Page 4 of Warrant (The Berserker’s Rage MC: Wyoming Chapter #1)

Ainsley

S hutting my front door with my boot, I dropped the stacks of folders onto the dining room table. I’d spent the day trying to go through a few of the town’s cold cases once Warrant had opened up that filing cabinet for me.

Too many people had kept popping their heads in for me to go through the files, so now I had the stack of them sitting inside my home. The curiosity had been eating at me all day, but I’d managed to wait.

Going down the hall, I stripped off my gun belt, hanging it in my closet, and changed from my uniform into some leggings and a loose fitting t-shirt. It was late. I’d stayed until the night crew had come in, led muster, then finally called it for the night.

I walked into my kitchen, exhaling as I tried to relax my muscles.

There was a lot of pressure on me. All placed there by me, of course, but I wanted this to work.

There was only one other female deputy, the rest were all men.

Not that that mattered. Especially not after Harlow telling me about the town voting in women to run it.

I’d looked that up after she’d left. The county commissioners?

All women. The mayor, the coroner, the judge, and now the new sheriff.

All women. There were more, but I hadn’t looked everyone up.

Guess Harlow hadn’t been kidding when she said the ranchers had been sick of being let down and decided to try something different.

It seemed to be working well. I boiled some water and tossed pasta into it. Leaning my hip on the counter, I looked around my new place. It was just a rental, but it was nice enough. It would do until I found something else. Something that spoke to me.

Draining the pasta, I tossed in some butter and seasonings after putting it into a bowl and taking it over to my table. I opened the first folder as I ate.

Warrant’s cocky face stared up at me. Denison had full background checks on everyone inside the Berserker’s Rage Motorcycle Club. My eyes scanned the information as I ate. He was thirty years old, he’d been in the army, and MP, military police.

That was interesting, I wouldn’t have pegged him for military or law enforcement. Not after some of the stories I’d heard about him. The guys gave Owen Ward a lot of shit about his best friend. Probably because that best friend seemed to cause a lot of trouble when he got bored.

I’d have to speak to Owen about keeping Warrant under control.

I didn’t have time for pranks and chaos and Warrant seemed like the type.

Flicking through the pages, I read about the man I’d agreed to go on a date with.

That had been stupid. I shouldn’t have done that, but it was done and I was a woman of my word.

Setting his folder aside, I picked up the next one.

Cypher. The president of the Berserker’s Rage MC: Wyoming.

He had a commanding face. Intimidating. Handsome, of course, and a bit older.

The picture on the top of the folder was helpful, because I knew I was going to run into these men.

Not only were they the local motorcycle club here, but Cypher ran some kind of security business.

I’d have to look more into Sentry Securities.

Were they like…mall cops? No, that didn’t fit.

There wasn’t exactly a booming need for extra security here in Sentinel, that I could tell.

Which meant they likely did something else.

As long as it was all on the up and up, me and Cypher wouldn’t have any issues.

I wasn’t going to let anyone walk all over me, however.

So, I needed to get to know the main players in this town.

Shoving down toward the bottom of the pile, I opened another folder.

These weren’t men in the MC. These were the men who Denison at least was smart enough to keep eyes on.

Riff raff. Low-lifes. The people more likely to cause me grief as the new sheriff of Sentinel.

Taking another bite of my pasta, I studied the files, getting to know everyone that I could.

I had to hand it to Denison, I hadn’t expected this level of detail from the man.

Some of these background checks were ten years old.

Others were newer, though those seemed less frequent as he’d gotten closer to retiring.

My phone’s ring blasted through my silent house, making me jump. Glaring at it, I answered, “Hello?”

“Hey! What are you doing tomorrow?”

I blinked down at the screen, the number on it wasn’t one I knew. It was a rather insistent female voice. “Um…”

“Oh, sorry, this is Harlow. The girls and I are getting together for lunch. They weren’t really willing to wait to meet you. Come over to Aggie’s at eleven. See you then!”

I opened my mouth to tell her I was much too busy to drop everything in the middle of the day for lunch, but she’d already hung up. Scowling at the phone, I shook my head. “That’s two invitations I feel I got railroaded into,” I muttered to myself.

Picking up my bowl, I washed it out and placed it into the dishwasher before I stretched and tried to decide what to do. I wasn’t much for watching TV. Reading wasn’t really my thing either. I liked to be active. Sitting around worked for all of ten seconds before I was climbing my own walls.

I headed into my room and pulled on a pair of sneakers.

I wrapped a band around my belly and put my gun inside the soft holster before letting my shirt fall over it.

Sentinel wasn’t exactly teeming with crime—most small towns weren’t—but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to be prepared.

Especially when running alone, at night.

