GUNNER: Lords of Carnage MC

by Daphne Loveling

  “What is it?” I mouth.

  Cas crooks a finger and I follow him back out onto the landing. He tosses the object down on the ground and brings his heel down on it, smashing it.

  “It’s a bug,” he says, turning it over in his palm.

  “What?” I cry. “Like, a spy bug?”

  “Sshhh,” he says urgently, and glances over his shoulder. “There might be more inside.”

  “Cas, what is going on?” I say urgently, trying to keep my voice low. “You have got to explain all this to me, right now!” My heart is starting to race. I’m being bugged? Does that mean someone’s been hearing everything I do?

  “I will,” he promises, grabbing my hands in his. “But first, let’s go back in and keep looking. I’m going to bet there are a few more of these around somewhere. Once we’re pretty sure we’ve got them all, I’ll tell you everything I know.”

  Cas finally seems to really look at me then, for the first time since he got here. He must see that I’m starting to panic, because his eyes soften and he reaches up to softly caress my face. “Jen. It’s okay,” he murmurs. “I’m with you. We just need to deal with this right now.”

  “I know,” I say. My voice is starting to shake and I can’t seem to control it. I already wasn’t feeling very well earlier, and now I’m starting to feel a little wobbly. “I know. I’m just… this is a lot to take in. I just feel kind of… sick, and violated, you know?”

  “I know, babe.” Tenderly, more tender than I’ve ever known him to be, he plants a soft kiss on my forehead. “We’ll figure this out. I’ll get to the bottom of this.” His eyes flash with anger. “And I swear to you, whoever’s behind all of this is going to pay.”

  “Yeah,” I say miserably. “But what if the person behind it is my father?”

  31

  Cas

  Jenna and I do a full sweep of the apartment. We check smoke detectors, wall and ceiling light fittings, lamps, and any other nook and cranny we can think of. We check all the baseboards and moldings. I look around the entire apartment, including Noah’s bedroom, for paint discolorations on the walls and ceilings, just in case someone’s planted a microcamera in here. We even turn all the furniture upside down and look for holes in the upholstery. It takes over an hour, and at the end of our search we’ve found three more bugs. I take them outside with me, one by one, and give them the same treatment I gave the first one. As I’m smashing the last one, Jenna comes out to join me.

  “Do you really think it was my father?” Jenna asks miserably.

  I feel like hell for her, but I can’t see anyone else it would be.

  “I think it has to be, babe.” I run a hand through my hair and take a deep breath. “You know how I went to the clubhouse to tell Angel about us?”

  She nods. “I assume that’s what this shiner is about,” she says, looking at my cheek.

  I shrug. “Yeah. No worries about that, though. He punched me, I told him it wasn’t just a roll in the hay — that you’re my old lady now — and he’s cool with it.”

  “Seriously?” In spite of how scared she is, she giggles. “Men are so weird.”

  “But that’s not the important part right now,” I continue. “Here’s the thing: I never even got the chance to tell Angel we were together. He already knew.” My eyes lock on hers. “Your dad told him.”

  She frowns in confusion for a second, and then it hits her. “The bugs! Oh my God, you think he knew from the bugs!”

  “I do.” I wait as she processes this, her face changing from astonishment to dismay to horror. “Oh my God! Do you think he heard us having… sex?” She says this last word in a horrified whisper. I almost laugh, but I know she’s not in the mood to joke about this.

  “Probably not him,” I reassure her. “These listening devices are pretty cheap, low-tech versions. The kind you can pick up for less than twenty bucks. I’d be surprised if they had a range of more than half a mile.” I raise my chin toward the house next door, and wait for Jenna’s eyes to follow mine. “My bet would be him.”

  Jenna’s eyes widen. “Charlie?” Her face contorts in revulsion.

  “Yeah,” I say in disgust. “It stands to reason that he could be on your dad’s payroll. I know from talking to some of the guys downstairs at Rebel Ink that there are some pretty serious code violations down there. But somehow, the city always seems to look the other way. My guess is that Charlie Hurt and your dad have a mutually advantageous arrangement.”

