Shield Her (A Bad Boys in Her Bed Menage, Cop Versus Biker)

by Cop Versus Biker) Christa Wick - Shield Her (A Bad Boys in Her Bed Menage

  I said nothing. I was in way over my head, hadn’t contemplated that my job might be as interesting to the criminals in Steel Tide as Carson’s shop had been. But it wasn’t like you could walk into a fund management company with rifles and walk out with money. Everything we did was electronic. The only cash was in the break room for the coffee and snack collections.

  “There’s a hard way to do this,” Priscilla said after several minutes of silence had passed between us. “And there’s an easy way. I’m gonna show you why you want to pick the easy way.”

  Her fingers strummed along the steering wheel. Semis rattled alongside us. I heard a train running on its tracks. Then we went through what felt like a dead zone — few vehicles beyond ours, no sound of industry, then back to a lot of semis.

  The light in the car’s interior changed as Priscilla slowed then stopped. I heard her put the vehicle in park. She killed the engine and unlocked the doors.

  “Get out.”

  I sat up, eyes open even though she hadn’t told me I could because getting out would be pretty damn awkward if she intended for me to keep them shut. We were inside some kind of warehouse, the windows all blocked out and no light other than intermittent fixtures fading into the distance.

  “Come on,” she said, her movements growing more agitated. “Some people you need to meet.”

  I had noticed a similar antsy state in her during the party, but it disappeared whenever she dipped into the women’s restroom, which had been once an hour like clockwork. Carson figured she was doping up in the bathroom, whatever she took putting her into regular withdrawals.

  As we moved deeper into the warehouse, I realized that, beneath the buzzing of the lights and the bustle of activity I could hear outside the building, that someone was groaning — maybe more than a single someone.

  At the end of one of the rows, she grabbed a rolling construction light and turned it on. I winced against the bright display, the lumens produced so much that I could already feel the heat they generated.

  Turning down one of the rows, I doubled over with the need to puke as the smell of waste rolled through me. Everywhere around me, I detected the foul odor of spoiled food layered over feces, urine and vomit.

  “You want to remember that smell,” she warned me as the groans grew louder. “Let it haunt your fucking dreams if you don’t want to wind up here.”

  God, what was “here?”

  She directed the flashlight at a line of chain link fencing and I realized I was looking at a cage, the first in a long row of cages. Priscilla kicked at the fencing, the light directed at a dark corner where a body huddled.

  “Get off your fucking ass unless you want to go in the ring tonight!”

  She kicked the cage again when the figure didn’t move.

  A gravelly voice sounded behind us. “He’s dead, you cunt.”

  I spun around, uncertain how close to me the speaker was. All I saw was darkness until Priscilla redirected the light at the cage opposite the one she’d been kicking at.

  “I was going to save the best for last,” she laughed, her light landing on a man sitting in the center of his cage with his legs folded under him.

  “Get your ass over here,” she barked at me.

  I moved to the center of the aisle where Priscilla stood with the light.

  “Closer,” she taunted then looked at the caged man. “She’s a goody-two-shoes. You don’t hurt women like that, do you?”

  “No,” he answered, his voice rock scraping over rock. “Just bitches like you.”

  I stopped a few inches from the chain-linked fencing but that wasn’t good enough for Crazy Eights. She ordered me to hold onto the cage. With my heart slamming against the back of my ribcage, I obeyed.

  Knowing nothing about the man in front of me, other than he held the same opinion of Priscilla as I did, I still found his imprisonment heartbreaking. The powerful body was naked, not even underwear from what I could tell, although his cross-legged position kept that part of him concealed. The construction light revealed a network of scars across his body — slash marks across his shins, along his arms and legs, over his chest and on his face. The slashes were harder to see along the right side of his body because the skin had been badly burned.

  “I call him Ash,” Priscilla whispered, her body positioned just behind me so that I involuntarily shielded her from attack. “Deadliest mother fucker in the history of this place.”

  He looked deadly. The corpse on the opposite side of the aisle had looked emaciated. This man had muscles on top of muscles.

  “You don’t eat unless you win,” she said, catching the direction of my gaze at the dead body. “Ash never loses.”

  “Why…” I couldn’t finish the question, not with him looking at me with one clear eye and the other scarred over. There could be no justification for his presence here, for the inhumane treatment of any of the people in the unlit cages groaning in pain.

  “Funny thing,” she said, pressing at my back so that I pushed into the fencing. “His family owned a bike shop like your boyfriend Carson. They trusted the wrong person, too. But Ash wanted to go to war with the club that had taken over.”

