Clean Hack (The Tainted Saints Book 1) Read online

  Maybe there was some kind of club for people like me. The others. The lone wolves that in a sense took care of the shit that people didn’t want to. We could get together and have an understanding of the darkness we all shared but never really talk about it. Hell, maybe we could brew beer as a group relaxation project.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I mumbled to the empty room.

  I was losing it. Sleep deprived. That had to be the reason that my mind was carrying me to strange places.

  I wiped my head clean. Something I’d gotten good at because when I was on a job I always wanted to be focused. Nothing like being off in fucking La La Land while you’re using a bone saw. That was how people lost fingers. And I really wanted to keep all of mine.

  Then I focused on finishing my meal, ignoring the fact that I knew I’d savor that last bite, chewing it a few more times than necessary before swallowing it down.

  I changed the sheets and was pretty sure I was out the moment I crawled into bed.

  This wasn’t home. I didn’t have one so that was how I knew this wasn’t it. I lived on the dream of one day in the back of my mind. The very, way far back of my mind. One fucking day I could have a place to call home.

  I had no idea why I chose to stay there a week. I ate a fucking burger every day that I was there, and I didn’t have an answer for why to that either.

  A week of odd relaxation.

  Then I hit the ground running. Not because I wanted to or forced myself to, but because the calls seemed to come in one after the other.

  -2-

  Don't Get Too Excited

  Lucy

  Another morning.

  Well, I guess you could have called it that. Really, I had no idea what time it was and nowadays, the hours just seemed to blend together. Each day melting into the next. Sure, I got a few hours of shut-eye here and there but I was always too restless and afraid I would miss something to ever really fall into that deep, dead to the world, REM sleep. I had become more of a cat nap kind of person, never really going under deep enough so I wouldn’t hear the things around me. Sometimes I even would swear that I fell asleep while sitting up with my eyes open. Like somehow my brain just gave up and shut down for a few.

  But that was how I had to live. It wasn’t that I was obsessed with the criminal world. Or had some weird kink about watching people when they had no idea that I was. Or even constantly looking for that one thing that gave me a reason to call a certain someone—no, not going into that right now. It wasn’t any of those things. In fact, all of those were a side task to the one I’d been on for years.

  Allison.

  My best friend.

  Taken from her home nearly five years before.

  That night changed everything for me. As I knew it did hers too.

  That was the night I got slapped into reality and began this downward obsession, as my parents had started to call it. Little did they really know what I was doing while they were asleep.

  Five years was a long time.

  And I was smart enough to know that she could have been long gone by now. Not only out of the city but out of the state and hell, the country as well. I didn’t even want to entertain the idea that she was just permanently gone. That would have been the cracking point for me. So for as long as I could, I was going to keep up the façade that she was still alive and out there.

  I was under no illusion that she was sitting back living the life, being fed bonbons by the man that had taken her. This very man had managed to evade all things I was able to slink into. A man that left a trail of scarred and sometimes dead people everywhere he went.

  I hated saying his name out loud, therefore I never did so. Unless there was no way around it. I even hated bring that evilness into my mind, but there was simply nothing that could be done about that. Merely the thought of him felt like it tainted my soul, turning the edges so dark and black that they were close to being ash.

  “Well, what do we have here?” I asked…well, myself. Because, as always, I was all by myself. Just me in this massive one-room apartment. I didn’t have a dog or a cat. Or even a goldfish. As dogs required outdoor time, and I had—maybe a little bit—become overly comfortable inside my four walls. And cats were too high and mighty for me. Maybe I just wasn’t one for pets in general, or any kind of company.

  Before you ask, I did have a friend. One. And that came around sort of by strange accident. The great thing about her was that she wasn’t a huge people person. So it was nice to have someone to talk to that I could also brush off when I felt the need to. Nadya was awesome in that badass, woman power, kill you before you even knew she was there kind of way. She was everything that I’d never be. Maybe sometimes I envied her. But mostly, I was just glad that she was on my side.

  Okay, so back to what was going on.

  Looked like it was time to make a phone call. The heads-up kind. To the man that…maybe I was mildly obsessed with. But in that curious about him sort of way. Like, I just couldn’t figure him out at all. Not to mention, the guy was hard to track and spy on. He wasn’t a fan of electronics. His phone changed constantly. He didn’t even have a new vehicle with GPS that I could hack and track. So, you see, he was a bit of a mystery. The only times I really got a glimpse of him was when he went to do a job. Those were the times he climbed into my world. It was all about the company he kept and those happened to be the ones I kept my eyes on.

  There were strange circles in this underground world. I was still trying to navigate them all. It was weird how there seemed to be all these strings, these tethers, that tied each criminal organization together. Clean was one of those strings. He wove himself in and out of and through many of the different outlaw groups. He was an outsider, one that most of them kept close. He knew things that most outsiders didn’t know and he was more in than he was out.

