by Dez Burke
My fingers knotted in the short hair. I had a moment’s regret that I had cut it before I had the chance to see those long red tresses spilling around my stomach as she teased my aching cock with her sweet lips. But then I remembered why I had to cut it.
To protect her.
My chest tightened at the idea of losing her, of how that scumbag prospect had gotten the jump on me at the last hotel. I kissed her again, my chest relaxing when her tongue slipped past my lips to lick at the edge of my teeth. The little gesture made me want to sink into her, slow fucking her until she melted in another puddle of satisfaction.
Breaking the kiss, I looked at the cheap clock on the scarred nightstand next to the bed. We’d stayed up late, slept late and now only thirty minutes remained until checkout. That wasn’t nearly enough time to do everything I wanted to do to Avery’s sweetly yielding flesh.
I rolled to my side, smiling at her whimpered protest. Damn, after so many years fantasizing about her, it felt amazing to know she wanted me just as badly as I wanted her.
“Patience, baby girl.” I reached for my jeans and sat up. “Just going to zip down to the front desk and buy us a little more time. You think they have breakfast set up?”
Avery snorted. “The room doesn’t even have a phone.”
Her nails gently scratched along the side of my stomach, my gut clenching as she hit a ticklish spot. She was different from the other women I’d been with in every way. The nails were her own and unpainted, her touch unpracticed but captivating. I wanted her to touch me, wanted to be gentle beneath her fingers and lips. I never wanted to rush exploring her or being explored by her.
I slid my t-shirt over my head then bent down for a parting kiss. The way she submitted, her skin glowing and blue eyes luminous, I wanted to crawl back under the covers.
Breaking the kiss, I growled. Standing, I slid my knife into my back pocket then checked the gun on the nightstand. “Safety is on, baby. You remember what I showed you?”
“Yes.”
She answered with a whisper. She didn’t like the gun, but we were only two days out of Thunder Valley. Virginia had its own chapter of Gypsies, although I’d stayed west of Richmond to reduce the chance we’d run into anyone who would recognize me. Then there was the sketchy nature of the little fleabag hotel we had checked into for the night to worry about.
“I’ll just be a few minutes, baby,” I promised, stealing another kiss before I had to leave.
Avery
They caught me in the bathroom as I pulled my panties up and turned to flush the toilet. Two men that I wouldn’t have guessed were law enforcement, but they had badges.
And guns...
The bathroom door splintered inward. My high-pitched scream cut through both men shouting, “DEA! Get down on the floor!”
They didn’t give me time to comply. One yanked my arm, tossing me stomach first onto the bed and twisting the limb behind me. He held me down while the other, bald and with a beard that looked like it belonged on an outlaw and not a cop, quickly searched the room. When he turned to pick up my backpack, I saw the gun that Callan had left on the nightstand tucked into the back of his pants.
Baldie unzipped my bag, reached in and pulled out the brick of hundreds Callan had taken from the Gypsy clubhouse. Bringing it close to his face, he drew a deep breath and let out a whoop.
“I fucking love the smell of money!”
His partner, holding me down, drew a similarly deep breath, only he had his nose pressed against my hair. His hands worked between us to cuff my wrists and then he slid down my body. Another hard inhalation and he groaned.
“How much you want to bet that little shit has been fucking this bitch all night?”
They didn’t look like cops, didn’t sound like them either.
“Where’s Callan?” Fear squeezed at my throat, the words little more than a croaking sound, but Baldie understood me anyway.
“Bleeding and cuffed in our car, sugar.” He nodded at his partner, who had both hands on my ass, his head still distressingly close to my body. “Get some pants on her.”
“Not yet,” the other answered as Baldie grabbed mine and Callan’s jackets and my shoes. “We have plenty of time.”
Baldie dropped my backpack and the other items he’d picked up. Another bolt of fear shot through me like lightning. These men, DEA agents or not, were going to rape me.
Surprising me, Baldie pulled his gun out, chambered a round and pointed it at the man behind me. “You really think Little Red is going to be happy to find out you had your dick in her?”
