Cold Fusion Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title page

  Special thanks to

  Legal matter

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Review

  As They Please

  Iron Tornadoes

  Learning Curves

  Lyv's family

  About the author

  COLD FUSION

  An Iron Tornadoes

  MC Romance

  By

  Olivia Rigal

  Special thanks to:

  Christa Wick

  for her cover design

  and

  to Christa Wick

  Zirconia Publishing

  who got me started on the Wild Ride.

  Also available in paperback

  This book is a work of fiction.

  Even if some locations depicted do exist

  and some collective events did occur,

  this story is totally fictitious

  The names, the characters, and the events described

  have been imagined by the author.

  Any resemblance to reality would be a coincidence.

  ©2014 Lady O Publishing LLC

  www.ladyopublishing.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below.

  contact / Lady O Publishing

  www.ladyopublishing.com

  CHAPTER ONE

  “You’re sure this is what you wanna do, bro?” I ask again.

  Brian shakes his head, and I know he’s made his decision. I can see that he feels like shit for letting me down, but I get it. We’ve been talking about it for a couple of weeks, but he’s bailing out, and it’s final. The life of a police officer isn’t in the cards for him. He hates the administration, the paperwork, and above all, the politics. Those things don’t bother me. I just keep my eyes on the bottom line. The bottom line is putting criminals away, and that’s what I’ve decided to do with my life.

  I’m tempted to draw an ace from my sleeve and play the Lisa card, but that would be really mean, like rubbing salt into a wound. If Brian leaves the police to go run his father’s Motorcycle Club, then there’s no way he’ll work with Lisa. My kid sister is in law school to become a D.A. She won’t turncoat and become a criminal defense attorney just because Brian’s decided to walk on the wild side. But I’m pretty sure he’s aware of that fact.

  “One hundred percent sure,” Brian answers with a grim expression. “Even if my father wasn’t so sick, I don’t think I can stomach all this bullshit. We’re not even out of the academy, and already we’re being forced into absurd games. Come on, did you hear them? I.A. wants to secretly recruit us while we officially join the special unit just so that we can spy for them. I can’t do that. It’s way too convoluted for me.”

  “But you understand they need to do it? They were very clear about that. Someone in the special unit had been undermining their efforts for years. I.A. needs to get to the bottom of this. I don’t know who they’re investigating—they just said it was some form of organized crime—but obviously it’s so well organized that they have ears in the special unit in charge of investigating them.”

  “Yeah, I get it,” Brian says, passing his fingers through his curls. That’s a sure sign he’s nervous. “But it would make me sick to join a team, have the guys welcome me as part of their unit, count on them to have my back, and then spy and tell on them.”

  “But you would only tell on the bad cops,” I protest.

  “No, David, this isn’t for me.” Brian shakes his head. “Tomorrow, I’m resigning. I feel like a jerk for letting you do this alone, but this is it.”

  We finish our beers, sitting on the flowery swing on my mother’s front porch. We have our feet on the fence, and I realize this may be the last time we can do this. I mean, even if Brian is almost family, I’m not sure I.A. would approve of me publicly associating with the son of the president of a motorcycle club, especially since he’s given up police work to go run the MC.

  Then again, no one has ever been able to pin anything illegal on the Iron Tornadoes. I guess that’s why Brian’s half brother is still a member of the police force. Of course, Ernest applied and went through the entire process using his mother’s name, but when the brass found out he was Cracker’s son, they gave him a badge anyway. As long as he was keeping some distance with the MC, they couldn’t blame him just for being his father’s son. Brian’s right—it’s a convoluted world.

  I’m sorry to see him go. I would have been more comfortable doing this job with someone like him at my back—I know he would have been there for me no matter what—but it is what it is. I’ll have to make do.

  “Have you told Tony and your mother yet?” I asked.

  “My mother knows. She’s helped me pack my things. She’s afraid of what Tony’s reaction will be though. You know he had big plans for me—like getting the college education he always dreamed of getting. He gave me a pass when we ran off to join the Army, and that used up all my credit with him. Since we came back, he’s tried to make peace with the idea that I would make my own choices, but I think it only worked because he approved of me becoming a policeman…”

  “He’s gonna have a fit when you tell him!”

  “That’s why I’m getting my shit out of the house and into my room at the club house.”

  “It’ll be tough on your mother, but I trust Nancy will find a way to make him come around.”

  “Somehow I doubt that,” Brian says. “I told her not to fight with him about it. I’ll come see her when he’s away at work, and we’ll give him time to cool off.”

  “How’s Cracker doing?”

  “He’s taking it surprisingly well. You know what’s the weirdest thing? Seeing him with no hair. All my life, my father had this fabulous head of hair, and now he’s a regular Kojak. He says chemo is like a bad acid trip. He’s so weak when he gets out of there that he can hardly walk.”

