made sure she was the recipient of a ten-thousand-dollar grant to the University of Michigan. I don’t know how he found it but here’s a record of the transaction and my letter to the provost’s office there.”
“Shit,” Hammy said, leaning in to get a better look.
“I’ve got a program running,” Brennan said. I jumped. The fucking kid didn’t make a sound when he moved across the room.
I thrust the bank statement into his hand. “Can you tell by looking at this where he might have got it?”
Brennan squinted, looked at the paper, then looked back at me as if he smelled shit. “No clue. But there’s a date stamp on the bottom. Wherever it was, he accessed it seven months ago.”
Seven months ago.
I dropped the statement and went back to the file where it came from. I leafed through the rest of the sheets of paper. I found another printout from a job-hunting website that had Harper’s resume attached.
“Motherfucker,” King said, reading over my shoulder. “He tracked her.”
Heat pooled low in my gut. “He’s been working for the fucking mayor a long damn time,” I said. “Harper didn’t just get some random job offer. They lured her here.”
There could only be one reason. My body quaked with blood rage. I turned over more pages of the file. My fucking heart imploded when I came to the end of the stack. Paul McGill had blurry pictures of Harper walking down the street holding Wyatt’s hand.
He knew. The fucking piece of shit knew who she was to me.
“Harper?” Brennan said. “Harper Mays?”
I turned to stone as I looked at him. “What did you find?”
“Well, nothing about the mayor yet. But your guy is running a GPS tracker as a background app on his PC.”
“English?” Hammy said.
“Hey, man, I’m just telling you what I see.” Brennan walked over to the computer. He clicked on a window and opened up a
map. The top corner of the map had Harper’s name on it.
“What is that?” I asked, my own voice sounding far away and hollow to me.
“I told you. A GPS tracker. The kind you stick on somebody’s car or cell phone. Whoever Harper Mays is, your man Paul has been keeping tabs on where she goes for weeks. If she’s a friend of yours, you might want to tell her.”
He’d been tracking her for weeks. Fucking hell. He knew. He knew she was mine. He probably knew Wyatt was mine. And if Paul had put a tracker on her car, he knew she was there the other night when he met with the mayor and where she’d gone after that … straight to me.
She was made. And her life was in danger all because of me.
Chapter Nineteen
Harper
* * *
It was the beach. It seemed every turning point in my life brought me there. I couldn’t escape the rolling surf. It lifted me up and dragged me under. I would die today. I knew it with the certainty in which I drew breath. This wasn’t Pirate Louis or even the mayor. This was far, far worse. I understood the desperation in Paul McGill’s voice because I shared it. He’d come to his own life’s turning point. The only difference was he wasn’t willing to die for it. I was.
I drove until the road gave way to sand and my tires spun. I would have driven into the ocean itself if that’s what he’d asked of me. My field of vision narrowed to a pinpoint as I tried to control my breathing and stepped off the gas. The car fishtailed as I slammed on the brakes and my tires searched for purchase in the billowing white sand.
He stood alone at the end of an abandoned pier and my heart dropped. Paul McGill stood next to his car, a silver Lincoln Continental. My phone vibrated as I slammed my car into park and turned off the ignition. Slowly, I brought the phone up to my ear.
“I’m here. I haven’t called anyone. No one followed me. I’ve done everything you said. Let my son go.”
Paul was too far away from me for me to make out any of his facial expressions, but I saw him throw his head back and his laughter filled my ear through the phone.
“Put your keys on the dashboard. Throw your phone on the seat and walk out here with your hands on your head.”
He was still talking when I clicked off the phone and threw it into the car like he asked. God. We were nowhere. The state had abandoned this part of the highway when the new high-rises were built further down the coast. The only people who ever came out here were diehard fisherman. But today, there was a riptide and the skies turned gray. In another hour, maybe less, we’d have a raging Florida thunderstorm that would douse everything, then disappear, leaving the blazing sun behind.
“Wyatt,” I whispered. I squeezed back tears and straightened my back as I hooked my fingers behind my neck and began the slow walk down the long pier. “Hang in there, baby, Mama’s coming.”
He was alive. He had to be. I’d only heard his sweet, scared voice in that first phone call. Paul refused to let me talk to him after that. I thought of Ghost. Had it been Paul himself who’d pulled the trigger on that lonely road a few nights ago? Ghost would have trusted him. They were family after all. Oh God. If this man could end the life of his own flesh and blood, how could I save my child? I took a strengthening breath and kept putting one foot in front of the other until I reached the end of the pier.
“Stop,” Paul said. He reached behind him and pulled out a gun. I wasn’t scared. I supposed I should be, but right now a bullet in the chest wasn’t the thing that frightened me most. Wyatt wasn’t here. Paul stood alone. I kept walking. Paul McGill’s eyes widened then his lips curled into a smile. I stopped no more than three feet away from him.
Paul’s face was red and sweat poured down the folds of his neck. He was forty pounds overweight and the blue golf shirt he wore barely covered his beer gut. He wore khaki shorts and worn Docksides. The man seemed almost entirely hairless except for bushy brown eyebrows and a few wisps of hair at the top of his head.
I could outrun him if I had to. If I got close enough to him, if he wasn’t holding the gun, could I hurt him quickly enough to get the upper hand? No. I could do none of those things until I knew where Wyatt was. I took a risk and looked away from him. I didn’t see Wyatt’s little blond head peeking over the seats in the Lincoln. The car wasn’t running. It was almost ninety degrees today with thick humidity that choked me.