I pressed my face to the mattress, a sob breaking from my chest as I saw my future ahead of me. Little Red, maybe the whole damn club, using my body and Callan beaten and probably dead before they finished with me.
Baldie laughed. “That’s right, sugar. You might want to rest up on the ride back to Florida. You’re about to become a very busy whore.”
Not trusting me with his partner, Baldie tossed my bag at the man. “Bring the car up to the door.”
When we were alone, he came around the bed to stand behind me. I felt the barrel of his gun push my panties to one side and then its cold tip slid between my labia.
“Look at me, bitch.”
I did.
Nothing lived in his dark gaze as he warned me. “I’m getting your pants on and gagging you. Do anything to attract attention and you’re gonna spend a long time dying. Understand?”
I nodded. He returned the nod then brought the gun to his lips. My stomach lurched as his tongue darted out to lick my juices from the metal.
“I sure hope Little Red leaves some for me, sugar.”
**********
Baldie hauled me out of the hotel room in a surreal version of a perp walk, handcuffed with my jacket over my head so anyone watching wouldn’t see the cloth he’d shoved into my mouth to prevent me from screaming. I was roughly shoved inside the car. The door slammed shut behind me then I heard the front passenger door shut. The vehicle accelerated, tires squealing as we left the hotel parking lot.
Baldie reached into the back seat and pulled the jacket from my head. He had to pry my face in his direction to remove the gag as I searched for Callan. With the gag out, I jerked my head back and looked to my left.
“He’s quite a fighter,” Baldie chuckled. “Usually you slam a gun into a man’s face, you just have to do it once and he’s out.”
I could see by the blood and swelling that they had hit Callan several times. I worried over the fact he remained unconscious. Had the blows been too many? Too hard?
“Hey, how many times did you hit the fucker?” Baldie asked as he lightly slapped his partner’s arm with the back of his hand. “I think it was three from me. He sure as hell didn’t expect that first one.”
“Twice,” the driver answered, a nostalgic smile lifting the side of his face that I could see. “That’s when the desk clerk started screaming because I broke his nose and it got really bloody.”
I eased a foot in Callan’s direction and brushed it lightly against his leg to see if there was any response. Nothing. He was out cold, only the clogged breathing and shallow lift of his chest letting me know he lived.
Trying not to cry, I looked out the tinted windows of the car. Callan and I had traveled side roads into town and it looked like we were being returned to Thunder Valley the same way. Maybe if I got them talking, I could figure something out that didn’t end with Callan and me dead.
“Are you really DEA?” I asked.
“Five more years and I’ll be collecting a federal pension, sugar.” Baldie turned in his seat to look at me. He jabbed a thumb in the driver’s direction. “Sprankle, here, he’s got ten to go but I don’t think he’s gonna make it after I’m gone. Too sloppy.”
“Don’t fucking use my name,” Sprankle growled. “Talk about motherfucking, sloppy assed...”
Baldie pulled a face, his eyes rolling to one side as he opened his mouth wide. When he finished mocking his pa
rtner’s reaction, he jerked his head in my direction. “Sugar here is as good as dead. Except Little Red wants to fuck her first.”
Sprankle snorted. “That dick better share. Bringing him back this bitch, over a hundred grand of his money and lover boy.”
Next to me, Callan began to stir. Baldie spotted the movement and reached into the back seat to slap at Callan’s knee. “Speaking of lover boy, looks like he’s finally coming around.”
Sprankle tensed and shot a glance in the rearview mirror. “We need to stop and shove his ass in the trunk. If we hadn’t blitzed him like we did—”
“Don’t be a pussy. He’s cuffed and Big Red wants him alive,” Baldie said. “Old man is scared shitless the kid figured things out and has evidence to back it up.”
He stopped talking long enough to crack his knuckles. “Going to be an interesting interrogation.”
