A sense of dread filled me as I got dressed for my meeting with Jeremiah the following morning. It was good to be home, though I had to realize that I was still not that far out of Damian’s reach. It wasn’t as if I lived in another city, just a part of it that I doubted he ever had reason to be in. My house was situated in a quiet cul-de-sac in a neighborhood that was about as upper middle-class suburbia as one could get. It wasn’t exactly the kind of place you’d find the leader of a notorious motorcycle gang hanging out for a fun weekend.
Looking at myself in the mirror, I saw someone I hardly recognized. I reached up and pulled the cosmetic lenses I had purchased for my time at the casino from my eyes. The dark brown veil that had covered my pale blue eyes went into the waste basket nearby as I frowned at my dark locks. Those would need to go too. In the meantime, I pinned them up and retrieved a hat to cover them.
Sitting down at my computer, I took a quick inventory of my bank account. I was happy to see that it was still fairly well in the black since I had been living off my income from the casino while working there and had only had to utilize my account to pay my mortgage and utilities while away from the house. Of course, I would have to buy my neighbor, Mrs. Peaches, something nice to thank her for checking on the house and plants for me in my absence.
I dreaded getting acclimated again with my neighbors. There would be questions. I had told Mrs. Peaches that I’d be traveling abroad. They would want to see pictures of my travels, hear tales of my adventures. Then, there would be those who had not seen me to give their condolences regarding my father. During his last days, he had stayed here with me, having been tossed out of yet another shitty little apartment in the city slums.
Despite his usual company and habits, my father had been a charming man, capable of fitting in with any crowd, and my neighbors had been quite taken with him. I suspected that he may have even been romantically involved with one of them, a widow who mostly kept to herself, but seemed to always make a point of coming out of her yard to speak to him when he went out for walks. Whether it was a mild flirtation or something more, I was uncertain and I had never seen fit to delve into it further.
Remembering that I had promised Jeremiah coffee, I gathered myself up and headed out to the rental car to take to his office. I would need to drop it off and grab a cab back. I had forgotten to even check on my own car in the garage. Mrs. Peaches had agreed to start it for me and drive it around the block every once in a while to keep it in good order, so hopefully it was fine. I was grateful not to encounter any neighbors as I climbed into the driver’s seat and headed into the city.
“Good morning, Janessa. It’s good to see you again. You’ve done something different with your hair. I like it.”
“Thanks. Don’t get used to it.”
“Is that for me?” he asked with a big smile, noting the Grounds for Life cup in my hand.
“Yes. Yoga pant coffee from the local dispensary, per your request.”
“You’re a peach. Thanks for that. Come on, let’s go into my office and we’ll talk.”
I followed him down the long corridor that led to his cramped little corner of the large organization in which he worked. He sat across from me, pulling out a file and laying it on the desk in front of him.
“Do you want to see the tape?” he asked solemnly.
“No.”
“I didn’t think you would, but I thought I would give you the opportunity. It will be played in court and if you choose to attend the trial, you will see it there. I didn’t want it to be the first time you were watching it in the front of a lot of people.”
“I don’t want to see it until I have to,” I replied.
“I understand.”
“So, what do we need to talk about? I’m anxious just to get life back on track and would like to get this as much behind me as I can.”
“Well, nothing formal, since you went in as an agreement between the two of us rather than as a witness for the department, but I do need to go over with you anything that you’ve found out that might benefit our investigation. That was our agreement. You give me what you can, and I would support you in your efforts and help you as much as I could to find out who killed your father.”
“Yes.”
“You should know that I’m aware that you developed a relationship with Damian Diaz while you were working in the casino.”
“I have no relationship with D. It was all only ever a part of my attempt to unearth my father’s killer. Now that you’ve done that, there is no need for me to be there or associate with him any longer.”
“I’m relieved to hear that. I was concerned that you might have been compromised. Damian Diaz isn’t the sort you’d ever want to be so closely associated with. I can assure you of that. It is well known that he killed his own brother to step into the role he holds now.”
“Brother? I don’t recall reading anything in the files you gave me about a brother.”
“It isn’t something you would find there, as they weren’t blood related. Damian’s mother had a string of boyfriends. One had a son named Zach Sharpe. He and Damian were about the same age. They ran together as teens, got into trouble with petty theft, drugs, vandalism. It was Zach who first joined the Black Aces when they were seventeen. Damian followed right behind him.”
