Chapter 4

Chapter 4AdamIwoke with the woman of my dreams draped over my naked body. It felt like being covered by the softest, most elegant fabric imaginable. I lifted my head and looked down at our joined bodies. We looked good together all the way down to just above my knees.Below that was an ugly mangled mess alongside her long silken limbs. From the knees down we were beauty and the beast. I laid my head back down and thought about last night. I’d had a lot of sex in my life, but this was the first time I’d ever made love to a woman. It amazed me to think I’d done it with the girl I’d left behind.Now, having tasted love, I never wanted to settle for anything less.A sleepy voice spoke, “You look like you’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders, babe. What are you thinking about?”She turned to look at me and I could see the trepidation on her face. “Is this the part where you tell me to hit the road because I was nothing more than a one night stand for you?”“Fuck no. Don’t ever think that about yourself. I was thinking of what a selfish bastard I am for cramming my cock in a sweet, innocent woman like you. And how I’m a double bastard for wanting to keep you.”Her face lit up. “You do? Really? I mean that’s wonderful.” She leaned over and kissed me. When she pulled back, she cupped the side of my face with her hand. “If I can’t think of myself as a cheap one night stand, you’re not allowed to think of yourself as a bastard.”“Double bastard,” I corrected her playfully.“Your no kind of bastard or any other awful thing.” After a momentary pause her expression shifted to one of surprise. Then she said timidly, “You can’t be anything terrible because you might already be the father of my child.”I bolted upright and shoved one hand through my hair. “Fucking hell, I’m sorry, Angel. I was so wrapped in my anxiety about finally getting naked with you that I didn’t even think to use a condom.”“It’s not your fault. I was so thrilled to get a chance to be with you that I didn’t have my head on straight either.”“You can fix this, make sure you…”She shoved my chest. “Don’t even go there. I’m not taking the day after pill or doing anything else that would hurt our baby.”“Possible baby,” I reminded her. “We’re probably freaking out for no reason.”She was staring up at me through her thick lashes. “Would you really want me to do something like that?”“Fuck no. I’d love to have a child with you. If not now, then later when we’re more settled. The decision isn’t mine to make, though, and I don’t want to pressure you.”She climbed into my lap. “It’s our decision to make together, and it sounds like we’re both on the same page.”I pressed my forehead to hers. “I fucking love you, Angel. We’ve been dancing around each other for months. I want you in my life permanently.”“Thank God. You’re all I’ve wanted since you came back home.”“Why don’t you grab some clean clothes, and we’ll go into town for breakfast?”She nodded, “That would be amazing, Adam.”I slapped her gently on the ass. “Get going, beautiful. Your man’s starving.”She laughed. “I’m a better workout than the gym.”My sweet Angel was dressed and out the door in record time. I threw myself onto my back and stared up at the ceiling. My life had done a one-eighty and it was a good thing. I was getting sick of wallowing in self-pity. It was time to live again.I cleaned myself up and pulled on fresh clothing. I had always put a pair of shoes on the foot rest of my wheelchair where my pants ended. I guessed it was because I was self-conscious. Now that I was intent on living my best life, I decided to lead a more authentic one. One shoe after another landed with thud in my bedroom closet.We’d obviously take Angel’s car. She had driven me places a couple of times in the past. Now that I was back in the game, perhaps I should explore buying a car modified for paraplegics. Since I had good manual dexterity, I was sure I could drive with my hands.I wheeled out onto my front porch and before I could navigate down my ramp, I heard a blood-curdling scream. My heart raced because it was Angel.I flew down my ramp and hit the driveway in time to see someone in a leather jacket shoving her into a van. We made eye contact for a split second, and I saw such regret on her face. I screamed, “Hang tight, Angel. I’ll be coming for you.”She shook her head in a silent plea for me to stay away. Fuck that. I didn’t even hesitate, I moved as fast as I could and missed being able to grab the door handle by seconds. Sitting there in the dust cloud they’d just kicked up; I took a second to memorize the license plate. Something settled over me in that moment. Gone was the panicking, my heartrate slowed, and I went into warrior mode, just like I did all those times in the military.I didn’t know who these men were or what they wanted