  Instead, he had gone to hell.

  “Everyone he used to know thinks he was murdered a couple years back,” she giggled, her arms getting jerky as the time for her next fix approached. “We exchanged him for one of our problem children, that way no one’s loyalty is tested. The men go into the fighting pits and the women…well…”

  Laughing, she ran her hand down my backside and between my legs. I closed my eyes, my stomach rebelling as she gave a squeeze before returning to the light.

  “Move your ass,” she said, heading for the center aisle. “I need to hit the toilet before we leave this dump.”

  ********************

  Two hours later I found myself sitting next to Carson in a strange kitchen. Maddox was visible out in the hall, a radio playing on the kitchen counter making it impossible to hear his conversation with his lieutenant and the late-middle aged woman who had arrived ten minutes prior.

  “That’s the district attorney,” Carson said, his lips against my ear so I could hear him over the radio we weren’t supposed to touch, not even to change the channel from the heavy metal station it had been left on.

  I sagged against Carson, sick from what I had seen at the warehouse and sicker still because I only had the vaguest idea of where the place might be located. I had gotten a glimpse of the clock on Priscilla’s dashboard before she made me shut my eyes and again when we got to the parking garage. So I knew it was within a thirty minute driving radius from my office building and that it had been a very large warehouse. Unfortunately, living in a metropolis, there were buildings of that size in every direction at that approximate distance.

  With the conversation over in the hallway, the DA and lieutenant glanced once in my direction then stepped into the front yard. Maddox returned to the kitchen and lowered the volume on the radio.

  “This investigation is not over,” I growled, seeing the look on his face. I couldn’t believe his boss or the DA wanted to pull the plug. Any resistance at the police or prosecutorial level was standing right in front of me, despite his best friend’s freedom being on the line.

  “I can’t protect either of you if it continues,” Maddox said, his voice deadened. “The minute DA Gorsky talks to her federal counterpart, the FBI will take over because of the money laundering aspect.”

  “I can demand you are at least detailed to the team, say I need someone I know and trust.” I looked to Carson for support but, despite his very personal investment in the investigation continuing, he wasn’t bobbing his head in agreement.

  “I never wanted to pull you into this, love,” he said, leaning away from me. “Maybe the information about the warehouse will make Gorsky go lighter on me.”

  “No!” I slapped my palm on the table. “If you are both being idiots because you want to keep me safe, this isn’t how you
do it, so stop that shit right now!”

  I looked to each of them but they were stubbornly looking away, their gazes occasionally meeting with one another but never with mine.

  “Infuriating!” I growled, reached up and jerked Carson’s face in my direction. “Yeah, part of the reason I want to do this is to keep you out of jail. But who knows how long it’s going to take them to find the warehouse, and if it will still be filled with the club’s prisoners or whether they will have moved them someplace else.”

  “You have no idea for whom you’re risking your life, Reggie,” Maddox pushed in. “That guy you saw was probably a killer to begin with.”

  I shook my head. “He was like Carson — just someone whose shop they wormed their way into. And if he had a wife or a girlfriend, then they took her, too. Priscilla said as much.”

  Fresh tears I didn’t think I had enough fluid left in me to cry filled my eyes. “And I know what I saw when I looked at him. There was compassion and sympathy and…when she touched me, he wanted to kill her.”

  “He needs to get in line,” Carson said, biting at his knuckle.

  Maddox crossed from where he had distanced himself at the counter to the kitchen table, his palms planted on its surface as he leaned over and tried to glare me into retreating. “It could take months for Eight Ball to trust you enough to give you access to his accounts and property holdings so we can find the location. Hell, it may be weeks before he even approaches you.”

  I threaded my fingers through Carson’s, hating that I was trying to make this argument two against one, but I needed him on my side. “I’m not safe until Eight Ball is arrested — and you’re not safe or free until then.”

  “Please.” I gave his hand a squeeze.

  He squeezed back and looked at Maddox. “She’s right.”

  Maddox sat down, sagging for a second before his spine stiffened into a straight line and he nodded at us. “Then we need to make Eight Ball think he already controls you.”

  ********************

  Standing on the side of the road a few nights later, the front of my Ford Focus crumpled against a tree trunk, I watched the approaching headlights of a tow truck with trepidation. Twenty minutes earlier, I had called Priscilla, slurring my words and telling her I needed the club’s help because I had just had an accident.

