Texas Hold 'Em

by A Parker

  Brody stayed close to me—not like a helicopter parent, but rather a concerned friend or brother. He watched every move I made, and every time I flipped open the Nokia to see if there was a new message, he’d stiffen.

  “Anything?” he asked the eighth time I checked the phone.

  I shook my head. “No. I wouldn’t be surprised if Bates was making me wait on purpose. Drawing it out.”

  “He’s a sick fuck.”

  “You can say that again,” I mumbled.

  “Hey.”

  I looked up at Brody. I hadn’t noticed before, but he had kind eyes. They were the eyes of a doctor—someone who was probably used to giving good news, bad news, and all kinds of news in between. He was a man who rode like hell at night and ran with criminals, but during the day, he saved people’s lives. I felt somewhat guilty for not bothering to try to get to know him better.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “I trust you, you know.”

  I blinked.

  He folded his arms across his chest and smiled down at me. “I think you needed to hear that. Out of all of us, Jackson is the hardest to win over. Always has been, always will be. But me? You’ve had my buy-in for a while already. If Mason trusts you, so do I. Plain and simple.”

  Oh no. My bottom lip began to tremble. Keep it together.

  Brody knuckled me fondly in the chin. “You’re alright, Hart. And hey, I get it, okay? I’ve felt like shit for two days too. The thought of what we’re going to do tonight…” Brody gazed off in Tex’s direction. His brow furrowed and his jaw flexed. “It’s kept me up at night.”

  “Am I a bad person if hearing that makes me feel better?”

  He smiled with his eyes again. “No, not at all. You aren’t alone. Whatever happens tonight, I’ve got your back, and I trust that you have mine. Right?”

  I nodded firmly. “Right.”

  Brody left me to my thoughts in the kitchen and went to join Tex, Abel, and Knox in the pit. Mason and Suzie lingered outside the bedroom door, speaking softly to each other, and Grant spoke with Sam and Jackson. Soon the three of them made for the pit as well, but Jackson looked in my direction and, seeing that I was alone, put a hand in the small of Sam’s back and muttered something to her.

  She looked warily over at me and nodded.

  My stomach threatened to climb up my throat and suffocate me as Jackson walked toward me.

  He stopped a few paces away. “You and I need to have a word.”

  “We do?”

  “Come with me.”

  Wordlessly, with my heart leaping wildly in my chest, I followed the President of the Devil’s Luck out of the apartment and into the humid hallway of the warehouse. He closed Tex’s door behind us and turned to face me where I stood under a flickering light mounted to the wall with my arms folded over my chest.

  “We’re in this now,” he said. “There’s no going back. So I need you to know something.”

  “What is it?” I practically squeaked.

  He moved in on me so quickly I forgot how to breathe. One minute he was standing in front of the door, and the next his massive frame was swallowing up all of my vision as he towered over me. “If you’re fucking with us and playing with Jameson’s life, you’re going to have me to answer to. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

  I nodded.

  “Say it.”

  “I understand.”

  “For your sake, I hope you do.”

  The Nokia buzzed.

  Jackson’s eyes slid down to it, clasped fiercely in my hand. “Is that him?”

  I didn’t want to look, but my eyes were pulled down to the tiny flip phone and the little blue light winking in the corner of the front display screen. I swallowed hard. “It has to be.”

  Neither of us said a word. The sound of our breathing filled the empty hall.

  Finally, Jackson reached out and took the phone from me. He flipped it open, and when he read the words aloud, his voice was thick with gravel and apprehension. “I’m waiting.”

  “That’s all it says?”

  Jackson flipped the phone closed. “We have to tell the others. It’s time for us to leave.”

  He turned back to the door.

  “Jackson.”

  He didn’t look back at me, but he didn’t abandon me out in the hall either, which told me he was willing to hear what I had to say—and holy hell did I need to say it. The words were burning me up inside.

  “I’m going to keep him safe,” I said. “I’m not going to let anything happen to him. And I’ll have Brody with me. We’ll do what needs to be done.”

