by Ivy Black
Nitro
Dark Pharaohs MC Series Book 4
Written by Ivy Black
Copyright © 2021. All rights reserved.
It is not legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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Ivy Black
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Epilogue
Volt Preview Chapter One
Volt Preview Chapter Two
Your Free Gifts
Chapter One
Nitro
It’s pickup day, which is a day that’s always filled with the potential for violence. Standing off to the side, my hand unobtrusively hovering near the butt of my weapon, I keep an eye on the proceedings. Cosmo and Monk are dealing with the man who runs our pipeline, a dude named Cort who’s got half a dozen guys of his own keeping watch on me, just as I’m watching them. It’s a very mutually assured destruction vibe we’ve got going on around here.
What they don’t know is that before they got here, I planted a few of my toys around the parking lot, making sure that if shit goes sideways, we’ll have the upper hand. It’s standard practice for me at any meeting site. With my background in explosives—I ran a demo team in Prophet’s unit over in Afghanistan—I know how to make IEDs and make them very well. I’ll blow them all to holy hell long before they even realize how fucked they are.
The sun is beating down on us hard. It’s an unusually warm day and I can feel the beads of sweat rolling down my back, making my T-shirt stick to my skin. We’re in the parking lot of a long-abandoned department store that’s well off the beaten track. Given that it fell behind the march of progress long ago, the cops don’t come by anymore, making it a perfect place to conduct our business.
Spyder, along with our new prospect, Blake, and an old-timer named Grease, are loading up the vans. From where I’m standing, I can hear Grease bitching about having to break his back lugging the heavy boxes around. That bitching and whining has been a constant thing with Grease for as long as I can remember. It’s one reason nobody likes him very much and most wish he’d just detach himself from the MC. Me included. But he’s an old-timer, so that earns him a modicum of grace.
Turning back, I see Cosmo hand Cort the duffel of cash and feel myself instinctively tense. This is the part where things have the highest potential to go sideways and end up with all of us throwin’ shots at one another. I have no reason to think this will be anything but routine. We’ve been doing business with Cort for years and have never had a problem. But I’m not necessarily the most trusting guy in the world. Especially when we’re dealing with sketchy people.
Personally, I don’t like dealing with punks like Cort and his boys. I trust them even less than I trust most people. Cort’s just a squirrely dude. Shifty. But they supply us with the guns and weed we need to do business, so they’re a necessary evil we, unfortunately, have to deal with. It’s not like there’s a bumper crop of guys running around who can get us both weed and guns. He’s a one-stop shop for us which is where his value to the MC sits and why we continue to deal with him.
Besides, I’m just a soldier here. Who we do business with ain’t my call to make. And honestly, I prefer it that way. I’m better as a soldier. I’m better at knowing what my orders are and then executing them rather than being the one doling out those orders. Being the decision-maker comes with profound responsibilities and my history has shown me that I’m not great at dealing with the fallout of my decisions.
“You all right?”
I turn to find Spyder standing there with a wide grin on his face. I look back toward the vans and see Blake and Grease still working away. Grease’s complaints are louder, and the scowl on his face has deepened. I look over at Spyder, and he gives me a casual shrug.
“Couldn’t deal with Grease’s constant bitching anymore,” he says.
“Don’t blame you.”
“They’re just about done anyway,” Spyder tells me. “Where do you think Cort gets all those guns? I mean, that’s some serious military-grade hardware.”
“Probably has a contact at Fort Liggett or the Presidio.”
“Makes sense.”
Cosmo is shaking hands with Cort before turning away and walking over to where me and Spyder are standing. Monk is over talking to Blake and Grease, helping them get the last couple of boxes into the vans.
“Looks like we’re done here,” Cosmo says.
“Smooth like butter,” Spyder replies.
“At ease, Nitro,” Cosmo says to me with a grin. “You’re wound so tight, you look ready to explode.”
I chuckle but still keep my eyes on Cort and his guys. Because I don’t trust them, I’ll keep watching them until they’re nothing but taillights heading down the road. Cort is a hard guy to get a read on. And I don’t like people I can’t get a sense of. Being able to read people is a talent of mine, but he’s utterly confounding. He plays things very close to the vest, and he’ll do business with anybody so long as you got the paper.
Some of these guys who deal guns or weed will only deal with one group or another. They can be paranoid as hell and have all sorts of conditions on who they’ll work with and who they won’t. But when you’re in the line of work we are, there’s usually a market for everybody. As far as Cort goes though, the only color he seems to care about is green—which I guess isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We’ve all got to make a living.
