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Now, though?
Now, I wanted to track down every fucking man who was involved with Clay’s car crash and making Cali dangle from a fire ladder and run for her life, beat the ever-loving shit out of them, and then put a bullet in their worthless heads.
Carefully, I pulled the ladder back up, dropping it onto the ground inside in a heap, then closed and locked the window before making my way back downstairs.
“Got her all packed. Perish took the trash down,” Nave said. “Didn’t see any clues about who might have been in here. But I wasn’t really expecting to.”
“I think I have a way of figuring it out,” I told him. “Back at the clubhouse.”
With that, we made our way back.
Church was over, but Fallon had hung back instead of going home to his wife and kids.
“Nothing?” he asked.
“Not yet. But I might have answers for you in an hour or so,” I told him, hand tightening on the handle of the suitcase.
“Alright. Just let me know before you head off to knock some heads together.”
“Will do,” I agreed, nodding again to Perish and Nave, then making my way into my room, finding Cali sitting against the headboard, legs pulled up to her chest.
“You okay?” I asked, setting her suitcase next to the dresser.
“Yeah. Just tired now that all the adrenaline is gone.”
“You can take a nap,” I suggested, thinking it might be easier if she was asleep when I brought out the flash drive.
“I want to know too, Brooks,” she told me. I opened my mouth to argue, but she shook her head. “He was my brother. I was just chased out of my home. I want to know why.”
“Even if you learn things about Clay that will mess with your memories of him?”
She was silent for a moment before giving me a nod.
“Even if.”
“Okay,” I agreed.
Sure, I wanted to protect her from the truth. But she was a grown woman. And no matter what was on that drive, I was going to have to explain it to her eventually anyway.
“Alright,” I agreed, taking a deep breath as I toed out of my shoes, then gathered my laptop and the flash drive before climbing onto bed with her. “Whatever it is,” I started as I waited for the laptop to power up, “remember how Clay tried to protect you from it. He didn’t want anything happening to you.”
“I know. Trust me, Brooks, I know my brother was a good man. Even if he was doing bad things, he was good. There’s not a doubt in my mind about that.”
“Good,” I said, giving her leg a squeeze before inserting the flash drive, watching the password screen pop up, and typing in the code she’d deciphered.
I don’t think either of us breathed as we waited for whatever was hidden inside, that was worth killing for, popped up.
A folder labeled ‘evidence’ was what we found.
“Evidence of what?” Cali asked herself as I scanned through the titles of each file. Which included documents and images.
“You can turn away now,” I gave Cali one last out. “I won’t judge you.”
“I want to know,” she demanded.
“Okay,” I agreed, reaching to move the cursor over the first file. An image.
The label on a package.
The next image, the contents of the package.
“Is that—“ Cali gasped, leaning closer.
“Heroin, yeah,” I said, nodding.
This was one of the possibilities I’d been considering.
That because Clay had been working for this delivery company for years, someone might have approached him with a scheme to have him cart drugs. Either as a partner, or under duress.
“Does this mean he was… not doing it willingly?” Cali asked, putting the pieces together as I clicked the next file. A document full of dates, times, and locations.
“Don’t have enough evidence yet,” I said, clicking the next image.
A man’s face.
Then another.
“That’s the one,” Cali said, stabbing her finger at the screen.
“At your apartment?”
“At the fight. The one with Clay’s watch.”
The file was titled his name.
Ryder Griffin.
The other files with names were, I imagined, more of the same crew. I studied their faces, but didn’t see any that brought any sort of familiarity. I would need to show it around to the other club members, see if they recognized them. If they didn’t, I could always reach out to Junior to see if he could use facial recognition or whatever the fuck else hackers used to track someone down.
After that, there were snaps of license plates, the fronts of stores, men accepting the boxes from, it seemed, Clay. They were shot from his back, so you never saw his face, but the frame was right and the angle was so that it seemed they were taken from a camera set on the dash of his delivery truck.
“It looks like he’s creating a file on this crew,” Cali observed.
