Chapter 7
Cowboy
Well, today’s been interesting and it’s not even noon yet.
I used to feel like time was just zooming past me, but since I met Faith it’s moving at a snail’s pace. A snail needing to swerve suddenly to avoid sinkholes, that is.
I’ve heard about people having meltdowns, I just had never witnessed one until an hour ago.
What I still can’t get over is how that woman was still drop dead gorgeous with swollen red eyes and a running nose as she bounced between crying or laughing every other second.
Could I live with her organizing my kitchen? Sure, no big deal.
I didn’t love opening my dresser to find every piece of my clothes folded and organized by color. That was a bit much for me. I mean, who the fuck folds underwear?
Then, I made it into my bathroom and opened the mirrored cabinet over the sink to discover an entire shelf of dental floss and it hit me: maybe having one place for things would stop me from buying new floss every time I had something stuck in my teeth.
Bruno running into my room and striking the downward dog pose while letting out an urgent bark was when I realized Faith was heading home. But now, here we are with her arms wrapped around my waist as we’re turning onto the highway.
What’s bothering me now is that I honestly care about her, and I’m hoping that she’s into me for more than riding my face. And then there’s that other thing …
Whatever the hell it is she’s running from. I now not only have to protect both my club and my woman, but I have to track down her ex and make that son of a bitch pay for how he treated her.
Two steps into one of my favorite burger joints in the state, and I’m suddenly anxious that it’s not quite what Faith is used to. Then her hand slides into mine and as I look down at her, my heart does that weird beating thing again.
“I need to pee,” she whispers. “Can you get me a cheeseburger—no tomatoes or mayo?”
“What do you want to drink?” I ask and her eyes shift up to the menu board beyond the ‘Order Here’ sign.
“A chocolate malt, please,” she quickly answers, and just as she was tugging her hand out of mine, I pull her in for a light kiss, appreciating the hell out of the fact she’s not asking for a diet soda in a place like this.
What I don’t appreciate is that every man in the place is eye-fucking her. Turning to the counter, the pimpled-face teenager waiting to take my order mumbles something under his breath.
“What’s that?”
“I wanna be you when I get older,” he says, unable to lift his eyes up to meet mine. “What would you like today?”
As I place our order, I try to think of something to tell this kid to let him know life will get easier, but not having a clue what to say, I settle for sticking a twenty in his tip jar.
Once I have our order and Faith has rejoined me, we decide to sit outside. And that’s when I have my next choice to make.
Do I give her a reprieve? Just let her enjoy the day and her food without starting in on the myriad of questions that I have.
She makes the decision for me.
“What were your parents like?” she asks after consuming half of her burger.
“I couldn’t tell you,” I immediately respond like I have countless times before. “Orphanage, foster system, Army, and you know where I live now. How about you?”
She lets out a laugh, putting the rest of her burger to the side as she takes a long sip of her malt.
“My mom, hmm. Well, she was all I knew. She claimed she got a degree in graphic art, but who knows. She may have designed a website here or there, but mainly she forged documents. The one thing I know with absolute certainty is that she had horrible taste in men. Each one was worse than the one before.”
“Yeah?” I question, getting nervous when I think of all the group homes I lived in and knowing what the more attractive girls went through. “Which one was the worst?”
“The one that married her when I was fifteen,” she says with a little smile. “Now, don’t get me wrong. Mom watched me like a hawk, but it was like she got harder as the years went on. The guy seemed like he was pretty well off, but she had to have known about his gambling debts.”
“How deep was he in?”
“Deep enough to sell me.”
Of all the ways I considered this conversation going today, this was not one of them.
“What the fuck did you just say?” I ask, almost incapable of comprehending the bomb she so casually dropped, especially with how calm she is.
“My mother’s husband sold me to pay off his debt. It could have been a lot worse; my ex wanted a wife who was fun to show off and could never leave him.”
There are so many things wrong with what she’s saying, I don’t even know where to begin. This is fucking America—of course she could leave …
Then I look into her eyes and know there’s far more to the story. Just as surely as I know this is all she’s going to share with me today.
“Is he looking for you?” I ask after a moment, genuinely worried about how well she covered her tracks.
“No.”
“Faith …”
“Logan, I swear to you, he isn’t looking for me.” She stops short of snapping at me, but there’s no denying the stress in her voice and she looks away, ashamed of herself. “Look, I got lucky. The guy needed a wife to fulfill an image. It’s not something I want to talk about though.”
