Morbidly, I hesitate over the ignition, almost afraid to cut the engine. As long as I’m idling, it’s like I’m not really here. Like this is all a bad dream, and I’m going to wake up any moment now. Biting my lip, I close my eyes and turn the key. The gentle vibrations of the engine cut out, leaving me in the still silence of a dead man’s driveway.
I don’t know why I’m here, but I tell myself that it’s to gather more information about how my dad might have died. I convince myself that there’s a good reason for me to get out of my car, climb the front steps to the screened-in porch, and fumble for the key in my pocket. The house was left to me, along with everything else my dad had to his name. Which wasn’t much.
I unlock the door and walk into the front foyer, glancing around. The electricity and air conditioning are still running, as his death is so recent. Everything looks pretty much the same way it always did. The house is only about 1,400 square feet, with two bedrooms and one cramped little bathroom. The living room coffee table is covered in papers. I cock my head at this odd sight; my father was always shockingly neat and organized. He never left documents just lying around, whether they were important or not. I wonder, with a pang of guilt, if maybe he just got a little messier over the years, without me around to help out. Not that he was even that old when he passed. He and my mother got together in their teens — they were highschool sweethearts. My parents were only in their early twenties when I was born, so my dad was just shy of his forty-eighth birthday when he died.
It hits me now, again, just how strange his death is. He wasn’t even fifty yet. What kind of physically active, religiously healthy forty-seven-year-old just drops dead out of nowhere? Sure, the police told me it was an industrial accident — that he was simply killed doing the same kind of thing he did every day of his life for over twenty years. A freak incident. A moment’s slip. A little mistake with a massive cost. Simply in the right place at the wrong time.
I knew, though, that something wasn’t right about it. That there’s no way this was an accident. And in school, they always told me to trust my gut. That it would lead to the truth.
“He was a hardworking, honest man right down to the very last,” one of his coworkers told me at the funeral, clasping my hand in both of his. There were tears shining in his eyes, a frown on his weathered face. I vaguely recalled him from my childhood as one of my dad’s friends — a man named Chuck, I think. His wife used to bring over casseroles on Sundays every once in awhile. I remember they tasted like salt and sawdust, but she was so sweet that we ate the whole thing every damn time anyway.
I sit down on the sunken-in, decades-old couch and tuck my curly red hair behind my ear to look over the papers on the coffee table. I can’t resist. And this makes me feel like I’m doing something, like I’ve got a reason to be here snooping around. It’s business.
I scoop up a stack of papers and lean back on the couch to look them over, only to hear a strange crinkling noise from underneath me. I wriggle to the side and reach inside the cushions, my fingertips coming in contact with what feels like more papers. But smoother. Slick. Glossy.
Photographs.
I extract them and look through them with a dubious expression. They’re pictures of equipment from his workplace, with names, dates, and notes scribbled on the back. The documents look like health code violation notices, employee complaints, and some handwritten letters. Some of them are in my father’s signature left-handed scrawl, while others I don’t recognize at all.
“What the hell was he doing with all this?” I mumble aloud, shaking my head.
Just then, I hear a strange rumble from outside. I look up in confusion, thinking at first that someone must have pulled into the driveway. But then I realize it’s the combined sounds of several smaller, louder engines. My heart stops for a moment and I jump to my feet, the papers and photographs falling in disarray on the floor.
Motorcycles.
28
Leon
“Mickey Lamar,” I say as I pace around the bar, addressing the gathered men and women. “We owe that son of a bitch a visit. For those of you just getting here, yeah, you heard right,” I state firmly, looking each and every one of them in the eye as I come to a stop in the center of the room, arms crossed. “The FBI is back in town. Eva says intel is still shaky, but if I know the FBI, they’ve sent Doyle and his boys down after us again.”
There’s a general murmur around the bar, and I can tell that some of the newer blood look uneasy, while most of the older patch-members have knit their brows and wear bitter grimaces. Us veterans have sour memories about Agent Charles Doyle and the FBI in general, and I suspect there’ve been rumors trickle down over the years.