11. Char
CHAR
I didn’t like the fact that she didn’t come back with us. I didn’t like her aggression, period. But I certainly didn’t enjoy the fact that Nielson kicked that bitch out of the cruiser and left her in the dust. Were we just leaving without her? Was that even smart?
I wanted to open my mouth and say something in protest.
But as the sheriff led me through the precinct, the smell of stale coffee and two-day-old doughnuts captured my attention.
“Here we go,” the sheriff grunted as he situated his belt buckle beneath the flap of his gut, “should be comfortable enough.”
I furrowed my brow as I glanced around the room.
He was right, it was comfortable. And it wasn’t the room I needed to be in.
The entire point of all this was to have people bear witness.
This woman needed to know that she was on other people’s radars.
No more slinking around in the dark for her.
I padded into the carpeted room and took stock of the palm tree in the corner.
The pale yellow walls and popcorn ceiling added a weirdly feminine touch to the area, and I couldn’t help the way my brow stitched itself together in confusion.
This wasn’t an interrogation room.
This was a waiting room.
“Sheriff?” I asked as I faced him. “Why have you brought me here?”
He stepped into the room. “To talk.”
“Officially?”
“Does it have to be officially?”
I folded my arms over my chest. “I won’t answer anything unless it’s being recorded and witnessed. That’s the whole point of this.”
Nielson nodded slowly. “We can accommodate that. But it’s not as comfortable as?—”
I rushed him, getting into his face. “I don’t give a damn about comfortability. Get me into an interrogation room.”
“Are you sure?”
I brushed past him, heading out of what looked like a makeshift, cheap ass conference room. “Now, please.”
“Fair enough.”
For a man with a beer belly, he moved swiftly.
He slid in front of me and escorted me down the hallway where we passed rows of cracked and closed wooden doors.
Windows flashed on both sides of my shoulders.
Picture frames with what looked like the stock photos they came in hung on the walls. All except for one.
A picture of the sheriff, surrounded by his deputies, and Axel.
Interesting, that it was the only personable picture hanging on the wall.
“There we are,” the sheriff said as he tossed open a stuck door, “make yourself at home.”
I peered around the corner and found a much more suitable environment.
My foot shuffled across the floor as I entered the harsh room with beige walls and a polished concrete floor.
A wooden table with two metal chairs sat in the middle with a harsh light beaming down upon one of the chairs.
And on top of the table, a single, lone bottle of water that wasn’t yet opened.
“Sorry for the harshness,” the sheriff said as he walked over and pulled out my chair.
“I’m used to it,” I said as I walked over to the chair, “I sat at a lot of these as a little girl. I know how it goes.”
He scooted the chair beneath me as I sat while one of his deputies came in with what looked like a big, black jewelry box. The deputy sat it in front of me and undid the golden clasp, flipping the lid open so quickly that it made me jerk.
However, when I peered inside, there was nothing.
“What’s this?” I asked.
Instead of answering me, however, I watched as the sheriff came around to his side of the table.
He jammed his hand into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone.
He pulled a radio off his hip and tossed both of the electronics into the box.
Off came his earpiece, and he tossed it in as well.
And after pulling one last phone off his hip, he tossed it on top of everything else.
“Any listening devices go in here,” Sheriff Nielson said.
I tilted my head. “Sheriff?—”
“Do it, or go back to the clubhouse.”
I eyed him carefully. What the hell was happening? “I don’t have anything like that on me. Not even my cell.”
“Are you sure?”
I stood back to my feet. “You can check me if you’d like.”
With a snap of his fingers, the deputy who brought in that black box rushed toward me.
I scoffed as I held my arms out, glaring down at the sheriff as he leaned back and slid his hands into his pockets.
That deputy’s hands ran all along my curves.
He slid them up and down my legs. He jammed them between my thighs.
I shook my head and chewed on the inside of my cheek as he checked my pockets and ran his hands along my torso.
