Confessions Of An Old Lady (11 page)

Chapter 20

“You’ve got to find out when and where this sit-down is going to take place,” Renley said as soon as I told him what I’d learned. “This is exactly what we’ve been waiting for. Can you imagine it, Rockford? Closing in on the Lords of Chaos and the Monsters of Mayhem at the same fucking time! And with a shit-ton of cocaine to boot? Maybe even guns?”

“Yeah, I can imagine it, all right. I’ll do my best to get the specifics for you, but I’m not sure even Sonny knows at this point,” I advised him, biting my bottom lip.

“You can do it. You’ve done a wonderful job so far, Rockford. Arlington is really impressed that you’ve been able to get so close so quickly. No one’s been able to do it before. You’re looking at a promotion, Rockford. Maybe even a transfer to any field office you choose. Be proud of yourself, but don’t stop working just yet. We need that intel.”

“I’ll get it for you as soon as I can,” I reassured him before disconnecting the line.

After pacing the living room for about ten minutes, I decided to draw a bath. Baths were my go-to when I had a jumbled mind, and my mind was more than jumbled now—it was scrambled eggs.

After dropping one of my favorite Lush Twilight bath bombs I’d brought with me from Chicago into the tub, I hung my blue fleece robe on the hook behind the door and sunk down into the warm, silky, lavender-fragranced bathwater. I laid my head against a rolled towel I had propped up on the side of the bathtub and used my toes to turn off the water spigot.

With my eyes closed tightly, I ran through all the possible scenarios I had come up with so far in my head. How could I possibly accomplish my mission, save my career,
and
save Sonny at the same time? Was it at all possible? It didn’t seem to be. No matter which course of action I chose, I would have to sacrifice something, either my job or Sonny.

I held my breath and sunk down slowly beneath the water’s surface until the top of my head was completely covered in purple-tinted silky bathwater.

My career…or Sonny. Which one meant more to me? I had only been an agent for a couple of years, including training, but it was all I had ever dreamed of being. Then again, I had only known Sonny for a few short months…but in those few months, we’d become very close and I had come to…dare I say it—
love—
Sonny. I had fought that feeling for as long and as hard as I possibly could, but it had consumed me like a piece of paper thrown into a raging fire. My will had completely disintegrated and all that was left was the smoke.

Suddenly, I heard a muffled noise I could not make out, but I was wound so tightly that it scared me, so I quickly pushed my head above water and used the rolled-up towel behind my head to wipe off my face.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

This time I knew what the sound was. Someone was pounding on my front door. Who would possibly be doing that? This couldn’t be good. I debated for a moment. It couldn’t be Sonny, because he would call before he came over. It couldn’t be Renley or anyone from the DEA, because they would risk exposing me. I had no friends besides Sonny and none of the other crew members or their old ladies knew where I lived. At least, I was pretty sure they didn’t.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

I jumped out of the bathtub, stepping onto my plush blue rug, and threw my robe around myself, tying the cord in a loop in front of me. I took a quick glance in the mirror—I have no idea why—then rushed to the front door and peeked through the peep hole. I didn’t see anyone standing there.

“Who is it?” I yelled through the door.

“It’s me, Trish. Open up the door.” It was Sonny’s voice, all right, but he didn’t sound the same. His voice sounded weak and strained. I opened the door immediately. There before me, lying on my front porch was Sonny Jackson. It didn’t take long to notice the blood seeping through an old white t-shirt that had been hastily wrapped around his thick upper right arm.

“Trish. I’ve been shot. I need your help.”

“You
what
? How the…who in the…what the…” I stood there for a minute trying to absorb the scene before me. Yes, he was right. He had been shot in the arm and that arm was now bleeding all over my front porch. I hesitated…perhaps for too long.

“Don’t just stand there, babe…help me up!” Sonny reached his good arm up toward me.

Why on earth would Sonny come to me when he’d been shot? Why the hell not go to the effing hospital? Then, like Thor’s hammer, it hit me right upside my head. Trish Sanders was a nurse!
Oh, this is not good
…
Not good at all
. I couldn’t tell Sonny that I wasn’t really a nurse. That would blow my whole cover and this mission. My life would be over. Suddenly, I remembered that I had been trained in first aid and trauma during my agent training…but that was over two years ago!

