Page 32 of Claiming Veronica

He tipped his head back with a laugh. “Fuck. You’re tough. You’re right. I’m sorry. I’ve got no room to judge how you make your money or what you did in the past.” He gave me a tentative smile. “Maybe we should go on that Jerry Springer show with all our drama. We used to watch that in the clink. Jesus. We have some baggage, don’t we?

“Yeah, we do,” I agreed with a chuckle. The temptation to not tell Pike the rest of the story was there, but I’d come this far. “The whole thing with Victor. He came here because of me.”

“I figured,” Pike agreed.

“He had some twisted obsession for some reason. He’d gotten worse over the years.” I cringed a little. “He’d been fighting for the business when asked to but gone a lot, and Luther and I had been busy. He was different, darker,angrier — if that was possible. He was losing it. Luther knew it, too. We all knew it.” I swallowed hard. “I had some fighters I was scouting in L.A., so I had Victor join me to see if I could talk to him about it. Things went fine, and then, on the last day, he sprang some crazy shit on me. Brought out a box with some trophies and photos.”

“Trophies?”

“Torture scenes Pike. Worse than the shit he did here in Morinrock.” I scrubbed a hand over my mouth.

“A box. He kept what … mementos? That sounds about right. What a psycho. I’m glad you killed him.” Pike’s words were vicious but not undeserved.

“Yeah, mementos. Fingers and shit, but they were people we knew or that I knew. Nobody close to me — I should say nobody that came around a lot, but now I know why he did it.”

“He took them out,” Pike said knowingly. “Victor had a thing for you, right?”

“I hadnoidea. Totally fucking clueless until he handed me that little treasure trove of his. He wasproud.” I spit out the last word. “Victor kept his personal life personal. He’d never hinted to me that he saw me as more than a friend. Maybe because he knew what myresponse would have been. We had a few words about his whole box. I was pissed and confused.

“Rightly so,” Pike agreed. “Then what happened?”

“He said he had an idea I’d like and took off. Victor always had ideas,” I explained. “He’d split and then show up later. Sometimes, he’d be gone for months, and we wouldn’t know where he’d been.” It suddenly occurred to me that the fucker had probably been off murdering unsuspecting people all that time.

“Well, you weren’t his keeper kid.” He shrugged. “You tracked him down and then came and warned me. You helped keep the girls safe. In the end, you killed a man that you grew up with. Even if he was a psychopath, you had some good memories with him. We can’t control other people and what they do. We can only control ourselves.”

That was true. Sometimes, I needed to focus on the fact that I could only control my actions, not everyone else’s. I still couldn’t think about Victor without conflicting thoughts, and Pike hit the mark about why. There were good memories mixed with the bad. It wasn’t bad that I could still think of good times with Victor. People might change or hide dark shit from you, butthey had moments, and those moments could still be treasured.

The wind picked up, kicking up sand and brushing it against our faces, but neither of us moved. I could feel the weight of what I’d just told him settling between us, a mix of anger, sadness, and something else. Something like acceptance.

“And Ronnie?” Pike finally asked. “Are you gonna treat her right?”

“I won’t hurt her. That’s all I can say.”

“Ok, kid. That’ll do.” He reached out a hand, and for the first time, my palm met his. “You inviting me to the next fight?” I grinned in answer.

“Sure, brother. I’d love that,” The idea of my brother in the audience watching the majesty of what we’d built made me a little giddy. The business was highly lucrative. Without a doubt, I knew that Luther and I had pulled more money in the last fight than the Cobras had in the previous three years. Easy. People were crazy when it came to gambling. Dumb fuckers. “We’ll have one in Phoenix here in the next few weeks. Maybe the Cobras want to run some extra security?”

“Sure. We can work it out.” Pike didn’t show anysigns of deception or anxiety about sending his men to work with me, so I didn’t give him an out.

“Gig will pay big. We’ll have high flyers coming in.”

“I look forward to doing business with you and meeting Luther. Do you fight ever?” We’d just started for the patio door, my hand on the doorknob when he asked the last question.

“Sometimes,” I said, turning to look at him. “I enjoy it, and I’ll fight on request.” There wasn’t any way around what was on his mind. You could almost see it spinning around in there on the spin cycle. “No — that’s not my thing. I’ll fight until knock out. That’s all,” I said pointedly. He gave me an answering nod. I knew that was his question.

Even as we went back inside and Natasha looked at him worriedly, I realized that we had covered a lot of ground but hadn’t discussed Veronica. She was the real reason I was here, but Pike had chosen to talk about other issues. Hopefully, he got the information he wanted because I was all talked out.

Chapter 18

Veronica

Ispent the evening combing through everything I could find online about Luther Booth: records of fights and fighters, photos, betting, all of it. Everything linked Booth to Victor with a continuous and accessible line with no problem.

Luther was also a street kid from Seattle, making the hair on my neck tingle. He’d been a little older when he went missing, but he had never shown up anywhere for years—not to school or on police radar. It didn’t seem like anyone looked for him. He’d been shuttled between group homes and stopped showing up, and nobody bothered to look for him.

Then, suddenly, he’d popped back up with a data footprint. He’d opened banking accounts, gotten a driver’s license, and bought a warehouse. Allseemingly legitimate, but the question had been where he’d been — or at least that would have been my question. Nobody seemed to care.

As I dug deeper, another name kept coming up in conjunction with the fighting business. Havoc. Finding clips of the fights they held was next to impossible. There were some early grainy videos, but the fighters were hard to make out except for Victor, who I had no problem discerning based on his blond hair and slight build. His fight style was straight-up vicious. He was easy to tag in videos because he fought like he was going for the kill every time. Instead of dancing and dodging, Victor wouldn’t deviate from a swift attack and brutal follow-through. Most of the fighters didn’t get back up. I couldn’t help but be thankful the psycho was dead.

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