Rock (Dead Souls MC Book 4)

by Savannah Rylan

  “The man had bond!?”

  “He did. And something tells me the U.S. fucking Attorney arranged it. Knox has more details for us once we all gather.”

  “Fuck. I’m getting there as fast as I can.”

  I hung up the phone and drove as fast as I could through alleyways and downtown areas. I almost ran over some fucking pedestrians trying to cross town to get back to the fucking lodge. There was one thing I did know. If Piper and I did work out, her house was way too far away from that damn place. We’d have to figure out a way to rectify that shit.

  I skidded into a parking space at the lodge and kicked my stand down. I ran all the way up the steps, launching myself onto the porch before barreling through the door. There they all were; Knox, Grave, Diesel, and Brewer.

  And no Mick in fucking sight.

  “We just got done going’ over all the shit you and Brewer picked up last night,” Knox said.

  “I’m surprised you’re as calm as you are,” I said as I walked in.

  “Piper good?” Diesel asked.

  My eyes connected with his as I made my way to the kitchen table.

  “Brewer tells me Rex is getting out today,” I said.

  “Yep. Monroe’s trying to fight it now, despite being fucking four weeks out from her damn due date. But she doesn’t think she’ll get far,” Knox said.

  “Those Black Saddle assholes are trying to build a damn case against us to legally push us out of Redding,” Brewer said. “This can’t fucking stand.”

  I looked over at Grave, who hadn’t said a word as I sat down.

  “You good?” I asked.

  And the second Grave’s eyes panned over to me, I saw that look. It’d been years since I’d seen that look in his eye. The bloodthirsty hound that made him good at what he did. His arms were folded over his chest, making his granite rock muscles bulge even more than they already were.

  I knew exactly where he stood on the matter.

  “I’m waiting until we get to the part where we kill him,” Grave said.

  “He’s right,” Diesel said.

  We all panned our gazes over to our President as he sat back into his chair.

  “Rock. Brewer. You two brought us identifiable proof that Mick is the rat in this group. And I don’t tolerate that bullshit in this club. We finish Mick, then we take care of Rex. We rid The Black Saddles of anyone they’ve been using to try and push us off our turf because they’re too pussy-shit to roll up onto our front lawn and try to do it themselves. We end them. Today.”

  My eyes glanced over at Brewer before taking in the guys around me. And no one said a word.

  “A vote?” I asked.

  I watched everyone nod as they all leaned back into their chairs. Girding their fucking loins and preparing to make a decision that would forever change the our club.

  “All in favor of Mick meeting the reaper, raise your hand,” Diesel said.

  Every single one of us slid our hands into the air, ready for this shit to be over with.

  “Unanimous vote. Good. Once the job’s done, we’ll take a breath, reconvene, and take a vote on what the hell do to with Rex.”

  That one I wasn’t quite sold on, but I did my best to hide it from the guys. Right now, we had a task at hand that would put me out of reach from Piper and Gavin for a few hours. The rest of the day, even. We all got up from the table and walked to the back room of the lodge. And when Diesel ripped the door open, he punched in the code for the sealed door behind it. He passed us guns and ammunition. Smoke bombs and grenades. Pistols and knives and everything else we could fucking stuff into our pockets.

  And once we were all loaded down, we walked out to our bikes and struck them up.

  We rode through the town as a club, letting any Black Saddle within a ten-mile radius know they couldn't tear us the fuck apart. I pulled out my phone and began tracking Mick’s phone using the tracker I’d used to find his ass holed up with that disgusting crew. He wasn’t at his home, but he wasn’t in town, either. He was in the middle of the damn woods.

  At the fucking bonfire sight where all this shit started.

  How ironic.

  We rode our bikes all the way to the edge of the woods, then shut them down and walked them in. None of that parking at the gas station shit again. We rode around and circled the bonfire sight, looking around to see if Mick was with anyone. A Black Saddle. Some woman he was fucking. Maybe a kid from a woman he didn’t know he had. I didn’t put anything past the guys in our club anymore when it came to their cocks and who they honed in on. Especially after the past week and a half I’d had. We surrounded the fire sight and saw Mick sitting there, dicking around on his fucking phone.

