Riding Dirty Read Online Free

made it pretty easy to disappear here.
    She stopped at an underground parking garage to switch vehicles. Then she continued to the retirement center. The precaution might be unnecessary, but she was happy to comply. Active members of the program weren’t allowed to see their loved ones at all. They couldn’t work in their choice of professions or live wherever they wanted. As a transitional member, Mia had more freedom. She didn’t need twenty-four-hour protection or constant check-ins anymore. After five years, she might be able to leave the program for good.
    In a way, she was lucky she’d been left for dead. Because she was dead, legally. They’d buried Jane Doe in a coffin alongside Mia’s husband. Michelle Ruiz had been reborn as Mia Russo, aka Mia Richards.
    Her husband, Philip, had stayed dead.
    She turned off the air conditioner and lowered the windows as she drove down the lonely desert highway. It was still hot, but she wanted to feel the wind and the warmth of the setting sun on her skin. She wanted to feel something .
    Her mind drifted back to the day she’d lost him. She usually tried not to think about it, but the session with Cole had jogged her memory. Cole had lost the person he loved most, too. For a moment, he’d shared her pain, and the weight of it had shifted off her heart. Lifted up to let her breathe again.
    She’d regained consciousness in the guest room, nauseous and disoriented. Philip didn’t come for her, and that was terrifying. At some point, she rolled over and crawled into the hall. She felt like a ghost, or a zombie. Her hair was matted with blood. One of her eyes didn’t work, her head ached and her ankle throbbed. She didn’t trust herself to stand, so she continued down the hall on her hands and knees.
    Philip was on the floor in the study. He’d been shot in the head. He was unmoving, unresponsive. She used his desk phone to call 911. Then she’d curled up next to his dead body and wept.
    The first twenty-four hours after the robbery went by in a blur. She’d been interviewed by two detectives at the hospital. She was suffering from traumatic brain injury, in addition to post-traumatic stress. The details of the attack were fuzzy. After the third or fourth round of interrogations, she realized that she was their prime suspect. Philip had taken out a significant life insurance policy. As his wife, she was the sole beneficiary. The police seemed to think she’d hired a pair of hit men to murder her husband. Then Damon Vargas of the Riverside District Attorney’s Gang Task Force took over the investigation—and he believed her.
    Damon arranged for her to have a cognitive interview, which was a psychological process designed to help witnesses remember details. She’d been able to form a clearer picture of her assailants. They were both big men, Philip’s age. One had salt-and-pepper hair. The other had dark, close-set eyes and a cursive tattoo on his wrist that began with the letter E.
    “I don’t think they were gang members,” she’d said to Damon, after that interview.
    “Why not?”
    “They were white.”
    “Most motorcycle club members are white,” he’d explained. “Some are organized criminals, like the mafia. They’re involved in everything from weapons dealing to armed robbery.”
    She’d had no idea.
    Damon had inquired about the antique motorcycle display Philip had hosted at the gallery the month before. It had attracted a large crowd of hard-core bikers. Hell’s Angels types. Tattoos and alternative lifestyles were common in Southern California, so Mia hadn’t been disturbed by the guests. The previous year’s display of historical vibrators and vintage BDSM equipment had drawn an equally colorful group.
    According to Damon, the masks she’d seen on the perpetrators were protective gear worn by motorcycle riders. He showed her pictures of men involved with Riverside’s White Lightning Motorcycle Club. She immediately identified one of its