Her voice was hard as glass, “This is between me and that saddle whore.” Bear held her back, but the look on his face suggested that he might let her go at any second. Jess wondered why Bear had been so quick to take her side.
Ryder spoke quietly, “Seems like you might explain about the one person I see conspicuously absent from in this room right now, Mary Ann.”
Quiet dropped over the noisy room like a sheet, like when someone says something perfectly wrong. The whole bar heard the door click and the clunk of Mace’s boots as he stepped in from the back.
An understanding passed from Ryder’s eyes to Bear’s, and the club noticed it. In the clink of a glass the atmosphere was back to normal, or it at least felt and sounded normal.
The moment of tension had been so brief that when it passed it was like it had never happened. Mace showed no sign of having detected it as he returned to his place by the bar. He sounded perfectly relaxed when he told Gyro, “This beer got warm, bro. Bring me another.”
Chapter 17
Ryder led Jess to his room. She was still sore and breathing hard. Jess expected a pit with piles of stale pizza and staler underwear, and she was surprised. The room was sparse, neat and clean. The table and dresser were dark wood, old but in good shape. The bed was a wide double with a red wool throw. The couch and chair were simple and leather.
Here was where she had wanted to be. The room itself was a whole lot of pleasant surprise. But now? She wasn’t sure. Her feelings still swung as if they hung on a rope. Jess sat on the side of the bed. Ryder leaned over her and his concern showed as he looked into her eyes. She looked back up, searching. “Are you okay?” he asked her. She bit her bottom lip.
“I have to do a thing later on, but you can stay in here if you’d like.”
She touched his face, getting a thrill as her fingers dragged over his hard, bristly skin. Did he really care about her? He could be so hard to read.
He said, “You don’t have to go back into the clubhouse yet.”
Her cheeks prickled hot, “I’m not afraid of Mary Ann,” she said, “I can go back and finish that any time.” He looked at her anew. She said, “I’d just rather be with you.”
The fight had her blood racing, and it was racing still. She saw how Mary Ann was tough, and she was mean, too, but Jess was sure that she was stronger and faster.
He said, “Mary Ann was doing something for Bear. And for me.” She hated hearing that bitch’s name on his lips. She wanted to slap him. She hated even more learning that Ryder was involved in any kind of a scheme with her.
When her face flushed and he saw it, that amused little-boy grin started to play at the corners of his mouth. Now she couldn’t help herself. Her open hand struck across his face. Four red marks faded quickly up and slowly down on his cheek like a traffic light.
He held her tight by her wrist. “Should I tie you down?” Her eyes blazed as she struggled but he pressed towards her. His size and strength overwhelmed her. She resisted as he pushed her down. His eyes flashed.
She saw the light of amusement in his face and her teeth bared. Her other hand shot up to slap him but he caught her arm. Now he held both of her wrists. She shook and glared in his face.
His knee was between her thighs. She slung her legs up and wrapped them around his waist. A mischievous smile lit his eyes. In fury she jerked her legs, crossed them behind his back and dug him with her heels.
His voice was slow, “I wonder if I shouldn’t turn you over and spank you. Should I? Fighting in the playground… tsk, tsk…” She lunged at him with her teeth, but he held her wrists too tight and she snapped at the air in front of his nose.
He said, “Wish I’d known you got this way when you get mad.”
“Why,” her voice was deep and rasping, “So you could have steered clearer? So you could have spent your time with that little whore?”
“No,” he was quiet. Firm. “I would have made you mad sooner. You're sexy as hell like this.”
She squeezed her legs around him and kicked back with her heels. She struggled with her arms against him with all of her strength, and her fingers clawed the air.
“Look, I really want to hold you down until you get too tired to fight,” he said, his grin growing as he watched her body buck against him. She hung by her legs off his waist, held down by her wrists. She struggled with all the strength she had and the more amused he looked, the hotter her anger grew.
Her eyes were wide and her mouth was open. Her lips tensed and curled. His lip twitched as he watched her. His mouth seized upon hers.
He pinned her to the bed and his lips possessed hers. Her arms shook against his grip and her legs thrashed along his hard torso. She squeezed with her thighs as his denim scraped her wet panties.
His hands took her face, held her and squeezed her cheeks as his tongue invaded her. The weight of his body pressed her down. His hips pushed against the heat between her thighs. She felt the hard swelling inside his pants rasp through the hot, flimsy fabric against her soaking petals.
Her free hand grabbed his hair, pulled to get him off. A voice in her head told her she must resist. All of her body clenched and ached. Resist, resist, fight back. She tugged on his hair. It did nothing. Fight, the harder the better. He pressed harder against her, into her. Struggle, as long as he wins.