“He never mentioned him.”
“I would guess not. Probably a hard pill to swallow when you kill your brother.”
“What can you tell me about him?”
“Zach, they called him Cash Sharpe, was the original leader of the club’s right hand after a bit of time. He acted as an enforcer, a collector. The club had agreements all over town, money paid to them in order for protection from other clubs and gangs. Cash got greedy. He upped their pay outs without club sanction and kept the difference in what the club expected and what he was actually skimming from the business owners.”
“He stole from the club, then,” Janessa replied, the dollar sign on Damian’s chest and what he had said surfacing in the back of her mind.
“Yes. The leader found out and decided to make an example of him. He offered Damian a position of authority in the club, but only if Damian was willing to do what was asked of him.”
“And D did.”
“That’s how the story goes. It’s never been proven, of course. Things rarely can be with a lot like that, but we do manage to get people in here and there or to get people to talk. They say that Damian and Zach were taken out to a field, along with some of the higher ranking club members. Neither knew what was coming. The leader had only told Damian that something would be expected of him, and he would know what that was when the time came.”
“They made him kill someone he considered a best friend, a brother even.”
“A witness says that once they reached the field, Zach was put on his knees and questioned about the money he had taken with a gun to his head. There was another put to Damian’s head. He confessed that he had taken the money, but claimed that Damian had nothing to do with it. Whether he did or didn’t is unknown, but the gun at Damian’s head was pulled away and handed to him. He was ordered to shoot Zach, and he did.”
“He had no choice, then. If he hadn’t, they would have shot him.”
“Perhaps. Kill or be killed, but the witness said that he never hesitated. Never even looked like it bothered him as he pointed the gun and shot a man he saw as family in the head at point blank range.”
“I think you’d be surprised to know that it did bother him.”
“How so?”
“He has a dollar sign, a symbol of money, tattooed on his chest.”
“Perhaps it is just a souvenir, a reminder of what was most likely his first kill.”
“No. It is regret.”
“And you know this how? Did he tell you he killed Zach?”
“No. He merely told me that he hadn’t had his back and because of that, he had died, but he didn’t refer to him as his brother or call him by name. He called him his best friend. It was obvious that he was important to him.”
“So important to him that he killed him in order to impress the leader enough for a promotion.”
“You said yourself that you can’t prove it. How reliable is your witness? How do you know that he isn’t the one who shot Cash and just laid it off on Damian?”
“Because my witness was undercover DEA with no reason to lie about it. His name is Samuel Robinson. You might know him as Jack Knife.”
“What? Jack Knife was DEA?”
“Yes. He went in fresh out of the academy and was in there for years undetected.”
“That’s why he was off to places that D knew nothing about. He was making contact with the DEA.”
“Most likely. I already knew about the cabin you told me about. He used it as a meeting place from time to time. It never drew suspicion for one of our female agents to meet him at a bar and then go home with him, or so it would seem to the casual observer.”
“And the BDSM chamber?”
“Well, Samuel did have the place at his disposal for whatever he chose to do with it. I don’t know if that was just there for show to keep people from nosing about too much. You know, setting it up to look like he was a real freak show, and it was best no one bother him too much when he was there.”
“He made videos of some of the things he did there with women and showed them to people.”
“Did he? Don’t believe all that you hear or that what people see is really what is going on. You’d be surprised how clever we DEA agents can be when we want to paint a picture of someone.”
“A picture vivid enough to get him tortured and killed.”
“Are you sure about that?”
I watched as he pushed a button on his phone and spoke into the speaker, asking someone to come down to his office. I looked at him blankly and he smiled, holding up a single finger as if to tell me to just wait. A knock at the door behind me sounded.
“Come in,” Jeremiah said and I turned to find myself looking up at the tall, hulking figure of a man in a suit. He looked familiar, but it took a moment to realize that he had only changed cosmetic things about his appearance. I was looking at Samuel Robinson.
“Nice to see you again, Janessa,” he said with a smile.
“How? You’re dead.”
“I don’t feel dead.”
“I don’t understand. They found you. They said you had been brutalized.”
“All set up with the right people. I’m very much alive, though I do feel a bit like a ghost with the limitations on how much I can go out in public.”
