Page 95 of Lake
Mullins sighed, long and heavy.
“Someone, not that long ago, told me it might be easier to win the war with collected enemies on my side.”
My brain went haywire trying to figure out who that might be. And what the hell that really meant.
“I have a problem that is bigger than guns and drugs or whatever you’re into right now. Homeless girls are getting snatched off the streets. No one is reporting them because…” He didn’t need to say the part that no one cared out loud. It was true, people didn’t give a shit about some runaway, troubled young girls. “There is a cancer in this city that is more toxic than you, and I… need your help taking it down.”
What the fuck?!
Yeah, I would have never seen this day coming. Not in a million damn years.
He was asking for our help, blatantly, might I add. In a way that said he wanted us to take this motherfucker down in our own way and he would turn a blind eye as we did so.
And that was how it all began.
The information he’d gathered wasn’t very helpful because there wasn’t much there. He couldn’t track down people to talk to because he didn’t really know where to look. This wasn’t a typical case, that was for sure.
We couldn’t turn our backs on this. Innocent women getting snatched up and possibly even sold. It wasn’t something we would stand for. Ever.
The thing that sucked was he didn’t have a direction to go in. So neither did we. No clue who was terrorizing the city. No idea why this was happening. There were a number of reasons it could have been. A serial killer, for one. Or it could have been for human trafficking. Those were the main two that I could think of. There hadn’t been any bodies recovered but I knew well enough that didn’t always mean anything.
I mean come on, we’d left our share of bodies around and we had someone who knew how to clean them up. And the club never had any problems with them resurfacing.
“Something is up,” Iron said after we took our seats. A few days had gone by and we were still basically chasing our tails. “And we already have enough on our shoulders right now. I’m not sure I trust Mullins, not even a little bit. But there was something that made me think he was desperate for our help.”
I agreed with that, he seemed desperate but I was worried that the detective would somehow use this to take us down. That said, there were women being snatched up. I wouldn’t let it go and I knew Iron felt the same, consequences be damned.
“I’m going to pull Sketch in on this one.” There was a look that passed over Iron’s face that said he hated to do it. “He knows the streets well. Maybe he can talk to some people, get some more information.”
I didn’t know too much about Sketch’s life before he came to the club. I only knew that he’d been a street kid but I wasn’t sure how that came to be or when. I got the sense that he’d been that way for a long time. He had skills that you just didn’t learn living a normal life.
“Lake,” Iron said, catching my attention. “Want you to go with him, keep an eye out.”
I nodded but wasn’t sure what exactly he meant by that. There was a hint of something that made me think he was talking about Sketch more than anything else. You never really could outrun your demons and all that shit. Right?
“We still haven’t gotten anywhere on the guy that Steve was working for. And though there hasn’t been any word, Keften is still out there somewhere.”
“What if this is him?” I asked without even thinking.
Because it very well could have been.
After all, trafficking women had been his business before he lost his men and burned up his building trying to quickly cover his tracks. And we’d thought more than a few times that a city like this one would be a good place to start over.
If it was him, then that wouldn’t be good. He’d managed to stay a ghost this entire time and I had a feeling that he wouldn’t be popping up out of the shadows anytime soon.
A sick feeling hit my gut as I wondered if this had been going on longer than the detective thought. It seemed that only recently he’d caught wind of this and it made me wonder how many homeless girls had piled up for it to reach the surface.
Fuck.
“Thought about that,” Iron said with a nod.
Then we tried to put the pieces together even though we had jack shit on what the picture looked like.
In the end, we decided to see what Sketch and I could find out and go from there.
That was the moment when I paused and took a look at my life from the outside. When I was alone, drifting in and out of each day with only myself and my club to worry about things like this weren’t all that terrifying. Yes, it hurt the whole club what had happened to Bocca and I felt that. And yeah, the level of danger always had us watching our backs. But we all were in it together and we knew what could happen. And we knew how to deal with it too.
But Bridget, she was too good for this kind of life. I had no guarantees that I could keep her safe even if that was all I wanted to do. It was wrong and selfish of me to even dream of her in my life.
Maybe that had been in the back of my mind when I told her to stay until her lease was up. That instead of thinking she needed to take that time to sort things out and get her head on straight, I was really subconsciously telling her to stay away. I was trying to keep her as far from the shit that surrounded the club as possible and maybe even hoped she’d wise up and forget my ass.
