I felt his mouth curl into a smile. “But you’re so goddamn sexy when you’re all focused and shit, what am I supposed to do with this hard-on?”
My eyes still glued to the monitor, I reached up and swatted his face away. “You need to wait your turn. Go away so I can finish.”
He chuckled and pulled away. “You’re even sexier when you get bossy. Fine, I’ll just watch then. Let me know when this hungry cock moves up in line.”
I glanced back over my shoulder and watched as he plopped down on the futon and stuck his hand down the waistband of his jeans. “You’re fucking incorrigible,” I chastised with a roll of the eyes.
He cocked his head and grinned. “That’s a mighty fancy way of saying you can’t wait to take another ride.”
“I think you’re experiencing selective hearing,” I groaned, turning back to the computer before he got me all hot and bothered. Just in time too, I caught a flash of something interesting in the video I’d been running through. Instantly back in work mode, I squinted at the screen and rewound.
There was my target, walking nervously by the bar hours before the brawl. I zeroed in on his hand. “Gotcha, asshole.”
“You get something?” Torch asked.
“Oh, I already had the ‘why’ figured out. I just found the ‘how’.”
Torch hopped to his feet and walked over, then leaned down and looked over my shoulder. “What are we looking at?”
“This is the feed that points at the front window from inside the bar.” I pointed at Alex walking into the frame, “And that’s our little friend. Watch his hand.”
“He’s running it along the glass?”
“Yeah,” I smirked. “With a glass cutter.”
“What?” He leaned closer to the screen. “You’re shittin’ me.”
I clicked over to the driver’s license picture I’d pulled from the DMV. “Nope. Meet Alex Mitchell-Collins, son of our recently appointed councilwoman, Jan Collins. Apparently this whole thing was planned. A long cut like that across the bottom made it hard to see and the whole pane was bound to shatter with a few pounds of pressure. He wanted to instigate a fight that spilled out into the street, and what better way to do it than by going through a window? There were too many bodies in the way to see anything down low during the fight, but I bet Alex kicked back at the glass since it’s pretty clear on the video that Jet pulled him away from it.”
“That motherfucker,” he seethed.
“It wasn’t his idea, Jan put him up to it. I traced the dispatch call to her cell phone. She must have been waiting outside or something.”
“What the fuck? Why?”
I pulled up the next picture, this time from social media. “Jan has another kid. Recognize her?”
“Is that—”
“Sadie… freshman club crawler and part-time cocktail waitress at the Nest. She didn’t have anything to do with it as far as I can tell, they’ve been estranged for months and Sadie wasn’t working last night. I checked phone records and voicemails but Jan’s the only one making calls, Sadie hasn’t picked up or responded. Apparently, her nutjob mom concocted the scheme because she’s pissed we’re ruining her precious offspring and turning her into a slut. Jan’s words, not mine.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s the problem. Jan’s been doing a lot of research on political strategy, I think she wants to go for mayor and probably sees Sadie as a liability for her image.”
“How would ruining our business help with that?” he asked. “We have a lot of supporters who vote.”
“No idea,” I replied with a shrug. “I can read her emails and see her internet habits, but there’s no getting in her brain. Maybe she thought Sadie would instantly lose her job and come crawling home, maybe she’s just being irrational and taking it out on the MC, or maybe this was just a first shot to make the club look bad and turn those supporters against it. The election isn’t for a couple more years, she might have a long-term plan.”
He scrubbed his beard and took a step back. “What about Gellar? Why would he go along with it?”
I stood up from the chair and handed him a stack of emails. “Mike Gellar’s just another pawn, Jan’s been fucking him and used the threat of a sexual harassment case to force his hand.”
“Fantastic,” Torch muttered incredulously as he thumbed through the evidence. “What a fucking cunt, this shit’s about to get ugly.”