“Watch it,” I warned him as he approached my breasts.
“My apologies,” the deputy murmured as he ran his palms along my tits.
I glared at him. My unrelenting stare connected with the bead of sweat between his eyeballs as he ran his finger along the outer rim of my shirt, checking my bra for its contents.
“Wrap it up,” the sheriff muttered.
The deputy practically snatched his hands away. “She’s clean. We’re good.”
“Told you,” I said flatly as I caught that deputy’s stare.
“You can leave us be, Deputy,” Nielson said.
The man damn near tripped over himself getting out of that room and I had to swallow down the smile working its way across my cheeks. He needed to be scared. If Deac ever found out that he fondled me like that, even at the behest of Sheriff Nielson, he’d mount that fucker’s head on a wall.
God, it was hot when Deac got mad.
“So is this where you bring out the listening devices you actually want in this room?” I asked as I sat myself against the cold, heartless metal chair.
“Once I get an answer to a question of mine.”
I folded my arms back across my chest. “And what question would that be?”
Nielson pinned me with a look. “Are you with the guys or not?”
I blinked. “Depends on your definition of ‘with’.”
He leaned forward, his leather belt creaking from the pressure of his gut. “Are you on their side or not?”
I searched his gaze for a while before I responded. “I suppose that depends on what side you sit on.”
Fuck, did I misjudge the situation? Did I get myself into more trouble than I bargained for? This only worked if the deal was still active between his department and the guys.
Holy shit, what if it was no longer active?
The sheriff leaned back before he heaved a heavy sigh. “You’re not in trouble. No matter your answer, you won’t be.”
“You sure about that?” I asked.
He nodded. “But your answer does gauge how I treat this meeting of ours, because something tells me you weren’t really in trouble and you didn’t really need emergency services.”
“No, I didn’t. I just needed you guys.”
“Why?”
I leaned forward, matching his posture so that he knew he couldn’t get the better of me. I had to know. Before I said anything, I had to know the conditions of the deal. I had to know if it was still intact, even though Deac was their head honcho.
“The deal you made with Axel, is it still in effect even though he’s dead?”
Nielson’s eye twitched before his tongue darted out. He licked his lips as his gaze scoured my body, and I leaned back so he could have at it. A buffet of all my nonverbal reactions spread out on a platter for him as he rolled his shoulders and cracked his knuckles.
“Fucking hell, I hate these chairs,” he murmured.
That spread a grin across my face. “Metal anything pretty much sucks when it comes to furniture.”
“Unless it’s a frame. My wife bought this stainless-steel frame for our bed. Best decision we ever made.”
“Yeah? How long have you been married?”
It was the first genuine smile he gave me. “Thirty years, this October.”
I whistled lowly. “That’s a lotta years. She doesn’t drive you insane?”
He barked with laughter. “Every fucking day of the week.”
I giggled. “As she should.”
Silence fell between us for a few minutes before he cleared his throat. “So long as they continue to protect us, we’ll always have their backs.”
“The guys?”
He nodded. “No matter who’s runnin’ em.”
“So was that the original deal?” I asked as my curiosity piqued. “Protection for turning your heads?”
He shook his. “No, but that’s the easiest way to put it.”
God, I wanted to know so much more. “All right, how about this? You tell me what the deal was about, in its fullest, and I’ll tell you what I know about this woman if you already don’t know it.”
He stretched his legs out, and I felt their presence creeping closer to me beneath the table. He reached his arms above his head, and the resounding crack that echoed across the room when he arched his back made my eyes widen.
“Feel better?” I asked.
He groaned as he settled back in his chair. “God, that was the spot I couldn’t get this morning.”
I grew impatient. “Sheriff.”
He drew in a deep breath through his nose. “When Axel first approached me about a deal, I was skeptical.”
I settled in for the story, leaning back and crossing my feet at my ankles. After all, he wasn’t the only person who could predict another’s thoughts based on sheer movements.
