16. 15 - Questions and Pee Stains

15 - Questions and Pee Stains

Reesa and I fell asleep on her couch the night before. Luckily, I woke early enough to head out before her kids caught me there. One day, there would come a time where it would be normal for me to stay. Imagining coming home to my family got me through the next few days of rough transition as Quickshot assumed the presidency of our chapter. Spike had been asked to step up and become the VP, but he declined for personal reasons.

Snake ended up taking the spot. It was a wise choice. He had the right temperament for leadership that meant he wouldn’t abuse the power given and he would be good in a crisis. Quickshot seemed a bit reluctant to accept his new position, but promised Ghost he would give it a shot because it would help ease some of the tension caused by the shakeup.

It was a shitty time to have to ask my new president for a favor, but he also happened to be the one dude who could find any information online. I gave him all the information Ree supplied about the men her husband hung out with before he died, the ancestry DNA files, and all the information I’d already gathered on Terry, Dina, and Danny. Then, I also told him about the strange man who had been camped outside of Ree’s house a while back. They hadn’t seen him since, but that didn’t mean anything. He could have realized he’d been made and got smarter about his surveillance.

“You claiming her?” Quickshot asked. I knew where he was going with this. If I didn’t claim her, his hands were tied. He might still help me, but any club business would be a priority over making sure my woman and her family were safe and not blindsided by a bunch of bullshit from a petty ass bitch again.

“Yeah, man. Gonna make her my old lady.”

“You sure? It hasn’t been that long.”

“Positive. Sometimes, you just know. I’m not taking the chance of letting her go when she’s fucking perfect for me.”

Quickshot nodded. “Fine. Get out of here and I’ll get back to you as soon as I have something for you.”

“Where are you headed?”

I turned to see Trouble and Hollywood standing there as I loaded supplies into the supply van. “Personal mission.”

Trouble’s brows shot up as Hollywood chuckled. “Personal stalker kind of mission that gets your kutte snatched, or personal revenge mission that protects loved ones?”

“The second one, asshole.”

“Right, then we’re tagging along.”

That stopped me in my tracks. “Why?”

“We’re club brothers. If you’re on a mission to protect your new old lady, then we’re going along for the ride. Besides, three assholes are better than one.” Hollywood grinned as he gave his answer, and I couldn’t argue with him. It would work to my benefit to have a few more men from the club backing my ass as I rounded up Josh’s old casino buddies. “Fine, get in.”

“Why didn’t you ask Spike to tag along with you? You two seem attached to the hip the past couple years.” Trouble asked.

“Spike has his own shit going on right now.”

“So, why didn’t you ask anyone else?”

I turned to Trouble as I shut the doors on the back of the van. “I didn’t think to ask around.”

“Because we’ve been shitty club brothers, and you didn’t think you could count on anyone else?”

“Something like that,” I admitted.

“Well, that fucking ends today,” Troubled demanded. “Honest to fuck, no one had anything against you. I think everyone was afraid they’d catch whatever fucking disease kept Sweet crawling up your ass the past couple years. That’s no excuse for having a brother feel like no one has his back. It felt like you were always one foot out the door, though. Not always because of your own actions. It made it tough for people to get close to you again.”

“Let’s put this conversation on hold until we’re done. I have to grab these guys before they leave for work.”

Both men nodded as they hopped into the van and looked around. “Damn brother, you lined this motherfucker.”

I glanced back at Hollywood in the rearview mirror. “Never know what kind of mess there will be when you question your garden variety pussies.”

“Garden variety pussies?” Hollywood asked and then threw his head back and laughed. “Holy fuck, man. Let’s go. My day is suddenly looking up.”

“He has nothing better to do,” Trouble proclaimed.

“Bullshit. I could be fucking Hilary Morton.”

“What the fuck?” I asked. “The town counsel lady?”

“Yeah, man. You know her?”

“No. Isn’t she in her sixties?”

Hollywood grinned. “So? Older ladies need love to.”

“What the absolute fuck, Hollywood?” Trouble turned and gave him a look that was part disgust and part intrigue. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Okay, so maybe the look had been more about the fact that Hollywood left something out. Those two had become close after Flight stepped on Hollywood’s toes, stole the girl he wanted, and then dropped her for some other chick. The woman ran before Hollywood could swoop in and make a connection and they were no longer on the friendliest of terms even though both men were still a part of the club.

The two men could almost be mistaken for brothers the way they both wore their hair buzzed close to their scalps and had their own shorthand language that I think had more to do with their prior military experience than anything else. They were both well over six feet tall and while Hollywood was more on the lean, runner’s side of the spectrum, Trouble was often found in the gym lifting and it showed in his muscular physique.