  Jackson pushed the door open. “See that you do.”

  Chapter 29

  Jameson

  At half past ten, I closed the door on my MC and turned to face Brody and Carrie, both of whom stood in my living room with their arms hanging slack at their sides. In their eyes, the truth of what we were about to do burned.

  “Alright,” I breathed, “let’s do this.”

  My chain smoking through the evening might have given away my nerves, but neither Carrie or Brody said a word about it as we moved into the bedroom and began staging the bed for the picture we’d have to send to Bates. I’d be alive and well in the shot, only playing dead, but we’d have to make sure all the details were the same in the picture as they’d be when I was actually lying in that bed without a pulse in who knew how many hours from now.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  It was anyone’s guess. Either way, I wouldn’t be here. My body would, but me? I’d be somewhere else.

  Gone.

  If there was a Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, or something else, maybe I was about to find out.

  Wouldn’t that be something?

  Brody was the first to move. He brushed past Carrie, who blinked in surprise, as if she hadn’t really been present in the room with us. Her gaze followed him as he went into my bedroom, where he lingered in the doorway and turned back to us.

  “Are you coming or not?”

  Carrie looked to me.

  I nodded. “We’re coming.”

  In the bedroom, Brody began unmaking the bed. Clearly, he had a plan in mind that he hadn’t run past either Carrie or me. She stayed in the corner of the room, arms wrapped tightly around herself, gaze fixed on the bed as Brody tugged the pillows down and made it look like two people had just been rolling around.

  “Alright.” He put his hands on his hips and turned to us. “What makes the most sense here? Obviously Carrie can’t take you in a fight one on one. No offense, Hart.”

  “None taken,” she mumbled.

  “She’d have to finish it quick and clean,” Brody continued, stroking his chin.

  “She’d have to shoot me,” I said simply.

  Carrie sighed. “And I’d have to shoot you in the head.”

  “Why?” Brody and I asked in unison.

  “Because.” She left her corner and moved toward the bed, her confidence seeming to grow as she spoke. “I’m an excellent shot and Bates knows that. He also probably thinks there’s a part of me that’s unsure about this. There’s no way he’s blindly trusting me.”

  “Then don’t you think we should show signs of hesitation?” I asked.

  Brody looked back and forth between us.

  Carrie chewed the inside of her cheek. “In other words, I don’t go for the kill shot right away? Perhaps I shoot to injure before working up the nerve to finish the job? Perhaps you charge me in self-defense? What’s more convincing, a messy crime scene or a tidy one?”

  “Shit,” I breathed. “I don’t know. We have to play to Bates’s expectations, not our own. Everything he knows about you comes from high pressure situations where you handle your shit. You killed three of his men without blinking just a few weeks ago.” I thought about her tucking and rolling after I dumped the bike when we were being chased through the city by Bates’s goons. She’d handled herself masterfully and hadn’t missed a single shot
. “Why should you hesitate with me?”

  “Because she’s spent weeks sharing your bed,” Brody said with finality. “Does he think she’s callous? Or does he think there might be a part of her that won’t go through with this because she might feel a sense of allyship toward us?”

  Carrie stared unseeing at the disheveled bed. “Shit. We can’t afford to get this wrong. The littlest thing might put his guard up and make him ask questions.”

  Carrie Hart the woman was no longer in the room. This was Carrie Hart the Ranger.

  She walked around the bed and stopped on her side, where she opened a nightstand drawer. “If I was going to kill you for real, I’d keep the gun here. Somewhere within reach. I would plan on shooting you as soon as you came into the bedroom, maybe after brushing your teeth.” Her eyes danced around the room, seeing a movie neither Brody and I could as she played out the fictional scene in her head, imagining the story she’d concoct for Bates in its entirety. “You walk in, and I hesitate. The gun is still in the drawer.”

  “I get undressed,” I continued, moving to my side of the bed.

