by Lydia Pax
And he wouldn’t let himself be hurt like that again.
“What is it?” he asked, his voice a bit on edge.
“I thought you were awake,” she said.
She sat up on the bed, slapping his chest lightly, then admiring it, running her hand down its hard surface again. Car lights from the highway outside shimmered through the curtain, casting strange shadows in the room.
“Listen,” she said. “I know that our fates are pretty much intertwined at this point. And I get the danger I’m in—from...everyone.” He could tell she wanted to be diplomatic and avoid saying you bastards. “But I’ve missed two days of work now and I disappeared in the middle of my shift. If I go back now, I might be able to explain it. But much longer and I won’t have a job. I won’t be able to get a job. And last I checked, you lot live a dangerous enough life to need someone in a hospital ready to help you out. I know that there's this deadline with the Cartel and everything, but I just...I want to feel useful. Everything you need to do now is like...criminal stuff. I don't know how to do any of that, but I know how to be a nurse.”
“That’s fine by me,” said Beretta. “I trust you. I’ll talk to Ace and we’ll make it happen.”
Just like that—it was easy to say it, easy to mean it. He really did think of her as one of his own.
How about that.
After a few moments, she seemed to doze. He looked down at her, wondering how asleep she was. He had to bite his tongue to keep from speaking.
Why did you leave me, girl? What wasn't I giving you?
Chapter 17
The two outlaws were on a roof of a small, abandoned department store at the edge of the city. The sky was clear, wide, and blue. This deep in West Texas, the horizon could stretch on for days, and the joke was you could watch your dog run away for a week.
About a half-mile away was the steelworks. Men with guns patrolled on the catwalks and checked in on radios attached their chests. They wore bullet proof vests and had heavy packs of ammo attached to belts around their waists.
“The Nurse,” said Locke, laughing. “I still can’t get over that shit. She was stone cold, man.”
He held a pair of binoculars in his hands, a small camera set up on a tripod next to him.
“Wasn’t hurting nothing,” said Tank. “Smart lady.”
Tank was laying down beneath the tripod, keeping his eyes on the steelworks. Locke got his eyes on specifics, and Tank kept his view on the picture as a whole. They worked well as a team.
His history with Locke was the best thing that had ever happened to him. Up until meeting Locke, his life had been a straight line of violence.
Tank had been in debt deep to the Furnace in Marlowe. They put him in the Pit Fights and essentially made a prisoner out of him. He wasn't allowed to leave or do anything else for more than two years except fight. They clothed him, fed him, and served him up women, like a gladiator in Roman times...but being a prisoner was still being a prisoner.
Then, Locke—as a new pledge to the Black Flags MC trying to make a name for himself—did his honest best to kick the Furnace out of Marlowe. With the other Black Flags at his back, he took out their bar and their Pit Fights...and that freed Tank from their grip.
Right after that, the Wrecking Crew swooped in and broke up the Furnace in Marlowe. The Furnace was still alive and well in other places like Stockland, having expanded into several cities just like the Wrecking Crew wanted to expand now. But, an MC lived and died on its reputation in a given city, and Locke and the Black Flags had destroyed the Furnace MC's rep in Marlowe.
It was a dog-eat-dog-eat dog sort of world when you were in a Motorcycle Club, and you stuck with the strongest men around to protect yourself. The Wrecking Crew took Tank in—glad for a fighter—and it was a strange inversion that they mostly viewed him as the veteran when he had less time than Locke as an actual MC pledge.
But, with as much time as he had fighting, they figured he was owed a little bit of special status. Truth was, they were all scared of him, and if he was being real honest, he knew they should be. Tank had a whole lot of violence left in him, even if he didn't want to let it out. He wasn't sure what to do about that, but it felt permanent.
Tank owed a great deal to the Wrecking Crew, and a great deal specifically to Locke. He was happy to fight for them, and more than happy to ride with them.
But this shit now in Stockland was a hard spot he'd found himself in and, though he'd never run, he could not help but wonder who he had pissed off to be in this situation.
He owed his whole life to the Wrecking Crew. When he had been in the Pit Fights in Marlowe, essentially owned by the Furnace, his existence had been nothing but one fight after another. He'd never lost. He'd built a reputation.
He had been miserable. Alone. They gave him books to read, sometimes. Pulpy stuff. He identified with zombies, because that's how he felt. The living dead.
Now, he was under the gun one more time. But he was grateful that at least he was fighting with the men he called his brothers. It was just too bad that he was the only one who seemed to get along with everyone.
Ace and Beretta hated each other, and Locke—who had never much liked Beretta, even when they were Black Flags together—seemed to still be mad that Beretta had gotten him shot. He had been complaining all day about the stiffness in his shoulder. An understandable grudge. Meanwhile, Ace treated Locke too much like a military subordinate and not enough like a second among equals.
Then there was that Nurse. Pretty woman. She seemed to already be fucking up Beretta's head. Tank just hoped it wasn't the bad kind of fucking up—the kind that would make his brother more prone to errors and mistakes.
It was a whole big mess they were in, all right. It was a big mess and the only way they'd get through it was to work together.
