Serving the Bad Boy: War Hawks MC

by Carmen Faye

  “You don’t understand,” Ali said. “In many ways, there are times man must be saved from himself. There is a difference between the call to healing and easing the pain of death and what modern medicine may become – what it has become. Man was meant to live well, not forever. A few of us work diligently to see to it that man never loses his humanity or respect for life and death.”

  “Is that why you haven’t cured yourself?” I asked in a surly manner.

  “Perhaps that is fate keeping me humble and human,” he replied calmly. “At any rate. If I give the word, they will go to the lengths necessary to save my brother. Just as we have a certain ethic in medicine, we upheld a certain ethic in allowing Perry Hamilton to find his own way. That path is no longer safe to himself or the masses. The underground must pool their resources. We will expose him and bring him down. There have been whispers over the years; it’s time to find out if the rumblings are true.”

  “So what is all this? What was all that you just did on the computer and with the papers?” I asked, gesturing at the mess on his desk.

  He began organizing them and handed me a small stack. Catarina watched, seeming only slightly more understanding of matters than myself.

  “I just sent a message for the Underground to gather. You are going to go to them and give them my research and tell them where you and my brother were taken to meet Hamilton. There are rumors that he had his own hidden hospital. Allegedly, it’s a place where he researches and practices his own variety of medicine,” Ali said. “If he is going to do anything to my brother - if the rumors are true, they will be there. The Underground will have to intervene by all means necessary.”

  “This will get them to help me?” I asked, gripping the documents he had given me.

  “They will help. The Underground will have to step outside of our code of ethics and put an end to Hamilton before he brings us all down,” Ali said.

  “I’ll take you there. If there is any doubt or disagreement, I can assert Mr. Poole’s authority on his behalf. I have met with the Underground many times,” Catarina offered. “I’ll call downstairs to have additional security brought up for you, Mr. Poole. Ms. Beckwith, I will arrange a car and security for us as well. We will see this thing through until Tarek is safe.”

  “Thank you,” I replied, finally beginning to feel some relief. “That sounds great.

  “Both of you be safe,” Ali warned. “This thing isn’t over yet.”

  ***

  Tarek

  “That’s got to be crazy for you guys,” I said as the guards steered me back through the halls.

  I dragged my feet, trying to take as much time as I could to formulate a new plan of escape. These guys were only taking orders, but anyone foolish enough to take orders from a man like Hamilton without question deserved whatever he got in the line of duty.

  “Quiet,” one man said in a low tone.

  “Yeah, I guess it’s better to not even think about it,” I said, nodding understandably. “Besides, I imagine you all have probably seen worse, right? I mean, this place is probably nothing but sights and sounds and smells you would rather forget. It’s easier to just do the job in silence and not think about it.”

  “Be quiet,” another guard said from behind me, a little louder with a nudge in the back from his gun.

  It was like he wanted to remind me it was there, more so than to move me along.

  I was quiet as we passed a few more doors and rounded a corner.

  “That nurse lady was actually pretty nice,” I said, as they stopped at the room I was designated.

  “Yeah, she was,” said a younger guard who stood at the door as I reentered.

  “Both of you be quiet,” said the first guard again.

  This time, he sounded angry. He looked back down the hall where we had come from and made a face and sound of disgust. We could faintly hear varying sounds drifting throughout the hall now that our footsteps weren’t drowning it out. Occasionally we would hear the sounds of a motorized saw or another blade of some sort. Then we would hear a moaning, wailing sound. Personally, I wasn’t sure if it was out of pleasure or pain. Neither conjured a very good image in my head.

  The men guarding me let the door between us remain open. I don’t know whether it was to keep a better eye on me, or because they didn’t expect Hamilton to be at his task for very long.

  “I don’t know how you all can just sit there in silence and listen to the sounds of a place like this,” I said, beginning to pace the room.

  I made an effort to take loud steps and complain. I touched things as I moved, thumping and shaking them to put more sound in the air to drown out the sounds eerily seeping down the hall. I moved at random so being in recesses of the room that weren’t visible from the door didn’t seem suspect.

  “I would have to wear earphones or talk to someone or something,” I said, tapping on a tray creating clanking noise as I slid a few scalpels and other sharp medical tools onto my person. “I don’t know what I would do to get over the smell. I guess I could rub something on the sides of my nose that was mentholated. That might mask things a bit for a few hours.”

  I poured chloroform from a bottle on the counter onto a towel and stuffed it into my back pocket. I squirted something from a clear bottle on the floor of the room.

  “Fuck, that hurts,” I called loud and sudden.

  The young fellow was the first to enter the room. He slipped in the solution I had put on the floor. Initially, he only seemed startled at falling, but he quickly stood and began rubbing his head, screaming and trying to make his way past the other guards who were entering the room.