  Jenna is nodding her head. “I could see that. Charlie is definitely a slumlord.” She glances back toward her apartment. “It was kind of hard for me to believe this place was up to code when I moved in.” She snorts. “Maybe it’s not.”

  “I’ve been noticing for a while now that Charlie seems to be outside a lot when we get here, and goes inside his house when we go inside your apartment. I thought it was just a coincidence at first, but…” I shake my head. “I should have figured this out before now.”

  “Oh, my God…” Jenna breathes. “I don’t know how, but that’s almost worse!” In a disgusted voice, she tells me about how Charlie came over once when she hadn’t found a job yet, and suggested an alternative way for her to pay rent. “God, the idea that he might be listening in on us and getting off on it…” She sticks out her tongue like she’s gagging.

  A wave of pure, unadulterated fury washes over me, so strong that I have to stop myself from going over there right now and beating that fucker senseless. The only thing that keeps me from doing it is that I want to know the full extent of how much he deserves this beatdown before I give it to him.

  “If that piece of shit ever touches you or talks to you that way again, you tell me right away, you hear me?” I say, gritting my teeth so hard I think they might break. My hands have curled into fists of their own accord, and god damn do I want to punch something right now.

  “I promise,” Jenna breathes, her eyes wide. She shrinks back just a little bit in fear, and I force myself to pull back and get a grip.

  “I’m sorry, babe.” Focus, Cas. I take a deep breath and make myself let it out slowly, to calm myself down. “Okay. So, let’s think about this for a second. I’m gonna assume that your dad isn’t just spying on you because he’s a possessive father. He must need information for some reason. What info is he looking for?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t think of anything.” She looks at me. “And I guess we don’t really know whether Charlie came in that day to install the bugs. Maybe they’ve been here all along, since I moved in.” She frowns. “My dad was really pushing for me to move into his house when I told him I was coming to Tanner Springs. I wonder whether there was some reason for that, other than him just wanting to keep an eye on me?”

  “Honestly, I doubt it,” I say. “If I had to guess, I’d say these bugs are relatively recent. Maybe Charlie started to notice me coming and going over here, and ran over to your dad with the info like a dog with his master’s slippers.” I run a hand through my hair. “Maybe it just started as a way for your dad to try to gather intel. Maybe that’s all there was to it.”

  Jenna stands up to her full height and seems to pull herself together. “I suppose we can’t know the reasons, or when he put them in. What's more important now is, what does he know, assuming it is my dad?”

  “At this point, I can’t think of who else it could be.” I pause for a second, trying to think of any other ways someone might be spying on her. “Have you left your cell phone in the room when your dad was here? He might have installed an audio recorder in it with a SIM card.”

  “No.” She shakes her head. “I’m sure of that. I always keep my phone on me. Besides, my dad barely understands how to operate his own phone. I’m positive he wouldn’t have any idea how to do that. Even if someone tried to explain it to him.” She cocks her head, then, and looks at me. “But… wait a minute.”

  “What?” I ask.

  “There’s actually a functioning land line here,” She says. She leads me
back inside, over to the divider between the living room and the kitchen. She reaches into a little shelf under the counter and pulls out an old, yellow rotary phone. “I can’t believe I just ignored this thing the first time around,” she says.

  “Holy hell, look at that thing,” I say, snorting. “It looks like it’s from about nineteen-ninety.”

  “It could be,” she muses. “I couldn’t believe it was connected when I moved in.”

  I pick up the receiver to the corded phone. The tinny dial tone is just audible in the otherwise silent room. I set the handset back into its cradle.

  “Have you used it?”

  “Not for anything important. I think I made a couple of local calls on it for the novelty, but just for things like ordering pizza.” She wrinkles her nose. “The connection’s not very good. The line pops a lot when you use it.”

  I pick it up again and unscrew the mouthpiece. Yup. There’s one in here, too. I pull it out silently and show it to her, then set it down on the counter and smash it with the back of the handset.

