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"Paranoia," Che suggested. "Just did a drive-by, and if someone reported the white car, they could be pulled over. Better to lay low for a day, then come back and get the car before the stores in that strip mall open for business."
"Fair enough," I agreed. "Alright. We are going to head over there and ask around, see if anyone will talk. It's not a bad area, so we might find some loose lips. Arty, I need your ass to take a shower and fucking burn those clothes and the bedsheets. And take out the garbage. And eat something. Maybe catch some sleep. And then, and I fucking mean this man, only then, get back on this and see if you can catch them leaving some other time."
With that, we headed back out all of us taking greedy breaths.
"You're going to trust him to do all that?"
"No," I said, shaking my head. "Once we get back, I'll send Seeley over to babysit. He'll be useless if he keeps slipping."
"Times like this, you gotta miss your crazy-ass sister," McCoy said as we got to our bikes.
I missed Gus all the time, even though I knew she was happy in her new life with her biker and all her new friends. She created more chaos than she calmed, but she did come in handy for the softer shit that the rest of us weren't known for.
We spent about an hour in the part of town where the car went missing, getting a lot of vague answers about there always being kids doing illegal shit, that most of it didn't stand out. And, I guess, that was fair enough. Especially seeing as the shooting hadn't taken place anywhere near that part of town.
"Let's head back," I decided. "Get Seeley over to Arty, so we can get him lucid enough to give us straight answers. Then we can try again."
There didn't seem to be a huge rush on it since no one had made another move in several days. We were getting more precautions put in place anyway.
It felt strange still to be so flip about active threats. Had you told me back when we were chopping cars that we would shrug off a drive-by instead of going after the perpetrators with everything we had, I would have scoffed.
But the fact of the matter was, we'd had a rough fucking year. And when you went up against actual organized crime and lived to tell the tale, the little nobodies didn't put the fear of God in you that they might have once upon a time.
We'd get them.
We just weren't going to run ourselves into the ground to do it.
Sure, a part of my decision making—however misguided—clearly had something to do with Harmon. Even as we were wrapping up questioning around the neighborhood, my mind had already been on getting back home, seeing if Harmon was done with her recording, then tossing her on the bed, and getting some more of her.
Then maybe seeing if she would be interested in throwing together some dinner. I was more than willing to trade orgasms for food.
And, yeah, I knew that when we took out the new threat, that Harmon would be free to go back to her own place, put more distance between us.
I should have been fine with that. That was what I liked best when it came to women. No distance at all for a night or two, and then all the distance I could get.
Sure, there were the club bunnies who hung around, and I'd slept with one or two of them, but I never had any interest in another lay.
Harmon, though, it seemed like I hadn't gotten my fill yet. And I wasn't too keen on her leaving the clubhouse until I did.
I figured it was a couple more days at most before I got to that point.
Or, you know, that was what I was trying to tell myself, even as a larger part of me knew that there was some shit going on between Harmon and me that wasn't like anything in the past.
I knew her story. Her fears. Her strengths and weaknesses. And I found myself wanting to know more, wanting to do shit like sit and listen to her talk.
What the fuck was that?
I'd made it through a light that the other two had gotten stuck at, leaving me pulling into the driveway alone.
And all the things came to me at once.
The open front door.
The tire treads on the muddy part of the front lawn where the grass didn't want to grow.
Two sets of treads.
Not a bike.
"Fuck," I hissed, flying off my bike, reaching for my gun.
I was ripping off my helmet even as I rushed in the front door, hearing a slamming sound in the back toward the kitchen, and making a beeline for it, my heartbeat hammering in my chest, my mind racing to one awful scenario after the other.
