“That’s one of my skills. It will cost you though.”
“That isn’t a problem. How will you go about it?”
“We do everything from seeing if we can track the GPS in her cell phone to reaching to contacts in the highway patrol, customs and immigration at the borders…. Does she have any family or friends she might go to?”
“Her mother is dead. No one else, no friends.”
Jack sized him up. Guys like Montrose didn’t lay things out for you. Expected you to read their fucking minds, so you had to tease information out of them, find out what they really wanted. “And just so I’m clear on my instructions… you want me to find her, but do you want her brought back to you alive?”
Montrose laughed. “Not brought back. I want you to find her and take her to someplace secure. Then call me. I’ll come to you. I want to arrive and find her alive and healthy enough to be terrified of what will happen to her next.”
“And if I’m right about her getting help?”
“What about them?”
“If she has a boyfriend or a hired hand, do you want him dead?”
“You know… You talked about cutting off the driver’s balls. I really like the idea.” He laughed. “It would be great to make her watch you do that and then make her eat them while he’s still alive. That way she’ll know it’s on her. I’d like to see that. Yeah, capture both of them so I can watch that. I’ll pay extra for that show. Maybe I’ll even video it.”
Jack almost smiled. The way the job was shaping up he didn’t care much about the extra money but it was a good idea to negotiate for more—get the client buying in. “Done. So I’ll get on it.”
“What about the driver?”
Jack shrugged. There was still some pleasure to be had there, but he didn’t really have time if he was going to catch up with the girl.
“He’s not much use to me now. The fucking idiot let the bitch con him.”
Jack tilted his head toward Montrose’s muscle. “Having your boy kill him, what’s left of him, would send a message.”
He watched the man’s eyes light up. “That’s a good idea. Paul, go wake the bastard up, explain things to him and then blow his brains out. Take a video for me.”
Jack watched him go to the door. The muscle wasn’t thrilled with killing a coworker, but saying no wasn’t an option. That pleased Jack too. He didn’t really like just killing. Where was the joy in killing where there was no suffering?
“I’ll find the girl,” he said. He signaled to his own goon and the two of them headed toward the door. There was nothing left that would incriminate him even if Montrose’s people made a mess of things. Working for a guy like this you had to watch your back. The man was a fucking idiot.
For now, Jack had his assignment and his plan. He’d do his own alerts. He had the girl’s cell phone number and he’d paid a geek he knew to try and trace it. That might end up a dead end, but Montrose had paid half in advance and he’d start spreading money around. There were people who could find all sorts of information if the price was right.
This was turning into an interesting job. Montrose brought him a number of them, and while he appreciated the business, the opportunities to be paid to enjoy himself, he found himself looking forward to the day someone would pay him to do to Montrose. It would be an incredible high to do all the exciting things he had in mind for him. If someone wanted to pay him to take out this jerk then he’d do whichever of the goons were around for free. Just for practice.
When this was over, he just might track down some of the man’s enemies and sound them out on the idea.
CHAPTER FIVE
It isn’t a good idea to dwell on a past that’s overfilled with scary ghosts and unpleasant memories. It’s an even worse idea, really dumb in fact, to reminisce when you are riding a motorbike down the highway. Highway speeds require your attention and quick reaction times. When your brain mixes what-might-have-beens with strange, and at times erotic speculations of the future, you fall unnoticed into the seductive arms of the rhythms of the road. That makes you vulnerable. Awareness simply fades away, and if you’re tired to boot, it can happen so subtly you never notice. Ultimately you are daydreaming, flying on autopilot, and simply not paying attention.
The twisty two-lane blacktop road he’d chosen ran through the shadows of trees that made the light flicker hypnotically. Audra’s bare arms wrapped around his waist, the feel of her face pressed against his back, the steady rumble of the confident engine, lulled him into a comfort zone.
A few turns ahead he saw a white Chevy sedan coming toward them. As it approached, he noticed a ratty blue pickup truck following closely behind the Chevy, periodically poking its nose out to see if he could pass, as if the solid yellow line didn’t provide enough of a clue for the driver of the truck. As they approached, the truck pulled out right in front of Dirk and pulled alongside the Chevy, filling both lanes coming at them head on.
With nowhere to go, Dirk swerved hard to the right. “Hang on!” he screamed as the bike went off the road onto the rocky verge. As the cars swept by, his motorcycle bounced under him, across the rough edge of the road. Audra clung to him but they were both being jostled by huge bounces. Her head was banging into his back, and he felt her lose her grip. Keeping the motorcycle under control took both his hands, and he was unable to help her.
The front wheel hit a large rock and they bounced. He felt her hands slip from around his waist; she fell off the bike with a shout of alarm, her foot catching him in the back. The handlebars twisted violently in his hands. The steering, the suspension of a big road bike wasn’t made for going off road. It had been designed for paved roads, and it took all his strength to keep the bike from going down. Bouncing over the verge, it was slowing, but not fast enough.
Suddenly he saw a fallen tree lying across his path. Unable to avoid it, the front tire bounced over it, but the center of the bike hooked on it, stopping the forward movement and catapulting him over the handlebars.
