“Boss?” comes the voice of one of my men, but I’m focused on Mickey.
Mickey starts laughing as though I’ve just played right into his hand.
“That so? Well, sure, I won’t mind doing that, so long as you go tell those hardworking immigrants outside I’ve gotta fire them ‘cause the local gang doesn’t like anyone hiring outsiders.”
That pushes the wrong buttons for me. Faster than Mickey can get another word out, my hand flashes forward and snatches him by the collar, pulling him close as he gasps in surprise. Guess the old fart didn’t think we’d so much as touch him. I don’t even hear one of my men call my name again from near the door.
“Oh no, you sniveling little shit,” I snarl at him, “things are gonna change for them, too, but for the better. Not only are you going to keep them on, but you’re going to pay them a fair wage, too. Not a cent less than what you hired the other two employees at. Think you’re going to get away with cutting corners at poor workers’ expense? Fuck that. You’re about to become the most generous man in the neighborhood, Mickey.”
“And just what the fuck do you think you’re gonna do about it, you potato-eating good-for-nothing?”
His voice is unwavering, but with our face so close, I can see the glint of doubt in his eyes. He’s starting to doubt that the threat of the FBI will keep things from getting real, and fast. My fist clenched, and I open my mouth to retort.
“PREZ,” Eva shouts at me, and this time I turn to look at her just as the door to the liquor store swings open.
Standing there at the entrance of the store is Cherry, mouth agape as she pushes past my man posted at the door and looks me dead in the eye as my fist is raised toward Mickey.
6
Cherry
“What the hell is this?” I exclaim, looking around the liquor store with my mouth agape.
After hearing the motorcycles rumble by earlier, I couldn’t resist the urge to follow them. Even though I knew I should be cautious, something told me I needed to find out where they were going. I followed them in my rental car, keeping about a block behind just in case they decided to look back and recognize my Focus. I was confused when I saw them pull into the parking lot of the liquor store which has been here ever since I can remember.
Mickey’s is where my dad used to stop on the way home from a long day at work to pick up a six-pack for himself, and a soda for me. It has memories, but they’re all innocuous. So I had no idea what the biker gang could possibly want with the store, besides just buying alcohol to fuel whatever criminal activities they were getting into tonight.
At first, I sat in my car in the parking lot, biting my lip nervously, trying to talk myself into just driving back to my hotel and pretending none of today happened. But when all the biker guys disappeared into the store and stayed inside for longer than an average trip to the liquor store should take, that same sense of duty and fate urged me to look into it.
So here I am now, standing in the midst of what looks like some kind of shakedown. Various motorcycle guys and even a couple women I didn’t notice before are stationed throughout the little liquor store. In any other situation, their arrangement might just look like a bunch of people who just happen to be browsing the shelves at the same time. But with my heightened awareness of the tension in the air, it is apparent to me that they’re strategically spread out to cover the store.
And Leon is here, with his fist raised in a combative stance, looking like he’s just about to rip into some wiry, fifty-something guy in a shabby business suit. The guy looks vaguely familiar, and it dawns on me that I saw him around the store on the few occasions when my dad stopped off here and left me sitting in the truck. I think it’s Mickey, himself. The guy the store’s named after.
In the next few seconds, a million little things seem to happen in slow motion. The man I shoved past at the doorway comes up behind me, his footsteps heavy and quick. Leon has turned to look back at me, his green eyes going wide with alarm and confusion.
A woman’s voice somewhere to my left cries, “Watch out!”
And then my eyes flick back instinctively to Mickey, who has used Leon’s moment of distraction to quickly draw out something small, black, and shiny.
A gun.
“Don’t tell me how to run my damn business!” Mickey shouts, a wicked grin on his face as he lowers the gun to point toward Leon’s chest. My whole body goes hot and cold with fear. Instantaneously, several biker guys come barreling down the aisles of liquor, bottles shattering to the floor left and right. One of the guys closest to the showdown between Mickey and Leon dives for the store owner, his thick, tree-trunk arms wrapping around Mickey’s legs as the two of them fall to the floor in a heap.
