Page 2 of Shadow Strike
We know you’re alone most nights.
Regan read it again.Set it down.She picked up her phone and photographed both sides of the note, then the envelope, then the door where it had been slid under, because documentation was what she knew how to do.Doing it kept her shaking hands a little steadier.
She added the photos to the folder labeled simply OL for Outlaws.Four hundred dollars a month was almost funny.Eight hundred was just insulting.Did they have a rate card?A sliding scale based on square footage and stubborn women?
The dark humor lasted about thirty seconds before the actual weight of the situation settled back in.
She locked the back door.Checked it twice.Went and checked the front.
Once she finished closing,she set her laptop on the bar and opened it.Her research folder on the Canon Outlaw motorcycle gang took up too many gigabytes and too many months of her life.
It was midnight, and she had a seven a.m.delivery—but looking at it had become a habit when she was unsettled.Like checking that the stove was off.Reassuring herself that she understood what she was dealing with.
The organizational chart was on top.She’d rebuilt it four times as new information came in, and it was starting to look less like a motorcycle gang and more like a small corporation with a violence problem.
Ryder Briggs was at the top, with the infrastructure his great-uncle Ben had established in the 1960s.The Briggs family had been maintaining it ever since.Ben’s son Wade had inherited the gang, and Wade’s son, Clive, had been next in line.When Wade had stepped aside ten years ago, Ryder, rather than Clive, had stepped into his shoes.
Thanks to Ryder’s father, Sheriff Ray Briggs and Wade’s brother, the Outlaws had compromised local law enforcement, had sympathetic city and county officials in their back pocket, and ran a network of legitimate front businesses that provided cover and cash movement.
She scrolled past Ryder, past the operational layer, to the file she’d opened and closed more times than she’d admit.
Clive Briggs.
CB, they called him.Born into the famous biker gang, he had once been considered the golden boy.The one destined to lead the Outlaws when Wade no longer could.Except Clive was the anomaly—the Briggs who got out.
A retired Army Ranger, he’d been honorably discharged.Her digging into him revealed he’d been a specialist in surveillance and intelligence gathering and was currently employed by Shadow Point Security.
The business, which operated out of a nondescript compound forty minutes north of Blackridge, had a reputation for being very good at very difficult problems.They didn’t share the names or backgrounds of their employees, but she knew Clive had been back in town since his father’s stroke, and he hadn’t stepped into Wade’s position.
She’d been considering contacting him for three months.As a source.For her podcast, Cold Circuit.
Sure, Regan.That’s definitely why you keep opening this file.
There was one photograph from his Ranger days—not an official headshot but a candid someone had posted to a closed Facebook group that she’d accessed through a source.Clive was standing with three other men outside what looked like a transport vehicle, all of them in dusty fatigues, all of them squinting slightly in bright sun.He was several inches taller and the only one smiling.As if in the midst of chaos, he was calm, alert, and ready for whatever life handed him.
He had his father’s build.Wade Briggs was a big man.His son had come out bigger.But Clive had his mother Mary’s tousled brown hair and her emerald-green eyes.Her easy smile.
Regan closed the file.Closed the laptop.Turned off the bar light—the last one, the one her father had always left burning—and stood in the dark for a moment.
The note was in its bag.The door was locked.The two men from booth seven were long gone, but the crawling sensation they’d triggered lingered.
We know you’re alone most nights.
She could go upstairs and wake her mother, dozing in the office.Tell her about the note.Lucy would want to know.
If she did that, Lucy would be awake until four a.m.running catastrophic scenarios over her morning coffee, and someone had to be functional tomorrow.
So.Not tonight.
Regan went upstairs to wake her mom and take them both home.
At one a.m.,she was at her desk in her bedroom, which was nothing more than a door on filing cabinets her father had helped her build at seventeen.She’d always meant to replace it with something that didn’t make her look like a grad student, but here she sat with a mug of tea she’d forgotten to drink, her headphones around her neck, and the cursor blinking in the episode notes document she’d been pretending to work on for an hour.
Episode forty-seven of the Cold Circuit podcast was supposed to be about a cold case out of Whitefish that her listeners had been requesting for months.She’d done the research.She had the outline.She had two interview subjects lined up.
She hadn’t written a single word of it in three weeks.
Partly because the case required a kind of focused attention that had lately been slipping away from her.Partly because every time she sat down at this desk, her mind went sideways to the Canon Outlaws material sitting in a folder two clicks away, and the question she’d been circling for months:when?
