Have Gun, Will Travel (The Bare Bones MC Book 5)

by Wolfe, Layla

“Vortices,” Harte said hotly, his jaw tight. “And her injuries aren’t going to be helped by any woo-woo spa treatment, Dad. That anusbrain cut her good. I can’t imagine a woman doing anything to warrant such fucking treatment.”

  Leo put his hands on Harte’s shoulders. “I know, I know, Harte. It’s inexcusable behavior and so on. But you gotta understand Tony. That’s the world he lives in, the circles he moves in. That’s the sort of shit they do. I’m sure you’ve heard the story of how they took Roman Serpico’s father’s face and plastered it onto a soccer ball.”

  What? That was Roman Serpico’s father who was turned into a sporting good? Roman was the newest member of the Pure and Easy Red Rocks Original chapter, where it’d all started. He’d transferred there when the Tucson clubhouse had blown up. I could easily see the former rocker—and hitman-in-training—Roman go on the warpath against Tormenta once he heard about his latest stunt. But according to Missy, he was on his honeymoon with Gudrun McGill. Maybe Harte would take up our cause. He’d been known to go against his father. He wasn’t just a brainless, mindless robot following his father’s orders. That was yet another attractive thing about Harte. He was his own man.

  “Of course I’ve fucking heard that, and I fucking believe it, Dad. That’s why we’ve got to put a stop to this asshole. He’s out of control. Can’t you keep your business arrangements with him but not let him near our fucking clubhouse?”

  Leo shook his head with certainty. “No. No. No, I can’t, Harte. You know how it goes. It’s the reaching out. It’s the courtesy between associates. It’s the common hospitality we show each other when we visit each other’s backyards. When I go down to Tucson on business, Tormenta hooks me up with a fucking time I’ll never forget.”

  Harte exploded. “Well isn’t that just fucking lovely, then? You’re going to invite that maniac back into our clubhouse just so he can do the same thing—or maybe worse—to another one of our women? You know what? You disgust even me, Dad. I don’t expect you or Birdseye to do anything about it, seeing as how no one has even bothered walking down that fucking hallway to see how Cassie is. That’s it. I’m washing my hands of you motherfuckers. I’m calling Uncle Sax.”

  “No!”

  Leo’s bark stopped Harte cold in his tracks. Harte had his cell in his hand as if about to punch his uncle’s number. But Harte chuckled with disdain. “You think you can stop me? Sax is the only one who’ll do anything about this. He’s the only one left with any decent, human emotions. Maybe because you drove him away ten years ago. He was never under your vicious influence.”

  Harte made as if to split, but Leo grabbed a handful of the front of his leather cut. Touching a man’s cut was an unforgiveable offense, but Leo was the Prez, as well as Harte’s father. Harte stopped.

  Leo snarled, rattling Harte mercilessly. “Let’s keep this buried, boy. I don’t know where you get the idea that that nomad loser Sax is suddenly going to ride over here from Maine or Bumfuck or whatever hellhole he’s currently growing moss in. But he’s going to care about some slashed-up pussy even less than I do. You give him far too much credit and I don’t know why. He’s a worthless, shifty nomad, and always will be.”

  Harte finally wrenched his cut from his father’s grip. His angry voice spewed from him, lizard-like, as though possessed by a demon. “Don’t fucking touch me. And I don’t know why you’re always badmouthing Sax when all I’ve seen from him is good.” He stalked off down the hall.

  Leo shouted, “You fucking call Sax and I’ll send you on that run to Nogales tomorrow.”

  “I won’t go,” bellowed Harte from the end of the hall.

  “That’s what you think!”

  Leo, too, stormed off. We women breathed easier. Like I said, never a dull moment around here. Normally that was why I liked it, but I was starting to question my attraction to the club. There was good excitement, and bad excitement. This was definitely the bad kind of excitement.

  Missy said, “Maddy will be here in an hour with her medical bag.”

  Brenda sighed. “I always knew Harte was a sweetheart. Now I’m convinced of it. Can you believe he’s the only one who bothered coming to see how Cassie was?”

  I said, “And he wasn’t even here when it happened. You know what? Let’s put a fucking bounty out on Tormenta’s head.”