  I’d seen him work only a handful of times, though I’d been watching him for a few years now. It was on those rare occasions that I took in every little thing about the way he worked. Whether he knew he was being watched or not, I’d never know. I wasn’t about to give myself away and ask him. Or more so, I wasn’t about to have a long enough conversation with the man to work up the courage to ask. I kept our calls brief, hiding my voice and giving him a location before dropping the call. I didn’t think he had any way to track me because he wasn’t that kind of guy, not tech savvy at all. And even if he were, I got the feeling that he wouldn’t.

  He wasn’t old, I’d have put him somewhere around ten years my senior. Maybe more. I had no real idea because Clean was pretty much a ghost and I was never able to get a super clear image of his face the rare times that I’d seen him pop up on my screen. I had no idea who he really was. And believe me, I’d searched. All I got was a handful of nothing in the end. I couldn’t even dig up his real name. So either he came from out of the damn sky, or he had someone that had helped make him invisible long ago. I was good and all, but there were still things that were just out of my reach. Finding out who Clean really was, well, that was one of them.

  “Yeah,” he answered in his oddly calm and smooth voice. We’d done this song and dance enough times that he wasn’t even a little bit fazed by my calls anymore. Which maybe wasn’t a good thing. The more comfortable with something you are, the bolder you get. And I was waiting for the time he started to throw questions my way. “Where am I headed?”

  “Dogs of Wrath MC,” I said knowing I didn’t need to give any more detail than that. He’d worked with them before and since they only had one chapter, there wasn’t any room to guess.

  “That it?” he asked and I could have sworn I heard something amusing in his usually smooth tone.

  I stuttered silently, the air becoming trapped in my lungs as my mouth and tongue had a seizure. See, this was what I was afraid of. The boldness. The questions. The push to get to know more. More about me specifically.

  Hang up, my mind screamed at me. Disconnect!

  But there I was frozen, listenin
g to his even, calm breaths as they fanned over the speaker. Those breaths somehow came out with little chuckles attached to the end of them. Mockingly. Taunting me. Daring me to say something else.

  In the end, I panicked, possibly even let out a squeak, and hung up as quickly as I could get my normally nimble fingers to do.

  Then my head hit the top of the desk with a loud thump. I resisted the urge to pick it up and drop it again. Though I did see myself doing it several times in my mind.

  I would have liked to tell you that this was not normal for me. That it was just this man that made me go all spastic and blank. But sadly, it wasn’t. Well, okay, he made me more so than normal. I could handle little bursts of conversation with certain people. I could count those people on one hand, using three fingers.

  My delivery boy, who not only fed my pizza addiction, but has also taken so much pity on my pasty, closed-off self that he had offered to do my grocery shopping for me once a week. I paid him extra for his troubles, of course—I wasn’t a bitch and I never wanted to feel like I was taking advantage of someone. So I could make with the ‘how is your day going?’ conversations with him just long enough to not seem rude and whatnot. I really was grateful for the guy. He was a little older than me and seemed to have a decent head on his shoulders, from what I could tell. I could see him doing something more with his life. Sad to say that I might hate that day because he will spread his wings and fly far away from his hot, greasy pie delivery duties.

  Then what will I do?

  Make friends with his replacement?

  No, that was something I didn’t want to think about.

  Then there was Nadya. I could actually talk to her like a human, mostly. Though, she sometimes didn’t seem like one. She was calculating most of the time. The type of person that didn’t let her guard down for anyone. That included me. I had a feeling that I was slowly working my way around it though. One day she’d let me in. I just had to believe that there had to be some reason she kept taking my calls and texting me back. Maybe she was as lonely as I was. But not like I’d ever know because she wasn’t one for the touchy-feely stuff.

  And the third just so happened to be my parents, I still talked to them occasionally. But that was strained at best. They hated the hole I fell into after what happened to Allison. They still loved me because I was their daughter. But because I wouldn’t go to them on holidays—or ever, really, then the distance just seemed to keep piling up as the years went on. So, I’d call. I’d ask how things were going. I’d take interest in my mom’s latest craft. I’d even attempt to talk sports with my dad. More like, listened to him as he went on about the season.

  That was pretty much it in a nutshell. I had people I shared information with, just rarely talked to them other than fingers-to-keys kinda way. I tried to keep my talk time to a minimum because I felt more comfortable that way, but sometimes it couldn’t be avoided.

  I may not have kept things simple, but I did like the lack of communication I had with the outside world.

  So, I knew I was fucked up. And not for the ways one might think. See, I was fucked up because as I watched the muscle of the MC—or Enforcer, these guys like their titles—work over this guy that they had tied to a chair, I was almost smiling. That wasn’t to say that I was enjoying the violence because I honestly didn’t really have the stomach for it. In fact, I wasn’t really watching. I didn’t have to in order to know what was going on and how it was going to end. Hence the reason that I called Clean in the first place. So back to why I was fucked up. Because I knew that this would end with me actually getting rare eyes on said man. Mr. Clean. The Cleaner. The man you called to clean up a crime scene and disappear a body. A man that was amazing at his job. I knew because I’d seen it. And also seen, or not seen, how well those bodies stayed disappeared. I didn’t get many chances to get a glimpse of him. Usually only when he was on a job that had cameras in areas that were less than smart. He never seemed to mind, even tossing a glance at them a few times. Just a flicker, but it had been enough for me to catch sight of his whole face for a brief second. Then there were the times he dumped his phone and picked up a new one. There were five places he did that at. Cycling through each one as he moved around. I could only assume that he had places nearby because it was always the same. Or maybe he just trusted those shops.

