“You’re lucky we got other anonymous tips on both these locations. They were enough to justify a bigger force than we initially planned. A lot of arrests tonight.” He grinned, as if he ate arrests for dinner and tonight he was having a feast. Donna and the others were responsible for calling in this address; I wondered who Shady had gotten to report the actual fight.
“We good?” Shady raised his eyebrows.
The cop eyed him up and down. “For now.” Then he turned to me. “We’ll need to take your statement, but I think an EMT should check you out first. Can you walk, son?”
“Yeah.” I gripped my ribs but hobbled out of there on my own two damn feet.
“That was a dumbass thing to do,” the cop said to me as he hurried ahead, one hand resting on the butt of his rifle. “Next time you might not get so lucky.”
I resisted the urge to give him the finger. All things considered, shit could’ve gone much, much worse. Instead I turned to Shady. “You’re an asshole.”
He chuckled. “Maybe.”
“You couldn’t’ve let me in on your plan?”
“You couldn’t’ve let me in on yours?”
Fair point. “I told you to stay away so you wouldn’t get caught up in this shit.”
“Yeah, but you know how it is, man. I saw an opportunity, and I took it. Everything worked out.” He winked at me.
As we emerged into the night through the same creaky door, I realized Shady was a fucking genius. And I needed to be more careful around him. He’d wanted to be rid of the people running the fights and making his life difficult, and maybe he’d wanted to help me out on some level too, but at the end of the day, he was always going to look out for his best interests first. He hadn’t told me jack shit because if the police hadn’t shown, he’d still be in with Frydenberg. I had no doubt he would’ve handed me over if shit hadn’t gone to plan. It was a win-win for him.
The area outside the factory was lit up now. A few cop cars and a van had converged near where I’d parked, and several police officers were milling about, talking on their radios, searching the property—doing whatever the fuck it was they did after busting bad guys doing bad shit.
I just wanted to sit down, go to sleep, maybe have Donna run her hands through my hair while I nestled my face into her tits.
As if I’d summoned the little hellion, her pearl-white Beamer came screeching around the corner and pulled to a stop next to my Tesla. She burst out of the car, and several cops tensed.
“Hendrix!” she bellowed as they approached her.
My heart lodged itself in my throat at all those guns pointed at her, but before I could yell, run, do something, they realized the little blonde chick in jeans and an oversized hoodie—my hoodie—was not a threat. The cops lowered their guns and just held their arms out instead, trying to herd her back.
“Don’t you touch me.” She pointed in their faces. “I’ll sue the department so fast and so hard none of you will be able to sit for a month.”
Despite the fucked-up situation, I chuckled. She was glorious when she was livid, and now that it wasn’t directed at me, it was hilarious. And she’d cracked an anal joke.
“What is she even doing here?” The plan had been for Harlow to send the address to the cop she’d been emailing as soon as the agreed-upon twenty minutes were up. In the meantime, the others were supposed to make anonymous calls from various public phones—which are not that easy to find anymore—while Drew headed down to the station to make his statement. Donna’s role was to wait for my call and, if I was arrested, come down to save the day with the lawyers the Meads paid an exorbitant amount of money to keep on retainer.
“Apparently Drew didn’t head to the station like he was supposed to and wasn’t answering his phone. So weird!” Shady grinned. “Then she found out the fight had actually gone down at a completely different spot—man, these rich people gossip when their kids start getting arrested. When she didn’t hear from you and couldn’t get any information out of the cops, she blew up my phone demanding to know what I knew.” He raised his arm to wave at her. “Over here, baby