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All of a sudden, there was a knock at the door. My eyes flew wide open and I squeezed the table until my knuckles went wide. But as I looked over at my dad, he was as calm as ever. He took one more sip of his water, dabbed the corners of his mouth, then laid his napkin on top of his cleaned plate.
“And speak of the devil,” he murmured, “there he is. Right on time.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Ben
I’d roared back to the clubhouse after letting that pathetic wretch Eric scamper off back to his rat hole. I felt filthy after touching him. He was a sniveling coward, too soft to do anything but run away from whatever paranoia it was that threatened him. He disgusted me.
But I had bigger fish to fry. He’d told me what I needed to know. I felt sure James was the man behind the trigger, the one who’d murdered Olaf, along with his own wife. We had our target. It was time to plan the strike.
My bike had barely stopped rolling before I was off it and storming inside. I burst into the office, nostrils flaring. Jay, Duncan, Spark, and Slick were all in there, still poring over the papers. Four pairs of eyes snapped up to me the second I entered.
“What happened?” Jay asked softly. “Did you find Joiner?”
“I found the motherfucker all right,” I growled back. “And he told me what I needed to know. It’s time for revenge, men. Tonight, we’re going to kill James Sanders.”
They all looked at me, flabbergasted. I briefly explained what I’d figured out, that Eric Joiner had been there the night of the murders. How he had seen James step into the apartment and shoot Olaf and then his own wife. That he’d been high and paranoid and recruited Ivan’s son to help him fake his own death and disappear, but that I’d found him and forced the truth out of him.
“The bastard,” Duncan said when I finished. He looked shell-shocked. “He killed his own wife? Why?”
That was the last piece of the puzzle I didn’t understand. But I didn’t have time to sit around and twiddle my thumbs while I perused James’s list of possible motivations. They said revenge was a dish best served cold, but they were wrong. It was best served when it’s hot enough to burn.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “We know he did it. He’s got Olaf’s blood on his hands. Now it’s time to spill some of his.”
Jay nodded and cleared the table. I started to walk across the room to join them, but before I moved, my phone started ringing. Annoyed, I fished it out of my pocket. Carmen’s number flashed across the screen. I frowned.
“I can’t talk right now,” I said. I tried to keep my voice as calm and nonchalant as possible. She didn’t need to know what was happening just yet. Learning that her father had murdered her mother would be a massive shock to the system. I wanted to wait until the right time and place to fill her in.
But it wasn’t Carmen. “I think you need to make some time for me,” said an unexpected voice. I halted in my tracks. I felt Jay look at me. He knew me well enough to see that something was very, very wrong.
“James,” I said in a dry rasp. “What are you doing?”
“I want to talk to you, Ben. You’ve been very nosy. I think if you had questions, you should have just come ask me yourself.”
“The only thing I’m coming to do is chop your fucking head off, you son of a bitch.”
“You could try to do that, if you wanted. Hell, you might even succeed. But, just a little bit of advice for you, since I am your father-in-law and all. I wouldn’t try to do that.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“You wouldn’t want Carmen to get hurt, would you?”
My heart plummeted. I knew it even before he said anything, but I asked the question he wanted me to ask. “What did you do?”
“She’s with me, Ben. Why don’t you come join us for dinner?”
The line went dead.
The room was completely silent as I walked over to the table, my eyes gazing into nothingness, and gently laid my phone on the surface. No one said a word for a long time. The fight and fire that had been raging in my chest was completely evaporated now, replaced by a cold, sucking void.
“What happened, boss?” Slick asked after a while.
I could hear my pulse hammering in my ears. “He’s got Carmen,” I replied. I blinked. “I have to go get her.”
# # #
The address in the text from Carmen’s phone matched the one on the mailbox out front of the house. It was a small, dusty bungalow a few miles outside of town, with plenty of acreage separating it from its distant neighbors. The afternoon was giving way to evening as I pulled up and parked my motorcycle. A man stood up from a lawn chair as I climbed off. He kept his gun pointed directly at my gut.