Stepping out of the house, I sucked in a deep breath of the cool night air. I looked around, searching for any threats before I began my run. I’d deal with Harlow and Warrant tomorrow. Maybe I could convince them that lunch and dinner dates weren’t necessary.

Something told me there wasn’t going to be anything I could do to convince either of them of that.

“There you are.”

I groaned and turned, looking over my shoulder at Harlow. “What are you doing here?”

Her eyes softened. “I wanted to come be available for the family if they needed me.”

Sighing, I opened the door and motioned for her to go before me. I’d texted her twenty minutes ago that there’d been a hit and run, and a death, so lunch wasn’t going to happen.

“Do we know who it is?” she asked. There was nothing but hurt and sorrow in her expression. She wasn’t here to gawk.

I looked down at the notepad I used to take witness statements at the scene. “Brandon Rice.”

“No,” she said, her voice cracking.

Looking up at her, I swallowed back emotion.

Heartbreak was all over her face. “Mary Rice owns the flower shop on Main Street,” she said with a sad smile.

Tears were welling up in her eyes. Jesus she was going to crack my composure if she wasn’t careful.

“Brandon is her oldest boy. A senior in high school. What happened?”

It was always so damn hard when it was kids.

“He was walking to school,” I told her. There was no big mystery here.

The perp was already in my jail cell. I was only here at the county coroner because I had to have the parents identify the body.

Even though he’d had his wallet on him and I knew who he was.

It was procedure. “Drunk driver,” I told her.

I didn’t say anything else because we walked into the sterile room where the county corner was. We both froze because the woman standing there was…not…what I was expecting.

She was nibbling on a sandwich as she scribbled down some notes in a folder.

There were various bodies, some covered, one looked like it had just finished being autopsied.

And she was eating a sandwich. She was also in a black lace dress that poofed out around her knees and a pair of black Doc Martins.

Of course she had some kind of apron thing on over it, which had some blood spatter decorating it.

The apron had a giant chicken on it. My eyes and my brain were fighting right now, both rejecting that what they were seeing was real.

She looked over, probably feeling our stares. Blinking at us in surprise—something we were all doing—she set her sandwich on a metal rolling table, next to some sharp looking implements, and I had to fight a cringe. “Hello.” Her voice was smooth and soft.

“Uh.” I glanced at the tools and sandwich again, then back at her. “Hey. I’m Sheriff Zimmerman.”

“Oh.” She blinked at me, a quizzical smile tilting her lips.

“The Rice family is going to be coming in to do an identification,” I told her. One of my deputies had been on scene when the coroner had come to get the boy’s body.

“Oh. Okay. Let me go get him ready.” Her voice was almost…musical. She wasn’t at all what I expected, but despite the high school goth girl vibes, her casual soft demeanor was setting me at ease. It was weird.

I gave Harlow a look as the woman disappeared into the next room.

“That’s Raeleen. Everyone calls her Rae. She’s the best,” Harlow said with a sad smile.

“She’s…yeah.” I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t even that she was eating inside a morgue that threw me. Cops ate in situations that most people would think were really strange.

Back home one of the deputies, Freddy Wilson, had pulled over a vehicle, gotten the call from dispatch that it was stolen a minute later and stepped out to arrest the driver with both sandwich and gun in hand.

Never dropped the Reuben. Kept eating after he had the guy locked up in the back of his cruiser.

No. It wasn’t even that, though I wasn’t sure dead bodies and food was something I’d be comfortable mixing.

It was just her overall demeanor. She was like a little doll.

Black long hair, pulled back from her face, black lacy dress, white lab coat hung up nearby, and this soft, serene, emotionless look on her face.

It was just throwing me for a loop. That, and I just had the distinct feeling that she shared an inside joke…

with the corpses. Like I might find her whispering to them.

There wasn’t much time to speak with either Harlow or Rae though, because the outside door to the morgue burst open and a pair of panicked, grief-stricken parents rushed into the outer hallway.

I stepped out—they didn’t need to see this room of death—and tried to steel myself for what is always one of the worst days of my life.

When I had to give anyone the news that their loved one had passed away.

The grieving wail of this mother was going to stick with me for the rest of my life. She collapsed into her husband’s arms, sobbing, and I wished I could make it better. Fix it somehow. All I could do was give her the justice of putting her son’s killer behind bars. It wouldn’t be enough.

Some days the job just sucked.

With Harlow and Rae’s help the parents were taken into a viewing room—Rae also operated the town’s only funeral home—and they were able to give me the identification I needed and say a tearful goodbye to their son.

My heart broke apart inside my chest. Their family would never be the same.

This wasn’t my town yet, but that didn’t mean that it couldn’t be.

That it wouldn’t be. These people would be mine .

And I vowed to do everything in my power to keep them safe, happy, and alive.