Outcasts MC (Complete Series), page 31
“Look, calm down. We’ve been here for two years, and the shop is doing better and better all the time, isn’t it? Clearly, we get the work done.”
John grumbled something under his breath, but sure enough, he didn’t try to fire us. He did point that crooked finger at me again. “Be better,” he said. Then, he walked out, the door slamming shut behind him.
I exhaled a noisy breath and looked back over at Lacey. “What a piece of work,” I declared.
Lacey gave me a look and didn’t comment. I knew she was probably thinking about how John could have known about that morning. She was worried that he had the place bugged or something, that he could hear our conversations. Even if he couldn’t, she wouldn’t say anything bad about him.
She thought she needed this job, after all. I just wished I could convince her that she didn’t deserve to be treated like she lived in some communist dictatorship or something. If John really was listening in on our conversations, without our knowledge, I was pretty sure that was illegal. Wasn’t it?
Anyway, I didn’t think he actually was. He was probably just guessing I had been late that morning, and since he had seen me clocked in at the same time as Lacey, he had guessed that she had logged me in. Simple as that. But he didn’t have any proof, so he wasn’t going to fire us.
“You ready to go to dinner?” I asked Lacey as we finished cleaning up the shop and getting everything ready for the next morning. “I hear a slice of buffalo chicken pizza calling my name. Maybe two slices.”
Lacey laughed. “Yeah, let’s get out of here,” she said, pausing to lock the door behind us.
But she wasn’t done thinking about John. “You know, you shouldn’t be so rude to John,” she said as we brought our slices of pizza back to our table.
“He’s not going to fire us; you know that,” I said, shaking my head. “Like I said to him, we’ve worked there too long. Do you know what it costs to hire a new employee? Between the paperwork and training and everything else, it would be a waste for him to fire us. Trust me.” I paused, debating whether I should add on the second part: John was only mad at her because he was mad at me. If anything, he would fire me and not her, but I could take care of myself. I knew that would open myself up to her questions, though.
Lacey shook her head. “You act like you don’t need this job at all,” she accused.
I shrugged. “We’ll find other jobs if he fires us. You’d make a great secretary.”
That got Lacey to roll her eyes again. I knew what she thought about that line of work. “I don’t want to be a secretary,” she said. “I don’t want to be on the phone all the time. I want to be there in a shop, face-to-face with the customers. You know that.”
“I know,” I said, nodding at her. “But why a bagel shop, of all places? You could be anywhere.”
Lacey grinned. “I’m not planning on working in the bagel shop forever,” she admitted. “Just for a little while longer.” She leaned in closer, as though she thought that John could hear the two of us, even here. “Actually, I’ve been saving up to go to beauty school.”
“No way!” I said, actually surprised. It wasn’t like Lacey to keep something like that from me, and somehow, I hadn’t even noticed. I wondered just how close she was to having the money she needed.
“Yeah, I just need another five thousand dollars,” Lacey continued. She shrugged. “I know that’s a lot, but if I keep cutting corners the way I have, I’m pretty sure I can get it. Or if I could just get one decent scholarship." She shook her head. “It feels like all the scholarships these days, though, they want you to be going for something academic. Like to be a doctor or something. But we can’t all be doctors, can we? Someone’s got to be there to cut hair and that kind of thing.”
“Of course,” I said. I could imagine Lacey in beauty school, too. I could imagine her working in a salon or something. It would be right up her alley, and way better than what we had at the bagel shop.
It suddenly made a lot of sense why she didn’t want to lose this job now. If she just needed another five grand, it had to feel like she could get that in not too long. After all, she and I both pulled a lot of hours at the shop since John basically didn’t work there anymore and just paid us to run the place. And it was pretty easy work as well.
All the same, hell, five grand could take a while to save up. It wasn’t like we were getting any younger. To think I had ten times that amount in my pocket right now, money I didn’t really need at the moment, money that was just going to go straight into the bank, albeit in small amounts that the government wouldn’t question, well. Not that there was anything wrong with building up my savings, but I knew if Lacey could get her hands on money like that right now, she’d be out of Hole in the Wall so much sooner. And she’d be so happy as a beautician.
I knew Lacey would never take the money from me, though. Not even if we drew up some sort of fancy contract and made arrangements for how she was going to pay me back. Hell, she probably wouldn’t take it from me even if we agreed she would pay me an exorbitant amount of interest on the money she borrowed.
First, she’d get all worried about when she had to pay me back by. She’d be worried I would need the money, like if there was some sort of catastrophe or something drastically changed in my life. But then, she’d start worrying about if she couldn’t pay me back. She was the type of person who liked to know exactly what they had at any given point and never owe anything to anyone. You did her a favor, and she did something nice for you in return, almost immediately. To her, it was a matter of good karma.
If she started out her beautician dreams indebted to me, she would be sure she was doomed, right from the start. It wasn’t entirely logical, but there was no reasoning with her.
