I closed my mouth.
Zip showed with the binder.
Snap’s leather creaked as he reached out, took it from Zip’sfingers, dropped it to the case and opened it at random.
The second my eyes fell on what was inside, I took a stepback.
Left side, eight by ten, man on his back in the street,chest covered in blood that came from several holes, eyes open and staringunseeing, since he was very clearly dead.
Gross and creepy.
Right side, eight by ten, man on his side in a gutter, halfhis skull gone, blood everywhere, brain matter a blood-covered white-gray wodgeof goo that wasn’t all contained in the place it should be, even more veryclearly dead.
Way creepier and off-the-charts gross.
This was a curious thing for a gun shop owner to have.
Unless he was a responsible gun shop owner who wished toimpart the seriousness of owning a gun on people like me.
“You got a weapon in your hand, you got the power to dothat,” Snapper said, tapping a finger sharply on the right-side picture.“Yougood with that?”
I tore my eyes away and looked to him to see him facing thebinder with his gaze aimed over his leather-clad shoulder at me.
Taking him in, for a second, I was thrown off kilter.
When the whole thing started with me informing on Bounty toChaos, and Snapper was assigned as my Chaos handler, we’d always met in person.I preferred it that way because I knew he’d never approach if he hadn’t checkedto make sure he could.Telephone conversations could be overheard.Beck had myphone password, so if he got any suspicions and was sneaky about it, without menoticing, texts could be checked.
I didn’t want a record.I didn’t want evidence easilyavailable.I didn’t want to have to hide what I was doing in my everyday life.I wanted Chaos to handle all that for me by casing the area to make sure it wassafe to approach.
Okay, so now I realized I also wanted an excuse to seeSnapper on a regular occasion.But also it had to do with feeling safe while Iwas informing on the criminal activities of a motorcycle club.
For some reason, after a while of meeting face to face, Snapdecided it would be better if he didn’t approach and he gave me a burner.Ididn’t like it but I figured the Chaos men knew how to do this better to keepit safer for me.
This turned out not to be the case.
In the end, I didn’t know how Beck found out.During thetense ride we took before he delivered me to withstand Bounty justice, hedidn’t share.
But my guess was, since he had that burner, and it didn’thave password protection, that was how he’d found out, even though I kept it inmy purse, which had been secured in the little staff room at Colombo’s.
Snap didn’t text.He called.So I couldn’t imagine evenafter Beck found it, he’d know.
Unless he did what I’d guessed he’d done.After they’d beentaken down by the cops during one of their runs, Beck somehow startedsuspecting me, so he’d broken into the staff room, found the burner in mypurse, called the only number stored in it, and Snap had answered.
I was curious about this as well as curious about how Snapand Roscoe had known where to find me.
This wasn’t what was on my mind at that time, standing inZip’s Gun Emporium with Zip and Snap.
What was on my mind was that it had ended up where Snap andI had a lot of phone conversations that had nothing to do with what was goingdown with Chaos and Bounty.
We just talked, about everything.
He knew about my mom and dad.He knew I liked my job butmostly the people I worked for.He knew my favorite pastime was shopping but Ialso liked going to movies and reading.
I knew he got along with his folks, was still tight with hisbrother and sister, even if he’d found another family in Chaos.I knew he spenta lot of time reading, mostly thrillers (I even knew Steve Berry was hisfavorite author, he was a Cotton fiend).Having that knowledge, it wasn’t a bigjump to the fact Snap was also a history buff.So if he wasn’t reading, doingChaos stuff, out on a ride (a lot of the time solitary, even if he found thebrotherhood, it was just his way), he watched documentaries.
And we were bothX-Filesfans.
But before we got into the marathon phone conversationdrill, we’d met up and he was Snapper.The boy-next-door biker with theeasy-to-be-with nature and even easier grin.