  We kicked our stands down and emerged from the woods, watching as he talked to someone on his screen. Diesel put his finger up to his lips to shush us and we all stopped, waiting for him to get off the video chat. But the second he said Axe’s name, Grave bristled. I reached out and grabbed his arm, trying to get the angry tyrant to fucking stay put.

  But the second he hung up the call, we all emerged from the woods.

  Mick turned around and his face automatically dropped. I hardened my eyes onto him as we slowly circled around the man. Stalking him, like prey.

  “Hey, Mick,” Diesel said. “How’s it going?”

  “Good,” Mick said. “What’s up, guys?”

  “Nothing’ much,” Knox said. “Just hanging’ out.”

  “Uh huh. On the other side of town,” Mick said.

  “You’re on the other side of town,” Grave said. “What’s wrong with us being on the other side of town?”

  His eyes hardened on the hulking man whose hand was already halfway to his gun.

  “Settle down, Grave. We still need to give Mick a chance to explain himself,” Diesel said.

  He was here. The torturer we were all afraid of.

  Diesel had finally arrived to the party.

  “Explain what?” Mick asked.

  “Oh, nothing,” Diesel said as he pulled out a knife.

  He whipped it around until the blade was shining against the streams of sun penetrating the treetops.

  “How’s Axe?” Diesel asked.

  I watched Mick swallow as his eyes darted to all of us. Then, Diesel’s eyes locked onto Mick’s.

  “I asked you a question, boy. And you better not lie to me.”

  “Axe is good,” Mick said. “He’s um… he’s good.”

  “I bet he is, seeing as Rex gets out of jail today,” Diesel said.

  Mick’s eyebrows shot up to his forehead.

  “Rock, go get Mick’s phone,” Diesel said.

  I grinned as I started for the man, but he reached for his gun. In a flash, Diesel was at his side, fisting his hair and holding his head back while the blade of the shining knife sat against his pulsing artery.

  “I wouldn’t move if I were you,” Diesel said darkly. “It might get a little sticky if you do.” Mick slowly moved his hand away from his gun.

  I walked up to Mick and took his gun, and tossed it to the ground. Then I fished around in his pockets until I retrieved his phone. I took out the battery and slid it into my pocket, then inched out the SIM card and crushed it underneath my boot. Then, I stuck it all back into my pocket to destroy in a fire we would all set later in order to mark this new transition for our club.

  With one man down and out.

  “Diesel, they made me offers I couldn't resist,” Mick said. “When we talked about cleaning up our act, I knew I wasn’t going to make the kind of money I knew I needed to in order to take care of my mom and sister. It was only to help them with the RICO case, but I thought the RICO case was against them. I didn’t think it was to push you guys out. I swear, I didn’t know that until last night.”

  “Now why don’t I believe you?” Diesel asked.

  “Please, Diesel. I was only feeding them a little bit of information at a time. Nothing that could get anyone hurt. Just enough to foil plans to keep us all at o
dds with one another.”

  “Until you tried to fucking kill me,” Brewer said.

  Mick’s eyes whipped over to my best friend.

  “Until you ratted on our women as well,” Brewer said.

  Mick shook in the palm of Diesel’s hand as my friend approached my side.

  “You’re a slimy, good for nothing piece of fucking shit,” Grave said. “And I’m going to have fun playing with my food today.”

  “Diesel, we’re a club. We don’t clean up acts. Redding’s our town, and we should own that. I was going to start feeding them false information. You have to believe me, Diesel!”

  “Say I do,” he said as his knife slid along Mick’s skin. “Say I do believe you. Give us the rundown of the long game for you. The long term play you were making.”

  Knox stalked toward Mick and punched him quickly in the gut.

  “Shit!” Mick exclaimed as he buckled forward. Diesel kept his hold on Mick, and he quickly pulled his head back up and pushed the knife harder into this skin.

  “Now, now, Knox. We did promise Grave the first shot,” Diesel said.

