It sent shimmering heat waves rolling off the asphalt, and the glimmer of reflections on the road – what old travelers described as a ‘mirage’.
There was something eerie about the pace – something which set my teeth on edge, as I flipped out the kickstand and rested my heavy bike on its edge.
My boots crunched on the dirt, as I crossed over to the edge of the road, and peered down at the farm below.
There were long polythene-covered tunnels laid out across the compound, and a couple of glasshouses next to an old farmhouse and woodshed. That must have been where they grew the weed – rows and rows of the bushy green plants that had once helped build America, and were now the subject of one of its most controversial domestic policies.
The weed didn’t interest me, though. I was looking at more practical concerns.
The first thing I noted was the eight-feet tall, chain-link fence that surrounded the entire compound. It wasn’t penitentiary-grade, but it was enough to keep out deer, coyotes – and, more importantly, any enterprising potheads who fancied picking their own.
A sturdy gate served as the entrance to the compound – chained up, with police-tape wrapped all over it. A small guard’s hut was installed on the outside, and next to that sat a pale, white Police Cruiser with the engine running and a bored-looking officer sitting inside.
Made sense… There were millions of dollars of marijuana plants inside those polythene tunnels and glasshouses, and if you didn’t have a cop on duty, anybody with a van and a bolt-cutter could just roll up and help themselves.
In fact, that’s exactly what Coyle and the Knuckleheads intended to do tonight.
And aside from that dozing officer, it didn’t look like there’d be much to stop them. I saw a couple of security cameras up there, but none of them had their LED lights on, which suggested they’d been switched off for God-knows-how-long. There was a dog basking down there in the sun, too – a grey-muzzled German Shepherd – but it looked like he’d be more likely to welcome uninvited guests with a wagging tail than gnashing teeth.
With a satisfied nod, I straightened up and turned back to my bike.
I’d got the lay of the land… Now it was time to face down the two crooked cops who Coyle would be relying on.
***
At 2 p.m. exactly, I rolled my bike around the corner of Old Survey Road, and found an old Dodge Charger police cruiser waiting for me.
Leaning against the car, wearing those douchey aviator shades, were two burly looking young cops in too-tight uniform shirts and knee-high, black leather boots.
They looked like bit-players from that old TV show, CHiPs.
I pulled my bike up alongside the cruiser, and cut the engine. As I swung my leg over the saddle, I noticed neither of the two men made a move. They just stood there, watching, like vultures.
I didn’t let it faze me. It was a intimidation tactic – one I’d employed myself back in Iraq. In fact, it was almost cute. As my boots crunched across the gravel, I realized that these two-bit cops probably thought I’d be quaking at their presence; when in truth I’d seen more shit than they could have possibly imagined.
I stepped up in front of them, and the cop on the right pulled off his shades. He had a tight, blond buzz-cut and beady blue eyes that glowered at me with such contempt that it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
“You Coyle’s man?” he growled.
“Who the fuck else do you think I’d be?”
I’m not normally an asshole, but I enjoyed firing off that retort. I could see the blond cop’s eyes widen in surprise – not expecting that kind of attitude from somebody he probably dismissed as biker-gang trash.
But that’s why I said it. These two cops had the swagger of high school bullies; and I liked tearing people like that down a peg or two.
“I’m Dempsey.” The blond cop recovered well, and tried to blow off my pissy answer. “This is Sanchez.” He nodded towards his companion – a dark-haired man with slightly-longer-than-regulation hair, and a day’s black stubble.
I could tell they were trying to go for a Bad Boys vibe. Truth was, they looked more like the Super Troopers – or a gay porn parody of Starsky & Hutch.
Peeling his own shades off, Sanchez demanded: “You checked out the farm?”
I nodded, digging my thumbs into my belt.
“Looks straight up,” I told him. “Those cameras don’t work, right?”
“Nope,” Sanchez confirmed. “And we’ll leave the gate unlocked. You’ll have between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. to get in there, load up, and skin out.”
