Page 11 of Wolf

“No shit,” I grind out. “I’m not a drug dealer.”

“Yeah, you’re too uptight,” Tracker sneers.

I look around for something to throw at him and sadly don’t find anything within reach.

The reason I went to jail is because the cops found some of the hard stuff stashed on my bike. Like a lot of clubs, we run a grow operation, but we don’t deal in dope or powder. In fact, Steel makes damn sure we keep that stuff out of Helena entirely. This is a good town, and we keep it that way.

My bloodwork came back clean, but I still got charged with possession and intent to distribute. Everyone who knew me knew that it wasn’t right, but there wasn’t shit they could do. Just being a biker sealed my fate in the blind eyes of the law.

“We were looking into it for you,” Edge says. “To find out who set you up and if there’s anything we could do about it. We didn’t make any progress until we got Tracker on it, but by then, you were basically on your way out. Steel decided it was best to wait to give this to you, let you decide what to do with it.”

“Well, what is it?” I demand, my heart pounding. My muscles tense up and my hands clench into fists hard enough to pop my knuckles. My blunt nails dig into my palms. All this time, I’ve been carrying the weight of something I didn’t do. Even though I knew, and everyone else knew, it means a whole hell of a lot that I will finally have proof.

Edge motions to Tracker, who leans forward and flips the folder open. “I’ll skip all the long, boring hours of research and cut to the part you want to hear. Richard Palmer’s the one who framed you.”

Julia’s father.

For a moment, I can’t think. I can’t do anything. Nothing seems real.

Then, black rage crawls across my vision like a swarm of insects. I lurch to my feet and pace away, then swing back and slam my fist against the wall. I hit something, but it’s not the wall. It’s fleshy. Someone grunts. A hand grabs my shoulder, squeezes hard on a pressure point. The black turns to a pulse of red, and through the glaze of pain I see Edge holding onto me.

“Pull yourself together,” he spits. “You put a hole in my wall, I put a hole in you.”

I shove him away from me and pace to the middle of the room. Edge shakes out his hand. He must have blocked my punch. I’d feel bad if I wasn’t so pissed.

I would say that I can’t believe this, except that I can. In fact, I should have predicted this from the start.

“That bastard!” I shout. Then, my breath rattling in my lungs, I repeat it quieter. “That bastard. He wanted me to stay away from her. He made damn sure that’s what happened.”

“Sit down, brother,” Edge says. “Let’s talk through this.”

I can’t help noticing Tracker’s been silent and still the whole time. Not a bad idea.

Shaking all over with rage, I sit down again and shove my hands back through my hair. “He got me alone once. The only time we was ever alone together. He told me that as long as Julia was with me, she’d never be safe, never be happy. I thought he was full of it. Then I got arrested and I knew he was right. I broke up with Julia. I broke her heart. I made it so she had to leave town right away to get away from me. I thought that was better than havin’ her wait around on me. But it was him all along. He’s the one who hurt her.”

“He knew you’d play right into his hand by breaking up with her.” Edge shakes his head. “Yeah. An absolute bastard. It makes you feel any better, it was a tiny funeral. Almost no one turned out for it.”

It doesn’t make me feel better because it means the man himself isn’t around for me to take revenge on.

I feel a little more in control, though still on the edge. It’d be all too easy to slip back into rage and possibly do some actual damage to Edge’s house. Deep breaths unfortunately don’t do anything. I just have to forge ahead. “How did it happen?”

“I compiled my research into that folder for you.” Tracker graces us with his voice again. “You can look at the finer details on your own time. Basically, you can track drugs by their makeup, right? You can look at the ‘recipe’ and find out what batch it belongs to, where it came from, who made it. If you’ve got access to some key police databases, it’s all there to be combed through by anyone who’s got the time. Well, the drugs they pinned on you weren’t local. In fact, they probably came from this one warehouse in Austin.”

“Austin, Texas?”

“It’s all in the folder. I looked for people who had access to the police department’s evidence locker, while also having connections to Florida. It’s not a direct connection, but there’s a cop who knows someone who knew the Palmer fucker,” Tracker says. “And he was in Florida a few weeks before your arrest. Coincidentally, Palmer was out of town around the same time.”

I feel dizzy and grip my knees. “If I bring this folder to a lawyer, could they get my conviction overturned?”

“Not likely.” Tracker folds his arms over his chest and leans back in his seat. That’s not what I want to hear and my lips curl in a sneer.

“It’s too circumstantial to fully change the outcome of the trial. Coincidences don’t mean anything in the eyes of the law. You could have gotten drugs from that same batch in a thousand ways. People know other people across state lines. I mean, you could try to do something, but it would stir up the past and cause a lot of trouble for everyone who was involved.” Edge raises his eyebrows. “Is that what you want? When you’re just startin’ to get settled in again?”

It isn’t myself that I think of, but Julia, Ruby, and Artie, who would all have their lives disrupted if they had to get lawyers and go to court. I don’t know much about the law, but if I happened to win, wouldn’t they have to suffer the consequences? Especially if I got compensation. Even if that wasn’t the case, I wouldn’t want to drag Julia and her family into a legal battle when it had nothing to do with her and her mom.

“Then what’s even the point of giving me all this information, if I can’t use it?”

“Because one day you might be able to use it,” Edge says, while looking hard at me. “Maybe you can’t use it to overturn the past, but there might be a point in the future when you can point to what’s inside and it will be enough for reasonable doubt.”