I grabbed Sonny’s good arm and pulled upward as he staggered to his feet. After wrapping his left arm around my shoulders, I helped him through the front door. Immediately, I peered out into the street, looking left, then right, to make sure no one had seen Sonny lying there. It looked like we were in the clear, so I slammed the door shut and turned my attention back to Sonny.

“What the hell happened?”

I followed Sonny as he slunk slowly down the hallway and into the living room. He flopped down onto the couch, but luckily, it wasn’t really my couch, so I didn’t care at all about blood getting into the fabric.

“I don’t fucking know, Trish.” I could tell he wasn’t cursing me. “I was riding my bike down US 27, minding my own fucking business, when all of a sudden this white van pulled up next to me. I barely even noticed it at first. Then the door slid open and all I saw was the flash of light coming out from the barrel of a rifle. I sped up and tried to lose them, but before I could turn off the highway, one of the bullets caught me in the arm.” He winced in pain as he relayed the story to me. All I could do was hold his left hand and listen.

“Did you see the guy who shot you?”

“No, hon. They were all in black and had black ski masks on, of course. It’s what I would have done.” He gritted his teeth as he spoke.

“Could you tell anything else about the van? Any markings of any sort?” I decided I wasn’t going to ask any more questions, lest I sound like the agent that I truly was.

“Nah…it was completely white. No markings at all. It has to be the Monsters. Who else would want to kill me?”

I pondered this for a minute. Of course there
was
the possibility that someone in Spider’s family tried to kill Sonny as payback for Spider’s accidentally-on-purpose shooting. Or even worse, it could have been a government agent, but what reason would they have to assassinate Sonny? Wouldn’t they rather have him brought in, alive, on federal charges and sent to prison for the rest of his life?

“You’re right. It had to be the Monsters. But Sonny, we’ve got to get this bullet out right now before it starts an infection in your blood. Let me take you to a hospital.”

“No. No hospitals. I hate hospitals.”

I gave him a queer look. Who really hates hospitals? Especially when they could be bleeding to death?

We sat there staring at each other for a few seconds until Sonny finally cracked.

“Okay…so maybe I
might
have a warrant or two out for my arrest.”

“Warrants?” Now this was news to me. Renley and Beauford never mentioned that he had any state warrants out. “What the hell for?”

“Nothing serious. Driving on a suspended license. A few unpaid parking tickets. I missed my court date for the parking tickets, so they issued a warrant.”

“Sonny! You do realize that if you just turn yourself in, you would probably get a slap on the wrist and some probation. You’d just have to pay your parking tickets. You might lose your license, though.”

“And therein lies the problem. I can’t lose my license, Trish. I love my damn bike. I can’t imagine not being able to ride.”

“Sonny, I hate to tell you this, but it’s probably already suspended. They probably did it automatically when you didn’t show for court.”

“Yeah, but I’ve still got my actual license. It just makes me feel better, I guess. I’d be humiliated if I had to turn it in.”

I pondered his rationale and although it seemed a little silly to me, I agreed not to take him to the hospital. But then what to do about the bullet in his arm? What was I going to do?
Fake it ’til I make it?

“We’ve got to get that bullet out somehow,” I informed him.

“Well, you’re the nurse. Take it out.”

“Sonny! I’m a nurse, not a surgeon!”

“Surely you’ve got a little bag like the nurses on TV do, with all your first aid supplies?”

Uh-oh
. I doubted anyone at the Agency had thought of a small detail like that. “Let me look around. I don’t remember which box I packed it in.” I began rummaging around the house, tearing open boxes and throwing aside the empty ones. Then I opened the fourth box and, to my surprise, found a black bag that, lo and behold, looked just like the ones you see on TV, just like Sonny had mentioned.
Wow.
They
did
think of everything! Thank you, Uncle Sam!