  I’m about to ask Brian if that means he can’t ride anymore, but that’s such a stupid question that I keep it to myself. If he can’t ride, he needs to resign, and Brian will never say that out loud.

  “The interesting thing is that he’s coming around to some ideas I have,” Brian says. “He liked my idea of starting a private investigation firm. The MC paid for the license, and he came up with the name—Friendly Persuasion. How cool is that?”

  I can’t help but laugh. Brian loves the chase so much. He just can’t help himself. He’s found a way to be an investigator. One without a badge.

  “What’s funny?” he asks.

  “I just had this vision of you being hired by the wife of a cheating husband and following him to one of the dens of inequity that the MC runs.”

 
When we were kids,“den of inequity” was the expression used by the fathers at All Saints School to designate any place they didn’t want us to go.

  Brian smiles when he hears the expression. He tilts his head and looks away. Maybe the idea that he could have a conflict of interest had never occurred to him, and yet it was the first thing that had come to my mind. The MC runs a few striptease bars and a very private sex club called the Styx.

  I’ve never been, but it’s not for lack of invitations. Brian says I’m a natural Dom and all I need is to take the few classes he and his brother give. Right, as if I could ever want to spank a woman!

  “I’ll cross that bridge when I’ll get to it,” he says and shrugs. “Gotta get going. We have a meeting at the club.” He gets up and stretches.

  I follow him to his bike, and we hug. I don’t tell him how much I’m going to miss him because that’s not who we are. But he knows. We’ve been like brothers since my uncle Tony married his mother. We were both five at the time. It was just about when Lisa was born.

  Oh shit, Lisa. I forgot to call her. I usually call her up after she works the lunch shift. Too late now. I have to remember it tomorrow. I haven’t spoken to her in a while. I need to call her and figure out how she’s doing.

  “Stay vertical,” I say as he rides away. I wonder how long it’ll be before we have a chance to sit down together again and share a drink. Fuck, I miss him already.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I’m fifteen minutes early for the briefing. I like getting places with some extra time to get my bearings. I run into Michael Mayfair at the reception desk. We did part of our training together, and we were often on the same team when work was assigned by alphabetical order. He’s very sharp and really good at technological stuff. That made us a good team, yet strangely, we never hit it off. I don’t know whether that’s because I was always hanging out with Brian or because Mike’s a shy guy.

  “It’s nice to see a familiar face,” I tell him.

  “Sure is,” he says with a warm smile. “Are you joining us?”

  “Yeah, I asked to be assigned to Point Lookout ’cause it’s my hometown, and I got it. How cool is that? I’m supposed to meet with Captain Black.”

  “Oh, you’re in the task force.” Mike’s face lights up like a kid talking about his favorite toy. “Good for you! They’re on the second floor, double door on the right. You better hurry. I hear she’s quite the stickler for punctuality.”

  “Thanks for the heads up.” I start to climb the steps and turn around. “Let’s grab a beer soon and catch up.”

  He nods, and I finish climbing to the second floor. I push open the double door to enter a large, windowless room. About a dozen people are present already, and the only one I recognize is the captain in charge of the station. His name is Steven Williams. He’s a big guy, about six feet tall—so not as tall as me—and massive. If someone told me he went to college on a wrestling scholarship, I’d have no problem believing it. Today he appears more relaxed than when I first saw him in a suit at one of the interviews conducted at the academy just before graduation. I’m sure he’s a jeans-and-T-shirt kind of man.

  Half the room has been furnished like a conference room with chairs facing a blackboard. The other one is filled like a regular office with a couple of partners desks that look really battered compared to the brand-new faux-brown-leather chairs on each side.

  I look around and sit next to a woman in civilian clothes. She’s arguing in hushed tones with a man about my age on her other side. He’s wearing an amused smile, as if her scolding is the funniest thing. She stops badgering him and turns toward me. She seems ready to bite and curse the person who has interrupted her, but she doesn’t. She merely frowns. I’m pretty sure she’s trying to figure out if we’ve met, and when she decides that we haven’t, she smiles.

  Wow, she’s a drop-dead beauty.

  “Hey, I’m Catherine.” Leaning back a bit, she adds, “And this asshole is my partner, Thomas.”

  “Nice to meet you both. I’m David, David Mayfield.”

  I shake their hands and notice that as soon as Catherine smiled at me, Thomas rested his left hand on the small of Catherine’s back. The gesture is subtle, but I get it as clearly as if he had said, “Back off, this one’s mine.” That’s fine because no matter how stunning she is, she’s way too skinny for me. I like to have something to hold on to, and she’s just skin and bones. Also, she has blood-red nails pointy enough to scare the erection out of any prudent male. I smile at Thomas and shake my head. Message sent loud and clear. You won’t get any trouble from me. He smiles back and relaxes.