It baffled me that Hollywood, aptly named because he looked like a fucking movie star, would be fucking a woman twice his age, but to each their own. We headed off toward Hiawassee where there was a parking lot on the lake that the ride share crew used to meet up. For those guys headed to different work crews, it made it easier than traveling all over the mountain back roads to pick one another up. Lucky for us, Gary, Andy, and Chuck all rode to work together. They were part of the lineman crew that Josh used to belong to before he got himself killed on the job.

“Fill us in. What’s the job?”

I glanced back at Hollywood again. “My woman’s dead husband left behind a bit of drama that has caught up to his teenage daughter.” I explained the situation and that I was trying to find out some information because Reesa had called that morning and said she saw the same car sitting outside her house when she left to take Ariel to school.

“You think it has to do with his gambling debts or the bitch claiming one of her kids belonged to the dead husband?” Trouble asked.

“Not sure, but that’s why I’m grabbing these fuckers up. They might have some answers, especially if the fuckwad owed money to the wrong people. These dicks were supposedly his casino buddies. If not that, they were at least his alibi for the time he spent with the other bitch.”

“You going to interrogate the bitch as well?”

“Last resort since she’s a single mom with kids of her own, but if she continues to be a problem, I will put an end to that shit.”

“A few well-placed threats should keep the bitch in line, but I think you’re on the right track. If there’s some dude scoping out your woman’s house, he’s probably trying to see if she has money to spare or other assets that can bring in money.”

“That’s what I’m worried about. You know how some of those fuckers work. We haven’t had traffickers in the area in a long while, since the women from S.H.E. ran them all to ground. Doesn’t mean those unsavory types that loan money wouldn’t see Ariel, or Josh Jr. for that matter, as a possible way to earn some green to pay off the dead guy’s debt.”

“Does your woman know that’s a possibility?” Hollywood asked.

I shook my head. “If Ree does, she hasn’t mentioned it, and I don’t want to put that thought in her head if it isn’t already there. She has enough bullshit to deal with.”

It didn’t take long for us to get to the lot where the three idiots met. I showed the guys the images of the men that Quickshot had procured for me. As soon as he got information in from his searches, he sent it to me via text on my burner phone. I only turned that phone on for a few minutes every two hours, so that the GPS couldn’t be tracked as effectively.

“There’s the first one. He looks a little gay, I’ll go lure him over,” Hollywood announced.

“What the fuck?” I asked as he hopped out of the van and Trouble shook his head.

“He thinks he’s God’s gift to all the sexes.”

“Didn’t realize he swung both ways.”

“He doesn’t. He’s a giant fucking tease for anyone who will give him the attention he craves though. The asshole really should have thought about a career in the spotlight. He thrives there.”

“Okay then.” We watched as the asshole’s charm worked on Gary Newsome. It took less than a minute for Gary to be led straight to the back of the van where Trouble opened the door and snatched him inside. We slapped some duct tape over his mouth, tied his ass up, and then waited for the other two morons to show up.

The same shit played out three times over, just as easy each time. “That was scary easy.” Trouble glanced back at Hollywood who toe kicked each of the sniveling bastards in turn. “It’s like none of them have ever heard of stranger danger.”

“Either that or they all have a type,” I suggested. Hollywood grinned.

“Great, you fed his fucking ego. He’ll never let it go now.”

“I went fishing and reeled in three supposedly hetero guys without even breaking a sweat or pulling out my best lines. This face works miracles, motherfucker!” Hollywood’s announcement was met by several groans from the three men who were tied up. Apparently, they didn’t appreciate his assessment.

We drove back toward Sierra High and then up into the mountains where the club had a cabin we used for the solitude and the easy cleanup when it came to messy jobs. I didn’t think things would need to get messy as the assholes we wrangled up weren’t the type to put up much of a fight. Still, we needed the solitude because they were already proving to be noisy fucks during the ride.

“The next one of you fuckers to start blubbering through the tape is going to be the first to die a slow death while you choke on a dick.” Trouble glared back at the men who all shut the fuck up.

“Wish I’d thought of that about fifteen minutes ago,” I muttered.

“That’s why you have backup.”

Once we got there, it took no time at all to get them into the makeshift cabin and strung up on the meat hooks that hung from the rafters. The cabin consisted of one room in the entry that appeared to be a living room area, and then the back room that was soundproofed. There were no windows in the back room, though from the outside it appeared as though there were and that blackout shades were drawn down.

The floor was sealed concrete that sloped from all sides toward the middle of the room where there was a large drainage pipe in the floor with an industrial mesh strainer to keep larger chunks of things from falling in and clogging the pipes. We weren’t necessarily a one percent club anymore, but the old ways meant that we were still prepared for anything and everything.