I pulled the black bag out of the box and ran back over to Sonny’s side. I opened the bag and ruffled through it, finding a scalpel, something that looked like very large tweezers, needles, some thick black thread for stitches, and lots of gauze and Betadine—everything I thought I might need to remove the bullet from Sonny’s very large bicep. What I didn’t see was any Lidocaine or anything else to numb his arm.
Shit.
I thought back to my training in trauma and first aid and then told myself:
You got this. You can do it.

“Okay, so the good news is that I think I can get this bullet out of your arm. The bad news is that I can’t numb you up first. I must not have packed Lidocaine. So just lie back on the sofa and let me do my very best to get this sucker out of there.”

Sonny lay back on the couch, his left arm folded underneath his head. I grabbed the floor lamp by the fireplace and dragged it across the living room to the couch, so I could have better lighting. It was now close to nine o’clock and well past dark since it was mid-December.

I grabbed my reading glasses, which were lying on top of the latest Wally Lamb book,
We Are Water
, and pushed them up on my nose. I looked down at the open wound on Sonny’s arm. It was covered in so much blood, it almost looked fake…like a Halloween costume or something.

“I can’t see shit. I’m going to have to dig around in there a little bit. See if I can find the bullet.”

“Do what you gotta do, Doc.”

“Okay, here goes…” I began gently digging around with the large tweezer-looking things until I finally felt the bullet. Thankfully, it wasn’t too far from the surface of the wound. “All right, now I’m going to have to dig just a little deeper to get a good grip on this thing…it might hurt.”

“Nah…I’m a big boy, darlin’. I’ll be fine.”

Sure enough, Sonny didn’t even wince when I shoved the tweezers down into the wound, grabbed hold of the bullet, and pulled it out. I held it up in front of Sonny’s face so he could see the larger-than-I-expected-bullet I had just pulled out of his arm.

“Looks like a .22 caliber Hornet. That’s no bullet, Sonny. That’s a cartridge from a high-powered rifle. Not everyone has one of these lying around…unless…”

“Unless you’re a motorcycle gang that imports and exports guns from Russia.”

“So it
was
the Monsters.”

“Yup. Looks like it. By the way…how the hell did you know what kind of bullet…I’m sorry…
cartridge
that was?”

Once again, I felt like it was over. A cold chill rattled my spine and made my knees turn to wet noodles. How many times was I going to almost give myself away before I ran out of explanations?

“Oh, my dad was a Marine during Vietnam. He taught me everything I know about guns…even how to shoot them, so you better watch out,” I said with a wry smile. I made a gun with my fingers and pretended to shoot him…trying to distract him.

He looked at me with a puzzled look on his face. “Every time I think I know everything about you, you surprise me with more information. I don’t know if I’ll ever truly know who you are.”

Yeah, you and me both, buddy.

Chapter 21

After I did the very best job I could stitching up Sonny’s arm—thanks to Mom’s sewing lessons when I was little—I sat down next to him on the couch. He wrapped his uninjured arm around my shoulders. We sat there in silence, just watching the fire I had made in the fireplace flicker in beautiful shades of orange and yellow. It reminded me of when my dad used to take me camping when I was little and how he would stoop over a pile of wood, cursing and spitting until he finally got it going.

“So, when are you going to have this big sit-down with the Monsters? I mean, things are escalating pretty quickly, don’t you think?” I shot a not-so-subtle glance down at the hole in his arm. It was now bandaged and wrapped with gauze found in my miracle nurse’s bag.

“Soon. Very soon. Pop’s got something in the works now. He’s been sending messages back and forth to their leader, trying to get them to bite.”

“Yes, but
how
are you going to get them to bite? How on earth are you going to get them to agree to sit down and talk when things have already escalated to the point that you’re trying to kill each other?”

“Cocaine, my darlin’. That precious, white nose-candy that everyone loves so much.”

“Cocaine? Huh?” I looked at him, puzzled.

“Leroy’s going to offer them our entire latest shipment as a peace offering. That’ll get them to the meeting.”

“Okay, supposing that works, then what?”

He turned and looked down at me. “Why so curious about this sit-down? Since when are you into biker politics?”