Shocks of unchained sensation made her back arch and strain while her treacherous legs pulled him hard to her opening wet need. Her swollen folds rubbed, pressed to reach his hot stiffening ram. She tried to bite his lips.
He gripped a fistful of her hair and yanked her head back. Her eyes were wild and her tongue flicked around her reddening lips. As soon as his other hand let go of her arm, she beat on his back with the side of her fist.
He opened his jeans. She felt the heat of his hard flesh. The heavy girth of his fat rod flattened her weeping petals and the base of her zinging buried trigger. Her hands clawed his shirt. The hot skin behind the dark, downy fuzz at the base of his stomach pushed against her.
His hand slid up the bottom of her thigh. She squeezed and kicked. His face looked like he was considering a complicated ice cream, chocolate, and cake dessert, and couldn’t decide where to start. She slapped him. It had little impact. She had no room to swing. She did it again.
Her panties made a raw sound as he tore them in one move. The cool air shocked her. His hot flesh pulsed against her wet pussy. She slid her hips as tight as she could against him and dragged her lips along his length. Her breath caught in a gasp. She found the end. She had the slick, hard head of him.
His musky scent filled her nostrils. She gripped his hair. Her eyes blazed into his. His bulb was at the hot pulsing mouth of her dripping wet sex. Through her gritted teeth she snarled, “Fuck me, you bastard. Fuck me.”
He held her still. The corners of his eyes crinkled. “Oh,” he said slowly, “you want to be fucked, do you?” She yanked on his hair and squeezed her pussy against his cock. “You want me to fuck you, little girl?”
She beat her fists on his back and his head. He lifted her by her back and flipped her over like a steak on a griddle. “You should have said.” Her face and arms were on the bed, her ass raised high in the air. He stood behind her. He slapped her ass cheeks. She convulsed and shouted. He grabbed her hips and his cock was at the clenching lips of her pussy again.
A roaring moan ripped out of her throat as he rammed into her. His hard, ridged weapon stretched her. Her juices slathered over the length of him as her soft walls closed around him. She buried her face in the red wool throw. He grabbed her hair and pulled her head up.
He wanted to see her. He wanted to watch her sob and moan as he slammed his cock into her. He wanted to make her walls all fall like sandcastles in a tide. He wanted to make her beg.
“Fuck me! Fuck me!” Her voice was hoarse and as sore as her aching clit. Her back arched and her toes curled tight. Her fingers groped blindly at the woolen throw.
A dam broke inside her, and pools,
rivers, seas of ancient emotion crashed over her. Starbursts of previously unreleased emotion washed through her.
His cock stretched her, filling her to perfection. It heated and charged her. It pulsed and swelled in her as she yelled his name. He blasted bolts of hot juice into herwide-open core. She bit her arm and her eyes screwed tight as she came with him.
Chapter 18
In the quiet desert dusk, Bear, Ryder, and the handpicked crew crouched while darkness stretched over the unearthly dustbowl of Sulfur Lake, flattening everything in a pale blue wash. The bikers waited, hunched by their cycles in a wide, shallow trench to watch the far horizon. If Ryder had calculated right, they and their bikes should be just about impossible to see from the direction he expected the Skulls would be coming.
A faraway rumble grew and a sweep of bike headlamps came up in a cloud of dust over the distant ridge. A black van rocked along in the middle of the group.
Bear kept his voice low. “Why do they need a dozen riders to protect something that they’re bringing to hand over?”
Ryder said, “They don’t. Those riders aren’t for protection. Watch. They’ll probably fan out wide quite soon.”
They did. Bear frowned. “What the hell are they doing?”
“They’re the floorshow. They’re to entertain us, and to keep us looking that way.”
“But we are looking that way.”
“We are.”
The riders made a long line, and spread out on either side of the van. They then drew slowly across the deserted plain to the point Ryder had given them. The Blades watched as the beams from the bike headlamps made crisscrosses over the pale brown desert and the Skulls clustered around the van.
Ryder held the throwaway cellphone in his hand. In five minutes or less, it should get a text message from another burner in the middle of town.
The van stopped by a bare tree at the designated location, and the outriders all leaned their bikes, looking around as they climbed off.
Ryder said, “If all’s well, the message will say, ‘Johnny,” for ‘good,’ ‘Michael’ for ‘bad,’ or ‘Levon’ for ‘wait’.”
Bear asked him, “And if all is not well?”
“It’ll say ‘Seeger,’ or, worst of all, no message.”