  Instantly, things seemed to brighten up the dark room. Rhetta was on it like sonic. “Yes!” she cried. “We’ll all put money into the pot and give the bounty to whoever manages to…” She trailed off, unsure what the desired outcome was.

  I wasn’t even sure, and I was the one who’d proposed the idea.

  I wasn’t quite so hardass, so faithless, as to propose what truly lay in my heart. I’d trained for years to assist the downtrodden, not kill the pathetic, the hopeless, the heartless. I could never truly wash my hands of my charitable, altruistic nature. How could I verbally propose what went so against the grain of all I’d stood for, until recently? Just because I’d lost the conviction of my beliefs, my hope for humanity, didn’t mean I could verbally propose—aloud—something that went against everything I used to believe in.

  But I was holding a slashed, bleeding girl in my arms. I’d finished dabbing her wounds. The bowl of water was now a solid, deep red. Her face looked like a bowl of chili, already swelling, puffing up around the canyons of the knife cuts. There were far fewer cuts than I’d originally feared. A few of them slashed her nose like a hashtag.

  It was Cassie herself who finally spoke. “Whoever manages to kill that douchecanoe.”

  Her speaking it aloud gave us all more courage.

  Brenda nodded emphatically. “Yes. Yes! Whoever manages to bury that fucker gets the bounty.”

  “Like in the old west!” cried Rhetta. “We need a hired gun, that’s what we need!”

  I was carried away with enthusiasm for the plan. Someone else had dared give voice to it, and now I was only going along. “No one even has to know who did it! Just hit him in the dead of night—like his sicarios do to Mexicans and people who try to escape from their cartel clutches. Hit him when he’s down, and boom! Whoever does it gets the money.”

  “Take him out no matter where the sicario finds him,” agreed Missy. “Sitting on the toilet, raping some girl, who cares? I’ve got about three grand I can put into the pot.”

  That sort of sobered us up. That was a hard act to follow. As a businesswoman, of course I lived month to month. But I had a small savings for emergencies. I said, “I’m in. I’ll see your amount, Missy.”

  Rhetta said, “I know plenty of guys who’d do it just for the first three large.” I wondered what Rhetta could contribute. She’d been a refugee from some whacked cult in the mountains above Pure and Easy. Of course the cult took everyone’s last dollar, so she’d been a pass-around ever since, moving from the P and E chapter up here to Flag. “I can give probably one large.” That surprised me.

  Brenda, too, was carried away by the spirit of the thing. “I can match you first two gals. Three large for me.”

  “Fuck it,” said Cassie, barely able to move her mouth. “I’ve got about ten grand I’ve been saving for retirement. This is more important.”

  Rhetta counted the total on her fingers. “Twenty large. Should be enough to get a professional, don’t you think? Plus, once we tell the other girls, who knows how much they’ll be down for.”

  I waggled a finger at Rhetta. “But keep this on the down low, away from Leo or any other club member. Leo’s obviously not willing to compromise his relationship with Tormenta to get revenge or even to ask the fucker to stop beating us up.” I knew I wasn’t one of “us,” having never balled a single patch holder. But I included myself, as their friend. “Who is this uncle Sax guy Leo was so against? I’ve never heard of him before.” It had immediately struck me, listening to the two men argue, that if Leo was so against this Sax guy, he probably wasn’t so bad. I had never cared for Leo. Far too hardened by the life, and far too mean to his old lady and wife, Lulu. I
’d seen him beat on her with his fists several times, and I wasn’t even that close to the club. But he’d never used a knife that I knew of.

  Brenda had probably been a sweetbutt the longest. “I remember before Leo sent Sax into exile. He was hot, way hotter than Leo.”

  “Maybe that’s why Leo hates him.” Cassie tried to grin, but winced.

  “Could be,” said Brenda. “I don’t know what their beef was, but it must’ve been a big one, because Sax was Veep, before Panhead started doing all day and a night in Tucson.” The Bare Bones’ old Veep, Panhead, had suddenly been arrested by feds about three months ago. Next thing anyone knew, he was doing life in Tucson, no trial or anything. It was a RICO indictment case and had everyone on edge about who’d be next. It sure seemed being Veep of the Flagstaff chapter was a hazardous career. “He was so hot I’d climb him in a heartbeat.”