“If you ever do, you let me know,” I quietly reply. I fully understand what it’s like to have baggage, but also being guarded enough not to drop it at a stranger’s door.
We sit there, eating in silence, at least until I catch her stealing one of my tater tots.
“Hey! Keep your hands to yourself,” I tease her, nudging her with my shoulder.
“This place was definitely worth the ride,” she says with a sigh, patting her non-existent belly.
“ The ride is worth the ride, this is just the icing on top,” I correct her. “What’d you think of your first time on a bike?”
“It’ll take a little getting used to,” she answers, carefully choosing her words. “But who knows? Maybe I’ll even open my eyes on the way home.”
“You don’t seem like the type who’d shy away from a challenge.”
My compliment brings a smile to her face, but the level of the sun tells me I need to get back home. Rocco will kick my ass if I let the chores pile up in his absence. Plus, it isn’t fair to the animals.
We’re both surprised to see Debbie’s purple car outside of her house when we get back, but their presence doesn’t seem to bother her, so I leave her to it.
*
After I deal with my beasts, I shower before loading Bruno onto my boat and head back to the clubhouse. I’m surprised to see Monk back and grab a pitcher of beer before joining him.
“Happy ending?” I ask about the job he was on.
“Happy ending that we got paid in advance. The daughter wants nothing to do with the guy, but he has her contact information now,” he answers with a shrug. “I heard you’ve got a girl.”
Letting out a sigh, I take a big gulp of my beer and wonder how I ended up surrounded by the biggest bunch of gossips on the planet. “I have a new neighbor,” I hedge as Beast sits down beside me.
“That the girl you ate out at the party?”
“Christ.” I throw my hands up as Beast reaches for the pitcher and takes a sip out of it. “I didn’t eat her out at the party.”
“If she’s half as hot as I’ve heard, smelling like her pussy is a badge of fucking honor,” Monk contributes, managing to look like we’re discussing the weather as he strokes his white beard.
I can’t help the twitch of my eyebrow, because yeah, Faith is out-of-my-league hot, and I’d like to think we’d have spent today in bed if not for how disorganized my kitchen apparently was.
Once I realize that Demo has other business to deal with, I decide to call it an early night and head back home; only briefly pausing at Faith’s dock.
The last thing that woman needs is a man crowding her right now.
At least that’s the excuse I use. The truth is that I’ve seen her every day since I met her and that is unfamiliar territory for me.
Not including the women that hang out around the clubhouse, a handful of whom I’ve sampled over the years, I’ve never been one to seek out a woman continuously.
What’s the point? Once the new wears off and they see me for who I am, they’ll just be disappointed anyway.
The only driving ambition I have is to hang out on my land, ride my horses, collect and sell the chicken’s eggs, cruise, and pick up bond or investigative work as needed.
I don’t have the first clue what a healthy relationship would look like or how I’d act in one.
Damn, even Monk, our chapter’s chaplain, pretends he’s single. The man thinks we don’t notice how he’s constantly sneaking off after Debbie.
Funny how the woman parties like she’s still in college, and technically she is, except she’s a professor nowadays. Who the fuck knows, maybe they have some naughty schoolboy-sexy professor thing going on.
The thought makes me cringe, so I shake my head and refocus on Faith.
Letting myself in, I leave the door cracked until Bruno finishes his business and joins me inside. Then I get to work.
Thankfully, Faith didn’t come across the panel Demo helped me create. We took space away from three of the rooms on the main floor and that’s where I keep my computer set up. I spend the next several hours backtracking my new neighbor until I realize how fucking stupid I am.
Looking up the county property records, I am able to pull Faith’s birthday and Social Security number. Knowing that she was from Los Angeles was like looking for a needle in the haystack, even when I expanded the years around her birthday.
And right around then is when I remember that she, very casually, mentioned that her mother forged documents.
Switching gears, I start combing through Las Vegas newspapers for the previous twelve months. While I have a vague idea of what I’m looking for, nothing really raises any red flags with me. Looking at the time on the bottom of my monitor, I shake my head.
Even across the country, it’s too late for me to call an old Army buddy of mine outside of Los Angeles, so that’ll have to wait for now. For a perfectly reasonable fee, the guy always delivers.
The thought of Owen makes me lean back, stretching to work out the kinks I always get from sitting too long. We went through basic together and were assigned to the same unit, but the guy always kept to himself.
