Rogue (In the life of the Rogue Book 1)

by KaNeshia Michelle

I hadn’t even realized how much time had passed while I was drinking away whatever I was feeling until Zander walked up beside me and leaned against the bar.

  “You just fucked off back there, Tristan,” he said and lit a cigarette then ordered his own drink on my money.

  I played with my drink, taking occasional sips from it before downing it completely and waited for another. It was too loud to talk, too loud to think, and this was fine.

  This was my life after all.

  I had worked too hard to be here in the gutter.

  Zander squeezed my shoulder. “Outside, T, I wanna talk.”

  I grasped my newly refilled drink and put it to my lips. I nodded to my cousin before tossing my head back and nearly crying when I felt the liquor move down my throat and burn.

  The cold night’s air brushed and burned my cheeks as Zander and I stepped out of the smoke hazed, neon lighting, strip club.

  Zander tucked his jacket a little tighter around his body. “I need to know we’re good on what happened back at the hotel room,” he said, meaning his little slip with the syringe.

  “Your bullshit is your bullshit. Keep me out of it and don’t let it fuck up what we do.”

  “It won’t and I’m done with all that. I was just screwed, man.” He chuckled to himself like I had told a funny joke. “So it seems apparent you got one hell of a hard on for Lu’s kid.”

  I took a deep breath and saw it in the cold air when I blew it back out. “This isn’t what you wanted to talk about, is it?” I glanced around the rather deserted parking lot. “You were dropped off?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then I guess we’re walking home since our car is in front of our apartment.”

  We both started off into the deserted night, our hands stuffed in our pockets and I our heads buried deep into our coats. I thought briefly about Miami: the warm weather, the women, the sun, but mostly about how much prettier crime life was there then here where it seemed what we did for a living was much more dirty, colder and seedy.

  “You think Johnny saw it coming?” Zander asked.

  “It doesn’t matter now, does it?”

  He lit two cigarettes and passed one to me. I fished out a bottle of rum from my coat and Zander smiled graciously as we passed the bottle back and forth between each other.

  “I’m thinking about visiting my kids,” he said.

  I used the palm of my hand to smooth the top of my hair. Zander took more sips until the bottle had a sliver of rum left in it before handing it back to me. I just hurled the bottle into the night and listened for the shatter and smiled when I heard it.

  “That’s for my brother,” I whispered to myself.

  My memories of Johnny hadn’t been good but he was still my brother. I hated him for almost all of my life, but he was still blood. Knowing that he was dead, and that his death had been ugly no matter if they didn’t beat or toture him, hadn’t sat well for me. I didn’t realize until now, in the dead silent night where all I could hear was my shoes scuffling against the pavement, that I preferred my oldest brother not dead.

  Zander pulled the collars up on his jacket. “My girls are growing up without me, Tristan.”

  “How old are they now?” I asked.

  “Five and eight,” he asnwered, but stopped and thought about it a little more, “Seven and nine.”

  Zander’s two girls were being raised by a mother who worked two jobs and had a nasty drunk for a boyfriend – not much better than what Zander had been but better because he wasn’t beholden by the needle. And it was now, when even your own thoughts couldn’t keep your mind from wandering, that you visited your past with a bitter taste in your mouth. He was thinking of his children, and I found myself thinking of the child I had lost and been happy about the departure.

  “We weren’t raised to be good men, T, but I think we are, really I do. I think we’re good men,” he said, more to himself than to me.

  And I disagreed.

  We weren’t good men at all. Good men don’t beat the mother of their children, make them cry because their crying on the inside, and good men don’t lead a woman to swallow a handful of pills because he allowed her life to get so agonizing, and so painful, that tomorrow just wasn’t worth seeing.

  We were nearing the apartment when Zander stopped and looked at me. “Papa wants you to come by tomorrow. He wasn’t happy you didn’t stay long. He said he needed to talk to you.”

  I turned to keep going but he grabbed my arm.

