Ben

It made sense.

Finally, it made sense. The Lake of Fire wasn’t going to these lengths—hiring Jeremy, threatening Charlotte—to protect a brother, or even to protect their president. They were doing it to protect Estelle.

“That’s the club president’s old lady,” I explained to Devon and Olivia.

“Why would she commit murder?” Olivia asked.

I shook my head. I’d known Estelle for a long time, but only as an acquaintance. Both she and Kingston had kept their noses clean all these years, and I’d never had to defend either of them. I’d mostly dealt with them when we crossed paths as I defended various members of the brotherhood. “If it was revenge for someone getting hurt, then it was someone important to her. I could see her killing someone who hurt Kingston, but she wouldn’t have to. If the club president was attacked, the club would do her killing for her.”

“So we don’t know why she did this,” Charlotte said. “But we know she killed someone, and the club will do anything to cover it up.”

“I should talk to her,” I said. “Settle this. Not for money. Just settle it one on one so the Lake will leave us alone.”

“Shouldn’t she be arrested?” Olivia said. She gestured to the figure, which was paused on screen. “This is evidence of a crime. Someone is dead, the murder unsolved. This should go to the police.”

“If we turn it over to the police, there will be retaliation,” I said. “We’ll all be targets, including Charlotte and Olivia. The Lake of Fire has hundreds of members in California alone. Ratting to the cops on the president’s woman won’t go over well with any of them.”

Devon’s voice was dark, that dangerous tone I’d heard him use before. “Let them try.”

I looked at him. “Is that a war you want to take on, Dev?” I said. “You versus a biker gang? Even with all of your money and resources, are you sure you want to start this fight? Because they will fight you. Sure, in the end they’ll lose. But until that happens, they’ll fight you with everything they’ve got. And someone is going to get hurt.”

“Then what’s the answer?” Olivia broke in before Devon could get pissed at me. “Just destroy the evidence and let a killer go free?”

I sat back in my chair and scrubbed a hand over my face. Suddenly, I was very fucking tired. Why had I chosen to be a lawyer, anyway? It was the world’s worst fucking job. Why couldn’t I be a garbage man or a pizza delivery guy? I’d probably be happier.

This is what you get when you try to impress your father, but you aren’t the man he was.

“I can talk to Estelle,” I told them. “I might be the only one who can. I’ll try to negotiate a compromise where she turns herself in. If I get the full story from her, there might be a way she doesn’t have to spend the rest of her life in prison. Especially if she goes to the cops voluntarily. She just has to tell me what the hell she was thinking, and give me a chance to explain her options.”

I turned and found Charlotte looking at me. She was pale and shocked, but her slashes of brows were lowered, and her eyes were sparking fire. “You’re going to represent her,” she said.

I tried to make light of it, though my heart was heavy and my stomach was turning. “She’s going to need a lawyer, am I right?”

“Not you,” Charlotte said. Her lips pressed together, which by now I knew meant I’m getting pissed at you, Ben Hanratty. “This woman,” she said, pointing to Estelle’s figure on the screen, “this biker chick murderer—she doesn’t get you. You’re better than that. You always have been, and now you don’t have to represent scum anymore. So she doesn’t get you.”

Fuck. Even though she was mad, I wanted to pick her up and kiss her, but that would have just pissed her off more. “I have to do it,” I told her gently. “Because I’m the lawyer who has seen this footage, and I’m the lawyer who knows the Lake of Fire. And if I don’t make the offer, then I’m an enemy of the club. Which makes you an enemy of the club. I’m the one who can stop it.”

She blinked, hard. “You’re doing this for me.”

What did she think? Of course I was doing it for her. I could have told her that. I could have told her that I wasn’t just doing her a favor anymore, because she’d come to my door and asked. I could have told her that there was no deal, no trade between us anymore. That there was just her and me, and if I had to go through the Lake of Fire to get to her, I’d do it without a second thought. But time was ticking, and Devon and Olivia were watching. So I said, “It’s just a case, that’s all. Easy. Everything will be fine.”