“I’m going to kill you,” I said. It mattered that he knew I meant it.
Paul laughed. “Relax, sweetie pie. This isn’t exactly how I wanted to spend my afternoon either.”
I raised a brow and kept my hands planted at the back of my neck. “Put the gun away, Paul. Your hand is shaking. You wanted to talk. I’m here to talk.”
“You know, this is entirely your fault. We could have set you up for life. You know that’s what the mayor was planning to do.”
I shook my head. My eyes went from the car to Paul and back again. Oh God, was my baby in the trunk?
“Wyatt?” I ignored Paul and called out to him. “Mama’s here, okay? You be brave. Close your eyes and be brave.” My heart dropped when my calls were met with silence. If he was in the trunk, Wyatt would have called out to me, I was sure of it. God, if he were in the trunk he could suffocate. I took a breath and tried to stave off the rising panic.
Paul just stared at me and smiled. The tide rolled in, sending white caps crashing into the cement girders beneath our feet.
“I made one mistake,” he said. “Never in a million years did I think you’d be dumb enough to hitch your wagon to a club member. I guess you’re just the slut the mayor predicted you were.”
“What is the point of this, Paul? What possible reason would you have for dragging me out here and putting my son at risk?”
Paul’s hand trembled and sweat poured down his forehead. He wiped it away with his forearm and finally dropped the gun to his side. “You’re an insurance policy. You were supposed to be leverage. I’m usually a pretty good judge of character, but I fucked up where you’re concerned.”
“An insurance policy against what?”
Paul laughed. It was the kind of high-pitched, keening sound of someone about to become unglued. “They know.”
“Who knows?” I took a tentative step forward. Thunder rolled in and lightning cracked to the east of us. In another few minutes, it would be dangerous for us to stand here. I scanned the horizon. None of the charter boats usually dotting the coastline could be seen. They’d headed in ahead of the storm.
“Russell, man. You know? He was a fucking thug through and through. She loved him better anyway. She defended him at every turn.”
Paul gestured with his hand, the one holding the gun. My heartbeat rose in alarm as he pointed it casually toward me, then to the side. One wrong move. One false step. If he pulled the trigger one way or the other, the bullet could ricochet and hit the car. If Wyatt was inside, crouched down where I couldn’t see, or if he were in the trunk. I prayed for the rain to come. With it, the temperature would drop if only for a little while. My baby would bake inside that car.
“Your aunt? Are you kidding me with this? Is this what this whole thing was about? Some sick version of sibling rivalry?”
Paul pointed the gun back at me and I sighed with relief. “They’ve got nothing, Harper. Nothing. Did Nash promise you he’d take care of you? With what? That club is in debt up to their ears. They’ve sunk all their hopes into expanding that fucking biker bar. He can barely pay his own mortgage. Did he tell you that? He played you, honey. And you just spread your legs like the whore you are. The mayor could have made him rich though. That was the plan.”
“Drug running,” I said, taking another step forward. “He wants control of the coast, doesn’t he?”
Paul’s eyes widened. “Maybe you’re not as dumb as you look.”
I saw Andre’s swollen, beaten face in my mind’s eye. The horror of the mayor’s reality sunk in. It wasn’t gang violence bringing this town to its knees. It was Dodge.
“But Gho
st wouldn’t play along, is that it? You couldn’t convince him to side with you. And he figured out you were playing both sides of the fence. How am I doing?”
Paul waved the gun around again. He was unsteady on his feet and his color turned to ash. A muscle twitched at the corner of his eye and now his shirt clung to him from the sweat pouring down his chest. This man wasn’t well. He gasped for air and took a staggering step sideways.
“Paul,” I said. “Does your chest hurt?”
He shook his head and pulled at his collar. Jesus Christ. The man might be having a heart attack right before my very eyes. No. I needed him healthy and talking. Until I knew what he’d done with Wyatt, I had to watch my step. I couldn’t draw my gaze away from the gun he held. Is it the one they’d used to kill Ghost? I knew what bothered Nash. He couldn’t understand why Ghost hadn’t fought back. He couldn’t make sense of why he got off his Harley and walked away from it. But now I could. Maybe Paul had flagged him down. He would have stopped for him. Bile choked me. If he could shoot his own cousin in cold blood, or at least stand by while someone else did, what made me think he would hesitate where my poor baby was concerned.
Paul’s eyes widened as his phone rang in his pocket. He steadied the gun and leveled it at my head. With his other hand, he brought the phone to his ear.
“Mayor Dodge,” he shouted, smiling at me. “Yes. Yes. You can trust me. He’s going to care. I told you I had a failsafe. It won’t even matter. The Great Wolves will be extinct by the end of the day. You just make sure you tip off your ATF contact like I told you.” He clicked off the phone while the mayor was in mid-sentence.
Paul erupted in that unglued laughter again. “Lucky for me, Nash thinks with his dick more than anything else. You know, that’s what started this whole thing. That’s the exact thing Ghost told me. So I started digging. It wasn’t hard to find a paper trail to you. People like Nash Tillman don’t send money to institutes of higher learning as a rule. University of Michigan. Good school. Go Blue. Too bad it ended up being a waste.”