On the way down, there’s a deafening crack as the gun goes off. I can feel the bullet whiz past me, and then there’s the sound of more glass breaking as the bullet goes through the window. The next sound I hear is the worst one yet: an agonized scream in a foreign language.
Someone’s been shot.
“You fucking mudak!” Leon bellows, kicking Mickey hard in the side as he lies crumpled on the ground, pinned under the bearded biker guy’s powerful arms.
“I’m sorry, Prez,” grunts the biker, shaking his head and looking up at Leon dolefully. “I didn’t know the gun was gonna go off. Chert voz’mi, I tried to stop him — ”
“Not your fault, Genn,” Leon replies, “Just keep him down.”
“Oh my God,” I murmur, turning around to see a woman in a leather jacket bolt out the entrance and kneel down beside a fallen guy outside. Through the shattered window I can make out the spread of scarlet blood pooling on the pavement.
“B-blood,” I mumble, just as my head starts to get fuzzy inside. I don’t do well with blood. Not at all. They make me lie down on a stretcher any time I have to give blood because I have a reputation for fainting. I start to feel that familiar, terrible wave of nausea and lightheadedness.
“Man down!” shouts the woman from outside, looking up through the hole in the window to give Leon a panicked expression.
“Where’s he hit?” asks a guy running past me.
“Left shoulder blade. Anya, we need you!” answers the woman. Another female biker comes bolting past, her cropped blonde ponytail bouncing. She nearly shoves me out of the way in her haste to get outside. She crouches down next to the guy on the ground and immediately rips his shirt to make a tourniquet from the thin material.
“Oh my… oh no,” I mumble, my vision going dark.
Some guy, possibly the huge bearded biker named Genn, calls out, “Uh oh, think we got a fainter there, Prez.”
I can feel my knees buckling beneath me but before I start to fall, a pair of muscular arms catch me around the chest and hold me up. “Already got one down, can’t afford another,” growls Leon in my ear, sending a shiver down my spine.
“What is going on?” I ask, my voice wavering and weak.
“I don’t know — you tell me,” he retorts, spinning me around slowly to face him. Once again, his hands are on my shoulders, bracing me. This is the second time in one day.
In my hazy brain, the only words I can manage are: “We gotta stop meeting like this.”
Leon sighs and pats my cheek, trying to break me out of my near-faint.
“Gotta get this guy back to church, immediately,” calls out a woman.
Leon looks past me to give her a nod. “Alright, do your best. Eva! Rod! Get our patient up off the ground and get him out of here so Anya can stitch him up. Everybody out! I’ll meet you back at church later, khorosho?”
“Got it, Prez.”
“Byet ostorozhen!”
With that, every single one of the bikers file out of the liquor store at once, except for Leon and the bearded, bear-like guy pinning Mickey to the floor. Leon looks back over his shoulder at the two of them, and the bearish guy speaks up.
“What should I do with him?”
“Stand him up, Genn. We’re gonna have a little b
usiness chat.”
“You think you got time for that?” spits Mickey as Genn swings him up onto his feet effortlessly. “Nosy neighbors ‘round this neighborhood must’ve called the cops by now. This gun, ya know, it’s small but it’s still awfully loud.”
“Yeah, and I bet you had the good sense to register it under your name legally, eh?” Leon says, turning back away from me to take an aggressive step toward Mickey, who shrinks back.
Mickey is silent.
“That’s what I thought. They’re gonna get here and see that gun and know exactly who shot it. You wanna go down for shooting an innocent man, Mr. Lamar?”
“Pfft!” the store owner snorts. “He’s an illegal. They’ll just toss his ass back over the border and be done with it. I’ll just tell ‘em he lunged at me or something. Self-defense is still a valid reason to fire in this country. And besides, who’re the cops gonna believe: me or some foreigner with no ID?”
Leon gives Genn just the slightest, subtlest nod. The bearlike guy pulls back and pummels Mickey in the gut, hard, causing him to gasp in pain and shock. With the wind knocked out of him so suddenly, he doubles over.
