Stay Vertical

by Layla Wolfe

  He laughed and started sliding off the tweezer clamps. “It’s not necessary. Now listen. Go talk to the people of the home where you want to put your mother. Then tell me how much you need. If it’s pancreatic, I’m sorry to say she won’t last much longer. My own mother’s in a care facility so I understand.”

  “Madison refused to help pay.”

  Lytton was surprised. The two sisters seemed close, from what little he’d seen. “Really? Ford has that much influence over her that she’d send her own mother up the river?”

  “It’s not Ford. I’m afraid we never got to the part of asking Ford because I’m sure he would’ve said yes. Madison outright refused. Apparently she hates our mother a lot more than I do.” She sighed sadly. “The old bat didn’t treat any of us very well, but she still doesn’t deserve to languish in squalor.”

  “No one does.” Lytton took June’s hands again and looked her square in the eye. “I’ve seen enough of that on the res. So do what I ask, first thing tomorrow. I’ve got to go meet with Tobiah about a job, go call an inspector friend of mine, so I’ve got to go now.” Lytton gave her boob one last caress before she replaced it in the underwire bra cup. He instantly felt a pang of loss. And he barely knew her!

  She stood to retrieve her pants. “Oh, I understand completely. I do have a hospice in mind but I believe it costs about seven thousand a month—”

  Lytton stood too. Two figures were coming down the path toward the greenhouse. He could tell by the skinny cut of the rust-colored pants and the accompanying white belt that one was Tobiah. The other guy wore a black leather cut, making Lytton tense. “Doesn’t matter. Whichever one you choose is fine with me. Here, here’s your shirt.”

  It was too late. June had barely stepped into her pants by the time Iso Weaver came barging down the aisle between the pot plants. “Driving Hawk!” Lytton knew Iso wasn’t terribly fond of him. He seemed to view him as competition of some kind, a threat. “We need to go over a few details of the Ochoa truck job. Well, hello.”

  As if he hadn’t seen June from far away. As if that hadn’t hastened his journey down the pot plant aisle. Lytton bristled, and tried standing between June and Iso. “That’s fine. Let’s go back up to the house.”

  “I tried to keep him up there,” Toby explained feebly, “but he saw June’s car and wanted to—”

  “June, is it?” Iso stuck out a paw for her to shake, even though both her hands were tangled up in her mesh shirt, trying to get it on. “You’re Ford Illuminati’s sister-in-law, right?”

  “Her eyes are up there,” Lytton barked. Now he had to crowbar himself between the two, Iso was standing so close. “Let’s take it back to the house, buddy.”

  June, of course, saw no reason not to be polite to Iso. She yanked her shirt down over her boobs, but Iso didn’t tear his eyes from them. “Yes, I’m Madison’s sister. You know Ford?”

  Toby chuckled. “I’ll say he knows Ford. Last time Ford and him were in the same proximity, Ford planted an IED in his warehouse, blew it all to hell.”

  “That’s okay,” Iso said greasily. “We needed a new warehouse anyway. So you’re this moron’s new old lady?”

  June said, “Oh, I wouldn’t say old lady. We just met. You’re not mad at Ford for blowing up your warehouse?”

  “Shit happens. I don’t let it affect my business dealings with him.” Iso tried to take June’s arm, as if to escort her back to the greenhouse door. “So you’re not his old lady? That’s intriguing. We could use a girl like you around—”

  “Enough.” Gripping Iso’s forearm, Lytton jerked the two apart forcefully. June looked at him with surprise, Iso with annoyance. “We’re working together, Iso, not brothers in a club who share everything. June, you got your boots?”

  June had sat back down to pull on her boots, and Lytton’s phone was pinging with a call from Saul Goldblum at the health department. Fuck. Everything happens at once. He needed to make June his old lady soon, or those carnivorous vultures would swoop in for the kill before he could say “ponytail butt plug.”

  “I’ll be right there,” June called out.

  Lytton was more than happy to put distance between her and Iso as he shuffled him toward the door. He tried to distract the twisted biker by discussing the upcoming job.

  “So obviously I can’t borrow any construction equipment from my brother Ford, but I was thinking we could just go to a safety equipment rental place and get some cones, stop paddles, shit like that. Maybe a roller or two.”