  How was I able to track him, pin down his number, and get in touch with him even when he used burner phones? Well, it was me. Come on. I wasn’t about to get all cocky and tell you that I was the greatest out there, because I wasn’t. I was just really good. And better in certain areas. I was also smart. He had a separate service set up to collect his voicemails. It was quite genius. A number that never changed and wasn’t really connected to him. It wouldn’t ring through to his phone. Instead, whoever called would get sent to an answering service he had set up. They would leave a message, something about needing their pool cleaned or something, which made sense because the business Clean advertised was just that—a pool cleaning service. Strange as all get out. But then again, the chemicals and things he used could be passed off as that if he ever got pulled over. Especially if one didn’t really know about such things. Well, most of them anyway. I imagined the bone saws would have been a little harder to explain.

  With every new phone he got, the first thing he would do was call into his voicemail service and program his new number in. So that when he got a new voicemail, it would push it through to the new number. And that was where I caught on. I was able to hack the service and get that new number every single time. Easy work. The first time I did it I think I actually rolled my eyes.

  He never questioned it.

  I never let on to how I got the number.

  It was all magical in a way.

  Right?

  Remembering the first time I called him almost made me chuckle. It took him a few good calls and locations to get him to even think about trusting me. Sometimes I wondered if he was still leery. Or maybe he just wanted more answers. He’d taken my calls on faith for a long time now, in a way, it wouldn’t have surprised me if he did start pushing for details about me and asking questions. But then again, maybe he didn’t really think about me beyond the call. And perhaps, that would have been the best thing.

  I didn’t really watch as they beat the guy to a bloody pulp. I occasionally flicked my eyes to that screen as I continued to work on other things. Like, look into the guy that was about to breathe his last breath. There was a story there and I just wanted to piece it together. I knew this MC pretty well. The Dogs of Wrath were on the coast of North Carolina and took in shipments of guns and smaller shipments of drugs. Nothing hard, from what I could tell. The guns were handed off to various other organizations, with one particular MC taking the bulk of it. That MC, the Steel Paragons, were larger but didn’t have a chapter in the coastal city. They were also on my radar. I kept an eye on all of their chapters, mainly focusing on the head one located in Moon Hill, NC. As far as outlaws went, the Paragons and the Dogs were not that bad. Sure they ran guns, but with the things I’d seen, that was nothing.

  Yes, I spent the majority of my time and focus on motorcycle clubs. I was looking for some sort of connection to Allison. Or the man that took her, rather. I knew he’d been a part of one. I had a good idea that he’d taken over one by force and I currently was looking for where he’d moved his organization to now that he’d caught some heat. In a way, these people were his people. I just kept hoping that he’d cross paths with one of them eventually and I’d be there to catch it.

  Then there he was.

  No, not the evil man.

  The guy that was such a mystery to me. The one with the clean shaved head except for a dark slicked back mohawk. The man that always wore white button-up shirts and black slacks. Which I never did understand, given that his work was very messy. But I guessed that was his thing, his ritual or whatever. Maybe it was just that he felt most comfortable in button-up shirts, though I didn’t get how. Whatever it wa
s, it was always the same.

  I watched him work. His muscles flexing under his clothes as he moved around. Every move steady and precise. The few times I’d seen him, he looked like a man at ease. Like a man that didn’t have a care in the world. I could tell that he took his jobs seriously but didn’t get enjoyment out of them. And I also noticed that his work was never rushed.

  He carried the limp body effortlessly and laid it out on a clear, plastic tarp. One that he’d already covered in baking soda. Yes, it was his thing, from what I could tell. The way he did it every time. How I wanted to call and ask him why all the time, but I knew that would be dumb. I wanted to know his reasons behind why he did it like that. And why he seemed to do it the hard way, when I knew there were much easier and less messy ways to do his job. But he didn’t. His methods almost seemed…old school, in a way. I had no idea what I was talking about, honestly, because I wasn’t well versed in how to cleanup a crime scene. Then he brought out the bone saw and I had to look away. I’d seen all of him that I could stomach for the night. Somehow it wasn’t enough.

  I was going crazy.

  Or seriously sleep deprived.

  Or maybe I was just subconsciously desperate for some kind of human contact.

  Who the hell knew?

  But there was something when it came to him that just caught me. I wanted to know more, yet I couldn’t let myself go there. So like some crazy stalker, I sat back and jumped at any chance I got to watch him.

  -3-

  Isn't That Just Sad

  Lucy

  Some days were more exciting than others. But with that said, I never had a lack of entertainment, that was for sure. Who needed TV when I had thirty or so outlaw groups to watch? Like really.