Page 23 of Property of Bigfoot
That was not what I expected. I wasn’t alone in that assessment. Jester groaned and then turned toward me. “Please, tell me you changed your mind.” I shook my head immediately.
“Not on your life, fucker.”
Sammy turned and smiled at the dead man who used to be my friend. Not the corpse, the other soon-to-be dead man, Jester. “I hope you brought the murder van!” I laughed because her voice had a cheery quality to it that should have seemed out of place, all things considered. Apparently, death and murder didn’t affect my woman the way it did most people.
“You’re not all there, are you?” Baffle asked her.
She pointed down at the guy she had shot. “Do you want me to feel bad for him? That asshole put three bullets into the bed I’d been in a few seconds before. If I hadn’t heard him breaking in the front door, I would be the corpse getting cleaned up. Fuck that. In a game of him or me… I chose me, and it makes me happy that it worked out the way I wanted it to.”
I glanced from Sammy to her uncle who stared at his niece like he wasn’t sure they had ever met before. “I’m beginning to wonder if you lied about what you did in the Army.”
She cocked her head to the side and rolled her eyes at him, as if he was nothing more than a nuisance. “Really?” She turned to me then. “Sorry about the mess. I’d have taken care of it myself, but honestly, I have no clue what to do with a dead body. Besides,” She pointed down to his cut. “I think that piece of leather means him being here was tied to you somehow.”
“Maybe, but my guess is they got your name off the accident report and figured since I was incapacitated, it had to be you who offed their Road Captain.”
“Did they find his body?” She asked.
“Hell no. There’s nothing to find. It just makes sense if he never came back that it was because someone took him out first.”
“Now there’s a second man who will be missed, and he was associated with my niece,” Brady said. Then he shook off whatever thought he must have had and looked me in the eye. “There’s more to this, Trav.”
“You two know each other?” Sammy asked.
“Went to school together,” her uncle explained as I watched to see if it bothered her that I was the same age as one of her uncles. He was the youngest of the three Morton boys, but still there was at least a decade between Sammy and me, maybe more. I wasn’t sure how old Sammy was because it really didn’t matter to me. I knew she was an Army vet, so she had to be over the age of eighteen, and the way she carried herself told me she was probably closer to mid-twenties. Then again, there was the comment about her studying for an exam earlier. Fuck, I didn’t know shit. It made me angry with Melissa all over again for interrupting shit when I had a file on Sammy in my hands earlier that would have answered all my fucking questions.
“What did you mean when you said there’s more to this?” I finally asked.
“I checked the security cameras while Sammy was talking to Sheriff Estes. We have them up near both garages, the campground, and inside and outside the camp store.”
“Was there someone else here?”
Brady shook his head, not this time. “The Sheriff showed up at a rather convenient time, considering how quickly that happened after the attempt on Sammy’s life. While shady as fuck, that wasn’t what bothered me the most.”
“What did?” Baffle asked him.
“Patrick,” Brady acknowledged my VP by his government name. “My sister-in-law had to take over at the camp store while Sammy was gone. I also had her stay on in the days since Sammy returned, because I gave my niece a couple of extra days off to get herself straight and get some studying in. Colleen was reluctant to do the job, and that’s putting shit mildly.”
“You think she pulled some shit out of resentment?”
Brady shook his head, and the grave look he lobbed on his niece made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. “What the fuck did she do?”
Instead of telling us about it, Brady pulled out his phone and queued up video footage from earlier in the day. It was the same man who was dead on the floor. The way he spoke with Colleen, and she with him, seemed very familiar. As in, they had not just met. That point was proven further when she told him exactly where to find Sammy and that they might need to move up their timetable if he offs the girl.
My phone buzzed as we watched Colleen flirt and drive a proverbial bus over her own stepdaughter. She pointed to the cabin where Sammy lived as I picked up my phone.
“Bigfoot.” Everyone turned to me and Brady paused the video.
“Hey Prez, I had some news that couldn’t wait. Ran a deeper dive on Colleen. Seems she might have an uncle in the Mojave Devils. There’s a discrepancy with their names that threw me off a bit, and I’m looking into that, but she has him listed as her next of kin at a hospital in Arizona.”
“How in the hell did you get that information?” I asked.
“It’s better if you don’t ask. If the body your girl dropped happens to be another Devil, I wanted you to know sooner rather than later that there might be a fox in the henhouse over there.”
I ignored Glitch’s need to make everything about predator-prey animal relations, thanked him, and hung up. “Looks like Glitch just figured out why stepmom was so fucking comfortable with a Mojave Devil.”
“What’s going on?” Sammy asked.
“She has an uncle in their MC. Glitch said something about her name being different and it threw him. He’s checking into everything, but her next of kin contact is a member of the fucking MDMC.”
