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Only one way to know, and that was to wait and watch. From here, in the shadows of the alley, he could watch through his little binoculars and see what Harris was up to.
Harris approached a small bench set in the center of the small park clearing. He didn’t sit on it; he walked up to it, put both hands on it, and then paced back and forth, waiting.
A signal. He was meeting someone. But why all the cloak and dagger?
Pony waited and watched. There was a single street light near the bench, lighting up Harris while leaving most of the park in gloom. Finally, someone showed up on the edges of the streetlight.
Two someones.
Men. Hard-looking men. Pony could tell that from here. Definitely not cops.
He focused his binoculars to get a better look. The two men Harris was meeting were about as far from cops as two men could get. They both had the look of predators, hard-eyed killers, and as they got further into the light, Pony spotted a tattoo on the one man’s neck.
A cartel tattoo. He was sure of it.
He lowered the binoculars, lost in thought. What the hell was going on here? First this FBI agent shows up in a huff, tearing up their club, seeming sure that he would find something that wasn’t there. Now, only a few hours later, he was having a secret meeting with what looked to be a pair of cartel hitmen.
Their voices floated to him across the small park, but too far away to make out anything specific. Harris seemed upset. He kept pacing, gesturing, his voice sounding strained.
The cartel killers seemed calm, reserved. They gestured once toward the bench, then back toward a nearby building.
It reminded Pony of a time when his neighbor had a dead tree come down in a storm. It had landed across his drivewayand was causing a real problem for him. When the tree removal service came out, his neighbor, still being upset over having the problem at all, paced around and gestured at the tree and hemmed and hawed about what a big deal it was.
The tree removal guys, though, simply stood and nodded and gave his neighbor the straight facts. For the neighbor, this was a unique disaster, a once in a blue moon black swan event. For the tree removal guys, it was just another day on the job. Just another tree.
Those cartel killers looked like the tree removal guys. Whatever Harris’s big deal was that had him all spun up, for those two killers, it was just another tree.
Harris finally threw his hands up in resignation, plunking himself down on the bench like a surly child. The cartel killers looked at each other once, then melted back into the darkness in the direction of the nearby building they had pointed to.
Someone was getting set up.
Harris was going to wait there at the bench, as bait. Then, whoever was coming to meet him, was going to get ambushed from behind by those two stone-faced killers.
Don’t be Piper, Pony thought.Please don’t be Piper. Please let me be wrong.
What would he do if it was her?
He had no idea. The more he tried to wrap his mind around the idea, the more he fought against it. He didn’t want it to be true.
All he could do, was watch, and wait. So he watched, and he waited, and soon enough, someone else walked into the circle of light thrown by the street light.
It was Piper.
His shoulders slumped. His heart sank. Everything seemed to fall out of him, from inside of him, spilling out and leaving him hollow.
His worst instincts had been right. Piper was the undercover fed.
He’d barely had time to process it when things started to get even stranger. Harris was standing, talking, but this was clearly not a friendly talk. Piper hurled something heavy at him, fast and hard, shouting at him while she did so.
Pony could hear the words, faintly.Here’s your fucking heroin.
Heroin? Now, the pieces really started to fall into place for Pony. Harris had been sure he’d find something under the bar. Under the bar, where Piper worked.
Something like a brick of heroin.
He must’ve sent Piper in to plant that. The MC had found out there was an undercover fed in the area, from the shootout with the bank robbers at the cabin.
More pieces fell into place. The cabin shootout. The mystery motorcycle rider that he and Wyatt had chased but couldn’t catch. All three of the meth heads had been accounted for, but the mystery rider had been skilled enough to give him and Wyatt the slip.