  Iso said, “We’ve got a couple of little dump trucks we could drive down the hill to the meeting place. Our brother Tyke will be stationed near Vernon, so when the Staples truck whizzes by he can radio us to be prepared. Now, why don’t you make that little sweetbutt your old lady, Driving Hawk?”

  “None of your fucking business, Weaver. Why don’t we get some of those barricades with the flashing lights? It might be getting toward sunset by the time the Staples truck drives past our ambush point.”

  “You could have a fake injured person on the side of the road,” suggested Toby. “Have someone waving down the Staples truck for help.”

  “This is why we don’t invite you,” said Lytton. “We need the truck to stop, not speed up to ignore an injured person.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” whined Toby. “Guy would be an insensitive jerk not to stop for a person whose limb is hanging off.”

  “Lots of people go out of their way to ignore people with missing limbs. No, Iso’s plan is more straightforward. Gets the job done.”

  “Shit. If you can’t add drama to the scene, what’s the point?”

  Lytton rolled his eyes. Drama. Just what they needed more of. “We’ll just stick with our plans, thanks anyway, Toby.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  JUNE

  “I’m sure if Lytton understood Ford’s reasoning for killing Cropper, he’d come around to Ford’s way of thinking.”

  Madison and I had just dropped Fidelia off with Ford at the Citadel. It wasn’t hard to convince me to take a detour into the game room where a pool table beckoned. The interview with the Public Works Department wasn’t until next week and the only other possibility in the P & E area for me was a supervisory position for water agency meter readers. That was way below my skill set, and the personnel were being replaced by computers anyway.

  So Madison, Turk, and I were shooting a little pool, enjoying the freedom from crying children. We’d already spent hours at a children’s birthday party. Parties for two year olds were incredibly stupid. The kids were probably like “Um, who are these other kids?” Madison claimed Fidelia would feel left out and ostracized if she didn’t go to the party, but do two year olds really feel offended by social gaffes like that? It wasn’t like they were familiar with their own social circle. Seemed to me the parties were mostly for the parents, and I didn’t know any of those women. It was an ordeal.

  Every moment I didn’t spend with Lytton was an ordeal, but he had that “truck job” with that Isosceles Weaver guy today. I loved the freedom I felt up at Lytton’s farm, and I couldn’t wait to get back up there. Being with him was a happiness I wanted to last forever.

  Maddy leaned on her pool cue. “What makes you think he doesn’t understand Ford’s reasoning? Maybe Ford’s reasoning doesn’t matter to him.”

  I waited until I’d finished my shot. No good. I had no patience for this sort of nitpicky game. I leaned on my cue stick, too. “Well, maybe because I don’t know the reasoning behind it? I’m in the dark, Maddy. Maybe if I knew, I could convince Lytton to go easy on his brother.” I hadn’t breathed a word about Lytton’s involvement with The Cutlasses. As Lytton had instructed me, I was to pretend I hadn’t heard a word of any of his business dealings. At the very least, I was consorting with his cannabusiness enemies by hanging with Turk and Madison.

  Was it my imagination, or did Turk shy away to the far side of the pool table to take his shot? He clearly wanted none of whatever the answer was. Madiso
n even looked out the window at the red rocks in the distance. “Let’s just say, Cropper wasn’t the most delicate of people. He saw nothing standing in the way of putting his hands where they didn’t belong.”

  I didn’t get it at first. “So he was sticking his finger in someone else’s piece of the pie? Isn’t that what bikers do?”

  Turk scratched big-time, completely knocking the cue ball off the table. “Fuck!” he cursed, and had to crawl under a cocktail table to retrieve it.

  Maddy came closer to me and lowered her voice. “Cropper molested me, June. Not just once, but several times.”

  My heart thudded. I’d always seen Cropper as sort of creepy in that caveman sort of way, as though he had played too much without a helmet. I’d seen him strike Ingrid a few times, although I hardly felt protective of her when she’d done the same to us so many times before. I never felt any warm stepdaddy feeling from him, and was glad when he left, even though it meant Ingrid was in the lurch again.

  But molesting Maddy? No doubt she didn’t want to dwell on it, and I in no way wanted to force her to relive anything, but of course I was curious. I had to step lightly. “Molested? As in—”

  “Grabbed and fondled, yes,” Madison said quickly, taking the cue ball from Turk and setting it on the table.