“Samuel is being relocated soon. He has some loose ends to tie up before he goes. A lot of the information he has provided us over the years has had to be kept quiet and can only now be brought out. Once they find out he is alive, he will have a huge target on his head.”
“Why now? Why did you pull him out after so long?” I asked Jeremiah, but Samuel answered.
“My position was compromised by the group of members that is trying to overthrow D. They wanted me to choose sides. I had to choose Damian in order to maintain my trust with him and keep doing the work I had been sent in to do. When I did, they threatened me. Some of them were tailing me everywhere. They had me in a corner that I couldn’t get out of. The DEA decided to kill me off before they did a more permanent job of it.”
I turned back toward Jeremiah again, my eyebrows raised in his direction. Something didn’t make sense about all of this. I was beginning to feel uneasy, used, not to mention the embarrassment of having fucked Samuel thinking he was a member who could help me.
“Why did you send me in there if you already had someone so close to him?”
“I didn’t send you in there, you insisted upon going. I couldn’t very well tell you about him. I figured you were going with or without me, so I might as well try to keep you safe. For all I knew, you might get incredibly lucky and learn something useful.”
“But I didn’t learn anything you didn’t already know.”
“Not true. There were some things that went on outside of Samuel’s knowledge that you were able to clear up for us and you seemed to have gained a level of trust with Damian very quickly that even Jack Knife hadn’t achieved in years of being undercover.”
I felt everything go red for a moment as a realization struck me. I shot up out of my chair and turned to face Samuel “Jack Knife” Robinson.
“You knew. You knew who I was before I even turned up there.”
“Yes.”
“You son of a bitch.”
“I’ve been called worse.”
“We’re done here.”
I was fuming as I picked up my purse and headed for the door. Jeremiah called my name as Samuel reached back and held it firmly closed with one of his large hands. I glared at him, only causing him to smirk a little, which infuriated me even more.
“We are not done, Janessa. You and I need to have some very long talks and very soon. I’m going to let you walk out of here right now and calm down, but you’re going to come back on Thursday at this same time and we are going to have a proper interview.”
“You can’t force me to tell you anything.”
“No. I can’t, but I trust that you will honor the agreement we made. You said if I helped you find your father’s killer, you would tell me whatever you could that would help me bring down Damian Diaz. Do you remember that, Janessa? Do you still believe he is a good person beneath it all after all you’ve learned?”
“I’m leaving now.”
“Let her go, Samuel,” he said, and Samuel moved out of the way for me to open the door. I yanked it open and stomped out of the building to the parking garage, making my way to my rental car in a blind rage.
“Janessa, wait!” Samuel called out to me, but I ignored him. I could hear his footsteps catching up to me and increased my pace, hoping to get into the car and leave before he reached me, but I failed. Instead, I found his hand on my arm, whirling me around to face him.
“Take your hands off of me!” I screeched at him.
“Listen, I’m sorry. I know why you are upset. I knew who you were and still did what I did with you.”
“You fucked me like I was some sort of play thing knowing good and well who I was and why I was there.”
“Yes. I admit that I did. It was what was expected of me. I could have said no, could have put you off. The truth is that I didn’t want to. It felt good, in a way, to be with someone like myself, even if you didn’t realize it at the time.”
“I’m nothing like you. I never will be,” I huffed, stomping away and getting into my car nearby.
I didn’t look back in his direction, instead making a hasty exit. I wanted, more than ever, to put all of this nonsense behind me as quickly as possible. I didn’t care what Jeremiah said, I was never coming back to this place and never telling him anything more than I had already divulged. These people, in their own way, were just as deceitful and shitty as the men in the Black Aces MC.
“I need to calm down,” I told myself. Glancing at my watch, I discovered that much more time had passed than I had realized. It was almost eleven. Driving over to a small section of town, I pulled up in front of the salon I used to frequent and walked inside.
“Oh, my god! Janessa! I hardly recognized you!” the owner exclaimed as she looked up from where she was sorting through some papers at the front desk.
“Good to see you too, Sherry. Do you think you can work me in for a cut and color?”
“You’re in luck. I’ve had some cancellations this morning and can take you back right now.”
“Perfect. I am so ready to do something with this mop.”
“I can see how you would be. You want your usual cut and color or something different?”
