The next morning, I went to the Richards police department and called on Dan Peters.

The first indication that things had changed was the fucker kept me waiting half an hour. Five days earlier, he would have come to the lobby personally as soon as I set foot in the door.

No longer. I wasn’t the president of the Midnight Riders anymore, and that thirty-minute wait was Dan Peter’s petty little way of letting me know the pecking order had changed.

Of course, he was too much of a pussy to say anything to my face. When the duty officer finally escorted me back, Dan was all smiles and bullshit.

“Jack!” he said, greeting me from his desk. Didn’t get up. “How’s it going?”

Considering that the bastard had taken an indirect hand in Lou’s coup against me, I wanted to punch his face until it looked like raw hamburger. But I restrained myself.

“Not bad, considering,” I said as I took a seat across from him.

“Heard you had a club election the other night. Sure am sorry to hear about the… well, changing of the guard, I guess you could say,” Dan said, with a perfectly faked expression of concern.

It was all a calculated message: I know you ain’t the top dog no more, son, so don’t act like you are.

My knuckles were white, I was clenching my fists so hard.

You have your men kidnap my best friend and my woman, deliver them to my enemy as leverage against me, then sit there and say ‘I heard you had a club election’?

I promised myself that, one day, no matter what happened, I was going to make Dan Peters wish to God he’d never met me.

In the meantime, I just clenched my jaw and gave a tight smile. “Shit happens.”

“Indeed it does,” Dan agreed sunnily. “Now what can I do for you?”

Go fuck yourself and die, for starters.

But instead of saying that, I followed my plan. “I came here because there’s a storm coming.”

Dan gave me a ‘concerned uncle’ kind of look and flapped his hands in the air. “Now, I can’t get involved in whatever goes on between you and Lou, you know that.”

You fucking piece of shit – you already did, when you had your cops nab Fiona and Kade. You just won’t do anything for ME unless I pay you more than Lou does.

I restrained myself yet again from leaping across the desk and pummeling his face. “I’m not talking about me and Lou. I’m talking about the Santa Muertes.”

“Oh, you mean that shooting over at the Seven Veils last Friday.”

“Yeah. That,” I said, unable to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.

“Well, I wouldn’t concern yourself if I was you,” Dan said patronizingly, like he was telling a sixteen year-old girl Don’t you worry your pretty little head. There was also the added jab of, You’re not the Midnight Riders’ president anymore, so why are you even here?

I ignored his tone. “All of Richards is going to be concerned when the bullets start flying. Especially the mayor and the city council.”

Dan smiled and paused before he answered. The smile said everything: Ohhh, now I see why you’re here… but I’ll play along, anyway.

Asshole.

“I’m not currently worried about reprisals,” he said loftily, as though using a three-syllable word made him a fucking genius.

“And why is that?”

“If they haven’t hit you fellows yet, I doubt they will.”

What the FUCK?

That was like saying, It’s not raining right now, so it probably won’t ever rain again.

“Oh, they will,” I said. “Trust me.”

Dan shrugged. “Well, I can’t arrest people for a crime they haven’t committed yet, so I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”

‘Wait and see.’

Jesus Christ.

“Two of their people did commit a crime,” I pointed out.

“And they’re not around anymore, are they?” Dan said smugly, like he and I were sharing some sort of private joke.

“But the leaders are.”

Dan looked at me blankly, like What’s your point?

“Aren’t you investigating them?” I asked in irritation. “Did any of your detectives even talk to the Santa Muertes?”

Dan shrugged. “Even if the top brass was involved, they’d deny it.”

That was the Richards Police Department for you. Oh, you say there might be a giant criminal conspiracy? Well, the perps would probably deny it, so there’s really no use in hauling them in and questioning them about it.

The irony was, corruption in Richards was mostly the Midnight Riders’ fault. We’d paid off every cop we could for 20 years – and, I’m ashamed to say, I hadn’t said ‘no’ to Lou when he wanted to sweep shit under the rug. Things like the shooting at the Seven Veils… drunken bar fights…

The death of Ali’s cousin.

I’d been telling myself for three years that I was making the club street-legal and legit, that I was changing things for the better. And for the most part, I was… but I’d looked the other way plenty of times.

In a way, maybe all this shit I was going through was the chickens coming home to roost.

But something Dan had said wormed its way past my guilt-ridden thoughts.

“Wait… what do you mean, ‘even if they were involved’? What makes you think they weren’t?”

There was a look on Dan’s face like uh oh, but it was fleeting. Just enough to make me take notice and think, Huh, what’s that all about?

He lapsed right back into the bullshit, smooth as silk. “You ever known a Santa Muerte to just walk into a joint with a bunch of other bikers and start shooting?”

I tried to keep the You idiot tone out of my voice. “Yeah, actually, that’s happened plenty of times.”

