Sid stood as they came in. God, she was thin, maybe thinner than usual. Her long blonde hair was back in a ponytail. She dressed a lot like Juliana did for work, but with a bit less flair. Trick’s girls loved their accessories.
“Hey, guys. Thanks for this.” She gave each man a kiss and a quick hug. Demon grabbed her chin and turned her head. Her cheek was red, swelling slightly.
Sid tipped her head out of his hand. “I’m fine. Muse is having kittens, I know, and Bettina keeps saying I got punched. It was a slap. Just a fucking slap. No big deal.”
“Feels like we’re missing a piece here. It’s not like Muse to lose his cool, Sid.”
She smiled. “Yeah, Connor, I know. Things are…” She shook her head like she’d changed her mind about finishing that sentence. “Anyway. I promise—just a slap. Nate’s going through some bad shit at home, and it blew back on me a little.” With a determined point in the middle of one eyebrow, she looked at Demon. “You understand?”
Demon blushed hard and dropped his head. “Shit, Sid.”
She patted his arm. “Sorry, buddy. Needed to make my point. Now, this was my idea, so don’t make me regret it. If this kid ends up doing real time, he’s lost. And he’s a good kid. So I thought you could scare him straight.”
“Sweet Christ,” Connor grumbled. “This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You want us to beat him, we’re your guys. Muse wants us to beat his ass. But we are not guidance counselors, Sid. You are.”
She shook her head. “He doesn’t see me as strong. He needs to see muscle, that’ll get his attention—but I don’t want you to hurt him. Get help from the strongest source, right? That’s what Muse says all the time. You’re my strongmen. Go be strong. But do it with your hearts.”
~oOo~
In Bettina Alvarez’s office, they found a big African American kid—over six feet, probably close to three hundred pounds. Nate Jackson. When they walked in, his eyes bugged out, and he jumped to his feet, ready to fight. He hadn’t been warned that the Horde was coming for him. He’d been expecting deputies, and he hadn’t been unnerved by that.
The Horde, however, obviously scared him.
He was nineteen, the principal had told them outside her office, and a junior. He’d been held back three times, and he was likely to age out before he could graduate. He had a history of destructive outbursts. His mother was in prison; his father was unknown. He lived with an aunt and her five kids. A poster child for failure.
But his tested IQ was 158.
It was Demon who talked to him most. Connor and Trick stood back, arms crossed, angry faces in place. Trick listened to Demon and watched Nate very slowly lose his defensive posture.
And Trick understood something ridiculous about himself. He’d been envious of Demon, a man whose childhood had been rife with horrific abuse. He’d envied him not for that but for the way the mental health issues he suffered because of it had manifested themselves. In their world, Demon’s violent outbursts made sense. They made him stronger. Trick’s self-flagellation and panic attacks, while perhaps more socially acceptable in the normal world, were weakness where he lived.
And Demon wasn’t at fault for his troubles; he hadn’t invited his demons in. Trick was; he had.
He’d been aware of the contrast, and his envy, for a while. But standing in this principal’s office, seeing Demon connect with a struggling kid, Trick understood the ridiculousness of it. Nobody ever invited their demons in. They were invaders, not guests. And living angry was no easier than living anxious. It was all pain, turned one way or another.
Maybe men like them did make decent guidance counselors, for people on a certain kind of path.
~oOo~
Neither Sid nor Principal Alvarez had probably intended the result of the Horde’s intervention with Nate Jackson; Trick was certain it didn’t count as being ‘scared straight.’ At any rate, a couple of days afterward, they had an overage, overlarge high school student lurking around the shop. At nineteen, he was old enough to start hanging around, but he was still in high school, and that fact seemed to have the Horde giving him a wary eye.
That, and the fact that Muse still wanted to rearrange his body parts. But Muse wasn’t around the shop much, and Nate made sure not to be around Muse at all.
Sid had been right about him, though: he wasn’t a bad kid. Around the Horde, at least, he was respectful and quiet. At the shop, he watched them work, asking questions that suggested a genuine interest, and possibly an acuity for mechanics.
Trick hated to have people hovering over him during a build, and he would not tolerate chatter. He sucked as a teacher, at least where bikes were concerned. But he wasn’t building the way Demon or any of the others were. They modified what already existed. He started from scratch. They improved; he created. To do that, he needed to be elsewhere in his mind than the shop.