“We can put one of the seats down,” Sprankle argued. “Asshole won’t overheat or die from fumes, but he’ll be out of sight. Windows aren’t so dark they’ll keep someone from seeing his fucked up face.”
Next to me, Callan started coughing. He leaned forward, spitting blood on the floor. His shoulder twitched and it took me a second to realize he was trying to hide his hands. I saw the knife he had used to pry the lightning bolts off his bike. The blade was closed. It would make an audible click when it opened and even more noise if he planned on trying to break the lock on his handcuffs.
I leaned toward the center of the front seat, both shielding him from their view and trying to serve as a distraction.
“Big Red is lying about why he wants Callan brought back alive.” It was a bluff, and I didn’t think it would work to get them to turn the car around, but if Callan was going to get his handcuffs off, I had to do something to divert their attention. “He wants the know where the rest of the cash is.”
The car swerved as Sprankle stopped staring at the road long enough to shoot me a hard glance. “What cash?”
I nodded at my backpack on the front passenger floor. “Nine more bricks, just like that.”
“Bitch is bluffing.” Baldie twisted in his seat to grab me by the hair. “If Red was missing another nine-hundred-k, he would have had us sit outside the little shit’s hotel until he could claim him on his own.”
He flung me back against the seat. “Like that stupid fuck would ever have that much cash anyway.”
I risked a glance at Callan but he seemed to have collapsed into the corner. Neither man paid attention to him.
Sprankle still wanted to talk about the money. “What if she’s telling the truth?”
“Then we get a bigger cut, but, I’m telling you,” Baldie growled. “The bitch is lying.”
“Listen,” Sprankle argued. “We need to pull over, shove his dumb ass in the trunk. Then we can work her over a little, find out if she’s trying to play us.”
He lifted his hands from the steering wheel for a second before slamming them back down. “C’mon, we’re talking about a million fucking dollars!”
I let out a shaky breath, my attention half on the argument taking place in the front seat and half on Callan. The way he was breathing scared me. Deep raspy sounds mixed with clogged, sputtering coughs came from him. His eyes had rolled up into his head. His shoulders shook.
“Fuck me if he’s going to last that long,” Baldie said, staring at Callan. “There’s a turnout coming up, you better pull over.”
A sound came out of Callan that made me think of a death rattle. A sob broke from me in response and Baldie screamed at Sprankle to pull into the turnout.
“Not time for you to die, chief,” Baldie said, his hand on the door handle as the car rolled to a stop. “Not yet.”
Intent on getting out of the car, he wasn’t looking at Callan. Neither was Sprankle. Callan lunged forward, each hand shooting in a different direction. He wrapped his left arm around the headrest and Sprankle’s throat as his right hand buried the blade of the knife in Baldie’s throat. He pulled it out, buried it a second time, arterial blood squirting from the first wound.
The seatbelt restraining him, Sprankle tried to unholster his gun. Callan jabbed the knife in Sprankle’s right eye. Sprankle’s jaw went slack and he stopped struggling, stopped moving at all.
Bile erupted in my mouth, not from the dead or dying cops in the front seat but as I saw what Callan had done to get one hand uncuffed. He had cut along his thumb, down near his wrist. The blood had served as a lubricant and the severed tendons had made slipping out of the cuff easier.
The weird breathing, the shoulder shaking—it had all been part of mutilating his hand to give us a chance at escape.
One handed, he stripped the guns from the men’s holsters, tossed one in the backseat and kept the other as he exited the car. I scooted across the bench seat, following him out of the vehicle.
“Who cuffed you?” he barked.
“The driver.”
Callan rifled through the dead man’s pockets until he came up with the handcuff key. I turned my back to him, wincing in sympathy as he fumbled to unlock it. With my hands free, he directed me to the other side of the car as he wrapped his arms around Sprankle’s body.
“We need to dump these...” Seeing how I hesitated, he stopped. “Baby? Are you with me?”
I nodded and opened the passenger side door. We looked at each other over the dead men.
