by Jessie Cooke
She pushed out a loud, heavy sigh, rolled her eyes, and turned her back to him. He was treated to the sight of that light blue fabric stretched across her full bottom and he savored it while she walked away before he finally followed her into the back door she’d left open. She set the shotgun up against the wall by the door and then went over and dropped down onto the couch. He watched as she kicked off those sexy shoes and tucked her stocking feet up underneath her. Arms folded, she gave him a defiant look and said, “What, Evan? What is so important that we ‘have’ to talk about it at 1 a.m?”
Blackheart wanted to sit down next to her on the couch, but her body language was telling him that would be a mistake. He sat down in the chair next to the couch and said, “First, I’d like to know why you’ve been avoiding me.” She was shaking her head and he said, “No, Sal, you know it’s true. You’ve been blatantly ignoring me all week. What’s going on?”
“I’ve been busy. I do have a life outside of sewing you up, you know? I have a job and...” She stopped there. Blackheart was willing himself not to get angry and say something stupid, but it was hard.
“And? You have a job, and...what, Sal?”
“A life, Evan. I have a life. Do you know that it’s been over a decade since I went out in public without thinking Christoff would be here waiting for me when I got home? And then what do you do? You skulk around in my backyard and scare me half to death!”
“Shit.” He ran his hand through his beard. “Sally, I never meant to scare you. I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry.” Christoff had terrorized Sally. He’d tormented her for years, and then he’d nearly killed her. Blackheart of all people should have known better than to sneak up on her. He hadn’t been using his head.
“Fine,” she said. “Now please tell me what was so urgent, Evan. I’m tired and I want to go to bed.”
Blackheart smiled and wiggled an eyebrow as he said, “We could always talk about it there.”
She rolled her eyes again. “Fat chance.”
“Why are you pissed at me, Sal? I mean other than tonight, which I fully understand and have apologized for...what did I do last week that made you not want to have anything to do with me?”
“You know what, Evan? Nothing. That’s what you did, nothing...at least nothing new. I’m nearly fifty years old and maybe I’ve finally just realized that I’m tired of playing games. I’m tired of my life being all about work and covering up the trouble you and your club get into. I feel like I’m their mother most of the time, and honestly, yours too.”
Blackheart chuckled at that and said, “Well, babe, I know we live in the south, but you’d have to live in West Virginia for us to be related considering all the things we’ve done together....”
“See what I mean? You can’t even stay serious for ten minutes. I’m tired, Evan. Please go.”
“I’m sorry, Sally. I just don’t understand the sudden about-face. I killed Christoff for...”
“Don’t! Don’t you dare tell me you killed that man for me. You could have turned him in, you didn’t have to kill him and I never told you I wanted him dead!”
He felt a little wave of anger as he said, “Sure, Sal, I could have turned him in so he could escape before he went to court the way he did the only time they ever had him in custody.” The FBI had caught him, once. He was taken into custody but managed to kill one of the transport officers when they were taking him to court, and when the other one opened the back of the van, he left her almost for dead...after he raped her. “Even if he didn’t, he would have gotten a slap on the wrist compared to all the shit he did in his life. He needed to be put out of the world’s misery just for what he did to you alone, and I don’t believe that you have a problem with that.”
“Maybe I don’t, Evan. But what I do have a problem with is you using me as an excuse for doing what you wanted to do. You’ve wanted to kill him since you were thirteen years old and you first heard his name.” Blackheart was thirteen and Sally twelve when the law finally caught up with Christoff the first time, and he’d ended up escaping. He’d disappeared for years after that until he started tormenting Sally, and then he’d disappeared again, until Blackheart finally caught up with him. He’d driven much of both of their lives, and Blackheart was surprised that Sally didn’t seem much more grateful that he was gone.
“And I readily admit it. I will stand by the fact that I did the world a favor. Is that what this is all about, Sal? Are you really pissed at me for taking him out?”
