Total pages in book: 62
Estimated words: 78696 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 393(@200wpm)___ 315(@250wpm)___ 262(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78696 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 393(@200wpm)___ 315(@250wpm)___ 262(@300wpm)
I’d not had one in a long time, and as I took a sip of the cold brew, I realized just how much I missed it.
I’d been going for the harder stuff lately…the stuff that would take my mind off of the gaping hole in my chest quicker than a beer would.
“Okay,” I said, crossing my arms and looking at the wood grained walls of the room.
I counted the planks of wood as I waited for them to start, not really in the mood to do much more than enjoy my beer.
“Booked your arrest today,” Ridley said as he came into the room, shaking his blonde hair out of his face as he did.
His eyes were on me, and they were shining with barely contained laughter.
“He told us that you helped him,” Ridley laughed. “It was the greatest thing in the world.”
Ridley was a Sheriff’s deputy for Harrison County, the same county I was assigned to.
He was how I’d met the rest of them, and a large part of the reason that I’d joined up with The Uncertain Saints.
Before I’d loved the hell out of my bike, but I drove it out of necessity now since my wife was given my truck in the divorce settlement.
She’d also taken all of my money and left me with barely a dollar to my name.
I’d had to apply for a job as a Texas Ranger not only to get the fuck away from Noreen, but also to earn some extra cash since I was still expected to pay her a whack in child support.
Child support that I no longer had to pay.
“What happened?” Peek asked.
I sighed. “Pulled him over for erratic driving. He was trying to force the girl in the car to give him head while he drove. She said no, so he hit her, which made him swerve so hard he nearly hit me.”
“You saw the whole thing, didn’t you?” Peek asked.
I nodded. “Every damn thing.”
“Stupid fucker should’ve looked beside him before he did that. That’s what I would’ve done,” Ridley said.
I tossed him a look, which he laughed at.
“I meant if she was giving me head,” he amended. “I wouldn’t be having anybody watch my woman do that.”
Ridley was married, and happily in love with his wife.
His dead wife.
He’d met her right out of high school and they’d married about a year later.
She’d died during a home invasion, and Ridley still acted as though she were alive.
He didn’t date.
Didn’t go out willingly.
Didn’t stay out late on the rare occasion that he did happen to go out.
“Yeah, well I pulled the little fucker over and beat the shit out of him…accidentally. And his woman took off,” I explained. “Told the guy I knew where he lived if he wanted to file a complaint.”
I wasn’t a good guy.
I was a cop…but I was pretty sick and tired of our supposed justice system.
The justice system was flawed.
Cops are held back by rules that don’t apply to the criminals, good guys go down for crimes they didn’t commit, and bad guys walk away from crimes they did commit on bullshit technicalities because the prosecution can’t make the charges stick. Which was what was going on with my son’s murderer.
My wife’s new husband had gotten tangled up in a bunch of shit and my son had paid for it.
And what did Dick get?
A slap on the fucking wrist.
A reprimand.
Why?
Because Dick had money, and a lot of it.
Dick was an ‘upstanding businessman’ and he didn’t do anything ‘wrong.’
I called bullshit, and I was now taking it upon myself to dole out retribution to the men and women that I knew wouldn’t get into the system.
And with the help of some of the men in my MC, we’d actually done quite a good job at it.
We solved and tried the cases that the fucking system wouldn’t take care of.
Lack of evidence didn’t matter to us.
What mattered to us was guilt and innocence.
I didn’t give a flying fuck if there was no evidence to tie a rapist to the rape scene.
“Speaking of which,” Casten said as he strolled in, a large rectangular box in his hands. “I found some shit you need to see. Shit that I think you’ll be interested in.”
Casten sat the box on the table and flipped it open, revealing two AR-15’s that had the serial numbers filed off them.
“Where’d you find those?” Wolf asked.
“Bought them,” Casten said. “Off of one of those garage sale sites. Look familiar?”
It took me a while to see it, but the moment I did I came right out of my chair…then nearly lost my lunch.
They were the guns that had taken down my son in the drive by shooting.
I’d studied the school surveillance video feed of my son’s death…of his murder…hundreds of times.
I knew the bodies of the men who’d shot my baby. Knew the guns that they used.
Knew the area directly surrounding where my child was murdered.
Knew everything I could from just a video.
And these guns were the ones that had been used to shoot my boy.
“Who sold it to you?” I asked roughly.
“Some kid, all of eighteen,” he answered. “She had no clue about what they even were. Said her father asked her to drop off what was in the box and to make sure she got eighteen hundred dollars for it,” he answered.
“Got her address?” I asked carefully.
Casten smiled. “Of course,” he said.
My eyes closed, and by the time I opened them again, after counting to a hundred, the box was closed and moved to the side of the table.
“You’re not giving that to the cops,” I said.
Casten gave me a look. “No. I’m not.”
We’d all lost our way from the justice system under different circumstances. What bound us together, though, was inherently good men we all saw in each other, the good men we knew each other to be.
We were men at the end of our ropes, pushed too far by an unfair, flawed justice system. We only wanted those who did wrong to be punished for their crimes.