  “No, you turn the lights off first,” she said, pacing. “When it’s dark, I grab the gun and put it under my pillow. Then you get undressed and slide into bed beside me. I can’t risk you finding it, so I have to act sooner rather than later, and I need to make sure you can’t manhandle the gun away from me. Like you said, if things escalated and a fight started, I would lose.”

  “So you shoot him as he gets into bed?” Brody asks. “We stage the photo with him lying on his side, a bullet in his head?”

  “No.” Carrie climbed into bed and motioned for me to do the same. It felt like I was back at a crime scene all over again with my badge on my chest. Brody watched us from the foot of the bed with puzzlement. Carrie rolled over to face me and slid a hand under her pillow as if grabbing her gun. “I flirt with you,” she continued, “to throw you off. You, drunk on tequila which we’ll leave out in the kitchen, fall for it hook line and sinker.”

  I’d fall for it hook line and sinker whether tequila was involved or not, I thought with a smile.

  “Is something funny?” Carrie asked rather sharply.

  “No,” I said hurriedly.

  She rolled her eyes. “It would still be a huge risk for me to pull the gun out on you while we’re lying face to face like this. I’d want more leverage. More control.” She pushed herself up on one hand, swung a leg over my waist, and leaned to the side until she pulled herself up on top of me. I resisted grabbing her ass, knowing Brody’s eyes were on us.

  She hovered over me and ran her hands up my chest. “I’d play coy until I could get my hands on the gun and you were good and distracted.” She leaned down, her breasts grazing my chest, and it worked.

  I forgot we were role playing. Her lips grazed mine and I lifted my head from the pillow for a kiss, and that was when she revealed the fake gun in a flourish, pressed her finger to my chest, and whispered, “Bang.”

  I winced. “The chest? Really? That’s cold, woman.”

  “It will be the most convincing,” she said with finality. “We’ll make sure you’re covered in fake blood. I’ll have to be, too.”

  Brody cleared his throat. “You’ll have to sell them on this, Carrie. Act like it bothers you. Like you can’t wait to wash it off. I have people in the ER all the time who come in covered in someone’s blood and sometimes they scratch themselves raw trying to get it off.”

  Carrie nodded. “Noted. Did you bring the fake blood?”

  Brody flashed a smile. “Of course I did. I’m not a rookie.”

  “Grab it,” Carrie said. “Let’s get this over with so I can finally breathe again. Oh, and Tex? Take your clothes off. We’re doing this in just your boxers.”

  “Come again?” I asked. “Can’t I have some dignity while you’re all poking and prodding at my corpse?”

  Carrie lifted her chin. “We’re trying to tell a convincing story. If I shoot you after you come to bed, you have to be dressed for bed. Strip.”

  We spent the next half hour working to stage the scene. We ruined Carrie’s yellow bedsheets with fake gore. Or rather, they ruined it. I was ordered to lie on my back in the bed while they used some of Carrie’s eyeliner and lipstick to create a fake bullet hole in my sternum. Once they poured fake blood on it, it looked freakishly convincing. She splattered some on the wall above the bed before resuming her place straddling my lap. Her thighs felt good wrapped around me and I savored the feeling, knowing soon enough I wouldn’t be able to feel a damn thing.

  Carrie looked down at me after flicking some blood on my face. “There. I think this will do.”

  She was covered in it. It stained her shirt, the inside of her legs, her stomach, her hands. And I had to admit, it looked pretty fucking convincing.

  She pushed off of me and scrambled off the sheets, messing them up at the end of the bed and leaving smears from her hands and knees on the yellow fabric. That too felt authentic, like she’d really panicked to get away once she’d murdered me.

  I didn’t move an inch.

  Brody handed her the flip phone. Her hand shook as she held it up to take a picture of me.

  “It will be blurry if you don’t still your hand,” Brody said.

  “I can’t help it,” she hissed.

  He shut his mouth about it.

  She snapped three pictures and looked down at me. “Are you sure? Once I send these…”

  “Do it.”

