Buried Biker (14 page)

She crossed her thin arms over her narrow chest and sniffed.

“I take it this man isn’t coercing you to be with him, ma’am?” Barry said.

“Of course not. I can take care of myself.”

“And that press ID is valid?”

She glared. “Definitely. I work for the
Rothsburg Register
. And I’m pursuing a story right now.”

“Okay. I just hope you’ll be careful, ma’am. Some of these criminal types can be unpredictable. And dangerous.”

“You don’t have to worry about
me
. But if you don’t stop this nonsense you might have to worry about yourselves.”

She was going to piss them off, and I’d be the one who suffered the consequences. I said, “Carissa. Shut up.”

She spun toward me, an expression on her face I couldn’t figure out. Her eyes were half-closed, and her mouth was open. She looked at me, and her tongue traced a circle over her lips.

The radio in the car crackled.

“We done here?” the other cop asked Barry, handing him my wallet and the IDs and moving to get back into the car. “We got an urgent call.”

“I guess.” Barry glanced down at the cards. “You can put your hands down,” he said to me.

Slowly I lowered my hands to my sides. Barry handed the IDs and the wallet, to Carissa. “Here you go.”

She took them, glared at him, and handed me my things.

The cops both got into the car, and it tore away, the siren winding up again.

Carissa tossed her head, grabbed me by the elbow and said, “Come on. We’re getting breakfast.”

I let her lead me away.

We walked down the street past her car and over two blocks, stopping at a trendy little coffee shop near the city hall complex. Office workers were lined up for their morning fix of legal but addictive caffeine. Carissa, still hanging onto my elbow, dragged me past the waiting line and into the back where hanging ferns were hung among mostly empty, dark wooden tables. She steered me to the back and plunked her purse on a chair beside her. She swept the coat off and laid it on top of the purse. The bit of sparkly red fabric
was
a dress of sorts. Since she was so skinny, it managed to hide all the essentials, above and below. I had a feeling a paper napkin could have done just as adequate a job.

“Take off your jacket,” she said. “I’ll go up and order for us.”

I stood there hesitating.

“You’re not going to run off on me right away again, are you?”

I probably would have if I were smart. Slipping the jacket off, I said, “I guess not. At least not right away.” I sat down and looked at the ferns hanging from the ceiling and the papers with splotches of random color all over them hung on the walls. They were in frames, so I guess they were pictures. Each one had a little price tag in the corner. $150. $200. $500. Must have been some kind of abstract artwork.

Who would spend the best part of a week’s wages for any of
that
?

Carissa came back carrying two huge steaming cups of coffee. “I ordered us strawberry crepes,” she said and giggled. “I shouldn’t really be eating anything with that many calories, especially this early in the morning, but I figured you’ve been working all night so it would be okay for you. And it sounded so good, I couldn’t resist for myself.”

Hard to believe anyone as skinny as she was would be worried about getting too many calories. I wasn’t entirely sure what crepes were, but I was hungry, and I thought I’d like strawberries. I hadn’t had any all those years in prison, and they were too expensive to even think about getting when I went food shopping.

Putting a cup in front of me, she slipped into the seat across the small table. There was hardly enough room for both of our legs under there. I tried to move mine to the side, but hers still rubbed against them.

“So.” She tilted her chin down and gave me a sideways smile. “Are you a member of that motorcycle gang?”

The coffee had so much other stuff in it—milk and whipped cream on top—that it was only lukewarm. I took a big swallow and said, “No, ma’am. They’re trouble. I try to keep my distance from folks like that.”

“Yet you were in the park with them this morning.”

“Yeah.” I took another drink. “That one guy on the trike, Old Buckles, he’s Kelly’s dad. We were talking about how she was doing.” Not the entire truth, but close enough.

She smirked. “Kelly’s dad is a biker? We’re talking the Kelly who was raped?”

If I’d realized she didn’t know that, I wouldn’t have mentioned it. Too late now. I just said, “Yeah.”

“And you didn’t know him before you started seeing Kelly?”

“No. I knew him first. We were locked up in the same medium security prison for a while.”

“So you know him from prison?”

“Kind of. I mean, we weren’t close or nothing. But he worked as a commissary clerk, and pretty much everybody had to deal with him at one time or another.”

“Were you a member of the gang
before
you got locked up?”

My criminal background was an easily accessible public record.
Weren’t reporters supposed to do background research when they were doing a feature story? By now, this wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing—she’d had plenty of time to look it up.
“I was
sixteen
when I got locked up. And I was living in Baltimore City. No, I wasn’t hanging with a bike club based in Rothsburg at that point. If they were even active twenty years ago.”

“So you hooked up with them after you were released from prison?”

I pushed my chair back and reached for my jacket. “If you ain’t gonna believe what I say, I’m sure as hell not gonna stay here and possibly incriminate myself trying to explain.”

She put her hand on my arm. “Wait. I’m sorry. Sometimes I just push too hard. That’s kind of a reporter’s job, you know.”

I didn’t know, and I was pretty sure that any reporter who was this clumsy about it wouldn’t get too far. But I dropped the jacket back on the chair.

She pulled that simpering smile again and leaned across the table, dropping her chest and throwing back her shoulders so I could see down the front of her dress. I tried to tell myself that there really wasn’t much to see, but I was getting a new understanding of the expression “moth to the flame.”