  “Welcome to Point Lookout,” Thomas says. “Where are you from?”

  “This is my first assignment. I’m fresh out of the academy, but this is my hometown.”

  A large hand lands on my shoulder, and both my neighbors turn to look at the newcomer.

  Catherine seems genuinely happy to see him. Her smile is more spontaneous than the one she gave me. “Good to have you in the team, Everest.”

  I turn and look up into another familiar face. Everest is Brian’s half brother, one of the kids the president of the Iron Tornadoes had with his old lady. Brian’s mum—that’s my aunt Nancy—was just a sweet butt he knocked up by accident. Everest’s real name is Ernest, but he’s so tall and spectacular that the MC picked an impregnable mountain name for his road name, and it suits him so well that even his fellow cops adopted it.

  Before I have a chance to say anything, I hear a hissing sound from the other side of the room. A woman standing by the blackboard is making a white board slide down from the ceiling, and the mechanism needs a bit of oiling. She’s a chubby, middle-aged woman with an Angela Davis sort of afro cut and a no-nonsense look. The room becomes silent.

  “Everest, the door, please,” she says.

  He turns around and locks it. While he comes back to sit on the bench behind me, the white board finishes descending from the ceiling. It’s covered with pictures of people connected by arrows that I understand to indicate some type of hierarchy in the group.

  “Good morning, everyone. I’m Captain Martha Black, and I’ll be heading this unit from now on.” She looks at each of us in turn, as if challenging us to question her authority.

  I follow her gaze and notice only three women in our group: Catherine, Captain Black, and a mousy little creature holding a pen and pad in the corner. When she notices me staring at her, she shakes her head as if to direct me to concentrate on Captain Black. Not that mousy after all.

  “Our mission is to shake down this organization,” Captain Black says, pointing at the board. “Our targets call themselves the ‘Unrepentant Southern White Wizards.’ They’re a very well-organized bunch of prejudiced neo-Nazi dicks. They’re well connected, and so far they’ve been able to short-circuit all our attempts to take them down.”

  While she speaks, I study the portraits of our targets. Unsurprisingly—since it’s an obvious prerequisite to become a member of a white supremacist group—all our targets are Caucasian. So are all the members of our group except our boss and Miss Not-So-Mousy.

  “Some of their activities are perfectly legitimate,” Captain Black continues. “That’s how they clean the money they earn through their other enterprises. They’re so well connected and cautious that we haven’t had a chance to infiltrate them. Now we have an opportunity though, because the White Wizards have associated with a motorcycle club in which we already have a man. They use the MC to run some bars and a couple of strip joints.” She studies her audience to make sure she has our attention. “We’re going to infiltrate them through the MC. We’re lucky to have one motorcycle club expert with us. For those of you who don’t know him, Ernest Hatcher was born and raised in a MC.”

  All heads turn toward Everest, who shakes his head and smiles.

  “Everest—that’s his nickname—is the closest thing we have to a profiler in this unit. He’s got a master’s in psychology, and he’s very good at reading
people.” There’s an unspoken threat in Captain Black’s words, as though she’s trying to tell us not to bullshit her. “The man we’re putting inside is David Mayfield.” She points in my direction, and all eyes land on me. “He’s just out of the academy, but he’s experienced. He was a MP for a few years.”

  I put two fingers to my forehead in a mock salute and smile. I’m not sure whether I was picked for this task because of my experience or because my being from Point Lookout will make my cover stick, but when they offered the job during placement, I was glad they did.

  “But as of today, David’s never been enlisted. That’s just the story his mother spun for the neighbors because he was actually doing time. He’s going in under his real name as a bad boy with a serious record. If anyone is to check, while he was in, he even managed to get his sentence extended by getting into fights because he hates ‘faggots, niggers, and spicks.’”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see the young woman with the pad cringe. Yeah, the N-word will do it every time.

  Captain Black continues. “Access to this room will be restricted. The only keys to this door will be kept by Captain Steven Williams, Wilma Stone, our administrative assistant, and myself. Anytime you’re not working on the white board, I want it rolled up and hidden. You’re not to talk to anyone about the purpose of our task force. I understand that some of you may have nosy spouses or partners, so just tell them we’re going after a branch of organized crime and that you’ll lose your job if you talk. That is not an idle threat. I will fire your sorry asses if anything slips.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “At least it’s nice that they’ve assigned you to the Point Lookout station,” my mother coos as she cleans up the breakfast table.

  “You realize that doesn’t mean I’m going to stay home all day,” I tell her more harshly than I should.