He hit the ground and rolled, letting the roll absorb the shock. Then he got to his feet. Nothing broken. He went to the bike to shut it down. As he switched it off he saw Audra limping toward him, holding her arm. He shook off a bad feeling. This wasn’t a good start to the road trip. Dirk didn’t usually think much of omens and signs, but this didn’t seem good. It was like seeing dark clouds on the horizon—you knew trouble lie ahead, but not exactly where or what.
He stared down the now empty road. Part of him wanted to scream after the white car. He felt he should be shouting: “Fucking asshole,” into the dark and shaking his fist. That’s what regular people did. His temperament and training kept him still and the desire to indulge in that outburst died a quick death. He knew blowing up wouldn’t make him feel a bit better. Not at all.
At least Audra seemed to be intact. That pleased him on two levels—he hadn’t screwed up the job, and he didn’t want to see her hurt. Not on his watch, anyway.
* * * *
“I’ve called Wrench,” he told her, sounding extraordinarily calm as he examined her injuries. They were superficial. Painful, but nothing she worried about. “He and the other guys aren’t far back, and they’ll stop and get us, get the bike sorted out.”
She nodded.
“You were limping. How’s that leg?”
“Hurts a bit, but I think I just twisted it. I think it will be fine.”
He examined her arm. “You’ve lost some skin here.” He got out his first aid kit and cleaned the nasty scrape on her elbow. After he’d covered it with antiseptic cream and put a gauze bandage on it, he looked at her. “Anything else? Any other aches and pains?”
She held up her elbow and looked at it. “You call that road rash, right?”
He laughed. “Right. That’s your first badge of honor.”
“Then I was lucky.”
“It could’ve been a lot worse
.”
“Sure could.”
“You said you called Wrench. Who or what is that?”
“The club mechanic. You met him.”
An image popped into her head of a man of medium height, muscular, with big callused hands. “I remember him.” Dirk shot her a look of surprise. “I met him at the clubhouse, sort of. He was sitting at the bar with us when we talked about the job. At some point he said his name was Greg, so I forgot about the nickname.”
“Right.” After a moment he seemed to look pleased. “Did you just remember him for some reason, or do you remember other people too?”
“I have a good memory for faces. An excellent memory. Always have.”
He nodded. “That might be helpful on this trip.”
“How?”
“Spotting a tail.”
“You’ll need to explain.”
“I’m pretty sure we weren’t followed when we left town. Ordinarily I wouldn’t expect anyone to locate us, but with your husband’s money, if he’s half as wacko as you say, he’ll hire people who really know how to track people, who know all the tricks. We have no idea what resources he has and we don’t know what any of his people look like, so we need to be looking over our shoulders for anyone who shouldn’t be there. So if you see a familiar face, one of his goons, or just someone who shows up more than once as we travel, that could mean that we’ve picked up a tail. You see anyone like that, or even think you do, point the son-of-a-bitch out and we will inquire as to his intentions.”
That made sense. “Can Wrench fix the bike and get us back on the road? I hate the thought of losing our head start.”
“No problem. He is our one-man version of AAA. He’s as good with bikes as Scotty was with spacecraft on Star Trek.”
He was looking at her, watching her move. She decided he didn’t entirely believe her about having no other injuries. Well, she was sore. Her arm ached but she shook it off. “Is it serious?” she asked. He looked at her curiously. “The damage to the bike?”
He shook his head. “I don’t really know. The good thing about having a good friend who is a magical mechanic is that you don’t have to answer those questions; the bad thing about having a buddy like that is that you never bother to learn to answer them. So the truth is, I know enough not to ride the damn thing until it gets fixed, but I have no idea how serious a problem it is.”
“That fool ran us right off the road. What the hell was that about?”
He shrugged. “The way he was driving, I’d guess the bastard was drunk. If not, then either he didn’t see us or he did it on purpose.”
“What? How could he not see us? And why would he run us off the road? He didn’t even know us.”
“Now that you’ll be putting on some miles on a bike get used to the fact that some people can look right at a motorcycle and never see it at all. Same with bicycles. And then there is another bunch of drivers don’t like sharing the road with two wheelers of any kind. They think they own the road and we are just road kill.”
“Doesn’t that make you angry, furious?”
“Sure.”
“You look so calm.”
“Stomping around fuming wouldn’t do us much good. I’m pissed that the bike is damaged, but I can’t do much about it. And whatever the driver’s problem is, he’s long gone.”
“I think I’d be furious anyway.”
The fury was there, hidden from her as it should be. He would save it, nurture it. For now he was looking under the bike, noting the way oil was dripping down onto the ground. He looked at her. “The truth is that if he’d stopped and given me some shit I might’ve torn his head off. If he’d been angry, I probably would have exploded. I’m not a nice guy. I don’t take shit from people. But seeing as he’s gone and I’m not going to catch him, being angry would waste a lot of energy.” Looking at her face, he laughed. “I guess I’m disappointing you—the big, bad biker isn’t threatening to chase the schmuck to the end of the universe to beat the crap out of him.”