She wrung her hands and sighed. “No...yes, maybe...I’m not sure, Evan. I just know that lately I feel like I need more than...” She held her hands up and said, “This. I’m turning fifty next year and what have I got to show for half a decade on this earth? I have no husband, no children, a career that’s killing me...”
“You’re confusing the hell out of me now,” he said, “because you’re the one who said no, all those years ago when I proposed.” Blackheart had proposed to Sally when they were seventeen and eighteen years old. He’d proposed to her when she first found out she was pregnant...but then so much shit had happened. But he’d proposed to her again when her Paw Paw died and she came home from nursing school. The only time she’d said yes had been the first time...every time after that, she used the excuse that too much had happened, and she wasn’t going to be the old lady of the president of an MC. Sally never asked him to give up his lifestyle, and he was glad, because Blackheart wasn’t sure that even for her, he would have been able to give it up.
“Yeah, Evan, I said no, and the last time I told you not to ask me again. I take full responsibility for us not being married...but that doesn’t mean I don’t wish maybe I’d met someone else.” He frowned at her and she said, “I was a brand-new nurse, Evan, and you were building a 1% MC. Those two lifestyles would have never meshed.”
“You’re judging me now, Sal?”
She ran a hand through her hair. Blackheart loved her hair. It was always soft and silky and it smelled like citrus and flowers. He liked to lie next to her in bed and bury his face in it, but it had been a long time since he’d done that. He was always in such a hurry...there was always so much to do. “I’m not judging you, Evan. I’m not telling you how you should live your life, I’m just saying that I’m tired of living it, even though I chose not to a long time ago. Does that make sense? I said no, but yet here I am, still living it alongside you all these years later. And here I am, still alone and as mixed up about you and me as I ever was.”
“Sal...” He got up and tried to move toward her, but she put her hand up and said,
“No, Evan! Don’t. You can’t make this better with words, okay? Just go back to your club and live your life. You do that just fine without me. The only way your life will change without me in it is you’ll have to find another woman to put into my spot in the rotation...and we both know that won’t be hard.”
“Your rotation? Are you kidding? Sally, you have to know that you’re more than that. You’ve always been more than that.”
She had tears running down her face. Blackheart was completely confused. He hadn’t seen any of this coming. The last time he’d seen her before the night she stitched him up, everything had been fine. He told her Christoff was gone, and they’d spent the night in each other’s arms, the way it was supposed to be...the way it had always been. “Is this about that guy, Sal?”
“Oh my God, are you kidding me? Have you been having me followed?”
“No. Le Singe saw him pick you up.”
She laughed, but not like she was amused. “Of course he did.”
“The guys worry about both of us, you know that.”
She rolled her eyes. “Whatever, Evan. It doesn’t matter. It’s not about Le Singe, or Lucien...”
“Lucien? What the hell kind of name is Lucien?” She shot invisible daggers at him out of her eyes. “Sorry, I know, that was a stupid thing to say. But Sal, you have to understand why I’d ask. I mean, this is so out of the blue...”
; “No, Evan, it’s not. This has been coming on for years...you just haven’t been paying attention.”
10
One Week Later
“Fuck you!” The Mississippi Mad Man spat out the words, literally, as Blackheart slammed the biker from the rival MC up against the brick wall. He felt Le Singe’s hand on his shoulder but shrugged it off. His VP had a talk with him the night before, telling him some of the crew were worried about him. Le Singe was worried he’d kill the fat fuck with one punch...and he’d love to. Blackheart’s club, and life as he knew it, were falling apart. There had been a fire the night after he had his talk with Sally. One of the warehouses they used to store guns and ammo, located out on the far side of Slidell, had blown up, and the police were reporting it as an arson. Of course they were also putting out feelers, trying to find out who owned the warehouse, and the firepower that had been inside when it was set on fire. Nobody was talking...so far, at least...and Blackheart always made sure things like that couldn’t be traced back to the club. But they’d lost a fuck-ton of money, and once again brought the cops sniffing around, and the accumulation of it all had him more pissed than he ever remembered being in his life. The autopsy had been a bust too. Not only had the body been moved, it had been tampered with. There were fifteen postmortem wounds on Christoff’s body, which he now knew was found only a few miles from the clubhouse. All that told him was that the son of a bitch that had moved him was crazier than he’d given him credit for. His head felt like it might explode and a ball of rage sat in the pit of his stomach waiting to be unleashed. So fuck his VP. If he wanted to take it out on a Mad Man, then that was exactly what he’d do.
