Chapter 8
There is no way to make sense of what just happened, but I believe her.
After I scrub both hands over my face, I curse under my breath. “Fucking hell.”
My job with the club for the last twenty years has made lots of men lie to me. They were usually trying to buy more minutes on their life.
You sit a man down in front of me and inside of a minute I will tell you whether the words coming out of his mouth have any truth behind them.
I’ve never been wrong. Vera’s not lying. Which means somebody put her in this situation. And I helped.
“Ace.” Winford’s hovering now that the car has left with Vera. He’s got his hat in his hands, turning it around and around like a steering wheel.
“I didn’t know,” he says in a choked voice.
“I want you to hear that from me before you hear it from anybody else. That man who read her rights, I don’t know why he’s here or who he is.
I’m just a body they threw in a car. I was halfway up the river road before I even read the address, and then I came around that corner and there’s your goddamn bike. ”
“Who signed it?”
“Ace, man—” he starts to say something I don’t care to hear.
“Who signed it?”
“I’ll find out.” He puts the hat on. Takes it off again. “There was a lot of money on the ground in front of all of us. Two of ’em are brand new to the department, including that guy. So I can’t put that money back in a box for you.”
“I don’t want it back.”
He blinks at me, the tension in his face making his skin shiny.
I turn my head and focus on Anna. She’s standing at her van with a camera around her neck.
She took photographs of a woman in handcuffs. Photographs of the money on the ground.
Photographs of me in a Kings of Darkness cut, putting a box in her hands with a goddamn ribbon on it. Timestamped. Geotagged. In focus. From four angles.
“Anna,” I growl. “Come. Here.”
She backs up a step. “No,” she says, biting her lower lip and shaking her head.
“Give me the camera.”
“Absolutely not,” she snaps.
“Hand it over,” I say more seriously.
Both of her hands are on it now, hugged up against her chest like a kid holding a stuffed dog. She says, “Do you know what this camera body cost? I have a wedding tomorrow, I have to be at the Ridgeline at nine in the morning!”
“They’re going to subpoena it.”
She stops, face registering shock.
I tell her the ugly truth. “That woman’s going to stand up in front of a judge and a prosecutor is going to put a photo on a screen of an outlaw handing her a box with fifty thousand dollars in it. And she is going to go away for twenty years. That’s what’s on your camera.”
Anna’s mouth is open.
I say, “Or it goes into evidence right now with Winford and gets sealed, logged, and the evidence goes away.”
I put my hand out.
She stares at me for three full seconds. And then this ridiculous woman, this walking car wreck, lifts the strap off her neck and slaps the camera into my palm hard enough to sting.
“I want a receipt,” she says. Her voice cracks. “I want it back, and you are going to fix this.”
She drags her wrist across her face, tears smearing on her skin. She’s crying and she’s probably furious about crying.
Anna shudders. “Vera was nice to me and she didn’t want to be here, but she came anyway. Who the hell does that?”
“She does,” I say with a catch in my throat.
I pass the camera to Winford. “Impound it. Log it. Chain of custody, every signature, all the way down. And nobody else puts a hand on it. You understand?”
Winford takes it like it’s a snake.
“You know what this looks like,” he says, voice wobbling.
“Yeah, I do. Now make it happen.”
He’s sweating bullets as he mutters, “It looks like a Kings of Darkness bought a county deputy to bury evidence at a felony scene.”
“That’s exactly what it looks like.”
“Then why the hell am I doing it?” he grunts.
I look at him until he stops all the twitching and nervous shit.
“I know everything about you,” I say, laying it out there. “Where you prowl around. The club whores you talk to when you’re drunk. What you did with that money you skimmed from the big drug bust.”
Winford’s Adam’s apple sticks up high under his chin.
“I’ll be in touch,” I warn and he knows that’s exactly what the threat is.
Winford may not know what I do for the club—the wet work, the disappearing of enemies, the darkest of the shit, but he knows I’m the one no one crosses.
“Okay, I’ll do it,” he chokes out.
I get on my bike and ride like a fucking demon.
The gate guard sees me coming and gets the barricade open, because I’m not slowing down and he knows better than to make me.
Engine screaming, I come into the lot hot, the sound of my bike echoing like a detonation off the brick buildings. I’m off the bike a split-second later. Up the clubhouse steps three at a time, through the door, into the noise and the music and the smell of greasy food and beer.
Skull’s right where I hoped he would be with his boots up on the table with a bottle in his fist. The man is grinning at the door like he’s been sitting there a solid hour waiting for it to open.
“Well?” he says. “How’d the drop go?”