Charlotte bit her lip.

“Set up a meeting,” Devon broke in. “But you don’t go without backup. Me and Max, at least.”

That made sense; it would show Estelle and Kingston that I wasn’t fucking around. “I’ll set it up,” I said. “But no cops. Not yet. Not until I talk to her first, try and persuade her to turn herself in.”

“Should you be wired?” Devon asked.

I shook my head. “She won’t talk if I’m wired. Besides, she has a right to lawyer-client confidentiality.”

I wasn’t looking forward to it. Fuck, I really didn’t want to do it at all. But this was my finale with the Lake of Fire. After this, we were done.

So I picked up my phone, scrolled through my numbers, and dialed one. She answered right away.

“Ben,” Estelle said.

“Estelle,” I said. “Let’s talk.”

* * *

We met on a park bench on the edge of a small local park. Estelle had wanted to meet in the club house, but no way was I doing it on Lake territory. I wanted to meet in a bar, but Estelle didn’t trust that I’d have no one listening in. So we ended up on the bench, at five o’clock as the shadows got long. In the parking lot of the closed-up tire shop on the corner, out of earshot but well within view, two bikes were parked, their riders leaned against them smoking, casually watching us. One of them was Kingston, the club president. Estelle had brought her own backup.

My backup—Devon, Max, and Charlotte in a black SUV with tinted windows—was parked across the street. At least, I figured, the Lake of Fire wouldn’t kill me outright while the kids played on the jungle gym in the park thirty feet away.

“Okay,” Estelle said as she sat down next to me. She was wearing jeans, a halter top, and a heavy gray sweater against the chill. Her hair was tied loosely up as usual, blonde tendrils trailing down her neck. I didn’t know exactly how old Estelle was, but she was at least forty; she was agelessly beautiful, except for the lines around her eyes. Those lines were hard, like they were chiseled from stone. “Let’s put our cards on the table here. I take it you’ve seen the footage, and the kid wasn’t lying when he said he had a copy.”

“He wasn’t lying,” I agreed. “I’ve seen it.”

“Then what do you want?” She looked me up and down. She was jumpy, and mad. I’d have to keep calm. “Money?”

“No.”

“Sex?”

“Jesus, Estelle.”

She shrugged. “I didn’t think so, but I had to ask. That’s never been your way, but you never know with people.”

I shook my head. I’d never gone for biker girls, or club hangers-on, even in my every-ninety-days years. Which were officially over. “What I want,” I told Estelle, “is to know why you did it.”

Her body was stiff, brittle as glass. “Why do you want to know that?”

“Because I’m a lawyer, and you need one.”

“I’m not hiring you.”

“No?” I said. “Who’s a better candidate? The guy the club has on retainer right now works for coke. You gonna trust your life to him?”

“He’s useless,” Estelle agreed. “You’re the best lawyer the club has ever had. But I’m not hiring you, because I don’t need a lawyer. What I did was justified. He had it coming.”

“Peter Corello,” I said, naming the murder victim. Like I said, it had only taken me a few minutes to get the information I needed. “Also known on the street as Viper. A pretty unoriginal nickname, and overblown for a punk like him. Two years in juvie, records sealed, and then a couple of busts as an adult. Breaking and entering, possession. Bothered a fourteen-year-old girl until she filed a restraining order against him. A real nice guy, from the sound of it.”

Estelle stared straight ahead at the traffic passing by, the people passing us on the sidewalk. She didn’t speak.

“It’s interesting,” I went on. “The case of the fourteen-year-old girl. It’s sealed up tight, because she’s a minor. No names in the usual record search except for Corello’s. But I know a woman in the court records department”—February, three years ago, though both of us never spoke of it again—“and she dug deeper for me. She gave me the girl’s name.” I watched Estelle’s profile. “But I don’t need to tell you that name, because you already know it. She’s your daughter.”