“‘Seeger’?”
“Means, ‘Get out of Denver’.”
Four minutes later, the burner vibrated and Ryder read the message. He nodded to Bear and the other Blades. Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B Goode’ blasted from his bike’s stereo and Ryder led the Blades to surround the Skulls.
Haughey stood by the side of the van. He and the other Skulls had confused, uncertain looks on their faces as they furtively scanned the far, empty distance behind Ryder and the Blades.
Ryder dismounted and walked slowly towards Haughey and the black van. Ryder put out his upturned hand. “Keys, bro.”
“Change of plan, bro,” Haughey said, but there was a catch in his voice. “We’ll keep the van.” Ryder squinted into Haughey’s eyes. The Skulls all drew weapons. The Blades pulled out their hardware. The two gangs eyed each other along the sights of their handguns.
Ryder said, “We have a deal, Haughey.”
“Wasn’t much in the deal for the Skulls, Ryder.”
“It was what you asked for. And you came to us.”
“Things change, Ryder.” All around Haughey the Skulls firmed their grips on their weapons. The Skulls were surrounded, facing out. The Blades’ position was much stronger, with their weapons pointed in at the Skulls from a wide arc. But the Skulls outnumbered them three to two.
Then they froze as Ryder raised his left arm, two fingers aloft.
The sides of Haughey’s hair whipped as two high velocity bullets cracked into the van’s side, one each side of his head, just inches from his ears.
The Blades didn’t move. Ryder didn’t move, but he spoke slowly and deliberately. “Anyone see where those shells came from?” The Skulls looked about frantically. Haughey’s face was red.
Ryder approached Haughey, his right hand still out, waiting. “No, I think Plan A should still work, Haughey. You can’t tell how many snipers are out there, can you? This part of the game is over.”
Deliberately, the Blades all drew weapons. The Skulls knew their choices. With snipers against them, out of sight and out of range, their chances of winning any kind of a fight were close to zero. They all looked to Haughey, but their shoulders were round, slumped and deflated.
Ryder pushed his face close to Haughey’s. “As you say, change of plan. Bro.”
Chapter 19
The Blades took the van, with the cargo, to a warehouse. Ryder went downtown to a bar and met up with Hammer and Scot, a couple of old buddies from the service. “You were right,” Hammer told him. “There was a party sneaking in behind you. You were right again when you said, ‘balaclavas, hoodies and no patches.’ They were not bikers.”
“I knew it.” Ryder raised a glass to Hammer. “Good shooting, by the way. I assume that was you.” Hammer smiled a modest acknowledgement.
Scot said, “We waited about three-quarters of a mile back from you, and three vehicles slid along behind your backs, just as you expected.”
“FBI?” Ryder asked him.
“Two cars of FBI, one ATF.”
“Where are they now?”
“The agents and officers are all trussed up with cable-ties, and they’re right where we found them. We went in behind them and they all failed the test.”
“Which test?”
“The ‘does this smell like chloroform’ test.”
Hammer said, “They’ll have to fish their cars out of the quarry back there.”
Ryder asked, “And their IDs?”
“We took pictures. Seem to have lost all of their wallets somehow.”
“None of them saw you?”
“Nope, and not their dashcams neither.”
“You’re sure?”
“We came up low from behind. The cameras point forward. They couldn’t have seen us.”
Ryder raised his glass again. “Good work.”
Scot checked his watch and said, “A concerned citizen should be making a call about now from the center of town on an untraceable phone. He’ll be letting the Highway Patrol know that there’s six guys in suits out on the flats, wriggling around and making like long, black fishes. Another shot, Ryder?”
“Thanks, bro, but I’m good. Something I need to take care of.”
Chapter 20
When he got back to the clubhouse, Ryder stopped in at the office. He told John Reader his theory. “The Feds, along with ATF, set the Skulls up. Maybe for a deal over Iron and Jam, who knows.”
He stretched his legs out as he reached for his whiskey. His thighs were a little stiff. “Skulls were supposed to hand their weapons stash to us, then the Feds were going to pick us up for taking it.” John Reader’s eyebrow rose slightly.
“Could be,” John Reader said. He probably had that figured out from the start, although, Ryder thought, with John there’s no way you would ever know.
Ryder looked into the distance. “Skulls turned rat. Well, Haughey and Mace did, at any rate.”
John Reader said, “That’s for later. Meanwhile, we got us a truckload of military grade hardware.”
Ryder said, “You think this could have been Haughey’s play for Iron’s patch? Seeing himself more permanently at the top of the Skulls council table?”
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