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That brought back some memories…
I turned the page, shaken as I saw the pictures of the aftermath. Men lay in pools of blood, and the club was absolutely riddled with bullets. It seemed like they’d pulled every single file related to the Dragons during this investigation. The police raid on their former base in Phoenix had definitely raised some eyebrows in the Tucson jurisdiction. Half the club was killed in the shootout, and most of the others were rotting away in a prison just outside Florence. From the looks of things, less than half a dozen men avoided being charged, and they’d spent the last handful of years bolstering their numbers out of a new clubhouse in El Paso…
Most of the information in the file came from the interrogations of a few captured club members, all of whom were released with no charges filed. Oddly, the files were missing notes on how, precisely, the bikers had been captured.
But their stories filled in some of the gaps.
The club was a shadow of its former self. Whoever the new leader was, he had steered the MC away from running drugs. These days, the club was making its money in armed protection. Bodyguards, concert security, asset retrieval. It was an above-board business as far as the case file was concerned, but people used to say the same thing about that little pink strip club in Phoenix up until the shootout…
What a strange niche to carve, I thought to myself as I sipped my coffee.
When it was clear that they had nothing to do with the disappearances, the police tied up their resources elsewhere: chasing known coyotes in the area. With the girls nowhere to be found on the north side of the border, eyes shifted south.
Mexico…
This is where the Devil’s Dragons dropped out of the case. For all the noise they’d made coming into Tuscon, they left quietly in the middle of the night.
Something wasn’t adding up here.
Something to do with these specific girls…
Lost in thought, I bit the tip of my pen. There was something here that I was missing right in front of my eyes… and I suspected that I wasn’t going to learn it by reading this case file.
Why did they come to Tucson?
And why did they vanish again?
The waitress returned, carefully placing my lunch down between the pages on the table. I hurriedly shifted papers out of her way, thanking her and politely asking for the check. If I were going to make heads or tails of this today, I would have to hit the road again, and fast…
I needed answers, and I wasn’t going to find them in Tucson. The lieutenant would be pissed, but maybe, just maybe…
I needed to go to El Paso.
Chapter 6
Getting to El Paso had been the easy part. It was only four hours past Tucson, and I’d arrived while the sun was still shining above.
The hard part was finding what I was looking for…
It would have been effortless to head straight up to the local authorities and request information on the Devil’s Dragons, but that could have gotten messy. I was out of my jurisdiction and my lieutenant would quickly learn that I was asking questions in the wrong city… and that was a conversation I was intent on pushing back as far as I could.
That left the slower option: relying on my wits and hitting the streets.
I put my honed skills to work, following Sergeant Thompson’s guidance as I dug up what I could on the renegade club. The locals weren’t too eager to answer the questions of a detective, which made me wonder why they were protecting the club…
But I got what I needed.
I always did.
It was dark outside by the time my unmarked car crunched gravel in front of the old bar on the edge of the city. My knuckles went white around the steering wheel as I took a few deep breaths.
This was their base.
Hunter might be in there.
The last time I’d seen him, things had gone sideways. I’d lost my lover. My father had been wounded. People had been arrested… and others had died. I’d spent years trying to free myself of the guilt. As it turned out, the raid wasn’t spontaneous. The sheriff’s department had been planning to take down the Dragons for months before that fateful morning. The assets were in place long before my father discovered me missing… Before he checked the GPS tracking app he’d installed on my phone.
I wasn’t the reason the raid happened… The Devils had sealed their fate when they started trafficking drugs up from the border.
My presence there with Hunter did nothing except speed up the inevitable.
I stepped out of the car – a Crown Vic, just like my father’s. The police lights were tucked away behind the grill instead of planted on the roof for all to see, but under all that white paint she was all business. Patting the hood affectionately, I gave the Interceptor engine a silent moment of gratitude for bringing me this far.
My life changed that fateful morning…
Fitting, perhaps, that it was clearly going to change again tonight.
At least this time, I could see it coming.
Silence fell the moment I stepped into the bar. An endless sea of eyes glared at me from bar tops, pool tables, and the countertop straight ahead. All of them belonged to rugged, weathered bikers or the slutty women of all ages that had given them company.
I marched straight to a free chair at the bar, ignoring how the patrons parted menacingly, closing off behind me as I took my seat.
“Whiskey sour, please,” I asked the bartender. She was a fiery little redhead, frozen in the middle of wiping a grimy glass as she glared daggers my way.
With narrowing eyes and not a syllable uttered, the bartender placed the dirty tumbler down and went straight for the bottom-shelf shit. For the garnish, she made a big show of spitting in the drink before sliding it my way.
“What the hell is this?” I snarled.
The redhead flattened her palms on the bar, leaning forward to grin wickedly: “We don’t serve your kind here.” To punctuate the point, she jabbed a thumb towards the window, and the parked Crown Vic outside.
I rose from my chair, preparing to retort, when a smooth voice called out from behind: “…Elmira. That’s no way to treat our guest, is it?”
The bartender froze again, glancing over my shoulder. Similarly, I stiffened up, locking onto the redhead’s eyes as she glanced my way with a mixture of equal parts confusion and irritation.
I knew that voice.
That was the voice that had haunted my dreams for eight years…
“Give her the Van Wrinkle and the Green Spot this time, Elmira. Use one of the clean glasses… and try to not spit in it.”
“Jack Daniels is fine,” I retorted, unwilling to take my eyes off of her own. The last time I’d seen this man I’d frozen in panic… Now that we were finally in the same room again, it was the same old song and dance…
“Jack in a whiskey sour? You always liked it a little rough, didn’t you?” I felt his breath near my ear, and a shiver slipped down my spine.
“Some things never change,” I murmured.
“True…” he chuckled, placing a strong, steady hand on my hip. God, I missed that. “But some things change for the better…”
Hunter spun me around in the stool, forcing me to face him. His piercing blue eyes drilled straight into my soul.
He was right – he had changed for the better.
Hunter was built even bigger now, his refined, sculpted physique imposing above me. Another inch of height added to his impressive frame, and broad, powerful shoulders filled my vision, sucking the breath straight from my lungs.
The ripped, worn shirt exposed his tremendous biceps, including the dragon tattoo that snaked authoritatively down one arm.
His expression was harder as well. A short layer of stubble cast a shadow across the hard edges of his chiseled face, and a thin scar glided from his temple down across his cheek.
For a fraction of a moment, I nearly caress the scar out of some place of loving concern… but I pause my hand halfway towards his face.
“That’s a story for another time,” Hunter laughed, knowing me so well even after all these years.
My face flushes red, and I feel heat rising from my core. Embarrassed, and all too eager to hide my developing arousal, I cast my eyes down to his chest. They land on the emblazoned patch above his heart, threaded into the leather – the emblem of the Devil’s Dragons MC.
But there was something else here. A single word that changed everything… President.
I’m in deep shit…
Elmira slid the drink my way. Hunter and I had been so focused on each other that, for all we know, she could have pissed all over that drink right in front of us and I wouldn’t have known it.
“Hello, Hunter,” I murmured softly.
“Hello, Sarah,” he replied with a smile.
In that second, I sensed a change in the atmosphere of the entire bar. With the exception of the bartender, the entire crowd visibly relaxed.
Did… did they know about me?