  “Well,” Jenna jokes nervously. “I guess they know my favorite pizza is pepperoni and extra cheese.”

  Down the hall, a small voice yells, “Mommy!”

  “Shit,” I groan. “I woke up Noah.”

  “It’s okay,” Jenna murmurs. “That’s the least of our worries.” Raising her voice, she calls, “I’m coming, bug!”

  “Jenna,” I say urgently. “I need to go take care of some stuff. I’ll be back later. But in the mean time, you need to hide the gun someplace else. You can’t take the chance that Charlie heard us when we hid it.”

  Her eyes are wide and serious. “Okay. I’ll be waiting,” she says in a strong voice. A wave of love washes over me to see her so steely and determined.

  “You’re fucking amazing, you know that?” I bend down and kiss her.

  She waves me off. “Call me.”

  “Will do. Just as soon as I can.”

  I tell Jenna to lock the door behind me. I need to get to the clubhouse. But first things first.

  I take the old wooden stairs two at a time, and cross the yard over to Charlie Hurt’s house. Not bothering to knock, I slam open his front door and find that miserable fuck getting out of an old, stained recliner in front of a big boxy TV. His eyes are wide with fear. He makes a break for the back door but I’ve got his fat ass by the collar before he can get two feet.

  Hauling him backwards, I throw him into the chair and pull back one clenched fist. “Who the fuck are you working for?” I say in a low, seething voice. “You’ve got once chance to answer.”

  He still looks terrified, but he shakes his head and lets out a high-pitched, nervous laugh. I snort and clock the fucker across the face, hearing the snap as his nose breaks.

  “Fuck!” he cries, raising his hands to his face as blood begins to spurt from his nostrils. “Fuck!”

  “I told you, you had one chance,” I spit. “Let’s see if you’re a quick learner. Who are you working for?”

  He’s moaning in pain, rocking back and forth, but he shakes his head again. “I can’t,” he gurgles.

  I punch him again, this time hard in the gut. I watch, impassively, as he leans over and retches. Blood mixed with spit and snot pours from his face.

  “I’m pretty sure you can,” I tell him. “You want some more, or are you going to tell me what I want to know?”

  “I fucking can’t!” he half-blubbers, half-cries. “It’s worth more than my life.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I spit out. “You can’t tell me Abe Abbott’s gonna kill you for telling me you’re working for him.”

  Despite the fact that he’s sobbing, Charlie starts to laugh. He sounds half-crazy, laugh-crying and holding his leaking face.

  “You think it’s Abe I’m scared of?” he chokes out. “It’s not Abe, man.” He shakes his head violently back and forth. “There’s nothing you can do to me that’s as bad as what they’ll do if I tell you. Nothing.”

  This isn’t what I’m expecting. This fucker’s got “I’m a piece of shit coward” written all over him. It shouldn’t have even taken me punching him to get him to spill. Hell, all it should have taken was me threatening to punch him.

  He’s not talking. And he’s not lying, either.

  Whoever he’s working for, this is a hell of a lot bigger than just Abe Fucking Abbott.

  I look down in disgust at the filthy fucker. Kneeling down, I get up in his face and grab him by the throat.

  “We found your bugs,” I tell him, keeping my voice low. He gasps as I begin to constrict his windpipe, clutching at my arm desperately. “I know you’ve been spying on Jenna. And I swear to God, if you ever come anywhere near her again — if you so much as look at her — I will fucking kill you.” With my other hand, I pull his head up by the hair until he’s looking at me. “You got that? I will fucking shoot you in the head.”

  He makes a strangled sound that I decide to take for a yes. I tighten my grip around his throat just a little more, for emphasis. When I let go, he lets out a loud sob and buries his head in his hands. I look down to see he’s wet himself.

  “Time to get that chair cleaned, I guess,” I snarl, and turn around to stomp out the way I came. The sounds of Charlie’s crying follow me out as the screen door slams behind me.

  I immediately head over to my bike and hop on. I need to talk to Angel. Now.