“And they’ll be nobody watching the place?”
“Sanchez is working dispatch tonight,” Dempsey replied. “At 10:30 p.m. he’s going to call in a 10-14 to the squad car assigned here.”
“A 10-14?” I was an army man. I didn’t know the cop jargon.
“A prowler,” Sanchez translated. “We’ll have the cop assigned to this place shining his spotlight into people’s backyards in Sunset Hills for a couple of hours – should give you all the time you need.”
I nodded. That was the sort of call a cash-strapped police force would be called to make on a regular basis – and should avert any suspicion from these two.
“Take the backs roads west to Interstate 15 and you guys’ll be golden,” Dempsey nodded. “Avoid 78. We’ve only got four cars on call tonight, and I arranged a DUI checkpoint on that road to keep ‘em busy.”
Damn, these two had thought of everything.
“Sounds good,” I nodded. “And what about afterward? How are you two collecting your cut?”
Dempsey bristled when I asked him that.
“That’s between us and Coyle,” he hissed. “You keep your mind on your business – and out of ours.”
I snorted humorlessly.
“Fair enough.”
And that’s when I pushed them.
Turning back towards the road, I nodded in the direction of Bandy Canyon Cannabis, and demanded: “So, what’s the deal with the place, anyway? Heard the owner took a buckshot facial a couple of months ago.”
Christi would have hated to hear me describe the death of her father like that – but it seemed to amuse these two cops. Dempsey even cracked a smile – the first time he’d warmed to me since we met.
“More like a 9mm suppository,” he quipped – and I felt a gut-wrench of hatred the moment he did. “We were just going to shake him down for some monthly protection, but the dumb bastard came barreling out of his house flashing a 12-gauge at us.”
“Blue lives matter,” Sanchez growled, clearly not as blasé about it as his partner. “I didn’t want to put the old man down – but I wasn’t about to get shot by him, either.”
There was silence after that, and I guess all three of us went off somewhere private in our heads to process what the cop had just said.
I’m not going to lie – I’d been in similar situations back in Iraq. When your nerves are on edge, and the grip of your M-4 feels sweaty in your palm, you don’t know whether or not the head-scarfed bastards screaming at you are just trying to protect their kids, or about to detonate a vest full of C-4 on you.
I could still hear the echo of gunshots in my mind – from the times me and my teammates had been forced to make similar calls… and sometimes, had to live with the consequences.
But even as soon as I allowed those memories to resurface, I swallowed them back down.
Iraq was different. Out in the desert, I’d been trying to do a job – following orders, rightly or wrongly.
These two bastards? They’d come raiding Bandy Canyon Cannabis to shake down Christi’s father for protection money. It was difficult to claim his death was ‘self-defense’ given the circumstances.
“Okay,” I pushed aside the topic, and got straight back down to business. “What’s the next step?”
“There is no next step,” Dempsey growled. “Just roll up to the farm at 11 p.m., and do what you’ve gotta do.”
�
�Keep your shit together, stay out of trouble, and we’ll all make it out of this with a nice little paycheck,” Sanchez nodded.
“But fuck with us,” Dempsey raised a finger at me, and pointed it at my chest the same way I imagine he pointed his gun as Christi’s father, “and we’ll make you fucking pay – understood?”
I didn’t reply. I just stared at him – deep into his beady blue eyes. Dempsey didn’t like that, I could tell. He expected some kind of deference – a little nod, or a word to reassure him that he was still in charge…
But he wasn’t.
“You try that tone of voice with Coyle,” I finally hissed back. “Let me know how it works out for you.”
And Dempsey lowered that finger of his pretty damn quickly after hearing that.
I gave the two cops a nod, and turned my back on them – crunching across the dirt towards my bike.
As I swung my leg over the saddle, I could feel their eyes on my back – their glare burning into me with suspicion and resentment…
…but as I fired up the Harley, and the big, rear wheel spun in the dirt, I reminded myself that those two deserved everything they had coming to them.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Christi
I froze when I heard the key in the lock, and ducked down behind the bed.
