Chapter 6
Fucking fuck.
Three cop cars. Four deputies inside. No sirens.
The silence means they’re not chasing anybody. It also means they knew exactly where they were going and exactly what they’d find standing there when they arrived.
Which means somebody told them about the drop.
Inside my head, I run the whole scenario in about two seconds.
There’s a gun under my cut. There’s four of them. There’s a civilian with a camera, and there’s a woman holding fifty grand in cash.
The whole damned day just went to hell.
I want to pull her into me and shield her from whatever’s about to go down. But that’s not gonna be possible.
“Don’t say anything,” I tell Vera, talking fast and low. “Not one word. Not your name. Nothing.”
“What?” she wheezes, swallowing hard.
“Nothing, Vera.”
They slide out of the cars with their hands riding on their belts and their eyes going everywhere.
It’s my business to know the cops in the county. Half of them are part of our network. The kind of men who look the other way.
The one out front is a burly guy with a clipboard and a mustache. I have never seen him before and that doesn’t sit well.
But I do know the one hanging back at the second cruiser, sweating through his collar, looking at me like a man watching his own house burn down.
Deputy Winford.
Thank fuck.
“Vera Healy,” Mustache says loudly with his eyes trained on her. “County Sheriff’s Office. Put the box down and step away from the man.”
Thud. The box hits the gravel.
She didn’t put it down. Her face went pale and her hands opened like the thing is on fire. After the box thuds on the ground it rolls onto its side and two bricks of hundreds slide out in front of the deputies and one professional photographer.
“Oh my god,” Anna gasps, backing away.
“Ma’am. Hands where I can see them,” the lead cop tells Vera.
My blind date that wasn’t supposed to be a date stammers, “I don’t… I don’t know what that is. I got here twenty minutes ago. He handed it to me!”
“Hold on,” I warn.
She’s wheezing, “I don’t even know his name.”
“Ma’am, turn around and put your hands behind you,” the cop orders.
Vera turns around like a woman moving through water, slowly, and she puts her hands behind her back because they told her to.
It nearly makes me sick. She’s the kind of person who does what she’s told because she’s good. This woman is fundamentally nice. Betty Crocker nice.
But she’s looking at me the whole time over her shoulder like I’m gonna whip out some kind of cape and save her.
The cuffs go on with a loud clatter of metal on metal.
The sound echoes inside my head.
The urge to defend her knocks the wind out of me. But I stay silent and still.
Fuck!
In my years with the club I’ve watched a lot of things happen to a lot of people. I have made most of them happen personally.
Never stood still with my hands at my sides while something horrible happened three feet in front of me.
It’s like having my spine ripped out one vertebrae at a time.
“Vera Healy, you’re under arrest for felony embezzlement, wire fraud, and theft by conversion.”
Mustache is reading it off the card in his hand. He’s enjoying it too and his voice has that little lift in it. “You have the right to remain silent.”
Embezzlement? My brows go up, then lock down hard.
Vera’s standing in the parking lot with fifty thousand dollars of Kings of Darkness cash at her feet.
The facts are so ugly this disaster makes my ears ring.
“That’s not what this is,” stammering, she shakes her head hard enough to make the clips and pins turn loosen. “That’s not mine. I have never seen that money in my life. I don’t even know how it got here.”
“Ma’am. Let’s go.”
“He gave it to me!” she cries.
Every deputy turns around to look at me.
Mustache’s hand goes to his belt. My abs tighten, my heart pumping like a bad piston. Here it comes.
“Sir. Step back from the woman and let me see your hands.”
I show him my hands.
“That your bike?” he asks.
“Yeah. It is.”
“You want to tell me what a Kings of Darkness patch is doing at a felony arrest with fifty thousand dollars on the ground?”
There are about nine things I could say. Every one of them puts more heat on her.
If I say it’s mine, she took cash from an outlaw MC.
If I say it’s hers, she’s holding stolen money.
If I open my mouth at all, the first words out of a prosecutor’s face are going to be that she was receiving a payment from organized crime.
No jury in this county has ever cared what came after that sentence.
Dammit to hell.
I have never been so fucking useless in my life.
“No, sir,” I say.
Vera makes a sound behind him.
“You got ID?” he asks me.
“In the left saddlebag.”
“Don’t touch anything.” He jerks his chin at one of the young ones. “Run him. Run the plate too.”
The young cop takes off like his ass has been lit on fire. And Winford steps up on my right side. He stands close, his hat in his hand as he leans in like he’s clearing me out of the way.
“Man,” he says, under his breath, not moving his mouth. “Whatever you’re thinking. Don’t.”
“I’m not thinking anything.”
“You are absolutely thinking something. Known you for years and I’ve never seen your hands do that.”
I look down. My hands are vibrating. Son of a bitch. I make them stop.
“That warrant real?” I ask him.
“Yep. Judge Britt signed it at Six-forty this morning.”
“On what?”
“Four hundred and sixty grand out of accounts managed by some accounting firm downtown where she works.”
He puts the hat on his head, keeping his voice low as he mutters, “Supposedly her name is all over everything.”
Well fuck.
Mustache cop and his ride-along put Vera in the back of the first cruiser. The younger deputy’s got a hand on the top of her head. She’s too tall for the door. Vera has to fold herself in half to get in there. Her dress catches on the frame. Her knees are mashed against the barricade.
The more I see, the angrier I get.
When the door closes, she’s shouting through the glass, her voice carrying over the engines, over Anna’s camera shutter, over the blood in my own ears.
She’s repeating, “He gave it to me. He gave it to me. I don’t know what this is.”