  “It hurts! It burns!” he yelled, running down the hall.

  As he swatted at his head, little tufts of hair and scalp fell leaving a trail behind him. His yells became more distant until we hear a loud thud as if he suddenly collapsed or ran into something.

  The other men immediately raised their guns to me.

  “What? He fell,” I replied, raising my hand and pulling the chloroformed towel from my pocket. “I yelled because I cut myself and he slipped coming into the room.”

  “It looks like there is water on the floor,” said one of the guards, kneeling to look more closely at the area where the young guard had fallen in his haste entering the doorway.

  “Let me see your hand,” said the guard who had wanted me to be quiet.

  As he stepped forward, I offered my wounded hand, but quickly clasped him by the wrist and twisted his arm to hold him in front of me. The other two moved just as fast, aligning themselves on the wall against me, aiming their guns and ready to pull the trigger.

  I pressed the towel to the face of the man in my arms, and as they watched him slump to the ground before me, I quickly threw the scalpels I had collected. They were caught off guard as they were randomly struck in their stomachs, chests, legs, and arms.

  “Sorry, guys,” I said as I made my way toward the door. “I really didn’t want to hurt any of you.”

  One of them tried to catch me by the leg as I made my way out of the room, but a scalpel in the shoulder limited his reach. I managed to scoot past him and the spill on the floor with ease.

  Once I was in the hall, I hesitated. I owed it to Nurse Fleiss to try to go back for the bag and see her dying wish through. I knew that going back in that direction meant risking a tangle with Hamilton. I knew that if our paths crossed again, one of us would not survive it. In his current state, I imagined he would even prove a challenge for me.

  It seemed the best thing I could do would be to shut this place down and hope that the attachments Nurse Fleiss had emailed would be enough to at least push through a search into Perry Hamilton’s affairs. I kept hearing my brother’s voice in my head reminding me that people like this should be dealt with through proper channels, but all I wanted to do was get revenge.

  I wanted to make Perry Hamilton suffer for all that he had done in this building to innocent people, to Nurse Fleiss. I wanted to be
certain he feared for his life as Annie did each time we were threatened by his goons. I wanted to lay his company low in the way he desired to do to my brother and take him for all he had the same way he took customers who were worse after receiving his companies high-risk medicines.

  I wanted to be the old me for just a moment, one last time.

  “Perry Hamilton,” I said through clenched teeth as I turned and made my way toward his office again. I passed the young guard, alive and whimpering. Patches of skin and hair were missing from the back of his head. He was in shock, but he would survive.

  As I neared the door where Hamilton had carried the nurse’s body, I realized I didn’t hear any moans or machinery. Once I was at the door for the room, I peered inside. Only Nurse Fleiss’s freshly tormented body remained. No sign of Hamilton and nothing particularly useful to defend myself with. He had claimed any handheld weaponry for himself.

  I returned to the hall and continued making my way toward his office to reclaim the bag. The bag was in the hall just after I turned the corner. Right where Nurse Fleiss and I had been caught before. I looked around and listened but heard and saw nothing. As I grabbed the bag, I felt a thwack against the back of my head that sent me tumbling. I kept a grip on the handles, and the bag rolled with me.

  “I’ll take that,” Hamilton said as he appeared behind me.

  He had hit me in the back of the head with the butt of some kind of surgical handsaw. It had fresh blood on it. Hamilton did as well.

  “I don’t believe I offered it to you,” I said, standing and backing away.

  He pressed a button, and the small circular blade began to whir and spin.

  “I don’t think I was asking,” he said. “I don’t need to be offered what is already mine. If either of us needs to be asking for anything, you should be asking for your life. I feel pretty pleased with the idea of taking it from you painfully now. I think I’ll start by relieving you of the hand holding my property.”

  He dove at me wildly swinging the device, and I ducked and dodged using the bag and its content to shield myself. On a failed swing at my arm, he just missed. He knocked the tool out of his own hand, and it spun around on the floor creating an additional hazard between us.

  Perry dove at me anyway grabbing the bag and my arm all at once pulling me down and forward. I barely caught myself with the opposite hand, but I lost grip on the bag. As Perry paused to momentarily gloat over this small success, I kicked the saw at Hamilton striking him in the leg.

  “Dammit!” he cried out, falling to one side and landing against the wall still holding the bag.

  I quickly moved to recover the tool and cut into the meat of my right palm in the process. Once I had it firmly, I moved it to my left hand for better control due to the injury.

  “You don’t need that,” he said, laughing. “I know all about you. Your brother has tamed the beast.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, still standing defensively with the spinning saw in hand.