  “Just got a text from Monroe,” Knox said. “Rex is out of jail and Axe somehow knew the exact time he’d be released. They were there to pick him up and they spat at Monroe in the fucking process.”

  Diesel’s eyes darkened to black holes that made even me want to take a step back.

  “What I was going to do was--”

  “Enough,” Diesel said.

  “But I was only going to--”

  “I said enough, Mick!”

  Diesel’s booming voice echoed off the trees of the woods and filled the crevices between us.

  “You’ve been ratting on this club for months. Talking to them about confidential information for months. Telling them about the families of this club for months. Then coming to church meetings and acting like you’re our buddy. Our pal. The man we could trust. While you were behind the scenes cleaning up your fucking messes and aiding a damn RICO case on us to shove us out of our town, and for what? Some fucking money!?”

  Diesel tightened his grip on Mick as he whipped his knife around and stuck it back into his pocket.

  “Our women,” he said as he took out his gun.

  “Our children,” Knox said as he took out his.

  “Us,” Grave said as he took out his gun.

  “Your family,” Brewer said as he brought out his gun.

  “You betrayed all of us,” I said. “And that comes with a fucking price.”

  Then Diesel tossed Mick to the ground and pointed his gun at him. He leveled it at the man as Mick scrambled to his feet, and I watched Grave snap. He reached down and physically tore the leather cut from the man’s back. Ripped our emblem off it and then he tossed it to the ground and spat on it, his eyes wild with fury as Knox’s boot stomped on it until it was unrecognizable.

  “You don’t deserve to wear that cut,” Diesel said as he stalked Mick. “You don’t deserve to wear that emblem. And you sure as hell don’t deserve to live. Did you think you’d really not go down with us? All of the numbers and the evidence and the eyewitness testimony? Did you really think The Black Saddles would let you off scot-free with the hundreds of thousands of dollars they gave you to rat on us? What? Did you think you wouldn’t go down with the club you’d dedicated yourself to for years simply because you decided to switch teams!?”

  Mick scrambled over to his discarded gun and leveled it at Diesel as he began to laugh.

  “I’ve never been one of you,” he said. “You never accepted me. Always teasing me for my shooting skills and mocking me for my mathematical mind. You shoved me into the shadows like I’m some kind of parasite. Some kind of pariah. Sure, I wore the fucking cut, but I never was actually a brother!”

  Diesel walked all the way up to the barrel of Mick’s gun and pressed his forehead directly into it.

  “Then if you’re such a big man, pull the fucking trigger,” he said.

  “What?” I asked. “Do you think being the behind the scenes man is any different than sneaking around in the shadows for them?”

  Mick turned his gaze over to me as his gun fell from Diesel’s head.

  “You think you're any less in the shadows simply because someone’s giving you some fucking money for it?” I asked.

  “That’s the thing,” Mick said with a grin. “At least if I’m going to be in the shadows, I might as well get paid handsomely for it.”

  “Can we fucking kill him now?” Grave asked.

  “That’s a good question,” Knox said.

  “I second and third that notion,” Brewer said.

  I looked over at Diesel as a devilish smile crossed his cheeks.

  But before he could get an answer out, two gunshots rang out into the woods. And I stood there, frozen in place as my heart stopped in my chest.

  Chapter 28

  Piper

  “Dr. Jackson, thank God you’re here,” one of the nurses said. “We got an emergency phone call from the 9-1-1 dispatch center. There’s a body coming for us, and it was specifically requested to be under your attention.”

  My heart slid to my toes as my entire world came to a grinding halt.

  When I’d woken up to the sound of my alarm going off upstairs, I scrambled to get ready for work. And I still hadn’t heard back from Rock. I double-checked with the babysitter to make sure she could pick Gavin up from the hospital daycare at four thirty, then I slid into my clothes and rode on into work. And the second I walked through the doors at two in the afternoon, the nurse had rushed me with this piece of information.

  I ripped my phone out of my pocket, begging for a message from Rock. A missed call. A voicemail. Something to indicate to me that he was all right.

  But again, there was nothing.