Locke kept talking. It's what he did best. “It’s weird how it was soft and it was hard, right? Her methods.”
“Yeah. Winced at the walnut thing.”
“Right? And I saw her put the walnuts down. It was just knowing that’s what he was feeling. She really convinced him.” Locke shook his head, adjusting himself in his crotch. “Bad time to pledge Copperhead, man.”
“Missed out on the bull market.”
Locke turned away from his binoculars, raising an eyebrow at Tank. “The what now?”
“The bull market.” Tank shrugged. “You know. When the market is good. Running strong. Pushing upwards. Prices rising, people making money hand over fist. Economics.”
Locke was aghast. “Since when in the fuck do you know about economics, Tank?”
“I read books. You should try it sometime.” He slapped Locke’s shoulder and pointed. “Check it out.”
Black vans were arriving. Tank started running the camera as Locke looked through the binoculars, spotting more places to snap photos. They could both see the goods, though—unloaded off the trucks—four of them in all—were bags and bags of cash and drugs, stuffed so full that the product was spilling out through the zippers.
Paydirt.
Chapter 18
It was no picnic, talking Georgetta into letting her work again.
There were all kinds of questions. Where had she been? Why hadn’t she called? Was everything okay?
And then there was the implicit question, the most important question, the question unasked—was Helen telling the truth?
Helen’s story was that her cousin had called, in town and in trouble from an ex. It was easy to provide details for the cousin’s trouble—she’d had plenty of experience with shitty exes, after all.
Anyway, in the story, she then proceeded to lose her phone—she held up the burner that the Wrecking Crew had given her to prove her point, as Georgetta had seen her old phone quite a lot—and forgot to call because she was so caught up in the emotion of her cousin’s plight. That morning, she’d sent her cousin off on a plane to Tampa and hopefully, to safety.
End of story.
Detailing th
at piece of fiction was the longest half-hour that Helen had lived through in the normal course of her life. She thought of the previous three days of sensationally shitty excitement as outside the bounds of that normal course, because in that particular period of time distortion, any given five minutes was the longest thirty minutes of her life.
As she spoke, everything narrowed and winnowed down on her field of vision, on her ability to talk and not choke up and just reveal the truth in a blur of tear-flooded emotion. The corner of Georgetta's desk was worn and scratched from where Georgetta had hit it over and over again with the nearby filing cabinet. There was a soft scratching sound from the air conditioning as it flipped on and off again. Her pens were all the same brand, many with the caps chewed through.
At the end, it was clear without her saying that Georgetta didn’t really believe her. But at the same time, Helen had worked there for four months now without a single slip-up, and had come into the job with a hearty recommendation after years of working in Marlowe. She showed up on time, she didn’t complain, and she made damn good coffee.
Georgetta gave her a pass based on her record, not her story. Helen knew this; they both knew, but neither of them acknowledged it.
“If there’s any more funny business,” said Georgetta, “you better be up front with it right away, or else that’s it. I’m giving you a second chance, now.”
“I know,” said Helen. “Thank you. I won’t make you regret it.”
And Helen truly hoped she wouldn’t.
The rest of the workday passed without incident. Helen was thrown right into the thick of the work—scrubbing down bedridden patients, setting a broken arm, stitching up the head of a child who fell hard on a black top during a game of tag. She made the strongest pot of coffee she possibly could, flinging the weak stuff straight into the toilet, just to get on Georgetta's good side.
Her mind was in her work. It was, really.
Not on Beretta. Not on his cock being so perfectly close to being inside her the night before. Not on the brilliant way he had eaten her out.
And she absolutely wasn't thinking about how she was still dead scared about what might happen to her now that she was so caught up so intrinsically with the Wrecking Crew.
She thought about work. Her mind set itself to tasks, and she did not allow distractions.
Or, this was the attempt. But as the day wore on, her focus waned, no matter how much coffee she drank. The exhilaration she felt at it all was undeniable. The danger. The excitement.
The sex.
Oh fuck, the sex.
Growing up in Marlowe, seeing the stud bikers prowl through town on their thick hogs, having their way with women everywhere and kicking ass in every last place they stepped in, she had developed a plethora of fantasies about them.
It would have been dishonest of her to deny that she used to fantasize about exactly this. Clutching her pillow tight in her room, feeling rejected at school and at home, dreaming of some black knight in leather armor with a chrome-steel steed draping her over his back and promising to keep her safe, to make her his forever, to let her know where she really belonged.
To make her his property forever.
Of course, in those dreams, the danger wasn't ever really real. They weren't up against an entire gang of insanely violent meth heads. They weren't on the run from the Cartel with a debt that they couldn't possibly pay back.
But the sex? Oh, god yes, the sex was even better than she had fantasized.
Beretta was all kinds of things, but she never would have suspected that one of them was being so incredibly gifted at eating her out. He hadn't ever done it when they had been together before—not all the way to her climax. He was a generous lover, and would take his time to get her dripping wet, but he always did it as a prelude to entering her.
Perhaps that was for the better. If he had licked her like he had last night, then she might never have left him.