The thing that bothers me most about him, though, is that I also get the idea that if he gets jammed up, he will throw anybody and everybody under the bus to save his own ass. Most everybody else seems to think he’s trustworthy for some reason unknown to me, but I just get the vibe that he’ll stab us in the back if it benefits him in some way.
It’s only when I see their trucks and vans driving off, kicking up a cloud of dust in their wake, that I le
t out a small breath of relief. Cosmo claps me on the shoulder and gives me a nod.
“All right. We’re good to go,” he says. “Let’s hit it.”
***
I’ve always loved being on a bike, out on the open road. Sometimes, when I’m indoors too long, I get to feeling a bit claustrophobic. I’ll usually just jump on my bike and head out with no particular destination in mind. I just ride. It helps quiet the voices in my head and calm the nerves that are usually jingling like hell inside of me.
There is nothing like saddling up and just riding out for a while. The sun on your face and the wind in your hair as you roar down an open highway is like no other feeling in the world. That hit of absolute freedom is better than any drug out there. And I’ve tried a lot of them.
We round a bend and hit the forty-mile stretch of highway that will lead us back to Blue Rock, and I’m thinking about riding on for a while when I notice a couple of black SUVs behind us in my mirrors. They’re closing the gap pretty quick, and a lightning bolt of adrenaline flashes through my body.
We’re only six months out after our big showdown with Zavala, and we’re all still a little skittish. Even though we haven’t faced any reprisals just yet, none of us have quite stopped looking over our shoulders. You don’t kill the head of the biggest drug cartel in Mexico and shatter his empire without some blowback.
So when I see those black SUVs haulin’ ass to catch up to us, my first thought is that Zavala’s former sicarios have finally gotten their shit together and are coming for us. And hell, on this long, lonely stretch of highway, it’s the perfect place to launch an attack.
I gesture to Monk who looks behind us, and I can see by the expression on his face that he’s having the same thoughts. He gets Cosmo’s attention who takes a look then uses the two-way radio to alert the vans. Grease is behind the wheel of one, Blake in the other, and they drop the hammer, rocketing off ahead of us, as Cosmo, Monk, and I fall back.
The SUVs charge on, their engines roaring as they draw closer to us. My gut is churning hard, like it used to do before a battle. I pull the .45 out of the holster on my hip and disengage the safety. The roaring of the SUVs’ engines builds, drowning out even the throaty rumbling of our bikes. And when they are practically on our back wheels, the three of us split; Monk and Cosmo veer off into the other lane, and I pull close to the shoulder, letting the pair of dark SUVs split the middle and continue their pursuit of our vans.
The three of us reform into a line and race forward. But as we do, I see a man hang himself out the passenger side window of the SUV directly in front of me. Knowing what’s coming, I fire preemptively. The bullet ricochets off the vehicle, making the man quickly duck back inside. But then somebody is already hanging out of the window of the other vehicle and takes a shot. Sparks fly off the pavement where it struck the road, and we power forward.
Cosmo and Monk are firing a barrage of shots, most of them pinging harmlessly off the metal of the SUV, but it keeps the guys pinned down, not letting them fire back at us. Shooting on the back of a bike is a lot harder than firing off shots while perched comfortably on a door frame. But we need to keep them in that car because if we let them get a shot off, we’re just sitting ducks.
But then somebody pops up from one of the sunroofs in the vehicle and snaps off a few quick shots that send the three of us weaving all over the road to avoid catching a piece of lead. We return fire, sending that man back down into the vehicle, only to have another guy pop up from the other sunroof and fire at us again. It’s the Whack-a-Mole game from hell.
We keep firing, our shots ringing off the steel frame of the SUVs. One of my bullets shatter the back window but doesn’t blow it inward. The guy gets off another couple of shots, and I hear Monk cry out a moment before his bike shudders violently, and then, as if I’m watching it all happen in slow motion, he goes down. The bike flips end over end with a sickening crashing, shattering sound, and I see Monk sliding along the road. His body spins around and rolls and all I can think is that he’s dead.
Cosmo and I lock up our brakes and after what seems like an agonizingly interminable time, we finally come to a stop. Both of us are off in a heartbeat, shedding our helmets as we dash back to where Monk is laying in the road, completely still. We drop down beside him and at first, all we can see is blood. It’s coming from his chest and arms mainly, and as we’re looking him over, he groans miserably as his eyes flutter open.
I let out a breath I didn’t even realize I was holding and say a silent word of thanks to anybody who might be listening for watching over him.
“Who were those guys?” Monk asks, his voice tight with pain.
