Page 48 of Knox Unleashed
“If it’s because I said he was an asshole about the return…”
“It’s not. But I need to make a quick call. Stay here.”
I step outside the store and take in the parking lot. All evidence from the storm is gone; I never realized quite how hard Maren and her team work here.
North doesn’t answer when I dial it, so I call Havoc.
“Prez,” he says breathlessly when he answers after the second ring. “Hang on a minute.” There’s a muffled sound, then I hear him say quietly, “Stop fucking sucking so hard for one second.”
“Jesus,” I say. “Didn’t need to hear that.”
Havoc chuckles. “You needed to hear me coming a lot less, Prez. What do you need?”
“To bleach what I just heard from my ear drums.”
“Sooner you tell me what you need, sooner I can get back to it.”
I glance out over the water. “It’s Pax who overheard Maren and Jackal’s landlord talking about his address.”
“How do you know?”
I look back at the shop and find Maren’s eyes on me. Quickly, she looks away, grabbing a pile of leaflets about airboat tours to shuffle them back into a neat pile.
Good to know she’s not immune to me either.
“Maren kept detailed records. Just been back to the shop and demanded to see them.” I didn’t demand. I asked, and Maren showed me. But for some reason, I need my men to not see this as anything other than a fact-finding mission. “Figured something might be traceable by Vex, credit card transactionson the day or something. But Maren keeps handwritten records. Pax was in around the same time as the landlord.”
“Does Maren remember seeing him?”
“She does.” I stub my toe into the gravel and make a dent that I smooth over. “He was upset about something he was returning, so it stood out in her memory.”
“You want me to go bring him in?”
“No. Let’s keep watching him. I want to know what else he’s up to. But under no circumstances should he be allowed to leave the state. Switch who’s watching him frequently. I want to know if he meets up with those two men. That will help us figure out if they’re our enemy or not.”
“You ever wonder why these people, whoever they are, haven’t approached the club directly to find him, Prez?”
“Only to the extent that we’re an MC and there’s a hell of a lot more of us than there are of them. Why? You think it’s more?”
Havoc sighs. “Not sure, Prez. But if I were trying to find a guy I knew was a biker, I’d make up some excuse to go there to try and find him.”
“Are we sure they’re trying to find Paltrow, though? I wonder if it’s Jackal they’re after, and maybe they knew Paltrow found him. And Paltrow won’t ever be returning their calls, their trail has gone cold, so they’ve come back to the last place they knew there was any intel. Not that we’d help them, regardless.”
“Fair play, Prez. Now, I’m gonna get back to what I was doing before this boner completely dies on me.”
“Fuck you,” I say with a grin and hang up.
I should just get on my bike and ride out of here, but even as I try to force myself in that direction, I turn on my heel and step back into the shop.
Just thank her, and leave.
“Beg me,” I say, instead, closing the door behind me, and switching the sign on the door toclosed.
Maren looks up from the laptop she was studying. “What?”
I march over to her. “Beg me, Maren. So that I can pretend this was all your idea.”
“What was?”
