Chapter 9
“Mother fucker,” I growl and grab two fistfuls of his cut.
He’s damn near as big as me but I’ve got him halfway up out of that chair before anybody’s turned around.
The Budweiser in his hand crashes loudly onto the wood. It floods the table and runs off the edge onto the floor.
The whole room shuts up so abruptly it’s like somebody pulled a plug out of a wall.
“Whoa. Whoa.” Skull’s got both hands up, palms out. He’s not fighting me. That’s the only reason we’re not on the floor breaking furniture. “Ace. Brother. Use your words.”
“What was in the box?” I demand.
“Fifty. Just like I told you.”
“Whose money?”
“Mine!”
His eyes are going back and forth across my face, and finally the understanding hits that something has gone badly wrong.
That grin dies and he says, “Ace, it’s mine. It’s my money. I pulled it out of my own damn safe this morning.”
“Why did you do that?”
“Because it was funny!”
I let go of him.
He drops back into the chair, the legs creaking from the impact as he looks up at me.
He thought it was fucking funny. The urge to ram his face through the nearest window is violently clawing through me.
But practically every man in the club is watching.
“It was a photoshoot,” Skull says, talking very carefully now. “Anna called me. She begged. Said she needed a guy. I thought of you, Ace. Big mean bastard who says hell no to love. I thought, put him in front of a nice woman in front of a camera and let God sort it out.”
I stare a hole in his forehead. Right where the bullet should go.
He rubs his mouth.
“The drop was so you’d show up. You wouldn’t show up for a photoshoot. But you show up for club business, no questions, every damn time.”
He shrugs one shoulder the way a man who knows he’s about to be hit. “The cash was so when she opened it, you’d have to stand there and explain yourself. And I was gonna get a picture of your face.”
My blood is boiling as he clears his throat.
“That’s it,” he says. “It was half joke, half mission to set you up with a woman.”
I grit out, “They arrested her.”
Everyone hears it. Skull’s spine snaps upright. The room shifts, the air tightening.
“What the hell?” Skull growls, shocked.
“Four deputies from the county showed up. A warrant for her arrest came down this morning.”
I hear my own voice inside my head and it’s flat as a table.
“Felony embezzlement. Wire fraud. Theft by conversion. The cops came into that parking lot knowing exactly where she’d be, and when they got there she was standing in the gravel holding fifty grand in cash that I put in her hands. In front of a photographer. Who took eleven hundred pictures of it.”
Skull has turned the color of a dead fish. “Oh, Christ,” he says, pushing up out of his chair.
“Yeah. Exactly. Now we have to fix it.”
“Ace, I swear to you—” he starts to say, but I cut him off.
“They have her on film taking fifty thousand dollars from an outlaw motorcycle club. And it is not going to matter one goddamn bit what’s true. She’s done. She was done the second I walked across that lot.”
Katie, Skull’s woman, is standing in the doorway with both hands over her mouth and tears in her eyes. The room is vibrating with unease around me. And behind Katie, standing in the hall, is Prez.
His thick tattooed arms are crossed. Reading glasses are shoved up on his head. He looks like he’s been standing there long enough to hear all of it.
“Explain why this happened,” he says, expression locked down.
Church is in session twenty minutes later. Not a full sit. Just the men who matter for the heavy shit. This time there’s a phone in the middle of the table on speaker.
The club’s attorney is a man named Dom Reingold. He probably hasn’t ever raised his voice in his life and he bills hard enough to feel like an arterial bleed.
In classic Reingold form, he listens to the whole thing without interrupting. When it’s done he’s quiet for a second.
“The cash that’s in evidence, is it clean?”
Skull leans in. “It came out of a legitimate business account. It’s mine.”
“Is it clean, Max?” Reingold presses Skull, using his legal name.
“It’s clean. One hundred percent.”
“Then we have a defensible position and a public relations disaster.”
Papers are shuffling on his end of the line. “Bail is the easy part. She has no record, she has roots, and the argument for flight risk is thin as a communion wafer. I’ll have her arraigned tomorrow morning and out the same day. The club will eat the bond.”
“Then what’s the hard part?” Prez asks.
“Two things.” Reingold’s voice floats up out of the phone, very calm and very cold.
“One, that warrant was early this morning. The sheriff’s office had three cars up there on the bluff road at sundown.
On a Sunday, on a white collar case. Nobody moves that fast. Not ever.
The only living human beings who knew that woman would be standing in that particular parking lot tonight are her photographer, and the men in your clubhouse. ”
Nobody says a word.
I’ve got my hands locked on the edge of the table as the ground turns unsteady beneath me.
“Two,” Reingold says. “The complainant is a problem. His sworn statement put this in front of a judge.”
“Give me a name,” Prez says.
“Wallace Prince. Managing partner of Prince and Halstead.”
Prez takes the glasses off the top of his head and sets them down on the table with a small, hard click as if hearing a name sealed the deal.
“Let’s get to work,” Prez says. “Make it happen, tell us what you need on this end.”
“On it,” Reingold says. “I’ll invoice you.”