“I’m not…not really. I just want this all to end and end soon. I’m worried about you. They already tried to kill you twice now. I want to know how exactly you’re going to prevent them from trying again, and maybe succeeding next time. I love you, you big oaf.”

“All right. Well, see, the plan is for Dad to offer to let the Monsters take over the entire gun running operation. He doesn’t really want to be part of it anyway…too risky.”

“And drugs aren’t?”

“No, not really. After 9/11, guns have been harder to get our hands on and the prices have skyrocketed. It’s just a big headache we don’t want anymore. Drugs will always have a market value—especially here in rural Kentucky. They get the guns, we get the drugs.”

“And the violence stops?”

“That’s what we want them to think, anyway. The reality is, the violence
will
stop, but not until we’ve wiped the Monsters off the face of the earth once and for all.”

I pondered this for a moment. Sonny probably thought I was contemplating the merits of his grand scheme, when in reality I was trying to figure out how I could keep Sonny from attending the big meeting, since Agent Renley was probably going to order a takedown once I handed him the exact when and where. If I could keep him from going somehow, maybe he could avoid being arrested. But then what? How do I get him to safety? It’s not like the DEA was going to stop watching him. After the raid, if he wasn’t caught up in it, they’d probably watch him even harder, since he would be the de-facto boss once Leroy was in prison.

“So, how soon do you think you can get them to meet? I want you safe as soon as possible.”

“Probably by the end of next week. Dad sent his message to Eddy Walters earlier this week and demanded a response by Friday. Although I’m pretty sure we’ll hear from them sooner than that. If they agree, we’ll meet as soon as possible, I guarantee you that.”

“How so?”

A knowing smile spread across his face. He knew something he hadn’t told me. Maybe he
wouldn’t
tell me.

“Sonny, what do you know? How do you know they’ll meet so quickly?”

“Let’s just say we sent them a little incentive, that’s all.” He smiled and crossed one booted leg over the knee of his other leg, sitting back in a way that said:
yep…I’m the man
.

“Sonny Jackson! What did you do?!”

“Oh, nothing, really. We just kidnapped his son. Sent him a little…
token
…to properly incentivize him.”

I looked at him with mock rage in my eyes. “Sonny! What token?”

He smiled again and paused, perhaps for dramatic effect. “Just one of his fingers. No big deal.”

“One of his
fingers?
Sonny! No wonder they tried to kill you today! That’s probably their answer to your ‘request’ for a meeting!”

“Oh, no…they’ll agree. Besides, it was only the tip. They may be highly pissed-off right now, but he’ll agree to meet. He wants his son back. If it were anyone else, he might just let us have him. He’s one tough SOB. But his son? No, he’ll agree.”

***

Friday morning, I was awakened by the sound of my black cell ringing. I rolled over and looked at the screen. It was Sonny.
Very early for Sonny to be calling
, I thought, so I picked up the iPhone and pressed “answer.”

“Sonny?” I said with a groggy voice

“I told you it would work,” was all he said.

“What would work?” I had just woken up and wasn’t thinking about the conversation we’d just had Wednesday night about the meeting.

“He agreed to a sit-down with us. But it’s much sooner than we expected. It’s going down tomorrow night…at midnight.”

That got my attention. I shot bolt upright out of bed. I had to control the panic I was feeling, lest Sonny pick up on it. I took a couple of deep breaths. “Hang on.”

I set the phone down, reached across to the nightstand, grabbed a ponytail holder, and pulled my messy morning hair up into a high ponytail. I rubbed my eyes and patted at my cheeks to help wake myself up. After another deep breath, I picked the phone back up and placed it on my cheek.

“So soon?” I tried to sound uber-casual about the whole thing.

“Yeah, I was surprised too. Guess he wants his son back, eh?” Sonny chuckled at himself.

Just effing great
. Now I had to tell Renley ASAP, so he could organize a raid in under forty-eight hours. Perhaps they were prepared and this wouldn’t be a problem, but I was concerned about the extremely short timetable. On top of that, I also had less than forty-eight hours to figure out a way to keep Sonny out of harm’s way—both from the Monsters of Mayhem and from the DEA. I had no idea how in the world I was going to pull this off.

