Page 18 of Sully

Anyone familiar with the deep well of loneliness that had been plaguing me for the past several years would understand that it was those simple words, that promise of no longer being alone, that had me agreeing.

“Okay.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Sully

I expected to need to do a lot more convincing. Everything about this girl said she was timid, shy, and wary of strangers. And I was not only a stranger, but the reason she had a suicide vest strapped to her body.

That said, she’d mentioned having no friends or family, no partners. She was all alone in the world. No one, least of all a girl with a lot of anxiety, wanted to go through shit like this alone.

Especially since we didn’t know if this was random for her or targeted. Clearly, for me, someone had a grudge.

“So, do you want me to take you ho—no?” I asked when she immediately started to shake her head. “You wanna hang here tonight?”

“Yeah,” she said, brows scrunching at her own admission. Like she didn’t understand why she would make that decision. “I mean I… oh no,” she gasped, throwing off the blanket.

“Whoa. What’s up?”

“Work. I should be at work,” she said, but she wobbled the second she got to her feet.

“Honey, there’s no work today. I didn’t even clean up your head yet,” I reminded her, gently placing a hand on her shoulderand pressing her back down on the chair. I didn’t like how pale she looked when she was on her feet. “How about I call you out of work, okay? Say you had an accident and hit your head. It’s not a lie.”

“But...”

“Hey, your boss did it without you before, right? She can handle it for a day or two. Let me just go see if your phone was in your—“ I said, but was cut off by a light knock at the door. “One sec,” I told her, moving out into the hall to find several of the guys standing around.

We’d decided that trying to interrogate her in a crowd would be too much for her. So Fallon and Brooks decided that listening outside of the door would have to be good enough.

“The car was where she said it would be,” Perish said when I closed the door. “Found this in it,” he went on, holding out a big crocheted bag done in a bunch of granny squares. I’d bet good money on her having made it herself. “Phone’s in it,” he added.

“Good. Anything else in the car?”

“Found the fake detonator,” Callow said. “But it was just a fucking piece of plastic with a damn pencil eraser glued to it. Guess to someone who doesn’t know better, it might look like the real thing.”

“Before you ask, I didn’t see any prints on it,” Nave said. “I mean, we will look closer. But it seems like he wore gloves.”

“We’ll have to look over every part of the vest, too,” Fallon said. “For any kind of trace evidence. If we find anything solid, we could try to have Junior hack into the NBPD to trace a print. Or have someone in our pockets run it.”

“Okay, sounds good,” I said, reaching into the bag to grab her phone, having to dig past two paperback books, a plastic baggy filled with paper garbage, two random paintbrushes, and a sewing kit. “Anything else you want me to ask her right now?”

“I’ll let you know if we think of anything,” Fallon said. “The OG guys are heading in,” he told me, nodding. Because you knew shit was feeling serious when the retired members of the club felt like it was necessary to get their hands on deck too.

“Probably a good thing. Have a lot of experts in that crew,” I said.

“And Chris is bringing two of her bomb experts in to check out that vest… see if they see something you didn’t.”

Maybe I should have been insulted at that. But at the end of the day, while I was what this club had as a bomb expert, I was by no means the best of the best. Chris up at Hailstorm had people on her crew who specialized in that shit for years before they left the service. She was who the club should be calling with something like this.

“And Aunt Janie,” Nave said. “I mean, she tinkers with bombs for fun. So…”

“Yeah, anyone who can offer some information,” Fallon agreed. “Might be able to shrug off a drive-by or something like that. But a bomb?”

“Yeah,” I agreed.

“We’re gonna need to have a sit-down with you too,” Fallon told me. “See what skeletons you might have in your closet.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. Even if I’d been racking my mind to try to think of anyone who would want me dead. And in such a splashy way. “But I’m gonna call Bonnie out of work and clean up her head wound first, if that’s alright.”

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