“Any idea who owns the car?” I ask as I look at the late model Buick.
Harry reaches up to push his hat back and wipe at his forehead. “Stolen out of New Albany. Went missing ‘bout a week back.”
“From anyone noteworthy?” Grem asks.
Pulling his hat back down, Harry shakes his head. “Just an older retired couple. We can poke around and see if we can catch when the car crossed the toll bridge, but that’s gonna bring more heat onto this.”
I shake my head. “Not a good idea right now.” Then I look to Grem. “Let’s get this over with. Harry, show us what you found.”
“Coy,” Harry says, all the anger gone from his face. “This ain’t gonna be an easy one to see.”
“How bad is it?” I ask with a knot forming in my stomach.
“Bad. Whatever they did, they made sure she hurt before she died. Only thing they didn’t touch was her face, I guess. There was a bag of that damn heroin shit right next to her head,” Harry says.
“Heroin?” I ask, my blood instantly fucking boiling through my body.
“Yeah, small baggy of it. Coy, you and your daddy know the rules. No drugs in this town, we made a damn deal.” Harry shakes his head in disgust.
“It ain’t us, Harry,” Grem says.
Ignoring them both, I duck under the police tape and head over to the back of the car. A couple of deputies stand with their backs to the trunk, and the county coroner is leaning inside, taking photos.
Fuck. This one ain’t gonna blow over easily.
“Jerry,” I say to get the coroner’s attention.
Standing up to look at me, he shakes his head. “Might not want to look in, Coy. This ain’t the kind of thing you want to see.”
Shrugging my shoulders, I say, “She was part of the club.”
Family is a sacred thing in this world, especially in a motorcycle club. Doesn’t matter if you’re blood or not, we look out for and take care of our own.
Even if she was a sweetbutt.
Jerry steps away from the trunk as Grem comes up beside me, murmuring something about hoping we didn’t eat breakfast.
Walking up to the trunk, I look in, and at first, I really don’t know what I’m lookin’ at. The flawless, porcelain skin on her face that gave her the name Snowbird is still so perfect, so unmarred, it’s hard to believe she’s dead. Even the way her white blonde hair is laid out, spread around her, it looks like she’s posing for some magazine.
It’s only from her neck down that the world shifts from sleeping beauty to brutally tortured corpse.
Grem grunts before running to the front of the car. “Jesus fucking Christ, Coy.”
I hear him heaving out what he’s probably eaten for the last year. Loud, wet splats hitting the pavement.
“Goddammit,” Jerry curses. “This is a crime scene.”
Snowbird doesn’t resemble a girl anymore, and whoever did this wanted us to know exactly how patient they were when they killed her.
There are bruises and cigarette burns all over her body. Human bite marks where her nipples used to be. Even chunks of her thighs have been bitten off. Her front pubic bone was shattered with a hammer or something because the skin is all fucked up, shards of bone ripping through the skin. One of her hips has been crushed, too.
At first, I can’t figure out how they got her body to lie so straight in this small trunk. But then I notice that her legs have been cut off mid-thigh and shoved deeper into the trunk.
Her fingers are missing and more chunks of skin are missing from her arms. Her stomach… I can’t even figure out how you would bruise one like that.
Fuck. I can feel my stomach churn slightly, but I gotta memorize every single wound, every single mark against her flesh.
“Any idea what finally killed her?” I ask when I turn away from the trunk.
“Some of those wounds are post-mortem. The poisonous scorpion I found crawlin’ out of her throat when I got here is my bet,” Jerry says, and there’s anger in his eyes at me and the club for that last tidbit.
Bloody Scorpions. I couldn’t pick a dumber fucking MC name if I fucking tried. Fucking dickheads think they’re in some kind of fucking western. Every single fucking Scorpion I’ve ever met reminds me just how much they scrape the fucking bottom of the barrel. Fucking degenerate fucks. The Bastards are a lot of things, but we aren’t fucking psycho serial-murdering trash like them.
Walking over to where Grem is still revisiting his past deeds, I slap him hard on the back. “You alright, fuckstick?”
After coughing out another heave of puke, Grem growls at me, “So… you can touch me now?”
Slapping him on the back again, I say, “Yeah, wanted to give you a helping hand.”
He snorts through a couple of deep breaths before he grunts, “Fucking Royal Bastard.”
When his ass is finally able to stand up and not puke everywhere, he looks at me. “Coy, I’m going to fucking kill whoever did that. I’m going to show ‘em every fucking mercy they gave her.”
“Fucking Scorpions,” I quietly growl at him as we walk away from the car. “They put a poisonous one down her fucking throat.”
“I’ll fucking kill every single one of ‘em,” Grem says quietly. “They came after a sweetbutt, a fucking chick, man.”
“I know, brother, I know,” I say, and I don’t have many words of comfort.
“No, you don’t, Coy,” he says before swinging his leg over his bike.
For once in my life when I look at my best friend, I don’t see that light in his eyes he usually has. It’s not there anymore, and all that’s left is cold, dark resignation.
“You’re not allowed to leave town, Grem,” I say to him.
“What?” he asks, his voice rising.
“Time and place. There’s a fuckin’ time and place for payback,” I growl.
He spits on the ground at my feet. “I don’t give two fucks about time and place.”
“Then give a shit that your fucking President says get your ass to the fucking clubhouse. And if you leave without fucking telling me, I’ll fucking come after you!” I nearly roar at him.
He stares into my eyes for a long fucking time. A long fucking time determining what I’d do if he ignored me. Would I punish him? Would I take his position away? Would he lose his fucking patch?
I can see every single thought running through that head of his.
“Coy,” he says with a deep sigh.
“Brother, now is not the time to run off and do somethin’ stupid. We don’t have the firepower,” I say, then look around us. “You want to fix that issue? Do me a favor, start hittin’ up any and every contact we have to sell us their guns. Hit up any suppliers you can think of, and check with all the good ol’ country boys and tell ‘em we’ll buy any heavy firepower at a premium.”
Nodding his head, I can see that he doesn’t like my answers, but he’s going to fucking listen to me.
“Alright, I’ll head over to the club now and see if Hershey has any contacts we can use too,” he says before standing his bike up.
“I’m gonna call Whitey. Gonna need another Church for this shit. Need him to get the club in order and see if we can pull the lifers into the protection,” I say.