  “Would you have ever wanted to be boss?” He asked.

  I tried not to answer him; he wouldn’t handle it right.

  “Just give it to me straight, Tristan,” he told me, as if my very thoughts had appeared all over my face.

  “No. I don’t ever want to be my father. That job is way too much for a fuck up like me. I respect my families’ business too much to walk into a train wreck I know I would cause.”

  “That’s bullshit, Tristan. That’s Papa talking and you know it.”

  “And what if it is? But he’s right, Zander. I don’t have what it takes for this business. I sure as hell wouldn’t have the balls to have one of my kids killed.”

  “Johnny was a traitor to the Rogue. He knew what he was doing.”

  “So did me with Katie, Zander.” Again I saw those pure blue eyes. I felt the way her smile widened against my neck when she nuzzled. “So did you when you sunk a needle into your arm and pushed the plunger.” My eyes met the dark sky and I wasn’t surprised not to see one star. “We’re in a shit hole. And it’s too good for us, man. This shit hole is too good for us for what we’ve done.”

  Zander’s face was deadly serious and I couldn’t remember ever seeing him this way, this fierce, and this careful about what he said. “You do have what it takes to make the right calls, Tristan. You not being enough for this family, thinking you’re your past is your chain tied to cement, and your right to life’s fucking scraps that has already been chewed, is Papa’s talking. That’s his fucking definition of you.”

  “And what if I had to have you killed you, Zander? Do you think I would do it?”

  “Yea, I do,” said, “If you had to, Tristan, and I wouldn’t hate you for it. You’re not like me. You were conditioned to be the boss. Your father knows this.”

  “I was six when he broke my jaw for the first time,” I argued.

  “And you think that doing what he does calls for an upbringing that deals out happy memories? You have to be strong. You have to be mean and you have to be tough. You can’t just walk into this family and run it and not have tribulations or demons. It didn’t make sense then in Papa’s days and it don’t now in our days. Papa tried with Johnny – good memories, hugs and pats on the back – and he made one greedy bastard who got himself killed.”

  He wasn’t finished talking but I was finished listening. He thought he could pull me out my downward spiral but the belts were fastened and I wasn’t going anywhere. I made bad decisions. One of those bad decisions had blue eyes and blonde hair, was twenty-six years old and dead.

  Zander called out after me. “The past is gone, T. When are you going to let it go?”

  And he was right, the past was gone. What we did was too far behind to correct any of it. You just couldn’t walk a straight line when there were too many kinks in the road.

  The past is gone, and whatever that was good in us was gone too, and I didn’t have the remorse for the man I could’ve been.

  ***

  Ally snuck a kiss on my lips and snickered about it, her bright smile was burning in the dark room. My arms were propped under my head as I glared up at the ceiling with the fake, plastic glow-in-the-dark stars. We were stuffed in her twin size bed, which proved to be a good reason as to why I never would stay too long after I fucked her.

  Her soft fingers drew circles on my chest. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  I shuffled into my pants and could feel her eyes watching me curiously. I had said nothing more than the sweet nothing
s to get her to open the door and take me to her bedroom, and now it seemed my lack of conversation explained to her that something was off.

  “I’m not coming back here,” I told her.

  She sniffled behind me. She was most likely fighting away tears that I sure as hell didn’t deserve. “Why, Tristan?”

  I shrugged causually. This wasn’t going to be a warm moment.

  “I don’t want to do this anymore with you,” I answered.

  And after that, her fight with the tears was lost. Ally cried and cried and I didn’t comfort her, help her to slow down and breathe – I gave her nothing that would make this easier.

  Then she took to begging.

  “Tristan, you said you would never leave me.”

  “I never said I was with you from the beginning.”

  “But I love you,” she mumbled.

  “I told you that you shouldn’t.”

  “You said you loved me,” she screamed.

  “No, I never did.”

  I waited for her to cry every single tear she had for me before slipping out of her apartment. It was the wrong thing to do but I had felt so worthless today at my brother’s funeral and after it.

