One of those rules being that after serving my time, I was a free man and not beholden to any police officers, detectives or otherwise. But as he saw it, since his brother was my parole officer, he owned me. The constant threat of a trumped-up violation, sending me back to Augusta, was his leverage. What he wanted was information, and using parolees like me who he could coerce meant he could pocket the money he claimed to be paying confidential informants with. The parolee CIs got to stay free if he got a stream of information he considered valuable enough, and he kept the department’s cash.
Every once in a while, one of us would get sent back up by his brother on a parole violation. The message to the rest of us would be clear—don’t mess with the Nesbit brothers. Spend the time, take the chances, don’t get paid, and let Martin Nesbit take credit for work he didn’t deserve. It was a raw deal I’d have to live with for another two years.
The public thought once you walked out of prison, you were a free man. Nothing could be further from the truth, at least in this little stretch of the country.
I cracked open another peanut and ate the contents before waving Cindy over to settle up.
The parking lot where Riggs and I met in was unlit and empty, with privacy behind two shipping containers. The store locked off-season merchandise in the containers that was too worthless for anybody to steal.
I parked and waited.
Riggs was late as usual, another one of his power moves—make me waste my time to demonstrate his power over my life.
He pulled up twenty minutes late, which was par for him. “Hey, Wrench.” He liked to use my street moniker, believing it made him seem more street-savvy than he was.
I nodded my greeting.
“What ya got for me tonight?”
The same question as always—what was I going to do for him?
I didn’t have anything that would make him happy. There hadn’t been anything juicy in the conversations I’d overheard recently. “Everything’s pretty quiet right now. Half the Howlers are on a road trip.” Which was true.
“And the rest of them?”
“They’re the ones with regular jobs that can’t get away for a few weeks.”
“So? What are they planning?”
“Nothing is my guess. With the leadership out, the guys left here are likely just hanging out until they get back.” Another truth.
In the motorcycle clubs like the Howlers, the top guys made the decisions, and it wasn’t good to improvise when they weren’t around. If something went wrong and it came back on the club, blood would be spilled.
Riggs shook his head. “I don’t pay you to guess.”
I held my tongue and didn’t point out that he didn’t pay me anything anyway. I gave him the one tidbit I did have. “There’s a new guy in town. Fresh out of Augusta, a mean one.”
“Yeah? Who, and what’s he into?”
“He goes by Cliff, last name But-something, I think—Butler, Butkiss, Butniss, I don’t know.”
Riggs moved into my space. “You think? Can’t you even get that right?” he spat.
It wasn’t smart, but I wasn’t about to back down to this dickwad. I straightened and moved closer. I towered over him. Without his gun, he was no match for me, and he knew it. I might not be crazy enough to start something with him, but he needed to question that.
He backed up just enough to show he’d gotten the message.
“He came in last night for the first time. These guys don’t hand out resumés and leave business cards. Too many questions from me, too quickly, and I get nothing, which means you get nothing. All I fucking know so far is he just arrived in town, and he might or might not stay, but if he does, something’s going down.”
“And how do you know that if he didn’t say anything, huh?” His spittle hit me in the chest.
“Simple. He’s not the type for honest work. He built a quick rep in Augusta. Not the kind of guy you want to mess with.”
He walked in a short circle. “I don’t like waiting.”
“The criminals don’t want to work to your schedule? Well, tough fucking shit, Detective. The guys that make the decisions for the Howlers are out of town, and the guys they left here won’t do squat without clearing it with them. They got a hierarchy, just like your department. Except when the top Howlers get pissed, they get serious. They don’t put a fucking memo in your jacket and call it a day. And this new guy, Cliff, I don’t know if he’s sticking around or not because he doesn’t fucking know yet. So get off my case.”
His jaw clenched, but he didn’t have a comeback for that.
“Until those things change, I got nothin’ for you.”
“You better not be jerking me around, Carver.”
I blew out a breath. “I’m not stupid. I know the score.” I turned to leave.
“Yeah. You remember the score,” he said.
I gave him a middle-finger salute as I opened the door to my van. “I’ll call you when I have something.”
He retreated to his car. “You do that.”
Dipshit.
Debbie
The whole way back from Bethesda, I hadn’t been able to stop my legs from shaking. The adrenaline had me jittery, and the smell of my vomit didn’t help.
I’d cleaned up the carpet in the back of Mom’s car after we got home.
Dom reattached the correct license plate. Now I realized that had been what he’d been doing when I saw him fiddling with it a few weeks ago.
They’d stayed in the kitchen, counting the money while they ate the Hamburger Helper Mom cooked for dinner.
I took mine back to my room and looked up the news on my phone.
The bank robbery had shown up, along with the fact that the teller who’d been shot was in stable condition in the hospital. Thank goodness for small miracles.
Dom had said he’d just “winged her,” but I doubted he was a good enough shot to have made sure of it. The difference between a shoulder wound and something deadly was probably only a few inches. The poor woman likely had Dom’s incompetence with a gun to thank for being alive.
If he’d killed her, what would that make me? If the TV shows were to be believed, I’d be an accomplice in a murder. They were probably right, and now I was a bank robber and an accomplice in at least an attempted murder.
Dom had me right where he wanted me; he’d said as much. He was one part certifiable, and two parts mean.
After finishing my dinner, I ventured out with my tray and dirty plate.
Baseball was playing, and Dom had planted himself in front of the TV. With the sound of the game, he didn’t notice me slipping into the kitchen.
I cleaned up the dishes and started the dishwasher. I granted myself a glance at the knife block and the weapons it contained. But I wasn’t the animal he was. He might deserve a knife through the back of his recliner for what he’d forced me to do, and for what he’d forced Mom to do, but I wasn’t the person to give it to him. That would make me as bad as him, and I wouldn’t let him pull me down to his level, no matter how tempting it was.
Instead, I retreated to the safety of my room, where another romance novel awaited me. Once I was safe behind the closed door, I inserted my earbuds, started soft music, and began reading again.