Chapter 2
Magnum
We rode for three hours before we stopped for bathroom breaks.
We’d brought plenty of food and water, and we had sofas lining three sides of the box van, with mattresses in the center.
Our van held fourteen victims, a team of mental health professionals (some with medical expertise), and enough bikers to keep the peace if a few of the victims went off the deep end.
I wasn’t needed for much, which meant I had too much time to think, and I worried about Storm. I knew Sloan and Ember would keep her safe, but not being able to talk to her was killing me.
I swapped out someone’s ice pack when I saw him turn it over, searching for cool. I listened in on the many conversations happening, and noted a few fighters seemed to be relying on each other more than the headshrinker talking to them, but that was fine.
The four victims with concussions were on their way to a hospital. We’d offered to take the others to a hospital, but all had flatly refused, and we weren’t going to push the issue.
I went back to thinking of how Storm might be managing.
Logan had been shot, and I wasn’t sure how much my girl had seen of it.
Squatch thought it was possible she’d seen enough that we might need to pull a vampire in and make her forget, but he said Ember intended to gaslight her into believing it’d been a flesh wound.
I didn’t think it would work with my Storm, but Ember’s game plan was to focus on how hard they’d worked to bleach the blood, to put the worry on LEO getting his DNA.
And that was actually a real concern, so it might help.
It killed me that Storm couldn’t come home with me, but she was going to have to distance herself from us, at least in the short term.
We’d known it for the better part of a week, and we’d dealt with it. It was comforting, knowing she was as distressed about the separation as me, and maybe that’s selfish, but it was the truth.
I was still awake when she went live at five minutes after ten o’clock the next morning, right after the huge mall she’d planned to use for her initial piece opened.
- - - ? - - -
Storm
The idea was to get into the mall and start the livestream before anyone had a chance to take me out. Ember had gone in, walked around, and then came out to get me. She was wearing the best wig I’d ever seen, she’d expertly drawn on her eyebrows, and she was wearing false lashes.
Sloan was also wearing a wig and fake eyelashes — and he’d drawn his own eyebrows on. I’d figured Ember would have to do it for him, but apparently not.
I’d had the majority of my first video written ahead of time for a while, but I’d spent a good part of the morning, once we’d arrived in our rented cabin, looking through the footage Skippy had uploaded for me.
This initial information was highlights — start with the governor’s husband running an illegal fight ring to get eyeballs, then backtrack to this tying into the missing people I’ve been focused on for years, be clear the fighters are the kidnapped homeless and older foster teens, forced to fight for their lives.
I showed a few well-known guests, also for eyeballs and to get people talking, and ended by showing footage of both the governor and her husband at the Friday night fight, which we had video of because of the glasses Ember had swapped out Friday morning.
At the end of my video, I played the video of the governor’s husband telling someone to kill me, and then told the camera, “I will broadcast every day, from a public place, before noon. If I do not, it means something bad has happened. I do have a dead-man’s switch — mega-embarrassing shit involving the man who wants me dead and a woman who is not his wife, for starters, but also financial stuff that’ll land the first family in prison if the justice system works the way it’s supposed to, though I’m not holding my breath on that one.
The point I’m making…” I paused a beat for effect.
“Is that killing me makes everything public immediately, so maybe the people wanting me dead might want to rethink that.”
And then I turned my phone off, put it back into the signal-blocking bag, and walked between Sloan and Ember, back to the car.
And here’s the thing. It took three different cars to get us to the mall, and another three to get us back to the cabin. That’s six damned cars. Six.
We drove to a Walmart, parked in front of the grocery side, and Ember and I went into the bathroom.
She changed her wig out, and I put my hair up and yanked a purple-and-black wig styled in a short bob over it.
We pulled our clothes off to show miniskirts and tank tops underneath, and we changed into heels.
Three minutes of glittery makeup later, with our original clothes and shoes stuffed into a bag and pushed into the garbage, we walked out holding nothing but cell phones in our hands.
No purses. We shopped for condoms and lube, checked out with a card Ember had under another name, and walked out of the other side of the building, to a different car, where Sloan was waiting for us, completely bald and also in different clothes.
“Damn, girl,” Ember said while Sloan drove out of the parking lot. “You have calves like a ballet dancer. What kind of legwork are you doing?”
Memories came rushing back — cleaning Magnum’s house in heels, and the days I had to walk on my toes for hours, but I only said, “I’m in heels a lot. People take you more seriously when you’re looking down at them.”
We drove to a restaurant, ate, walked next door to a head shop, where Sloan and I acted like we were together and Ember was the third wheel.
