“I wove you too, Daddy, but I’m big now. I don’t get hurt.”
“I know, but let your grandmother go down the slide with you for my sake. Please?”
She stared at me, contemplating. Then a bright smile spread across her face, lighting up the entire room. “Okay Daddy. I don’t want you to be scawed.”
“Thanks, baby girl.”
After breakfast, I continued the façade of a businessman, backing my nondescript silver Toyota Camry out of the garage and heading out of my peaceful Bellevue neighborhood toward the hustle and bustle of downtown Seattle. I needed to go to the club, but I never drove straight there.
Don’t get me wrong, I trusted my patched brothers as much as I could trust anyone, but they wouldn’t learn where I lived or what I drove unless I was incapacitated and one of my contingency plans kicked in. In other words, over my dead or dying body. And that’s exactly when they’d find out about Hailey. Since the club was filled with nosy assholes, I drove to an office building with a private garage and parked, sliding my hanging parking pass over the rearview mirror.
One of my shell companies owned the building. The purchase had been a necessary gamble, but like my side hustle, it was paying off. Diversification made it harder for anyone to track me down, so I kept eggs in multiple baskets, juggling the shit out of them when necessary.
I’d worked for the government long enough to learn how to evade it.
Carrying my laptop bag, I took the elevator to my third-floor office (high enough for safety, low enough to appear unimportant) and let myself into the small space rented by a second shell company. Turning off the alarm, I glanced around the office to make sure nothing was out of place before disarming the lock on the supply closet and stepping inside.
Weapons lined the shelves of one wall. It wasn’t a full armory, more like an option. The past three years had been quiet, but I wasn’t about to let that lull me into complacency. If someone from my past surfaced, I had enough firepower in this closet to get me and my family out of the city and dissuade a tail.
I wasn’t here for guns today, though. Instead, I headed to the organized bins of clothing on the opposite wall. There, I exchanged one costume for the next, removing my business casual wear to don jeans, a black T-shirt, and motorcycle boots.
The shelf on the back wall held nothing but an ethernet cable. I plugged my laptop into it and entered a series of secure passwords, logging into the building’s security system. Checking the live camera feeds covering all three parking garage exits, I watched and waited, making sure I hadn’t picked up a tail and that no one was waiting to ambush me. Once satisfied, I removed my glasses, popped in a pair of contacts, stuffed my laptop into a backpack, traded out my keys, locked up, and took the stairs up to the fourth-floor garage. I headed to what should be a janitor’s closet, but had been rented out to a third shell company.
This was where I kept Valkyrie.
She was a 2016 semi-matte black Harley Softtail Fat Boy “Special,” with a massive 110 cubic inch twin cam engine. The rear had been widened with a Rick’s Trick’n’Roll kit with redirection, it had no rear taillight. I’d opted for two bullet turn signals instead. She was the slickest looking bitch on two wheels, and I’d named her Valkyrie because she resurrected something inside of me every time I slid my leg over her saddle. My cut was draped across the seat, so I took off my backpack long enough to slide it over my shoulders and complete my ensemble.
Now, I was Tap.
It started as just another role, played to provide the ultimate safety net for my family, but over the past year, it had become much more. I liked being Tap. Too bad he wasn’t real.
***
On my way to speak with Link, I passed through the common area of the old fire station that served as our club headquarters to find Naomi sitting behind the bar, nursing a bottle of water. She smiled up at me as I approached.
“Hey, Tap, can I get you something to drink?” she asked.
“I’ll take one of those, please,” I said, pointing at her bottle.
“Water?” she asked, her brows creeping up her forehead. “You do know we have whiskey, right?”
I chuckled. “Yeah. I’m not much of a drinker.”
“Not much? What does that mean? You don’t pop a nipple on the bottle and suck it down like the rest of these bastards? Or you wait until after noon to launch attacks on your liver?”
“I don’t touch the shit at all.”
“As in ever?”
“Yeah. My dad was an alcoholic. They say shit like that runs in the family, and I never wanted to take the chance.” The practiced lie slipped easily from my lips; it was the same excuse I’d given my club brothers every time they tried to pour shit down my throat. Truthfully, my sobriety was about control. I worked my ass off to get it, and I’d be damned if I’d let it slip through my grasp for some temporary reprieve from reality.
Normally, people responded to the lie about my dad with meaningless words of apology or stories of their own family drunks, but Naomi just cocked her head to the side and studied me as she pulled a water from the fridge and set it down on the bar.
“Thanks. Link here?” I asked, feeling a little uneasy at the way she was watching me.
“Yep, but he’s in a meeting with the officers. They should be out soon. Have a seat.” She nodded at the stool in front of me.
I didn’t want to sit and talk to Naomi. The few interactions I’d had with her had revealed her to be smart and observant, basically the last kind of person I needed all up in my business. I was having a hard enough time fending off tracking devices planted by Morse, the club’s computer guru, and dodging the incessant questions of Wasp, the club’s vice president. Still, she was the president’s sister, so I sat my ass down.
