Page 12 of Clean Hack
“No…” I said with a sigh. “This is personal.”
While it did have to do with a kidnapping this was something I needed to see through myself. This was very personal and I wasn’t beyond making sure that they knew that. I needed the best and that was why I’d called them.
“Okay,” Tristan said sounding more professional and serious. “I’ll track him down for you. Hold on, Lulee.”
“Thanks,” I managed to say before he clicked me over to the hold music.
“Lucy,” Burke said in a way of a greeting as he picked up the phone like five minutes later. “What have you got this time?”
“I need to hire you. I don’t know how long it will take and there might be more to it than what I need.”
Yeah, that was pretty cryptic. I was tripping all over myself. I hated talking on the phone and to be honest, Jason Burke scared the shit out of me. It wasn’t anything that he’d done and though I’d never met the man in person, he came off as rather intimidating on the phone. I didn’t know how he was outside of the job—if there even was such a thing in his line of work—but he was very much get-down-to-business every time I’d talked to him. But then again, it was the only reason he’d be talking to me anyway.
“I’m going to need more than that, Lucy. Specifics. How long do you think? Is it a one man job? And most importantly, whatisthe job?” I could almost hear a sigh at the fact that he’d had to say all of that. Especially since we’d done this numerous times before.
Yeah, I knew better.
But I was still a little rattled.
“I need you to get close to the head of a motorcycle club. He has a connection to a missing girl.” Well, woman. She was older than I still pictured her in my mind, I knew that, but it still always came out that way. “Allison Whittemore.”
Even as I was talking I could hear him typing away, more than likely looking for anything on who Allison was.
“These reports say she ran away almost five years ago. How do you even know if she is still alive? And what does this have to do with going undercover in a motorcycle club?” I wouldn’t have said he sounded irritated, but there was definitely something around the edge of his tone.
“She didn’t run away,” I snapped. It had been years but the fact that nothing was done when she’d been taken still pissed me right the fuck off. There was so much cover-up of the whole thing that always made me question just how much pull Mr. Whittemore had.
Her mother though, she never gave up the fight. Never believed that Allison would just run away. She knew but she was powerless to do anything. No matter how hard she tried, she just kept getting turned away. Eventually, people started to see her as going crazy. Which, in a way she was. Maybe, so was I. We just went in different directions with the whole trying to find Allison thing. I went dark, closed myself off, made a silent vow that I would figure out a way, and then began to find ways around everything.
“She was—is my best friend. We grew up together. She was taken. Or rather, her father gave her to a man named James Craig in order to pay off a debt. I’m pretty sure about that. All I know is that I was there, I saw her father stand to the side while James Craig dragged her away, tossed her in a blacked-out SUV, and drove away. I never saw her again.”
The tears were there, stinging my eyes and making me feel like I was about to sneeze. I held them back. Not because I didn’t like to cry, but because I promised I wouldn’t anymore. I wouldn’t shed any tears over this until they were happy ones. Happy because I’d found her, I’d gotten her back.
“Ah, I see,” he said in a tone that suggested he’d figured out the meaning of life. “This is where it all started. This is why…”
“Yeah,” I said, my brows pinched together in frustration. “Now you get me. Good for you, dude. Now, will you help me?” It may have come out a little more snarky than I meant for it to.
There was a pause, the still air almost ringing in my ears. Then a long, drawn-out sigh.
“Yeah, Lucy,” he said like he’d resigned himself to his fate. “You know I will. Now, I need names. Everything you have on this guy.”
As we talked and I filled him in with more detail, I was sending him everything that I had on the whole situation. Which wasn’t as much as I wished I had. That was why I’d taken so long to even get this far. I had luck to thank that he’d walked into the Dogs of Wrath compound, but then again, most of them were dead, so it wasn’t all that great.
I even had FBI files from a long, ongoing investigation. Burke knew better than to ask how I’d gotten my hands on them. I had to know everything and if they had even a whiff of where he might be, then I wanted that information. But sadly, they had about as much as I did.
I explained that James Craig went by the road name Savage and had at one point been the President of a club named The Devil’s Kings. I was pretty sure he still held that position but I couldn’t have been sure. He got that position by ending the life of the former President and promising great things to the rest of the club. A club that was already filled with disgustingly evil men. It hadn’t taken them long to bow down to their new leader. Especially after he jumped right in and fulfilled those promises. Back when he’d taken Allison, he’d had many things under his belt. Drugs. Guns. Prostitution. And even trafficking. He somehow managed to fly under the FBI’s radar because he kept his ring small and didn’t expand too greatly. But then, like most people, he got greedy. He messed with the wrong person and began to catch the eye of the wrong people. Well, wrong for him.
When the heat got too hot and too close, he disappeared. Gone. Like dust in the wind. Killing half the men in his club before he took off. I couldn’t tell you why, but if I had to speculate, I bet he thought he had a mole in his group. Maybe he did, but I couldn’t find anything out about one in the FBI reports. But it did show me that he was beyond crazy paranoid. Which was why this was going to be not only hard for Burke, but super dangerous. To get close to Savage…well, it would most likely require some things that he wouldn’t exactly be willing to do.
I was asking a lot of him.
But I couldn’t feel bad about it because Allison was still out there, and that meant that I wouldn’t hesitate to do anything to save her.
I told Burke that I wasn’t sure, but I had a pretty good feeling that he was going to try and set up there in Wilmington, NC. He and I both seemed to agree that Savage wouldn’t have taken out the motorcycle club if he hadn’t had some sort of plan to take over.
“I’ve got to run this by the boss,” he said as I wrapped up everything. “I’m honestly not so sure he’ll be on board for it.”
“Yeah, I know it’s asking a lot.”