We walked down the strip mall to a few other shops, and I went into a family bathroom with Sloan, where they had hidden more clothes for us.
We came out with me in a ponytail, jeans, and an oversized tee with scuffed-up sneakers.
Sloan was back in a similar wig to the one he’d started in, wearing joggers and a T-shirt that didn’t show his muscles.
Ember was waiting for us in the car this time, the third damned car, and we drove all over creation before she finally headed back to the cabin.
“This spy shit is a lot of work,” I noted, and Ember laughed.
“Even with all of this, the FeeBees and the bad guys will eventually follow every motherfucking step we took, but it’ll take a week or more to figure it all out, unless they put hundreds of people on it.”
“And they might,” Sloan said. “Probably not right away, but we don’t need a whole week anyway. Couple of days should do it, if this works.”
Right. Enough time for everyone looking for me to get the word that killing me is now off the table.
Once we were sure I was safe, I’d have to go talk to law enforcement.
And by then, I’d have the final package to hand over to them — all the data the bikers got from the site.
We’d taken the hard drives to keep LEO from seeing the op.
The plan was to erase only the actual op, make sure we had copies in case the hard drives disappeared later, and then hand the hard drives over to LEO.
It fucked with chain of custody, but there was nothing to be done about it.
Plus, we had plenty of other incriminating evidence.
It wasn’t like they needed those hard drives to make a case.
It was all I could do to focus on the tasks at hand, though. I wanted to know how the victims were doing, wanted to check in with Magnum, wanted to talk to Logan and see this damned flesh wound, because how the hell do you miss hitting vital organs from only four damned feet away?
I finally fell into bed at two o’clock that afternoon, when I’d been awake for thirty-one hours straight — and I still had to force my brain to shut up so I could fall asleep without wearing a damned waist cincher, and without my asshole full of a motherfucking plug.
I slept ten hours straight and woke at midnight, which was going to completely fuck up my sleep schedule, but it meant I worked through the night and was ready for my next livestream, this one at seven the following morning, given with the Lincoln Memorial behind me.
This time it was two cars and then a motorcycle, with Sloan driving and me behind him.
Getting back was the motorcycle and two more cars — so we were up to nearly a dozen vehicles.
“How the hell do you have so many cars available to you?” I asked partway through the process of getting back.
“It’s why we cost several grand a day,” Ember said. “It isn’t just us, there’s a team of people you don’t see.”
“But you said this was a favor. No charge. Do I need to pay? I will. I don’t want to take advantage.”
“You risked your life for this,” Sloan said.
“And yeah, it’s your job and you’ll make money from it eventually, but this is bigger than most independent journalists can handle.
We had to go to Aaron Drake, giving him broad brushstrokes without specifics to give him plausible deniability, but we have some company resources, within reason, we can use.
If we need to go above his limits, we’ll discuss it, but for now, we’re good. ”
“Watching you edit video, plan the broadcast, and then quickly figure out the best spot for lighting, dealing with the sound…” Ember shrugged.
“Your job is way more complicated than it seems, and that’s just the part where you share what you’ve found out.
Most of your job is running down the stories, chasing the bad guys, and not backing off when they want you dead.
You’re as much of a badass as anyone in the security world.
I really hope you and Magnum work out, not just because I can see how much ya’ll care for each other, but I want you close, so we can be the kind of friends who go shopping together, get drunk together. ”
“I’d like that, too, but I have to be careful not to bring attention to the bikers. It’s possible I’ll never be able to go around them publicly, ever again.”
Because two guards were dead and another in critical condition.
Seventeen men had infiltrated a large property with thirty armed staff, thirty-five victims, and eighty guests.
They’d disabled over one hundred people and only killed two in the process.
Seemed like pretty good odds to me, but some in both law enforcement and the media were all over the vigilante murder thing.
Most people were so horrified by what’d been happening, they were saying whoever had rescued the fighters deserved medals and not jail time, but it wasn’t clear just yet which opinion was going to win out in the legal system.
In my broadcast that morning, I’d pointed out that calling in law enforcement to handle this ahead of time meant the possibility the bad guys killed all the victims and wiped all traces of them ever being there, and it was too big of a risk to take.
So, the decision had been made by others, not me, though I agreed with the decision, to call in experts who could rescue the victims before we went public.
And I stated that there were more people than me looking for the victims, some of whom had the funds to hire the kind of people who could actually pull this off.
We needed people to believe a professional team had done this, not a bunch of bikers.
Because in three months, if I started being seen with a biker, no one could think the men of the RTMC had been part of it.