He didn’t need quiet; he could shut out all the noise around him and focus—another gift of his Army days. Snipers were teamed with spotters because their focus was necessarily far away from their own zone, and they needed someone to watch out.
But that focus didn’t work as well when there was someone directly attempting to draw it to them with pestering questions and comments.
A commission had come in from the East Coast a week or so before; some financier guy Trick had never heard of who wanted an art bike for his collection. His only preference instruction had been ‘mean and futuristic.’ That was best case: a commission that let his mind roam freely. He’d pulled some of his more fantastical sketches and submitted them. Now he was building something truly weird and wonderful.
He was deep in the zone one afternoon, sitting on the stool at his station, fashioning small parts. The shop was full, everyone working at capacity, and he’d locked his mind down hard, closing all that noise off. So it took him a few seconds to understand that the shop had gone quiet. By the time he turned off his torch and pushed his goggles onto the top of his head, Connor had arrived at his side.
Connor’s expression rioted with bad things: anger, worry, shock. “What?” Trick asked.
“We got four Feds in the showroom. T, they want you.”
He could see that Connor had prepared for him to break down in some way, but that wasn’t how it worked with him. In times of real danger and crisis, the soldier won out over the sufferer. His insides became stone, and he stood up, giving Connor a curt nod. “Okay.”
His friend blinked. “Dad’s already on it. He called Mel before he came out to the showroom.” The club’s attorney was a partner at Juliana’s firm. “They won’t say what they want with you.”
Trick could see in Connor’s eyes that he knew just as well as Trick himself did what the Feds wanted with him. Allen Cartwright’s murder was more than a year old, but the case had not been closed. They’d finally wended their way to him.
He also knew that if he had screwed up the hit—if any of them had screwed up any part, if law had concrete, material evidence—then Trick would have been picked up long ago. This wasn’t about evidence. This was about information.
Connor knew it, too. “We’re on it, T. Hang tight. We’re on it.”
“Okay.” He released the band he’d used to tie his hair back while he’d been welding, he dropped his goggles on his table, and he walked through the shop to the showroom. All the Horde who’d been working stood, practically at attention, all angry and resolute. Nate stood next to Demon, his eyes wide.
They all followed behind Trick and Connor.
Four male Feds stood near the reception desk with Hoosier and Bart, their jackets open and their holsters unsnapped. They were expecting trouble, but unless they started it, trouble wouldn’t happen. Not here.
As Trick approached them, the older and larger of the four stepped forward, his badge out. Department of Homeland Security.
“Patrick Stavros?”
“Yes.”
“We need you to come with us.”
“Why?”
> “We have questions involving your whereabouts on the afternoon of Thursday, August 8th of last year.”
The date of the Cartwright hit. “You can ask your questions here.”
“We need to ask them at our office.”
He knew how he wanted to answer, that he would not go anywhere with them willingly, but he spared a quick glance at Hoosier, whose head moved slightly from side to side. Trick met the lead Fed’s eyes again. “I’m sorry, no.”
“It isn’t a request.”
Keeping his voice calm and unthreatening, he answered, “I’m sorry.”
As if the event had been choreographed, one of the other three Feds came at Trick from the side and drove him chest-first into the reception desk, knocking the wind out of him. His head was shoved hard to the desk and he was roughly frisked, then his arms were yanked back. Handcuffs closed, brutally tight, around his wrists, over the ink of his shackles, and then he was dragged backwards. No one had announced charges or suspicions; no one had read him his rights.
The three other Feds had drawn on the Horde, whose hands were up. As the lead Fed pushed Trick toward the front door of the showroom, Hoosier yelled, “What the fuck? What are the … the…”
“CHARGES!” Connor’s voice erupted, filling in his father’s sentence. “Jesus fuck!”
None of the Feds answered.
~oOo~
He had demanded his lawyer immediately and then sealed his mouth shut. No one even bothered with the pretense of interrogation. But they didn’t put him in a cell, not at first. They left him sitting on a metal chair, chained hand and foot to a metal desk, in a bare room, for hours. Trick had a great deal of experience in remaining still for hours, however. So he sat and stayed in soldier mode. He focused on analyzing and understanding the situation.
No one had spoken to him at all, except to make demands about where to go and what to do. He had not been charged; nothing more at all had been said about why he was here. They’d said they had questions about last August, but none had been asked. Since they had not begun any interrogation, they had not read him his rights.