The idea that she was disappointed embarrassed her—he was right. She grinned. “Well, kind of. Yeah. You expect people from a different universe to do things like the stereotypes tell you they will. When they don’t it can be disorienting.” He seemed to enjoy the idea that he disoriented her. She did too.
She looked around. “He’s gotta be some distance away. Wrench, I mean. Do we just wait for him here until he shows up?”
“No. I called for a cab. We aren’t far from the place I intended to stop anyway. We’ll leave the bike here and head up the road to the next town and find a motel. Then I’ll call Wrench and tell him where to find the bike.” Then he grinned again. “I know it must be yet another big disappointment that I don’t have some alternate lifestyle solution to the situation and here I am just doing what any ordinary Joe would do—calling roadside assistance and all.”
She laughed. “Actually, I’m glad. I could use a meal, a shower, and some sleep. We can work on the biker mythology more when I feel up to it.”
* * * *
The taxi dropped them at a Greek restaurant where they ate a subdued dinner that they washed down with retsina. She was famished and wolfed her food. Dirk got a bottle of the wine to go, by slipping the waitress a bill, then they went outside. “The motel is close by,” he said. “Care for a stroll?”
As tired as she was, the walk was nice after a day of riding. Her elbow burned, but her leg was fine now and somehow, rather than being upset by the accident, she thought it just made the escape seem more doable.
The motel was a shabby place a few yards off the road. It was getting dark, and an odd assortment of people milled about in the courtyard, some stood in the doorways of rooms as if they were waiting for something. A man wearing dirty army fatigues, with long scraggly hair, swept the sidewalk in from of the rooms. A thin blonde, wearing a torn cotton dress and no shoes, stared at Dirk from the shadows just inside a room as if she knew him.
“A friend of yours?”
“Probably the friend of anyone willing to pay her price. Odds are she’s a meth whore,” Dirk said.
“Everybody has to be something,” she said, trying to sound more confident than she felt. Falling off the bike had unsettled her more than she wanted to admit and she felt a need to live up to Dirk’s nearly professional composure.
Dirk went to a window, marked ‘night window’ and paid the woman for a night in cash. No one asked for identification.
“I don’t imagine your old man will think to look for you in a place like this,” he said.
She laughed. “Probably not. He wouldn’t even come here himself.”
When they went to the room, the squalid nature of it didn’t surprise her, but she’d never been in a motel quite so trashy before, and she allowed herself to see it as a novelty. This escape had to be an adventure or what good was it.
Still, the room was something remarkable. An old television sat on a stand chained to the wall; the room smelled of marijuana. She allowed herself a sigh of relief to see that there were two beds. Dirk turned on the air conditioning unit, which roared to life, and she sat on the bed by the bathroom. “I’ll take this bed,” she said.
“Fine.” He sat on the other one and stretched out, putting his boots on the covers. She guessed his boots were probably cleaner than the covers.
“Is he really that much of a prick? Bad enough you have to run?”
She looked at him, seeing his hands tucked behind his head. “My husband?” Of course that was who he meant. “Absolutely.”
“All that money must make it easier to deal with though. I mean he’s an asshole and all, but living with him you have nice shit.”
She laughed, a choking laugh. “When you are locked in a room with no food, and not even allowed to go to the bathroom, you don’t care how much money you have.”
Dirk sat up. “He
did that to you?”
“A lot.”
“Why?”
“Various reasons, most of which never made sense. I thought I had done something to piss him off at first, but he’s a sadist. He says it’s to punish me for misbehaving, but then he does things that force me to upset him so he can punish me. So it’s simple. He enjoys making me suffer.” She stopped for a moment, remembering, never having had a chance to tell anyone before. “Once things went to shit, he grew more abusive, hitting me, raping me. I figured out that he liked it when I fought back. But then once he tore my clothes off and slapped me around, he couldn’t get it up. I made the mistake of sneering at him. Partly it was relief. He blew up and after he beat me, he decided to lock me in my room. He left me there for three days.” She shrugged. “Then he decided that was great fun. Bring home some girl or another, fuck her in front of me, then lock me in my room while they went out to dinner or whatever.”
“Shit. This happened a lot?”
“More and more.”
“So you finally decided to run.”
“First I decided to kill him.”
“Really?”
“I had the money I got secretly selling off things he gave me when he was in a good mood. I needed to do something. I heard about your club, your rep and I thought I might hire your gang to kill him.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I’m not entirely sure. I guess I thought that if I had him killed his evil would stick to me, like some kind of disease. I couldn’t stand the idea that I’d never be rid of him. That’s when the idea of just escaping came to mind. Your club, bikers… no one like Terrance pays them much attention.”
He scowled. “I suppose that’s right.”
“Trudy told me you are the club Enforcer.”
He looked over at her, and she saw him trying to read her face. “Yeah. That’s right.”
“You cut people? Is that why they call you Cutter?”
“Yeah. I’ve cut people.”
And he had. The streets he grew up in were dangerous and he’d learned that a knife was a great equalizer. He liked knives. They never misfired or ran out of ammunition. They did what you asked of them as long as you kept them sharp and the one he carried in his boot was always sharp.
CURSED - CHOSEN FEW MC ROMANCE: BOOK ONE Page 4