  She hit send. “How long do you think we’ll have to wait?”

  Brody, who had brought his defibrillator into the room while Carrie finished the final touches with the fake blood, shrugged. “It’s anyone’s guess.”

  Carrie wrung her hands. “Where are you going to hide, Brody?”

  “I thought I’d wait in the pit.”

  “They might look there,” she said.

  “Any suggestions then?” Brody asked.

  She shook her head.

  “You’re going to have to wait out back,” I said. “Leave your truck on the north side of the building. Wait in the cab. They’ll be coming from the south so they won’t see it, and if they do a lap of the permitter, they’ll likely assume you’re just another resident.”

  “The truck is too far,” Carrie said. “We have minutes, remember?”

  “It’s our best option,” I said.

  She raked her fingers through her hair and huffed out an exasperated breath. “You’re okay with this, Brody?”

  He shrugged. “Sounds like I have to be.”

  The Nokia chimed, and then it started to ring.

  All three of us stood there staring at each other like a bunch of slack-jawed idiots for a minute before Carrie snapped into action.

  She pulled out the phone. “It’s him.”

  “Answer it,” Brody said. “Don’t make him wait. He thinks you’re alone and Tex is dead, remember?”

  Without another second of delay, Carrie answered the call on the third ring. “Yes.”

  Brody and I couldn’t hear what Bates was saying, and the old Nokia didn’t have a speaker phone option. So we stood there and watched while Carrie nodded, and her eyes went wide.

  “I can’t do that,” she said.

  Bates spoke.

  “No,” she said firmly, “you listen. I did my part of the job, okay? How am I supposed to drag his bloody fucking corpse down the hallway of this stinking apartment and get him into a car? I’m a hundred and thirty pounds. I can’t move that kind of dead weight. You’re going to have to come here if you want to confirm.”

  Good girl, I thought proudly, don’t give him an inch.

  Whatever Bates said must have been more reasonable because Carrie started to nod before she spoke. “That’s fine. I’ll be here. Residents enter through the back, so come to the front. I’ll prop the door open somehow. I’m in unit 106 at the end of the hall to the right when they come in.”

  She closed the phone when he hung up on her. />
  “So?” Brody asked.

  “He’s sending Caroline and his enforcer.” Her voice shook.

  “You can do this,” I said. “It’s all going to go to plan. I can feel it.”

  Brody moved forward with his defibrillator. “They won’t be long. We should make sure we have you in position. We can’t afford to waste time. Carrie, you need to be my lookout. As soon as they arrive, I need to stop his heart so I have enough time to slip out the back before they come inside. Got it?”

  Carrie nodded and looked up at the warehouse windows over our heads in the bedroom. “And how am I supposed to see?”

  Brody grimaced. “You’ll have to wait by the front doors.”

  She looked longingly at me, and her gaze said everything. She didn’t want to be apart in the final moments before shit hit the fan.

  I went to her and took her hands in mine. “We’re going to get through this. All three of us. Okay?”

  She nodded. All the fear she’d carried the last few days seemed to have taken a back seat as adrenaline got behind the wheel. “Okay.”

  Before Carrie left, she helped set the scene. I got back into the blood-smeared bed. They adjusted the sheets all around me and referred to the picture on the flip phone to make sure I was in the same position. When they were good and satisfied, Carrie slipped out to watch for Caroline and her father’s enforcer.

  Brody leaned up against the wall at the end of the bed so I could look up at him without moving. “How do you feel?”

  I chuckled. “You know that feeling you get when you’re at the top of a rollercoaster looking down and you know it’s a hell of a lot more than what you thought you signed up for?”

  “Yup.”

  “Well, I feel like that, but the rollercoaster has a track that ends midway through, and I’m not bolted in and there’s a lightning storm.”

  Brody laughed. “Sounds fucking fun, brother.”

  “Yeah,” I said as I eyed the paddles hanging off the side of the defibrillator, “it’s a fucking blast.”

  Chapter 30

  Carrie