“Here’s what’s gonna happen,” Leon says, calmly and quietly. “You’re gonna hire back everyone you let go, including the innocent man you just wounded, once his shoulder’s all healed up. And speaking of which, you are also going to pay for every dime of his medical care until he’s even better off than when he first met your slimy ass.”
“Or what?” Mickey manages to choke out, though his arms are wrapped around his stomach like he’s trying not to wince.
“Well, we don’t exactly have a contract drawn up, but I think you’ll find that Genn here can be very convincing. I think he’s all the incentive you’ll need.”
Genn knees Mickey in the back and the store owner yelps in pain.
“Go to hell,” he groans viciously.
“Fine, we’ll throw in another benefit. We’ll get rid of the gun.”
“You mean you’ll confiscate it,” Mickey snaps.
“Look, do you really wanna have that gun in your hands when the cops show up? Illegal alien or not, it’s gonna look real incriminating already that a man you hired got shot on your property with your gun while you were on the premises. Don’t you think? And take in the fact that he’s not from around here — well, that jury is gonna take one look at your racist, good-for-nothing face and convict you before you can even take a breath, Mr. Lamar.”
“So why not let us take that smoking gun off your hands since you obviously don’t know how to handle it anyway?” Genn adds, looking to Leon for approval.
Mickey is fuming, shaking his head at the floor.
“Agreed?” Leon prompts, bending down to stare at Mickey, who’s all but kneeling on the floor in front of him by this point.
In response, Mickey simply drops the gun on the floor. Leon snatches it up and latches the safety back on before tucking it into his leather jacket. “Good choice. Nice doing business with you, Mr. Lamar.”
“Genn, get him into the back room and leave him there. Then get outta here while you still can,” Leon orders. “I’ve gotta talk to Miss LaBeau.”
At the sound of my name, I freeze up. How did he figure out who I am? Did he look me up? Was he watching me? Was he only pretending not to know me when he questioned me this morning? Then he looks back at me. As soon as those vivid mossy-green eyes land on me, my whole body tingles with a low thrum of electricity. He’s a lightning bolt of a man, and I find myself oddly exhilarated at the idea of being left alone with him here.
At yet another crime scene. I can’t help but wonder which one of us is attracting such dangerous situations: him? Or me?
Genn replies curtly, “You got it, Prez.” He drags Mickey off down the aisles, the two of them stepping all over broken glass and puddles of spilled booze as they go. Mickey is kicking and screaming like a petulant toddler, but Genn restrains him easily, without even having to say a word or break a sweat. He locks the store owner in the storage room at the back before jogging out an emergency exit door on the side of the building. I hear the rumble of his motorcycle engine firing up, the roar fading away to nothing as Genn disappears down the road.
Leaving me all alone in this fucked-up scene with Leon.
He’s looking at me almost warily, like he doesn’t know how to approach me. I wonder if he knows more about me than I know about him — he’s got to, since what I know about him is hardly anything at all. I take in his enormous height, his muscular build, his jet-dark hair and those damning, electric green eyes.
I swallow hard. He seems to notice this — the tiniest but tell-tale sign that I’m afraid. That he has the upper hand here. After all, he’s the one with the gun tucked into his jacket.
“Why are you here?” he asks in that deep, commanding voice.
“I — I think we should both just go,” I breathe. “Cops will be here soon.”
“A call to this neighborhood?” he scoffs bitterly. “They’ll take their damn time.”
“Please just let me leave. I’ll go home. I’ll stay out of this — whatever this is,” I plead.
Leon steps closer and shakes his head. I instinctively fall back slightly, even though some foolish, inexplicable part of me longed to get closer to him. Much closer. I forced that little voice in my mind to pipe down.
“You’re in it now, prekrasnyy. No going back,” he replies quietly.
“I didn’t mean to intrude. I messed up. I should never have — ”
“Ah, but you did,” he croons, moving in on me. “You wanna play cops and robbers? Well, you got what you came looking for. Hope it lives up to your expectations.”
I shake my head quickly, putting my hands up in front of me in surrender. “No, no, I swear I’ll just disappear and you’ll never see me again. I promise.”