Blackheart twisted the fat man’s arms behind his back and held out his hand. Without a word, Chance, one of his enforcers, laid a piece of plastic in it. With one arm pressed into the fat man’s back, he used the other hand to cuff together with the plastic cuffs the hands of the man whose name was “Pinky” of all things. He could have had someone else do it while he held the fat fuck, but he was taking too much pleasure in doing it all himself. And Le Singe was right. With one well-placed punch he could finish the fucker off too, but this one belonged to Chance, and he wasn’t going to take that away from him. He glanced at his young enforcer. Chance was about thirty, but looked twenty-five. He was blond, blue-eyed, and relatively clean cut compared to the rest of the crew. He was tall, way over 6'0", and made out of lean muscle. Blackheart knew he had tats, but they weren’t visible underneath his t-shirt and kutte. If not for the kutte that announced to the world he was a Joker, and the homicidal look in his eyes at the moment, he could have been mistaken for a college kid. Blackheart spun the fat bastard around to face his accusers before finally taking a step back and telling Chance, “He’s all yours.”
“I didn’t touch that bitch!” The dumb fuck was stupider than Blackheart gave him credit for, and that wasn’t much. Blackheart was sure that Chance had never killed a man, but the rage that was rolling off the young biker at that moment was thick enough to smell.
“What did you call her?” Chance asked, in a surprisingly calm-sounding tone of voice. He had one hand on the man’s t-shirt, the white cotton balled up in his big fist.
The stupid fuck against the wall narrowed his ugly black eyes and said, “I called her a bitch, you know, a female...” The “dog” part came out in a grunt when Chance’s fist connected to the man’s fat gut. The kid was about to take another swing when Blackheart said:
“Wait. Take off your shirt and kutte.” He had been more impulsive than usual lately, but the bottom line was always that he had to think of the club. If Chance ended up killing this fat fuck, he didn’t want any bloody clothes lying around to prove it. As Chance started to pull off his kutte, the Mad Man tried to move. He was instantly pushed back into the wall, hard, by Gabriel. Blackheart wasn’t sure Gabe was healed up enough to be out riding, but for this one he’d begged to come along. Chance was his best friend, and the woman the fat fuck against the wall had helped to hurt was his best friend’s girlfriend, so Blackheart hadn’t had the heart to leave him out. They’d gotten a call earlier from the manager of the strip club they owned in New Orleans. Pinky had been stupid enough to show up at a business owned by the Jokers, alone, after assaulting a woman who belonged to one of them only days before. It was like he was suicidal...and the Jokers didn’t mind helping him out with that at all.
Chance was stripped from the waist up and now his tattoos were showing. He had a huge, colorful tattoo of a jester on his back. Blackheart had been there when the little blue-haired pixie that did most of their tats had inked it. He had one just like it, as did most of the Jokers. Chance threw another punch as soon as he was free of his shirt, that one landing on the man’s jaw and sending a spray of blood and saliva that landed all over the kid’s face. Chance was ready to fully unleash, and no one was going to stop him, but Pinky finally realized they weren’t playing and pulled his head up and said:
“Please, I’m sorry, okay? Please don’t kill me. I’ve got a family...” If he thought that would help him, he had another thing coming. Chance’s girl Sharon had a family too. She had a set of twins, an eight-year-old boy and girl. She worked as an exotic dancer to support them because their daddy had run out on her as soon as she told him she was pregnant. She was only eighteen at the time. Now at twenty-six years old, she and her kids lived in a nice little neighborhood, and the kids went to a good school and from what Blackheart could tell, they had plenty of love. The thought of those kids seeing their mama the night those assholes dumped her off when they were finished with her made him want to push Chance out of the way and kill the fat fuck all over again. Chance unleashed his full rage on him then, one punch after the other, and when the man could no longer stand, Gabriel and Booger picked him up. Chance was ready to throw another punch, and Blackheart wasn’t going to stop him. Pinky deserved what he got, and then some. It was Le Singe who suddenly wrapped his big arms around the kid’s chest and pulled him back.
