I glanced over to see that Grunt studied her like a science experiment. He gave me a slight nod. And I turned my full attention back to Simone. The cartel was the original buyer for Tiffany Baker’s land?”
“Yes, they wanted that land because it sat adjacent to the club’s property.”
I nodded. “Anything else we might find useful considering your father and his men are in town in a standoff with the Rivera Cartel over where the hell you disappeared to?”
“He’s here?” There was hope in her voice as she asked. I didn’t know why. The fucker sold her out long ago. It was obvious he didn’t really care about her beyond how useful she could be as a pawn in whatever he had going on with the Riveras.
“Is that all?” I asked again.
“Yes, that’s all. I swear. Can I please talk to Cassidy? Is she okay? I want to apologize. I really didn’t mean to shoot her. I need to tell her…”
I ignored her plea to talk to Cass and wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of knowing whether Cass lived, died, or was even at the clubhouse. Instead, I asked my final question. “Did you have anything to do with Tiffany Baker being murdered?”
“She was murdered?” Simone asked. Once again, I couldn’t tell if her surprise was real or faked. She was either that good or I had blinders on and didn’t know how to remove them where Simone was concerned.
I walked out of the cell and Grunt followed behind me as Simone called out to us. Once we were further away, where she couldn’t hear us, we were met by Bigfoot for an update. He had been following along via the security feed from the cell.
“Sounded like the truth to me,” Bigfoot said. “The important parts anyway.”
“You’re not wrong. She knew about Tiffany, though. That was a bullshit response.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“She does this thing with her fingers, picking at a nail nervously. Only when she lies, never when she tells the truth.”
“Damn,”I hummed. I had noticed the way she did that but never put it together with her lying to me.
“Now, we have some weapons in our arsenal to get the mafia and cartel the hell out of our town.” Bigfoot started to head upstairs. “Daddy won’t like that his baby girl was used by cartel members for years, especially when I spell out the fact that the baby she lost was because of a particularly brutal attack.”
“I think we can go a little subtler,” Dime suggested.
Later that day, Bigfoot met with Nero and Emilano. He played it perfectly and told them that a woman named Tiffany Baker was trying to sell a plot of land that was situated adjacentto the club. Simone was the real estate agent helping her before Tiffany ended up dead after Simone agreed to the offer the club made on the land instead.
“No, that’s not what happened,” Emiliano urged Nero to believe him. “I told your daughter that if she got the deal to go through with us buying the land, she was free and clear to start over her life somewhere else. I put her freedom on the hook for that deal. She would have never taken any amount of money.”
“Except she did because she didn’t trust you. Your men have been raping her for years. Marco Delgado was the reason she lost her baby years ago because of how brutally he raped her. She told me all about it when she begged me to throw in extra cash on her end so she could disappear. I didn’t like that she was stepping out on my club brother, but after hearing that it was the fucking cartel picking her up and using her as their personal whore, I was fucking sickened. She hadn’t cheated on her husband. She was raped, brutally and repeatedly. She had the medical records to back up her story.”
“No,” Emiliano appeared horrified by the news. Nero, on the other hand, was enraged. He stood up from the table they’d all been seated at and opened fire on the man with Emiliano. “Jesus!” Emiliano cried out. Jesus Flores had been the right hand man to the top dog in the Rivera Cartel for years. Outside of the other Rivera brothers, he was the man at the top and now he was dead. “Wait,” Emiliano yelled. “I will get Marco here.”
“No, you and Nero need to get the fuck out of my town. Take this meeting to your own turf because my club has nothing to do with what went down. You’re lucky the whole fucking lot of you aren’t dead considering you sent a little girl in to spy on us while you were abusing her the whole time,” Bigfoot told them. He really liked to dig that knife deeper into the wound.
“Where the fuck is my daughter?” Nero asked him as the others moved around to get the body and get out of there.
“No fucking clue. Haven’t seen or heard from her in over a month. When Tiffany was killed, Simone hauled ass to wherever she planned to start a new life. Don’t think you should hold your breath on her contacting dear old dad, since you gave her to a bunch of rapists and monsters.”
Nero bellowed out a rage-fueled sound the likes of which I’d never heard before. Funny response coming from a man who had used his daughter as a bargaining chip with the cartel when she was barely legal to make decisions for herself.
After both groups retreated from Violence, the club officers met in church to discuss a few things. “She needs to die, but I don’t think I can be the one to pull the trigger, especially not knowing everything that happened to her. She was a victim in all this, too. I can’t ignore that.”
“I can,” Grunt said. “Leave it to me, Prez.”
“If everyone’s good with that, we’ll go from there.”
“How can you be okay with it?” I asked my best friend.
“She’s been ripping my best friend apart for years and the whole time, she would make these little comments to me about how we could have been something special - better - or whatever.”
“You never told me.”