  To know someone would cry for me felt good.

  Before disappearing into my apartment, Ally’s parents passed me, walking arm-in-arm down the tight hallway. They looked tired, beat up by their jobs that were never going to pay them enough for their troubles. But I could see the determination in their eyes, too. They were doing this for their daughter. They were determined to make her life the best that they possibly could, and for that, I smiled at them and told them to have a good morning.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Stuck in Circles…

  What I loved most about my father’s compound was the bars with the free booze. There just wasn’t one bar inside the home, there were several with a bartender waiting, ready to take your order, listen to your problems, nod when you asked a question and laughed when you told a joke. And if you cried, they handed you a filled glass of whatever you were drinking rather than a napkin to wipe your tears.

  They were our therispts.

  The bartenders knew far more secrects than I did. And I was the one who saw the dirt first hand.

  I rubbed my hands over my face and exhaled.

  The bartender sat a napkin down. “What you having?”

  “Something that’ll make me feel like I took two to the chest.”

  “I know just the thing.”

  He unscrewed the cap. A glass hit the counter, two cubes of ice dropped inside. My mouth watered as I saw the liquor pour in – dark and thick.

  One sip, the burn, the heat rising into my cheeks, and the world felt a little better…and a little sideways.

  This bartender had just become my new best friend. And as a show of friendship he just received from me, I decided best not to let him in on the secrect: that the majority of the bodies I had to make unrecognizable before Zander made them disappear was theirs.

  I re-adjusted the tie around my neck and felt more choked than less. I had to dress to Papa’s liking: suit, tie, polished shoes, murderous gleam in the eye.

  I hoped Papa would be a little lackluster on the polished shoes and murderous gleam. My shoes weren’t polished, or even nice enough to be polished. And my gleam was anything but murderous. I looked more or less like I had been up all night in a rave. I finally gave into temptation and loosened the tie slightly and felt a rush of air on my bare neck.

  Papa took a stool next to me. “It’s a little too early for the sauce.” He lifted a finger, and immediately, a napkin was placed and drink was sat on top of it.

  I smiled into my glass. “It’s never too early.”

  Papa glared at me, his dark eyes behind his sunglasses glanced down to my neck. “Fix that tie. You have to look presentable in my home.”

  I wanted to say that it was now my father’s home but did not; instead, I fixed the tie, tightening it, and was miserable again from the heat as the air was choked off.

  Papa lit a cigar. “The girl had a doctor give her the once over after you dropped her off.”

  “Something happened?” Fear had crept up so fast that my stomach churned, the liquor souring in my stomach.

  Papa waited me out. Maybe he sensed the fear and wanted to let me wallow in it for his enjoyment. “No. Nothing happened. We wondered and now we’re certain she’s still in one piece – still intact.”

  His answer barely registered. I was too busy going over that night in the beach house in my mind. I went over every detail, wondering where her safety was in jeapordy. I wondered if I had missed something, blocked it out because maybe I was in shock after killing a man. Did I suppress a detail? Did the events play out differently than I remembered?

  Was there a chance that she could’ve been hurt under my watch?

  Then it hit me as to why a doctor would need to check Dominique out, and the realization wasn’t pleasant.

  My chin hit my chest as my head dropped. “You had her looked at because she was alone with me, didn’t you?”

  “Not me, Lulina did.”

  I replayed the words over and over in my mind. I tried to understand, tried to make sense. I wanted to chalk it up to the fact that Lulina had every right to worry about her daughter’s safety. No chances taken, no slack given.

  And the understanding ended there.

  Anger settled into the pit of my stomach and warmed like my drink had just done. Lulina knew me. Knew me. I felt she was the only person on this planet that actually saw me. I was many things, many bad things that I didn’t skip over and try to paint myself as a good man who so happened to be on the left hand of God because of the life I was raised in and surrounded by.

  Like Zander tried.