  She had told me to call a tow truck and started to cuss me out for waking her up.

  I can’t…I’ve been drinking…a tow company will report me…

  Magic words designed to awaken the scheming part of Priscilla’s mind. She told me to hold tight, the club had its own towing business and someone would be out right away.

  “You owe us,” she had said then hung up.

  With the call ended, I had begun to drink just enough to convince whoever showed up that I had been driving after drinking. Maddox was there, along with two FBI car units that would tail us from the site of the wreck all the way until I was safely back in my apartment.

  I tried not to look where his car was concealed further up the road in the direction opposite of the expected tow truck’s arrival. I didn’t want to give his position away and I didn’t want him to know I was as close to scared shitless as I could be and actually have clean underwear.

  The plan could easily blow up in my face, with partial payment demanded tonight, and the decision to force me to launder money for them still months in the future.

  I wasn’t one to hate people, but I hated the members of Steel Tide, hated Mildew who had pretended to be Carson’s friend, hated the president and his old lady for everything, hated everyone that wore their patch and thought it was their right to ruin lives.

  The tow truck swung across the road, then backed up so that its rear faced my car. I hadn’t been able to see beyond the headlights during its approach to discover the identity of the driver. I was hoping for some low level flunky within the club, someone who couldn’t afford to mess with me just for the sake of messing with me.

  “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” Eight Ball said, climbing down from the cab. “This was stupid, Hedgehog.”

  “Hedgehog?” I asked, trying to switch the subject from my apparent fuck up that he would leverage against me to something neutral. It didn’t matter that the plan was to give him something he thought he could leverage against me; it was the setting that counted.

  “That’s what Mildew said we should name you,” he answered. “Hedge funds, Hedgehog.”

  “Clever,” I said, my stomach twisting with nausea as he rested a hand between my shoulder blades, his fingers curling around the back of my neck to control me.

  “You don’t seem too steady on your feet,” he observed, his grip on the back of my neck tightening.

  “I’ve been standing out here a long time,” I answered, hoping my tone sounded evasive. I had already lied about wrecking the car after drinking, when the real order was reversed. Now I wanted to seem apprehensive about admitting I was drinking so Eight Ball would think he really had me under his thumb.

  “What I heard was a little different,” he said, forcing me to turn.

  Before I knew what he was going to do, he had his tongue halfway down my throat. I pushed at his chest, praying Maddox wasn’t going to break cover — at least not yet.

  Letting me stumble backwards, Eight Ball released me with a high-pitched laugh. “Southern Comfort, seems a little low rent for a Hedgehog.”

  Stifling the urge to puke or at least spit, I shrugged at him.

  “What the fuck you doing way out here?” he asked, grabbing a flashlight and the tow chain and walking down the small embankment.

  “Thinking,” I answered, hoping it wasn’t something Eight Ball did too much of because I didn’t want him poking any holes in my story.

  “Thinking and drinking,” he corrected with another of his girlish laughs. “You aint gonna be any help wobbling all over the place. Better haul that sweet ass up in the cab.”

  “Thanks.” I climbed up, reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out the last of the bottle I had been drinking from to wash away the taste of Eight Ball’s tongue. I had the urge to whisper in the microphone, but there were strict rules for when that was acceptable, and wanting to comment on how gross that kiss had been wasn’t on the list of approved circumstances.

  Eight Ball finished hooking up my car and winching it out of the ditch. The front would clearly need work done on it in one of their shops, another favor they would be doing me without reporting the accident to the police.

  Sliding behind the wheel, he jerked for me to move closer.

  “We got shit to talk about, Hedgehog.”

  I slid over, allowing my fear to play across my face.

  “I don’t bite unless you ask,” he giggled.

  I wouldn’t ask even if he was the last man on earth, but I kept that to myself and didn’t say anything in reply. The more he talked, the better. I needed to prove I wasn’t a threat, that I wouldn’t betray him. So stomping down the snark and letting my more vulnerable emotions show were essential.

  He started driving one handed, the other hand landing on my leg and squeezing. I had put as many barriers as possible between my lady bits and anyone trying to touch them — girdle panties, pantyhose, complicated fasteners on my dress slacks and a buckle actually shaped like a Gordian Knot. But none of that protected me against Eight Ball’s oil-stained hands rubbing at my thigh as he talked about how I owed the club big now.

  “I know,” I said as we reached the garage that the club owned.

  “You owe me, especially,” he said, putting the tow truck in park and turning to me. “Those cops that showed up at your old man’s bike shop…”