Page 12 of The Devil's Viking

“Go on then.” Wolf sighed. “Hit us with it. How did a woman end up in the back of the club cage with a steel drum full of dead-body shit?”

“The last time that I had that back door open was… was last night at the place that I… I got rid of the evidence.” Viking swallowed hard. “After that, I was in the van driving for hours on end.”

“You stopped somewhere?”

“Yeah, once at a crappy roadside café place, but the van was locked. No way she snuck in there.”

“So,” Scars said. “She climbed in when you were –”

“Disposing of Brian Fielding,” Viking supplied. “Yeah. Exactly.”

“Where was this?” Ice spoke for the first time that whole morning. “I know we aren’t supposed to know your dump site secrets, but we’re long past that now, right?”

Wolf nodded. “Damn right.”

“Utah,” Viking said reluctantly. “In the woods around the Uinta Mountains, about five miles from Takoma Ridge.”

“Utah?” Wolf repeated, incredulous. “Fuckin’Utah? Fuckin’ Crusher Alcott’s stompin’ ground? Fuckin’ Crusher Alcott who knows that Brian Fieldin’ was here in Denver, lookin’ for Jo? Fuckin’ Crusher Alcott who we’re hopin’ hard doesn’t come lookin’ for answers where Jo’s ex is?”

“Yeah,” Viking said heavily. “Fucking Utah.”

“Jesus,” Scars said. “Utah and Crusher just keep popping up all over the damn place, like there’s some weird magnetic disruption that sucks us into their crap all the time. Why the actual hell would you gothere?”

“Well, first,” Viking replied. “I know that mountain area well – better than I know anyplace else, if you know what I mean. Deep forests, hard to navigate, no hikers. No reason for anyone to head out that way at all.”

The three men nodded. They might not have any clue where Viking had buried the bodies over the past decade, but they assumed that he had his best, favorite, safest spots. Apparently Utah was one such place.

“And second,” Viking continued. “I burned that motherfucker to ashes that all blew away in the wind, and buried the few small bone fragments deep, and threw the teeth out of the van window at a few different remote spots around Utah.Butif anything turns up, I thought it would be helpful to have him dead in the very state where the one-percenter MC that he did some lawyering work for is located.”

“Huh.” Wolf cocked his dark head. “You were thinkin’ about the connection between Alcott’s Highway Hellions and Fieldin’ as somethin’ positive, not negative after all?”

“Yeah,” Viking said. “He did work for them once that we know of, but who says it wasn’t more often, maybe on some really illegal and dangerous shit? And don’t MC lawyers get knocked off all the time, once they know too much or become liabilities?”

“Hmmmm,” Wolf muttered. “I mean – yeah. That’s actually –”

“Damn smart,” Ice said with rare approval. “And we can work with that, if we have to.”

“We can,” Scars agreed. “But hopefully it never comes to any of that. In the meantime…” He looked back at the woman. “What do we do withher? I mean, shehadto have seen something, right? If she got in the van at the site, then he must have seen you doing – whatever you were doing.”

“Yeah,” Wolf said slowly. “But you said that the whole reason you like that place is because nobody has any reason to be out that way.”

“Mm-hmm.” Viking nodded.

“OK, so…” Wolf stared hard at the woman in his office. “Why the hell was she way out there in the woods middle of the night, in the mountains in February? In a nightgown and oversized clothes and boots that clearly belong to a man? No pants or socks, just scarves all wrapped around her?”

“I don’t know,” Viking said. “She looks like someone on the run to me.”

“Me too.” Wolf looked at Ice. “Thoughts, man?”

“Yep. Good and bad.”

“Go on.”

“OK, well.” Ice paused. “Starting with the good thoughts: in terms of all the shit with Jo’s ex, I’m actually not worried about Crusher Alcott and his Hellions. I’m not even worried that Fielding was actually staying here in Denver with Dawson Kinney and his Blood Crew, and that there’s a connection closer to us through them. Yeah, by now they’ll all have noticed that Fielding is gone, and yeah, they’ll wonder why. For about ten minutes. Then they’ll either figure that he fled the country to get away from the federal investigation into him, or that he’s dead, maybe courtesy of us. Either way, they won’t worry about any of it too much.”

“But blackmail?” Scars asked. “Isn’t this something they could hold over our heads, that Fielding went missing right at the time he was looking to hurt Jo?”

“Why would they?” Ice said sensibly. “Blackmail is useless without leverage and whatever leverage that exists is scattered all over fucking Utah. Viking is a damn good body man – how many people did we disappear over the years and everyone in the MC world knew it was us, and nothing happened because there was nothing to be found? I think this whole thing will just blow over with Alcott and Kinney. Suspicions about what happened to Fielding are fine and good, but proof is impossible to get their hands on. Viking is too good for that.”

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