  It was an ugly go ‘round, but I finally came full circle and settled on one fact: Lulina Wells was no better than my family.

  I roughly rubbed my temples, a headache creeping up with the ever promise that when it hit full swing, that any thoughts that managed to slip into my mind would feel like belly dancing in a pool of glass.

  Without even realizing it, I loosened the tie around my neck again. “But there wasn’t a scratch on her. Lulina had to have seen that – why the doctor?”

  Papa shrugged his shoulders causally. “Maybe she was making sure that the flower wasn’t wilted.”

  I didn’t even try to understand what that meant. Papa loved talking in metaphors, and I was too flabbergasted to try and participate – be the good student, think out the problem and answer correctly.

  Papa asked: “Who gave you Lulina’s room number?”

  Not answering was as bad as answering so I elected to take on the lesser evil. “Lulina met me for a drink before our meeting in your hotel suite.”

  “And that’s when she gave you her room number?” He smiled, his eyes lighting up at the possibility that I had spent the night in Lulina’s bed, which I had.

  “She’s my sister-in-law, Papa. She’s the closet thing to a mother that I have.”

  I could still feel the disbelief in his stare. He let my explanation pass and turned back into his drink. I took a heavy sip of mine, knowing full well that after today I would have to watch my back. All he needed was a sniff in the right direction and he would draw his own conclusion.

  Once a wife fucker, always a wife fucker.

  And he would be right.

  “Sure, Tristan, you wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.” And he patted me on the back - roughly. “But we need to talk. I have some good news for you. You’re up for a promotion in the family. You’re not clean by any means but you’re not as dirty either.”

  “How tight is the leash?”

  “You’re still choking but it’s a longer death.” He smiled at the use of words – metaphors, oh, how he loved them. “You’re still a nigger, Tristan, and Zander ain’t gonna change from being a spick, but despite the dismount you handled yourself in Miami and I want to show you the appreciation.”r />
  He patted me on the back again – rougher, harder, this time – and my shoulder blades began to ache.

  “Now you still do the clean up jobs but the bodies are going to thin out. Your father is running a tighter ship on things, and even though we haven’t had any problems on your end, we got sources saying we’re getting looked at for disappearances. So tighten your ship even tighter. I want you to tighten it, not Zander, okay?”

  He took a sip of his drink, waited me out for a moment then continued. “Your new job will be security. We have our gun shipments in the shipping yard and you’re going as back up. Just you for a while, get the layout, learn the ropes then bring Zander and show him. But, remember, the shipments are your brother’s territory. You do what Ralph say, no bullshit.”

  I responded, almost believably sincere, “Why would I want to cause the only brother I have left any problems?”

  Papa winced and I smiled.

  The pain flared and passed, and Papa sipped his drink – this time a longer gulp. “This is your last chance to find favor in the family, Tristan. Don’t you dare fuck this up - you do and you’re dead. I don’t mean cut off either like last time, but swimming with the motherfucking fishes like a gang nigger. And I swear on my father’s grave, that I’ll stuff gang colors up your ass and no one will ever know you were one of us.”

  I had to fight the urge not to reach in my coat for a cigarette. Papa wouldn’t have it. Inside or out, not in his home that he built with other people’s sweat, blood and tears. Cigars were the desired choice. To him, cigarettes were too cheap; too much like a habit than just smoking for pleasure.

  Cigars were for the enjoyment.

  Cigarettes were because you had a weakness.

  Weak men were dead men in his world.

  “Sober up first, Tristan,” he said, “Sober up some before you get the hell out of my house.”

  ***

  Lulina was in my thoughts, over the warm buzz of early morning liquor in my head.

  I knew now that my sister-in-law was too dangerous to be around. She saw my life as a game; she moved pawns, played dirty, and bet heavy. She played with my life like she would a lollipop. She would twirl me around, drag her tongue over me and pop me back in her mouth when she missed the flavor. It was a game of circles, a race to see how far you could go, but only to end up right back were you started.