Allegiance - Chiah Wilder Page 0,39
any sense. Do you seriously think I’m making this up?”
The sheriff stared at her, pushing up his hat as he maintained eye contact. “No, I don’t. But we don’t have enough to prove anything concrete. There are no markers on the money we might find to indicate it was yours and taken from this establishment. And we can’t go hunting down every biker in town. You must understand that.”
She nodded mutely and swallowed past the thickness in her throat, fighting back tears.
“I’m sorry about all this,” he said in a low voice.
“One of the men hurt me. He almost broke my damn arm and slapped me across the face. That’s assault, isn’t it? You can do something about that. I want to file a complaint.”
Sheriff Windsor took out a notepad. “We can take your statement. You can give us a description of the perpetrator. Maybe one of us will recognize him.”
“His name is Cougar. He had it stitched on his leather vest. The other guy was his brother. They’re in a motorcycle gang.”
The sheriff looked startled. “How do you know that?”
“They were both wearing leather vests with patches on them. The first time they came in to
shake me down, I noticed the name on the back of the vests when they left. I had no idea what MC meant. Last night when I went to the grocery store, I saw some guys wearing the same type of vests, and I was going to write down the name, but they kept staring at me, and it spooked me.”
“Why didn’t you mention any of this the first time?”
“I was so shocked and upset about the whole incident, I didn’t remember the name. Like I told you, I didn’t even know what the initials stood for until last night.”
“What’s the name of the club?”
Rubbing the back of her neck, she tried to remember the name, but her mind was a blank. Pursing her lips together, she shook her head. “I don’t remember. I keep wracking my brain, but nothing’s coming up.”
“You didn’t see the name tonight?”
“They weren’t wearing their vests this time, but there can’t be too many motorcycle clubs in town. I’m sure their club is one of the bad ones.”
“You’d be surprised. A lot of people are in biker clubs.”
“These guys, and the ones at the grocery store last night, looked like thugs, not the kind of people who’d go out riding on the weekend.”
Windsor smiled. “There are quite a few guys in different motorcycle clubs who look like they belong in prison, but they’re decent people. Anyway, why don’t we start with a description of these two characters.” He glanced down at his notebook. “Start from the beginning.”
After she was done regurgitating for the fourth time what had happened in her shop earlier that night and what the men looked like, exhaustion washed over her. She had to grip the arms of the chair to keep from keeling over.
The sheriff slipped his pen into his front pocket and closed the notebook before catching her gaze. “I can imagine this must be hard for you. I want you to know that I’ll do everything in my power to make it easier on you, but right now, my main focus continues to be showing up within the next two weeks to catch them in the act. Once that’s established, we’ll have enough evidence to turn it over to the DA’s office, and we can start getting the money they took back to you. Does that sound good?”
Lena nodded, thanked the sheriff, and pushed up from the chair. There was nothing left for her to do but wait until the lowlifes came back in two weeks. One thing was for certain: the next time they came back, the security system would be up and running. She just hoped the sheriff, or one of his deputies, would be able to catch them in the act.
She ran her fingers through her hair. What a fucking mess. Never in her wildest dreams did she think something like this was possible in a town as quaint and beautiful as Santa Teresita. Her head was in a million different places at once. She knew she didn’t want to go back to the restaurant to finish up the rest of her paperwork, but she wasn’t sure if she wanted to go home yet, either. The idea of sitting in her empty condo, replaying the night’s events, jumping every time she heard a noise, didn’t appeal to her at all.
She