Chapter 17
Seventeen
We go together like drunk and disorderly.
—Eddy to Nettie
Eddy
“What are you doing here?” I wondered.
There was no fear inside of me, not when Weaver had made sure that I wasn’t alone when he wasn’t able to be here. I’d met several of his club friends and a few of their wives.
But there was a whole lot of curiosity in this man that seemed too important to be here for no reason.
Weaver’s friend was older and had salt and pepper in his hair and beard. He was a senator to boot. There was no way he was here to babysit me. He definitely had an agenda.
“A friend of Weaver’s,” he confirmed. “Figured you could use some company.”
I smiled. “I’ll take anything you have to give.”
Because lying there in a hospital bed for hours a day was so much fun.
Plus, I’d gotten used to skipping the commercials and ads. It was pure torture to watch a TV show that still showed commercials.
“I have about an hour.” He put his phone down and studied me for a long moment. “What’d it feel like?”
“Getting attacked by a bear?”
He nodded.
“I was scared,” I said. “Did you hear the 9-1-1 call? I feel like I can hear it in my dreams—that operator’s voice.”
He nodded. “I heard it. Actually, I heard it live.”
My brows rose. “You what?”
He scratched at his head. “How much did Weaver tell you about me?”
“Not very much,” I said. “I’ve just heard your name said now and then.”
He crossed his arms over his chest, and I noticed then that he was wearing a wide wedding band on his left ring finger. Lucky lady.
But his next words broke my heart, and had me blinking in surprise at his explanation into who he was and why he was here.
“I lost a little boy.”
I looked sharply at him. “I’m sorry.”
Because what did you say about that?
“So I know what it’s like to lose the thing you love most in this world.”
I blinked.
“You barely know him,” he said.
“Weaver?” I asked.
He nodded.
“I feel like we’ve talked more in the last few days while I’ve been in this hospital than I have with any of my past relationships combined,” I said. “But I did learn today, after overhearing his conversation, that I might not know it all.”
Let this man try to figure out what it was that I knew.
I wouldn’t be telling.
“I heard his conversation.” He pointed at the speaker by my bed. “I hacked into that.”
“You’re a hacker?”
He nodded. “A good one.”
“Why are you hacking into my things?” I wondered, then my frown deepened. “Did Weaver ask you to?”
I wouldn’t blame him after what I’d overheard earlier.
I may not know everything, but I had a very distinct guess, and I was trying pretty damn hard not to think about what that meant.
“No,” Apollo admitted. “I’ve been watching this town since I found it.”
Since he found it?
“Why?”
He leaned forward so that his elbows were resting on his knees. “I’m going to talk, tell you a hypothetical situation, and see what you think.”
“Okay…”
“If you tell anyone about this hypothetical situation, I will make sure that your body is never found.”
My stomach somersaulted.
“I…”
“A year or so ago, I found out that my woman had a brother in prison that didn’t really deserve to be there.”
I blinked but didn’t speak.
“Fast forward a bit of time, and I found a way to get him out,” he continued.
“Okay.”
“Hypothetically, I did that in a way that meant when he was out, he had to disappear to a town that was small enough and far enough away that he wouldn’t be recognized.” He leveled me with a look. “Where he could go on a hike, and save the life of a woman getting attacked by a bear.”
My belly sank.
Romeo was his brother-in-law?
And the man sitting next to me was the one responsible for breaking him out of prison?
Somehow, I knew this wasn’t a hypothetical anything.
I also started to allow my brain to formulate the answer from earlier that I wasn’t allowing myself to think about.
Weaver had escaped from prison.
His daughter coming to visit him was bad, mostly because he was supposed to be dead. And if someone reported his daughter missing, and she was found here with the man that was supposed to be in prison, it would be bad.
Very, very bad.
No wonder he’d rightly freaked out.
“While I was looking into my brother-in-law’s problems, he ran a few names past me that he thought might benefit from the same kind of actions.
Men that he met in prison either before he was sentenced or after that he felt like were wrongly accused and wrongly tried.
I looked into them, and a few more, and hypothetically found them a way out.
I found them a new life, way away from their old ones.
Found them jobs. Established connections.
Made it to where they had a place to lie low, with people that would always have their backs. ”
A motorcycle club.
Sawtooth and the surrounding towns.
