Chapter 3
Three
Women say we have trust issues. But here’s the thing, we put our most prized possession in a mouth full of teeth. If that doesn’t say trust, I don’t know what does.
—Weaver’s secret thoughts
Weaver
My phone rang, and I looked at it in my jeans pocket and contemplated not answering it.
The phone stopped ringing, then started right back up again.
“Fuckin’ answer it,” I heard my partner call out from the ground. “I’m going to take a piss!”
I sighed, pulled one glove off with my teeth, and pulled my phone out of my pocket.
Fuck, it was cold.
My fingers were so damn stiff that I could barely hit the answer button before placing it to my ear.
“Yeah?”
“Weaver,” Gentry said gruffly. “I need a favor.”
“Does it need to be right now?” I wondered.
Because I sure the fuck hoped not.
“No.” He hesitated. “But soon. Can you come by my place after you get off work?”
The fact that Gentry was asking this of me was making me nervous.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Are you having issues with your power or something?”
I was a certified electrician as well as a lineman for the county co-op.
The only time people called me was when they needed their house rewired.
Well, that wasn’t fully true.
People called me all the time.
The club was a busy place, and there was always someone wanting to do something somewhere.
When I’d joined the Dixie Wardens MC, it’d been out of necessity.
Part of the new life Apollo had made up for me was that I was prospecting for a motorcycle club.
According to the dossier I’d been handed upon arrival in Sawtooth, Montana, I’d graduated from the University of Wyoming.
I’d become a lineman right out of college, and had become an electrician during my off hours for the hell of it.
The local motorcycle group—the Dixie Wardens MC—had vouched for us and given us a good cover story so we could assimilate easier.
There’d been seven total men that Apollo had broken out of prison, and it would’ve looked damned suspicious had all seven of us just shown up without a single ounce of backstory.
Apollo and the Dixie Wardens MC had given us that.
Staying in the club had been optional.
Every single one of us but Romeo had stayed in, and I’d just officially earned my patch only a month ago—but for real. It hadn’t been handed to us. We’d actually had to put in the work.
“Are you even listening to me right now?” Gentry sounded rough.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll come by as soon as I’m done here. Probably shouldn’t be more than another couple of hours.”
“Okay,” he said. “You know the gate code.”
“See you in a few.”
That two hours had turned to more like three after dealing with problem after problem with the call we were on, but eventually we got the new utility pole up, and the power restored to our cold customers.
That didn’t mean that my fingers weren’t overly fuckin’ frozen by the time I arrived at Gentry’s place.
He opened the door as I made it to his front porch.
“You look rough,” he said.
“Spent nine hours fixing a fuckin’ utility pole that some dumbass hit with his Tesla. Why the fuck he is even driving a Tesla in snow, I don’t know. Now I can’t feel my damn fingers.”
I was from Miami, for Christ’s sake.
We didn’t get snow in Miami.
The coldest it ever got there was sixty-five.
Needless to say, I wasn’t a happy camper by the time the door to Gentry’s place closed behind me.
“Sorry to call you here and not explain,” he grumbled as he walked to the kitchen where there was an unopened bottle of Jack Daniels sitting on his counter. “Come over here and drink a shot. You’re going to need it.”
This was starting to make me nervous.
I walked up to him and said, “What is it?”
He jerked his chin at the shot he’d just poured, and I drank it, feeling the fire start to line my throat and belly almost instantly.
“I’m working a case with Sheriff Black.”
I placed the glass gently on the counter, but the hard clack of it meeting the stone countertop still rang through the otherwise quiet room.
“Okay.” I waited.
He scrubbed his hands over his face roughly before he started in on the story.
“You know the big super church in town, right?”
I nodded once.
“As of right now, we don’t know that this is the church. It might just be the parents, Minnie and Barton Wheeler.”
I didn’t reply.
“The Wheelers’ daughter came in four months ago because of something she saw at her parents’ place. She took a video and shared it with us.” He took a seat on the closest stool.
“What was on the video?” I asked. “What did she see?”
“I have permission to show you,” he said. “Sit down.”
I sat, and he opened up his laptop before twisting it my way.
At first, the video was black, and you could see nothing.
Then there was so much shaking that at first, nothing could be made out.
It was only when the phone stopped moving so crazily that I saw.
“What the fuck?” I reared back in horror.
“The rest of the video is like that,” Gentry said as he slammed the laptop closed, as if he couldn’t bear to see any more of it.
“I have Apollo looking into everything. But this has to be done by the book, unless we just want to kill them and dispose of the bodies. But they’re pillars of this community. They’d be missed.”
I swallowed hard. “Tell me what you know. And what you want me to do.”
“After seeing the video, we started to look into them. We found fraud. Embezzlement. Tax evasion.” He grimaced.
“The Wheelers run that church on their own. Barton’s the pastor, and the wife is the director.
Handles all the books, etc.” He twirled his empty shot glass around on the counter.
“But we’re not seeing anything that leads to what we saw in that video.
I think everything that was in the video was their own stuff.
Not related to the church at all.” He stopped spinning the glass.
“Apollo is finding none of it on their computers, either work or at home. Apollo, Sheriff Black, and I think that that’s the reason behind the hidden door in the basement.
Everything is private. Not hooked up to the internet.
And honestly, would’ve stayed being hidden had Eddy not walked in at the exact right time. ”
I blanched.
“You’re telling me that two ‘upstanding members of Sawtooth’ are into child porn and rape, and that there’s no way to get them for it?” I asked.
“That’s where you come in,” he said softly.
“We need you to pretend to go in there and fix something. A faulty wire. A fuse being blown. I don’t know.
We know their schedules, and Eddy’s shared that tomorrow would be the best day to do it.
They’re both gone all day long. Won’t be back until the following day.
Eddy can let you in as a worried daughter trying to get her parents’ house fixed so it doesn’t burn down. I don’t know.”
My stomach hurt.
“You want me to go looking for it?”
“I want you to not only go looking for it, but find it. When you find it, you call us in immediately.”
I gestured to the bottle of Jack, and he wordlessly poured me a shot.
“Let’s go over everything you want me to do.”
Because no way in hell was I going through this again.
It might not be the same thing that I’d gone through with Pippa, Stanton, and Sonny, but it was similar enough that I felt like I was tasting ash on the back of my tongue.
Ash from the fires of hell that I’d already gone through once.
Never again.