  Brenda would climb anyone in a heartbeat, so I thought no more about Harte’s studmuffin uncle. Madison came to minister to Cassie, gave her a shot of morphine, and angrily added another ten grand to the pot. She loathed Tormenta, too. She said it was just too bad Roman was on his honeymoon in Barbados—she smartly didn’t want to disturb him with this news—because he would’ve done the deed for free.

  Of course I didn’t know it yet, but that day was the start of the rest of my life. My redemption from my self-imposed hell. My loss of faith, my inability to believe in anything or anyone, my skepticism of anything larger than myself—all that would slowly be eroded until it was replaced with a new, wider, more all-seeing sort of faith. A faith in humanity itself.

  I didn’t know it yet, but that was exactly what I needed.

  CHAPTER TWO

  SAX

  He was torn in a thousand directions at once.

  Zane “Sax” Saxonberg got the call from Harte while he was at a gem show in Tucson. It wasn’t the big annual gem and mineral show, but one where he knew almost all of the dealers and a good percentage of the buyers. Sax dealt in rare and exotic minerals, and had been known to dabble in diamonds and tanzanite. One plain and ugly exotic rock could sell for five thousand dollars or more. He was able to ride the country this way, a gritty, colorful and glamorous door-to-door salesman.

  Things were predictable, the way he’d set up his life. It was like being on one constant fun charity run, only he rode alone, without the pack of his Bare Bones brothers. Sax had become accustomed to riding solo, a nomad without a home. He still had the house near Flagstaff that he’d bought fifteen years ago while Veep of The Bare Bones. But his younger brother banished him into the hinterlands of America, he’d only spent a couple of days a year there.

  Harte needed him. He didn’t give details, just that a beloved sweetbutt had been cut and maimed by an associate who was dubious to begin with.

  “Sax, I’m questioning my dad’s direction,” Harte had said. “I think he’s reaching out to the wrong people, these dangerous cats. I need you to come and talk some sense into him. I know you don’t like meeting face to face with him, but you’re the only one who can do it. You’re the only one he respects.”

  Sax had scoffed. “Me? Harte, you might’ve been too young to remember, but Leo is the one who had me ‘out good’ a decade ago. He’s the reason I’m not Veep anymore. That’s not my wheelhouse, man. Nothing lands on my back anymore.”

  But Harte had become impatient with his excuses. “This is serious, Sax. Bodies are going to start dropping because of this associate of my dad’s. You might not believe me that he respects you, but he does.”

  Harte wouldn’t tell Sax who the associate was. Sax had only seen Harte a few times since going on the road, and he deeply craved to see his only flesh and blood again. Tucson was only a four-hour ride from Flag. And it would be good to see his old brothers again, whoever was left from the old school days—Woodstock, Dayton Navarro, Baron Funkhauser. From what he’d been hearing from Woodstock and Funkhauser, brothers had been dropping like flies up there. Panhead, who’d taken over as Veep from Sax, was suddenly doing Buck Rogers time on a federal drug running beef. That shit was RICO, and if Panhead started snitching, the club would be falling like snowflakes.

  So curiosity got the better of Sax eventually, and he rode up to Flag. He was fortunate—or maybe he’d worked it out this way—that most of the minerals he sold were small, thumbnail-sized and could be kept in his saddlebags. He had several storage units and safe deposit boxes scattered across the nation, mostly close to world-class mines where he obtained product.

  As he rode, he had ample time to ruminate on sordid subjects like his age, his feud with his brother, the futility of his existence. Above all, Sax was forty-fucking-five years old and his nomadic lifestyle was beginning to wear on him. He was getting to be too old to be riding around the country, haunting bondage clubs to get his kinky rocks off. He was a born Dom, but it was growing old lording it over nameless, faceless subs. There were several women in several cities he could call “his” slaves. He knew their names, they hooked up, and he even went to some of their apartments and spent the night.

  Still, it wasn’t like having The One. One was all Sax needed. One who’d be the perfect balance of submissive with perhaps a bit of the switch thrown in, a sassy woman who might top from the bottom now and then. That took imagination and verve, none of which his current subs had. They were routine, by the book subs, and their lingo and protocol was boring him. He was maturing, he supposed. He wanted someone who’d challenge him.

