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Chapter Eight
Dixon
“You’re lying.”
I pause for a moment, fight back the intensity of the anger that is burning right below the surface of my skin, skin that is already hot in the places where I’ve touched Alexandra. Everything about this situation is so wrong — the dead man on her kitchen floor, that his pooling blood neither detracts nor adds to the decor, that I’m caring for the woman who wants to murder me — that it enrages me, and despite my better judgment, I want to help Alexandra, because she is clearly suffering from what I did. I want to help her remember, even if that means diving into memories that have haunted me for years.
“I’m not lying. I recognize the face, recognize the neck tattoo, and if you roll up his sleeves, you’ll find a roadrunner tattoo on his left bicep. He was at that meeting and wearing a Crimson Fury cut.”
I remember that roadrunner tattoo clearly. I’d loved those cartoons when I was a kid, and, had everything at that meeting gone as it was supposed to — it was supposed to be a meeting that ended in peace between the Crimson Fury and the Road Kings, two clubs that had been at war over territory and the incursion of drugs in their neighborhoods — I’d planned on chatting up the guy over a beer. Things didn’t go as planned, though; someone fired first, a gunbattle erupted, and I put a hole in Lucas Reyes head, all while he watched on in wide-eyed wonderment.
“You have to be wrong,” she murmurs. But she rolls up the man’s sleeve to see, sure enough, the tattoo of the roadrunner.
“See?”
Alexandra stares at that arm for a long time, shaking her head. I don’t see what she’s so upset about. Maybe it’s finding another member of her brother and father’s MC dead, maybe it’s that the same man who once wore her family’s cut died trying to kill her. Not that I particularly care — I’ll hate her either way and hate her about as much as I want her to toughen up and kill me.
“This is impossible.”
“Seems pretty possible. Hard to doubt the reality of your own eyes, isn’t it? Much less the fucking pool of blood on your kitchen floor.” I allow her another moment of taking in the sight of her dead clubmate, and then I cough loudly. “So, are you going to look at him all day, or are you going to get back to what you were going to do?”
“What I was going to do?”
She’s so out of it, I need to nudge her back to the matter at hand.
“You were going to kill me.” My words linger in the air, but there’s no reaction to them on her face. It’s like I’m speaking to a brick wall. She might be crafty, she might be well-educated thanks to those ridiculous podcasts, but she’s not that bright. “Alexandra? Would this be easier for you if I got back in that chair, or would you prefer I come at you with a weapon? You can call it self-defense, then.”
When she doesn’t respond, I sigh. I wouldn’t have thought that this little incident would knock her so off track. If anything, seeing another of her brother’s clubmates murdered would inspire her to try even harder to kill me. What is wrong with her? Is she dense?
I take a seat on one of the kitchen chairs.
Obviously, she’s going to need more than a little prompting. Shame that I have to do this, but it’s time to dig up old memories.
“Did you ever get the full story about how your brother died? Did your daddy ever tell you what really happened, or did one of the Crimson Fury that survived tell you? Funny thing, that fucking mess. It was a meeting he brokered. Supposed to be a peace arrangement between his club and mine. We’d been fighting, you see. Over territory, obviously, and that someone — his club, I’m sure of it, though we never could get any of the dealers we ran down to fully confess — was dealing all sorts of fucked-up drugs on our turf. Not just coke or fucking party drugs, the kind you’d take on Spring Break in Cancun, but the hard shit. The twisted shit. The shit that fucks up entire communities. Well, you want to know what happened? Your brother brokered that meeting. We showed up in good faith and were ready to put the whole fucking mess behind us, and I have to hand it to him, because he seemed sincere. He seemed like a decent man, someone that, maybe, in another life, I could have been friends with…” I stop, because the man I spoke with in those final moments of his life is one that I would have been proud to call a friend, which is why his death haunts me. I killed a good man who was just trying to make his community a better place. “And then someone started shooting. I shot Lucas right in his face, and I got his brains all over my cut and my boots. Brains and shards of his skull. Had the smell of that — blood and brains and bullet-burnt skin — stuck in my nose for days. This dead asshole on your kitchen floor was there when the shooting started, so don’t tell me you don’t recognize him.”
Alexandra looks from him to me, tears in her eyes. Finally, I’ve done it — I’ve pushed her enough that she’ll do what needs to be done. She’ll kill me, and finally it’ll put to rest the ghost of the honest man who has haunted me since the moment I killed him.
Finally, I can rest.
All I have to do is urge this woman to do what she wanted to do in the first place.
“Dixon, you don’t understand.”
“I understand it clear enough. Do what you have to do, Alexandra.”
Alexandra looks back to the body, then she rises to her feet just as anticipation rises in my chest.
This is it, finally.
But when she turns back to me, that anticipation dies as quickly as her brother.
“Dixon, I knew every man in the MC. Every ol’ lady, every hanger-on, and everyone who worked at the clubhouse, too. My fifteenth birthday — my quinceañera — was at the clubhouse, and they made me a cut that said ‘birthday girl’ and I wore it over the top of this frilly pink dress. I lived at that place. My daddy was, and still is, the president, and my brother was the vice president. And I am telling you, I have never seen this man before in my life.”
I shrug. “So what?”
Her voice takes on weight. In her words, I feel a shift, hear confusion, and thrilling potency.
“After you killed my brother, I did everything I could to investigate what happened. I talked to the brothers who survived that shootout, namely, my brother’s best friend Mateo. I even tracked down and talked to anyone I thought might be an eyewitness. And no one — no one — mentioned this man,” she says, nudging his limp arm with her foot.