  “You don’t have to talk about this,” Turk said. “Just that June knows Ford had every good reason to do what he did.”

  “Oh, I understand completely!” I said brightly, setting my hand on my sister’s shoulder.

  Her look was dark. “Do you, really? Did he ever touch you?”

  My hand on her shoulder became a dead weight. “Well, no, but I always got creepy feelings from…him…” Madison was right. How could I ever really know what she’d been through unless it had happened to me?

  Turk said softly, “She didn’t tell Ford for a long time because she was afraid he’d kill Cropper. Rightfully so,” he added, before going to take a turn at the table that wasn’t his turn.

  This was all too heavy for me, and I wanted to change the subject. Luckily, Maddy did it for me.

  Suddenly cheerful, she said, “Listen, do you have any of that stuff you give Ingrid? Let’s take it out to that dog’s head rock at the end of that runway before it gets too dark.” Quieter, she leaned in and told me, “Don’t let Ford know we’re smoking Lytton’s stuff.”

  Turk added, “That’s where the vortex is supposed to be.”

  Pure and Easy was littered with psychic vortexes, columns of purified, concentrated energy that could cleanse your soul. The old airfield the Citadel was situated on was supposed to have several of them, and The Bare Bones were constantly having to deal with hippies toking up right where they wanted to wash their motorcycle or bang some chick. Having lived with some animist African tribes, I could probably fall for that woo-woo crap more gullibly than most people, so I agreed. “After the game.”

  More steel-toed boots were clattering down the hall by the time I sank my last ball. Ford was on his cell, being trailed by Ziggy, Faux Pas, and Tuzigoot, who had become the new sergeant-at-arms after the disappearance of Cropper’s scary right-hand man, Riker. There were rumors that Ford had buried Riker as well.

  “Man, this is going to blow back on us,” Ford was saying angrily. He stopped suddenly in the doorway to the game room, and Ziggy and Faux Pas nearly ran into him from behind. “That fucker has his own agenda. We need to be united now more than ever, Duji. We’ve got to shut those fucking Cutlasses down.”

  Maddy and I exchanged a look that said uh-oh. I had my own reasons for being afraid of what Ford was talking about. As far as I knew, The Bare Bones had no idea Lytton was working for The Cutlasses.

  This bucolic idea went out the window when Ford added, “I believe you if you say my fuckwad brother was spotted with Zelov and Weaver. They’ve been trying to get his product for years, so he probably caved and went over to the other side. Well, as far as I’m concerned, Driving Hawk’s got a huge target on his back. If he had anything to do with this fucking fucked-up heist, he’s actively against the family. We’ve got to kill that alliance now.”

  Uh-oh. The truck job. I told Maddy from the corner of my mouth, “I guess we’d better not go light up that bowl.”

  “Nuh-uh,” Maddy agreed.

  Ford angrily jammed the END button on his phone and focused all his ire directly on me. “This is club business, sister, so it doesn’t leave this room. A truck coming from Ochoa’s pot plantation was just jacked near Show Low and the driver killed.”

  I gasped. Killed? From what little I’d heard of the plan, I did not think that was part of it. I hadn’t dwelled much on it, but I could never imagine Lytton killing anyone. He would never wear the “Filthy Few” patch like Ford had since age seventeen. Lytton had a worse childhood than Ford, but he had a more sensitive demeanor. He may have been a scrapper, a fighter as a teen, but now he was just a mellow pot farmer. I’d even seen a Grateful Dead CD in his house, next to Great White, Lynryd Skynyrd, and Los Lobos discs.

  Don’t get me wrong. Lytton was bad to the bone, just like Ford. He just had an acute sensitivity to the world around him. He may have been somewhat of a selfish jerk when I first ran into him, but already I’d seen changes in him. My self-esteem wasn’t high enough to think I had anything to do with his transformation, though.

  Maddy stepped up for me. “Why are you angry at her, Ford? Do you think she had any knowledge of it?”

  Ford narrowed one eye at me, assessing. “I don’t know. Did you have any knowledge?”

  Jesus Criminey! He was sure putting me on the spot. Luckily, Lytton had a similar secretive credo as Ford, and I barely knew anything. “I just knew there was a truck job. That’s it. A truck job. That could mean anything.”

