Chapter 8
“Hey, Op, where have you been?” Ronnie picked up the purring cat as he threaded his way around her torso and under her arm in a bid for attention.
She snuggled him close and kissed the top of his head before releasing him to go on about his business.
Instead, he flopped on to the sofa cushion beside her and rolled against her leg for a couple of minutes.
“I still can’t believe you named your cat after a character on TV.” Gavin shook his head as he continued to read through the file in front of him.
Ronnie shrugged and let it go. Lots of people named their pets after TV characters. It was a conversation they’d had too many times to count, and she wasn’t in the mood to rehash it now. She had other things on her mind.
They’d taken the six skips she’d been assigned and eliminated two, at least she thought she had. It was possible that there was more to the two they’d dismissed, but she didn’t think so. Both were first-time offenders with fairly minor charges.
And while she knew anyone could be dangerous under the right circumstances, she didn’t think a thirty-two-year-old woman picked up for possession was who her father planned to use to scare her off.
The same with the sixty-eight-year-old man picked up for indecent exposure.
Ronnie wasn’t one-hundred percent convinced that that one didn’t have a touch of dementia, but she wasn’t a doctor to make that diagnosis.
“Ok, so now we’re down to four, how do we figure out which one it is?” She stared at the four folders spread out on her coffee table. She felt more than a little stupid and paranoid for doing this, but Gavin was right, the more they knew, the more prepared she could be.
“Now we look each of them up.” He pulled his laptop from the bag, set it on the table, and opened it. After giving him the password to get online, it took him a couple of minutes before speaking again.
“Give me the first name.” He typed as she read him the info he asked for, all the usual stuff, name, date of birth, etc.
“Ok, count how many charges you have on him in the file.”
She counted those to herself while he did something on the computer.
While the number was close, it wasn’t the same, so they went through case by case and checked on each charge.
It didn’t take them long to realize that all the most serious things were listed, and only petty crimes had been left off, at least from this one.
They moved on to the next file and repeated the process.
It wasn’t until the third file that they found significant charges missing.
“What’ s not there is all the violent shit,” she said, leaning back against the rear cushion of the sofa.
“Not that car jacking doesn’t have the potential to become violent, but it wasn’t this time and until the moment happens you never know, they could get cold feet at the last minute and back away from hurting someone.
” She waved one hand toward the files still scattered across the table in front of them.
“That’s how that makes him look. Like he’s not done anything violent yet, so whether or not he fights being taken in could go either way. ”
“You’re right. This is probably the one, but I’m going to check the last file too, just in case.
What if he gave you two dangerous skips and not just one.
I’d hate for you to go in blind, thinking that because that one’s dangerous that this one’s safe.
Or relatively. Gavin reached over and picked up the last file while Ronnie stared at the one they’d already uncovered to be falsified.
Of course it would be that one. And thinking of, she needed to check in with the cousin. He’d given her his number. There was no reason she couldn’t reach out to him. She wondered if he was any different from his cousin.
“That one looks good,” Gavin said, dropping the last file on top of the four they’d already looked up and dismissed.
“Can you look up another name for me?”
“Sure. What is it?”
“James Joseph Jennings.”
Gavin’s brows shot up, but he didn’t say anything as he typed the name in. She watched his face and saw as several emotions flashed across it, too fast for her to figure out what he was seeing, but she could tell he was surprised.
“What did you find?”
“Confusing shit. Something’s not right with this.”
“What do you mean?” She leaned forward intrigued.
“This one was in the Marines. Honorably discharged, nothing notable there, but not even a month later he’s got his first charges, but no conviction.
There are charges scattered over the last two years, stretching from Biloxi, Mississippi to here, but all of them end up dismissed.
He’s never been convicted of anything.” He read for a few more seconds, clicked several times and continued reading.
“His known associates are all members of a motorcycle club here in Tucson.” Gavin scowled.
“These are not the same names or the same club that the other one was part of.” He looked up and met her gaze.
“The two Jennings are related, aren’t they? ”
She nodded. “They are, at least according to the second one. He said they’re cousins.”
“On the surface it looks like the apple may not have fallen far from the tree.” Gavin’s gaze never left the computer screen.
“What do you mean?”
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Ronnie didn’t know if it was because he didn’t want to tell her what he was seeing or if he was still organizing his thoughts.
“On the surface, these two look very similar, I’m not talking looks, though there is a lot of resemblance there too, I would have guessed they were brothers just by looking at them.”
That made her feel better about having mistaken Joe for Jim Bob, but it didn’t answer her question.
Gavin continued to stare at the screen for a couple of minutes then he shook his head. “Give me a few. This feels off. I’m not sure why. There’s nothing I can say is wrong or out of place, but it just feels off.” He scowled at the computer then hit a few keys, and did something with the mouse.
When he still hadn’t spoken more than five minutes later, she got up and headed into the bedroom.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. You do your thing. I can’t sit still and wait for answers any longer.”
“What are you planning?”
“Nothing. I’m just going to make myself busy.
I’m going to start a load of laundry and go clean up the kitchen.
That will give you time to do your thing without me breathing down your neck, and it will give me a chance to do some thinking.
” What she didn’t say was it was either clean up her place or hit the gym.
She had a billion thoughts swirling through her head and she needed some sweat therapy to calm her thoughts and try to make sense out of what was going on.
Not the least was coming to terms with the knowledge that her instincts were off.
She was usually pretty good at knowing when someone was blowing smoke up her ass, but it looked like she had total missed the mark when it came to Joe Jennings.
Sure, she’d known he was with some club, but she hadn’t gotten the impression from him that it was one of the outlaw clubs. Not that she knew anything more about outlaw motorcycle clubs other than that they existed, there was more than one in Tucson and the guys in them were not good guys.
She focused on cleaning up the kitchen and tried to forget the way her brain had betrayed her by featuring one hot Mr. Joe Jennings in her fantasies over the last couple of days rather than her usual Opie Winston from that TV show about MC’s.
She loved that show, and she wished she could say why.
It wasn’t like she believed that the show was anywhere near accurate as to what being in a club like that was like.
She figured it was as close to reality as those ‘reality’ shows about bounty hunters.
Which was to say they’re both fiction and that’s all that needed to be said.