Of course, the other trouble was that if I was going to just pull out five grand and hand it over to her, I would have to explain to her where the money was coming from. She would want to make sure that she wasn’t caught up in some sort of terrible scheme—she had quite the imagination on her, and she’d probably imagine my money came from much worse sources than it actually did.
Maybe it was selfish of me to keep the money just so that I wouldn’t have to tell her about the other job I did, but I knew it would raise certain issues in our friendship. She would want to know why I was only telling her about it all now. Why I hadn’t told her years ago. And why hadn’t I told her? Well, because the more people who knew what I did, the more danger I was in and the more likely I was to draw the wrong kind of attention to myself—or to Lacey.
The other strain on our friendship would be the money itself. As far as Lacey was concerned, she and I lived very similar lives, just scraping by, working our asses off to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. Even if she knew I was making money in some other way, she had no idea just how much money I was making. If she knew that, she was sure to think we had nothing in common anymore, that I was too high up the social ladder to be slumming it with her, that sort of thing.
I liked to think that it wouldn’t matter, that Lacey knew me well enough that it would never matter if one of us were drastically more financially successful than the other. But at the same time, I didn’t want to make her feel uncomfortable. I didn’t want her to start thinking that maybe I would want to go to nicer places than this cheap pizza place or that grungy bar. Because I liked these places, I really did. No matter how much money I made, it wasn’t going to change me.
It was something I sometimes had to remind myself, and I guess that was the real reason I didn’t tell Lacey about my side hustle. She treated me like a normal person; she treated me like myself. And I needed that.
Still, I wanted to figure out some way I could help her. Beauty school was a big thing, a great dream, and I had the chance to help Lacey: I just knew it. And if I could help her out of this crappy living situation where we lived month to month and worried so much, I had to help her. I wanted her to have that better life.
I just couldn’t let Lacey know that the money was coming from me. There had to be some way, I was sure.
“We’ll find some way to get you the money,” I promised her. “Maybe there’s a way other than at the bagel shop.”
Lacey narrowed her eyes at me. “Don’t go getting us fired because of one of your schemes,” she warned me.
I laughed. “Of course not,” I told her. “John told us to shape up, and I promise, I’m going to try.”
Would I try my hardest to be on time for work? Probably not. But maybe I’d quit letting Lacey cover for me and take whatever punishment John had for me. I doubted it would be anything too serious. Probably he’d just make me do inventory for the next three months or something like that. Inventory was boring as all hell since I was stuck in the musty back room for hours on end, the only person there, but I could handle that.
I grinned at Lacey, and she grinned right back.
5
Victor
On Wednesday morning, I headed over to the clubhouse to start checking into the representative, our would-be client, and seeing what I could find out. I could have done the work from home, but I tended to focus better at the clubhouse with the ambient noise of the other guys coming in and out and chatting. And when things got really frustrating, it helped me cool my temper a little as well.
I knew this one was going to be frustrating too. Sure, I could find out the basic information about the guy without really even trying. But the basic information wasn’t what we needed. It wasn’t what Otis kept me on the staff for. No, we needed the deeper information. We needed to figure out if someone was paying him to look into us, either a campaign contributor or a private donor. Or if he had any sort of ties with, say, the Savages or any other motorcycle clubs.
That was the kind of information that Representative McCree wouldn’t want anyone to have access to. Not the media, not the voters. So that was the kind of information I would have to do the hacker equivalent of moving whole mountains to find.
And not only that, but I would have to be stealthy about it. We wouldn’t want anyone to know I was hacking into a government official’s information. That could get me put right back into jail, regardless of the reason I was doing it. After all, there was a lot of important information behind those firewalls that the government wanted to keep hidden.
Two hours later, I still hadn’t gotten anywhere, and I was definitely starting to feel that frustration creep in. I drained the rest of my coffee, pushing my laptop away from me in disgust.
“I guess I shouldn’t ask how it’s going?” Otis asked, sounding amused.
I jumped a little, not having realized that he had come out of his office and was watching me. I wondered how long he had been there for. Not that it mattered. Otis knew he was getting his money’s worth out of me, that the salary the club paid me was more than deserved. He knew exactly the kinds of trouble clients I’d kept us away from in the past.
And he believed I could do this. We wouldn’t even be considering accepting this job if Otis didn’t know for certain that I could adequately profile the representative before we stuck one of our men to his side for his protection.
Right now, though, I grimaced. “Having a little trouble with the firewalls,” I admitted, running a hand back through my hair. “It’s trickier than I’d expected. Trickier than it should be.”
“Which means?” Otis asked, taking a seat across from me.
I shrugged. “Could be nothing. But it could mean that whoever the representative is looking for protection from, they’re trying to make sure that no one else can find out any information about McCree, either.”
“You think he’s up to something shady?” Otis asked, frowning.