  Ford arched his eyebrow even higher. “So he is in bed with The Cutlasses?”

  Again, Maddy defended me. “Ford! She knows nothing other than what she told you. You know how it is. Do you think he runs around discussing club business in bed? Old ladies never know anything, to maintain their plausible deniability.”

  Ford nodded at his wife. “Well played.” Behind him, the handsome French Canadian Faux Pas and the inked rebel with the high and tight hair, Ziggy, had never looked more menacing. Faux Pas had just come into a fortune by taking Slushy’s advice and designing a zombie video game. It was so realistic due to Faux Pas’ proclivity for gore that instead of being a money laundering scheme, it had actually made a mint. I had seen these guys goofing around, playing air guitar at concerts, cooking, kissing their old ladies, sitting on toilets, but right now they just looked downright menacing.

  Maddy took the ball and ran with it. “Anyway, why would Lytton kill an Ochoa driver, even if he was in on the heist? That sounds more like the work of that Isosceles Weaver asshole.”

  Everyone nodded then. “True,” said Turk. “Iso Weaver likes to take guys to the ground just for the hell of it, even when it doesn’t make good business sense.”

  “Yes,” said Faux Pas. “Remember that time Weaver killed that Baal’s Minion and rolled him up inside the gym mat at Gold’s?”

  “Right,” reminisced Ziggy. “They were workout buddies, but Iso got mad the guy had lost more weight than him.”

  Turk added, “And it’s widely known Weaver put down that guy who showed up on Google Maps.”

  “Right,” said Maddy. She explained to me, “The Google Maps satellite picked up a dead body on the railroad tracks between here and Cottonwood. At first everyone thought it was just some bum, some meth addict, but then Iso’s stamp was found on his forehead.”

  “Stamp?”

  Maddy said, “He wears this coat of arms signet ring, claims it’s from his father’s Scottish ancestry or whatever. He likes to leave his stamp on his victim’s foreheads. It’s got a shield or something.”

  I actually became nauseous when Maddy said that. It reminded me of how Iso had looked at me in the greenhouse when I hadn’t pulled my tank down yet—or even after I’d pull
ed it down. He had still leered, almost as though he was taunting Lytton to do something about it. Lytton had, as far as I was concerned, shooing the guy out of the greenhouse. It was no big deal. Every club had their perverts, I imagined. The Bare Bones used to have a sergeant-at-arms named Riker. Some people walked around with toilet paper stuck to his foot, but that guy had showed up for a meeting at Ingrid’s once with an anal douche bulb sticking out of his back pocket. I knew, because Madison had told me what it was. And what it was for.

  Ford said, “Yeah, that Google Maps thing was unfortunate. Goes to show how technology can nail you these days. Regardless.” He sliced the air with his hand. “June, I can’t stop you from seeing that colossal toolbag Lytton. Women are going to go where their rampaging hormones tell them to.”

  “Hey!” cried Madison.

  Now Ford pointed at Maddy. “You. I’ve got to get over to Ochoa’s and get more intel on this job that went totally sideways. Of course they stole our entire shipment of product for Joint Effort. Julie and Brunhilda are down the hall in the nursery with Fidelia but they can only watch her for another hour.”

  The men turned on their boot heels and clomped down the echoing hallway like an invading horde of barbarian Tartars. Turk was the last to go, actually touching me on the shoulder. “I love you, June, but you’ve seriously got to rethink your alliance with that guy.”

  I probably muttered something like, “Yeah, sure, whatever,” and Turk was gone too. I said to Maddy, “I guess that ruins our plans for the vortex. I’d better get over to Ingrid’s anyway.”

  I’ll have to admit, I didn’t even go to Ingrid’s. She already had enough weed to last another few days, and to be honest, I couldn’t wait to get back to Lytton’s. It was a good excuse to bust on in, having heard about the murder, being concerned.

  It was almost completely dark when I passed by Mormon Lake in my “cage” and started up the mountain. Lytton had given me the pass code for the front gate—another good sign if ever I saw one. Even more important, he’d agreed to pay for Ingrid’s hospice and I had a move in date for her all set. That had hugely alleviated any sense of guilt I’d been feeling.