And maybe that's not for the better at all.
An annoying, self-doubting thought. She pushed it aside.
In many ways, it was even more intimate than normal sex that he would lick her out straight to her orgasm. Strangely, she felt closer to him as she woke up than she ever had before.
During the day, she would drift from to time, recalling the intensity of his tongue, the ferocity of his licks, the perfect rhythm he had achieved to get her going...and she would need to run to the bathroom and splash a little water on her face to keep her mind steady.
And so the workday progressed, and Helen felt almost normal by the end of it. That was when Georgetta asked to speak with her again.
At first, Helen began to panic—she's found something out. I'm fired. I'm exposed.
But though Georgetta's face was clouded with concern, it was not the kind that foreshadowed Helen getting dumped from the hospital. They walked to a dark hallway together where there was only one room occupied.
Georgetta kept her voice low. “Someone came in earlier, looking for you. You were busy with a patient.”
“Oh,” said Helen. Immediately, she thought Georgetta meant Beretta. “Did he give you any trouble?”
“Said he was a friend of yours. Said you had a lot of history. Wanted to talk to you.”
“Wait.” Helen squeezed the bridge of her nose with her fingers. If Beretta wanted to see her, he wouldn't have used any pretense. He would have just talked to her. “What did he look like?”
“White boy. Blond hair. Good looking, though a little on the skinny side.”
“Yeah, that’s—” she shook her head. “Yeah, okay. Sorry.”
“I told him you were unavailable.”
“Thank you.”
“I didn’t like the look of him.”
“Me neither. Ex-boyfriend. Sorry.”
“I see,” said Georgetta. “Not your cousin’s ex-boyfriend. Your ex-boyfriend.”
Now, this was getting embarrassing.
“...yeah.”
“I see. Well,” said Georgetta, taking Helen’s hands. “I know all about the exes of cousins and how shitty they can be. ‘Specially the kind of fools that come round to a place of work and expect an audience just ‘cause they showed up. So I tell you what. You have any more problems with your cousin’s ex, you just let me know. And I’ll take care of things here at work, all right?”
Guilt flooded through Helen’s system. Georgetta had the right idea and the wrong idea simultaneously, and there was really no good way to tell her without making her feel betrayed for believing Helen’s lies.
All this lying had turned Helen into a snake eating her tail. The sooner it was done, the better.
“Thank you, Georgetta. I appreciate that. And your...discretion.”
Georgetta winked and walked back down to the nurse station. Helen was left alone in the hallway with its soft blinking lights, opening and closing her hands again and again in the dark as Georgetta's warmth faded from her palm.
Chapter 19
“So here’s the deal,” said Beretta, laying out a map. “Ace got us the blueprints for the steelworks. I’ve been studying them all day.”
They had changed motels, moving across town. After the episode with Damage, it only made sense to move on to a new place. The body had been disappeared, but that didn't mean they ought to stick around where all the evidence could be. Beretta had lived long enough in this life to know that you didn't just hand the enemy an opening.
Even though it was a different motel, the set-up of the room was still similar. The beds were on opposite sides and the windows had different blinds—the kind that opened vertically instead of horizontally. There were pictures of farmland over the beds and the bathroom's wallpaper had a lighthouse theme.
Outside, the sun had set and night was falling on Stockland. It was Friday night—two nights left before the deadline. Cars could be heard revving up as teenagers took joyrides with their dates. Their new motel was next to a club, and as the night progressed, the deep bass sounds from it g
ot louder and more distinct.
Behind Beretta, Helen sat in a corner on a chair, looking vaguely interested in the plan. None of the men had a problem with her being there—she was in it now, she might as well be in it all the way.
Ever since their encounter—when he had tasted her again, enforced his will upon her in that deliciously intimate way—he'd noticed her staring at him. Wanting him. She saw the soft little motions of her mouth when he pulled on his biker vest or when he fired up the engine to his bike.
A suspicion began to nag at him—about why she had left in the first place all those months ago. Like it wasn't him that turned her on, it was the fact of him: the fact that he was a biker.
Well, that was fine, wasn't it? She shouldn't be in his life anyway.
Right? Wasn't that what he was supposed to think?
No. You're supposed to be thinking about the plan.
Beretta tapped his hands along his jeans, wishing for a quick piece of candy. Instead, he pointed to various points on the map. “They’ve got sharpshooters here, here, here, and here. Not to mention armed patrols running along these catwalks and in front of every entrance. There’s only about a thirty second gap between any patrol, and I’m pretty sure they’ve set up motion detectors to let the guards know when someone’s walking in through the perimeter”
“Rattler’s getting paranoid in his old age,” said Ace.
With good reason, thought Beretta. We’re coming to steal his money.
“The major problem we’re facing,” said Beretta, “is that doing this is going to be pretty much impossible.”
Ace laughed at that, making a “no shit?” face.
Beretta continued. “He’s too wily for us to outsmart him. Anything that looks like a con will just end up with people getting shot. He took down—what was it?”
He looked to Locke, who nodded and leaned forward. “They nearly shot the pizza delivery guy when he walked too close. Put a few rounds in his car.”