“No. I’d like to get back to being me again. The usual will be great.”
I sat in her chair watching as long strands of dark hair fell onto the heavy vinyl cover she had placed over me and slid to the floor below. I had spent a long while growing out my hair even before I had gone into the casino to apply. I had purchased fake contacts online and darkened my color to a deep, dark brown. During the time I had been with D, I had slept in my contacts and feared one would fall out in my sleep. It had been nice to finally take them out and toss them away. It would be even nicer to look completely like my old self again.
“There. How’s that?”
Sherry turned the chair to face the large mirror in front of me and I smiled. There I was, shoulder length layered honey blonde hair and blue eyes, the vision of the girl next door rather than the hooker in the seedy casino. This was me. This was who I once was. Looking in the mirror, I realized that I looked like myself again, but I still didn’t feel like myself. I wasn’t sure that I ever would again.
“It’s perfect, as always, Sherry. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, honey. It’s good to see you again. Hopefully you won’t be such a stranger in the future.”
“Oh, you can count on it. I’ll see you for a trim in a month or so.”
“Sounds good. Have Jill at the counter go ahead and set that up for you if you want or you can call later.”
“I’ll do that. Thanks again.”
“Hey, it’s what we do here.”
I smiled at her and paid Jill at the counter, making an appointment for six weeks from today. Stepping out on the front sidewalk, I already felt better. I slid behind the wheel of the car and headed down to the rental place to return it. Thirty minutes later, I had all that sorted and was on foot. I enjoyed the warm day, a nice breeze blowing through my hair as I made my way down the sidewalk toward a small café where my father and I used to eat. Walking inside was like a ripple in time. Nothing had changed since the last time I was there.
“Janessa! It’s been so long,” Mr. Carroway, the aging manager said with a big smile when he saw me. “Let me get you a table. Will your father be joining you?”
“No, Mr. Carroway. I’m afraid my father passed.”
“Oh, I am so sorry to hear that, my precious girl. He was always a joy to have here. I am glad that you’ve finally returned on your own, at least.”
“Thank you.”
“You are welcome. Right this way.”
I followed him in the awkward silence that I knew would be repeated with various people for some time to come and sat at the small single table near a window. The city looked different to me, somehow foreign, like it had when I had first come here from the farm to live with my father. Everything seemed new, waiting to be discovered again.
“Will you be having your usual?”
“You remember what that is?”
“Of course. I’ve a mind like a steel trap. There’s a bit of rust, mind you, but I just dust it off from time to time and the details are still there.”
“The usual will be fine.”
He excused himself and returned moments later with a small dinner salad and a glass of lemon water, waiting on me personally despite the wait staff who seemed fairly unfettered with the small crowd being served. Ten minutes later, he returned with a plate of spaghetti and warm toasted garlic bread that would make the finest Italian restaurants envious of its presentation and taste.
“Oh, this looks wonderful. I’ve missed it.”
“It has missed you. I’ll be right back with a nice pitcher of sangria for you,” he replied as he removed my salad plate.
“I never ordered sangria with my usual.”
“No, but you should have. It’s on the house.”
“Thank you, Mr. Carroway. It is good to be home again.”
“Home is always one of life’s greatest pleasures, isn’t it? I’ll leave you to your meal.”
He returned a few moments later with a fresh wine glass and a small glass pitcher filled with cold sangria and chunks of fresh fruit, silently pouring me a glass and then disappearing with a wink. I picked up the glass and took a sip. It was like nectar compared to the shots and beer I had been consuming in the casino in the past weeks. The restaurant began filling quickly as I enjoyed my meal, listening to the happy conversations of people around me. No one realized what a great gift innocence in life could be until it was lost. I found myself envying them theirs.
“Excuse me,” I said politely, waving a server over once my meal was finished and no bill had arrived, “but I’d like to get my check, please.”
“No check for you today. Mr. Carroway said so.”
I smiled at her and nodded. I normally didn’t like charity or sympathy, but it felt good to have someone care for me even in such a small way as comping my lunch tab. I would be sure to make it up to him the next time I came in and thank him personally. Stepping back out into the sunshine, I walked a little further down the street and into a clothing shop to buy a few things. An hour later, I left with three bags and two boxes of shoes, juggling them in one hand and a crook of an arm while I hailed a cab home.