“I honestly don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. “Have to get more information before I could tell you. But that’s proving to be impossible at the moment.” I paused. “There’s a reason the guy is looking for protection from us, rather than from the Secret Service, though. I’d say this has to be government work, or at least government-paid-for work. The person who put these firewalls in place knew what they were doing. It’s not amateur work, and it wouldn’t have been cheap.”
“And you don’t think that McCree himself is the one behind all these layers of security?” Otis asked.
I shook my head. “I mean, it’s possible. But it’s clearly two different people at work trying to protect his stuff; the signatures are different. Their digital fingerprints, if you will. Think if he was just trying to keep us from seeing his information, he’d use the same guy. Fewer people getting close to his sensitive information and that sort of thing.”
“Makes sense,” Otis said, nodding sagely. He paused. “But you can get to the information, can’t you? I’m sure I don’t need to stress how important this is.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, a bit of my frustration creeping into my voice. Even though I knew Otis didn’t mean it that way, it was frustrating to have him remind me of how important this was, as though I didn’t already know.
I knew just how much was at stake, though, and being reminded of it only stressed me out more.
Just when I said that, Logan walked in the door to the clubhouse. “Whoa,” he said, looking back and forth between Otis and me. “Everything okay?”
I grimaced, giving Otis a look of apology. He was president of the club, and I knew better than to snap at him like that. We were lucky that it was Logan who walked in then and not, say, one of the Savages, searching for division in our club.
“I’m just not having any luck getting my hands on Representative McCree’s information,” I admitted to Logan. “I’m sure I can get there, but not without a stronger computer.”
I really hoped that Logan wasn’t going to ask if I had made any progress looking up his lost client, either. I had barely scratched the surface on that project since I was focusing all my time and energy on the representative and getting nowhere with either of the cases. I knew it probably didn’t matter so much, that if Logan had waited months already to get the client to pay up, a few more weeks wouldn’t hurt. But at the same time, I just wanted to solve all these different challenges.
“Well, that’s easy, isn’t it?” Logan asked, sitting down at the table with us and glancing over at Otis. “We just have to get you a stronger computer.”
“Easier said than done,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m not talking about going to the shop and just buying any old computer.”
“Ah,” Logan said, nodding his head, and I could tell that he understood.
I had dabbled in building computers for a while, but it wasn’t anything I had stuck with. Especially not since finding my place with the club. Most of the guys that came to us for protection were relatively harmless, and that meant that their important information was easy for me to get my hands on. I didn’t need many fancy tools, just a little common sense and a little bit of luck sometimes. There was a system in place, of course, but it never hurt to get a little lucky, whatever the field was.
There was only one person I knew who had the kind of computer I needed for a project like this. The trouble was, she wasn’t going to be too happy to see me.
“So what’s the plan?” Logan asked. “You have to have connections, right? Other stalker dudes with tracking devices and that sort of thing?”
I rolled my eyes but nodded at him. “Yeah, I know someone who might be able to help out. If they want to, that is.”
Logan grinned dangerously at me. “You need me to come along with you and get this guy to agree?” he asked, and I knew just what he was suggesting.
I shook my head, though. “I don’t need intimidation for this. I just need to be a little persuasive, that’s all.” I glanced over at Otis and then reached out and shut my laptop, getting to my feet. I didn’t really have a choice in the matter, after all. As Otis had reminded me, we needed this information. The sooner, the better, probably. Otherwise, the representative might go to someone else for protection.
We didn’t need a frustrated politician as our enemy. And we definitely didn’t need that hefty price for protection to go to someone else. As much as I didn’t want to make this visit, I knew I needed to.
“I’ll keep you posted,” I promised Otis before heading for the door.
I paused outside the bagel shop, looking in through the windows to see if Brittany was even in there. For all I knew, she might have moved on by now. I knew she probably didn’t need this gig. Not with a mind like hers. But she was paranoid about looking suspicious and attracting the wrong kind of attention. Holding down some sort of job helped with that, I supposed.
Me, I had Otis and the MC for protection if the wrong sort of people came after me. It wouldn’t save me from all things, but I had always been glad to have a little bit of a safety net. It meant my income wasn’t the most suspicious thing about my work.
Sure enough, though, Brittany was still there, back behind the counter. She looked the same as always, her black hair cropped short in a cute pixie cut, her blue eyes frowning behind thick-rimmed glasses. She rolled those baby blues at the man she was talking to, and I had to hide a grin as I realized it was none other than John, the owner of the shop.
No, she hadn’t changed a bit. Just as much of a smartass as she’d ever been.
John apparently finished his lecture, and Brittany threw both hands in the air, stalking out from behind the counter and heading toward one of the tables. She started clearing off dishes, anger in every line of her body. I paused outside, wondering if it might be a better idea to come back later when she had calmed down a little.
But just then, John walked out of the shop, and Brittany looked up, watching him leave. Our eyes met, and I knew that I was caught. Couldn’t turn tail and run now—she had seen me, and she would know that something was up. Better to get this over with.