Once I had all of their attention, I grinned at them. “Do you know who we are?” They all shook their heads. “Good, if you have any hope of surviving this, when we’re done here, you also won’t know who we are. You won’t know who anyone we talk about is and you won’t remember that this ever happened. Are we in agreement?”

They all nodded their heads vigorously and Trouble and Hollywood moved forward to snatch the tape from their mouths.

“We can’t all miss work together. Someone will know,” Gary yelled immediately, as he was in the grips of full-blown panic.

“Nah, they’ll think you fucked off to the casino together again.” At the worried looks they cast one another; I knew it was the right thing to say. “No one is going to miss you.”

“We’ll get fired. They warned us if it happened again…” the smallest of the three, Andy started to say, but Hollywood reached over and smacked him across the face with an open palm. I shook my head at the cartoonish slap and the responding gasp from Andy. If these were Josh’s friends, it made me wonder what kind of man my vivacious Ree had hooked up with. Then again, she probably didn’t know any better, since they were together in high school and stuck it out for the baby they made.

“Don’t speak unless directly spoken to,” Hollywood ordered once he had all of their attention. Then he turned back to me. “You were saying?”

“We already established no one was going to miss you and whether you lose your jobs or not isn’t my concern. It shouldn’t be yours either as your lives are the bigger problem at the moment.” Andy whimpered and Gary pissed himself. Chuck, the third asshole we had strung up, watched me with calculating eyes. He was the one to worry about. I nodded my head toward him and Trouble moved in to slap the tape back over his mouth.

“He didn’t even say anything!” Gary cried out in defense of his friend. It surprised all of us because it didn’t seem like he would have the balls to stand up for himself, much less his friends. I nodded again and Trouble slapped tape back on his mouth as well. That left Andy as the mouthpiece of the group.

“Let’s hope Andy here can tell us what we want to know. If he can’t you two assholes will be the ones to suffer for it.” Andy, who was strung up between the other two looked left then right and gulped.

“You’ve been missing the fourth man in your crew for a couple years,” I started. Andy’s eyes went wide, and he shook his head. “We didn’t have anything to do with that.”

Well, fuck. That wasn’t where I thought this was going to go. “Are you sure about that?”

“It wasn’t our debt, man. Fucking Josh had to find a way to pay that bitch to keep her mouth shut. He borrowed money at first, but then he needed a way to pay that back too. We took him to the casino, and he won a few thousand dollars that first night. He gave it to Terry to keep her from talking. Then, she wanted more. When he told her he had no way to get more, she set him up with Joey Farina.”

“Who the fuck is Joey Farina?”

“The mob guy that handles loans for the Martinelli Family.”

“We don’t have mobsters around here.” Even though I didn’t let on that we knew exactly who the Martinelli Family was, the chances of them setting up shop in Georgia or North Carolina was inconceivable. They were an outfit out of Chicago and not big enough to expand out this far from their home base.

“We do. Terry knows them. Joey is her kid’s dad.”

“The boy?” I asked because I could have sworn Ree said he was mixed race, and it had to be from the dad’s side. I didn’t think she would mix up and olive skin tone for being a different race.

“Nah, the girl.” Andy blabbed. “He was here when he was a senior in high school. Got kicked out of school back in Chicago and he was sent to live with a relative who settled here.”

“So, Joey’s been here all along?”

“No,” Andy shook his head vigorously. “He only came back recently when he found out the girl might not be his. While he was here, he said he had some business with an MC and that they were going to partner up on something. I didn’t get all the details, but he put the blame for Terry’s kid on Josh and told him he needed to pay up for all the years of child support he’d sent to Terry. She was milkin’ him for like three Gs a month for twelve years. It was like half a mil, or something.”

“You’re telling me that the Italian asshole loaned money to Josh to gamble with so that he could make more and pay him back all the child support he spent on Terry’s daughter for twelve years, and Terry was blackmailing Josh about the same kid and wanted money from him?”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m telling you. That accident he had that got him dead was no accident. He was in for the half mil that Joey thought he owed him plus the $30,000 he borrowed to try to win more.”

“How fucking stupid are you guys?” Trouble asked. Andy glanced around as if either of the other two assholes could speak up.

“I don’t know. How the hell else was Josh supposed to come up with that kind of money?”

“He wasn’t. He was supposed to figure his shit out and take care of the threat to his family,” I said.

“We aren’t like you. We don’t just go around kidnapping and killing people.”