But Trick suspected that Miranda did not apply to him.
His only experience in a situation like this had been after he’d beaten his CO, and that had not been remotely normal. So he had nothing to go on but the stories of his brothers.
And his reading. He read widely and deeply, and he had read a lot on American ‘justice’ and the penal system. As the hours ticked by and his body finally began to clamor against its stillness loudly enough that he couldn’t ignore it anymore, Trick understood that they were holding him as a suspected terrorist.
Which meant that he was entirely, completely, wholly fucked.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“They look like little boats!”
“You’re right, they do. Scoot, mija. Oven’s hot.” When Lucie had stepped far enough away, Juliana opened the oven door and slid in the tray of stuffed eggplant. “Okay, I need to do chopping for salad, so you need to leave the kitchen. You can set the table.”
“Okay.” Lucie went to the table and started laying out place settings from the stack of silverware and dishes Juliana had left out for her. “Three plates because we’re a family. One-two-three. Is Trick my step-papi like Nikki is my step-mami?”
Juliana stopped in the act of chopping scallions and turned to her daughter. She and Trick had been serious now for about two months, and he’d been staying overnight with them, almost every night, for a while. Lucie had accepted it without any comment at all. Until now.
“Well, Papi and Nikki are married. Trick and I aren’t married.”
“Why not? He sleeps with you in bed like Nikki sleeps with Papi.” She folded a napkin into a triangle and set it next to a plate. “And he loves us and we love him.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“I want to marry him.”
How did one explain love and relationships to a five-year-old? “If we got married, it would be me who marries him, Lulu. Little girls don’t get married.”
“Why not? I live here, too.”
“Marriage is a grownup thing. Marriage love is a little bit different from family love.”
“Because married people hug naked?”
Oh good lord. Juliana’s heart skipped weakly as she tried to give an answer. “That’s one thing married people do, yes. But that isn’t what marriage is.”
“Nikki said being married means loving somebody and wanting to be with them forever. Is that why you didn’t marry Papi, because you didn’t want to be with him forever?”
Juliana focused on chopping for a few seconds while she tried to get some thoughts in order. “You’re full of questions tonight, mija.”
Arranging the silverware neatly at the last place, Lucie nodded. “Yes. I’m curious and asking questions is how we learn.”
Before she could formulate a response, the gate console buzzed. Juliana set the knife on the cutting board and pushed the board to the back of the counter, then went to the console and answered. “Yes?”
There was no one she expected, so she expected it to be Mark, causing some new kind of trouble. He’d been civil and under control for the past few weeks, and she’d just started to believe that Trick had, in fact, handled her problem.
But it wasn’t Mark. Connor’s gruff voice came through the speaker. “Hey, it’s Connor. Buzz me in.”
Connor worked at the shop with Trick. If he was here and Trick was not, something had happened to Trick. The subtly sick worry in her belly bloomed into fear. “What’s wrong?”
“Buzz me in, Juliana.” His tone brooked no refusal.
She did as she was told and then opened the front door and stepped onto the walkway. Lucie tried to come with her, but she pushed her daughter back. “No, mija.”
“But, Mami!”
“No! Stay inside!”
Her eyes flared at Juliana’s sharp tone, but she stepped back into the apartment.
Connor, Demon, and Sherlock, the Horde other than Trick that she knew best, all headed to her, with Connor in the lead. As they neared her, she asked again, “What’s wrong? Is he hurt?”
Taking her elbow in his huge hand, Connor said, “Let’s go inside.”
He had her so firmly that she didn’t have a choice, so they went inside.
“Hi, Connor!” Lucie grinned and trotted up to him. He crouched down to her level.
“Hey, Lucie-goose. Can you do me a great big favor and go play in your room for a few minutes?”
“Okay, do you have to do grownup talk?”
“Yes, we do. Just a little bit.”
“Okay, but dinner’s almost ready, so don’t take too long. It’s stuffed eggplant and salad. If you ask Mami, maybe everybody can stay and we can have a party, but we can’t eat until Trick gets home.” With that, she turned and went to her room.
Juliana had stood quietly through that, her arms wrapped around her body. “He’s hurt,” she said, when Lucie was in her room.
“No. He was arrested.”
Her knees weakened with relief at first. Arrested was much better than hurt or dead. “Why?” She laughed bitterly and waved her hand. “Never mind. You won’t tell me.”
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