I’d just always pegged him as a loner, and while I was dealing with my own shit, I never went out of my way to make friends. One of the rare nights I went out with the unit to celebrate a birthday or some shit, a fight broke out.
The last thing I wanted was to get arrested because two guys I barely knew decided to get into a pissing contest, which was on its way to becoming an all-out brawl. I turned, making for the back door, just in time to see that one of the locals was about ready to clock me over the head with a beer bottle.
It never made contact. Owen had seen it going down and dropped him before I got hit. We took one look at each other, nodded and ran out the back door and all the way back to base. In the years that followed, there were a few things I learned.
One being that he had gotten into trouble. A lot of it, and the judge, thinking that the teenager in front of him was a little slow , had given him the option of jail or the military.
The next thing I worked out was that Owen was absolutely not slow. Admittedly, I still don’t know much of anything about Autism, but it’s talked about enough now that I would imagine he’s on the spectrum.
While I’ve invited Owen to try out life with the Outlaws, he turned me down and lives what seems to be a very solitary life. Not that sharing personal details is his thing.
I settle for shooting him an email with a random meme; that’s long been our code for ‘give me a call’.
Grabbing a bottle of water, I head back to my bedroom to get a few hours of sleep before it’s time to feed the beasts.
No sooner than I nod off, my phone rings and I look over to see Owen’s number pop up.
“What have you got for me?” he asks without preamble.
“A new neighbor,” I reply, clearing my throat at how groggy my voice sounds to me. Looking over, I realize I’ve actually slept for an hour.
“I don’t have any neighbors,” he says, as though he had to think about it.
“I do,” I say, sitting up and reaching for the bottle of water beside my bed. “She said she’s from LA, but had been living in Vegas …”
Continuing on with the few facts I have, including the ex, there’s silence after I stop talking. “You still there?”
“You haven’t told me her name,” he answers, and I realize I left that, somewhat important, fact out.
“I’m not sure that it’s hers, but she goes by Faith Murphy.”
He reconfirms her birthday after I say that.
“Yeah, I see her on my run every day.”
“No, she lives here, has for a couple of months now.”
“No. Faith Meadow Murphy, born March the third, died March eight the next year. She’s got a corner plot in section nine sixteen of Roseacre Cemetery right next to Angela Summer Anderson, who died March eighth, nine years after Faith. It’s weird, isn’t it? Children dying on the same day, all of those years apart, but ending up buried next to each other?”
“You go running at a cemetery every day?” I don’t know why that’s the most pressing question I have right now.
“I went to a gym, but women would keep interrupting me. So, I quit. No one interrupts me at the cemetery.”
I shake my head, having to concede that’s some solid reasoning there. “Okay, can you look into the woman who’s living next door to me?”
“I need her picture.” His simple request has me cursing a blue streak and moving to my hidden office. “I mean, I can trace her without her picture, but it would make it easier.”
“No, man, sorry. I was beat last night. I don’t have a photo, but she has to have a driver’s license either from here or Nevada. I should have searched the database.”
“I’m looking now,” he responds, remaining quiet until he grunts. “Weird.”
“What?”
“She looks pretty in her license photo.”
“She’s a beautiful woman.”
“That doesn’t matter. People go to the DMV; it’s crowded and stressful. They get annoyed, then are told to line up for a picture. They’re still trying to figure out where to look when their photo is snapped. But she is looking directly at the camera and doesn’t seem agitated.” Even as he explains his reasoning, I can hear his fingers moving over his keyboard. “And she had a California Real ID, which means, when she got to South Carolina, all she needed to do was surrender the old one without submitting any historical documents, just proof of address. There.”
A message bar opens on my computer, and two images appear. The first is Faith’s California license, followed by the one she has in South Carolina. His point becomes even clearer the moment I look between them.
The stress on her face, coupled with the angle of her head, is noticeably different in the second image. Then I see the issue date of the original license and know it was during the period she was allegedly married and living in Vegas.
“How good would a forger have to be to not only provide a Real ID and a Social Security number, but to have uploaded them to government databases?”
“I know of three in my region, but only one is a woman.”
“Is she old enough to be Faith’s mother?”
“Both Faiths’ mother,” he answers without hesitation this time. “I’ll get back to you with the rest in the next forty-eight hours.”
“I owe you.”
“I’ll bill you.” There’s no trace of sarcasm in his words, then he ends the call.
Considering it’s nearly dawn, I get dressed and set out to feed the chickens before seeing to my horses.