Page 55 of The Devil's Scars

“Hmmmm.” Wolf stared at the finger. “We need to get some intel, guys.”

Kansas and Cole looked up, even as everyone looked over at them. In the previous incarnation of The Road Devils, they’d been the guys who collected any info the Prez asked for. They’d had the contacts, the charm, and the smarts to cajole, tease, coax whatever they’d needed to know out of people… and then they’d had Ice, Cain, Dux, and Drake if they’d needed a different form of persuasion to get people to cooperate and talk.

“Where do we begin?” Kansas asked, all business. Like he’d never stopped being the main information-gatherer for the MC. “With the owner of the finger, or with who sent it?”

“The sender,” Wolf said without any hesitation. “Take the box, check the cameras around the businesses, check vehicles and plates. And everyone here – you think if you saw anybody around the back door of Blue Dragon, or anyone who you see now was maybe sketchy, even if you didn’t think much about it at the time. Anythin’ that you think of, no matter how small, you tell Scars, Kansas, and Cole. Am I bein’ clear?”

Everyone nodded.

“Prez?” Saint said, clearly hesitant. “A question?”

“Yeah?” Wolf nailed the man with his famous ferocious glower. “Shoot.”

“Do we – do we tell Zee about this? I mean… this box showed up at the tattoo place, right? Not Satan’s or the garage, so do you think… well. Do you think she needs to know?”

“No.” Wolf snapped the word, and the other men all nodded again, accepting the President’s decision without question. “This ain’t got nothin’ to do with Zee. The box showed up at the parlor back door because it’s the only one with no real foot traffic and no camera at all, which pisses me off now, so Jinx, you get on that. But anyway, how could anyone drop a box off at Satan’s, with all the comin’ and goin’? Or the garage, which is nothin’ but huge windows facin’ every direction? Nah… whoever it was didn’t even walk up to the parlor front door, they snuck around back. This ain’t about Blue Dragon, or its staff, or Zee. It’s about gettin’ us the message without bein’ found out.”

Scars listened to Wolf, his stomach tight with worry. Yeah, OK, what Wolf was saying made sense, on every level – but something wasn’t sitting right with Scars. A part of him wasn’t so sure that the choice of location was totally unimportant. After all, the person could have couriered the box to the clubhouse, right, put Wolf’s name on it, and had it delivered direct to the President’s desk.

So why the roundabout delivery, why risk discovery, just to leave a box on the ground where it could have been damaged or destroyed, maybe carried off by mountain animals? They came down around the clubhouse sometimes, and went through the bar dumpsters for food, so it wasn’t totally unheard of.

Maybe –just maybe – the woman’s finger was intended to be received by the only woman who worked at the tattoo place? Maybe this had something to do with Zoe’s arrival back in Denver? The timing was a bit worrying, after all, seeing as she’d shown up barely two weeks before, went on a supply ordering spree… and suddenly weird packages were appearing at the door of the business she managed? Packages with woman’s body parts?

Yeah, I don’t know. Fuck. Am I paranoid? Am I not paranoid enough? Maybe?

Then again, if Scars was thinking about timing, he had to take into consideration the fact that he and Wolf had just been to The Blood Crew’s clubhouse that very goddamn week. It was their first face-to-face with Dawson since he’d stabbed them in the back, and wasn’t it more likely that the box had something to do with that meeting than Zoe Parish?

He didn’t know. He just knew that he didn’t like it. He didn’t like thinking about some guy sneaking around the place that Zoe worked, watching and waiting, then getting so damn close to her, without her knowing. Without anyone knowing.

Because there’s something else, isn’t there? Well, two something else’s.

First, Scars was furious that someone had gotten that close to Zoe. Wolf had charged him with keeping an eye on her, and even though he suspected that the box had been dropped off while Zoe had already been home with Keira, that didn’t make Scars feel much better, or any less guilty. If somebody was skulking around Zoe’s place of work and leaving mangled body parts, then Scars needed to step the hell up.

Second – and this was the one to be careful about – Scars had feelings for the woman. Yeah, he was still good and pissed about what she’d said to him in her kitchen, and he intended to give her some space, but maybe he was jumping to conclusions just because he cared about her. Maybe he was seeing threats to Zoe personally where there were none – because Scars knew that if anything happened to her, he’d never forgive himself.

So maybe Wolf was right after all: maybe this damn box had nothing at all to do with Zoe. Maybe Scars was looking into the shadows and seeing fanged, clawed monsters, when really, what was standing there was a rock. Or a kangaroo. Or a stack of crates of vodka.

But who the fuck did the finger belong to, then?

“So,” Wolf said, his growl cutting into Scars’ confused thoughts. “We find out who sent the box, we find the poor woman who they’re probably holdin’, definitely hurtin’.”

“Any chance she’s already dead?” Scars asked softly. “That they took the finger off a corpse?”

Wolf nodded at Viking, who ambled up to the head of the table. He reached into his jeans pocket, fished out a pair of nitrile gloves from the tattoo parlor, snapped them on. Gently, carefully, he picked up the slim finger and held it up to the light, squinting at the severed nerve endings, the coagulated blood. He shook his head, his mouth angry and grim under his wild beard.

“She was alive when they took her finger,” he said, setting it back in the box. “No doubt.”

“Goddammit,” Wolf said, letting his temper get the better of him, just for a few seconds. “That’s not what I wanted to hear, man. Not that I want a dead girl out there, but you know what I mean.”

“I know.” Viking sighed, pulled off the gloves. “I wish that I could smell formaldehyde or something chemical, and then I could say that this asshole – or these assholes – maybe raided a medical school autopsy room, but I can’t. Until about four hours ago, this was attached to a living, breathing woman.”

“Wait,” Scars said, stunned, but confident that Viking was right. After all, the man’s medical and forensics background hadn’t failed any of The Road Devils yet. “Four hours?”

“Yeah,” Viking replied. “No more than that.”

“Jesus fuck,” Scars said, horrified, though also secretly relieved, because that meant that when this sick prick had dropped off the box, Zoe had definitely been home, safe and sound. Scars had followed her home and made sure of it. “But that’s good, in a way, for a sense of time. We need to look at all our security cam stuff going back no more than a few hours.”

“No,” Cole corrected him. “We’ll need to look back way farther, since no way this guy did this important of a drop cold. He’d have for sure done some scouting, and we might get lucky and see someone or a vehicle that shows up a lot over a few weeks, for short periods of time. But yeah… we start with the past four hours.”

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