She said, “I’d like to do a feature story on that gang. What’s their name—the Preyers?”

Which sounded so much like it might be a fanatical religious group called the Prayers that I had to laugh. It broke the spell. “The Predators,” I said.

“So how would I go about getting closer to the group so I could find out what’s going on with them?”

“Not a good idea.”

She pouted. “Why not?”

“If you hang around them, they’re gonna expect things from you.”

“What kinds of things?”

May as well be bluntly honest. “Sex.”

She sat up straighter. “Sex.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s so bad about that?”

That struck me as an interesting way to look at it. “For one thing, it wouldn’t be on your terms.”

“What do you mean, ‘not on my terms’?”

“If they figure you’ve come to party and everybody gets going, nobody’s gonna
ask
you if you want to go along with whatever they want to do.”

“I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself.”

“You’re not gonna have much choice in who’s your partner. Or partners.”

Her eyes opened wide. Her voice breathy, she said, “Group sex?”

I hadn’t spent all that time in prison with various cell buddies without hearing all the gory details of how biker parties usually went. “Maybe. Or one at a time, but a lot of them. And it’s gonna be rougher than anything you’re used to.”

She sniffed. “How do
you
know what kind of sex I’m used to?”

I had to admit she had me there. “I don’t. But you don’t look like the type to go for that type of stuff.”

“I’ll have you know I like ‘bad boys.’”

Not looking at her, I nodded.

She leaned close. “You want to find out what kind of sex I’m used to?”

Alarmed, I sat up straight. “No, ma’am.” I had enough problems in my life.

A waitress arrived with two plates of crepes, placing them on the table between us. Good timing. The waitress looked too harried to have caught our conversation.

A crepe seemed to be some kind of a thin flat pancake which was rolled around a filling of strawberries and smothered in whipped cream. I took a taste. Delicious.

Carissa lifted a forkful of whipped cream, but instead of opening her mouth and eating it, she flicked out her tongue and caressed the cream.

I concentrated on my own breakfast.

“I understand the gang has a clubhouse out in the hills somewhere,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Will you take me out there?”

She just didn’t believe me. “I’ve never been there. And I’m not planning to go.”

“This is important to me.” She reached for my hand. “I
really
want to do a feature story. Maybe get out to a party there. It could be a turning point in my career.”

A turning point in her life, I thought. And not in a good way. She’d lose some of her naiveté pretty quickly if she got out there during a party. It might change her thinking about a lot of things. I said, “No.”

She pulled that pouting number and tossed her hair back.

“Look.” I pushed my now empty plate to the side and took the coffee cup. “I appreciate you buying me breakfast and all. But you can’t get involved with the Predators to do a story. You’re either a member, or it’s not safe. Even then, it might not be safe.”

“How do I get to be a member?”

This wasn’t working at all. “Only way a woman can get to be a member is to hook up with one of the men. Then it would be hard to get out of it. So just forget it. Find something else to do a feature story about.”

“Like what?”

“I dunno. Must be lots of stuff. But messing around with the Predators is
not
a good idea.”

“You mess with them.”

“Not if I can help it.” And if it wasn’t for Kelly, I wouldn’t mess with them at all. “And I got to be going.” I took the last swallow of coffee.

She tilted her head and smiled up at me. “Where are you going?”

“Home. I worked all night. I got to get some sleep.”

“Can I come with you?”

I almost choked on the coffee. Was she as hot to trot as she made out? Or would she lead me on and then pull out at the last minute? Or follow through, think better of it, and claim she’d been raped?

She was not the kind of complication I needed in my life right now. Of course I was interested—what man wouldn’t be?—but up until now, casual sex wasn’t part of my life. And I had a feeling that, even if I decided to go in that direction, Carissa would be a poor choice to start with.

Trying to sort out what was going on with Kelly was more than enough.

“No.” I got to my feet.

She made a face and stuck out her tongue.

I grabbed my jacket and left.

Chapter 8

I H
AD
T
O
P
ASS
the public library on my way home and decided to check today’s edition of the
Rothsburg Register
to see if Carissa had written any more articles that included me. Or taken any more pictures I wasn’t aware of.

As I came through the front door, Mandy Sterling, the clerk who worked at the circulation desk greeted me.

Mandy had been the person who had accepted my prison ID and copy of the lease on my apartment as adequate when I’d first applied for a library card. And she hadn’t acted like there was anything unusual about someone having a prison ID. I would be eternally grateful to her for that.

No one was at the desk to check out anything, and Mandy stood, a book in her hand, staring out the window and frowning. I went up to say hello. She wore a plain pullover sweater and a cardigan of the sort my former foster mother would have called “a twin set.” Only Mandy’s looked soft and luxurious, like it was made of cashmere. Diamonds mounted in platinum sparkled at her earlobes and a heavy matching pendant hung from her neck. Or maybe, for all I could tell, they were cubic zirconium in steel. On her, though, probably not.

Her parents had died, I remembered, and she was an only child, so she had inherited a house and lots of other nice things. She probably didn’t need to work, but I knew she didn’t have much of a social life, and the job was important to her.

As someone who had worked in a prison laundry for years for a dollar a day, I understood how important it could be to have a structured routine in life that required attendance at work on a daily basis, even if the money wasn’t important. She probably figured working was much better than being stuck home all day. I thought working for a dollar a day was better than being stuck in a cell all day.