Who was trying to get into our motel room? Those crooked cops? Some of Coyle’s biker goons?
Shit, was it housekeeping?
But then the door swung open, and the silhouette I saw in the doorframe had a reassuring familiarity to it. I watched Mason swagger in, patting the road-dust from his leather jacket, and I felt my whole body relax the moment I saw him.
The door of the motel room clunked shut, and I crossed the room to wrap my arms around his muscular waist.
“Well?” I demanded, pressing my face into his broad chest. “How did it go?”
Pulling my face away, I looked up into Mason’s handsome face, and asked: “Did you… Did you meet them?”
His face was grim, as Mason replied: “Those two cops? Yeah.”
He untangled himself from my embrace, and peeled off his leather jacket. His tight Led Zeppelin t-shirt was plastered with sweat underneath, clinging to every bulge of his chiseled torso.
“I met ‘em, alright,” Mason murmured, tossing his jacket onto the bed. “And I’m sorry.” Turning to me, the handsome biker sighed: “I’m so sorry for what they did to your father, Christi.”
I felt myself tremble when he said that.
“Well…” I could barely find the words. “They’re going to pay, right? That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”
Mason said nothing.
I knew the truth. He was here for Coyle, and the Knuckleheads. Those two crooked bastards who’d murdered my father were just on the periphery of this investigation…
But they were still part of it – and on the wrong side, no matter which way you looked at it.
“So, here’s the deal,” Mason stepped up, and placed a heavy hand on my shoulder, “I called in with my people in Homeland Security. There’s an F.B.I. detail in town. We’re going to head across the street in a little while and rendezvous with them.”
I shuddered when I heard that.
Across the street was an old diner – I’d grown up drinking milkshakes there with my dad, every Saturday. Would anybody recognize me? And what if those two cops saw us, talking to the feds there?
As if reading my mind, Mason squeezed my shoulder.
“Hun, it’s been months since you left town, and I don’t think your own mother would recognize you since you’ve been gone.
It hurt, him mentioning my mother. She’d been laid into the ground years ago… The only upshot was that now my father was buried right there next to her, in that plot on cemetery hill.
But anyway… Mason was right. When I’d skinned out of town, I’d been a curvy brunette with a stoner sense of style. I’d had a couple of dreadlocks, wore cargo pants, and never spent much time out of my old Nirvana hoodie.
Now, after months of riding with the Knuckleheads, I’d dropped thirty pounds, gone bottle-blond, and showed off all that skin I’d used to keep hidden underneath my baggy clothes. What’s more, most of it had been adorned with a litany of tattoos since I’d last been in town...
Mason was right. Nobody would recognize me.
“Besides,” he squeezed my shoulder again, “we’re going to be smart. It’ll be like something out of a spy movie. You and I sit in one booth. The F.B.I. agents will sit in the one next to it. We’ll talk over the partition, but to anybody looking – it’ll seem like we’re two separate parties.”
I wrapped my arms around myself, and shivered.
“I… I guess.”
“Don’t worry.” Suddenly, that hand on my shoulder pulled me in for a massive hug. Mason crushed me to his chest with his bear-like arms, and I gratefully breathed in his delicious, sweaty scent.
“Don’t worry,” he repeated, as I pressed my cheek against his clammy t-shirt. “I won’t let anything happen to you. I promise.”
And as I peeled my face away, and looked up at him, I could see that he really meant it.
“Okay, kiddo,” the corner of Mason’s lips curled, and it was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen. “Let me go take a shower.” He winked at me. “If the road-dust hadn’t dirtied me up, what we did in bed a couple of hours ago sure did.”
But I didn’t let him go.
In fact, I just clung on tighter.
“You know what?” I bit my bottom lip. “If we’ve still got some time to kill…”
And then I started sliding myself down Mason’s body, onto my knees on the floor of that motel room.