“What the fuck?” Chance yelled, something he would never normally do when it came to his VP. Blackheart waited, ready to ask Le Singe the same thing, but willing again to let Chance handle it.
“You’re gonna kill him, kid.”
“And? Why the fuck shouldn’t I?” Chance pulled out of Le Singe’s grasp.
Le Singe sighed and looked at the bloody, almost unconscious mess of a man. He glanced at Blackheart first, waiting for his president to intercede, but when he didn’t Le Singe said, “You ever kill a man, kid?”
“Never knew one that needed killing as bad as this motherfucker does.”
“I ain’t debating that with you...but I’ll tell you a secret, kid, that most of us men in the club already know, and that is, it might feel good while you’re doing it, while you’re all hopped up on anger and adrenaline...but it ain’t gonna feel so good tomorrow, or the next day. I think your point was well taken today—you don’t have to kill him. It might be even more satisfying to let him live and spend the rest of his days looking over his shoulder.” He looked at Blackheart again. Blackheart still didn’t speak. With another sigh Le Singe said, “You got the green light from our president, so I ain’t gonna try and stop you if that’s what you figure on doing...but maybe take a few deep breaths and think about it.”
Blackheart turned and walked away. Whether Chance killed the man or not, he really didn’t care. Le Singe would handle it either way, and he needed a drink. He walked around to the front of the brick building and pulled open the door. The music inside was so loud and the walls so thick that he hadn’t been worried about any of the patrons hearing what was going on outside. The colored lights pulsed along with the music and as he walked toward the bar in the center, he nodded at a few people who said hello, most of whom he couldn’t even see. When he reached the bar, he took a seat at the end where a girl named Cindy was dancing in a pair of long, black boots and a red thong. Whatever else she’d been wearing when she came out was gone and now she was wr
apping her tight, toned body around the pole that ran from the bar to the ceiling. He didn’t have to signal the bartender; the pretty blonde girl named Lou Ellen was at his elbow before his butt hit the stool. With a smile, and a lick of her lips like she was the cat and he the canary she said:
“Hey there, Blackheart, what can I get you?”
“Whiskey, leave the bottle.” Either the tone of his voice or the look on his face caused the smile to fall from hers. She scurried off and seconds later set a bottle of Crown and a glass down in front of him. Lou, as everyone called her, would normally stay around and make conversation...hoping that it would end up in the back room with Blackheart pounding her up against the wall...but the girl wasn’t stupid. Blackheart couldn’t even see his own face and he knew he probably looked scary as hell...because that was exactly how he was feeling. He’d hoped that watching Chance beat the living shit out of a Mississippi Mad Man would help, but it hadn’t, especially when his VP stepped up and did what he knew he should have. Blackheart had a reputation for taking care of his guys, especially the younger ones. He knew when a man was ready to take a life, and deep down, he knew Chance wasn’t. He was one hell of a hard worker, and as loyal as a puppy, but the kid didn’t have a mean bone in his body and Le Singe was right. As soon as he “sobered up” from the effects of that adrenaline surge, he’d start worrying about what he’d done, and beating himself up over it.
Blackheart was on his third glass of whiskey when he felt someone take the stool next to him. He didn’t have to look left to know it was his VP...he’d known the man for over two decades, he could smell him coming. Lou was there again, this time setting a beer in front of Le Singe. Blackheart’s VP only drank beer, or the moonshine that the man’s Paw Paw had been famous for making at one time. As soon as the pretty bartender was gone Le Singe said, “You pissed at me?”