He reaches out with lightning-quick speed and grabs hold of my wrists. He’s so close now I can feel the heat radiating off of his hard body. Those jade-green eyes search my face earnestly, as though he’s trying to glimpse my soul. Like he’s trying to remember something he once lost, something far away and out of reach.
“I won’t let that happen,” he answers quietly. “Not again, Cherry.”
There it is again, that burning warmth that passes down the entire column of my body at the sound of his strong, baritone voice saying my name. My flimsy, silly name.
“How do you know my name?” I dare to ask, regarding him fearfully.
Leon’s eyes flash dark momentarily, as though I’ve offended him. No, softer than that. Like I’ve hurt his feelings or something. But surely a man like this doesn’t get his feelings hurt very easily? Besides, what could I possibly have done to him?
“You don’t remember me at all, do you?” he asks, a little sadly.
Sunlight dappled through gem-blue water. Wondering if this is the last thing I’ll see as my chest grows tight, the sharp pain in my lungs threatening to drag me into unconsciousness as the oxygen in my brain dissipates into nothing.
Hands around my wrists. Just like now. Holding me up, up out of the water.
I gasp at the realization. “I… I remember you,” I whisper, scarcely able to believe it.
“The girl from the shore,” he says, almost fondly. His thumb traces a soothing circle over my hand as he opens his mouth to say something else.
Just then, there is the distant wail of police sirens, jolting us from our shared reverie. The cops are coming. Panic floods into my veins and I tense up. Leon takes my hand and pulls me along behind him. “We’ve got to go!”
“Where are we going?”
“I’ll know when we get there!” he calls back over his shoulder. We run out the door and across the parking lot. There’s only one helmet hanging off the handlebars of his motorcycle, and he tosses it to me, eschewing his own safety to ensure mine. “Hop on!” he orders.
Before I can think better of it, before I can ask what will become of my rental car, before I can
talk myself out of it, I do exactly as he says. I climb onto the motorcycle behind him, clinging to his hard chest as we peel out onto the road in the opposite direction of the police sirens.
7
Leon
My bike feels unfamiliar with the weight of someone else on it. I live on my bike more than I do on my own two feet, more often than not, and my bike feels comfortable enough under me that it’s like just another appendage. So having someone hanging on behind me feels as unusual as a new arm.
“Where are we going?” I hear Cherry shout from behind me as I tear through the streets, but I don’t bother trying to answer. The wind would just take the words from me, if she isn’t used to talking on a bike.
Instead, I just nod to the alley I’m about to turn down, and I pull her hands a little tighter around my waist before taking a sharp turn around a corner.
I have to be quick. The local police are probably the only ones who know the back alleys of Bayonne as well as we do, and I don’t know which officers are tailing me. For all I know, it could be some rookie too new to town to know not to answer this call, or it could be a couple of seasoned veterans with an FBI agent right behind them. The wake of a shooting isn’t the time to take those kinds of chances.
Mickey’s isn’t far from the worse-off parts of town, but as I take us through the back alleys and narrow side-streets that make up the older parts of Bayonne, things get a little rougher pretty quickly. We pass by yards with run-down cars in them, a few of them with cinderblocks holding them up where the tires should be. There’s an old American flag waving on tarnished flagpoles over a house with a couple of boarded-up windows. There’s a family with at least ten children holding what looks like a little quinceañera outside, the father wearing tattered overalls and the mother with a tired look on her face as she herds the group around.
This is where most of the workers live, and I know it’s thoroughly our territory. The sooner we can find somewhere to hide out in a place like this, the easier it will be for the two of us to utterly vanish. As we pass by, some of the locals who happen to be in their front yard give us friendly greetings. A young man with arms stained black from working at a repair shop gives us a smile and a wave while he gets his mail as I drive by, and I nod back. An older guy with a limp who I recognize as a local school bus driver does the same as he gets out of his vehicle, just now off work.
Hitman - the Series: A Bad Boy Mafia Romance Collection (Alexis Abbott's Hitmen #0) Page 24