that Kat may be the murderer, but I couldn’t do that, either. I was just not sure enough to tell the men information that could potentially save their lives.
And I can’t just tell them that it’s someone within the club, or else it would get ugly really quickly in here. For now the men had to trust each other, otherwise the killer could just pick them off one by one if they scattered. For all I know Kat may have an accomplice as well.
I wasn’t particularly close to any of the men there, so I went up the stairs and let myself into the office that Jed had inherited from Frank. Our hunt for clues just that morning seemed to lose all significance or importance in the face of Tim’s bloody murder. The goal of reeling in several big crime organizations felt like some nebulous dream in the face of the harsh realities of the present.
I paced around the room, antsy for action and heart racing but with nothing to which I could put my energy to.
Notebooks were picked up and flipped through for a couple seconds before getting thrown across the room. The frustrating method Frank had for writing down nonsense that had seemed like a tricky code earlier in the day started to piss me off.
“Fucking nothing!” I shouted. “That’s what’s in these books.” I took up a pile and chucked them at the far wall one by one to punctuate each word. “There. Is. Fucking. Nothing. Of. Importance. In. These. Fucking. Books.”
My chest heaved as I exerted as much energy into the throwing as I could. The image of Jed and Kat embracing at the bottom of Tim’s driveway flashed through my mind.
“Ah, fuck!” I ran to the wall and flung my whole weight behind my hand as I sent it hurtling towards the drywall. I wanted to destroy something to let out some steam. Putting my fist through a wall sounded like a fantastic idea to my enraged mind.
Instead of cracking through drywall, my fist slammed into something metal just behind the drywall facade. I could feel my knuckle splinter under the force of my blow as it met the immovable object buried in the wall.
“Oh Christ!” I swore fiercely as pain exploded through my hand and up my arm. I fell back onto the floor as blood washed over my vision and threatened to take my consciousness away.
I fought off the rush of blood to my head and tried to blink away the darkness. My hand throbbed in massive swells in time with the beating of my heart, impossibly quick.
My back pressed into the hard floor as I stared up towards the ceiling and gingerly touched my hand. My nerves screamed back at me and I stopped probing it.
“What the fuck was that?” I couldn’t think properly but that was all that I cared about. Thoughts of Jed and Kat vanished as I tried to make sense of what had just happened.
Pieces of drywall crumbled away from where I had struck. There was an impact zone where the wall had caved inward slightly, but it didn’t get punched through the way I had expected.
I clambered to my feet slowly and heavily, careful not to use my now useless right hand.
With my left, I tore at the drywall with my fingers, tearing chunks away and revealing more of the metallic object. Eventually I found that there was a seam in the wall, cleverly hidden behind adjacent paintings of motorcycles. The wall opened up to reveal a large safe.
“Would you look at that?”
After a few weeks of trying to crack a code in Frank’s files we hadn’t felt any closer to finding the answer, and now I knew why.
“I guess Kat helped to find it after all.”
I needed to let Jed know about this. It could probably wait, but I needed to finish our discussion about Kat anyway. Now that this safe had come to light there were no more excuses for cowering away and avoiding the confrontation.
There was nothing I could do to hide the safe, but it looked as though it was firmly attached in the wall. There was a false alcove and the safe was bolted into the floor. It wasn’t going anywhere, and considering no one in