  I stood anxiously at the automatic front doors, ready to receive the trauma patient. And the entire time, I tried to hold back tears. I knew it was Rock. Somewhere in the pit of my gut, I was convinced his body was about to come rolling into the hospital. I wrung my hands in front of me and shuffled on my feet while my mind reminded my lungs to breathe. My heart raced. Sweat dripped down the back of my neck. The tears I kept at bay leaked from the pores of my skin, drenching random parts of my body as I stood there in my white coat.

  “Please don’t be Rock. Please don’t be Rock. Please don’t be Rock.”

  “You okay, Dr. Jackson?”

  I looked over at the nurse as she gazed up at me with an odd expression.

  “I’m fine. Still acclimating to the small town,” I said.

  “We don’t have the loud noises a city does. Get yourself a white noise machine. I know they’re made for kids and stuff, but I use one all the time.”

  “You do?” I asked.

  “Yep. Born and raised in Santa Barbara, California. Can’t go to sleep without a little bit of noise filling my room at night.”

  “Well, I was actually born and raised here. But I’ve been in New York City for the past decade or so,” I said.

  “That’s more than long enough to get--”

  The automatic doors rushed open and paramedics came screaming to a halt in front of me. I reached for the rolling gurney as a hospital bed rolled up beside me, ready for the patient’s body. Blood was everywhere, and two gunshot wounds pierced the man’s chest.

  But when I looked into his eyes, relief rushed through my veins.

  It wasn’t Rock.

  I didn’t know who the fuck it was, but it wasn’t him.

  Oh, thank fucking God.

  “I’ve got two gunshot wounds to the chest, one through and through,” the paramedic said. “Had to revive him twice in the ambulance. We can’t get him stable.”

  “He’s crashing!” I exclaimed as I ripped the man’s shirt open. “I need a cart.”

  But I knew it was already too late for the man on the hospital bed. We tried to revive him right there in front of the doors, and I thanked my stars the waiting room was empty. Blood seeped on
to the white sheets, dying it a glaring color that almost encompassed all of the white in sight. I pressed the paddles to his chest while nurses set I.V.’s and tried to gather blood, but we had no idea who the man was. He had no I.D. in his wallet.

  “Clear!” I called out.

  The nurses backed away and I zapped his chest. His body jumped, held still, then collapsed. The nurse walked back up and started compressions while the paddles charged, then I hovered them over the man’s chest.

  “Clear!” I called out.

  And still, nothing.

  We zapped him three more times before we called his time of death. Two thirty-three on a fucking Tuesday afternoon. I set the paddles down and sighed, my eyes raking up and down the man’s body. No bruises. No scratches. No nothing. Just two bullet holes, a lot of lost blood, and no identification.

  “Do any of you recognize this man?” I asked.

  Everyone around me shook their heads as the paramedics bowed their heads. We all gave a moment of silence for the man as the nurse pulled a sheet over him, then I wheeled the gurney down towards the elevator. If there was some reason this body was requested into my presence, it meant there was a connection to Rock somehow. But I didn’t want to let anyone on to that fact. I told the nurses to get back to work and that I would see the body down to the morgue since it had been put into my care in the first place. And the second the elevator doors closed, I used the time to dig through the man’s pockets with gloves on.

  There wasn’t much. A crumpled up receipt. Some lint. A bit of pocket change. But once I held up his body and dug around in his back pocket, I felt it.

  A folded sheet of paper.

  I slid it out and unraveled it as the elevator made its way into the basement of the hospital. My hands trembled as the piece of paper unfolded, and I took in the familiar chicken scratch in front of me.

  Rock had left me a note.

  His name’s Michael ‘Mick’ Carpenter. He’s got a sister and a mother about an hour outside of town. Contact his family.

  The second the elevator stopped I jammed the note into my pocket. Then, I rolled the hospital bed all the way into the morgue. The Medical Examiner that worked part-time at the hospital walked in through the side entrance just as I moved the bed into the middle of the room. She gave me a weak smile before walking over to the body, then threw the sheet back and studied the man’s face.