Estelle spoke through gritted teeth. “Jesus, Ben. Why can’t you just be a useless cokehead?”

“Sorry,” I said. “But when your guys follow my woman around, trying to scare her, I get fucking mad. And I start to dig.”

“That was a mistake,” she admitted. “We thought you brought her to the club house for show. We thought that if anything was going on, you were just fucking her, like you’ve been doing for years. The lone wolf. We didn’t think…”

She didn’t finish the sentence, though I waited. So I said, “You thought wrong.”

“Obviously.” Estelle took a breath. “King and I don’t bring our daughter into the club life. We leave her out of it. Maybe when she’s older, if she wants. But she’s too young, too precious.” She glanced at me. “Her name is Lisa, but you already know that.”

I nodded.

“We keep her out of the life,” Estelle said, “but she isn’t a secret. Viper isn’t a brother, but he’s had dealings with the club. He learned about Lisa. It turns out he’s a sick fuck, and he wouldn’t leave her alone.”

I listened, and I didn’t speak. I’d been in this situation hundreds of times. The client doesn’t want to talk, and then the words start. When that happens, you just sit and listen.

“He’d show up outside her school,” Estelle said. “He’d follow her. He tried to message her on Facebook, so we deleted her account. I got her a phone—you know, for safety, because she’s fourteen. Somehow he got the number and he started texting her.” Her eyes were hard, so hard. “Lisa was scared. But her father is the president of the fucking Lake of Fire. We came down on him, and he got a beating one night. The restraining order was my idea—I wanted something on record about the harassment, because if he didn’t stop, I was going to kill him, and nothing and no one was going to stop me.”

“He didn’t get the message?” I asked.

She shook her head. “He was outside her school again last week, just like before. Trying to talk to her, get close to her when she stepped outside. The teachers called the police, but that didn’t matter to me. I came and took her home. King was going to get the brothers together for another run at him, but I didn’t want that. I took White Castle with me. We went to his house. He was smoking a cigarette on his back stoop. I put a bullet through his brain and went home.”

This was a horrible story, shocking and painful, but my lawyer brain was still working. “So the story you told Jeremy about some brother getting beat up, and the club needing retaliation, was a lie,” I said.

The look she gave me was scornful. “You think I was going to let some outsider hear about club business? He was of use to us, that’s all. Until he got it in his head to try blackmail.”

Fair enough. “We can work with this. It doesn’t have to be so bad for you. There was a pattern, a history. We can—”

“Ben,” Estelle said, “I wasn’t born yesterday. It’s first degree. I planned it, I wanted to do it, and I knew what I was doing. I wasn’t crazy or confused. It doesn’t matter what my motive was. I could still end up on Death Row.”

“No,” I said. “There are witnesses, the restraining order. The teachers called the cops on him. No state prosecutor is going to take it that far. I’m telling you, we can plea.”

But she was looking at me like I wasn’t speaking English. I risked a glance past her shoulder and saw Kingston and the other biker still watching us, still as statues except for the smoke rising from Kingston’s cigarette.

“Ben,” Estelle said again, “I want that footage.”

“That isn’t going to help you,” I told her. “It isn’t going to make this go away.”

“It is if you give me the footage and walk away from this.”

“I can’t do that,” I said. “Not right now.”

“You mean not ever.” She stood up, crossed her arms over her chest. At the end of the block, Kingston shifted his posture, paying close attention. “You’re wasting my time,” she said. I could see now that she was stretched to the limit, her hands shaking so hard she was pressing them against her arms to keep them still. “If you’re not for me, then you’re against me,” she said.

I stayed where I was, sitting down, so I wouldn’t seem like a threat to her. “Estelle,” I said as calmly as I could, “I’m not the problem here.”

“You’re in the way between me and my freedom,” she said. “So yes, you are.”

It was quick. Too quick, and too unexpected. She had a gun in her waistband, beneath the bulky sweater, and she pulled it out. We were so close that she didn’t even have to have good aim.

She pulled the trigger, and everything went black.