with my Angel, but I was going to track the fuckers down and make them pay for putting their hands on her. The first order of business was to report her abduction to someone who could actually help me find her.As I wheeled back up my ramp and went toward the front door, I saw that the two men who had visited the day before had left behind a flyer on my door. But it wasn’t the number of the support group that caught my eye, it was something else. Their organization was run by the Dark Slayers MC. Didn’t a lot of those motorcycle gangs help with this sort of trouble?Bringing the flyer with me, I wheeled over to my desk to retrieve my cell phone and started to dial. Even if these guys didn’t help with kidnappings, they might have some idea who would.A woman answered the phone. “Slayer’s garage. How may I help you?”“I want to talk to Storm.”There was a slight hesitation in her voice, “He’s in a meeting right now.”I spoke loud and clear to make sure there was no misunderstanding. “I don’t care if he in a meeting, sleeping, shitting or crawled under a vehicle changing a leaky oil pan. I want you stop whatever you’re doing and get him to the phone right goddamn now. It’s a fucking life or death emergency.”“Yes sir. Right away sir.”Storm came on the line less than a minute later. “Who the fuck is this and what do you want?”“It’s Adam Daniels. You said to call if I need help. I need fucking help, right now. This very minute.”Storm’s voice became instantly alarmed. “You got it, brother. What’s going on?”“Some thugs wearing leather cuts forced that nice, friendly neighbor who called you into their van. They took her away, kicking and screaming.”“I hope the fuck you don’t think it was any of my crew.”“No. They had a reaper with a piece of twisted metal in his hand instead of a scythe.”“We know the fuckers. They call themselves Twisted Metal. They’re a local MC filled with real shitheads.”There was a brief pause while I tried to process this new information.Storm mumbled something to another person that I couldn’t make out, then spoke to me again. “Sit tight. It’ll take us about forty minutes to get to you. We’ll do whatever it takes to get your friend back.”“Hurry Storm. I don’t want her with those fuckers one moment longer than necessary.”I set down the cell and fired up my computer. It was a beast with three large screen monitors, which I’d picked up when I moved in a few months ago and had been using for some online work just to distract myself.There were very few encryptions that I couldn’t break, so getting into the DMV’s database wasn’t all that hard. I knew how state and federal databases were set up. I typed in the license plate number and pulled up the owner’s name. Charles Revin. Then I snagged a copy of his driver’s license. The picture was clearly of the man who grabbed Angel. He even had the same strange tattoo on his left temple.My mind filled with ideas on how to track down his associates. I checked DMV records for others who were using his same address. Then checked county records to see if he owned any property.He was gifted some properties from his maternal grandfather. Looking up arrest records was also easy because they were open to the public in California. Hit the jackpot there. Charles Revin had been arrested seventeen times over the last eight years and the police had listed several aliases for him including Charlie, Chev and Chevron.Slowly, I pieced together information on Revin and the MC he was involved with. But I couldn’t seem to figure out what his exact connection was to his MC. I delved deeper, slowly immersing myself into the seedy underbelly of this small town that seemed so all-American apple pie on the surface.Around an hour later, Storm showed up with a half dozen of his club brothers. He looked at the computer screens, each showing multiple documents. Once he realized I was picking through the police database, he jerked back. “What the hell are you, some kind of hacker?”“I’m military fucking intelligence. When we do it , it’s not called hacking. It’s called investigating.”Storm gestured around to my computer set up. “You’re no longer in the military, numbnuts. So this is definitely hacking.”Ignoring his rant about me breaching into state and local databases, I moved on to the subject at hand. “I’ve been digging up everything I can on Charles Revin.” I quickly went over what I’d found.“He goes by the club name, Chevron. I’ve heard it’s because he never made it past lance corporal in the Army, which means he only ever had one bar on his uniform. His father, Duke, is the club president for Twisted Metal MC. Duke’s real name is Dunford Revin.”That answered the question about how he was connected to the MC, but it didn’t help a damn bit. Nothing stoked my anger like running down information that led nowhere. “Don’t fucking care about his MC, but I do care that he owns properties all over the county. He’s likely taken Angel to one of them.”Storm stared at me. “I never would have taken Chevron to be such an industrious little snot. We need to figure out why he targeted her before we go blundering into a situation we don’t understand.”