“Don’t worry about that right now, kid,” Cosmo says then looks at me. “Call for a meat wagon then call Prophet and tell him what happened. Tell him to get some guys out here with a truck.”
“What about the vans? What about Grease and Blake?” I ask.
“Hopefully, they’ll be back at the compound before us,” he says.
With a feeling of trepidation in my gut, I get up and pull my phone out of my pocket. And as I’m making all of the calls, I’m replaying the whole scene in my mind. In particular, I’m thinking about the guys who were firing at us, and the one thing I keep circling back to is the fact that they weren’t Mexican. They couldn’t have been Zavala’s sicarios.
So who were they?
Chapter Two
Hadley
“Hey, Hadley, would you mind dropping off these Notices to Appear at the sheriff’s station?” Brent asks. “You can cut out the rest of the day after that.”
Biting my tongue, I give Brent the sweetest smile I can muster. “Sure. No problem. I’ll take care of that.”
“You’re an angel,” he replies.
“So you keep telling me,” I say with a chuckle.
What I don’t tell him is that by the time I’m done dropping off the papers at the sheriff’s station, I’ll be cutting out a whopping twenty minutes early. Woo-freaking-hoo. But still, it’s better than nothing, I suppose.
“Oh, and tomorrow, I’m going to need you to do some research on the Bender case, please,” Brent adds.
“You got it, boss.”
“You’re—”
“An angel?”
He chuckles. “No, a wiseass. Now get out of here.”
I laugh to myself as I grab my things. Brent is the sole practitioner in one of Blue Rock’s most successful criminal defense law firms. He’s got such an outstanding reputation and track record in the courtroom that people come from as far away as Sacramento and San Francisco to hire him.
Brent can be a bit cantankerous, and he’s got a rep as a bit of a fuss bucket with a lot of people in town. But having worked for him for a couple of years now, I can say with some conviction that he’s a good guy. He can be ferocious, and a lot of people think that’s who he is. But Brent’s ferocity is simply him advocating for his clients. Nobody would believe me if I told them—in fact, they’d probably laugh their ass off—but Brent Polaski is actually a big ol’ teddy bear.
He’s got a full head of iron-gray hair and blue eyes that sparkle—whether it’s with mischief or malice depends on the setting. He’s creeping closer to sixty and has a bit of a paunch around the middle. He says he doesn’t need to worry about it because he’s not out to impress anybody. After his wife passed away a few years back, Brent seems to have given up on love entirely. It’s like Jamie was his one true love, and he can’t bring himself to look for another. It’s very sweet and it’s very sad.
Brent is a good man and a good boss. I actually enjoy working for him, and frankly, I’m learning a lot. I’d daresay I’m learning more about the law and the practical application of it from him than I am in the night classes I’m taking at the local JuCo. School was never really my thing when I was younger, and I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, but somehow, I caught the law bug. So I started taking junior college classes and convinced Br
ent to hire me as a paralegal. Eventually, I will get my Bachelor’s and transfer to a proper law school. And if the stars all align, it’ll be Stanford, which is my first choice.
None of this would be happening without Brent though. Getting him to hire me as a paralegal was something of a coup since in all the years he’d been practicing law, he’d never once had a paralegal. But I somehow managed to walk in and dazzle and charm him into taking me on. At least, that’s what I tell people.
The truth is probably that he saw a heartbroken, shattered woman—who was coming off a failed relationship she once thought would last forever, with no practical skills, no career prospects, and no real future to speak of—and took pity on me. I’m an only child and my parents passed away when I was a teenager, so I have no family. And since I’ve always been shy and a bit of a recluse, I’ve never had a large group of friends. I have those people close to me—like Robin—and that’s always been good enough for me. I’m lonely sometimes, but I just don’t have it in me to be a social butterfly. I have a very small group of people in my life, and I’ve never needed more than that.
So I think Brent took all of that into account before he hired me on. He saw a woman who was broken and needed a boost in life. Working for him has absolutely helped with my confidence and my outlook on my future. Oh, Brent is always gracious enough to say that he saw the vast potential in me and thought it was about time he took on the role of mentor since he had no children of his own. He also likes to say he somebody needed to carry the banner of his legacy once he steps away from the game and rides off into the sunset.
But I really don’t think Brent is ever going to step away from the game. I have a feeling the only way he’s going to stop practicing law is when they carry him out of the courtroom in a body bag. I’ve never met somebody as in love with being a lawyer or as passionate about it as Brent. And honestly, his passion is infectious. I came to him simply looking for a job, but he’s inspired me to want more. It’s because of him that I’m planning on becoming a lawyer.