“They would have let Big Red kill us—”
“I know,” I interrupted. He didn’t have to justify killing them, not to me. “Let’s get them into the woods before someone else decides—”
Half out of the car with Baldie’s body, I jerked my head up at a faint whirring sound that was growing louder.
“Chopper.” I heard the air leave Callan for a second, then he shook off whatever feeling had gripped him. “Nothing to do with us. Just shove him back in and we’ll wait until they pass over.”
He stuffed Sprankle’s body behind the wheel and shut the door. Staggering as he walked, he rounded the vehicle to help me with the heavier body I wrestled with. Looking at his hand, I didn’t know how Callan remained on his feet. I wanted to faint and it wasn’t my blood or severed tendons.
The whirring turned into the swooping sound of a giant mechanical bird. We both looked up, any hope that the helicopter was just flying over vanishing as it came into view. Dark blue, it had ATF stamped in big block letters on its tail. The side door was open, two men in tactical gear each holding a rifle aimed in our direction.
“Out of the frying pan,” Callan started. His right hand grabbed my elbow and I had a moment’s impression that he planned on our bolting into the woods behind us.
“I need time to figure a way out of this—”
I laughed, the sound bordering on hysterical. “You need a doctor.”
Without the helicopter hovering over us and the rifles targeting our heads, we might have made it back on the road. But Callan couldn’t see out of one eye. The cuts on his face had reopened from the exertion and I knew his head had to feel like a cherry bomb had exploded inside his skull.
The last chance to break for the woods was cut off as a van swept into the turnout, its tires screeching as it came to a stop. The side door flew open and bodies poured out, all of them screaming for us to put our hands on the car’s roof.
They threw Callan to the ground. I heard his grunt of pain, but he didn’t say anything, not even when they wrenched his left hand behind his back.
“What the fuck?”
I stared at the ATF agent trying to cuff Callan.
“I’m gonna need cable ties,” he shouted. “He’s about to lose his thumb.”
Fresh bile coated my taste buds. The tears I’d been holding back started rolling down my cheeks. Through my blurred vision, I saw another vehicle pull to a stop behind the van. A woman, somewhere in her early fifties, exited from the front passenger seat. All the agents from the van stopped talking to watch her walk around Sprankle’s car.
“Both dea
d?” she asked the agent who had opened Sprankle’s door.
He nodded and showed her the blade Callan had used to kill the men.
She smiled, the gesture sending a chill down my spine. This woman wasn’t someone’s grandmother who spent her Sundays baking cookies, even if she did. Seeing the quiet satisfaction on her face as she looked over the dead DEA agents, I wasn’t sure whether we had escaped one set of dirty cops just to get grabbed by a bigger group of them.
The woman straightened and turned to us. Her gaze swept coldly over me before she looked at Callan. “Get him a doctor. No pain meds. I need him lucid when I talk to him.”
She stepped over Callan, then gestured for the other agents to load us into the van.
“We’ll use the local sheriff’s office,” she said, returning to her car like she was leaving last night’s garbage on the side of the road. “Have the doctor meet us there.”
**********
A little over two hours later, I was yanked from the jail cell the ATF had parked me in to a room some ten feet by ten feet. There was a cheap conference table in the middle and bolts on the floor with chains attached to them. The agent retrieving me shoved me into a plastic chair and secured one of the chains to my cuffs.
By that time, I knew the lead agent’s name was Gloria McCready and she was as cold a bitch as they came. She had stood outside my cell telling me about the drug and accessory to murder charges she was having drawn up against me.
I hadn’t yet invoked my right to an attorney, but I didn’t take the bait of her threats. She was too much like the useless counselors back in school, always trying to scold and threaten me into more regular attendance and completed homework when they didn’t have a fucking clue what the real facts were.
Same gray hair, same polyester skirt suit in dark colors with their low-heel dress shoes. Same holier-than-thou attitude.
I waited, chained in place, for about fifteen minutes before McCready entered. She carried a thick file and had some new guy in a suit trailing after her like a puppy. He waited for her to sit, but she slammed the file down and started pacing the floor.