  More than anything, he didn’t want to look like these burnt-out old bikers with crazy, frizzed grey hair and permanent bugs in their teeth. Holes in their throats from smoking too much, or corroded, picket fence teeth from doing too much meth. Sax was a clean liver and he worked out in the gym of every hotel he stayed in. He prided himself on his physique and the fact that almost all of his hair was still there, smooth, and barely flecked with grey. But still. That wouldn’t last forever. Lately, he’d had an empty, yearning ache in the pit of his stomach, and it wasn’t just for kinbaku rope binding. He wanted something more stable and soothing, and that unsettled him more than anything.

  He met Harte at an old biker bar up the road from the North Fourth Street address of the Bare Bones’ club. Sax realized with shame that Harte had chosen it because, unlike most biker bars where scoots were lined up at an angle out front to make a show of power, this bar had a side lot where Sax’s Softail Harley was less likely to be noticed.

  Harte’s gorgeously shiny head of ginger curls could be seen from the front door, even from Sax’s view in the back of the darkened bar. His chest was flooded with joy to see Harte again. Harte didn’t see him, glued to a game on the TV behind the bar. He was drinking some dark liquor, brandy or whisky, and Sax frowned. Harte had been a clean liver like him, as far as he knew. Maybe he was just upset about this associate of Leo’s. Lord knew, Leo gave a person enough reasons to drink in the middle of the day.

  Was it his imagination, or did Harte’s eyes mist over when he got an eyeful of Sax? They embraced in a thug hug and even gripped hands after taking their respective bar stools. But soon they were down to brass tacks.

  “Ah,” said Harte, yanking his hand from Sax’s to rake it through his hair. He should’ve been a rock star with hair like that, but instead he’d joined Leo’s construction company. Harte was even in the Laborer’s Union like Leo. It was an old family business founded by their father before them, so Sax guessed it was an upstanding path to follow. He was just selfish wishing Harte had chosen one of the sciences, like he had. And, of course, they used the construction company as a money laundering front for darker, more lucrative enterprises.

  “It’s a major clusterfuck, Uncle.” Harte sighed, his hand wrapped around the whisky glass. “You probably never met Cassie Hasselbeck—she’s only about my age, and didn’t start hanging around until she was eighteen—but she’s got a sweet heart, and to see her face look like an upside-down pizza on the floor, well, that’s just too fucking much. She’s going to need p
lastic surgery.”

  Sax told the bartender, “Soda water. So who’s the fucktard I need to concern myself with?”

  Harte’s eyes clouded over. He looked from side to side before leaning toward Sax and saying, “Tony Tormenta.”

  Tony Tormenta. Sax knew the asswipe well. He’d started out in the short pants days as a low-level Sicilian mafia wannabe, real name Anthony Tataglia. But he soon abandoned wearing fedoras and suits for the rougher, more lucrative business of trade south of the border. He became an enforcer for the cartel, one of those frightening men who fold people up like massage tables and stick them in his car trunk.

  Tormenta rose from the ranks, driving around in a weird mixture of various military uniforms, insignia and medals patched together from every country and branch of the armed forces possible. His armored cars had gold-plated bumpers and wheels. Sax had dealt with Tormenta before, unfortunately. He was a toolbag of the highest order. His favorite practice was “el guiso,” the stew. He boiled people alive in a large pot, then set them on fire with gasoline.

  Sax pinched his forehead between his eyes. “Yeah. I know the guy. Leo’s been dealing with him?”

  “Yeah, for about four months now. Pure and Easy won’t have a thing to do with the guy anymore. Tormenta recently backed Riker, remember him? He was ‘out bad’ when Cropper went down in the desert a couple years ago.”

  “Yeah, who could forget that guy? Always running around wearing a latex hood or a PVC Y-harness going up his ass.” As a master in the world of BDSM, Sax had learned to loathe people like that. He was all for cock and ball torture, but people like Riker made it look like the most embarrassing lifestyle in the world. Riker wasn’t serious about it—he dabbled a little bit in everything, never truly committing himself. Sax had seen him wearing an adult diaper once, too, and he could’ve swore he glimpsed one of those giant baby cribs in one of the back rooms at their old P and E clubhouse, The Bum Steer. That was back in the days when anything went.