“Unfortunately not,” he replied. “I’m having the boys pull old files from the storage room, just like you asked, but you know what it’s like down there.”
I did. It was a fucking shithole, to put it lightly. The previous presidents had never much bothered to keep things in order, preferring instead to just chuck boxes full of crap down the stairs of the basement without caring if they landed with any semblance of organization, the dumb bastards. I’d had the cleanup languishing on the very bottom of my to-do list for years, but I’d never quite gotten around to it. Looked like that was going to come bite me in the ass just when I needed a break desperately.
“How long?”
“Hard to say. Have you seen the rats down there? They’re fucking huge. I’m not letting Fang anywhere near that basement.” Fang was Slick’s Rottweiler. He was huge in his own right, and vicious when provoked.
“No, I haven’t seen the rats, and I don’t think I want to either.”
“Probably a good call,” he mused. “I wonder if you can train them. Couldn’t be that hard…”
“Focus, Slick.”
“Sorry, got a little carried away there. Anyway, like I said, they’re sorting through the files, but between the rats and that little leak we sprung last year, it’s going to be a long time before they find what we’re looking for. And even if we do, the boxes could be too damaged to be of much use. I’d say it’s a few weeks at best before they’ve done a decent enough job to start analyzing what we’ve got on hand.”
A few weeks. Goddamn it. After my conversation with John Robinson, I’d tasked Slick with digging through the club’s old records to see if there was anything else we might have missed. Newspaper clippings, illicit photocopies of police documentation that our informant on the force had managed to slip us—anything like that that could provide an extra clue, some context, whatever it took to double down. But by the sound of it, we weren’t exactly going to be racing to an answer.
“All right, thanks, Slick. Stay on top of this shit. I want results as soon as possible.”
“You got it, Ben.”
“And Slick…”
“Yeah?”
“Keep those fucking rats downstairs.”
He chuckled. “Will do.”
I hung up and sighed, tossing my phone onto the kitchen counter before burying my face in my hands. I could feel Carmen’s eyes still locked on me.
“Trouble on the home front?” she asked. It was the first thing we’d said to each other all morning. Her tone was cautious and deceptively light. But it was a peace offering, or something close to it. I needed to stop being such a child and just accept that things were either going to be bearable or they weren’t, and it was up to me to decide which one. We were coexisting now, for better or worse, at least until a better option arose.
“Rats the size of dogs, a filing cabinet that makes burning junkyards look like the goddamn Dewey Decimal system, and nothing for me to do but sit around and twiddle my thumbs. Yeah, things are going swimmingly. Christ, I need a drink.”
“Little early for that, isn’t it?” she asked as I dug through the cabinet over the stove and found a half-empty bottle of Jack.
The first sip hit my throat with that hot, familiar fire, immediately taking the edge off my nerves, although I was still jangling and fidgety. “No such thing as too early,” I replied with a belch.
“Lovely manners there, dear,” she shot back sarcastically.
I whirled around to face her and narrowed my eyes. “Yeah, well, Mama wasn’t around often enough to correct me, so things kinda just are what they are. What you see is what you get, more or less.”
“Hmm. What’s the return policy on husbands?”
“Very funny,” I mumbled, but I screwed the cap back on the whiskey and tucked it away again. She was a sassy little spitfire when she wanted to be, but I had to admit it was growing on me. Nice to have someone around who didn’t fall all over themselves to do my bidding. A man got soft when he wasn’t challenged every once in a while. I never would’ve imagined that this girl—barely five feet tall, frail as a twig, with a snowball’s chance in hell of defending herself if she were ever to be suddenly tossed into the wild—would be the one to do it, but hey, life’s full of surprises.
I went into the bedroom and tugged on a fresh t-shirt, then swung my jacket around my shoulders before coming back out. “I’m gonna go to the clubhouse for a bit,” I said. “Check up on things.”
She looked up at me and smiled. I felt my chest surge with something that, once again, I couldn’t quite identify. It was like a big weight settling on my rib cage, but I felt lightheaded at the same time. Twenty-five years of life and my body was choosing now to start acting up on me? I didn’t like it any more than I had the first time I started feeling these weird little tingles when Carmen was around. Then there was the ever-present pang in my cock when she switched her crossed legs, revealing a sliver of tanned skin high up on her inner thigh. That particular reaction was expected, though, and I crushed it as brutally as I had every time before. No touching, I reminded myself. Don’t even think about it.