“What are you doing?” Mason’s eyes widened. “Wait, Christi, you don’t have to…”
But his protests stopped, as I finally reached the ground, and find myself eye-level with Mason’s belt buckle.
With trembling fingers, I reached up to unbuckle it.
Mason gasped as I pulled open his thick, leather belt, and popped the button on his Levis. The zip rasped as I wrenched open his fly. A moment later, I was tugging his jeans down around his muscular thighs – dragging with them his boxer shorts, too.
“Oh, my…”
Mason’s big, beautiful cock swung out to greet me – thick, half-hard, and radiating heat.
I breathed in his heady, musky scent. Then I reached up my slender fingers to curl them around his shaft.
“Oh, God…” Mason’s knees nearly buckled, and one of his hands reached down to touch my cheek. “Oh, Jesus…”
I stroked Mason’s beautiful cock until it was rearing upwards, as hard and veiny as a length of well-oiled beechwood. Then, opening my mouth wide, I enveloped the swollen head of it.
“Fuuuuuck,” Mason flopped backwards onto the bed, unable to control himself the moment he felt my warm, wet mouth on his dick. “Oh, Christi…” His fingers slid into my hair, and he gently cradled the back of my head as I eagerly swallowed more and more of him into my sweetly sucking mouth.
I loved this part of it, you know. The feeling of power you get when a man’s most sensitive organ is between your lips.
For the past few months, I’d been nothing but a tight little ass and a warm, wet mouth for more bikers than I cared to remember. I dreaded to even count the number of times I’d found myself like this – on my knees in some seedy roadside bar, slurping and sucking like an obedient little whore.
But while most of it I’d disassociated myself from – shut off that part of my brain with reason and logic, and just embraced the act of sex itself – I was always there for this part of it.
Giving blowjobs was the only time I’d felt truly powerful while I rode with the Knuckleheads – and the one I was giving Mason felt no different.
Saliva drooled down my chin as I softly sucked on Mason’s big, thick shaft. With one hand, I gently massaged his head, egg-sized balls. The other I slid under his t-shirt – massaging his broad chest a
nd flat stomach, as I massaged his cock with my mouth.
He tasted salty, and musky, and I didn’t care. Hell, I’d tasted worse in all those months on the road. In fact, there was something delicious about Mason’s manly taste, and as I swirled my tongue around the head of his cock, and drooled wetly down his shaft and balls, I felt almost drunk from the flavor of him.
“Oh, fuuuuck, Christi,” Mason was lying on the bed, utterly powerless. “That feels so fucking amazing.”
And that’s where the power came from. These big, burly bikers were so strong and dangerous… But when I had one of them like this? They were as helpless as baby kittens.
I started bobbing my head up and down, the wet sound of suction echoing back and forth in that tiny motel room.
I knew Mason was about to get in the shower, so I didn’t worry about the mess I was making… Saliva pooled down my chin, strands of it stretching from Mason’s cock to my eager lips. It was wet, and sloppy, and from the way Mason was writhing and groaning on the bed, I knew it felt amazing.
“Oh, Jesus, Christi…” I felt his cock throb in my mouth, and tasted the first spurt of salty pre-cum. “It’s… it’s too much…”
But that just spurred me on.
As Mason arched his back, and clawed at the sheets, I doubled my efforts. My tongue swirled relentlessly. My lips sucked like a vacuum. My head bobbed up and down in Mason’s lap like one of those oil pump jacks in the desert...
“Oh God…” his hips lifted from the bed. “Christi… I…”
And then it came. Like a firehouse, Mason’s big, beautiful cock spurted into my eagerly-sucking mouth, flooding it with thick, salty heat.
I eagerly gulped it down, swallowing each spurt with practiced ease until I’d literally drained him dry.
Mason almost cried out, as I relentlessly kept sucking. He flopped onto the bed, twitching and groaning, finally admitting surrender when he grabbed a fistful of my hair and pulled my face from between his legs.
Mason’s drained cock popped from my lips with a wet-sounding smack, and I lifted my head to smile at him.
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