“Agreed,” I intoned. “Let’s have a look around her place. Maybe we can figure out what they want from her.”We headed over. Her door was standing wide open.Storm jerked his chin to the yard. “Have a look around the back. Adam and I are going to go through the house with a fine-toothed comb. We don’t need to be fucking tripping over ourselves.”We entered her old house, which she’d inherited from her parents, and my heart melted. Unlike the previous décor from our youth, the walls were now painted in light pastels and the living room furniture was pale pink with colorful toss cushions. Everything was adorably feminine.She had a white table and a matching desk. Little pots of flowers were scattered around, and a green vine was growing up and around the arched entrance leading to her kitchen. Her house looked just like something she would create, and it tugged at my heartstrings to see it for the first time in years while piecing together clues about her abduction.A white kitten walked up and meowed at us. I instinctively reached down and picked the ball of fluff up before wheeling over to her desk. Her computer was opened to a spreadsheet.Storm hovered over my shoulder. “What did you find?”I flipped through the document. “It looks like she was providing accounting services for local businesses. I knew she worked from home, but she never said what it was she did for a living.”I jumped to her e-mail. “She’s a certified public accountant. I can see about a dozen full time clients and a bunch of others she does weekly payroll and taxes for.”Storm walked around the room eyeballing everything. “Was Twisted Metal MC one of her clients?”I did a quick search on Chevron’s and his father’s real names as well as their club name, but nothing came up. “I’m not seeing evidence that she’s involved with Chevron, Duke, or their club.”Storm’s excited voice caught my attention, “Heads up. I found her cell phone.”I snatched it out of the air when he tossed it to me. “Fucking hell, my sweet friend was not very security conscious. Her phone isn’t even locked.”Scrolling through her phone, anger fired in my gut. “She’s been getting text messages from Chevron. He wants her to launder money through the businesses that have entrusted her with their financial accounts. He’s not coming right out and saying it, but I can read between the lines. She turned him down repeatedly, even though he kept offering her larger sums of money.”“That’s good news. If he needs her to launder money for him, that means he’s not going to kill her.”“Yeah, but he can do a lot of horrible shit to force her into doing his bidding.”Storm walked over to stand in front of me. ““There’s no guarantee that Duke is in on this scheme. It could be that Chevron is doing it behind his back. Either way, they’d take her somewhere isolated. What’s our next move?”I blinked up at him. “Don’t you have a fucking plan?”“No. We just got here, remember?” A brief silence spun out between us before he spoke again. “You were military intelligence. Analyzing shit was your job. Apply those skills to this situation and we just might be able to recover your friend before seriously bad shit happens to her.”My eyes drifted closed and images of the information we’d uncovered swarmed through my mind. I had an identic memory which is why they tapped me for military intelligence in the first place.The assortment of properties floated to the top of my mind. It’s logical to think that he took her somewhere private that he controls.Suddenly, a vision of the abduction crystalized. I could see the one they called Chevron. He looked like he had a Native American heritage. Then there was the driver. He had a gold tooth and a sneering smile. I could tell there was another man, but I didn’t get a glimpse of his face. Angel screamed. Seconds ticked by, and when the door slammed shut there was an image of a restaurant logo. A Mexican hat with two red peppers decorating it. The lettering read, Les Mes Taco. It was a restaurant delivery truck. My eyes popped open.“There was a taco stand on the outskirts of town, the east side, that used to be popular when I was a kid. I didn’t think it was still in business, but Les Mes Taco was printed on the side of the van.”“I remember that place. It closed down years ago,” Storm said.I looked up into his eyes. “It was one of the properties Chevron inherited from his grandfather. It’s isolated, and a place Chevron has total control of because he owns it.”Storm nodded, “It’s as good a place as any to start our search.”