Page 3 of Truths

They better make it quick. If not, they all may pass out from heat exhaustion in the poorly ventilated room. Times like this oddly bring his mind to Dani. Most times bring Dax’s mind to his dead wife, but especially like this. They’d been stuck in a stuffy cabin hiding out from the cops once, and they’d made good useof the space. Made it even hotter and stuffier. God, he misses her.

“So, what'd you find?” Dax asks the original President. “I can't imagine you'd all haul your asses out here if nothing was found.”

Jennings stares at him with his long, brown hair from across the table. He nods towards a muscular man with a shaved head sporting tattoos of skulls. Dax finds it strange to have skulls tattooed on a skull, but it's not his skin.

“Brock?” Jennings asks.

Brock Bradshaw. The resident tech wizard and man in charge of most of their information and electronic needs. Besides Brock, Dax knows the club has an outside man to help. A private investigator who used to be a police officer. It still feels questionable to have a relationship with someone from the right side of the law, even if he no longer works for the 'good guys.'

“As you know, after all the shit that happened with Black Valley, we've done extensive background checks on all of your men.”

Troy Savage was a prospect in Black Valley who belonged to the Savage Slashers. He helped kidnap and torture Lex as well as three other women of the club.

Unlike Black Valley, I have my shit together. I know my men. Whatever they think they found is bullshit.

Motion along the wall gets Dax's attention, and he looks at Mickey Fields. The man is nothing short of silent, and sometimes Dax forgets he's even a member. The way he presses himself against the wall as though he might become one with it looks more than a little suspicious.

Jennings notices, too, because he says, “You must be Mickey.”

“Yes, sir,” Mickey says, a slight drawl sounding odd to Dax. Maybe he doesn’t know everyone as well as he thinks.

“Do you want to tell everyone what we found, or do you want us to?” Brock asks.

Dax looks at his Vice President, Graham Finnegan, and he's relieved to see the man looks as confused as Dax feels. Finnegan shakes his head and asks, “What did you find?”

Sighing, Mickey looks at the ground. “Mickey Fields isn't my real name.”

“Say what?”

“It's Jason Dunlap,” he says. “Here's the deal, okay? I’m not a plant, and I'm not trying to harm anyone. I'm here for my own safety. Kind of like my own witness protection.”

Jamie “Mac” McBride shakes his head from Dax's right. The Sergeant at Arms looks like a fish as he opens his mouth and closes it a few times before he finds the words he searches for. “What-what are you hiding from?”

“I'm... well-educated. Like, I'm technically a doctor. I have a PhD in chemistry. I contracted with the military, and somehow, my name got passed along to a mobster. Have you heard of Victor Moreno?”

Jennings laughs. “You pissed off Moreno?”

“Kind of. He wanted specific explosives to take out a competitor as well as Feds closing in on him under RICO. What he asked felt more like a terrorist attack, and I refused. Besides, I never got into that line of work to blow up people.”

“Why not go to the military you were working with?” Finnegan asks with a shrug that saysidiot.

Swallowing, he looks at the ground. “They're the ones who gave Moreno my name. They were in his pocket. They would have benefited from the perceived attack, and I just... it didn't feel right.”

“So, did you end up creating anything for him?” Brock asks.

Shaking his redhead, he sighs. “No, and when I said no, he threatened me. Then word got around to his competitor what Moreno was planning. The guy came to me offering more thanMoreno had for something similar. But the real fun came when the cops got involved.”

“They wanted a bomb, too?” Jennings asks, obvious doubt in his voice.

“No, but each side had cops in their pockets. So I had cops trying to convince me either way, and I knew I had to leave if I had any hope of staying alive. And the only way to leave was to die.”

“You faked your death,” Brock says as a statement rather than a question.

Why the fuck don’t they just say what we need to know? We’d be out of here a hell of a lot quicker.

Mickey nods. “If you look up Jason Dunlap, you're going to find that he went to Louisiana to visit family. While he was there, he drowned and was eaten by alligators. On my way out this way, I found an abandoned hospital and combed through the records left behind. That's when I found Mickey Fields. He was the first guy I found who was around my age, dead, and wasn't a lunatic.”

“Jesus,” Brock says and chuckles. “Assuming this is all true, that's a fucked-up story.”

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