“Years ago, sure, back when you and the Riders were going toe-to-toe with ‘em. But since then? Nothin’.”

“There weren’t any shootings because we weren’t at war with them,” I said, slowly and deliberately, like I was explaining it to a child.

“Exactly,” Dan said, stabbing the air with his finger as though I’d made his argument for him.

…what the fuck?

Goddamn idiot.

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re saying that just because the Midnight Riders aren’t currently at war with the Santa Muertes, there’s no possible way they might send in shooters to take us out, and therefore there’s no reason for the police to investigate.”

Dan shifted uneasily in his chair. “Well… it sounds a little simplistic when you put it like that.”

More like fucking stupid.

“But basically, yeah – it makes no sense,” he continued.

“It makes perfect sense. I still have bad blood with Rodrigo Alvarez – you think he’s forgotten that?”

I’d rearranged Rodrigo’s face back in the day, which had put me in Chino for three years – not to mention on Rodrigo’s permanent shitlist. Now he was the Santa Muertes’ Sergeant-at-Arms. Even though the Riders had negotiated a peace treaty with them when I became president, Rodrigo was never going to forgive or forget. He was just biding his time.

“If you guys have such bad blood,” Dan asked, “then why the hell would a couple of Santa Muertes walk into a club with the Riders’ President, VP, and Sergeant-at-Arms all in the same place, and then only shoot some little pissant new guy? ‘Scuse my talkin’ about your friend that way.”

For a second I got angry at him for referring to Benjy as a pissant.

Then I felt a pang of conscience that I’d totally forgotten about Benjy in the chaos of the last few days. I need to go to the hospital and check on him…

Finally, I realized that what Dan had asked was a damn good question.

“Say it was a hit,” Dan continued. “Why would they send in the JV team? If they wanted to take you guys out, they would have used a dozen heavy hitters with machineguns. But they didn’t. They sent in two retards, one who got himself shot right away, and the other – ”

Dan caught himself before he spoke the truth out loud.

Instead, he just chuckled. “Well, I guess the other one got away, so he wasn’t too much of a retard.”

Despite being a loathsome asshole, Dan had a good point: if the Santa Muerte brass had been behind last Friday night, why the fuck had they wasted a prime opportunity to assassinate me, Lou, and Kade? And why had they sent in a couple of jack-offs to do the job?

Dan shook his head. “Mark my words, they were just two guys who got a wild hair up their ass. Probably high on somethin’. That, and just plain stupid enough to stumble into the wrong fuckin’ titty bar.”

Stumble into the wrong fuckin’ titty bar.

Well, they’d definitely come into the wrong fuckin’ titty bar – but they didn’t stumble in by accident. The Seven Veils was known to every Santa Muerte in Southern California, because five of their men had gotten gunned down in the parking lot two decades ago. It was one of those epic stories in outlaw biker legend – not to mention that shooting had sent Lou to prison for five years. I could absolutely fucking guarantee that every single Santa Muerte foot soldier knew the Seven Veils, knew who ran it, and would have loved to burn it to the ground.

Stupid enough to stumble into the wrong fuckin’ titty bar, my ass.

“Was the shooter high on something?” I asked.

Dan looked confused. “What?”

“Was he high at the time? Did you do any blood tests?”

Dan gave me a smug little smile. “Well, as you know, we pretty much determined cause of death at the scene. Anything beyond that would just be a waste of tax payers’ money.”

Like you give a shit about tax payers’ money.

“What was his name?”

Dan gave me a blank look. “Who?”

Jesus Christ. “The shooter’s.”

There it was again – that little fleeting look of unease on Dan’s face. “Why you want to know that?”

“Because I’d like to know the name of the asshole who tried to kill Benjy.”

Dan waved his hand dismissively. “I don’t remember.”

“Well then why don’t you fucking look?” I growled, pointing at his computer monitor.

Even though I wasn’t the President of the Riders anymore, I was still a scary motherfucker. And Dan Peters was, at heart, a coward.

He swallowed hard, then turned to his computer and tap tap tap came up with a name. “Emilio Gonzalez.”

Emilio Gonzalez. I thought about going to see Benjy again. At least I could tell him the name of the guy who’d shot him, and assure him the asshole was dead.

Dan must have taken my brief silence for some kind of weakness, because he finally grew a pair. A small pair, anyway.

“If that’s all, Jack, I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” he snapped, the smiley bullshit a distant memory. “I got a busy day ahead of me.”

Figuring out how to squeeze the biggest bribe out of Lou, no doubt.

“Alright,” I said, then walked to the door without another word.

As I left, I glimpsed a brief, fleeting look of hatred on his face.

Good.

I vowed to see that look on his face as often as I could, until his sorry ass got fired. And hopefully thrown in jail.

And if he got shot, I wouldn’t mind that, either.