“Well, that’s why you’re all hanging from the rafters and we’re getting answers from you so easily. Probably also why your friend is dead.”

“Jesus,” Andy’s leg developed a dark stain right around the time the acrid stench of piss ramped up.

“Two for three. Wonder if we’ll get all three to piss themselves before playtime is over?” Hollywood laughed maniacally as they all turned to stare at him. “You guys were too easy to nab considering you got in bed with the Italian mafia.”

Chuck rolled his eyes and moved forward to rip the tape from his mouth while Trouble shut Andy up by putting tape over his.

“What do you have to say about your involvement with the Martinelli Family?” I asked.

He shook his head. It took one punch to his stomach to change his mind about being stubborn. Once the asshole finished gasping and sputtering, he glared at me.

“Joey is a chump. He was always a chump. He thought he was so fucking cool when he came to our high school because the girls fell all over his dick back then.” Chuck spit onto the floor, as if he wished it was Joey.

“Ah, he fucked your girl, huh?” Hollywood surmised.

“Fuck you!”

“Was Terry your girl?”

“Fuck no. That bitch was all about Josh. I can’t believe she even hung that kid on Joey, or that he believed it. They only hooked up once, not long after Josh went back to Terry.”

“When did Josh go back to Terry?”

“Around the time she got knocked up in high school. He already had Theresa pregnant, but he panicked about being a dad and then Theresa refused to marry him, so he went back to Terry.”

“He ended up with Theresa and Terry obviously fucked someone else, so what happened?”

“The asshole woke up in Terry’s bed, sobered up and realized that wasn’t where he wanted to be. Terry was angry and thought if she made him jealous, he’d come back and stay for good.”

“That didn’t happen?”

“Nah. The idiot was in love with Reesa. He was just mad at her.” The way he spoke about my woman sounded an awful lot like he was a little in love with her himself.

“You ever go there with either of them?”

“No. I didn’t even like Terry and Reesa only had eyes for Josh, even though she wouldn’t marry him at first.”

I nodded my head. “Why do you think the Joey guy is a joke?”

“I think he likes to pretend that he has that mafia family at his back, but he’s blowing smoke up the ass of the MC here, telling them he’s connected and can get them all these deals. Thing is, I don’t think he can.”

“Why not?”

“He’s almost always alone and when he isn’t, he doesn’t seem like the one in charge the way he claims.”

“I see. So, you think he just happened to have $30,000 of his own money lying around to loan Josh?”

“No,” the man grinned evilly. “I think he had thirty grand of the MC’s money that he loaned Josh in the hopes that he would be able to double it before anyone knew it was missing.”

“The MC – you mean Aces High?”

Chuck shook his head. “Nah, the bitch bikers.”

Son of a bitch. Things started to clear up with the troubles that Angel Girl might have been having. If these assholes were to be believed, and two of them mentioned the MC connection, Angel Girl had somehow gotten the MC involved with the fucking Martinelli Family out of Chicago.

“Fuckin’ MiMi,” Chuck spit out. I chose to ignore that he called a specific S.H.E. member out, especially since it wasn’t Angel Girl. I filed the information away to deliver back to Quickshot when we were done.

“Do you know who really fathered Dina?” I asked.

“Josh did. Joey had a DNA test done when he heard that Terry was shaking down another dude for support. It wasn’t his. I don’t think Terry slept with anyone else.”

I nodded my head and Trouble slapped tape back over Chuck’s mouth too. We got enough information that we had a club connection too and suddenly, my woman’s problems became club business, which meant everything was a priority from there on.

I didn’t bother to turn my cell back on until we had dropped the three assholes off with the instructions to remain quiet or end up dead. After we were close to the clubhouse again, I turned my cell on and there was a text from Quickshot showing that Joey Farina was listed as the father on Dina Matheson’s birth certificate.

“Son of a bitch. We have confirmation about Joey’s involvement,” I stated. We’re going straight to Quickshot when we get back.

“You really think the women from S.H.E. are in bed with the Italian fucking mafia?” Hollywood asked.

“Seems like it. Chuck specifically pointed out MiMi as the culprit, but we’ll take it to Quick, because that’s some shit that needs to be looked into. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know that the mafia are loansharking in our backyard.”

“His woman is a member of that club. What if he kills the whole thing because she’s involved too?”

“Ghost is still hanging around for now, he’ll need to be pulled into the meeting too.”

“His daughter is the President of S.H.E.” Trouble pointed out.

“Not anymore.” I wasn’t supposed to know that Sweet wasn’t the only one to be ousted from his position, but I learned to listen and be watchful during my time as the ostracized man in the club. Angel Girl had been removed, unwillingly from her club’s presidency as well.