Page 16 of The Belle and the Biker

"It's possible that as I was walking to the coffee shop, somebody drove by and shot at me," I say so quietly that I can barely hear myself.

His eyes flare with rage, and he goes very still, like a predator about to pounce. "What did you just say?"

"Nothing."

He stalks up to me, anger and menace rolling off him in thick, choking waves. "What. Did. You. Just. Say?"

I repeat myself, louder this time.

"What the fuck?" His bellow bounces off the walls.

"Unnecessarily crude," I say huffily. Then I wince. "But fair. When I woke up, I saw we were out of coffee, so I walked to the coffee shop to get some. A car went screeching by, and I looked over and saw a hand pointing out the window. Another car rear-ended them, and then a store window behind me kind of exploded. They were shooting at me but missed because they were rear-ended."

"What did the car look like? Was it the same one from the hipster shooting?"

I stare miserably at the floor. "I don't know. I'm terrible in an emergency. Not a truck. Like, a sedan or a regular kind of car. I'm not a car person. Blue, and I think it had four doors? Oh, it was going north!" I look at him hopefully.

"That's fine. The direction it was going in is very helpful. And don't worry… Most civilians freeze up in situations like that." His voice has gone from furious to merely gruff.

Then he grabs his phone. His cell phone is in a black hard-shell case, which looks nothing like mine. He calls Axel and tells him what just happened.

"They'll be long gone, won't they?" I plop down on the couch, my knees suddenly going weak. He sits down next to me, and the couch creaks under his weight.

"Probably. Axl will send the guys out anyway. We might get lucky."

"I should call the police, right?"

He shakes his head. "No point. The law can only do so much. They're already looking into the murder, and if they find anything, great, but odds are they won't. Did you know that forty percent of murders go unsolved?"

"Seriously?" My voice rises to a squeak of dismay.

He nods. "When I talked to Axl just now, he told me the guy who killed the Volvo driver was driving a vehicle with stolen plates. The cops did pick up that much from the traffic cameras, and it makes it that much harder to trace.

Just one piece of bad news after another. "So, what's the plan now?"

"We're going to hit up our cop sources again tonight. There'll be a police report about today's shooting since the bullet went through a store's window. We'll find out who the license plate traces back to and try to follow where the car went using city traffic cameras. And if we find out who the shooter is… we'll take care of it."

I chew my lip and stare down at the floor. He's talking about vigilante justice. It's not a completely foreign concept. I'm a small-town girl from the South, and plenty of men in my family have taken the law into their own hands. A young lady got knocked up, and then the cad tries to leave town? Oh no, he didn't. Some meth head breaks into the house looking for the family silver? He'll be lucky if he survives to go to prison.

I'm still torn about what Crash is suggesting, though. Does the man who is trying to kill me deserve to…disappear?

It's hard to argue in the killer's favor. He's a terrible person. He murdered a mildly annoying fedora wearer over a parking spot, and now he's trying to hunt and kill me, an innocent bystander, just to eliminate a witness.

And still, I hesitate. I'd rather let the legal system, flawed as it can be sometimes, handle this and hope for the best. Hope that the man gets caught. Hope that he gets convicted. Hope he gets a lengthy sentence.

"Don't overthink it," Crash says. "A man like that will cause a lot of harm in his life if he's not stopped."

That puts me in even more of a moral quandary—because I know he's right. He'll keep hurting people until he's stopped. If the Iron Ride finds out who he is, they will take care of the problem in a permanent and fatal fashion, and the legal system may be unable to accomplish that.

Not that there's much I could do to stop Crash when he's determined to do something, anyway.

My phone's ringtone makes me jump. "You hung up on me," Aunt Hepzibah scolds me when I answer. "Your gentleman friend was telling me that you witnessed a shooting the other night, and he's concerned about your safety."

Gentleman friend? That may be the funniest thing I ever heard.

I shoot him a dirty look and put my hand over the phone. "You told her about the shooting?" I whisper.

He meets my glare steadily, his whiskey-colored gaze boring into mine. "I thought you might take it more seriously if your family got involved."

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