  “You aren’t going to do what has to be done. You can’t stop me because you aren’t man enough to kill me,” he said, returning to a fully upright position. “You might try to intimidate me a little and maybe knock me out until some sort of help or authority can arrive, but I have what little evidence Nurse Fleiss thought she had. I have a billion dollar empire. Nothing you can throw at me will stick, and you don’t have the balls to do the one things that will keep me at bay forever.”

  He started to straighten himself up as if he were about to leave casually. He seemed to have decided I was no longer worth his time.

  “You don’t know what I’m going to do,” I replied.

  “I know what you are not going to do,” he countered, standing near toe to toe with me. “It’s a shame. In your hay day, I bet we could have had some real fun. You’re a fighter. I always like that.”

  Chapter 22

  Annie

  “Catarina, Ms. Beckwith,” said the taller of the two motorcycle muscles guarding the doors of the Underground, “Glad to have you back. Sorry about our last encounter and the current situation with Tarek.”

  He shook Catarina’s hand first. Then he offered his hand to me as well. He had at least attempted to be helpful when Tarek and I stopped by, so I believed the sincerity of his words and clasped his hand in my own, shaking it firmly.

  The other man who had stood behind him previously as a backup was not present today. I preferred it that way. I assumed he still would have treated me poorly, despite the current situation and especially in Tarek’s absence.

  “I see you have new help,” Catarina acknowledged.

  Clearly, she had been here many times before, but she paid attention. Her comment was made with a slight smile, so I assumed she had not been fond of the other man who shared this post either.

  “Yes, Gibbs hadn’t really been working out for some time, but we recently learned he was looking for other work. When word got back to the Underground of who he was discussing business opportunities with, he was dealt with accordingly,” the large man said.

  “I see.” Catarina looked at the new man monitoring the door. “Well, it looks like better help was found quickly.”

  “He’s actually a War Hawk, one of Tarek’s own,” the man continued. “We may be in different MCs, but I think I’m going to like him just fine.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Catarina replied.

  I nodded in agreement. The man seemed pleased to hear himself being complimented but did his best to be professional and maintain a straight face.

  “Would it be okay if we went in now?” I asked, hoping I wasn’t being offensive by being so direct.

  “Absolutely, ladies,” the large man replied, stepping aside and opening the door. “They have been expecting you.”

  “Thank you,” Catarina and I both said as we passed through the door.

  This time, it did not look like the gentlemen’s club it had before. There were no scantily clad women serving alcohol or servicing men in the recesses. The only sexy secretary was Catarina, and she really couldn’t help it. Everything about her was tasteful - she just exuded a certain something I couldn’t put my finger on. Still, as firm as her face was at the moment, I doubted even a man who knew her well would attempt a flirtatious word.

  “I assume everyone has been brought up to speed,” she said, loud and clear as she entered the same room that Tarek and I had asked for assistance in before.

  “Yes, Catarina. Ali’s email explained the situation in full,” said a man standing at the head of the large conference table. “Ms. Beckwith, please forgive our harsh words and behavior earlier. We would like to make that up to you and Tarek both properly, but I am afraid we will have to do so at another time.”

  “All is forgiven as long as you can save Tarek,” I replied, not wanting to make small talk.

  “We intend to do our best. We wish to see Tarek returned as well as take a definitive action toward Perry Hamilton,” the man replied reassuringly. “First, we need to know anything you may know about Tarek’s whereabouts. The information we have is largely speculation and rumor. Anything you can remember about where you and Tarek were taken would be invaluable.”

  “That’s the thing,” I replied, disappointed in myself. I don’t know exactly where I was taken. It was a rundown building on the outside, but inside was some sort of office and research facility.”

  “Did you see anything that was in the area or do you remember anyone you saw there besides Perry Hamilton?” another man at the table asked.

  Catarina stood closer to me and began to rub my arm lightly.

  “Give her a moment to gather her thoughts gentlemen,” she scolded. “Ms. Beckwith has been through quite an ordeal the past several days; just because you are ready to help now doesn’t mean talking to you about anything will be easy.”

  I looked at her appreciatively, and she squeezed my arm again where she had been rubbing it. Then she gave me a pat on the back and put a step of space
between us.

  After taking a deep breath, I said, “The elevator that leads to the conference room where I spoke with Mr. Hamilton was marked broken. There were three that seemed to work, but my abductors selected one that was broken. Once we reached our floor, it also appeared to be the only elevator that went to that level.”

  “I thought that facility had been closed,” a woman at the table said quietly.

  “Apparently, it is closed in appearance only,” a man replied. “What else do you remember, young lady?”

  Catarina cleared her throat loudly.

  “Forgive me,” the man said. “What else do you remember, Ms. Beckwith.”