  I fire up the engine and kick it into gear, throttling up so fast my tires squeal and skid out from under me for a second. As I head out onto the road, I’m going easily twenty over the speed limit. I’m sure to make it to the clubhouse in less than five minutes, but then I feel the vibration of my phone in my back pocket. Swearing, I slow down a bit and take it out to look.

  It’s a text from Angel. With an address, and the code we use for “urgent.”

  “Fuck!” I shout. I throttle down, spin the bike around, and take off as fast as I can in the other direction.

  32

  Jenna

  After Cas leaves, I lock the door like he tells me to.

  “Mommy,” Noah says in a sleepy voice, holding his arms out to me. I slide onto the bed and wrap him in a hug. I take a moment to just breathe him in, love washing over me as I hold my little boy. I’ll keep you safe, I tell him silently in my head. I promise that no matter what, I’ll keep you safe.

  “I got scared of a loud noise,” he murmurs into my chest.

  “It’s okay, sweetheart,” I tell him. “It was just Cas. He had to, uh, fix something, but it made a loud noise.”

  Noah sits up and looks toward the bedroom door. “Is Cas here?”

  “No, bug. He had to go somewhere.”

  “Oh.” His tone is disappointed. Noah looks up at me. “I like it when Cas is here,” he says.

  My heart constricts. “I do too, honey.”

  “Is Cas gonna be my daddy?”

  I freeze. Somehow, Noah has asked the one question that I have no idea how to answer. All my fears, all my hopes, all my regrets about the past are encapsulated in it.

  I sit there paralyzed, unable to answer, and Noah asks me again.

  Oh, God.

  “I don’t know, baby,” I finally whisper.

  “I want Cas to be my daddy,” he declares. “Can we ask him later?”

  “I’ll tell you what, Noah,” I say in a strangled voice. “Let’s not ask him just now. Okay?”

  Noah frowns, but thankfully he doesn’t argue. “Okay. But can we ask him later?”

  “We’ll see, bug.” I kiss him on the forehead and try to blink back tears. “We’ll see.”

  Noah’s wide awake now, and I don’t have the heart to tell him to just go back to sleep. Since I’m too antsy to sit and read with him, I settle him in with my computer and Chip-Chip and let him watch videos for a while. Then I go back out to the living room to pace and think.

  The nausea I’ve been fighting off and on for the past week is back, and I bow my head and close my eyes as a wave of i
t washes over me. With everything that’s happened today, I’d tried to push it to the back of my mind. But now that Cas is gone, and after Noah’s too-astute question, it’s harder to ignore. When the wave has passed, I stand up straight and open my eyes.

  It’s time to find out the answer to something I’ve been almost too afraid to contemplate.

  I remember the first time I used one of these pregnancy tests. At the time, the humiliation of buying the thing was almost more traumatizing than actually taking the test itself. I put it off for weeks, and worked myself into such a frenzy of worry that by the time I actually saw the twin pink lines in the little window, it was almost a relief just to have it over with. Just to have an answer.

  This time I’m older, so buying the test was less embarrassing. Even so, I made sure ahead of time that the cashier at the drug store in Tanner Springs wasn’t someone I knew before I checked out. Now, as I lock myself in the bathroom and pee on the strip, I’m hit with a sense of déjà vu. Twice in my life, I’ve been worried I was pregnant. And both times, it was from being with the same guy.

  I stare at a tiny hole in the shower curtain, my hands clasped tightly in my lap, and count three and a half minutes in my head, just to be safe. Then I take a deep breath and look at the little stick.

  And, both times, the answer was ‘yes.’

  I spend the next half-hour wandering around the apartment in a daze. How could this have happened? I’ve been on the pill for the last two years. Wishful thinking, since I hadn’t had sex in much longer than that before I came back to Tanner Springs and started up again with Cas. I guess it’s true what they say about the pill working only ninety-nine percent of the time. But, I mean, ninety-nine percent… that’s practically always. How the hell did this happen?

  If it could happen to anyone, it would happen to you.

  Just one more damn mistake. God, even when I’m trying to be responsible, I still can’t manage to keep my life sorted out. It’s so damn discouraging.