I wondered who else was here that’d had the same things happen to them?
I was now questioning every able-bodied man in the Dixie Wardens Motorcycle Club.
Were they all escaped convicts?
And did I care?
I didn’t think I did.
I knew the type of man that Weaver was.
He may not have shared his deepest and darkest secrets, but he’d helped me out of an intense situation.
And he’d told me about a man that would be looking into that situation.
“I want to thank you for looking into my parents,” I said instead of commenting about his not-so-hypothetical story.
His eyes darkened. “They’ll slip up.”
I sure hoped so.
“What are you going to do about Weaver’s sister?” I asked.
Apollo sighed and leaned back in his chair once again.
“The easiest thing to do would be to make Boston disappear,” he admitted.
“She’s fifteen. She’ll change a lot in the next year when she hits a growth spurt.
She can change her hair, wear contacts, and maybe his sister will just think she ran away and doesn’t want to come back. ”
“But you don’t think she’ll let it go,” I guessed.
“She’s already suspicious,” he said. “I read in one of her messaging boards that she was in for grieving widows that she doesn’t feel like her parents and Boston are sad enough for the loss of a son.”
“Shit,” I grumbled.
I didn’t even know Weaver that well, but what I did know was that I wanted to help him in any way that I could.
Hell, I didn’t even know why he went to prison in the first place.
“What happened there?” I found myself asking.
“A shit show of epic proportions,” he said, shifting so one ankle was resting on the opposite knee. “Did Weaver tell you he was a SEAL?”
I nodded.
“When he got out, he had some hearing issues. Not bad, but bad enough that he couldn’t stay in,” Apollo said.
“He started lineman school and graduated in like eight months after getting out of the Navy. He started working, finally getting to spend some quality time with his daughter after getting out. And then he finds out that his daughter has been groomed by a man at her school.”
My gut clenched, which shot a bolt of pain through my entire body.
I didn’t move, though.
“The man’s name was Sonny Gibbons.”
“The billionaire professor that was substitute teaching?” I gasped.
Everyone had heard about Sonny Gibbons.
Apparently, the man had been grooming students for years and had been finding young eighteen-year-olds with their whole lives ahead of them and turning them into his playthings.
When they would get too old—and being old to him meant getting to their twenties—he would pick up a new substitute teaching job and find another one.
The FBI officer on Sonny’s case had been murdered by…
I gasped.
“You’re telling me that Weaver was the one that shot that FBI profiler?” I asked.
“Weaver—who used to go by Winston—was asked to help due to his expertise in hostage negotiation. He probably shouldn’t have been there at all since the FBI profiler, Stanton, was engaged to Weaver’s sister, Pippa.
Long story short, Pippa was kidnapped by Sonny—who used to be one of the women that Sonny had groomed but had gotten away—his one regret.
When she was kidnapped, Stanton and Weaver went into the building to get her back.
What they didn’t know at the time was that Pippa was being tortured.
Both men went out of their way to offer themselves, which was how they both ended up being put in a situation. ”
“According to all the news and court documents, Weaver shot Stanton and killed him,” I recalled. “He said that he did it because he was trying to save his sister.”
“I was,” Weaver’s voice sounded from behind Apollo.
I whipped my head around and immediately regretted it when pain shot through my torso.
I cried out, which had Weaver moving toward me and depressing the button on my morphine pump.
“I’m sorry.”
“She had to know,” Apollo said.
“I know,” Weaver said. “I was coming to tell her everything. She already guessed a lot. I needed to explain.”
“Well, finish up the rest,” Apollo suggested.
“What the court cases and TV newscasters didn’t tell you was that this was a planned op.
There were several other people that were supposed to be there…
and they conveniently didn’t show. Something stank from the very beginning, but I couldn’t let my sister get murdered by this nut case.
And I couldn’t let Stanton go in there alone or he’d be killed. ”
“What happened?” I asked. “I thought this had to do with your daughter.”
“That was why I originally got involved, yes,” he said.
“But later on, Pippa shared with both Stanton and I that the only reason Sonny had targeted Bossy at all was because of her. Pippa had walked away from him in high school, and it’d pissed Sonny off.
No one else had ever been the one to leave.
It was always him. And Sonny didn’t like that. ”
“Okay.” I nodded. “So how’d he get your sister?”