“Uh…yeah. That’s great, Sonny. But you’re not going, are you?”

“Hell, yeah, I’m going! Why wouldn’t I?”

Yeah…why wouldn’t he?
What possible reason was I going to be able to come up with to keep him from going to the meeting?

“Be-because…” I stuttered. “Because…I’ve got a bad feeling about this meeting, Sonny. You guys are trying to kill each other. They just shot you, for God’s sake! Now, you’re holding his son hostage and you chopped off part of his finger! Do you really think they’re going to just sit down quietly and have a ‘meeting’ with you without trying to kill you again?” All I could do was hope my love and concern for him would be enough to persuade him not to go.

Silence. No response.

“Sonny? Did you hear me? I love you, Sonny. I don’t want you to go to this meeting. It could be a trap.”

“Yeah, I heard you, babe. And I love you too. But if it
is
a trap, I can’t let my dad walk into it alone. I have to go.”

“No, you don’t. Make up an excuse. I don’t want you to go, baby, please. I have a bad feeling.”

Again, silence. Was he considering my plea?

He sighed. “All right. If it means that much to you. But what am I going to say to Dad? I can’t exactly call in sick.”

I thought for a moment. “Sure you can. Rather, you tell him
I’m
sick. I have an idea, but you’ve got to hear me out.” I was nervous all of a sudden, but this was the only thing I could think of on the spur of the moment. “Tell him I’m pregnant.”

“What? Are you? Pregnant, I mean.” He sounded panicked.

“No, God no.” At least I was pretty sure I wasn’t. I hadn’t really been keeping track of my periods, but I was on the pill and was pretty sure I hadn’t missed any…pretty sure.

“How is telling my dad that you’re pregnant when you’re really not going to convince him that I should stay back from the meeting? And what are we going to tell him when he realizes that you’re not pregnant?”

“One thing at a time. You just tell him I just found out I’m pregnant and that I’m really sick. Tell him you’re worried about leaving me all alone and that in case something goes down, you don’t want to leave your future son a bastard. He’ll understand that. Then, later we can just tell him it was a false alarm. He’ll understand that too.”

“No, he’ll be disappointed. He’s wanted grandkids ever since I graduated high school. But still…it might work. But Trish…I still don’t feel right staying back from the meeting. I’m vice president of this club. If anything did jump off, I’d never forgive myself for not being there.”

“You’re right. You’re the VP. Which is exactly another reason why you shouldn’t go. Tell Leroy you’ve got to stay behind…for preservation of the legacy. If, and only if, something was to go down, someone would have to be here to pick up the pieces and keep the club going. It would be insanity to put both of you at risk. Where would the club be if they lost both of you?” That argument sounded even better than I had intended. Especially since I came up with it on the fly.

“You know what? That actually does make sense. All right. I’ll talk to Dad as soon as we hang up. He’ll agree. Especially when I point out the whole legacy thing. He’ll probably wish he’d thought of it himself.”

“Good.” I felt a wave of relief wash over me. Now, if Renley could pull together a tactical team in time to raid the meeting, Sonny wouldn’t be there and he’d be safe not only from them, but from whatever the Monsters might have planned for them.

But when we hung up the phone, my elation was short-lived. It hit me almost immediately that now I had an even bigger problem on my hands. What was going to happen to me, to Sonny, and to the assignment after the meeting? If Renley and the full force of the DEA came to bear on the club the next night, did that mean my assignment was over? If so, Renley would pull me out of Nicholasville faster than I could spell m-o-t-o-r-c-y-c-l-e and then would I ever see Sonny again? Not likely.

So now what? My next job was to call Renley, inform him about the meeting, and try to convince him there was some merit in letting me stay in Nicholasville to continue the investigation into the club. But Leroy was going to be caught up in the raid, so theoretically the assignment would be over. I just had to convince him, once he realized that Sonny wasn’t at the meeting, that I should stay and continue on with the investigation, ostensibly to “try to take Sonny down.”

Would that even work? I wasn’t sure, but it was my only option for not blowing this investigation, but still being able to stay with Sonny…at least until I could figure out something more long-term.

I picked up the white iPhone.