“Checking to see if King’s put anything on your car,” I said. “You can never be too sure with this shit.”
I didn’t see anything on the exterior. I also didn’t see anything on the interior. The sensor didn’t pick up anything. As best as I could tell, Hailey’s car was clean.
But I still didn’t feel great. King had a shitload of resources, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d created something or purchased something that could evade basic scanning devices.
“Come on,” I said.
Hailey came inside. I led her to my kitchen table. She started to ask about the boarded windows, but I think she got the hint. I sat across from her after grabbing myself a beer and let my shoulders relax a bit.
I realized I was looking at her in person for the first time since that journalism piece had broken. And I felt…
Sorrow?
No, that was too strong a word.
But I didn’t feel as much anger as I would have suspected. No, it was…pity. Tragic pity, perhaps.
I could tell by her tone and her presence she felt terribly guilty about what had happened, but also frustrated. If she were faking the whole “the station changed my bit to something else,” she was doing a hell of a job of it.
“So what the fuck happened?”
“King tried to hire me to be his spokesperson,” she said. “He said he’s wanting to exert control over the area. Said you and the Black Reapers were the violent ones.”
“Of fucking course, because those bastards are funding the violent ones, we’re just trying to keep them under wraps.”
We. Now the Black Reapers and us are a “we.” What the fuck has this world come to?
“What else?”
“I…he didn’t really say anything deep. But I think the town is under his palm already. He didn’t come with any guards, but I noticed that the barista provided him a drink without him ever ordering it. And I always got the sense that he’s well protected, like almost everyone at that coffee shop was undercover something for him.”
“As I thought,” I said. “We can’t expect to hit him while he’s here. We’d have to go up to Las Vegas to strike at him.”
“Vegas?”
I nodded.
“People are often weakest at their homes,” I said, words that made me pause.
I knew the King’s Men would strike soon. I’d told the clubhouse before I left that from there on, everyone needed to have a gun on them at all times. But if they had, in fact, tracked Hailey in any way, and they had a way of knowing she was here…
“Did you get anything else from him?”
She shook her head.
“I’m trying to remember…he had a lot of philosophical talk. Loved to hear himself speak. Was very much in control.”
“King’s a big man,” I said. Hailey understood I wasn’t being literal.
“It seemed like he was trying to bribe me to work for him so he could get intel on you. He wanted me to be the face of his organization. Probably figured I could flirt or use my looks to try and calm other people down before he wiped them out.”
“He wants the unedited footage,” I said. “He probably thinks that if he watches it, he’ll catch something, some sort of weakness that he can use to exploit us.”
But I knew right then what the truth was. The weakness I had wasn’t anything at the clubhouse or my men.
It was the woman sitting across from me.
The fact that I was here, in person with her, for the first time since the report had gone out, and I wasn’t wanting to cuss her out or yell at her revealed just how much I was into her. In fact, the very anger I’d shown on Monday probably said even more about how I felt about her. How many times had pieces or articles come out about us that I had shrugged off with nothing more than a laugh or even nothing at all? And how vastly different was my reaction to this one?