The sheriff snickered. “I mean, we knew he wanted access to our cache of guns in the evidence locker that would’ve just been melted down for scrap, so I took everything he said in that first meeting with a grain of salt.”
I did my best to hide my shock. “So you give them guns in evidence that you don’t need that they can sell in exchange for protection on both sides?”
“Not sell, no.”
I studied his face. “Sheriff, my guys don’t have a lot of time right now. So what do you say we speed this up a bit?”
He smirked. “Your guys, huh?”
I sighed. “Sheriff, I just meant?—”
He waved his hand in the air. “The deal between me and Axel was excess guns, information, privacy, and a monthly stipend to the department in exchange for security, help when necessary, and the occasional turning of the head.”
“So you don’t help them with… anything else they’ve got going on?”
The conversation hit a mature point where information was freely flowing, and yet that question stopped him in his tracks.
Sheriff Nielson raked his gaze down my body so hard that I swear his eyes could’ve taken my fucking shirt with them.
I touched a nerve. A nerve that caused him to fall silent.
And as he sat there, with minute after minute ticking past, I thought I dug myself my own fucking grave.
“Like I said,” Nielson murmured after the silence damn near swallowed me whole, “help when necessary.”
Fantastic. The entire fucking town was dirty as hell. Suits me right, dropping into a place like this after my childhood.
No wonder it feels like home.
The sheriff leaned forward again and reached for the water bottle that hadn’t been touched. “You don’t mind, do you?”
I shook my head. “You’re good.”
“Thanks,” he said with a grunt as he flopped back against the chair.
I cleared my throat. “Do you know anything about this woman running around town?”
He cracked the water bottle open. “Probably not much more than you know. I do know something that could be of use to us, though.”
“Is this the part where we start recording?” I asked.
He shook his head. “None of this can be recorded. Not any of it.”
“Even the stuff pertaining to her? That… was kind of my point.”
“Not with this answer.”
My senses heightened. My hearing sharpened. Even my eyesight recalibrated, as if all of the adrenaline in my system prepared me for a fight. I didn’t like how it made me feel. The sheriff was supposed to make this easier for all of us, not harder.
Tread carefully.
And for once, I listened to the voice in my head. “Fine, no recording. What do you know, Sheriff?”
He sighed so hard that his shoulders slumped. “You ever hear them mention someone called Doc?”
There was so much that took place that I had to wrack my brain for much longer than I wanted to before it dawned on me.
“With the signal, or something like that?” I asked.
Nielson nodded. “That’s the one.”
“What about him?”
“Do you know who he is?”
I paused. “A customer, right?”
He nodded. “Right.”
I nodded my head slowly. “Are you… going to tell me what you know?”
“I know why he threw the signal.”
I leapt out of the chair. I couldn’t fucking help myself. “Wait, you do? Seriously? What happened? I don’t think even the guys know that. Have you told them? Should we?—”
The sheriff slowly stood. “Why don’t I get us something to eat first? This is gonna take a while, and I could use something more than lukewarm bottled water.”
I lunged at him. “Sheriff, wait!”
I wrapped my hand around his wrist and the door that closed us into that room flew open.
Three deputies stood there, with their hands on the butts of their guns and their stares focused on me.
I stepped out from around the table. I walked toward the sheriff.
I stood beneath him, gazing up at his beady little brown eyes as I continued holding his wrist.
“Do you really know what happened?” I whispered.
He nodded. “Yes.”
“Why haven’t you told the guys then?”
He brought his free hand to mine and patted the back of my hand. “Food first, explanation after. Trust me, you’re gonna want the strength.”
And as I studied his gaze, trying to find even the smallest hint of a lie, I found none.
Which caused me to release his wrist.
“I’m not picky,” I murmured as I went and sat back down.
The sheriff dismissed the three musketeers and exited the room, leaving me there with my swirling thoughts.